I have got a set of data that goes by hierarchy. For argument sake, let's say this is the top level:
The user should be able to drill down on one of the boxes to explore the data. When clicked, the user sees the second level of data:
Alternatively, the second level of data can totally cover the first level (but have a breadcrumb that shows the drill down journey):
I am hoping to be able to implement such visualisation tool on ASP.net (i.e. web). Does anyone have a suggestion on a suitable JS / extension plugin?
Thank you kindly.
You can use jsTree jquery plugin. It gives very nice interactive UI in hierarchical level. It provides support like drag & drop support, inline edit, create and delete etc.
You can get it from https://www.jstree.com/. It is easy to use.
I've been trying to separate the text/images into columns using normal CSS script, but they are not recognized by the google custom card interface. I've noticed that all the commands are a little different stylistically from CSS, though derived from that language as far as I can tell. I've tried looking for some general reference material on this google variant to solve this issue, but so far have not had any luck. Any suggestions?
The card layouts do use standard CSS. We strip out anything that might be a security risk, but it's unlikely you're encountering that. Can you include a link to your table and an example of the CSS you think should be working but is not?
If you'd rather not make your table accessible you can send mail to googletables-feedback#google.com and we can pick up the conversation from there.
I'm wanting to use Panels to drive a whole bunch of pages for data interaction, but I'm not sure how to get Panels to "interact" with each other. I think the best way to put it is with an example. Say I have one Panel which has a list of nodes (in a view?), and another Panel that I want to display an editor for any node I click. And I have a page that has the first Panel in a block on the left, and the second in a block on the right. So I suppose on click, there'd be some AJAX grab that puts some page in the other Panel. Now, this is a simple example, and I'm going to end up with many different sets of interactions among multiple panels doing all sorts of stuff. But this works as a starting point. The goal is to be able to reuse these Panels in multiple pages that may interact with similar data, but with different operations (maybe there's the above edit page example and also a similarly designed view page also utilizing the left block node selector?).
How much of this can be accomplished with Panels (and maybe supplementary modules?)? Where would I need to code to put it all together? I assume it would need code perhaps in the Panel page that contains things like the data selector panel, data view panel, etc. to "link them together". Are there any good examples floating around on how to do this, since it seems like a fairly bread-and-butter exercise for any sort of web-based data interaction...
The best and probably the simplest way probably would be to do it with some coding but if you prefer using modules there a module families like Context or Rules that should give you some functionality which you are after. I also suggest looking into AJAXification methods and modules.
I am working on the prototype for a scheduling application on an intranet system. The application is for scheduling and tracking promotional workers at various locations on various dates.
Currently, only for prototyping, I am generating a data table of location/date, and from this I iteratively build an HTML table (asp:Table control). On visiting each cell, I query for people working that location-date and populate the cell accordingly. This is very inefficient, and will at worst be improved by querying cached data for the whole location/date grid.
I'm looking around for established patterns and techniques for dealing with scenarios like this in HTML in general, maybe a visualization library for jQuery or something, and for ASP.NET in particular, maybe a library for implementation on a GridView etc.
Am I going in the right direction with this, and if so, what recommendations are there regarding the previous paragraph?
As regards the user interface, I would take a look at the Telerik scheduler control and see how that one is done. You don't want table cells stretching the layout, and even filtering may not help you unless you truncate the displayed text as a link to a modal pop-up, or some kind of master-details set up.
http://demos.telerik.com/aspnet-ajax/scheduler/examples/overview/defaultcs.aspx
Why don't you try placing the calender control on the left side and then select the current date by default. Thereafter user can select a date and you can list the data using a gridview based on the selected date-location. That should ease up the interface as well.
These controls are complex, and there are many third party vendors out there with components like these. Take a look around at some of the components available to you, as it is A LOT of work to develop a component like this yourself (we were going to attempt to do it, but realized to make it efficient and usable we needed to buy one, so we purchased Telerik).
HTH.
I am working on an ASP.Net web application that must print dynamically created labels on standard Avery-style label sheets (one particular size, so only one overall layout). The labels have a variable number of lines (3-6) and may contain either lines of text or a graphic barcode image.
Our first cut, that I inherited, used monospaced fonts to reduce the formatting issues, but that did not allow enough text to the fit on the labels and the customer was dissatisfied. Basically it was formatted text.
My next version used TABLEs, DIVs, CSS, and a bit of JavaScript calculations to format the labels using proportional fonts. It still required a bit of tweaking (the user had to set their print margins correctly and turn off the print headers and footers), but it seemed to work.
