Articles - Joel Lipman .Com

Creating a Profile Plugin for Joomla 1.6

: Joel Lipman; Joomla; 27 April 2011; Hits: 28222

So there is other documentation out there. I'm basing most of this article on the official Joomla 1.6 documentation: http://docs.joomla.org/Creating_a_profile_plugin and I want to use an example that worked for me. Important: This is for Joomla version 1.6.x+.

Aim / Objective

Add a field with a dropdown list.
~~Add a button to upload an avatar (and sync with 3rd party avatar)~~.

Not riveting stuff but something that all my clients want. Fortunately for me, I just created one plugin which I can install on any number of Joomla 1.6 sites and it does all this for me... Neat huh?

Folder
I'm going to shove all these files into a folder which I will then compress and install using the Joomla! CMS Extension Manager.

I'm going to call the folder "profile5" (without the double-quotes) and create a subfolder called "profiles".

So I should end up with the following file/directory structure:

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./profile5
     ./profile5/profiles

./profile5
./profile5/profiles

Also copy one of those handy blank "index.html" files into each of these folders in case "directory listing" gets enabled on your server.I'm going to refer to the files to create as being in this folder.

Category: Joomla :: Article: 351

: Joel Lipman; Cascading Stylesheets; 25 April 2011; Hits: 11534

Spent enough time trying different methods across the web but only 1 article worked for me using the "push" div layer. Loosely based on Ryanfait: Make a Footer Stick to the Bottom of the Page

Aim:

Header
Left	Right
Footer

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<div id="container">
     <div id="header"></div>
     <div id="content">
          <div id="left"></div>
          <div id="right"></div>
          <div class="push"></div>
     </div>
     <div id="footer"></div>
</div>

<div id="container">
<div id="header"></div>
<div id="content">
<div id="left"></div>
<div id="right"></div>
<div class="push"></div>
</div>
<div id="footer"></div>
</div>

Situation
The header displayed fine. The left and right columns finally got them side by side. But the footer that has a background image was under the left and right columns... The main content layer was overlapping the footer. I tried various z-index's bearing in mind that the footer has to be behind because the main content had a semi-transparent layer that overlapped it half-way.

I managed to fix this by including a div push layer which clears both (even though i had clear:both on the css for my #right div layer). For some reason, it has a more forceful effect in its own separate layer.

Category: Cascading Stylesheets :: Article: 350

: Joel Lipman; Cascading Stylesheets; 25 April 2011; Hits: 5653

Add horizontal space between label and fieldset

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fieldset label.inline { display: inline-block; margin-left: 2em; }

fieldset label.inline { display: inline-block; margin-left: 2em; }

Change color of fieldset grouping line

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fieldset { border: 2px ridge #7abcff; }

fieldset { border: 2px ridge #7abcff; }

Category: Cascading Stylesheets :: Article: 349

CSS Background Without Causing Scrollbars

: Joel Lipman; Cascading Stylesheets; 23 April 2011; Hits: 8872

Quick note in case I spend as long as I did again.

A Client had some clouds on the background of his photoshop file for his website. They were to be positioned in the top right corner with the leftmost tip aligned to the right of a central content section. I separated off the clouds as another div layer, specified the width and height and specified it's left. It caused the horizontal scrollbar which is a bit annoying because you scroll to the right and theres nothing but some background image. Also the footer was at 100% so it got cut off if you scrolled horizontally.

Aim / Objective
To have a background of sky and grass with a centered content section (white semi-transparent layer) of 900 pixels width as shown in the following picture:

background of sky and grass with a centered content section (no clouds)

And I want the clouds as another layer ontop aligned to the top right:
background of sky and grass with a centered content section (with clouds)

: Joel Lipman; MySQL; 15 April 2011; Hits: 7519

Situation:
I have a silly database table (not mine) storing CMIS Facility week numbers and their starting dates. For those of you unfamiliar with this system, the reason week numbers are different to normal people's week numbers is because these are academic week numbers. So I can't use the built-in functions.

The current structure looks similar to this:

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ID        SetID            WeekNumber             StartDate
--------- ---------------- ---------------------- ----------------------------
1         2011/2012        1                      2011-07-18 00:00:00
...
52        2011/2012        52                     2012-07-09 00:00:00

ID SetID WeekNumber StartDate
--------- ---------------- ---------------------- ----------------------------
1 2011/2012 1 2011-07-18 00:00:00
...
52 2011/2012 52 2012-07-09 00:00:00

Joe you're an idiot!
You might say to me why not run the CMIS Facility application and add a new set, it will put these dates in automatically.

Herein lies the problem
The reason I'm doing this is for another system which decided to "cleverly" use the exports from CMIS Facility so that all the weeks correspond to the rest of the academic data. Unfortunately the developer wrote a system he felt would last the rest of his PhD degree, it's a shame he started in his last year. He used functions to mktime and simulate the dates. A function goes in with a normal calendar date and returns an academic week number and the week commencing date.

Problem?
The 1st of January 2010 was a Friday. The 1st of January 2011 was a Saturday. The developer felt that as long as you adjust the script each year you could make the system last another year. Shame he also forgot the academic year ends halfway in a normal people's calendar, so you actually have to adjust this twice a year.

Category: MySQL :: Article: 342

: Joel Lipman; Web-Development; 14 April 2011; Hits: 4860

To be honest I saw this on some Joomlaworks Blog who appropriately title it "A must see for professional webdesigners". If you're a developer relying on clients for your income, then at least watch some of this.

March 2011 San Francisco, CreativeMornings (creativemornings.com) was Mike Monteiro, Design Director, and co-founder of Mule Design Studio (muledesign.com). This event took place on March 25, 2011 and was sponsored by Happy Cog and Typekit (who also hosted the event at their office in the Mission).

