Can't paste into web form - asp.net

A user complains they can't paste into one particular text box on a form and that this is a change in behavior that occurred three months ago. I can't reproduce the error. I've tried long text, short text, plain text, formatted text, everything works. I did fix some poorly formatted HTML, but it didn't change their problem.
The user and I are both using XP/IE7. The application uses a proprietary MVC framework with C# on .NET 1.1. The UI only works reliably in IE. (I tried Opera and the paste works, I can't get logged in with Firefox to get to the screen.)
Any ideas where to start?
Thanks!
Edit - here's dialog I had with the user that didn't bring to light any issues.
You were actually on the right track
in asking about the firewall, because
you are trying to identify something
that is different between me and you.
Here's some other potential
differences.
Maybe we aren't doing it the same way:
Do you use keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl-C,
Ctrl V) or the context menu (right
mouse click and select copy/paste)?
Maybe our computers are different:
What hardware (Windows/Mac), operating
system (XP, Vista, etc.), and browser
(IE, Firefox, etc.) are you using?
Maybe our understanding of the problem
is different: Do you not see the text
when you paste it in, or is it not
being saved?
Maybe what we are copying from is
different: I copied something from
Bugzilla and something from notepad.
Both are plain text. I need to try
formatted text, like from a PDF and
from Word. You need to try plain text.

This may be actually a user training issue. If it were me, I'd use something like crossloop to watch the user interact with the page. If you can see what they are actually doing (not what they SAY they are doing) then you have half a chance at reproduction of the issue. Based on your description, it is very likely not an issue with the software, but a PEBKAC situation with your user.
Notes on Crossloop
We use crossloop with our clients and our developers in training. Basically you install the software (very easy) on both your computer and the end user's computer. The end user then authorizes you to "see" his machine by sending you a connection code. Once connected, both you and the user can move the mouse/type/see the other person use the mouse.
It would be like a remote desktop or vnc session, but much easier to get up and running across firewalls and without too much setup/config headache.
It is also a free download, and a free service (the last time i used it anyway).
Suggested course of action
Install Crossloop on your machine and familiarize yourself with it. (maybe do a trial run connect with a co-worker)
Call user and ask if they would be willing to show their issue to you directly via some screen sharing software.
Walk them through the install and connect of Crossloop.
Instruct them to show you the issue.
Watch for glaring errors, etc.
Hopefully see either what the user is doing wrong, or what conditions the bug manifests itself.

Related

To open a webpage in a popup dialogue box from a windows application

In one of my projects i need to open my webpage(.aspx or .asp) in a popup dialogue box from a windows application.
i tried window.open(), but certainly its not giving me the desired output.
can anyone help me??
You're not giving us a lot of information (e.g., C#?, vb.net?, any contextual code relevant to the issue), but as sort of an all-purpose solution to this, you may want to consider using javascript to open the window. You can even run it from server-side by registering the script. I'd provide you with code, but I don't know what language you are using.

