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Using MVC resource in Jquery - function stops working

I have a Jquery function in MVC View that check if at least one checkbox is clicked. Function is working properly if I use hardcoded string. But when I add
#Resources.myString into, it stops working, I can't figure out why
$('.form-horizontal').on('submit', function (e) {
if ($("input[type=checkbox]:checked").length === 0) {
e.preventDefault();
alert("This is working");
alert(#Resources.myString); //with this the function is not working anymore
return false;
}
});
I need to add the the string for multilingual purpose.
I tried diferent aproches
alert(#Resources.myString);
alert(#Html.Raw(Resources.myString))
var aaa = { #Html.Raw(Resources.myString)} //and calling the aaa
I think I am missing some basic knowlage of how this should work together

During page rendering, #Resources.myString will be injected as is in the code. For instance, if myString == "abc";, you'll end up with alert(abc); which is not what you want.
Just try to enclose your string in quotes:
alert("#Resources.myString");
As an aside, putting Razor code in Javascript logic is usually considered bad practice, as it prevents you from putting Javascript code in separate files (and therefore caching), and makes the code less readable.
Take a look as this question and the provided answer which gives a simple way to deal with that.

As ASP.NET dynamically generates HTML, CSS, JS code, the best way to find the error is to read the generated sources (Ctrl + U in most modern browsers).
You will see that your code
alert(#Resources.myString);
produces
alert(yourStringContent);
and should result in a console error yourStringContent is not defined.
You need to use quotes as you are working with a JavaScript string:
alert('#Resources.myString');
It will produce a correct JavaScript code like:
alert('yourStringContent');

Invoking parameterised function of javascript from managed bean in jsf

I have googled it several times but i can't get a solution. I want to make javascript function call from the bean class in jsf and i get that using the following code.
RequestContext.getCurrentInstance().execute("handleResize()");
and is workign fine. But I want to give two parameters to that function height and width. How can it be done ? please help

You seem to fail to grasp the fact that in the context of Java/JSF, all the HTML, CSS and JavaScript code are merely plain vanilla Strings and you seem to expect that HTML/CSS/JS somehow magically runs inside Java/JSF code. This is not true. Java/JSF is a HTML/CSS/JS code producer, not executor. The webbrowser retrieves them all as one big String and then parses and executes it.
If you want to invoke a JS function with parameters supplied, like so when you would do in real JS code:
handleResize(500, 300);
And you have those values as Java variables, then you just need to make sure that you write Java code in such way that exactly the above String is produced (again, this is just Java code, no JS code):
String call = "handleResize(" + w + ", " + h + ")";
You can verify beforehand by printing it to the stdout/logger:
System.out.println(call);
It must print exactly the desired valid JS function call syntax handleResize(500, 300);.
If it does, then just pass that unmodified to RequestContext#execute().
RequestContext.getCurrentInstance().execute(call);

Techniques to avoid building HTML strings in JavaScript?

It is very often I come across a situation in which I want to modify, or even insert whole blocks of HTML into a page using JavaScript. Usually it also involves changing several parts of the HTML dynamically depending on certain parameters.
However, it can make for messy/unreadable code, and it just doesn't seem right to have these little snippets of HTML in my JavaScript code, dammit.
So, what are some of your techniques to avoid mixing HTML and JavaScript?

The Dojo toolkit has a quite useful system to deal with HTML fragments/templates. Let's say the HTML snippet mycode/mysnippet.tpl.html is something like the following
<div>
<span dojoAttachPoint="foo"></span>
</div>
Notice the dojoAttachPoint attribute. You can then make a widget mycode/mysnippet.js using the HTML snippet as its template:
dojo.declare("mycode.mysnippet", [dijit._Widget, dijit._Templated], {
templateString: dojo.cache("mycode", "mysnippet.tpl.html"),
construct: function(bar){
this.bar = bar;
},
buildRendering: function() {
this.inherited(arguments);
this.foo.innerHTML = this.bar;
}
});
The HTML elements given attach point attributes will become class members in the widget code. You can then use the templated widget like so:
new mycode.mysnippet("A cup of tea would restore my normality.").placeAt(someOtherDomElement);
A nice feature is that if you use dojo.cache and Dojo's build system, it will insert the HTML template text into the javascript code, so that the client doesn't have to make a separate request.
This may of course be way too bloated for your use case, but I find it quite useful - and since you asked for techniques, there's mine. Sitepoint has a nice article on it too.

