CyphersTECH Consulting » Programming

REALbasic and Snow Leopard: Redraw what?!

Anthony G. Cyphers — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 05:15:35 +0000

A customer has tasked me with updating some of the UI elements in their application. Among the problems they listed was a redraw bug in Snow Leopard, where the controls on windows with a set background color would display a slightly different color in their background even with the Composite property set to True. After about an hour of testing different workarounds, I found what I believe to be an excellent solution.

In this application, all of the windows have a set background color, but only a few displayed the error. I had absolutely no luck in determining the difference, so I can only assume that it’s an inconsistent REALbasic bug. Here’s how I fixed it:

Add a new object to your project, mine is named “WindowHack,” and set it’s Super to “Window.”
Open the window subclass, and navigate to the “Paint” event.
Inside the “Paint” event, add the following block of code:
#if TargetMacOS then If Me.HasBackColor Then g.ForeColor = me.BackColor g.FillRect( 0, 0, g.Width, g.Height ) End If #endif
Now set the Super of the windows with the problem to “WindowHack” and test.

This seemed to be the most elegant solution I could find to the problem and, quite honestly, the root of the issue still eludes me. Any thoughts on what might be causing this inconsistency?

A weekend with C#

Anthony G. Cyphers — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 00:53:28 +0000

I’ve spent the majority of my time this weekend learning the finer points of design in C#, and I have to say that I’m quite impressed.

See, I’m a BASIC developer — or have been since QuickBasic — so I was looking at C# like it was the devil. Pure evil. Ugh. C-Based nonsense. With a little pushing from friends, I decided to give it a go and see where I ended up.

It’s hard to compare C# to any of the BASIC variants I’m used to, but I’m going to try.

Variables
This is a change up that I had a tiny bit of trouble adjusting to. In C#(and any other C style language), there’s no “Dim X As (Type)”. Instead, you simply have the Type name, Variable name, then any assignments. For instance:

int XPosition = 100;

Not too bad. “int” is our type, “XPosition” is our variable name, and “100″ is the value we’re assigning to it.

Methods
This one isn’t too different. Instead of like I’m used to in BASIC, having the method definition look like Scope Name(Parameters) As Type, C# moves one thing. It’s Scope Type Name(Parameters). If your method isn’t going to be returning a value? Easy, your type is “void”.

private void myMethod(string myName)

{

}

Easy to grasp, right?

Events
Events aren’t as tough to figure out as I thought they’d be. Visual Studio holds your hand the entire way. Start by checking out the “Events” tab of the Property listbox, then go to the language ref and check out what EventArgs etc you need. After that, you simply code up the event, something like…

private void myControl_Paint(object Sender, PaintEventArgs e)

{

}

Then go right on back to the “Events” tab in the Property listbox, find the event you want to implement, hit the dropdown, and select the event handler you just coded. Pie.

I’ll be sure to write up more of these articles as I learn the language. Wish me luck!

RB: Hate that flicker

Anthony G. Cyphers — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 20:24:53 +0000

I’m currently working on a project for a client that requires a cross-platform UI class which is pretty standard. It has working alternatives on Windows, Mac, Linux, and anything else you can think of. They want a certain style within the application, regardless of OS, and I don’t blame them for it.

Now, that’s all fine and dandy…so what’s the problem? Windows + REALBasic = Problem. We all know that flicker on Win32 is a pain in RB. I’ve managed, over the years, to work out a system to negate that issue. Except, of course, in this circumstance.

We have a custom UI class, inside that we have a PagePanel, and inside that we have various different elements. On Mac, everything works beautifully. Once we switch over to Win32, however…ugh. See, that class itself is flicker-free. Until we put the PagePanel on it and start changing values, that is. Anytime that PagePanel’s value changes, our entire custom class has to be redrawn with one of those beautiful little flickers. What a pain.

About the only thing I can think of to get around this problem, would be to manage showing/hiding of child elements in code, and drop the PagePanel. Of course, that’s not the route we want to take with this project.

Anyone else have an idea?

JS: Multiple lines in a cookie

Anthony G. Cyphers — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 17:32:23 +0000

Coming from my buddy Shawn over at Lyme Team is an easy way to store multiple lines of data in a single cookie!

First we’ll start off with our HTML. This is an example template from which we’ll work.


	"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">





	Multi-line cookie example





	Multi-line cookie example


	

		








			
				

					Text to be stored in a cookie:


					<br />
this is some<br />
example text<br />
					

	  		
	  		

	  			Data Stored in cookie:


					


					Decoded data from cookie:

Now that we have our template, we can dive in to the JavaScript.

We’ll start with a few generic methods to control our cookie, and we’re going to put these in ‘cookie.js’

function createCookie(name,value,days) {

  if (days) {

    var date = new Date();

    date.setTime(date.getTime()+(days*24*60*60*1000));

    var expires = "; expires="+date.toGMTString();

  }

  else var expires = "";

  document.cookie = name+"="+value+expires+"; path=/";

}
function readCookie(name) {

  var nameEQ = name + "=";

  var ca = document.cookie.split(';');

  for(var i=0;i < ca.length;i++) {

    var c = ca[i];

    while (c.charAt(0)==' ') c = c.substring(1,c.length);

    if (c.indexOf(nameEQ) == 0) return c.substring(nameEQ.length,c.length);

  }

  return null;

}

function eraseCookie(name) { createCookie(name,"",-1); }

Since these aren’t the meat of the magic, I won’t explain their function. The names should be self-explanatory.

Now the good stuff.

Starting with our function to encode the value for storage in to a cookie. encodeTA{} is a simple function which takes the value of our textarea above(TxtIn), and replaces all of the line endings with tags.

		function encodeTA()

		{

			var big_string = document.ExampleForm.TxtIn.value; //Get the value that we want to encode

			createCookie('multiline', big_string.replace(/\r\n|\r|\n/g, '
'), 1); // This will replace line endings with a 

		}

On the other side, decodeTA{} takes the output from encodeTA{}, which comes from the cookie, and replaces all those lovely tags with line endings.

function decodeTA()

		{

			var txt = readCookie('multiline'); //Read in our cookie

			document.ExampleForm.RawOut.value = txt; //Display the cookie's value in it's raw form.

			document.ExampleForm.TxtOut.value = txt.replace(/
/g, 'n'); //Now we're going to replace those 
s with line endings.

		}

Now, all that’s left is to modify our HTML to call these functions, and include them in the document. For this and more, download the example below.

multiline-cookie.zip

PHP: SQL2XML

Anthony G. Cyphers — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 02:24:54 +0000

This bit of code will connect to a MySQL database, run the passed query, and return the results as XML. I wrote this for use with FLEX, and it works quite well.

// Database configuration.
define("db_host", "localhost");
define("db_user", "some_user");
define("db_pass", "mypass");
define("db_name", "mydb");

// Authenticate calling application
define("auth_user", "someUserName");
define("auth_pass", "someUniquePhrase");

//Set our header…
header("Content-type: text/xml");
// and send our first line…
?>

// Kick things off…
user_authenticate();

function db_connect ()
{
mysql_connect(db_host,db_user,db_pass);
mysql_select_db(db_name);
}

function print_error($error)
{
// We print the error as XML so that the FLEX app can handle these problems.
echo("");
echo("" . $error . "");
echo("");
}

Text to be stored in a cookie: <br /> this is some<br /> example text<br />	Data Stored in cookie: Decoded data from cookie: