Author: Amy

I am an Agile Delivery Lead helping engineer be successful one decision at a time.

Lazy Programming: Lowercase URLs

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Just so everyone knows, when it comes to programming I prefer to be as lazy as possible. This means that when I got my most recent story to render all routes in lowercase I decided fixing the Routing manually was way too much work. I spent some time on Google and discovered that the built-in lowercase functionality that is built into MVC 4 is broken and its a pain to work around. Instead I am adding a nuget package called LowercaseRoutesMVC to the project. It automatically renders routes in lowercase.  Unfortunately my coworker spent a couple hours yesterday working on updating his code to work manually.

Update: Quote from my boss to the coworker who did it manually yesterday, “hard work sometimes pays off tomorrow but procrastination always pays off immediately.”

MVC Tips n Tricks: Using a button like an action link

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I had the need to display a button that works like an action link to redirect the user to a page within an Area and didn’t want to wrap the whole thing in a form just to do the redirect.  Here is what I used.  It allows the same styling and behavior as a button but redirects directly like an action link.

<input type="Submit" 
       value="Add Persona" 
       class="btn btn-primary btn-lg" 
       onclick="location.href='@Url.Action("Detail", "Persona", new { area = "ProfileInfo" })'" />

Web Dev: Using data-* attributes – Web developer guide | MDN

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JavaScript Access

Reading those out in JavaScript is also very simple. You could use getAttribute() to read them but the standard defines a simpler way: a DOMStringMap you can read out via a dataset property:

var article = document.querySelector('#electriccars'),
data = article.dataset;

// data.columns -> "3"
// data.indexnumber -> "12314"
// data.parent -> "cars"

Each property is a string (even if you omit the quotes in the HTML) and can be read and written. In the above case setting article.dataset.columns = 5 would change that attribute.

via Using data-* attributes – Web developer guide | MDN.

RegEx: Validating Phone Numbers

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I am horrible at writing regular expressions but, like any developer, when I need them I want a good one.  Today I needed one to validate North American phone numbers, that would allow for all different kinds of formatting by the users and also allow for extensions.

On the following blog post, by Chris Nanney, I finally found the perfect one: 

/\D*\(?(\d{3})?\)?\D*(\d{3})\D*(\d{4})\D*(\d{1,8})?/

I also found this site that I used to validate that it worked as I expected: http://regex101.com/

I’ve been in the position of having to take an unnormalized database that had virtually no data validation or standardization in place, and migrating it to a normalized schema. I used regex to help me through the process.

This post will deal specifically with phone numbers. The data I was importing had many problems: First, there was no standard formatting—some numbers were stored (xxx) xxx-xxxx, some xxx-xxx-xxxx, some xxx.xxx.xxxx, etc. Second, there wasn’t a separate field for extensions—they were just tacked on the end by either ext., EXT, x, Ex, or some variation. If there were only 20 numbers or so you could just fix them by hand, but you need an automated process to deal with say, 15,000.
via Cleaning Phone Numbers with Regular Expressions : Code : Chris Nanney.

Web Dev Tips n Tricks: Using font awesome as icons to beautify Input boxes

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Today I had a requirement that asked for a textbox that looked similar to the following.  Since we don’t currently use BootStrap or anything similar I had to come up with it on my own.  I found the following post that worked perfectly.emailbox

Purpose of this post is to show you how we can use font awesome to beautify a HTML text field or a HTML number box or similar. Its not exactly a background image but our Font awesome icon will be placed on top of our input box so that it act as one.

Read more: http://jaspreetchahal.org/using-font-awesome-as-background-images-to-beautify-input-boxes/#ixzz32HwoWKHw