Extra In Mile in ASP

AthlonTom · 27 Mar 2006 at 20:05

Meh, been given a really easy ASP assignment in which I have to do the following;
1. Create an Admin area for a site that allows for the Adding, Removing, and Modifications of records in a product database.
2. Create User Log-ins with different levels of permissions, only the manager for example can remove records, sales can add records, etc, etc.
3. Validate all data entered, ensuring proper formatting is used for things like product Names, email addresses etc.

As you can see its all pretty simple, I'm just trying to concoct some crazily groovy ASP ideas to implement in this assignment to liven it up.

So far I'm thinking;
1. Spell Checker, particularly handy for updating item descriptions in the database.
2. CSS manipulation tools, allowing users to change the external css file to change the appearance of the site quickly and simply.
3. Traffic monitoring for the main site.

I cant really think of anything else to-do, ideas have to be strictly limited to whats achievable in ASP in order to conform with the brief. What do you reckon?

AthlonTom · 12 Apr 2006 at 12:17

Bumpy

GravyMonster · 12 Apr 2006 at 13:08

Spell Checker - there's probably a third party component you can install on your server to take care of that, but it'll cost. As this is for an assignment i guess it knocks it on the head.

CSS Manipulation tools - all CSS is is a text file, so, as long as your server has anonymous write access, which isn't a fantastic idea tbph, you can just use the FileSystemObject to change lines around.

Traffic monitoring - Easy to do with a database. Just have a single include file in each page, which records IP address, page name, time etc. Failing that there is almost certainly some components around again.

Hope thats all of some help

akakjs · 13 Apr 2006 at 08:12

My thoughts on your thoughts

1. Nice touch.
2. is a pain in the behind. Its lots of work, and tbh in the real world the style of a website is never usually changed along with the product (keeps all the product layouts exactly the same)
3. Lots of promise here for an online business getting detailed information on visitors is a make or break issue. Personally I'd do this, as its more transferrable into the real world.

happy coding

akakjs

AthlonTom · 13 Apr 2006 at 15:28

Thanks for the feedback guys - really helps when you can bounce ideas off people

1. The spell checker is a nightmare, I tried having the whole of my "Dictionary" in 1 table in a database, but this was caning the server as it had to go through a huge table, 1 table per letter works well, though if the first letters wrong it doesn't work - tis a challenge but hey!

2. Im writing themes into a table with each record containing the hex colour values for the theme, each column representing a different CSS tag, so the admin can just select a theme for the whole site rather than changing all the individual colours, I'm only putting in say a light theme and a dark theme just as a kinda demo thing for the moment but I want to make the theme time based.

E.G:
00:00 = Dark/Grayscale
06:00 = Dark Red/Orange
10:00 = Orange/Yellow
12:00 = Light/Grayscale
14:00 = Cyan
18:00 = Cyan/Navy
22:00 = Navy/Black
00:00 =

When I say theme I mean very subtle changes to the design - not total recolors. This will be dead simple to implement but is quite cool

3. Not really started the traffic monitoring compontents yet but I have been looking at graph generation and I'm pretty stumped on it - unless i just build the graphs from asci characters rather than graphics - any ideas?

ClearChaos · 13 Apr 2006 at 17:57

there was a free client side spell checker floating around a while back, bit like ie spell but worked in both firefox and ie but i cant remember the name of it :confused:

if you dont mind doing your stats in bar charts then you can simply adjust the height/width of an image to build each row of the graph, bit basic but its a dead simple way of doing it

sparkymark75 · 13 Apr 2006 at 19:31

Not sure if your covering this already but how about auditing so that every action on the database is captured by the system?

AthlonTom · 13 Apr 2006 at 19:45

ClearChaos said:
there was a free client side spell checker floating around a while back, bit like ie spell but worked in both firefox and ie but i cant remember the name of it

That would massivly simplify the problem but wouldn't get me any marks

good idea none the less!

if you dont mind doing your stats in bar charts then you can simply adjust the height/width of an image to build each row of the graph, bit basic but its a dead simple way of doing it

genius!

