Tech Blog

At this moment, all the language translations of the Floorplanner 2D app are stored in a database table. Today we discovered that a couple of these translations didn’t align properly in the interface. After some investigation we discovered that they all contained a hidden tab character at the end of  each string. This was probably caused by importing a malformed CSV file.

I thought a simple REPLACE query would fix this problem, but (as usual) it was a little more complicated than that. First I had to find the fields with the tab character… Willem pointed me to the right direction with his favorite weapon of choice REGEXP. According to the MySQL docs I could find tab characters with something like this:

SELECT * FROM table WHERE field REGEXP '[[.LF.]]'

The next step was to remove the tab characters. My first thought was to do this by replacing them with an empty string. It turns out you can’t combine a REPLACE with a REGEXP in a query. So I used good ol’ PHP for the job. A nice advantage was that I didn’t have to do any replacing, I could just use the trim() function.

$res = mysql_query("SELECT id, field FROM table WHERE field REGEXP '[[.LF.]]'");
if($res) {
	while($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($res)) {
		$id = $row['id'];
		$field = trim($row['field']);
		mysql_query("UPDATE table SET field = '$field' WHERE id = $id");
	}
}

Rather simple, when you know what to do… Another bug bites the dust!

I wanted to get some data from a web service using Javascript. I looked at several Javascript classes (like this), but because the web service was running on another server it got a little troublesome. As a solution I tried to call the web service through a proxy, but that didn’t make it any easier.

Jaap suggested to take a look at NuSOAP, a -kinda old- SOAP toolkit for PHP. With an AJAX request I could call a PHP page that uses NuSOAP to consume the web service. It was actually easier then I thought it would be.

To make the AJAX call from Javascript I used Prototype and this script:

  function doRequest() {
    var url = "ajax/consume_webservice.php";
    var param1 = "value1";
    var param2 = "value2";
    var params = "param1="+ param1 +"&param2="+ param2;
 
    new Ajax.Request ( url, { method: 'POST', parameters: params,
      onComplete: onResult } );
  }
 
  function onResult( result ) {
    alert( result.responseText );
  }

The PHP file consume.php looks something like this:

< ?php
 
  $param1 = isset( $POST_['param1'] ) ? $POST_['param1'] : false;
  $param2 = isset( $POST_['param2'] ) ? $POST_['param2'] : false;
 
  // this is the only file I used from the NuSOAP project
  require_once( "nusoap.php" );
 
  $url = webserviceurl;
  $params = array( "param1" => $param1, "param2" => $param2 );
 
  $soap = new nusoap_client( $url, true, false, false, false, false, 0, 60 );
  $proxy = $soap->getProxy();
  $proxy->functionname( $params );
 
  echo $proxy->response;
 
?>

That’s all. Do a AJAX request from Javascript to a PHP page. Then the PHP page uses NuSOAP to consume the web service and returns the result. Back in Javascript you can do whatever you want with the given data.