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Feb
13thHow to Remember which Tab was Open with jQueryUI and Cookies
It is often quite useful on page reload or when coming back to a previously visited page, to open up that page with the last tab that was being viewed still activated. In the past jQuery UI tabs made this fairly easy through browser cookies being baked into the tabs initialization call. Unfortunately, with the release of jQuery UI 1.10, the cookie option for tabs has been deprecated, rendering all your previous statements that looked like this, pretty much useless: From the official upgrade path notes: Support for cookies is not part of the core functionality for tabs and there are many ways to manage state across page loads. Therefore, the cookie option has been deprecated in favor of setting the active option appropriately during initialization. Luckily for us though, just because native tab support for cookies is gone doesn’t mean that we can’t still remember which tab was open using cookies – we just need to alter our approach first! The idea is simple enough. As before, use a cookie to store the currently activated tab index. On load, if the cookie exists, activate the associated tab index. If it doesn’t exist, load the first one. Finally, on tab activate, update the cookie with the new index value. In practice: Simple, but works like a charm!
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Aug
12thPHP: How to Implement jQuery Autocomplete using a JSON datasource
The jQuery UI library is really useful in that it packages a number of jQuery-driven interactions, widgets, effects and utilities into a single package, ready for smooth integration and even easier deployment. One of the many available widgets in the jQuery UI library is Autocomplete, which makes adding autocomplete functionality to an ordinary text searchbox a doddle! Let’s have a look how to implement this when using PHP to provide us with a separate JSON datasource then, shall we? First, if your web page contains a normal textbox within a form that is used to conduct searches, you need to attach the jQuery UI autocomplete functionality with the following code snippet: $(‘#datafilter-search-textbox’).autocomplete({ source: “ajax-search-autocomplete.php”, minLength: 2}); Note the minLength setting of 2. It is often useful to set the number of characters needed to initiate the search so as to minimize the possible amount of search return values for efficiency’s sake. As you can see, we have prompted the autocomplete widget to make use of a file called ajax-search-autocomplete.php as a datasource. This file should look something like this: //… all your database setup stuff $searchresults = array(); $searchterm = (key_exists(‘term’, $_GET)) ? $_GET['term'] : ”; if (strlen($searchterm) > 0) { $results = mysql_query(“SELECT `name` FROM `myTable` WHERE `name` LIKE ‘%$searchterm%’ ORDER BY `name` ASC”); while ($result = mysql_fetch_assoc($results)) { $searchresults[] = $result['filter-name']; } } $searchresults = array_map(“html_entity_decode_custom”, $searchresults); $searchresults = array_map(“get_correct_utf8_mysql_string”, $searchresults); echo json_encode($searchresults); And that is it. Load it up and try it out, and hey presto, you [...]
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Jun
24thjQueryUI Datepicker Calendar Control Visible at the Bottom of the Page
For some or other annoying reason, my jQueryUI datepicker controls start exhibiting a weird bug where on page load, the normally hidden control calender was appearing right at the bottom of the page. Clicking on the launch control would then bring up the calendar correctly, and on selection or unfocus would then hide it again correctly. So only on page load then.
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Aug
11thjQuery DataTables: How to Use jQuery ThemeRoller CSS Styling on Your Table
As a bonus, the awesome jQuery DataTables plugin (which I religiously use on all my work-related HTML tables nowadays) comes with the option to enable jQuery ThemeRoller styling with a simple switch of an initialisation parameter!
