Category: Languages

The programming directory

CKEditor – adding custom style sheet

Within the CKEditor editor you can add in custom style sheets to assist with styling of the content within the editor and here is how you do it

CKEDITOR.config.contentsCss = '/css/mycssfilename.css' ;

After you have created the instance of the CKEditor you just need to add in to the configuration the contents cascading style sheet file.

CKEditor – auto save

A follow on from the previous post CKEditor custom dialog you can auto save the content with sending a AJAX call to another page that will save the content and also give back a updated time of that content saved.

I created a function called autosave(), that will call itself every 20 seconds (20000 milliseconds). This will get the data (getData()) from the CKEditor instance called content and then go some JQuery to do the actual AJAX function which in-turn calls the url autosave.php (can be any backend page that will deal with saving the data) and once the backend page has completed then update the HTML element with the ID of lastsavetime to the new time that is returned from the webpage.

function autosave()
{
   var t = setTimeout("autosave()", 20000);
 
  var content = escape(CKEDITOR.instances.content.getData());
   if (content.length > 0)
   {
       $.ajax(
       {
           type: "POST",
           url: "autosave.php?method=saveCKEditor",
           data : "content="+content,
           cache: false,
           success: function(message)
           {
               $("#lastsavetime").empty().append("Last saved : "+message);
           },
       });
   }
}
$(document).ready(function(){
    autosave();
}); ";

CKEditor – custom dialog

The CKEditor is a great WYSIWYG and the best thing is that you are able to customize the interface to have buttons on the toolbars, here is a way that I created a custom button with custom image attached to it.

The editor is created with

var editor = CKEDITOR.replace( 'Content');

So from now on in the variable editor is linked to the CKEditor instance, to setup the plugins to load when the CKEditor is created you call the pluginsLoaded function

 editor.on( 'pluginsLoaded', function( ev )
         {
           if ( !CKEDITOR.dialog.exists( 'statisticsDialog' ) )
                 CKEDITOR.dialog.add( 'statisticsDialog','/statistics.js');
           // Register the command used to open the dialog.
           editor.addCommand( 'statisticsAddCmd', new CKEDITOR.dialogCommand('statisticsDialog' ) );
           editor.ui.addButton( 'Statistics',
                    {
                        label : 'Statistic',
                        command : 'statisticsAddCmd',
                        icon : '/statistics_small.png',
                    } );
});

The first part will check to make sure that there is not dialog already created with the same name, and if not then load the javascript file that is the custom built dialog. The second part is adding the command (the button clicked) to be linked to the custom dialog, and the third part is to add the actual button to the user interface (editor.ui). The addButton function links to the command to bring up the custom dialog.

Here is the custom dialog code that will be called when the user interface button is clicked.

CKEDITOR.dialog.add( 'statisticsDialog', function( editor )
{
      // Load data asynchronously.
       return {
               title : 'Pick a statistic',
               minWidth : 400,
               minHeight : 200,
               onOk : insertOntoEditor,
               contents : [
                       {
                               id : 'tab1',
                               label : 'First Tab',
                               title : 'First Tab',
                               elements :[
                                       {  id : 'graphselect',
                                               type : 'select',
                                               items : [ ["option1", "link to image"] ] ,
                               }]
                       }
               ]
       };
} );

The dialog, will load up a screen and have a one drop down box that will allow the user to choose from the options (will you need to insert more options, or dynamic created options if you wanted to) and once the OK button is clicked (onOK) it will call this function below

function insertOntoEditor()
{
       elem = this.getContentElement('tab1','graphselect');
       value = elem.getValue();
       if (value != -1)
       {
               var writer = new CKEDITOR.htmlWriter();
               var fragment = CKEDITOR.htmlParser.fragment.fromHtml( '<img src="http://'+document.domain+elem.getValue()+'"/>' );
               fragment.writeHtml( writer )
 
               // need to wrap up the graph image insertion into the ckeditor
               CKEDITOR.instances.Content.insertHtml(writer.getHtml());
       }
}

This will basically insert some code into the CKEditor from the drop down box, the “link to image” you will need to insert a link for the insertion.

