Footprints in the snow of a warped mind - AJAX

What have I been up to?

Tim — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 22:20:01 GMT

It's been rather quiet on my blog recently, if you're wondering why (and don't chat to me on/off-line) I thought I would share with you what we've been working on recently.

For the past month or so The Site Doctor has been developing a new web site (www.wineandhampergifts.co.uk) for Porter and Woodman Gifts Ltd - a local company that produces personalised corporate hampers and gifts. It's been quite a challenge as they have a rather unusual ordering system that allows multiple recipients/addresses multiple items. Looking at it now, it's not so complicated but the delivery charge calculations and initial specs took a while to fully grasp. It's been really enjoyable.

I'll probably cover aspects of the site over the forthcoming months but there are a few really nice features to the Wine and Hamper Gifts site (or at least I think so), some of which the end user will never know about such as the use of generics to calculate the address/recipient/gift variations) and those that they may -for instance the use of the JavaScript¹ Zoom function on the product details page (courtesy of LuckyZoom), also the design created by our excellent designer Gareth Brown all adds up to what has to be one of the best sites I've developed to date.

¹ Yes, I did just say I've integrated some JavaScript into the site ;)

I doubt most of my readers are interested on the in's and out's of the project itself but from an SEO perspective, I for one am expecting pretty decent results. We opted to use the URL Rewriting ISAPI from Helicon this time round over our usual IISMods URL Rewriting ISAPI as for some reason the IISMods site has been offline for a while (and checking now has been converted into a very weird site).

Another aspect that some people may be unaware of is that the majority of the Wine and Hamper Gifts site operates the same without JavaScript as it does with JavaScript, this is important not only for screen readers but also search engines. There is only one area of the Wine and Hamper Gifts site that I'm aware of that doesn't operate without JavaScript and that is the "Personalise this gift" link on the cart page that allows the user to either edit the existing message or add one that doesn't already exist, that's because it uses a LinkButton, but I may find a way around that later.

Other features that I really like are little things like the way the drop down lists on the left hand menu are created -they're not actually drop down lists but unordered lists that are then manipulated using JavaScript, I think the JavaScript could do with a little tweaking but the result is superb. The Wine and Hamper Gifts site also creates a PDF receipt for the user which is emailed to them, this is something I've been meaning to look into for some time but haven't had the chance, luckily while I was developing the site, Sean Ronan posted to the MsWebDev list about an ASP.Net PDF library iTextSharp (a port from a Java library) which, despite a few oddities from the POV of the Java port does exactly what I wanted. The library is pretty easy to use once you get your head around it and certainly produces some nice results.

There's still more work that's needed to finalise the content and various aspects of the Wine and Hamper Gifts website but if you have a chance, check out the new Porter and Woodman Gifts Ltd Wine and Hamper Gifts website and leave a comment here letting me know what you think :D

Oh, and they've given us a pretty high target to get before Christmas so if you're thinking about treating your customers to a personalised corporate hamper or gift give a little thought to using www.wineandhampergifts.co.uk

'debug' is undefined with Microsoft AJAX release and TextChangedBehavior.js

Tim — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 05:20:47 GMT

As with my previous post, we upgraded the AJAX framework on the weekend which broke a few things, but one control in particular that broke was our TextChangedTextBox which is based on Pete Kellner's timed postback control. Since updating we were receiving a "'debug' is undefined" error on line 1409 (which was in one of the JavaScript include files).

Having had this issue before I updated the TextChangedBehavior.js but that didn't sort it, I have the latest version of the Futures on the server too so I was lost. Turns out I had an old version of the AJAX Futures DLL within the Bin folder of the project.

So as with my post on the ASP.Net forums before -make sure you update your AJAX Futures when updating your Microsoft AJAX framework!

Reporting errors from AJAX using the WebException Class

Tim — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 07:57:18 GMT

I’ve been using Phil Whinstanley’s error reporting class¹ within my applications for some time now and it really does help with diagnosing issues with the site’s during development (or client testing) but also alerting me to errors on live sites. I also like it because it can highlight hacking attempts and also spambot form submissions –allowing you to alter the site as needed. A lot of the time it also means we’re alerted to an issue with the site before the client has a chance to call.

¹ Note: I've been told the files Phil put online all those years ago are offline but don't panic, I'm posting another post with the relevant files shortly. If you don't want to use the search function (top right) or you're just keen, check out my comment within my post about ASP.Net WebException and Error Reporting useful code.

I’m glad he developed it because before this was around I was using a very simple email alert system that didn’t contain even a third of what this one does. Historically in ASP we always reported 500-100 errors as I don’t like clients spotting issues before I do. It’s very important to include error reporting in your code otherwise you may miss a sequence of events that causes your client to loose out on a sale.

Recently however we got in on the Atlas/AJAX scene pretty early on because we had a new application that would really benefit from a lack of postback and as it was an internal application only where we had complete control over the user’s environment, accessibility wasn’t so much of a concern (though FWIW you can still use the site in the same way without JavaScript activated).

