More related to just web development in general, but sometimes you might need to change the onclick event handler of an element. This can be a little tricky, but I find the best way to do this is:br /br /blockquotebr /element.onclick = function() {this_i... [More...]

The templates_c folder is location of where the smarty tag templates are compiled to. And these templates are used to display the Xataface application. So it's important that end-users are able to read from this folder so that they are use the applicati... [More...]

Sometimes the fields.ini doesn't have enough functionality for you to handle some features you need. In these cases, you will have to do it programmatically. Here is a short piece of code:br /br /blockquotebr /$table =amp; Dataface_Table::loadTable(#39;... [More...]

Recently ran into an interesting request on how to change the label of the save button on the edit form to something else. While I don't believe there is a direct way to do this in Xataface, you can utilize a little workaround with the feature of "intern... [More...]

One thing you'll want to do is to grab related records in Xataface. Say for example, you have an abstract record that belongs to a conference. In the relationships.ini file of your abstract table, you would include something like this:br /br /blockquote... [More...]

One good thing you should do if you are planning to develop an application with Xataface is to actually checkout the svn repository of Xataface. The most recent code for Xataface which includes bug fixes and features will be added to this repository. I ... [More...]

One of the more annoying challenges involved with managing production web applications is keeping the development and production versions in sync. Verson control systems such as Subversion and CVS make this task trivial for source code and file system c... [More...]

I have used Scriptaculous in the past to sprinkle little bits of UI magic into Xataface. Specifically, I have used it to add collapsible sections, sortable sections (via drag-and-drop), and sortable tables (also via drag and drop). These worked great! ... [More...]

A major development issue in any computer project that requires a database is keeping your database structure keep to date with the different versions of the code. Keep database up to date is always a difficult because you cannot simply put it under vers... [More...]

This isn't exactly a Xataface related issue, but I found myself continually forgetting about this that I thought it would be good to blog about this so I can remember. When I have ssh'ed onto the server and I need to do a svn commit, I get an error messa... [More...]

So I ran into a pretty annoying problem the other day. I had to test a Xataface application on IE6 with Vista as my OS. Which basically meant I had IE7 preinstalled, and I couldn't install IE6. Ughh...annoying. I don't understand why people still use ... [More...]

Sometimes you need to add some text to a certain template, but Xataface doesn't have the specific block or slot to use. For example, say you wanted to include some text underneath the password field in the login page for Xataface. You can't do this with... [More...]

While using the fields.ini is a good way to set attributes such as widget:label, description, etc sometimes you need more control. This can be accomplished by loading the table in the code and then directly modifying the fields. For example:br /br /bloc... [More...]

You can leverage off the power of Xataface to create forms allowing users to submit data to your tables. Here is some code to allow you do that, I'll go into more explanation after:br /br /blockquotebr /$app =amp; Dataface_Application::getInstance();br /... [More...]

If there is a row in a table that contains a NULL value, you can use Xataface to search specifically for that record but it's not as trivial as searching for NULL. You have to set it to an equal sign which will basically look for exact matches to nothing... [More...]

Found this great IE blog article explaining the cryptic “Operation Aborted Error” in IE.
Click Here.
Another reminder of why I don’t use IE, but also why the fact that many people do use it makes my life as a developer miserable.

... [More...]

If you are using Xataface as your backend management, and also as a front end (through the use of actions and templates) this can save you lots of time. However, sometimes you set permissions on records that you don't want users seeing if they are in the... [More...]

One of the things you can do on a live xataface site is turn on caching to allow the server to just the information in RAM rather than continue to hit the database for information each time. You can do this by simply entering this in the conf.ini:br /br ... [More...]

In your users table, you might want to store the user's password as a MD5 hash. When xataface is authenticating users, you make to tell them to encrypt the password they enter so that it can be properly compared to the value in the database. To do this,... [More...]

When you have a custom action, you need to be able to return back to the page you were on before your custom action. The best way to do this is to take the query that was sent to your action:$query =& $app->getQuery();... [More...]

Taking a look at the Xataface Record API presents you with several techniques to display the values of the record. At the lowest level, there is a function called val and can be called like this (assuming $rec is a Xataface record)... [More...]

I was tired of having to resize my images before uploading them to the web. I also wanted to be able to host more video on my website in a simple way. So I created an application to manage and serve all of my videos and images - Internet Media Manager.... [More...]

When you go into the details view of a record, in addition to the all the different values in the database about the record, you can also specify a logo for that record and this logo will appear in the top left corner of the record.You should ... [More...]

This is a tutorial to show how to specify some variables in a php class and then use them in the smarty template. Here is the situation: There is a below_header.html file needs to have a drop down menu which lists a bunch of offering_types as a classifi... [More...]

Here is an interesting example of how to use actions in an html select from object.In our actions.ini file (delegate or conf.ini) we have a set of actions each with the category attribute set to bd_company_filters. Like this:... [More...]

You can use the function df_display() to actually include html files (or I think any other file) in your templates folder that can then be displayed in your delegate class functions. For example,function block__before_header... [More...]

So Xataface employs smarty templates throughout its application to apply its styles and stuff. I am not 100% sure how it works, but there are list of ENV variables which are available to be used throughout any template file in xataface. These ENV varia... [More...]

The conf.ini file there is a section called [_pref] which you can use set different preferences through the application. For example, show_search = 0 will turn off search. How this works is that the various template files the application uses has specia... [More...]

You can actually change the default template list view (or maybe any other template) by doing something really simply. For example, we can use the Dataface_List_View_summary.html file (it's in the Dataface/templates folder) to replace our normal view of ... [More...]

You have the option of turning on debug = 1 in the conf.ini file in the application folder of a Xataface application. What this will do is basically display all the possible blocks you can insert code/templates into. Slots will not be display... [More...]