However, it seems that there are some variations on how different printers render the text (WYS ain't WYG), so even though we tested on different browsers using at least two different printers (an inkjet and a laser printer), some user's labels don't line up. Slight margin variations can be adjusted by adjusting the margins on the page setup dialog, but the harder problem is that the inter-label spacing can be off by a tiny fraction of an inch, so that if the first label is pretty well centered, by the end of the page the label text and images have crawled off the top or bottom of the labels.
We are about to the point of switching to generating Word, Excel, or PDF output which is going to take quite a bit of development time and possible add extra steps in the printing process.
So, does anyone have any suggestions on how to do an HTML/CSS layout that will precisely render on different types of printers? I don't really care if the line/word breaks are a bit different, but I need to be able to predictably position the upper left corners of each label area.
Right now the labels flow down the page in a table and we have been tweaking the box model of the cells and internal DIVs to make them a uniform height. I suspect that using absolute positioning of each element may be the best answer, but that is going to be tricky as well due to the ASP.Net generation of the label elements. If I knew for sure that would work, I would rather try it than throw away everything we have to go to a different generation method.
Slight Update:
Right now I'm doing some tests with absolute positioning - setting only the top and left coordinate of a containing block element. So far there are minor variations on the offset onto the page (margins, paper alignment, etc.), but all browsers and printers tested put the elements in exactly the right spots relative to each other. I appreciate the PDF tips, but does anyone know of additional "gotchas" on using absolute positioning this way?
Update:
For the record, I rewrote the label printing portion using iTextSharp and it works perfectly - definitely the way to do this in the future...
Forget HTML and make a PDF. HTML printing is extremely variable - not just across browsers but across different versions of the same browser. PDF is a lot easier.
Even if you get it exactly right with one browser / font setup / printer / phase of the moon, it will be the most fragile thing you've ever had to maintain. No matter how long you think it will take to make a PDF (and it's not really that hard as there are some free libraries out there), HTML will ultimately take a lot more of your time. PDF readers are widely deployed and print more consistently than even Word files.
The web is not a format that is guaranteed to get consistent print results. Given the standard support for label printing with MS Word, and the relative ease of automation and generation, I would strongly recommend going that route.
I'm not aware of ANY method to get percise printing across all types of browsers, operating systems, and printers when using web content.
"precisely" and "printing" aren't two words that really work together that well. I did an OCR/OMR application a year or so ago, and even when building a PDF I saw significant differences between different print drivers and such. Because of that, my gut is to tell you that you might not have 100% success.
If CSS and layout issues don't work that well for you, you might need to resort to building the labels as images using GDI+ -- at least that way you can use GetFontMetrics() and such.
Good luck!
I had a similiar issue and the answer is you can't do it. Instead, I generated a PDF file in realtime using iTextSharp and passed that to the response.
Using SQL Server Reporting Services, I generate a PDF to send to the printer, but it can be seen as HTML on the screen using the control you can include in your web pages. There are RDLC files that are available on the internet to print to various Avery formats.
I rewrote the SharpPDFLabel code that was mentioned back in 2011 this week as I needed it to be a lot more flexible (and to work with the current iTextSharp library).
You can get it here:
https://github.com/finalcut/SharpPDFLabel
I added the ability to specify the contents of each individual label if you want (or to continue creating a sheet of identical labels too). By extending the LabelDefinition class you can specify the layout of your labels pretty easily.
I also struggled with the HTML/CSS approach due to the inconsistent printing behaviour across browsers.
I created a C# library to produce Avery Labels from ASP.NET which I hope you might find useful:
https://github.com/wheelibin/SharpPDFLabel#readme
You can add images and text to the labels, and it's easy to define more labels types.
(I use it for barcode labels, the barcode is generated as an image and then added to the label using this library.)
Cheers
Add a few options to your app that let users adjust spacing for their particular configuration. You could include this right on the label if you want, and style it away via media selectors, but you'll probably want to persist them somewhere, too.
Flash is also good method to push a printable like a label albeit a little more complex to implement and maintain. In most cases it displays much quicker than a PDF and you can embed it into the design of the page and simply add a "Print" button within the flash.
I did this several years ago when we were using HTML and PDF to generate confirmation receipts. HTML is "ok" but is at the mercy of the end users web browser so we quickly dumped that method. PDF's are good as long as they have a PDF reader, which to our surprise a lot of our customers did not. So that was dumped as well after we switched to a FLASH version using a simple flash movie that included a few dynamic text areas and a "print" button. I communicated the data between the page and flash using a few flash vars. You can also use web service.
When I need something more than just simple text I use the free community edition of the PDF Generator component from DynamicPDF.com. It works great and is very quick.
I just went through the same thing. Ended up switching and making a short little JSF app (running on Glassfish) that uses JasperReports to print directly to the lable printer. Push button, instant label at the printer, don't even have to view it on-screen if you don't want to since Jasper can directly output to printer (as well as PDF in browser).