MVC3 Razor and Javascript - lots of syntax errors in green - asp.net-mvc

I am starting to notice problems when I try and code my javascript and use functions that are in my viewmodel. Things like this:
case 37:
#if (Model.GoLeft)
{
Here I get a syntax error and the words "expected constant" for Model. Is there some solution to this? Do I need to upgrade something so it works?
I checked around on stackoverflow. Someone else suggested that I should separate my js but that doesn't help me as for example in this case where I want the keypress to do something if on a certain type of page where the Model allows it. If the js is in another file I can't code this way.
thanks

your approach is just wrong. Dont generate JS code in views by ifs. You defintely should keep your JS separetly (so that browser can efectively cache and reuse it). If you need to change behaviour of client-side code according to model values, do that by generation only some king of "flags" (JS have multiple ways to do that, i am not expert in JS - for example global variable works always, but there are more elegant and recommended ways) and in your client-side method test for their presence and fork your code by that.

Related

How to implement multilingualism in SPA

I'm currently struggling with the problem of multilingualism in an SPA.
I've come up with several solutions, like building a wrapper for the resources resx files, or saving all labels in the database, but I am wondering if any of you have found some solution which automates these steps.
Are there any practices which are specific for this problem?
For a reasonable amount of literals, I suggest to save the resources in the DB or in a .RESX file in the server. When the user logs in or you detect the language that will be used, the literals are requested by the application and saved either in a collection of your translation module or in the LocalStorage of the browser (this could be a good approach for large data).
Then this module could have some methods to retrieve the messages, probably passing a key.
Using this solution you could inject this module in the viewmodels that need to show translated literals and acces them through the view:
<p data-bind="text: resourceManager.get('M01')"></a>
For large applications that would require huge localization data to be transfered, maybe some kind of modularity could be applied and only load the resources really needed for each module/section.
I don't think making recurrent requests to the server to get the translated literals is a good practise. SPA's should provide a good user experience and loading the translated literals from the server could be a blocking issue. Text is not like an image, you can render a page without all the images loaded, imagine rendering a page without the text :o
Anyway, I think the best solution would be to keep the server as repository and create a custom JS module that takes care to get data in one or multiple loads and is able to store it somewhere in the client.
I've solved my own problem, using a custom binding and i18next.
First, I've implemented i18next for translation of my labels/buttons and other resources.
Secondly, I've added a custom Knockout bindingHandler:
ko.bindingHandlers.i18n = {
init: function (element, valueAccessor) {
var translateKey = valueAccessor();
ko.utils.setTextContent(element, $.t(translateKey));
}
};
Finally you can add the following code to your views:
<span data-bind="i18n : 'buttons.cancel'"></span>
This will automatically get the correct resource, and Knockout will handle the bindings.
Hopefully this will help others struggling with the same problem.

MVC 4 VB Additional view data

Trying to find help for this problem has taken me to a whole new one: complete lack of ressources, books and samples vor MVC 4 in VB.NET. I am having to choose between learn by experience (and the associated feeling of banging your head against a wall) or give it up and move to C# alltogether.
No company should ship a product if they are not willing to give it the same support as its sibling pruduct. They should drop VB for MVC completely or give us the means to learn it.
With that out of the way, here's my question. This line:
#Html.EditorFor(Function(x) x.UsersData(temp).Roles(Role))
Is a nice line of code. Works wonders. But How can I add a class to it, so I can change the style on my css files?
Well, it seems that this should do the trick:
#Html.EditorFor(Function(x) x.UsersData(temp).Roles(Role), New With {.class = "users-manage-check-box"})
But guess what, it doesn't. Ever. The result is the same.
What is wrong and how can I fix it?
And to be completely honest, I did come up with a solution. One that makes me feel dirty.
Looking at the output from that code, i see that the boxes classes are "check-box".
So what I've been doing is this:
#html.Raw(Html.EditorFor(Function(x) x.UsersData(temp).Roles(Role), New With {.class = "users-manage-textbox"}).ToHtmlString.Replace("check-box", "user-manage-checkbox"))
This feels wrong. So wrong. And not only is it a sad piece of code, it introduces security risks, which I'll have to fix before my solution is out of the development phase.
Any clues on why the additional view data is not working as it should? Am I getting something wrong? Am I asking too much?
Thanks a lot!
I don't think EditorFor allows that. So you need to create a custom editor template yourself.
You can read more about creating custom templates in this blog post
Update:
Take a look at the answer for this issue from http://aspnetwebstack.codeplex.com/
This behavior is by design.
The overload that you are calling accepts an object parameter called
additionalViewData (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff406462).
The default implementation of EditorFor ignores this value. You would
have to write a custom editor template to be able to access that
information.

