When a request comes into my web app, I check the CONTENT_TYPE header. Most browsers send this…

application/x-www-form-urlencoded

Firefox 3.0.1 is sending…

application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=utf-8

…which completely threw my program off when using FF3, while IE6/7, Opera, and Safari were working just fine. The program is using jQuery, the form plugin, etc so the problem could have been anywhere.

I finally broke down and asked for help. Rick was nice enough to point out the flaws in my logic and get me back on track.

2.5 hours of pulling my hair out. Grrr!

You can add an event to each day by clicking the small ‘edit’ button next to the day number. I haven’t included anything like security, users, authentication, etc. but I think it is flexible enough too. This comes straight out of my intranet app, so may be a little rough around the edges as I had to generalize it for demo purposes.

Update (08/06/2008): Fixed the download link. Oops.

Download
Download Zip

There is no live demo, as I don’t have a public facing Windows server to put it on. Sorry.

Tested on the following browsers
IE6 on Windows XP (works)
IE7 on Vista (works)
FF2 on Vista and XP (works)
Opera 9 on Vista (works)
Safari on Vista (kinda works, probably fixable)

Written in
VFP 7 and West Wind Web Connection 4.68

Screenshots

Flat Calendar Screenshot 1

Flat Calendar Screenshot 2

Install Instructions
I’m sure you all know how to do this, but just in case. If I miss a step here, please let me know.

1. Download the zip file and unzip to a temp directory
2. Open the folder of the freshly unzipped file. You should see two folders, vfp and www
3. The ‘www’ folder contains a folder called ‘FlatCal’. Place this folder in the root of your IIS install or create a virtual directory in IIS to this folder. Make sure that you have ‘index.html’ as a default document option.
4. Create a scriptmap of ‘.fc’ to the wc.dll in IIS that is accessable from either the wwwroot or the virtual
5. Open the folder called ‘vfp’
6. Place the three files for the ‘flatcal_events’ free-table in your data directory where it is accessible from your wconnect app
7. Place the two prg files in your programs directory where you can add them to your wconnect project
8. Add the ‘FC’ scriptmap extension to the main file in your wconnect app
9. Add this code ‘Set Procedure To flatcal_main Additive’ in the ‘SetServerProperties’ function in the main file in your wconnect app
10. Open your browser and point it towards ‘http://localhost/FlatCal/’

Credits go to

• Brandon Wood for the HTML Template
• Nathan Smith for the Calendar CSS
• John Resig for jQuery
• Rick Strahl for Web Connection
• Trent Richardson for the Impromptu Plugin
• Developed by Shaun Kester (shaun@skfox.com)


loMagickImage = Createobject("ImageMagickObject.MagickImage")
lcSourceFile = "C:\uploads\"+Alltrim(gFileList.FILENAME)
lcThumbnailFile = "C:\uploads\thumb_"+Alltrim(gFileList.FILENAME)
lcMidFile = "C:\uploads\mid_"+Alltrim(gFileList.FILENAME)
loMagickImage.Convert("-resize", "x128", lcSourceFile, lcThumbnailFile)
loMagickImage.Convert("-resize", "x512", lcSourceFile, lcMidFile)
loMagickImage = .Null.


Make sure that you check the option labeled “Install ImageMagickObject OLE Control for VBscript, Visual Basic, and WSH” during the install or else you won’t be able to call it from VFP or any other language.

See the function at CodePaste.net

MD5 can easily be reversed using a lookup of ‘known’ hashes. So if user ‘Bob’ made a choose a password of ‘abc’ and we encrypted it on the client then sent it to the server we could store it in the databases as a hash instead of plain text. Hashing something without a salt would lead to a problem when the table got stolen or a man in the middle attack occurred. The bad guy could then take the hash and look it up in the reverse table then would have Bob’s password in plain text. Salt is when you combine Bob’s password with something else. For example, create a hash of his last name, DOB, and UserId…append it to the end of the password hash his browser sent and hash them together to compare with the hashed password.

Hmm…that didn’t make a lot of sense to me…I need more Code Red. I’ll try this way:

Bob signs up for your site with user name ‘Bob’ and password ‘1234′
Password in plain text: 1234
Password hash (1234, easily reversed): 81dc9bdb52d04dc20036dbd8313ed055
Password hash with salt (1234+Bob, not as easily reversed): 27d5c234335b9762416808e2ace80842
Password hash with salt + GUID: (1234+Bob+791ae620-e2f5-11db-8314-0800200c9a66, very hard to reverse): 34e25923be3cad2bb140c8c508f59e16

Store the hash of 1234 in your table, then when it is time to compare, make sure you concatenate consistently to get the right result.

