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.NET MVC Scheduler/appointment open-source?
Thanks!
Our team had an MVC 5 project recently with this need. The project required the ability to display a calendar of events from a database as well as add and delete existing calendar items. We looked at DayPilot Lite's & Dhtmlx's JavaScript version 4.1 open source versions.
What we found
Both have JavaScript versions and .Net WebForms and/or MVC integrated versions however for our project we desired the JavaScript versions over the MVC integrated versions as we felt it was cleaner and fit more with our development model (We don't tend to use 3rd party integrated controls). JavaScript was the only free version offered by Dhtmlx while DayPilot offers the lite open source version for WebForms and MVC.
Both have nice tutorials available on their site and on various sites like code project.
What we chose
We used dhtmlx's JavaScript Event Calendar / Ajax Scheduler in an ASP.Net MVC 5 app as it had a few more features in it's open source version that we desired. Namely the color coding option was ready to go out of the box and we found the API very flexible, exposed events and customization options to be very powerful. We have been very happy with it and found it was easy to use their documentation site and samples site to figure out all that we needed to do. We did not use their data connector as we found straight AJAX calls worked easy enough for our scenario.
Getting started with dhtmlx
Here's a couple of articles on code project that we used to get us going with dhtmlx.
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/148500/Event-Calendar-for-an-ASP-NET-MVC-Application
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/249921/How-to-Build-a-Room-Booking-Calendar-with-dhtmlxSc
In case the links stop working the author is Stas Wolski for both of them.
Both examples are old but still effective. Finally, we used their online demos (can be downloaded) and online documentation site as well.
Knowledge share
One of our biggest tricks to the calendar was the date format matching (or mismatch in our initial case).
We used the format of scheduler.config.xml_date = "%m/%d/%Y %H:%i".
For dates coming from our MVC View Model (VM) we made sure to convert them to string formats of short date (#Model.StartDate.ToString("d")) if it was a date in the VM.
If the VM passed a date as a string then we made sure the controller used the following format example (item.StartDate.ToString("MM/dd/yyyy HH:mm:ss")).
Some potential helpful API's we used that might just be of use.
Reacting to calendar clicks - take a look at scheduler.attachEvent
Changing the Hours Scale look - take a look at scheduler.templates.hour_scale
Need to customize the view of different event types - take a look at scheduler.renderEvent and scheduler.templates.event_class
Hiding/Ignoring Weekends in the calendar - take a look at scheduler.ignore_week
Need to have a confirm dialog for a calendar action - take a look at scheduler._dhtmlx_confirm
Minifying Issue
We did find one gotcha with the JS version and MVC in particular that we didn't resolve. If you bundle and minify the dhtmlx's scripts the scheduler breaks as the scheduler object is renamed and becomes undefined. We simply setup the scripts to bundle but not to minify by using Bundle instead of ScriptBundle.
bundles.Add(new Bundle("~/bundles/dhtmlx/calendar").Include(
"~/Scripts/dhtmlx/dhtmlxscheduler.js",
"~/Scripts/dhtmlx/ext/dhtmlxscheduler_limit.js",
"~/Scripts/dhtmlx/ext/dhtmlxscheduler_minical.js",
"~/Scripts/dhtmlx/ext/dhtmlxscheduler_readonly.js"));
I'm sure there is a way to solve that but we weren't too worried about this in our case as this part of the app was not going to be getting high amounts of traffic....
Check this
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/404647/AJAX-Event-Calendar-Scheduler-for-ASP-NET-MVC-3-in
I will use it in next project
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for a project I will need to develop a website. The problem is: This is the first time for me.
I am currently planning and drawing the outlines and also trying to find out which technique will suit the project best and how to approach this task.
The website should retrieve data from an API by using RESTful HTTP-Commands and present the results to the registered user.
My programming experience so far is mainly C++ and some C#/.NET which I used for the creating the API.
So, which language and script do you think would suit best? I have looked into ASP.NET MVC a bit because of my previous experience with .NET. Is that a proper choice?
Apart from
that, I would prefer a graphical designer for the HTML-coding. What tools would you use? I looked into Google Web Designer, but I was not quite persuaded. What would you recommend?
Thanks in advance!
Eteokles
I agree with Sami, if you have basic knowledge in CSharp/.Net it is not a bad idea to use ASP.NET MVC/API to setup your project. But you should bear platform dependence in mind if you are not using .NET Core, which is actually in Version 1.0.0 RC 2. So if you use ASP.NET 4 you will have to use a Microsoft Server to deploy your application. If that is no problem for you, then I would recommend to have a look at Microsoft Virtual Academy. Developing ASP.NET applications with Visual Studio is a pleasure, you have great debugging tools and you can create Unit Tests to test your application.