CKEditor – Custom upload dialog

The great WYSIWYG editor called CKEditor allows you to do a custom file upload, so that you can handle where the file is stored and also you can do your database extra inserts for example.

To start with you have to tell the CKEditor where to post the file uploaded to custom built page

var editor = CKEDITOR.replace( 'Content',{ filebrowserUploadUrl :'/custom.imageuploader.php'});

Where the custom.imageuploader.php is the actual php page that will deal with the custom page, can be done in any other language if required. In the above code, the ‘Content’ is the textarea to change to a CKEditor WYSIWYG.

Here is a basic php page that you will need to alter to store the $_FILES[“upload”] into the place where you want to store and do any database code to link to the resource that you are uploading, but the bit underneath that you need to have, this will tell the CKEditor what to do after your PHP code has stored the file, the CKEditoFuncName, is required (but passed in) to tell the CKEditor what function to call after the upload has happened, the $wherestorage, is where the actual file is so that the WYSIWYG can show the image and any $message that may help the CKEditor user for any error reports.

<?php
// the files are stored within the upload part of the $_FILES 
$_FILES["upload"];
?>
<html>
<body>
<script type="text/javascript">
window.parent.CKEDITOR.tools.callFunction(
   <?php echo $_REQUEST["CKEditorFuncNum"].",\"".$wherestorage."\",\"".$message."\"";?>
);
</script>
</body>
</html>
?>

Custom wordpress page on a new URL

I liked to have the idea of having google search my site and have it displayed within my current site design, and since wordpress allows to have action hooks that allow you to interrupt the present flow of generating the wordpress outputted page.

So to have the google searched and display results within the style that I am using I first needed to create a plugin, if you create a file within your

wordpress base directory/wp-content/plugins/codingfriendsgooglesearch

within the file below within the that directory created above, (I saved this file as googlesearch.php, but it does not matter as long as it is a .php file with the plugin details at the top of the file between the /*… */ parts.

<?php
/*
Plugin Name: Google search page
Plugin URI: http://www.codingfriends.com
Donate link: http://www.codingfriends.com
Description: Google search page
Version: 0.1
Author: Ian Porter
Author URI: http://www.codingfriends.com
*/
 
function get_requested_uri() {
       $requesturi = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
       if (substr($requesturi, -1)!="/") {
               $requesturi = $requesturi."/";
       }
       preg_match_all('#[^/]+/#', $requesturi, $matches);
       $uri = $matches[0];
       return $uri;
}
 
function google_search_display() {
       $uri = get_requested_uri();
       if ($uri[0]=='googlesearch/') {
               include(TEMPLATEPATH . '/googlesearch.php');
               exit;
               }
}
 
add_action( 'template_redirect', 'google_search_display');
 
?>

What basically happens is when the template_redirect is called, this is when most of the processing of the page has already been done, and we are about to display the requested page from the blog, well in this case I would like to add function call to google_search_display, which is within this same file, and what it does is to search for ‘googlesearch/’ within the first part of the URL requested e.g.

http://www.codingfriends.com/googlesearch/

and if so display the googlesearch.php php file from within the templates directory, and here is my googlesearch.php file, and it displays the content within the div tag with cse-search-results, with the present style around the google search results.

<?php get_header(); ?>
<div id="content" class="narrowcolumn" role="main">
<div id="cse-search-results"></div>
<script type="text/javascript">
 var googleSearchIframeName = "cse-search-results";
 var googleSearchFormName = "cse-search-box";
 var googleSearchFrameWidth = 795;
 var googleSearchDomain = "www.google.co.uk";
 var googleSearchPath = "/cse";
</script>
<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://www.google.com/afsonline/show_afs_search.js"></script>
</div>
<?php get_sidebar(); ?>
<?php get_footer(); ?>

wordpress is really nice where you are able to alter the present execution process.

