is it possible to take a screenshot of what a textbox holds when the user presses the sumbit button for example?
EDIT: this is an aspx webpage
In short, no it is not possible to do this in a consistent, cross browser fashion (that I am aware of). If your textbox was implemented inside of a flash movie, it would be possible to take a 'screenshot' of what the flash movie was displaying when a button was pressed (discussion on this subject available here). But otherwise, you are going to have to do this processing on the server.
You could simulate this process by having the server render a copy of the page itself (feeding it the data the user entered) and then doing what you wanted with it from there. There are free and paid for solutions to assist you in taking a screenshot of a website (browse options available here).
On the client side I think you're stuck with the limitations of javascript, which might not be possible. Here is another question that is very similar to yours:
Take a screenshot of a webpage with JavaScript?
In the general sense, no, you can't. However if you have a constrained environment (e.g. kiosk, intranet), you can create a browser plug-in which can essentially do anything, including snapping a screenshot and sending it to the server.
If you have lots of control over the environment, you can create your own web browser which can take screenshots. In fact, I've done this with C#. I just wrote an app that hosts a browser control and sends screenshots to the server on certain key presses or at a user-defined interval.
Related
Is it possible to have a website displayed on two seperate machines but to syncronise the users input on either machine to the other?
Basically any anchor clicks, image zooms, javascript pop out menus etc need to also occur on the other users screen and vice versa.
In my case the site will be developed in c#.NET but how would one approach something like this, would you use javascript or a database or some other method?
Having spent a long time looking into this I've found a solution, SignalR - http://signalr.net/ for ASP.NET allows you to do exactly what I require, I won't go into detail here as the post would become huge but for anyone wanting to do the same in future then visit http://signalr.net/ and have a read, it's amazing technology!
Due to real estate/space constraints, I want to put a Printer icon on a button rather than the text "Print"
Yet I see no obvious way to do that (No "Image" property or so on the button).
Is it possible (without jumping sideways through flaming hoops)?
The standard button does not support images, no. You have to create a custom control. This was such a common request that Microsoft released an article on MSDN showing how to do it.
I'd argue that they would have been better served just creating the support in the Button (after all, they had several releases after that article) but they didn't ask me.
I am working on an ASP.NET/C# application,
I am looking for the best way to do the following. (Note: I don't need you to tell me how to do it, just if you can point me to the right direction to look)
in my main page I have a button. When the user clicks it,I want to open popup open containing a map. the user can click on counties to highlight them and then click on submit. I want to be able to know which countries the user has clicked on in my main page (maybe save it in a array or string or anything)
What is the best way to do this? Should I use flash?
I know this is not a problem/solution type of question, but if someone can point me in the right direction I would very much appreciate it. Just some ideas and I will do the researches.
Thank you very much for any inputs or comments
And sorry for not being a specific problem question.
For the pop-up you can use a dialog (a "modal" HTML form like what you find in jQuery UI or similar). If you're using plain "old" ASP.NET you may need some trick if you want to use forms but they works well.
If what you want to provide is a selection from a map you do not need Flash (at least I wouldn't use it for such simple task, I'm not a fun of that kind of extensions). An image map can work well and it's more portable. If you want you may use HTML5 features to provide better experience for users with a compatible browser. I do not remember the link but I saw a very nice example of this using plain HTML (4) and JavaScript. Using a low-res image as base for the map, small images as checks applied on top of it and div tooltips for details (it supported a zoom-on-click feature too to enlarge a portion of the map loading a higher resolution version). I guess I wrote somewhere that URL...
Links
Nice article: http://www.workwithchoicecuts.com/methodology/revisiting-the-html-image-map/
For image maps basics: http://www.javascriptkit.com/howto/imagemap.shtml
Image map builder: http://www.image-maps.com/
jQuery plug-in for selection from maps: https://github.com/jquery/plugins.jquery.com
Is there any pattern or kind of "least requirements list" to follow for ensuring an asp.NET application to support BACK button of the browser for each aspx page?
thanks
In general, the back button on the browser will take you to the previous HTML GET or POST that occurred. It navigates by page-wide transactions, so anything done dynamically cannot be navigated that way. Also, the back button doesn't rewind code execution, so if you are determining something based off of a Session variable or something similar, that won't be rewound either. Obviously, it won't rewind database transactions either.
In general, if you want to support the back button, you'll need to make sure to divide everything you need to navigate between with said button is divided by an HTML transaction of some sort.
Again, you're going to run into issues if your page display is dependent on server-side control that changes from one post to the next. This is one reason you see some forms feed a 'Page has expired' error when you try to navigate back to them.
Not really... It depends on your application flow.
There are things that make supporting the back button more awkward.
for example using pure ajax to change the majority of the content on the page,
will look like a 'new' page but wont be compatible with the back button (though you can fudge it)
another example is posting back to the same page more than once, as this can make it appear like the back button is not working, and at the same time re-doing your request (and therefore database transactions)
Fundamentally it depends on your application requirements.
I'm working on a web scraping application and was testing it with ebay. The thing is that the application should follow the link "Next" (the one at the bottom of the page that should go to the next page of results) but it kinda stays on the same page (yea, i'm actually not sure about that). If you try to open ebay and search for any term that will give a result with multiple pages, and then either copy the link of "Next" and paste it on a new window or right click it and select open in a new tab/window, it will stay on the same page. I tested it on Chrome and IE8. So my question is what are these browsers doing when they actually follow the link (when I just click on it) so that I can do the same with my scraping application? (Oh, and by the way I'm working on C#)
In the case of eBay it is just a normal link (at least on http://www.ebay.com, look for page 2 of TV's) so the problem is probably with your code (are you storing cookies for instance?). From your description it sounds that it's an AJAX request, which would go "under the hood" and gets XML from the server which is rendered by JavaScript on the client side.
Traditionally, AJAX requests are hard to follow. In the case of ebay, however, I'd suggest use the interface that ebay has to query for information. If you are building a generalized web crawler, then stay away from the AJAX requests. Google doesn't bother either, most of the time.
I did a element.InvokeMember("click"); (where element is an HtmlElement) and it worked. Not sure why though. I'll take a look at that HTTP GET thing anyway.