2011/03 Mike Monteiro | F*ck You. Pay Me. from SanFrancisco/CreativeMornings on Vimeo.

Difference between two dates - the midnight hour

: Joel Lipman; Web-Development; 06 April 2011; Hits: 6821

I might already have something similar to this but this deserves its own article. Why? Well try to search the web for a PHP/MySQL solution which suggests on how to count the hours between two times on the same date, when one of the hours is on the other side of the midnight hour...

Now bear in mind the below is in European date format

Consider the following:

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Date       Customer        Time From       Time To          Hours
---------- --------------- --------------- ---------------- --------------
04/03/2011 Tweedle Dee     10:00           12:00            2.00
08/03/2011 Tweedle Dum     23:30           00:30            -23.00

Date Customer Time From Time To Hours
---------- --------------- --------------- ---------------- --------------
04/03/2011 Tweedle Dee 10:00 12:00 2.00
08/03/2011 Tweedle Dum 23:30 00:30 -23.00

Note the last row is obviously incorrect. This is because the script is not changing the date at the stroke of midnight. Take the last row as an example, the equation that's happening is:

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$thisDateSQL=date("Y-m-d", strtotime($sub_row['DateSession']));

$this_time_from1 = date("H:i", strtotime($sub_row['TimeFromSession']));
$this_time_to1 = date("H:i", strtotime($sub_row['TimeToSession']));

$this_time_from_sql=$thisDateSQL." ".$this_time_from1.":00";
$this_time_to_sql=$thisDateSQL." ".$this_time_to1.":00";

$sum_hours = number_format(((strtotime($this_time_from_sql)-strtotime($this_time_from_sql))/60)/60, 2);

// Using the examples above this is doing the following:
2011-03-04 12:00:00 - 2011-03-04 10:00:00 = 2.00
2011-03-08 00:30:00 - 2011-03-08 23:30:00 = -23.00

$thisDateSQL=date("Y-m-d", strtotime($sub_row['DateSession']));
$this_time_from1 = date("H:i", strtotime($sub_row['TimeFromSession']));
$this_time_to1 = date("H:i", strtotime($sub_row['TimeToSession']));
$this_time_from_sql=$thisDateSQL." ".$this_time_from1.":00";
$this_time_to_sql=$thisDateSQL." ".$this_time_to1.":00";
$sum_hours = number_format(((strtotime($this_time_from_sql)-strtotime($this_time_from_sql))/60)/60, 2);
// Using the examples above this is doing the following:
2011-03-04 12:00:00 - 2011-03-04 10:00:00 = 2.00
2011-03-08 00:30:00 - 2011-03-08 23:30:00 = -23.00

This is great for everything during that date as long as the "To Date" never goes past midnight into the next day... But what system doesn't do this (no Microsoft jokes please)?

Category: Web-Development :: Article: 339

: Joel Lipman; SQL Server Reporting Services; 05 April 2011; Hits: 17366

Situation
The requirement in a lot of my reports in SSRS has always been a date range rather than just the one date. The user must be allowed to select all results between two dates instead of just specifying the one day. If the second parameter (ToDate) is the same as the first (FromDate), then the range is for that particular date.

Solution

: Joel Lipman; SQL Server Reporting Services; 04 April 2011; Hits: 11773

This must have been so obvious to everyone else that nobody bothered to write an article on it... till now.

Situation
I have a report that returns room bookings based on a user and given a date range. The problem is that there are a few thousand users and Microsoft's SQL Server Reporting Services interface isn't the most fun to scroll endlessly down. Advanced users can type the name really fast for it to auto-scroll down to the desired name. Our advanced users are exceptions to the rule.

Problem

: Joel Lipman; SQL Server Reporting Services; 01 April 2011; Hits: 8213

Open a Windows Explorer and make a duplicate of the report that you want to use as a template.
Rename the copy (suffix with template?)
Remove objects unique to the report and leave elements for all reports.
File > Save selected item as...
For SSRS 2008: Save in the folder: "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\PrivateAssemblies\ProjectItems\ReportProject"
Done!

SSRS Hide results table if empty

: Joel Lipman; SQL Server Reporting Services; 29 March 2011; Hits: 38720

Update August 2011
So I don't know how many people were just saying why don't you do the following:

Bring up the "Tablix Properties" of the dataset
Look for the section "No Rows"
Put in a value for "NoRowsMessage".

This solution hides the entire Tablix which kinda defeats the purpose of having anything there. I want my end-users to have faith in my report. The report just returning blank can also mean "I don't know". I want the report to either return the correct value or say "No data found". My end-users would otherwise ask is the data value reliable if it's blank?

The long way of doing this
I would have called this article "Iteration within SQL Server Reporting Services Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) version 2008 through combining Transact-SQL and MDX expressions" but boy what a mouthful, and it's not really iterating anymore. So it's "SSRS Hide results table if empty" though I will add that if you wanted to put a message instead of hiding the table then following the below will also let you do this (requirements: common sense or the IQ of a duck).

It's what I've been searching for for the past hour and although you may think I'm just adding to the cyberspace pile of useless info, at least I'm not just copying and pasting from other sites to add content to my own. And I'm not just adding content, the way I'm doing the below is nothing similar to what I googled (probably a bad sign but time is ticking and no one has forever).

: Joel Lipman; SQL Server Reporting Services; 25 March 2011; Hits: 24833

Re: Business Intelligence Development Studio 2008

Often happens to me and not sure why. You open the project and the window panel for the Report Data containing the parameters and datasets isn't there. I spent a bit of time enabling/disabling toolbars before I found this.