Unfortunately there is nothing like a graphical designer for your HTML frontend in Visual Studio. But if you are using Bootstrap you can reach your design goals really fast. Also Bootstrap is "mobile first" which means, that even if a user accesses your Website over a mobile device (Tablet, Smartphone) the site will look great. The basic ASP.NET 4 MVC template comes with a Bootstrap layout, you could build upon.
If you want to enable users of your application to create user accounts you can choose the ASP.NET MVC template with "individual user account" ASP.NET Identity
In conclusion I want to provide you another link where ASP.NET is compared to another very popular and easy to learn language for developing websites PHP vs. ASP.NET. I would recommend ASP.NET after using PHP for years, because thinks like asynchronous programming and using Entity-Framework to handle your database needs.
I would also recommend you to do further reading on the pros and cons of different tools and languages and after you have a general overview over the available solutions you should compare which language and which tools match your application needs most. Happy coding.
Based on your experience/knowledge, ASP.Net, MVC and API seems a good to go option. You might need to understand Javascript/jQuery and JSON to communicate with API. It's pretty simple like:
$.getJSON("http://localhost/api/products", function(result){
$.each(result, function(i, field){
$("div").append(field + " ");
});
})
For UI, Bootstrap is always a good choice and easily get your layout at
Layoutit
For Web API, a good tutorial found at Web API in ASP.Net MVC
Hope this helps!
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I will start a new .Net MVC project with a small team. It have five members, two back-end devs and three front-end devs.
The front-end members will work separately, building a html version of this project using tools like gulp/grunt, less/saas, jade and others frameworks. They prefer to use editors like Sublime and will run interface tests in many differents devices in real time.
They not able to work with MVC specifically Razor view engine, so we need two repositories, one to front and another to back.The back-end developer in the process ever need to catch the built html and suit it in Razor MVC.
Any ideas how to improve this process? How can i reduce the technical gap between back devs and front devs?
IMO you are trying too hard to accommodate the skills/desires of your team members. You will not get good cohesion from the client side with the server side if you completely ignore Razor/CSHTML. Your overall architecture/design should come first, and dictate these decisions. Of course you would take your team's skills into consideration, such that you wouldn't make a team of Java developers adopt C++. But you are taking this to an extreme by basically throwing consideration for design/architecture out of the window, and saying you will divide the application based on what your devs are willing to work with.
My opinions aside, you can make this work, but somewhat painfully.
For one, developing HTML apges first in a vacuum without consideration for interactions with the server is either going to result in very crippled interface that is more like static website from the 90s. There are a few cases where you can build a single-page-application that's pure javascript with no AJAX requests, but these scenarios are very rare.
Therefore, you need to either build the server-side first, or have a design step that mocks up the page and talk through how it will work.
1) Design a page and it's features, and how it interacts with the server. Identify what interactions are navigation actions, such as clicking a link to navigate to another page, versus those which are AJAX operations. Do NOT implement HTML, that comes later. As a team review what each dev mocks up and make sure they've thought through all of the interactions thoroughly.
From this, list what server side operations are needed in the controller for that page:
agree upon URLs
is it GET/POST
is it AJAX
whether it returns a page, partial HTML fragment, or JSON.
what parameter names for each are and data types
2) Your backend developers create controllers, exposing actions based on agreed upon design. CSHTML will for now be stubs and return nothing.
3) Your frontend developers create HTML/javascript to consume these.
They will be able to point ajax operations to the controllers, but they will need to mock what is returned since the Controllers don't know what HTML they should be returning yet.
4) Front end devs provide HTML to back end devs to incorporate into the project so that actions/partial views return the HTML or HTML fragments.
The problem is you are going to constantly be iterating through frontend devs giving HTML to backend devs to incorporate into the MVC project so that the actions that return HTML and or AJAX actions that return partial HTML fragments (PartialView) can be tested.
It makes for a very non-agile process.
You won't be able to take advantage of many frameworks for MVC which assume you are using Razor views/HTML helpers. Many frameworks for compressing/bundling javascript/less/css which integrate well with MVC are not going to be viable. You can still do this stuff, but you'll have a workflow that is not as smooth and will involve more hacking it together yourself.
