I have an application I'm developing that has some multi and single select lists that can contain a lot of items. In the interest of time I don't really want to write my own widget right now, but I'm having a lot of trouble finding what I want.
Here are the requirements:
1) It must be a select list under the covers; I'm using ASP.NET MVC3 so so make form submission and model binding easier I really need it to be an actual select list
2) It must be searchable
3) I really want selection and deselection to be a single click (rather than ctrl+click to select multiple items)
4) A select all and deselect all would be a plus
5) Bonus points if it uses jquery UI as a base, since I'm already using those libraries
6) it must NOT use theme roller for styling...it has to be easy to independently style
7) No side by side type controls where the selected items go on the right. disliked by the designer and myself.
The closest I have found is http://www.erichynds.com/jquery/jquery-ui-multiselect-widget/, but number 6 ruins it for our use. Why don't we want to use theme roller you ask? Well I am no CSS guru and our designer hates it, so its out of my hands.
I have found quite a few things that have one or two criteria, but non that have them all.
Can someone save me from wasting days (at minimum) rolling my own widget?
I just finished a project where I needed one. I spent a long time trying to use this one:
http://www.filamentgroup.com/lab/jquery_ui_selectmenu_an_aria_accessible_plugin_for_styling_a_html_select/
HOWEVER I really found it limiting and it caused weird things to happen to positioning of form elements in position:fixed divs as well as being tricker to show/hide and animate so I changed to this:
https://github.com/ehynds/jquery-ui-multiselect-widget
which was way better in my opinion also it was simpler to implement and didn't mess with anything else on the page so much.
Best
Alex
Related
I have an HTML/CSS/Javascript related question, but I'm unsure of exactly how to ask, as I've long since forgotten the technical terms for everything.
My ultimate goal is to construct (code) a webpage element that does the following:
-Has a number of clickable elements (graphical buttons, not HTML "buttons") that, when clicked, display a variable amount of text that provides interesting details about certain things. If possible, some way to have these buttons "highlight" would be desired (I know how to pull off a CSS trick where the image is swapped up/down or left/right by coordinates when clicked, but I'm unsure of how to get this to work with what I intend).
-Allows me to affix some kind of a label in front of each button. (My original plan was to throw everything into an HTML table, so I could have a column on one side of the buttons that I can type labels into).
-Allows me to have an image background appear when the detail box pops up.
-Is organized such that the buttons and their title plates are on one side of the detail box, and the detail box itself is on the other side.
Example:
I have a column on the far left that has names of fruits (Apple, Orange, Banana, Pear). In a column immediately next to these names is a series of buttons aligned with each fruit name (one button per fruit name, so "Apple" then {button} on one row, then "Orange" then {button} on the next row, etc.). Clicking on that button will display, on the far right, a detailed description of each fruit, with a background image (same image for all of these detail boxes) behind this detailing text. This background image, and any text, would be hidden until a button is clicked. I would prefer it that if the same button is clicked twice, the text is once again hidden.
I've no problem constructing images for all of this, but I'm lost on the code. Is it possible to code all of this as some sort of HTML Table, so I can keep it organized? Would it be possible to have the far left column (example) have a background image, then replaceable text on top of it (thus decreasing the number of graphics)?
I apologize if my question and phrasing isn't technically descriptive. I've long since gotten too used to simple HTML pages and never really learned CSS/Javascript. If my question doesn't make sense, I'd be more than happy to draw an image to better explain my goal.
Thanks in advance for any responses.
Well, there's no single "right" way to do what you're asking. There's dozens of ways to approach this problem. It comes down to: 1) How much time do you want to spend building the solutions, and 2) Would it be an issue if you added different technologies to your project (such as Bootstrap or jQuery)?
To look it at from a general viewpoint:
There's a rule of thumb I heard somewhere that I think helps in situations like this. Every single thing on your page is a rectangle. Everything. All you're really doing is naming, styling, and manipulating these rectangles.
Any element, id, or class that you create on your html page can be manipulated by your css or javascript. And if it doesn't exist on your html page, then you can create it with css or javascript and then manipulate it.
Anything can be made into a "button", not just items specifically called out as buttons. You can choose whichever rectangles you want to be your "buttons"; you would just have to target and style them as such.
(As a piece of advice, though, I would recommend sticking with html's <button> functionality. Standardized semantics is good for everyone all around, and you can change the look and feel of these buttons however you want by using css).
To be more specific:
The traditional way to handle the hiding or showing of information on the page is by using javascript and/or jQuery.
Give all common html elements to be manipulated a class name class="example-class", and give any unique elements to be manipulated an id name id="example-id".
Here's the jQuery page regarding .hide() and .show(). (If you have any specific issues with these methods, then Stack Overflow can help). You would target the classes or ids that you named in the html.
As for organizing your page, using and nesting <div> tags is usually the way to go. Bootstrap comes with special classes that can help with the necessary roles: class="row" to help with the horizontals, class="col-SIZE-NUM" to help with the verticals, and class="well" to help with organizing sections.
Bootstrap's main page has a pretty good overview on your options: Here.
All of the above can be done with vanilla css and vanilla javascript as well. It's up to you to decide if you want to (or are even able to) make things a little easier for yourself here.
Hope this helps!
Might not be the BEST fit for Stack Overflow, but I trust you guys, and a lot of you are the best web devs around, so here goes:
I have a web app with several groups of phrases. For each group, you put 4 "answers" in order of most like you (it's a personality test).
