I ended up changing directions with the project I was working on and this code never got used in production. Testing on it was minimal and I haven’t touched it two years. However, I have received a large number of requests for the code…so here it is:

ASP.NET 2.0 Web Service Membership, Role, and Profile Provider

Feel free to post enhancements or suggestions here.

I’m looking for a change log to find out what has changed from the original beta version to the beta 3 version. Does this exist?

• ASP.NET 3.5 Framework
• ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions CTP
• ASP.NET MVC Toolkit
• Visual Studio 2008

Sites with Tutorial, Tips, Help, etc..

• Scott Guthrie Intro and Tutorials:
  • Intro
  • Part 1
  • Part 2: URL Routing
  • Part 3: Passing ViewData from Controllers to Views
  • Part 4: Handling from Edit and Post Scenarios
• MVC Forum
• MVC Quickstarts
• Tips from Mike Bosch
• Creating Client and Server-Side Form Validation (sample project)
• Ajax with the ASP.NET MVC Framework
• Roadmap for MVC Framework

Sample Project

The sample project is a very basic issue tracking system. The database is not included, but can easily be built according to the following diagram:
(click to view)

Have fun! [Download project files]

More demos and tutorials can be found in the laboratory.

The idea is simple; each step of the plan has a check box. As you complete a step, you check the box. A cookie is saved in your browser…the next time you open the page it remembers what you’ve already checked…no database required! Take a look at the demo.

If you like it, help yourself. Feel free to download it, modify it, borrow it, or whatever. All the code is visible via view source. Here’s a zipped version, if you’d rather download it.

Undefined index: action in /cake/dispatcher.php line 144

$aInfo = $this->requestAction('/tours/GetAgentInfo/' . $property["Listing"]["agent"] . '/' . $property["Listing"]["listingoffice"]);
?>

The problem turned out to be that one of the values in $property["Listing"] was returning a value which included a space. Something like this: “396 “. Since the requestAction method uses a URL to get it’s parameters, it was bombing when the URL looked like this: ‘/tours/GetAgentInfo/396 /94′. I used the php trim() function to remove spaces, and presto… problem solved!

$aInfo = $this->requestAction('/tours/GetAgentInfo/' . trim($property["Listing"]["agent"]) . '/' . trim($property["Listing"]["listingoffice"]));
?>

I recently discovered this workaround for a scenario that is new to me. Apparently this is a common problem. However, being a developer who in the past has used little (if any) javascript in to build sites, I had not encountered it before.

The bug, present in IE 6 and below, is manifested when a positioned block should cover a select element in another layer. This could occur easily with a dropdown menu or a popup layer that need to open over a form containing a select element. The easiest way around this is to position the conflicting elements so that they do not interfere with each other. However, if this is not possible, there is a workaround using the iframe element and IE conditional comments.

IE 6 Screenshot – demonstrating the bug. Shows two select elements poking through the positioned layer.

Firefox 2.0 Screenshot – the way it should be. Shows the one select element that is actually in the positioned layer. The two below it are hidden by the layer’s light-blue background.

A few seconds of Googling turned up the following useful links:

• <SELECT> Free Layer
• SELECT elements ignore Z-index (“windowed element” problem) (see bug #4)
• How the Z-index Attribute Works for HTML Elements

The first link offered a useful solution which I am abbreviating here:

#popup iframe
{
display:none;/*sorry for IE5*/
display/**/:block;/*sorry for IE5*/
position:absolute;/*must have*/
top:0;/*must have*/
left:0;/*must have*/
z-index:-1;/*must have*/
filter:mask();/*must have*/
width: 100%;/*must have for any big value*/
height: 100%;/*must have for any big value*/;
}

In the linked example width and height are both set to 3000px. I found that it worked better for me to use 100% instead since the former caused unnecessary scrollbars to appear on the page.

<div id="bd">
<h1>select element z-index workaround</h1>
<div class="parameter">
<label for="ddTest">Test</label>
<select id="ddTest">
<option>&hellip;</option>
<option>pick me</option>
</select>
</div>
</div>
<div id="popup">
Is the select element poking through? It shouldn't be!
<!--[if lte IE 6.5]><iframe></iframe><![endif]-->
</div>

Download the demo code: Select Element Z-index Workaround Code