Flex - invisible text until mouse pointer moves outside textInput

We have an application running flex sdk 4.5 and have recently encountered an issue with textInput fields which we have not been able to reproduce on our end for the better part of a month now.
Here are the symptoms:
Users opens an input form which contains several input fields (combo boxes, calendars, text inputs, etc)
User clicks inside a text field
Users types (obviously!)
** Nothing appears in the text input - we have validators on some of these fields and they do kick in properly (ie. user sees red box around textInput disappearing)
User moves cursor outside of text input field and text appears
Give or take, this is the test case we've been provided. We have been unable to reproduce this and I'm reaching out to see if anybody has heard of issues like this in the past.
They are running our flex application in the following environment:
Windows XP SP3
IE 7.0.5730.13 (locale = en-gb)
Flash Player 10.3.181.14
Upgrading either of these components is not an option. Installing the flash player debugger is not an option either.
Now we've setup a pc exactly the same way as they have on their end and still haven't reproduced. So we're really stuck at this point :)
Any suggestion is greatly appreciated. I'll provide any additional info needed.
-Marc
Feb. 2nd 2012 - Update
As I noted in my comment reply to shaun, it seems our customer was more or less precise in their description of the issue. We ran a webex session with them this morning and actually saw the issues first hand.
Here's what happens:
- User loads our application via its url
- User is able to input data and pretty much do any function for a 'random' time period
- All of a sudden, the issues start (there are more symptoms than just the one I originally mentioned):
1. Users type in text input fields and they won't see the text appear until they move the cursor out of / into any other component (could be entering an hbox, exiting a text input field, etc)
2. Combo boxes behave more or less the same. They can drop them down, but then the mouse wheel no longer refreshes the list. It actually scrolls in the background, but until the user moves the mouse, the list does not refresh
3. We also communicate between the server and client via an amf channel. The events make it to the client, but again, they won't see the screen refresh until they move their cursor.
So basically, the application still seems to work, but the screen is no longer refreshing. Could it be something to do with an invalidate / update of the display list that doesn't kick in? We'd like to get them to install the debugger version of FP, but that doesn't seem to be an option.
Another thing to keep in mind: they have a VERY bad internet connection. They average around 1-1.5mbps (megabits) which is enough for our app, but I just thought I'd let you know.
We learned that they also use a Citrix presentation layer to deploy IE 7 to the end users. We've received confirmation from the end user that even if they launch IE on their workstation (not through citrix), they get the issue also.
Another note is that we've seen no errors in our web server, jboss or application logs...
So that's the update I've got... anyone have more thoughts on this? We've more or less discarded the fonts being an issue at this point since the issue affects more than just 'fonts'. Is everything on the screen not updating anymore.

Disable print, print screen, right click using asp.net

How to Disable print, print screen, right click using asp.net
You cant. You cannot avoid content being copied from your pages.
Disabling Right Click is possible, but it doesnt solve your 'problem'. The user could still copy your image, by disabling javascript or just inspecting the source.
And even if you could disable those keys, the user could still just make a photo of his monitor. Good luck disabling that!
Short answer: You don't. You are writing a web application; features of the underlying platform are outside your scope, and you have no business trying to fiddle with them.
Long answer: You can try to capture those keys using javascript, and override the default behaviour, which will somewhat stop very naïve users, but all it takes to disable this "security" is to turn off javascript. Even if you come up with more sophisticated "protection", the essence remains: You are sending content to the client, and once it gets there, it is out of your hands. Given suitable tools (wget is enough for most things), anyone can copy and modify your content in any way they like. Similarly, whatever can be shown on the screen inside a browser can be captured and saved. There is no way around it. If you don't want your content copied, don't send it.
Forget about it. You will irritate your end users who will find a way to con you and do what you didn't want them to do. Forbidden fruit is always the sweetest. By telling them explicitly "you cannot do this", they will wonder why do you want to guard your content and they might try even harder to do stuff you otherwise wouldn't want them to do.
Psychology and technology are against you in this case.
Printing
You could disable printing (well sort of - it's not 100% effective) using a "print" style sheet.
I have not tried it myself, but here is a link that could get you started: http://webdesign.about.com/od/advancedcss/qt/block_print.htm
Print screen
Print screen is something that is typically controlled by the operating system not the browser nor webpage. So you are unlikely to be able to stop this. However, casting my mind back I remember a time (perhaps a long long time ago), where you couldn't take screen shots in Windows (maybe Windows 98) of videos... so if your really in need of disabling print screen - perhaps you could perhaps encode your content in a video... but this will have many many downfalls - namely accessibility, search engine optimisation and it being a royal pain to do... so I wouldn't recommend it under any circumstance.
Right screen
Right click you can disable, but not using a server-side technology (such as ASP.net) instead in a client-side technology such as javascript. A quick search in your favourite search engine will find some help. But disabling right click is rudimentary to get around, so it is not full proof.
An alternative to protect your content is to possibly investigate "rights" in PDFs. I believe you can disable the "right" to print.
However none of these solutions are going to be full-proof. As long as you are making your content available to an end-user on their own computer, there is always going to be a way around your restrictions.
I have implemented for disabling printing using window.onbeforeprint()
Refer this Answer