I made a fancy svg and responsive, game-like system where there are 4 clouds that you click on in the order that you want. But it's html5/css3/svg effects with a lot of transformations and it only works on some browsers
I don't know any design "theory", but what I need to figure out is how to make an extremely simple, fully cross-browser and cross-device way to do the same TYPE of thing.
examples:
list each group of 4 answers with a dropdown box next to each one where you can select 1-4
drag and drop them to put them in order (jquery. but this won't work on touchscreens)
put and "up/down" arrow next to each one (like some windows dialogs)
use radio buttons?
YOUR SUGGESTION HERE
I hope the question is clear. I'm a web developer looking for a cross-device "ui widget" (or idea) for putting sets of 4 "answers" in order.
Any suggestions?
I have an idea regarding this. Hope this will be helpful.
Please do comment if you have any problem to understand my above image.
If I used:
parentNode.removeChild( divHere );
It does work and the scroll bar for the overflow updates accordingly. If I use JS to 'divHere.style.visibily = "hidden";' well that doesn't work anymore. What I've done pretty much is create 115 divs that are in a container div and the user can select filters to show only the images they want, all the divs have a background image and are essentially just an image with a name under it.
So I have 2 questions:
1) Is there a way to update the overflow and make it not take hidden elements into consideration?
2) If 1) isn't possible than when I use removeChild to remove a div from the container, it does indeed disappear but what exactly happens to it? Does it disappear off the page because it's not added to any element on the page? So it essentially works like it's hidden? I don't have to worry about people seeing the images in some completely weird spot in some lesser used browser?
and well 3) If you have a better method of doing this it would be greatly appreciated
Thanks in advance for any help
The removeChild() method removes a specified child node of the specified element and returns the removed node as a Node object, or null if the node does not exist.
That null means that the element is now removed from your mark-up.
You should use it to not let the browser take that into consideration, as the browser will not find that element in the mark-up.
You can do it in this way as well:
$(document).remove(object_to_remove);
FInd more about it: http://api.jquery.com/remove/
I believe I may have a response for the third part of your question. That large number of divs in your containing div and the usage of filtering make me think you might want to look into using the DataTables plugin for jQuery (http://www.datatables.net/). It has some very nice features for sorting/filtering/etc. a large number of data elements and supports a variety of data sources. There are also some plugins for the plugin if the basic functionality isn't enough for you.
There is a bit of a learning curve if you want to do more complex stuff with it, and it might be tricky to get used to if you haven't worked with jQuery much (though being someone who hasn't worked with jQuery all that much due to not doing much web development, I can say that I quite like using it whenever I get the chance, although that may just be due to me enjoying learning how to do new things in programming), but I feel that if you're willing to spend the time on it you will have something much more maintainable than what you currently have.
So, I've built a responsive site with Twitter Bootstrap. The problem is that I've done this using visible-phone, visible-tablet, and visible-desktop. This means that when someone views my source code, I have whole sections that are included twice or three times, in order to get around problems with differences in span amounts, or, for instance, because a carousel on the tablet should have 2 items, while on the desktop it should have 4.
I'm wondering if I'm doing this right. Should I be injecting (or adding? Not sure of the right name) code to the DOM dynamically using Javascript, based on screen size? Or should I be editing around with my custom, very simple .php files based on screen size? I don't know, and I can't find an answer about good practice anywhere. I've tried looking at sites I like for this, but I never find a javascript script that specifically adds stuff in this situation. Given, I'm not sure what I'd be looking for.
Any pointers?
I would avoid using script to dynamically add the content; as a fellow developer that just makes it less intuitive (in my opinion) and I always aim to produce intuitive code for the chap after me.
If your requirements state that a carousel should have four items on the desktop and two on mobile, then I think your solution is completely valid.
Cocoa Touch's UITableView allows a user to scroll through large numbers of data rows with good performance because it recycles table rows. Rather than create a GUI element for every single data row, a limited number of table rows is created, and simply updated with the relevant data as the user scrolls, giving the illusion of navigating up and down a very large number of table rows.
Has anyone seen this done in javascript? Is there a plugin available anywhere that will do this for me?
infinity.js works well. It will dynamically load 'pages' behind the scenes giving you the appearance that the list has been fully loaded.
More information can be found on their Github page - https://github.com/airbnb/infinity
Additionally, I've forked the project updating it to work with Zepto. I also set it up to use any scrollable div (set up with overflow: scoll) with the class 'scrollable' - https://github.com/elliotcw/infinity
I should add that I made these changes as this is great for large lists on mobile devices, which slow down when you have to many complex elements on the page.
I was looking for this as well, and infinityjs [1] doesn't seem to quite mimic the same interface as UITableView. And it was a problem for my scenario that infinityjs required that the element containing the list items already be added to the DOM.
MegaList [2] came closest to what I wanted. Andrew (author) has done a great job of designing it for mobile first, with touch support etc. One caveat for me was that it appears to assume a strict selection list model and does a little bit more than I'd like a list component to do (e.g. binding to resize events and trying to handle that automatically).
So I started writing a barebones list component, also modeled after the iOS UITableView. It's a work in progress and I'm putting in just what I need. Sources are here https://github.com/shyam-habarakada/js-virtual-list-view. I'm putting in just what I need as I go, and contributors are needed :-)
[1] http://airbnb.github.io/infinity/
[3] https://github.com/triceam/MegaList
Actually the algorithm is not difficult at all. If you know javascript you should be able to write this. The algorithm only needs the height of a cell and the height of the table.
I only know these two:
Apple's Dashcode javascript Framework has an implementation of a Table. You could take a look and see if that is what you need.
Or Cappuccino Framework which is basically Objective-J but behind the scenes is Javascript.
Clusterize.js does exactly that.
It's small and works with any tag (table, lists, divs)