At present, our development server’s SMTP server isn’t working properly so I didn’t think anything of receiving no email when I threw an exception during the early stages of development but as soon as I threw it onto the live server I quickly noticed that I wasn’t receiving errors from the application (we’ve got a test page to ensure the error reporting is working as expected), on investigation I found that the errors were being caught by the Atlas/AJAX handler (in a similar way to a try/catch block) which meant no emails were being sent out –so what do you do?

Note: Since I first started this article, Atlas has been released by Microsoft and is now AJAX and as part of the current release, Atlas/AJAX allows you to capture errors that are otherwise trapped by the framework and handle them as you like but for completeness I’ll overview things I tried.

Firstly I tried simply bubbling the error up to the global.asax’s Application_Error event handler as I normally would but that won’t work as it will still be trapped by the Atlas/AJAX framework, further more, the error returned to the user isn’t very useful (it’s the text within the exception):

The next thing I tried was taking the exception and passing it to the WebException as you do within the Application_Error event handler, although this worked and for this project would have been an alright solution because the ScriptManager was contained within a single MasterPage, I wanted a solution that I could easily roll out to other projects.

What I decided to do in the end was to wrap the WebException class and adding a single static method that takes an exception, then I replaced the code within the Global.asax and within the ScriptManager’s error event handler and responded to the user with a more informative message. The code below will output a user friendly message -still in a popup though you could redirect if desired. In the live application the user's location and a reference for the incoming error email is also shown to the user.

Note: TSDGlobals is a settings class we use here, it just references the relevant setting and contains a set of useful methods that we use throughout most of our projects.

aspx code

<asp:ScriptManager runat="server" ID="sm" EnablePartialRendering="true" AllowCustomErrorsRedirect="true" OnAsyncPostBackError="atlasScriptManager_PageError"></asp:ScriptManager>

codebehind

protected void atlasScriptManager_PageError(object sender, AsyncPostBackErrorEventArgs e)

{
    //A page reference for you (optional but useful)
    string __PageRef = "132";
    //Update the message the user will see
    sm.AsyncPostBackErrorMessage = String.Format("I'm sorry, an error has occured, please contact us on 01234 567890. Quoting Page Ref: {0} - {1}", __PageRef, DateTime.Now.ToString());
    //Pass it through to the new Error Handler
    ErrorHandling.ErrorHandler.Handle(e.Exception);
}

global.asax

void Application_Error(object sender, EventArgs e)

{
ErrorHandling.ErrorHandler.Handle(Server.GetLastError());
}

protected void Application_PreRequestHandlerExecute(Object sender, EventArgs e)

{
if (Context.Handler is IRequiresSessionState || Context.Handler is IReadOnlySessionState)
ErrorReporting.SessionTracker.AddRequest("Pre Request Handler Execute", true, true, false);
}

ErrorHandler.cs

using System;
using System.Data;
using System.Configuration;
using System.Web;
using System.Web.Security;
using System.Web.UI;
using System.Web.UI.WebControls;
using System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts;
using System.Web.UI.HtmlControls;

namespace ErrorHandling

{
public class ErrorHandler

    {
        //Declare for the scope of the class
        private static HttpRequest context = HttpContext.Current.Request;

        public static void Handle(Exception currentError)

        {
            Handle(currentError, true);
        }

public static void Handle(Exception currentError, bool redirectUser)

{
if (TSDGlobals.SendSiteErrors)

{

                #region Deal with 404's

                //Redirect the user to a friendly page
                if (CheckForErrorType(currentError, "FileNotFound") && redirectUser)
                    RedirectToFriendlyUrl(TSDGlobals.ErrorPage_PageNotFound);

                #endregion

                #region Deal with Spambots

                //Check the error type
                if (CheckForErrorType(currentError, "System.FormatException"))

{
if (context.Form.Count > 0)

{
foreach (string key in context.Form)

                        {
                            if (key.IndexOf("_VIEWSTATE") > 0 && context.Form[key].ToString().IndexOf("Content-Type") > 0)
                                return;
                        }

}

#endregion

                //Enable the trace for the duration of the error handling
                TraceContext t = HttpContext.Current.Trace;
                bool bCurrentState = t.IsEnabled;
                t.IsEnabled = true;

                #region Handle the Exception

                WebException WE = new WebException();
                WE.CurrentException = currentError;
                WE.Site = context.Url.Host.ToString();
                //Pull the information from the web.config here if desired
                WE.FloodCount = 50;
                WE.FloodMins = 5;

                #endregion

                #region Choose what you're interested in>

                WE.ReturnCache = true;
                WE.DrillDownInCache = true;
                WE.IncludeApplication = true;
                WE.IncludeBrowser = true;
                WE.IncludeEnvironmentVariables = true;
                WE.IncludeForm = true;
                WE.IncludeProcess = true;
                WE.IncludeQueryString = true;
                WE.IncludeRequestCookies = true;
                WE.IncludeRequestHeader = true;
                WE.IncludeResponseCookies = true;
                WE.IncludeServerVariables = true;
                WE.IncludeSession = true;
                WE.IncludeTrace = true;
                WE.IncludeVersions = true;
                WE.IncludeAuthentication = true;