I don't want to display back and forward button in my browser. Is there any solution apart from popup trick?

customers does not want to allow user to use back or forward button. Just a clean page without commandbar and toolbar, same for FF an IE.
Disabling them is not an option as now.
You cannot change that kind of thing in a existing window -- the only way you can make those disappear is by opening a popup, specifying they should not appear in that popup when it's being opened.
Still, note that you should not try to disable those buttons nor have them disappear : your application should work fine with them, handle their actions -- after all, it's one of the few things users have understood in browsers...
And as a user, this is disturbing and annoying :
I don't like popup windows -- and I'm not the only one who doesn't
I don't like when a website tryies to take control over my browser
It will not always work anyway.
And, as a sidenote : even if the back/forward buttons are not displayed, users can still use Ctrl+left/right or some kind of equivalent !
I know this is not easy, but a part of your work as a web-developper is to explain your clients how Internet and web-applications work... not the same way as desktop applications !
If you can force your users into IE (can't believe I'm suggesting use of IE!) you can do this trick. Try running this from the command line
"C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe" -k
This will force IE into kiosk (or full screen mode), similar to pressing F11 when in a usual browser session.
PS. I agree with the other answers suggesting this should be discouraged but there are instances (such as when the end user really can't be trusted) that this is a good solution.
No, there's no other way.
However, this is extremely annoying behavior and should be greatly discouraged. This isn't a code issue to solve...this is behavior that shouldn't be implemented at all.
My opinion here, you have a client problem not a code problem. Whatever standard is the expectation, and the user has the expectation of having their back/forward buttons, break that and you break their experience.
Ever see a Windows application that removes the taskbar? That's the equivalent...
I don't think there is a reasonable way to disable the behavior. You may get rid of the buttons in various ways, but the behavior is still there (through keyboard commands, popup menus and so on).
The only reasonable way is to make your web application follow web semantics, and make the client realize this.
many web based ERP (for example) does not tolerate people using navigation buttons. BUT these web applications handle the fact people use these buttons and do not crash. That's what you should do. If each time people use the back button, they get an error message, they will quickly stop using it.
The solution that used to work in IE was adding a startup script with one line:
location.forward();

Why can't I save CSS changes in Firebug? [closed]

