Application description:

The AJAX Explorer application provides a reference for the graphical capabilities of ActiveGrid.  Also, it should servce as a HOWTO for some common operations.

AJAX Explorer is available for download here: dev.activegrid.com/community/files/ajaxexplorer.zip

Also, he application requires an installation of MySQL's Sakila database.  It's available from MySQL: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/sakila/en/sakila.html.  Alternatively, a small subset of the database is included in the application tarball as a SQL file ajaxexplorer.sql.

Capabilities:

The AJAX Explorer application will demonstrate an array of different ActiveGrid features, each on its own page.  Hopefully, this will provide both a reference and a HOWTO for users.

The features include basic AJAX, XForms and common XForm components; different styles of navigation; customizing the look and feel of applications; actions, XPath, and error handling; a basic image upload, and displaying the uploaded image; and finally, integration with some Dojo widgets.

Future work:

There's still some work to be done.  The HOWTO file included in the application includes the original spec, and everything that's been left unfinished.

I think the Dojo integration could be tighter.  While output to a Dojo widget is easy, it might be nice to show how to get the output from that, as well.  Maybe have the Editor2 HTML editor pass its contents into a preview page, and let you continue to edit it if you'd like.

Also, the general look and feel could be polished.  I'm far from a graphic designer :)  It might be nice to have each page show both the example (as it currently does), as well as tabs to see a screenshots of the relevant configuration in the studio, and maybe a page to play around with parameters.  That might help to really link together the examples shown in the application with the Studio.

Please let me know if you have any questions, comments, or improvements.

-matt

• AJAX and XForms
  
  • Introduction: hello world, showing and hiding Ajax frames
  • Structure of an XForm: message variables, groups, fields, actions
  • Placement on the page: HTML table, row, cell, borders, position, width
• ActiveGrid Layouts
  
  • Navigation: accordion, horizontal tabs, tree
  • Data grids: paginating grid, sorting, paging
• Modifying ActiveGrid Layouts
  
  • CSS basics: editing css for single element, editing css style sheet for whole app. css styling of width, color, font, highlight
  • Adding corporate look & feel: header colors and image
• Actions
  
  • Expressions: xpath, expressions, functions (current_date(), string-join())
  • Events: trigger, observe, handle with action editor, handle with javascript.
  • Error handling: file not found, database error, web service error
  • Validation: field validation, form validation, project validation
  • Security: conditional display of form elements
• Multimedia
  
  • Multimedia input: upload images, audio, video
  • Multimedia output: images, audio, video
• Integrating DOJO Layouts
  
  • Rich text input: input html/rich text with wysywyg editor, images, hyperlinks
  • Rich text display: html/rich text, images, hyperlinks
  • Charting: line chart, pie chart (integrate with flash widgets?)
  • Reporting: simple report with header/footer (equil, BIRT, Jasper?)
  • Custom layouts: integrating with Dreamweaver, customizing grid column widths

• Use the MySQL sample movie database?

• Demonstrate each Ajax feature on a separate page (maybe with an accordion group on the left side to navigate between pages) along with some text around what the page is doing. The HowTo should describe in detail how to create each page.