incorporating all views into one view

Just wondering what the shorthand would be in Rails to do this (if any):
I have views/pages/ containing 5 html.erb files and they all use the same default layout.html.erb, with one yield statement in the middle of it (the standard setup).
Now I want one view that incorporates all 5 of those erb files above contiguously, one after the other, in place of the one existing yield statement in that same layout.html.erb.
What minimal changes would I make to the layout.html.erb to accomplish this.
(Rails Newbie - like it more than Django now).
Ah,
I see what you're saying. Try this. Have your file structure such that all the views for said controller are in one folder...
#controllers_views = Dir.glob("your/controllers/views/*.erb")
#controllers_views.each { |cv| puts cv }
Seems like that would work, I'm away from my dev box or I'd test it for you.
Hope that helps.
Good luck!
You could always have a javascript that requests the sequential yields at a time interval as an ajax request. Then just your target element change to reflect the updated information.
Alternatively load all 5 into different divisions, and have them revolve visibility, like a picture gallery. CSS3 could pull this off.
http://speckyboy.com/2010/06/09/10-pure-css3-image-galleries-and-sliders/

ASP.NET MVC JavaScript Routing

Spoiler alert: this is NOW a question, so apologies to anyone that read it purely as a discursive topic :)
Anyway, I was doing a little research today re adding routes via javascript when i thought that a bit of google research wouldn't hurt. Basically, my aim was to do away with the following type of construct within my views:
and replace it with something akin to:
well, i lucked out a little today after finding this fantastic article (which isn't mine nor do i have any affiliation other than respect for the piece of work):
http://weblogs.asp.net/zowens/archive/2010/12/20/asp-net-mvc-javascript-routing.aspx
this really has been a missing link (or so i thought) for me when dealing with routes via javascript. However, the 2nd code example is misleading and actually won't produce what the example leads on. Can anyone suggest a fix for this and/or an alternative solution to allow this fluent convention of js routes within mvc views??
cheers...
[edit] - question edited 22:16 GMT to explore deeper options on this topic, plus changed title (removed OT portion).
So the question is why the second code example won't work as expected. Here's the answer, post currently doesn't return anything. This is an example of a certain developer not looking at the details of the code. When you use homePageUrl, the value will be undefined.
To actually get the home page URL, you'd do the following:
$.routeManager.action({controller:'Home', action:'Index'}).toUrl()
So, the moral of the story is that the code is a bit broken. The post action SHOULD return an object where you can put "toUrl()" right after the post is performed, like this:
$.routeManager.action({controller:'Home', action:'Index'})
.post(function(data){ alert(data); })
.toUrl();
I'll be fixing this bug in a bit!

Making tagsoup markup cleansing optional

Tagsoup is interfering with input and formatting it incorrectly. For instance when we have the following markup
Text outside anchor
It is formatted as follows
Text outside anchor
This is a simple example but we have other issues as well. So we made tagsoup cleanup/formatting optional by adding an extra attribute to textarea control.
Here is the diff(https://github.com/binnyg/orbeon-forms/commit/044c29e32ce36e5b391abfc782ee44f0354bddd3).
Textarea would now look like this
<textarea skip-cleanmarkup="true" mediatype="text/html" />
Two questions
Is this the right approach?
If I provide a patch can it make it to orbeon codebase?
Thanks
BinnyG
Erik, Alex, et al
I think there are two questions here:
The first Concern is a question of Tag Soup and the clean up that happens OOTB: Empty tags are converted to singleton tags which when consumed/sent to the client browser as markup gets "fixed" by browsers like firefox but because of the loss of precision they do the wrong thing.
Turning off this clean up helps in this case but for this issue alone is not really the right answer because we it takes away a security feature and a well-formed markup feature... so there may need to be some adjustment to the handling of at least certain empty tags (other than turning them in to invalid singleton tags.)
All this brings us to the second concern which is do we always want those features in play? Our use-case says no. We want the user to be able to spit out whatever markup they want, invalid or not. We're not putting the form in an app that needs to protect the user from cross script coding, we're building a tool that lets users edit web pages -- hence we have turned off the clean-up.
But turning off cleanup wholesale? Well it's important that we can do it if that's what our usecase calls for but the implementation we have is all or nothing. It would be nice to be able to define strategies for cleanup. Make that function plug-able. For example:
* In the XML Config of the system define a "map" of config names to class names which implement the a given strategy. In the XForm Def the author would specify the name from the map.
If TagSoup transforms:
Text outside anchor
Into:
Text outside anchor
Wouldn't that be bug in TagSoup? If that was the case, then I'd say that it is better to fix this issue rather than disable TagSoup. But, it isn't a bug in TagSoup; here is what seems to be happening. Say the browsers sends the following to the client:
<a shape="rect"></a>After<br clear="none">
This goes through TagSoup, the result goes through the XSLT clean-up code, and the following is sent to the browser:
<a shape="rect"/>After<br clear="none"/>
The issue is on the browser, which transforms this into:
<a shape="rect">After</a><br clear="none"/>
The problem is that we serialize this as XML with Dom4jUtils.domToString(cleanedDocument), while it would be more prudent to serialize it as HTML. Here we could use the Saxon serializer. It is also used from HTMLSerializer. Maybe you can try changing this code to use it instead of using Dom4jUtils.domToString(). You'll let us know what you find when a get a chance to do that.
Binesh and I agree, if there is a bug it would be a good idea to address the issue closer to the root. But I think the specific issue he is only part of the matter.
We're thinking it would be best to have some kind of name-to-strategy mapping so that RTEs can call in the server-side processing that is right for them or the default if it's not specified.

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