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Closed 10 years ago.
Firebug is the most convenient tool I've found for editing CSS - so why isn't there a simple "save" option for CSS?
I am always finding myself making tweaks in Firebug, then going back to my original .css file and replicating the tweaks.
Has anyone come up with a better solution?
EDIT: I'm aware the code is stored on a server (in most cases not my own), but I use it when building my own websites.
Firebug's just using the .css file Firefox downloaded from the server, it knows precisely what lines in which files it's editing. I can't see why there's not an "export" or "save" option, which allows you to store the new .css file. (Which I could then replace the remote one with).
I have tried looking in temporary locations, and choosing File > Save... and experimenting with the output options on Firefox, but I still haven't found a way.
EDIT 2:
The official discussion group has a lot of questions, but no answers.
Been wondering the same for quite some time now,
just gut-wrenching when your in-the-moment-freestyle-css'ing with firebug gets blown to bits by
an accidental reload or whatnot....
For my intents and purposes, I've finally found the tool.... : FireDiff.
It gives you a new tab, probably some weird David Bowie reference, called "changes";
which not only allows you to see/save what firebug, i. e. you, have been doing,
but also optionally track changes made by the page itself....if it and/or you are so inclined.
So thankful not having to re-type, or re-imagine and then re-re-type, every css rule I make...
Here is a link to the developer (don't be disparaged by first appearance, mayhap just as well head straight over to the Mozilla Add-On repository .
I got here looking exactly for this feature, that is, being able to save edited CSS properties back to the original file (on my local development machine). Unfortunately after searching a lot and not finding anything that suits my needs (OK, there's CSS Updater but you have to register and it's a paid extension...) I gave up on Firefox + Firebug and looked for something similar for Google Chrome. Guess what... I just found this great post that shows a nice way of getting this to work ( built into Chrome - there's no need for additional extensions ):
Change CSS and SAVE on local file system using Chrome Developer Tools
I tried it now and it works great highlighting the changed lines. Just click Save and you're done! :)
Here's a video explaining this and much more: Google I/O 2011: Chrome Dev Tools Reloaded
I hope it helps if it doesn't matter to you changing browser while editing your CSS files. I made the change already for now, but I would really love to have this functionality built into Firebug. :)
[Update 1]
Today I just saw this video: Firefox CSS live edit in Sublimetext (work in progress) Looks promising indeed.
[Update 2]
If you happen to be using Visual Studio 2013 with Web Essentials you'll be able to sync CSS automagically as shown in this video:
Web Essentials: Browser tools integration
The Web Developer add-on let's you save your edits. I'd like to combine the editing of Firebug with the Save feature of Web Developer.
(source: mozilla.org)
Use the "Save" button (click CSS menu -> Edit CSS) to save the modified CSS to disk.
Recomendation: Use the "Stick" button to prevent losing your changes when you change the tab for doing other browsing. If it is possible, use only one tab to do the edit and other firefox window the related searches, webmail, etc.
I just released a firebug addon at the mozilla addon sandbox which might quite do what you want:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en/firefox/addon/52365/
It actually saves the "touched" css files on demand to your web server (by communication with a one-file webservice php script).
Documentation can be found at my homepage or on the addon page
I would appreciate any testing, bug reports, comments, ratings, discussion on this, as it's still in early beta, but should already work fine.
CSS-X-Fire
I'm surprised that it still not listed to this question, but probably because is new and the author didn't have time to promote it yet.
It is called CSS-X-Fire and it is a plugin for JetBrains series of IDEs : IntelliJ IDEA, PHPWebStorm, PyCharm, WebStorm, RubyMine.
How it works:
You install one of these IDEs and configure the deployment (supports FTP and SCP). This will allow you to stay in sync with the server.
After this you install this plugin. When it starts it will ask tell you that he will install a plugin for Firefox, in order to do the integration between Firebug and the IDE. If it fails to install the plugin, just use the drag-n-drop technique to install it.
Once installed it will track all your changes from Firebug and you will be able to apply them with a simple click inside de IDE.
FireFile
FireFile is an alternative that requires you to add one small php file to the server side in order to be able to upload the modified css.
You could link firebug to eclipse with fireclipse and then save the file from eclipse
I think the closest you're going to get is by going into Edit mode in Firebug and copying and pasting the contents of the CSS file.
We just introduced Backfire, an open source javascript engine that allows you to save CSS changes made in Firebug and Webkit inspector to the server. The library includes an example C# implementation of how to save the incoming changes to your CSS.