There are many possible techniques. Perhaps the most obvious is to have all elements on the page but have them hidden - then your JS can simply unhide them/show them as required. This may not be possible though for certain situations. What if you need to add a number (unspecified) of duplicate elements (or groups of elements)? Then perhaps have the elements in question hidden and using something like jQuery's clone function insert them as required into the DOM.
Alternatively if you really have to build HTML on the fly then definitely make your own class to handle it so you don't have snippets scattered through your code. You could employ jQuery literal creators to help do this.

I'm not sure if it qualifies as a "technique", but I generally tend to avoid constructing blocks of HTML in JavaScript by simply loading the relevant blocks from the back-end via AJAX and using JavaScript to swap them in and out/place them as required. (i.e.: None of the low-level text shuffling is done in JavaScript - just the DOM manipulation.)
Whilst you of course need to allow for this during the design of the back-end architecture, I can't help but think to leads to a much cleaner set up.

Sometimes I utilise a custom method to return a node structure based on provided JSON argument(s), and add that return value to the DOM as required. It ain't accessible once JS is unavailable like some backend solutions could be.

After reading some of the responses I managed to come up with my own solution using Python/Django and jQuery.
I have the HTML snippet as a Django template:
<div class="marker_info">
<p> _info_ </p>
more info...
</div>
In the view, I use the Django method render_to_string to load the templates as strings stored in a dictionary:
snippets = { 'marker_info': render_to_string('templates/marker_info_snippet.html')}
The good part about this is I can still use the template tags, for example, the url function. I use simplejson to dump it as JSON and pass it into the full template. I still wanted to dynamically replace strings in the JavaScript code, so I wrote a function to replace words surrounded by underscores with my own variables:
function render_snippet(snippet, dict) {
for (var key in dict)
{
var regex = new RegExp('_' + key + '_', 'gi');
snippet = snippet.replace(regex, dict[key]);
}
return snippet;
}

JavaScript multiline strings and templating?

I have been wondering if there is a way to define multiline strings in JavaScript like you can do in languages like PHP:
var str = "here
goes
another
line";
Apparently this breaks up the parser. I found that placing a backslash \ in front of the line feed solves the problem:
var str = "here\
goes\
another\
line";
Or I could just close and reopen the string quotes again and again.
The reason why I am asking because I am making JavaScript based UI widgets that utilize HTML templates written in JavaScript. It is painful to type HTML in strings especially if you need to open and close quotes all the time. What would be a good way to define HTML templates within JavaScript?
I am considering using separate HTML files and a compilation system to make everything easier, but the library is distributed among other developers so that HTML templates have to be easy to include for the developers.

No thats basically what you have to do to do multiline strings.
But why define the templates in javascript anwyay? why not just put them into a file and have a ajax call load them up in a variable when you need them?
For instantce (using jquery)
$.get('/path/to/template.html', function(data) {
alert(data); //will alert the template code
});

#slebetman, Thanks for the detailed example.
Quick comment on the substitute_strings function.
I had to revise
str.replace(n,substitutions[n]);
to be
str = str.replace(n,substitutions[n]);
to get it to work. (jQuery version 1.5? - it is pure javascript though.)
Also when I had below situation in my template:
$CONTENT$ repeated twice $CONTENT$ like this
I had to do additional processing to get it to work.
str = str.replace(new RegExp(n, 'g'), substitutions[n]);
And I had to refrain from $ (regex special char) as the delimiter and used # instead.
Thought I would share my findings.

