I am looking for a library to facilitate a nice UX for displaying a reservation calendar for a small bed and breakfast place. I would like to be able to show a calendar with maybe two views, being a high level 'year' view, showing high and low seasons, and basic indication of existing reservations, and a 'month' view showing more exact reservation details and allowing a user to submit a reservation request by using buttons or context menus.
I am in a very early part of the life cycle for this project and am looking for suggestions here rather than specific solutions, but what libraries and components are out there that I can look at and draw up a shortlist from?
For the sake of simplicity and speed of execution, I would consider the Telerik controls. If you're able to implement this in Silverlight then the calendar/schedule control pretty much gives you everything that you're asking for, really:
http://demos.telerik.com/silverlight/#ScheduleView/FirstLook
They also have a fair amount of configurable controls for .NET and JavaScript as well:
http://demos.telerik.com/aspnet-ajax/calendar/examples/functionality/specialdays/defaultcs.aspx
If you just want a solution that doesn't require integration into the .NET code then the jQueryUI JavaScript library may be useful. It merely takes data coming back from the page load or a service request and displays it for you:
http://jqueryui.com/demos/
Hope that's helpful.
Ext JS could be a viable option, then you could use a scheduling product that I have created. This demo could be pretty close to what you need: http://ext-scheduler.com/examples/html5/html5.html (try it in FireFox or Chrome for best experience). Integrates easily with ASP.NET too.
Other options would be FullCalendar (jQuery), ASPxScheduler by DevExpress.
Related
I was commissioned to build the following:
Web app to be accessed by all mobile devices - so no Flash/SilverLight/HTML5...
Main page will contain a calendar of current month (ability to navigate to other months is not required)
Each day should display one or more jobs (I am thinking 2 lines of text for each job), and each of these jobs may have a different color, depending on the time.
Database is SQL Server, hosted on GoDaddy, on the same hosting account as the page will live.
I am a newbie in web development and I would like to get some guidance of the best/easiest approach to implement this. Since I am a .Net Windows developer ASP.Net (or MVC) would be the preferred technology (unless you recommend a different one for this problem). I would really appreciate specific help on things like what control to use? Should I create a grid/table manually? How to customize each day's content, so it shows multiple jobs, each job being a couple of lines of text, but with specific color according to the job type?
(in WPF I would use templates, converters for color and everything data-bound. Do these things exist in Asp.Net?)
Thank you so much for your help!
Those links might help you:
Some javascript/JQuery calendar: http://www.webdesignbooth.com/9-useful-jquery-calendar-and-date-picker-plugins-for-web-designers/
A databound templated calendar control for Asp.Net: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/webforms/MellDataCalendar.aspx
You might look at jquery UI calendar or Telerik extension for MVC. It's not "fancy" but javascript.
Running an MVC2 site against IIS7 and would like to capture more detail of how users traverse the site - ideally to the point of being able to replay even the duration between mouse clicks - feedback of where people pause and/or backtrack.
I could do this with flash but that's no longer an option. Now it's just IIS7 via asp.net f4. IIS7 _should be able to provide this via 3rd party extensions - especially for this sort of niche need. I'm willing to consider client-side .net components but this sure seems to be the responsibility of the server.
[opps...does this belong on serverfault?]
thx
justSteve. Here is a solution that we have used:
http://www.seevolution.com/
I don't think that it gives time between clicks, but it does give very detailed tracking considering it's price (I don't know if that's an issue). We have really liked it. Fantastic detail.
You could also roll your own solution. Using jQuery and the $(document).click() function, you can log when they click, and the points on the screen. Then every couple of minutes, serialize it and fire it off to the server. You can get extremely fine-grained detail that way. The nice thing with seevolution is that they've done all of the work for you already, but it probably isn't as detailed as you would like.
JMax
Maybe not the "in-house" solution you're after but we are about to implement SessionCam at my company, which seems like a pretty good match for what you're looking for. Not having actually finished implementing it yet, I can't vouch for it in terms of quality at this point - but the description of the product certainly matches.
You aren't going to be able to capture the level of detail you need using a solely server-side solution. There needs to be a degree of client-side work - whether it's in flash or javascript - to capture things such as where the mouse is hovering (for heatmaps etc).
I personally haven't used this product, but a friend of mine spoke highly of it.
Clicktale
We are planning to extend an existing ASP.NET application (a real huge one) to have a slicker UI. One of the requiremnents is to have a way to execute server side code without a postback (As an example, say a user clicks on a link or hovers on a link, a popup comes up which executes server side code or makes calls to the database)
We plan to add more functionality that closely aligns with the behavior of a yahoo or a google customized page.
Is UpdatePanels a way to go or should a lot of it be implemented using JavaScript? One of the main requirements is to keep the pages as light as possible and to have good performance. We don't plan on using any 3rd party components.
What technologies are suggested that will help us add UI heavy features in the future?