                #endregion

                WE.Handle();

                //Return the trace to its original state
                t.IsEnabled = bCurrentState;

                //Redirect the user to a friendly page
                if (redirectUser)
                    RedirectToFriendlyUrl(TSDGlobals.ErrorPage_CodeIssue);
            }

}

private static bool CheckForErrorType(Exception ex, string errorText)

{
if (ex != null)

            {
                //Check the exception
                if (ex.GetType().ToString().IndexOf(errorText) > 0)
                    return true;
                else
                    return CheckForErrorType(ex.InnerException, errorText);
            }

else

            {
                return false;
            }

}

private static void RedirectToFriendlyUrl(string Url)

        {
            //Only redirect the user if the URL is not empty and we're not on a dev machine
            //TODO: Check the referrer to ensure we don't redirect the user to the page causing the error!
            //TODO: Pull the list of development server addresses from an XML file
            if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(Url) && (context.Url.Host.IndexOf("localhost") < 0))
                HttpContext.Current.Response.Redirect(Url);
        }

}

I’m not sure if this is a recommended way of doing it but it works pretty well and in my case, the majority of settings from the code are the same regardless of the project but you can still alter those if required –as they’re not likely to change project-project I’ve kept the settings within the web.config. I decided to wrap Phil’s code in my own because that way if he ever releases an update (not sure what that’d do tbh ) I could just drop the new WebException code into my project and be ready to go straight away.

What do you think Phil? Use or Abuse of your code ;)

Atlas – AJAX Update issues (Could not load file or assembly Microsoft.Web.Extensions.Design)

Tim — Sat, 18 Nov 2006 09:52:00 GMT

Being a fair way into an application that relies heavily on Atlas I wasn’t best pleased to hear that Microsoft had done the usual comedy act of renaming the framework which would mean we’d have to update a plethora of controls.

Today we bit the bullet and along with a few other changes we already had planned made the switch. It wasn’t as bad as I was expecting tbh but it wasn’t without issues. The first issue we ran into was with Visual Studio’s Intellisense which has gone haywire, the recommended solution is to switch quickly between Design Time and HTML View –something that we can’t do as we’re using nested MasterPages which Visual Studio doesn’t support.

The next issue we ran into was the fact that our onKeyPress TextBox has now stopped working as planned but we’re looking into that.

The main issue that we ran into this morning however was on putting the site onto the server as we were faced with the following:

Configuration Error

Description: An error occurred during the processing of a configuration file required to service this request. Please review the specific error details below and modify your configuration file appropriately.

Parser Error Message: Could not load file or assembly 'Microsoft.Web.Extensions.Design, Version=1.0.61025.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.

Source Error:

Line 97: 			<assemblies>
Line 98: 				<add assembly="Microsoft.Web.Extensions, Version=1.0.61025.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35"/>
Line
99: <add assembly="Microsoft.Web.Extensions.Design, Version=1.0.61025.0, Culture=neutral,
PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35"/>

Line 100: <add assembly="System.Design, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral,
PublicKeyToken=B03F5F7F11D50A3A"/>

Line 101: <add assembly="System.Windows.Forms, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral,
PublicKeyToken=B77A5C561934E089"/>

Source File: **********************************************\web.config Line: 99

Assembly Load Trace: The following information can be helpful to determine why the assembly 'Microsoft.Web.Extensions.Design, Version=1.0.61025.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35' could not be loaded.

WRN: Assembly binding logging is turned OFF.

To enable assembly bind failure logging, set the registry value [HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Fusion!EnableLog]
(DWORD) to 1.

Note: There is some performance penalty associated with assembly bind failure logging.

To turn this feature off, remove the registry value [HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Fusion!EnableLog].

Version Information: Microsoft .NET Framework Version:2.0.50727.42; ASP.NET Version:2.0.50727.42

The official take on this from the Microsoft guys is somewhat comical (http://forums.asp.net/thread/1455060.aspx):

Hi guys - yeah the problem you're having is because you installed on a machine w/o VS. All of our machines have VS, so we didn't catch this problem. On a machine w/ VS, Microsoft.Web.Extensions.Design.dll gets dropped.

Probably the best workaround for this is to go get that file from a machine with VS and either install it (gacutil -f Microsoft.Web.Extensions.Design.dll) or try dropping it into the bin directory, which I believe should also work but I haven't tried it.

I've been talking with the AJAX team about this, so we're on top of it. Sorry for the confusion.

Not an ideal fix but at least it works! For those of you wondering where you can find the DLL, look in: %Program Files%\Microsoft ASP.NET\ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions\v1.0.61025