I would like to point out that almost all javascript frameworks work great within CSHTML. From the client side perspective, MVC/CSHTML doesn't introduce any strangeness that prevents you from building very interactive pages. You can build a CSHTML page that is pure HTML and javascript, and makes AJAX calls to controllers, but trying to take that outside of the MVC project is going to cripple the development workflow. Designing and implementing an interactive page requires alot of consideration for how the actions on the server side are implemented.
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Has anyone integrated meteor with mobile front-end frameworks?
In making mobile html5 apps look "more native" there are a number of CSS/front-end frameworks. eg:
Meteoric http://meteoric.github.io/
http://onsenui.io/
http://topcoat.io/
http://jquerymobile.com/ (shudder)
http://goratchet.com/one.html
http://ionicframework.com/
App.js: http://code.kik.com/app/2/index.html
http://lungo.tapquo.com/
http://famo.us/
http://goratchet.com/
http://www.idangero.us/framework7/
Foundation for apps
and more. In comparison to plain Bootstrap, the main benefits are:
preloading content
smooth full-screen page navigation
mobile widgets with "native look" for ios/android
But these frameworks often have use their own MVC model, for example pre-loading content into offscreen DIVs and doing full-screen transitions. they often use an internal router or Pushstate which would conflict with Meteor/IronRouter. And ionic for example depends on angular...
Has anyone had success with this type of integration? Any leads appreciated.
Meteoric
http://meteoric.github.io/
is a port of ionic, to remove the Angular stuff, and make some UI parts reactive. EDIT: not being updated now that angular is an option to jam into meteor itself.
related article:
https://medium.com/space-camp/cross-platform-uis-for-mobile-meteor-apps-6f12b583b205
this does seem like a great solution for mobile, but won't help if you want one UI to be responsive across to desktop devices too. they have deliberately kept the grid simple and mobile focused.
As I understand, you are interested in any cases of mobile front-end framework integration with meteor.
Let me show you great example famo.us + meteor from Percolate Studio - guys who are doing a lot of stuff with meteor and for meteor too. Here announce in meteor blog, also video from devshop
Some useful links in blog and devshop will be a good example of successful mobile+meteor integration in production app.
Ratchet is available as an atmosphere package. It does not include all the javascript parts of the framework but very handy nonetheless.
meteor-ionic
It uses the ionic
Bootcards is very good choice it's not meteor package yet .
Ratchet is lightweight but also good choice .
another new contender is Materialize which is a CSS/JS version of the material design elements, ie no angular required:
https://github.com/Dogfalo/materialize
here's a blog on some of the basics
http://blog.differential.com/the-easy-way-to-add-material-design-to-your-meteor-app/
pros
Materialize seems to have a decent set of widgets, and nice animations.
cons
pure android look, don't expect any appstore feature love
no full-page transitions out of the box, like meteoric
From the general goal sense, the front end part of Meteor somewhat conflicts with Angularjs. However, nothing is impossible if you really want to make them together. To accommodate them together, you need to do some special tricks. This following post shared the experience to make them working together.
mrt:ionic is the package by integrating meteor and ionic together. But it does not support the latest meteor version. You'd better wait for some time for the update.
Foundation for Apps from Zurb is another option, but it's built on Angular so would have to be ported/hacked about in the same way the Ionic project was.
http://foundation.zurb.com/apps/
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I've been in some discussions lately and the talk is about moving over to ASP.NET MVC and Knockout for future work on a product that is currently ASP.NET web forms. This product has many of the characteristics of the general current definition of a SPA.
I've never quite seen how MVC actually fits in when you start generating all your views with JS view models which get their data from calls to JSON web services.
Is there a "sweet spot" that leverages the best parts of Knockout w/JS models and JSON and the MVC framework?
Here are some things that I've been thinking about this (a little random - just seeing if I can spur on some discussion/answers):
When would you use Knockout vs. Razor? Knockout generates the view elements at run time on the client browser. Razor runs as part of the server request before the client receives the response. Are there times that one is clearly better than the other or does it come down to personal taste?
Is there value in keeping more code under the guise of C#/Razor for the purpose of code completion? Also, when exceptions get thrown, stack tracing to compiled code seems easier than JS debugging.
Is it better to completely separate the view from the back-end by creating a blank ASP.NET application and an independent Web API project?