There are several templating systems in javascript. However, my personal favorite is one I developed myself using ajax to fetch XML templates. The templates are XML files which makes it easy to embed HTML cleanly and it looks something like this:
<title>This is optional</title>
<body><![CDATA[
HTML content goes here, the CDATA block prevents XML errors
when using non-xhtml html.
<div id="more">
$CONTENT$ may be substituted using replace() before being
inserted into $DOCUMENT$.
</div>
]]></body>
<script><![CDATA[
/* javascript code to be evaled after template
* is inserted into document. This is to get around
* the fact that this templating system does not
* have its own turing complete programming language.
* Here's an example use:
*/
if ($HIDE_MORE$) {
document.getElementById('more').display = 'none';
}
]]></script>
And the javascript code to process the template goes something like this:
function insertTemplate (url_to_template, insertion_point, substitutions) {
// Ajax call depends on the library you're using, this is my own style:
ajax(url_to_template, function (request) {
var xml = request.responseXML;
var title = xml.getElementsByTagName('title');
if (title) {
insertion_point.innerHTML += substitute_strings(title[0],substitutions);
}
var body = xml.getElementsByTagName('body');
if (body) {
insertion_point.innerHTML += substitute_strings(body[0],substitutions);
}
var script = xml.getElementsByTagName('script');
if (script) {
eval(substitute_strings(script[0],substitutions));
}
});
}
function substitute_strings (str, substitutions) {
for (var n in substitutions) {
str.replace(n,substitutions[n]);
}
return str;
}
The way to call the template would be:
insertTemplate('http://path.to.my.template', myDiv, {
'$CONTENT$' : "The template's content",
'$DOCUMENT$' : "the document",
'$HIDE_MORE$' : 0
});
The $ sign for substituted strings is merely a convention, you may use % of # or whatever delimiters you prefer. It's just there to make the part to be substituted unambiguous.
One big advantage to using substitutions on the javascript side instead of server side processing of the template is that this allows the template to be plain static files. The advantage of that (other than not having to write server side code) is that you can then set the caching policy for the template to be very aggressive so that the browser only needs to fetch the template the first time you load it. Subsequent use of the template would come from cache and would be very fast.
Also, this is a very simple example of the implementation to illustrate the mechanism. It's not what I'm using. You can modify this further to do things like multiple substitution, better handling of script block, handle multiple content blocks by using a for loop instead of just using the first element returned, properly handling HTML entities etc.
The reason I really like this is that the HTML is simply HTML in a plain text file. This avoids quoting hell and horrible string concatenation performance issues that you'll usually find if you directly embed HTML strings in javascript.

I think I found a solution I like.
I will store templates in files and fetch them using AJAX. This works for development stage only. For production stage, the developer has to run a compiler once that compiles all templates with the source files. It also compiles JavaScript and CSS to be more compact and it compiles them to a single file.
The biggest problem now is how to educate other developers doing that. I need to build it so that it is easy to do and understand why and what are they doing.

You could also use \n to generate newlines. The html would however be on a single line and difficult to edit. But if you generate the JS using PHP or something it might be an alternative

VBScript: Using a variable within a DOM element

I'm looking to use a VBScript variable within a reference to a DOM element for a web-app I'm building. Here's a brief excerpt of the affected area of code:
dim num
num = CInt(document.myform.i.value)
dim x
x = 0
dim orders(num)
For x = 0 To num
orders(x) = document.getElementById("order" & x).value
objFile.writeLine(orders(x))
Next
This is my first venture into VBScript, and I've not been able to find any methods of performing this type of action online. As you can see in the above code, I'm trying to create an array (orders). This array can have any number of values, but that number will be specified in document.myform.i.value. So the For loop cycles through all text inputs with an ID of order+x (ie, order0, order1, order2, order3, order4, etc. up to num)
It seems to be a problem with my orders(x) line, I don't think it recognizes what I mean by getElementById("order" & x), and I'm not sure exactly how to do such a thing. Anyone have any suggestions? It would be much appreciated!

I was able to get this working. Thanks to both of you for your time and input. Here is what solved it for me:
Rather than using
document.getElementById("order" & x).value
I set the entire ID as a variable:
temp = "order" & x
document.getElementById(temp).value
It seems to be working as expected. Again, many thanks for the time and effort on this!

I can only assume that this is client side VBScript as document.getElementById() isn't accessible from the server.
try objFile.writeLine("order" & x), then check the source to make sure all the elements are in the document.
[As I can't put code in comments...]
That is strange. It looks to me like everything should be working.
Only other thing I can think of is: change
orders(x) = document.getElementById("order" & x).value
objFile.writeLine(orders(x))
to
orders(x) = document.getElementById("order" & x)
objFile.writeLine(orders(x).value)

It looks as if you're mixing client vs server-side code.
objFile.writeLine(orders(x))
That is VBScript to write to a file, which you can only do on the server.
document.getElementById
This is client-size code that is usually executed in JavaScript. You can use VBScript on IE on the client, but rarely does anyone do this.
On the server you'd usually refer to form fields that were part of a form tag, not DOM elements, (assuming you're using classic ASP) using request("formFieldName").
To make server-side stuff appear on the client (when you build a page) you'd embed it in your HTML like this:
<% = myVariable %>
or like this (as part of a code block):
document.write myVariable

Don't you need to change your loop slightly?
For x = 0 To num - 1
E.G. With 4 items you need to iterate from 0 to 3.