MVC ActionLink not working after submit

These past days, I was having a problem with links for an iPad web app. The problem was that when I submit a form (step 1) and go to the next form (step 2), the link to return back to step 1 was not working. Apparently the problem is caused by Ajax. The solution is the following, instead of using the normal form tag to init a form:

use this type of form initialiser

@using (Html.BeginForm(“action”, “controller”, FormMethod.Post))
{

      ……

}

And add the following attribute:

{ “data-ajax”, “false” }

So the final code would look like this:

@using (Html.BeginForm(“action”, “controller”, FormMethod.Post, new Dictionary { { “data-ajax”, “false” } }))
{
……

}

Hope this post helps you, and reduces your swearing Happy Form-ing!

Delete Operation in MVC

This week I just started some MVC tutorials which I’m really liking. And after some tutorials I found this “Performing a delete operation in response to a GET request (or  for that matter, performing an edit operation, create operation, or any other  operation that changes data) opens up a security hole”.

The problem is that if you create a link with the following href: www.mydomain.com/Movies/Delete/23, it will delete the movie with the passed id 23. If a hacker finds this, he can create a loop and delete all of your movies in the database.

The best solution would be to delete an item in an HTTP POST operation instead of the get, so the user must submit a form to delete an item. This is done using either buttons, or else images using the following markup:

This will create an image link in a form which would POST the delete operation. This will reduce the security hole in your system. I suggest you read this article by Stephen Walter. Hope this will help you in your new MVC adventures.

CSS Tricks Quickie – Multiple Border Styles and Radius

Did you know that you can set multiple border styles for the sides of divs and images. By using the following css script, you can define any multiple borders you want:

div
{
border-width:5px;
border-style:dotted solid;
}

By using this with another css trick, the border radius, you can set some nice effects when hovering images. The radius css is below (all three must be include to work in all browsers):

-moz-border-radius:13px;
-webkit-border-radius:13px;
border-radius:13px;

Do you have some more simple tricks? Let me know in the comments Happy CSSing!

Resources

Are you a Brogrammer or a Programmer?

So I was listening to Windows Weekly and heard Mary Joe Foley, from Cnet, mention the word Brogrammer. Hmmm never heard that before!

What is a Brogrammer?

A simple search sent me to the UrbanDictionary.com and according to this site, a Brogrammer is:

A programmer who breaks the usual expectations of quiet nerdiness and opts instead for the usual trappings of a frat-boy: popped collars, bad beer, and calling everybody “bro”. Despised by everyone, especially other programmers.

I continued my search, and guess what I found.. Continue reading »

Improved Alexa Ranking by 1 million positions in 12 hours | Project Nine

Yesterday early in the morning, at about 2 o’clock I was still up, and spared a few minutes to try out some optimisations on my own site, www.nine.com.mt. In the afternoon I had a great surprise, the optimisations I did improved my Alexa ranking position by much over 1 million positions. I know I’m still far far below but using some simple optimisations, your website can also start ranking higher.

Click here to find out the simple optimisations I did on Project Nine’s website to get this result with your own site…

For Loop with Negative Step | Quickie

Cannot believe that I’m writing some helpful examples using VB.Net, but that is the language that we’re using at work, so have to adapt now. Next find how to make a loop with a negative step (decreasing step):

Imports System

Public Class MainClass
 Shared Sub Main()
 For intCount As Integer = 10 To 1 Step -1
 'Add the item to the list
 System.Console.WriteLine(intCount)
 Next
 End Sub
End Class

Add AutoNumber to GridView showing the RowNumber | Quickie

<asp:TemplateField>
  <ItemTemplate>
    <%# Container.DataItemIndex + 1 %>
  </ItemTemplate>
</asp:TemplateField>

Hope this helped

Solution | Unable to write output file ‘…pdb’; unspecified error

During this weekend, I started having a problem when building a solution in Visual Studio. It would load the following error:

Unable to write to output file Solution_Name.pdb

This Visual Studio solution has 8 projects, and a lot of files and folders. I tried several solutions that I found on the net, which worked for others, but none worked for my case including:

• Delete the .pdb file from the solution – Didn’t Work
• Delete the Debug folder – Still Didn’t work
• Delete the whole obj Folder – Nothing Continue reading »

Get data from an SQLDataSource to a DataTable and Bind Grid

This week, I needed to bind a gridview to and SQLDataSource. The only problem is that I need to include extra rows. How to do this? First I removed the binding code to bind the grid directly from HTML (in gridview remove the DataSourceID attribute).

Then I wanted to get the data from the SQL Data source and convert to a data table to insert and update the table as needed. Next is the code to get the data… Continue reading »

Change Lightbox 0.5 Image Size

Update 2011: For those people who had problems with the below instructions.. please find in on my website here. And when you’re there take a look at my site and see what you think about it

Lightbox 2 has the functionality to set maximum width and height. But what about previous versions? To set the maximum image width and height for lightbox (version 0.5) you need to do some extra coding yourself. Open the jquery.lightbox-0.5.js file and search for the next pieces of code (in bold below):

    settings = jQuery.extend({
        maxWidth: null,
        maxHeight: null,
    ...

Then search for the next function (in bold) and write copy and paste the code underneath it: Continue reading »