Let me announce the open test run of my Final Year Project: EvtLog

You can now check out the alpha run version with the following URL:
http://snap-port.net/fyp/alpha

You can:

• Click the menu buttons at the bottom part of the application for different features
• Click on the MapTags to see the detial of the event
• Register the application to be a member for more features
• Select scope on the map to browse events that will happen within that scope
• Search events with the built-in search feature
• Try out the suggestion search keywords
• Post events (try to post some real events)
• Send Private Message(PM) to event’s poster or other user
• etc. ^^

It has been kept tested and improved with some of my friends who has programming-background and it is now so great to make it as open test run. I wish to receive anyone you comment and sharing about my FYP. You can just simpily click the button for the feedback form.

Not much time is left, hopefully the development is almost reaching the destination:

Need modification to make the application look nice as well as improving the search mechanism. I wish to use FULL-TEXT search as the search mechanism, but the fact that FULL-TEXT does not support Chinese Characters as there is no delimiter for Chinese (else well as Korean and Japanese, does not have space as word delimiter like English). Therefore current search feature just apply MySQL ‘LIKE’ pharsing search. As well as I am designing the “suggestion search” feature.

I can’t believe the application is almost finish, even it may not have enough commercial smell~

For RIA, it is more appropriate to have fluid layout for application as there are many different resolution for different user’s computer.

Flex’s datagrid, however, its column does not support dynamic width.

I do tried to use actionscript to set those width during runtime like using onCreationComplete or onResize of the datagrid, sadly that it is unable to control the width of columns, keep being feeded with some float values.

Until Dave suggested a over-simplified solution: to use decimal number for the width value:
http://www.daveoncode.com/2009/03/18/set-datagridcolumns-width-in-percentage-with-ease/

It is really crazy simple, with spent me lots of time in brain-storming other useless AS3 solutions……

Time fires and there is about 13 days left for the deadline of FYP,  I am behind schedule because as long as you design and implement the desired part out, more un-expected issue and ideas come out. Let say what I am implementing these days is the Private Messaging feature(PM), I had already design a very basic one, without friend list consideration, I predict I can finish it within 1 day and have bug fix and improvement for 1 day, but turn out that it needs 3 days, just only wish to make my application more user friendly…

What I did:
An InBox and OutBox, a message with title and rich text Body using DataGrid

What I didn’t think in detail:
Should it be multi-page, or just 1 datagrid?
Should it be multi-selectable?
How about bulk deletion?
Read/ Non-Read Flag?

And the most important is: The sorting of the messages. How to let users feel good to use.

People will say that, it’s just easy: sort the messages order by date in decending order and use it as the dataprovider of the datagrid. Okay, everything think that the data is displayed pretty good in the datagrid, but what if user click the column header? Flex will use its default sorting mechanism and disturb the original messages order. For example, if I press the header “readflag”, the messages are really sorted with “readflag” column but Flex will also sort other columns in the datagrid in ascending order. Making some very old message rise and new read/un-read message sink. So What do I do as soon as I get this point? I have to immediate draft a solution for this, like how should I handle the sorting, how to implement that sorting mechanism?

Initial sorted view:

After user’s manual ReadFlag sorting (click the column with some circles), the data is already a mess: the read/un-read messages are sorted but their date are not sorted as well

The same situation, with color indicated, occured, the ReadFlag column is sorted while the messages are not sorted by datetime, resulted that in such situation, the oldest message which is read already will be shown at the first row.

Things always go bad, yet, it still gets some way to go well. So then I learn the powerful feature of Flex DataGrid with reference to the following website the coding mentioned:
Programmatic multi-column sorting on DataGrid or AdvancedDataGrid
http://raghuonflex.wordpress.com/2008/01/25/programmatic-multi-column-sorting-on-datagrid-or-advanceddatagrid/

For sure it is not the only part that make the implementation more difficult than I expect. From the previous of some social platform experience, some statistic table should be maintained so as to facilitates the running of the platform. And careful updation of those statistic is important otherwise either making those statistic not real/incorrect or lowering the performance of the application/platform due to mass updation occuring in the database.

The point I want to point out is: Never think programming a software an easy stuff. And don’t think oversimple for a programmer who have heart to make good application stuffs.

And I wish my advisors and people who are going to be invited to test my application will not think my application is a mess stuff~^^

As long as developing my FYP, I keep testing the freshly made components with aggressive attempts. And these days I just find out more about some necessary precautions to avoid the application crash. For my application, like other applications, there are some textboxs or textareas for data entry, and the data will be stored in database. In case you did not handle the data that being sent carefully, what it’s: Validating data that being sent, those careless can crash the application. In my case, I have to handle symbols like apostrophe(’), backslash(\) so as to avoid the backend forming an incorrect format SQL statement to the database.

Normally a SQL statement is:
INSERT INTO `TABLE_NAME` (`data`) VALUSE (’field1′);

If some people feed the data field1 with “Data\”, then the SQL statement will become:
INSERT INTO `TABLE_NAME` (`data`) VALUSE (’data\’);

The backslash symbol will hide the orginal function of apostrophe and make the SQL statement syntax incorrect, error like ‘missing apostrophe’ is resulted.

If the previous example the backslash is replaced as apostrophe, the SQL statement will also be generated error because of an extra apostrophe.
[X] INSERT INTO `TABLE_NAME` (`data`) VALUSE (’data”);
[X] INSERT INTO `TABLE_NAME` (`data`) VALUSE (’da’ta’); //SQL will think that only [da] will be feeded to `data` column meanwhile do not know what [ta] mean in the remaining part of the SQL.

Hence, great care have to be taken into account so as to avoid the application being crashed by somebody whose intention is bad.

More about validation, Flex has provided several validation class. It is sufficient for general use but I am so interested in thinking whether they are useful or not, just a passage about EmailValidator:
http://www.stimuli.com.br/trane/2007/sep/13/email-validation-actionscript-3/