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Read more about the article Making the footer-navigation bar stick to the bottom in Susper

Making the footer-navigation bar stick to the bottom in Susper

In Susper, we have a navigation bar as a footer, as shown:

Previously this footer-navbar would appear immediately after the content, even if it was in the middle of the page. This is how the footer would appear:Since this could be a very common problem on a lot of websites, this blog deals with a simple hack for it.  

  1. Design your footer navbar as you please. You need not use any predefined bootstrap classes. You also need not specify any parameters regarding the position of the navbar (relative, absolute etc.).
  2. Enclose the rest of the data on your webpage in a div tag, do not forget to mention a class name or id name for the tag.  
  3. Now comes the simplest trick: Set a minimum height for your div! It is advisable to use vh (viewport-height) as your unit of measurement since it is easy to estimate how much of the viewport needs to be covered by your width.

This is how it is used in Susper:

Remember that each vh corresponds to one-hundredth of the viewport total height. So 100 vh here will mean a minimum height of the full viewport.

You can check the Susper repository for the source code or go through this link for alternate ways to create a sticky footer at the bottom.

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KISS Datatable

Recenlty I’ve faced a problem with sorting columns in Datatable.

What is Datatable?

Datatable is a plug-in for Jquery library. It provides a lot of features like pagination, quick search or multi-column ordering. Besides, you can develop easily Bootstrap or Foundation ui css styles. There are also more other option but It doesn’t make sense to list it here, because you can visit their site and you can read clearly documentation. On Datatable website you can see a lot of examples. First of them shows how to improve your ordinary table to awesome and rich of features table. One function changes everything, It’s fantastic!  

$('#myTable').DataTable();

Returning to my problem which I’ve faced, as I told it was problem related to sorting column in table.

I know sorting is a trivial thing. I hope that everyone knows it 🙂 Sorting by a date is also implemented in a datatable library. So everything is clear when we don’t change date format to human readable format. I mean something like this ‘3 hours ago’, ‘1 year ago’.

When Open Event team tested how datatable manages ordering columns in that format it didn’t work. It’s quite hard to sort by that format, So I’ve invented an idea. Surely you are wondering what i’ve invented. I’ve postponed my minds about sort by this values. It can direct to overwork. When I thought about it, weird ideas came to my mind, a lots of conditions, If statements… Therefore I’ve resigned from this. I’ve used KISS principle. KISS means ‘keep it simple stupid’. I like it!

Therefore that sorting is implemented on frontend side. I’ve decided not to display human readable date format at the beginning. I find  all dates which have format “YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm” then I replace that format to human readable format. So it’s very quick and comfortable, and doesn’t require a lot conditions to write. Of course I’ve tried to implement it in Datatable library. I suppose that it would  require more effort than it’s now.

Below You can see great function which changes a date in frontend side but does not change data in a datatable. So sorting process takes place in a datatable using format  “YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm” but user see human readable format. Isn’t it awesome?!

function change_column_time_to_humanize_format(datatable_name, column_id) {
  $(datatable_name).each(function( key, value ) {
    $(value).children().each(function( key1, value2 ) {
       if(key1 === column_id ){
          var current_value = $(value2).text().slice(0, 16);
          var changed_value = moment(current_value, "YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm").fromNow()
          var isValid = moment(current_value, "YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm", true).isValid()
          if (changed_value !== current_value && isValid === true){
              $(value2).text(changed_value)
          }
      }
  });
});

 

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Adding Client Side validation to Login and Registration Forms

Its very important to have a client side validation apart from a server side validation. The server side validation only helps the developers but not the clients. Thus it was necessary to add a client side validation to the Login page and its other components so that the users  would be comfortable in this.

I had never before done this and was looking at how to achieve this using jQuery or JavaScript when I cam to know that we were already using an amazing validation tool : Bootstrap Validator

It just involves wrapping the form in the html with the validator plugin and all the checks are automatically carried out by it.

 

1.png

As you can see in the above image, we have just added a data-toggle=”validator” line to the form which automatically wraps the form with the plugin. The above form is the Create New Password form which checks whether the new password and the password entered again are matching or not. If not then the line ,

data-match="#new_password"

checks it with the password in the new_password field and gives an error on the page to the client defined by the following,

data-error="Passwords do not match

Thus adding such checks to the form becomes very simple rather than using jQuery for it. Similarly it was important to add validation to the Register page.

 <input type="email" name="email" class="form-control" id="email" 
 placeholder="Email" data-remote="{{ url_for('admin.check_duplicate_email') }}"
 data-remote-error="Email Address already exists" required="">

This is the validation for the email field. Apart from checking whether the text entered by the user is an email id or not it was also important to check whether the email entered by the user exists in the database or not.

data-remote="{{ url_for('admin.check_duplicate_email')

This line calls a view function to check whether the email entered by the user is duplicate or unique. Here is the function

2.png

This function takes the email value from the request.args and then performs a simple check in the db to check for duplicate email. If the user doesnt exist then the validator receives a simple string “200 OK”. If the error is 404 then it gives the error defined by,

data-remote-error="Email Address already exists"

However this error only for the data-remote part. If the error is something else then it is handled by ,

class="help-block with-errors"

Thus without the hassle of using Ajax and JQuery we can easily add validation to the forms using Bootstrap Validator.

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