Edit: Thanks everyone. It appears that the approach to take is to use a JS library such as JQuery and AJAX (from initial research the PageMethod/WebMethod way of doing it)?
Any more suggestions?
I think that UpdatePanels are actually pretty clunky. (Actually, I think ASP.NET is pretty clunky now that I've moved to ASP.NET MVC). If the page is going to be highly interactive, I'd suggest using some sort of javascript framework, like jQuery, Dojo, MooTools, etc. that will allow you to do AJAX easily as well as manage the user experience client-side. MS is distributing jQuery with Visual Studio and has promised to support it, so you might want to consider that when making your decision.
Stephen Walter did a great talk about the next version of ASP.NET Ajax 4.0. It's not an immediate solution but it's interesting to see where Microsoft is going with their Ajax framework.
There's a lot more to ASP.NET AJAX than the UpdatePanel, and a fair amount of it can be done without heavy JavaScript work. UpdatePanel is quite inefficient in terms of the amount of data send over the wire. As with everything, only optimise when you need - but bear in mind that the UpdatePanel is one of the first places to look for your slowdowns.
Just to give you a different answer than everybody else: why not try silverlight?
I need to make a client able to drag and drop images into category-folders in an ASP.NET 3.5 web-app.
I was hoping that an option existed, that was almost as easy to use as the Reorderlist from Ajax Control Toolkit, and where I did not have to look into JQuery or similar handcoding.
What are your recommendations?
Similar questions have been asked before, like this 6 months ago...: ASP.net AJAX Drag/Drop? where MooTools is recommended, but 6 months is a long time in the ASP.NET/Ajax world, so maybe a better and even simpler option exists now?
Commercial components are also an option - well up to 200$ anyway.
My experience with the Reorder List in the Ajax Control Toolkit, as with many other 3rd party providers, is that most of them don't seem to be worth the effort. Definitely try them before you buy.
Unfortunately a lot of the samples/components out there are all too client-based and always seem to fall short on real-world uses and the sorts of interaction you need with ASP.Net applications (e.g. handling postback). Dragging a div around isn't that complicated, but that's all a lot of examples do. If your needs don't exactly mirror their offering try something else.
The Manning book ASP.NET AJAX in Action is a good reference on code for performing drag and drop. It uses Microsoft.Web.Preview, but this hasn't been updated in quite some time which is a worry. I have created a pretty good drag and drop UI with MS's PreviewDragDrop, it does work cross-browser, and it's pretty easy to code. Preview DLL's aside, the Manning book is great for understanding Microsofts AJAX API.
However, since jQuery is going to be shipped and supported with Visual Studio, I would recommend using it over anything else in a vain attempt to future-proof yourself.
A final piece of advice is never outsource your core competency. If this page is a core part of your offering you're better off implementing it yourself using library code like jQuery or Microsoft.Ajax rather than relying on a 3rd party component. However, if it's just a minor part of your site, then go ahead and use 3rd party controls.
Ref: My Version of Microsoft.Web.Preview.dll is 1.1.61025.0.
i have been very very happy with telerik's treeview control and use it for almost any asp.net application which needs a treeview drag and drop.
they allow free development licenses (not production though) so i guess you should give it a try. go to www.telerik.com and have a look
This is another Mootools suggestion, but you might find the Mif.Tree plugin useful. It's an MIT license. There are also code examples for each of the demos and API docs.
Robert>>
After spending 4-5 painful days of hacks, double-hacks and hacks to get around other hacks, I have come to the same conclusion as you. Especially the reorderlist from the ajax control toolkit drove me to the very edge of insanity.
It seems to me there is no real way around learning JQuery and simply doing the stuff myself. I used to shy away from doing client-side code, but with AJAX so much code has moved away from being just serverside.
JQuery has just been moved to the top of my personal study program.
Jquery has drag and drop controls.
Link
Maybe that will help...
I want to build into mt ASP.NET application the ability for users to fill up forms, but the forms are not something I can hard-code into my (Enterprise) software.
So I need one screen that lets end users create the forms. Doing it the 2.0 way, I just love what PollDaddy did in their survey editor (great job guys!). How do I replicate that? (don't worry pollDaddy, my app has nothing to do with survey and I am not at all in your domain (-: )
Since you need to login to the site to play with it, I made a 20 sec video of how it looks like. Please see below and tell me how to best replicate this (as simple as using JQuery tip? use an entire open source project? Buy something?)
Requirements are:
support multiple types of elements (like multiple choice, free text, comboBox)
drag and drop
editing of order
click image for video or here
http://frame.revver.com/frame/120x90/1376799.jpg
The AJAX control toolkit is free and would work for some of this items shown in the video. However, JQuery has tons of plugins it is easy to extend and even easier to use. I would suggest starting there and extending it where needed.
Good Luck
You could build it yourself using an AJAX framework like ASP.NET AJAX or even telerik controls. You could use jQuery but ASP.NET AJAX is free and embeds well with ASP.NET pages. You could buy something, but I've yet to encounter packages as such.