Here's a blog post about how it works:
http://blog.quplo.com/2010/08/backfire-save-css-changes-made-in-firebug/
And here's the code hosted at Google Code:
http://code.google.com/p/backfire/
I know this doesn't answer your question, but surprisingly, Internet Explorer 8's Firebug clone "developer toolbar" (accessible via F12) offers the option to "save html". This function saves the current DOM to a local file, which means that if you edit the DOM somehow, e.g. by adding a style attribute somewhere, this will be saved too.
Not particularly useful if you're using Firebug to mess around with CSS like everyone does, but a step in the right direction.
I propose a solution that involves a combination of Firebug and FireFTP as well as code that directly accesses the local file system when running a website locally.
Here are the scenarios:
Working on a website that is hosted on a remote machine
In this case you would provide the FTP details and the location of the CSS/HTML/Javascript and Firebug would then update these files when you save your changes. It may even be able to locate the files itself and then prompt you to verify that it has the correct file. If file names are unique it shouldn't be a problem.
Working on a website running on your local machine
In this case you could provide Firebug with the local folder location of the website and the same behaviour would be used to match and verify the files. The access to the local file system could be performed through FireFTP if necessary.
Working on a website hosted remotely without FTP access
In this case something like the FireFile add-on would have to be implemented.
An additional feature would be the ability to save and open project files that store the mappings between the local files and the URLs they are associated with as well as saving the FTP details as FireFTP already does.
I am the author of CSS-X-Fire which Sorin Sbarnea also kindly posted about in this thread. Guess I'm a bit late ;)
CSS-X-Fire emits CSS property changes from Firebug to the IDE where the changes can be applied or discarded.
There are a couple of advantages with this solution over most of the other existing tools which only know know about the filenames and the content downloaded by the browser (see NickFitz comment in the original post).
Scenario 1: You have a website (project) which has a handful of themes from which the user can select from. Each theme has its own CSS file but only one is known to Firebug, the current one. CSS-X-Fire will detect all matching selectors in the project and let you decide which should be modified.
Scenario 2: The web project has stylesheets created compile-time or during deployment. They might be merged from several files and the file names may change. CSS-X-Fire doesn't care of the names of the files, it only deals with CSS selector names and their properties.
Above are examples of scenarios where CSS-X-Fire excels. Since it works with the source files, and knows about the language structure, it also helps to find duplicates not known to Firebug, jump-to-code, etcetera.
CSS-X-Fire is open source under the Apache 2 license.
Project home: http://code.google.com/p/css-x-fire/
FireFile
Firebug was created to detect a problem not to be a debugger. but you can save change if you add new tool that integrate firebug with save changes. it is FireFile, click here
http://thelistoflist.blogspot.com/2010/04/how-to-save-change-you-make-in-firebug.html.
FireFile provide the desired functionality by adding a small PHP file to the server side.
Since Firebug is not working on your server but taking the CSS from the site and storing it locally and showing you the site with those local changes.
Use the CSS editor in the Firefox Web Developer toolbar:
http://chrispederick.com/work/web-developer/
It's got enough good stuff to use in conjunction with Firebug, and it lets you save your CSS out to a text file.
Use Backfire.
http://blog.quplo.com/2010/08/backfire-save-css-changes-made-in-firebug/
It's an open source solution that sends CSS changes back to the server and saves them.
Backfire uses a single javascript file, and the sourcecode package has a working .NET server implementation example that is easily portable to other platforms.
I had this problem forever as well, and finally decided that we shouldn't be editing things in the web inspector and built something for it (https://github.com/viatropos/design.io).
A better solution:
The browser automatically reflects CSS changes without reloading when you press save in your text editor.
The main reason we're editing css in the web inspector (I use webkit, but FireBug is along the same lines) is because we need to make small adjustments, and it takes too long to reload the page.
There are 2 main problems with this approach. First, you're allowed to edit an individual element that may not have an id selector. So even if you were able to copy/paste the generated CSS from the web inspector, it would have to generate an id to scope the css. Something like:
#element-127 {
background: red;
}
That would start making your css a mess.
You could get around that by only changing styles for an existing selector (the .space class selector in the webkit inspector image below).
Still though, the second problem. The interface to that thing is pretty rough, it's hard to make big changes - like if you want to try real quick copying this block of css to this place, or whatever.
I'd rather just stick to TextMate.