Lagz · 13 Apr 2006 at 22:13

AthlonTom said:
1. The spell checker is a nightmare, I tried having the whole of my "Dictionary" in 1 table in a database, but this was caning the server as it had to go through a huge table, 1 table per letter works well, though if the first letters wrong it doesn't work - tis a challenge but hey!

I dont see how you are doing this? You have a table with a load of words in. . . if a word is mispelt it isn't in the table, so how do you suggest replacements?

akakjs · 14 Apr 2006 at 18:37

the metrics you'll want to focus on for traffic monitoring (on a per page level) are "Impressions" (or page hits), "Click Through" (which links on the page where followed), and "referrer" (if comming from off-site).

Collect the info first then worry about the graph tbh. Pritty graphics are not raw data.

akakjs

Conrad11 · 14 Apr 2006 at 19:52

ClearChaos said:
there was a free client side spell checker floating around a while back, bit like ie spell but worked in both firefox and ie but i cant remember the name of it

Sorry to hijack your thread, if you remember the name of the program, or if anyone can think of any other free ones, please post.

Thanks...

robmiller · 14 Apr 2006 at 20:08

Lagz said:
I dont see how you are doing this? You have a table with a load of words in. . . if a word is mispelt it isn't in the table, so how do you suggest replacements?

Most database systems have support for selecting results that are similar to - or even in some cases pronounced similar to - a query. In mySQL:

Code:

SELECT word
FROM dictionary
WHERE word SOUNDS LIKE "coffee"

Will select all the words in the dictionary that are pronounced similar to "coffee".

AthlonTom · 21 Apr 2006 at 17:02

Gah - well I've been plodding on with this project but the other day caught a glimpse of PHP - and it looks a lot more powerful than ASP, can I run PHP on IIS 7.0?

punky_munky · 21 Apr 2006 at 18:28

I'm pretty sure you can. My flatmate was doing a PHP project with IIS but swtiched over to Apache after getting frustrated with it.

Reezer · 21 Apr 2006 at 18:52

AthlonTom said:
Gah - well I've been plodding on with this project but the other day caught a glimpse of PHP - and it looks a lot more powerful than ASP, can I run PHP on IIS 7.0?

What version of ASP are you using? Ye Olde bog standard ASP or .NET 1/2?

If it's ye olde I'd certainly recommend PHP over it, if it's .NET I would say stick with the ASP. Also, do you know ASP already or are you learning whatever language from scratch for this project?

Reezer · 21 Apr 2006 at 19:00

Check http://orangoo.com/spell/ out...

It's an AJAX spell checker that uses Google dictionary to suggest corrections in exactly the same way GMail does.

At the bottom of the page is the code for that and links to the google API it's using and some ASPELL library I haven't looked at.

You could take a look at how it does it and write your own version as a web service you call from your project. You may get just as many marks for working out (and documenting) the google API as you would writing a less good version yourself. You could write about why it is the *best* solution, cost effective, always being improved by google, world leading, buzz word, buzz word, buzz word, etc.

AthlonTom · 21 Apr 2006 at 21:32

Reezer said:
What version of ASP are you using? Ye Olde bog standard ASP or .NET 1/2?

If it's ye olde I'd certainly recommend PHP over it, if it's .NET I would say stick with the ASP. Also, do you know ASP already or are you learning whatever language from scratch for this project?

I am unfortunately doing it in Olde ASP as you put it, I already know ASP pretty well, I'm going to learn PHP rather than ASP.Net next I thinks.

therubble · 22 Apr 2006 at 09:35

AthlonTom said:
I am unfortunately doing it in Olde ASP as you put it, I already know ASP pretty well, I'm going to learn PHP rather than ASP.Net next I thinks.

I've got both, if I was you I would learn .net 2005, the IDE is free from www.asp.net and from my experience you will get higher salary's in the real world. Oh and 1/2 the things your trying to achieve it can do out the box.