Custom process bar in Rails 3 - ruby-on-rails-3

I need to implement a custom process bar (not progress bar) to map progress through a multi-step client project sequence. It has to be graphical, not just a breadcrumb trail, similar to this:
--- O --- O --- O --- O --- O
label label label label label
Each 0 above represents the graphical button that will be have separate states, :hover and :active and be a link to each page of the process so that the client can skip around and not have to follow a linear process.
The projects controller should handle the page views, with the first on being handled by a static page controller '/start_project'. This is due to the need for the client to accept terms and conditions on the /start_project page before they actually create a record in the database.
I need to know if there is a way to implement a process bar like this in Rails 3, with each step along the way reacting to its individual state. For instance, the first step, INTRO, should map to the /projects/new_intro.html.erb page dynamically. Each page will have a form_for element that fills in another part of the database.
I want a dynamic solution to avoid having to develop 11 individual graphics.
Any ideas?

After some research, I discovered that what I am implementing is a multi-step form map. There are several resources out there, including screencasts that show how to implement multi-step forms natively, or there is the wicked gem which does the same thing.
I am going to try to implement a native method first because I want to have the information saved to the database at the completion of each step, not just at the end of the form. This should allow me to implement the requirements of having both a [save] button and a [continue] button, the first which saves information but allows for continued editing, and the second which saves the information and moves the user to the next step of the form.

Related

For Page Object Pattern, when designing the page objects in Selenium, how do you handle multiple modals correctly?

Let me further explain.
You have a page where an application lives. However, upon first login, the user is prompted with a welcome screen that loads in the center of the browser. Like a pop-up from the application. This welcome screen is to help the user get familiar with the app. You can move on through the screens by reading the information and clicking the Continue button. After several of these pop-ups, the application will now be available for testing.
So how would I handle this in the Page Object Pattern using Selenium. Should I have a main page that just has functionality to navigate through these modals? Or should the main page return objects that represent each of the individual modals? Or should each modal be a separate page that I interact with?
Basically, I can think of several options:
ApplicationPage.Modal1.Continue();
or
Modal1.Continue();
Modal2.Continue();
or
ApplicationPage.ContinueThroughModal1();
or
ModalPage.Continue1();
ModalPage.Continue2();
I prefer to look at pages as collection of services. So
should the main page return objects that represent each of the individual modals?
PageObject helps you to improve the maintenance and reduces code duplication. So you can use it as an interface to a page of your AUT.
should each modal be a separate page that I interact with?
I would say - yes. If some future change occurs (in any modal), your PageObj will handle it without changing the test itself. Why not introduce a IModalPopup with Continue() method which will handle the skipping that your tests need. Further more in your MainPage class you can keep a ICollection<IModalPopup> welcomeScreens and iterate those.
Aiming at a full answer here - there is no need to actually go through this
welcome screen that loads in the center of the browser.
Once is enough. Every other test can utilize URL navigation over crawling each middle page. Single test that covers your end-user journey (by clicking required buttons/links) should be sufficient.

Capture the browser's back button in an MVC4 web application and execute a Controller's Action

We have developed an MVC4 Web Application. Due to the flow of pages (it is a reservation system) we need when the user pressed back button the page to be executed again ie reload data from database as it was called from first time.
May be a solution is to suggest how to Capture the browser's back button in an MVC4 web application and execute a Controller's Action
Kindly consider.
Any assistance is kindly appreciated.
Based on your comments it seems you are building up state over several pages (in a wizard style) and it is when navigating back to an earlier page that you would like the state to be cleared.
You would need to capture the page navigation logic on the server side and not rely on capturing back button events on the client side.
You should use the state you've captured to determine what should be displayed to the user and what should happen to the current state you have.
For example, imagine you have pages A, B, C, D which collect user information. The user has entered information on pages A and B (which has been gathered in the session or the database perhaps) and is now on page C. They then navigate back to page A (via the back button or by modifying the url directly). At this point (in the controller for page A) you can determine from the current state that they have been to page B and therefore deduce that they must have navigated back. You can therefore clear the state at this point or perform whatever logic is required.

