Don’t use innerHTML, but use Prototype’s Element.update method!

Posted September 20, 2007 * Comments(1)

Note to self: When using prototype don’t use the innerHTML property.

Internet Explorer has got a (in my opinion) broken implementation for certain elements.
It is not possible to change the innerHTML content of the TR and SELECT elements.

Fortunally Prototype has fixed these problems in the Element.update method!

$(“tr_id”).update( “<td>Test</td>” );

MSSQL Locking Problems

Posted September 14, 2007 * Comments(0)

It has been a long time since my last post. Currently I’m very busy on a big project…

Yesterday we had a nice problem. A company I work is using the following configuration on it’s webserver: IIS, PHP and MSSQL. (yes an S). What’s wrong with this configuration? Well two things: IIS and MSSQL.

That’s not all: in PHP we connect to the database via 2 methods: via the ADODB COM object and the normal mssql functions from PHP.

We had the following problem in a certain module:

Every time we executed a Second query, the second query failed but we NEVER got an error message. Example:

(pseudo code:)

BEGIN TRANSACTION
SELECT * FROM mytable WHERE kind=’item1′
… more code …
SELECT * FROM mytable WHERE kind=’item2′ // <= This query failed every time, without an error message
... more code 2 ...
COMMIT TRANSACTION

Looks very strange, but after too many hours we found our problem:

(pseudo code:)

BEGIN TRANSACTION
… code 1 …
SELECT * FROM mytable WHERE kind=’item1′
…
INSERT .. INTO mytable( … ) VALUES ( … )
..
SELECT * FROM mytable WHERE kind=’item2′ // <= This query failed every time, without an error message
... code 3 ...
COMMIT TRANSACTION

What’s the problem:

BEGIN TRANSACTION # is executed by ADODB
SELECT * FROM … # is executed by mssql_* functions from PHP
INSERT … # is executed by ADODB
SELECT * FROM # is executed by mssql_* functions from PHP
..

Well when retrieving the data again the mssql_* connection fails because it notices the data has changed and it must wait for the other transaction to finish…

Aaaaaargh…. 8 hours of my time wasted!

Btw. A few year ago we had a good reason forusing ADODB in PHP: the mssql version of PHP wasn’t realiable. And we are using “queries from hell” ( sql server XML queries ), which (at that time) couldn’t be retrieve by the mssql functions of PHP.

FreeBSD, (SuSE) Linux date differences

Posted September 4, 2007 * Comments(0)

I wanted to retrieve yesterdays date with a format of YYYYMM
This was solved in FreeBSD like this:

date -v-1d “+%Y%m”

(SuSE) Linux doesn’t know the -v option
The same thing in Linux could be done like this:

date -d yesterday “+%Y%m”

Why the difference?

Flash Actionscript XML.send( … ) doesn’t send

Posted August 31, 2007 * Comments(0)

Once in a while you require Flash… Well yesterday was such a day :-)
I’m was working on a Flash component that tries to submit data back to the server…
I don’t have a lot of flash experience so I still don’t know all its quirks.

Well I was trying to submit an XML document the following way:

var xml:XML = new XML()
//… fill xml …
xml.send( ‘/my/url’ );

Well… it didn’t submit! No interaction with the server…
After some searching I discovered this was caching. Always that stupid caching…
So I solved this by adding a timestamp:

xml.send( ‘/my/url?ts=’ + ( new Date() ).getTime() )

Again the timestamp to the rescue…

Convert java libhttpd to the Eclipse platform

Posted August 26, 2007 * Comments(0)

I’m trying to switch java libhttpd to the Eclipse Java platform. I’ve worked with it before, without problems. Now a few years later Eclipse has improved and seems to run smoother!

There seems no reason to stick with JBuilder. Except the company I work for is using JBuilder.

And there another small problem, in JBuilder I had a build.num, which incremented with every compiler, which is a very nice feature.

Well the first impression is Nice, Eclipse warned me about some things in my code. I did some quick cleanup and placed it back into subversion.

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