I found an MD5 program by Gilles Patrick that works really well off of the VFP Wiki. It produces results that agree with the client side JS MD5 program I linked to above.

Hashing a single word is not nearly as secure as hashing that word plus some random (but consistent) text. More and more people use the same password for their email, system, start page, etc and I think my users appreciate it when I tell them up front that I don’t know their password. Recovering a users password can be a little tricky in that they have to create a new one instead of you telling them what it is, but security questions and using the email address on file works out good for recovery.

I’m no expert on this stuff, but here are some people that are.

When I was in Mesa, AZ last week for the West Wind Web Connection conference I demo’ed a couple of my single page applications (SPA). I really wish I had more time to go over the details and mechanics that make them work. The SPAs that I create don’t generally create a history in the browser i.e. the back and forward buttons don’t apply. All of the navigation is done by controls embedded in the page. To keep from distracting my users, I automatically close the browser and launch a chromeless window in IE6 that has the address bar, buttons, and file menu stripped away. The browser that spawned the new window is automatically closed without the dreaded ‘Are you sure’ dialog with this javascript in the new chromeless window.

<script type=”text/javascript”>
function closeit()
{opener.opener = top;
opener.close();}
</script>

<body onLoad=”closeit()”>

This is a bit of a hack, and it isn’t going to work for very long. As I alluded to ealier, the latest browsers work harder to allow a developer to remove features or menus from them automatically. So what is a developer to do? Luckily, more and more options are presenting themselves. Here are the ones that I’ve started to play with:

• Adobe Air
• XUL Runner
• XUL Runner stepchild, WebRunner
• WebRunner stepchild, Prism
• Bubbles

Some have local data storage, some use a standard rendering engine, and all have unique strength/weakness points. Surprisingly, none are in a stable/production version. They are all in an alpha or beta stage of development. I’m going to play with more of them over the weekend. Look for a through review next week of how well they work with my VFP/WC environment.

P.S.: I’m also working on the jQuery books reviews from earlier this month. Look for them about the same time.

The conference

Sarah and I have returned safely from the West Wind Web Connection conference. It was really awesome to finally meet so many of the people that I hang out with on the Web Connect forums in person. Web Connection 5.30 is awesome. The wwBusiness Objects and JSON handling is very powerful and something that will take me awhile to learn, but will totally be worth the time.

I gave a short show and tell about my work with jQuery and Visual Foxpro/WC. There were a lot of questions and I think people were very interested in what I was doing. I’ll try to resurrect my examples page here soon to share with everyone. jQuery got a lot of attention too. I brought the books that Packt Publishing sent me with me. They were passed around most of the afternoon and several people took note of their ISBN numbers to order them from Amazon. jQuery may well soon be part of Web Connection. The excellent Date Picker from Marc Garbanski has already been added and I’m sure there is more to come.
</rave>

<rant>

The hotel

The Arizona golf resort and conference center is a very beautiful place, but for us that was about the only thing going for it. They managed to leave my wife at the mall for almost two hours because somebody at the front desk repeatedly dropped the ball on calling the driver to come pick her up. We were without power for the better part of a day because an underground line got cut. Room service likes to barge in without knocking. Wi-Fi is $9.95 per day and connections are inconsistent. The front desk staff like to use foul language. I’ll define our experience with simply, They Suck!

Update!: Rick Strahl has blogged about his experience and made some very good points about the two way street that is customer service as has my latest addition, Eric.Weblog() , to Google Reader.

</rant>

• gMail-esque upload (.Net)
• SWF Upload (flash/js, but backend agnostic)
• MultiFile (jQuery, but backend agnostic)
• jUpload (java, but backend agnostic)
• File Chucker (PHP and Perl)
• …and my personal favorite, jQuery form plugin which handles all of your ajax and file uploads at once. Very nice, highly recommended as is jQuery.

Using Ajax in your website makes you buzzword compliant these days (OMG teh Web 2.0!?!), but once the hype passes I think everyone will agree then when used properly, it can greatly enhance the user experience.