Duplicate dijit widget instead of recreating it

Is there a way by which I can duplicate or clone dijit widgets?
Basically, idea is to improve page rendering performance by minimizing widget creation time.
We have a single page web application and we do not reload the entire page whenever the user performs any action.
The flow of events is as follows,
The main page is loaded by the browser. It contains a dijit ContentPane which acts as a master container and displays the entire page using various other dijit widgets like textboxes, tabs, datefield, Enhanced grid etc.
The user performs an action (e.g. click on a dijit button)
The application sends an ajax call to server which processes the button click event and generates UI of the next page.
Browser receives successful response from ajax call and calls refresh method of dijit ContentPane. Which triggers destruction of existing widgets and new set of widgets are created and placed at appropriate position. (instead of refreshing the entire page)
The user again performs some action and again the refresh method is called which triggers destruction of existing widgets and new set of widgets are created and placed at appropriate position.
Because of such architecture the browser has to destroy existing widgets and recreate them again and again. Which results in slow performance.
The idea is to have a set of widgets always readily available on the browser clone them and place at appropriate position and update them instead of recreating each time.
Yes this is possible with something called _AttachMixin.
Basically there is no getting around the fact that your widgets would need to attach event listeners to the HTML Document. What can be cut out though is the time in the Dijit Widget's lifecycle to generate the DOM. As we well know, simple Dijit widgets like a dijit/form/Button has a div inside a div inside a div etc.
This is explained in detail here http://dojotoolkit.org/reference-guide/1.9/dijit/_AttachMixin.html
Here is an example using Node.JS as a backend. http://jamesthom.as/blog/2013/01/15/server-side-dijit
This is a tough problem and this concept isn't explained very thoroughly. If you have a backend that is not Node.JS you have to manually make the widget string and pass it as a response to your AJAX and an follow the example from the 1st link (Ref Doc)
We have had lots of widgets of our app render nicely within the client side. A far less complicated approach would be to simply show / hide (instead of render and destroy) widgets as and when they are needed. I assume that you app's access policy would focus on data and not which person has access to which widget.

WinRT XAML Toolkit preloaded pages

I have a question to creator of WinRT XAML Toolkit that had helped me a lot.
What is the best mechanism for working with rich pages in WinRT?
These are the conditions:
There are about 2 pages that have a lot of elements and some high resolution images in the background. Obviously they consume time to load their content. That's why I use AlternativeFrame.Preload() method from the Toolkit.
Also these pages are the most frequently used.
That's why I stand before choosing to either constantly preload these pages (create, draw, fill) but when it is needed or creating my own page cache that would store them (maybe I am blind and the Toolkit already has this functionality?).
Can you advise what's the best practice in this problem and whether maybe there's a third way?
To add some more background - the WinRT XAML Toolkit library has two controls: AlternativeFrame and AlternativePage that are alternate implementations of the base Frame and Page classes that come out of the box in Windows 8 SDK for dealing with UI navigation - similar to how you navigate pages in a web browser. The API of these alternative controls is almost the same as in the base ones, but it adds some more support for asynchronous development model, page transition animations and preloading pages before they are requested.
Currently the Preload() method preloads a page of a given type in the background and puts it in a cache and when a Navigate() method is invoked to navigate to the page of that type - instead of instantiating a new page - the one in the cache is used, so it can immediately be shown, but also - the cache gets emptied and the next time you want to navigate to that same page - you need to preload it again. This works well if you don't return to the preloaded page often and the page uses a lot of memory, but if you want to keep that page in cache - there is not built-in support for that. The original Page class has a NavigationCacheMode property that allows to configure a page to be kept in cache once it is loaded the first time and it would be a good option for you, but AlternativePage doesn't have that support yet. I am thinking about adding it there today since I have some free time, so you might decide to wait for me to do it. Other options include
displaying your page on top of the navigation frame instead of navigating to it in the frame - then you could simply show/hide it when needed
or you can switch back to the standard Frame/Page controls and set NavigationCacheMode="Required" on your Page so it stays in memory forever, though you do lose the Preload() feature then.
or you can modify the Toolkit yourself
or you can cache the content of your page yourself - simply save the Content of your page in some sort of cache (e.g. a Dictionary<Type,UIElement> that maps page type to content) and remove it from the page (set Content to null) when you navigate away from the page and then add it back to the page when you navigate to it and the content is found in the cache. In that case you would probably want to make the Content be a separate UserControl and skip calling InitializeComponent() in the constructor if you retrieve the content from the cache since you can only have one Content and having it defined in a separate UserControl will allow you to get auto-generated code that gets executed in InitializeComponent() that grants you easy access to named elements, registers event handlers etc.

partial view in mvc4

I am new to Jquery mobile and asp.net mvc4. In my application I have divided my page into three blocks(ui-block-a,ui-block-b,ui-block-c).These three blocks are in shared folder(_Layout.cshtml). Left side and right side blocks are partially viewed. In the middle block is normally viewed. When I perform any modification the partial view is also refershing.I want to load my partial view on my first time loading only. If I do any change on middle block the partial views should not be affected. please help how can
I do this?
Partial view doesn't mean it would be partially updated. It's just a small chunk of ui code wich is suitable to be grouped into a separated file for reuse.
you'll need to implement ajax functions into middle block when updating.
jQuery.ajax
would be the api you can refer to.