Lots of great questions, I'll share some of my thoughts on the subjects. (Questions have been paraphrased):
1) Is there a place for MVC in a Knockout world? - Absolutely. MVC is a lot more than just Razor. Server side routing, Areas, Authentication, and more, are all provided by MVC. So in my mind, I can still use MVC for all the "admin and organization" but still have all my Views be primarily (but not necessarily completely) AJAX driven. I have discussed using MVC and KO together on SO before. I also have a video dedicated to that topic at WintellectNOW dot com.
2) When should I use Razor? - Let's actually switch up the terminology. It really isn't about Razor vs. Knockout: it's really about server-side vs. client-side rendering.
So when should you use server-side rendering? One ideal time for this is when you are loading data that only has to be done once when the page is initialized. For example, if you have a list of States for a drop down, and that list is extremely unlikely to change, go ahead and load that on the server side. Why turn around and make another request back to an API in that case? I would reserve those calls for dynamic or context sensitive data.
3) Is there value in keeping more code in C# for tooling purposes? - IMHO, no. It's true that debugging JS can be painful, but that is not enough justification for me to disregard all the awesome things I can do client side. It's worth the occasional frustration to provide a better user experience.
4) Should I move Web API to a different project to keep the code separate. - It completely depends on the needs of the project. If the Web API project is going to service multiple applications, then YES it should be in a separate project. That will also put it on a separate DOMAIN, SUB, PORT, or something to differentiate it from the rest of the Web app. Doing so introduces Cross Origin Resources Sharing (CORS) issues. CORS is a particular hell I wouldn't go through unless absolutely necessary. If your Web API is only going to service your single web app, do yourself a favor and keep it in the same project.
As with everything else, a lot of this comes down to personal preference. Mine is to use Server side for managing the bigger picture of my app, and client side for all the UI/UX.
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I'm wondering if someone can give some advice as to which is 'better'. Twitter-bootstrap or JQuery mobile?
Thanks,
-peter
I don't know if "better" is something you can answer since they serve different purposes. Bootstrap is great all-purpose CSS library whereas jQueryMobile is closer to a framework. Meaning jQueryMobile doesn't just make your pages look nice- it gives a lot of mobile oriented features such as- swipe-events, page transitions, allows for single page applications (since it will only show a single div with data-role='page' at a time), AJAX preload and history API, and lots of touch friendly components/widgets. Whereas bootstrap is foremost a CSS library mostly for desktop but works on mobile as well especially since 2.0 comes with media queries built in. Bootstrap will not help you with touch friendly lists, checkboxes, select menu's, etc.
One more thing to point out, jQueryMobile takes your markup and dresses it with all sorts of pretty stuff using JavaScript. Bootstrap has some javascript, but only for optional components, the rest is CSS.
So to answer IMHO- if you're a making a web application that you explicitly plan on using primarily on mobile devices go with jQueryMobile; Anything else go with Bootstrap- it's really quite awesome.
jQuery mobile != twitter bootstrap. Twitter bootstrap is used to create responsive layouts [a single CSS can work on big as well as small screen size]. jQuery mobile is intended for mobile development. So if you develop a site using jQuery mobile won't give a good layout consistency in all desktop browsers.
While I agree that Twitter Bootstrap != jQuery Mobile, you can develop mobile sites with Bootstrap. After spending the last couple months developing a mobile site using jQuery Mobile, my conclusion is this:
The concept behind jQuery Mobile is perfect. The "page" concept integrates very well with server side technologies (ASP.Net MVC in my case). It allows you to develop pages as individual files, rendered mostly on the server, as you're already used to doing and probably desire to do.
However, in its current state, it can get very slow and very buggy if you try to do too much with it. I've run into problem after problem with it on my project.
So I'd say, if your site isn't too complicated (e.g. no swiping, no wizards), then go with jQuery Mobile. Otherwise, think about waiting for the project to mature. It's almost there.
I think the main differences are apparent by how the two projects identify themselves:
Bootstrap:
"Sleek, intuitive, and powerful front-end framework for faster and easier web development."
jQuery Mobile:
"Touch-Optimized Web Framework for Smartphones & Tablets."
Both frameworks are aiming at meeting different needs and accomplishing different things. I've used both of them in separate projects and each of them have strengths and weaknesses, but it would be a disservice to both to directly compare them. It's our job as programmers/designers/engineers to decide the goal for your project and pick the best tool for the job.
It depends on what you are going to do with it. I prefer Bootstrap in most cases, because i like the base css plus you can compile with responsive.less so you got a mobile version too. Iam much faster when prototyping with bootstrap because it is very loose coupled and just plain markup (except for the plugins, those are great too).