The ideal would be to just write the CSS in your text editor and have the browser reflect the changes without reloading the page. This way you'd be writing your final css as you're making the little changes.
The next level would be to write in a dynamic CSS language, like Stylus, Less, SCSS, etc, and have that update the browser with the generated CSS. This way you could start creating mixins like box-shadow(), that abstracted away the complexities, which the web inspector definitely couldn't do.
There's a few things out there that kind of do this, but nothing really streamlining it in my opinion.
LiveReload: pushes css to browser without refreshing when you press save, but it's a mac app, so it'd be difficult to customize.
CodeKit: also a mac app, but it refreshes the browser every time you save.
Not having the ability to easily customize the way these work is the main reason I didn't use them.
I put together https://github.com/viatropos/design.io specifically to solve this problem, and make it so:
The browser reflects the css/js/html/etc anytime you save, without reloading the page
It can handle any template/language/framework (Stylus, Less, CoffeeScript, Jade, Haml, etc.)
It's written in JavaScript, and you can whip together extensions real quick in JavaScript.
This way, when you need to make those little changes to CSS, you can say, set background color, press save, see nope, not quite, adjust the hue by 10, save, nope, adjust by 5, save, looks good.
The way it works is by watching whenever you save a file (at the os level), processing the file (this is where the extensions work), and pushing the data to the browser through websockets, which are then handled (the client side of the extension).
Not to plug or anything, but I struggled with this issue for a long ass time.
Hope that helps.
Firebug works on the computed CSS (the one which you get by taking the CSS in the files and applying inheritance, etc. plus the changes made with JavaScript). This means that probably you couldn't use it directly to include in an HTML file, which is browser/version specific (unless you care only about Firefox). On the other hand, it keeps track of what is original and what is computed... I think it should not be very difficult to add some JS to Firebug to be able to export that CSS to a text file.
I was wondering why can't I bloody well select and copy the text in front of my eyes. Especially when others say you can just "select and copy". Turns out you can, you just have to start the drag outside of any text (i.e. in the gutter above or to the left of the text) as any mousedown -- whether it's a click or drag -- on any text immediately invokes the property editor. You can also click outside text to get a cursor (even if it's not always visible) which you can then move around with the arrow keys and select text that way.
The text copied to the clipboard is devoid of any indenting, unfortunately, but at least it saves you from manually transcribing the entire contents of the CSS file. Just have your diff programme ignore changes in whitespace when comparing against the original.
You could write your own server script file that takes a filename parameter and a content parameter.
The server script would find the requested file and replace its contents with the new one.
Writing the Javascript that taps into firebug's info and retrieves the useful data would be the tricky part.
I'd personally rather ask the dev team at firebug to supply a function, it shouldn't be too hard for them.
Finally, Ajax sends the filename/content pair to the php file you created.
Quoted from the Firebug FAQ:
Editing Pages
Can I save to the source the changes I made to the webpage I'm seeing?
Right now you can't. As John J. Barton wrote on the newsgroup:
Editing in Firebug is kinda like taking out the pickles from and adding mustard to a restaurant sandwich: you can enjoy the result, but the next customer at the restaurant will still get pickles and no mustard.
This is a long-requested functionality, so someday it'll be available directly from Firebug. Meanwhile, you can try Firediff, an extension for firebug by Kevin Decker.
How can I output all changes that have been made to a site's CSS within firebug?
That's a feature implemented in Kevin Decker's Firediff.
Here's a partial solution. After you make your changes, click on one of the links to the relevant file. This is the original file, so you'll have to refresh the file, which is under the options menu button in the upper right of the firebug pane. Now you have the modified css page, which you can copy & paste. Obviously, you'll have to do it for each css file.
Edit: looks like Mark Biek has a quicker version
A very easy way to "edit" your page is to go onto the site via your internet browser. Save the page as html only onto your desktop. Go to your desktop and right click on the new web page file and select open with, choose notepad and edit the page from there, if you know html it will be easy. After all your editing is done, save the file and reopen your webpage, the changes should be there if done correctly. You can then use your new edited page and export or copy it to your remote location
Actually Firebug is a debug and analyze-Tool: not an editor and obviously not considered to be one. The other reason was already mentioned: how to you want to change CSS, stored on a server when debugging a webpage?

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