CS107 – Assignment 2 – Six degrees

This is assignment 2 from a older CS107 course, because the latest course work is held on a UNIX server which in turn you need access to!!.. kinder does not help when you do not have access too!!.. Here is where I got the files from cs107 link, there is a zip file at the bottom of that page which has all of the assignments and handouts etc.

I have included the PDF of the assignment in the above file link, but since the actual assignment includes a few massive files you can download them from the CS107 link of the whole course work that I am using from the cs107 link.

As a note, within my linux setup, I need to setup the environment variable to tell the program to use a Linux little endian by

export OSTYPE=linux

Basically the assignment is to load in cast/movie details (which the base code from the assignment already does for use) and then we are needed to pull out the data from the structure of the file, the structure of the actors is (as taken from the PDF file)

  1. The name of the actor is laid out character by character, as a normal null-terminated C-string. If the length of the actor

threads – singleton

As from one of my previous posts about threading in csharp (c#), well with using Singletons you can use similar data between two different threads running.

In basics a singleton is when you want to have a single class instance so that you can share this class so that every time that you use it (even across threads) will only access the same class, it is very useful for when you have a printer spool so that you do not want to have x amount of printer spools (spool is when you have a list of print tasks waiting to print) and thus you only want to have one instance of a printer spool !!.

I have used the singleton creation from Microsoft website, that creates a singleton class that is thread safe which means that I am using the lock method that will lock on a object to stop thread contention and thus only creates a new instance of a Singleton class so that each thread will only get access to a single instance of that class.

So when you want to gain access to that single instance, you just call the

Singleton theSingleton = Singleton.Instance;

So here is the full source code, and below is the output where the output is displaying the value is incrementing otherwise if is was not a singleton class, the main class would print out 0-4 and also the runthismethod would output 0-9 instead!.

using System;
using System.Threading;
 
namespace monotestproject
{
	public sealed class Singleton
	{
		private static int _value;
		private static volatile Singleton instance;
		private static object syncRoot = new Object();
 
		public Singleton() { _value = 0;}
 
		public static Singleton Instance
		{
			get { 
				if (instance == null)
				{
					lock(syncRoot)
					{
						if (instance == null)
							instance = new Singleton();
					}
				}
				return instance;
			}
			private set {}
		}
 
		public int theValue 
		{
			get { return _value;}
			set { _value = value;}
		}
	}
 
	class MainClass
	{
		public static void Main (string[] args)
		{
			Singleton theSingleton = Singleton.Instance;
			// initialize the RunThisMethod as a thread
			Thread theThread = new Thread(RunThisMethod);
			theThread.Start();
 
			for (int j = 0; j < 5; j++)
			{
				theSingleton.theValue++;
				Console.WriteLine("Main Singleton value " + theSingleton.theValue);
				Thread.Sleep(100);
			}
		}
 
		// the method to create as a threadable method
		public static void RunThisMethod()
		{
			Singleton runsSingleton = Singleton.Instance;		
			for (int i =0; i < 10; i++)
			{
				runsSingleton.theValue++;
				Console.WriteLine("RunThisMethod Singleton value " + runsSingleton.theValue);
				Thread.Sleep(45);
			}
		}
	}
}

here is my output, as you can I am getting the singleton value incrementing, which is what should be happening.

Main Singleton value 1
RunThisMethod Singleton value 2
RunThisMethod Singleton value 3
RunThisMethod Singleton value 4
Main Singleton value 5
RunThisMethod Singleton value 6
RunThisMethod Singleton value 7
Main Singleton value 8
RunThisMethod Singleton value 9
RunThisMethod Singleton value 10
Main Singleton value 11
RunThisMethod Singleton value 12
RunThisMethod Singleton value 13
Main Singleton value 14
RunThisMethod Singleton value 15