Nottingham Energy Partnership

The Nottingham Energy Partnership provide advice about all aspects of using energy more efficiently.   They recently worked with the City Council to fit  Photovoltaic Panels on 600 council houses.

I worked with the NEP marketing officer to build and host a new content management system for their web site.

Because of the richness and sheer volume of content we used Expression Engine to organise it in three tiers.

I made the web site for the gliding club where I fly with Expression Engine and a helpful set of snippets and templates called EE SiteKit.

  # eg in October, ["Nov", "Dec", "Jan", "Feb", "Mar", "Apr", "May", "Jun", "Jul", "Aug", "Sep", "Oct"]
  def previous_twelve_months
    month_names = []

    (0..11).each { | m |
      month_names << m.months.ago.strftime("%b")
    }

    month_names
  end

Myself and Fat Digester’s lead guitarist, Dom P. did the first five days of the walk with him.

To fully enjoy the video, watch while sipping the same peaty whiskey that Dom and Martin sneakily took from their ‘water flasks’ every couple of miles. So here are a few pictures and a happy song to sum up our tramp over the Cheviots.

The normal Netzke edit form looks like this;

In this example I’ll make it resemble this;

My widget started off being like the Bosses and Clerks example, here are the first few lines of my widget file (kept in lib/netzke/studies_and_comments.rb (like bosses and clerks). The important bit is :static_form_layout => [ ….. because this defines the alternative set of fields in the form.

module Netzke
  class StudiesAndComments < BorderLayoutPanel
    include HTTParty
    def default_config
      super.merge({
                    :title => "Documas",
                    :regions => {
                      :center => {
                        :class_name => "CustomActionGrid",

                        :static_form_layout => [
                          {
                             type => 'fieldset',
                            :checkbox_toggle => false,
                            :title => '',
                            :auto_height => true,
                            :defaults => {:width => 600},
                            :height => 500,
                            :width => 800,
                            :collapsed => false,
                            :cls => "study_heading",

The full file has a complicated form layout, but its mostly just EXT JS translated straight into in ruby, so if you have an EXT JS form from the example code you can work quickly.

Editing the nested structure can be a head ache, but I found the textmate beautify plugin a great help.

By now the Netzke code has probably drifted away from the version that I forked, and have not yet read my Git book so I can’t show you a repository to clone or whatever. I bet Spock didn’t know Git either so I am in good company.

The three files changed are given below, if you want to try this before Sergei integrates it then try to diff these files with the ones in your version of Netzke. In fact I have a feeling that in the end form_panel.rb did not change.

form_panel.rb
form_panel_js.rb
form_panel_api.rb

Many thanks to Sergei Koslov who helped me out with this, he’s my second favorite Russian of all time. (The first was the bald chap who stopped pointing the missiles at my house).

I chose Ruby on Rails and a wonderful gem/plugin called Netzke written by Sergei Kozlov. Rails is a great way to plumb a web page into a database, although it is annoyingly prone to change (just try running any example from a two year old text book, my old Rails books have been converted into gerbil bedding by my daughter).

Netzke blend the advantages of Rails with the loveliness of EXT JS. Now Rails is written in a language called Ruby and executed on the server while EXT JS is Javascript on the browser, so inventing an easy to use combination is a clever trick. Sergie Lozlov’s Netzke is of the most beautiful bits of computer science I have seen in a long time.

Sergie makes Ruby and Javascript tango together. Further more, he’s written some easy to read tutorials that help other people to do the same thing.

I know that the Ruby language and associated tools are created for free by enthusiasts, but quite often there are little issues that spoil the experience. Like this one;

I needed to install Rails on Ubuntu 8.04.3. After installing ruby gems 1.3.5 I did this;


$ gem install rails
$ /usr/bin/gem:11: undefined method `manage_gems' for Gem:Module (NoMethodError)

The solution is here. You have to edit the /usr/bin/gem file that was just installed.

Now I can work around this kind of thing, but I wonder how many people coming to Rails for the first time are put off and go away with a bad impression. I guess I ought to contribute.

SyntaxError: missing ) in parenthetical cannot parse JSON response: { "success" : true, "msg" : "This is the message !", "rows" : [ { "task_id" : "jbpm$2", "description" : "Can you look at this buddy ?", "status" : "Not Yet Started", "priority" : "2", "resources" : [ { "name" : "B0006336.psd", "url" : "/d/d/workspace/SpacesStore/62cd9c9c-95a1-4363-a618-69f4c119860a/B0006336.psd" } ],... ...... date) } ] }

Use the JSON formatter and debugger to spot the mistake;

JS Lint

JS Lint checks Javascript Syntax like the old lint program used to do for C.

We needed to remove the scary phrases and I quickly found this useful explanation of what to do by Tom McQueeney.

So I checked out the source, edited PageTag.java to alter the footer and compiled it.

ant -f HEAD/root/build.xml incremental-webclient

I backed up the jar file alfresco-web-client-3.2.jar and then unpacked it, copied in the new PageTag.class and restarted Alfresco.

The result was an Exception saying that the method getCheckContextAgainstPath() in the class ClientConfigElement was not found.

This was because since Tom wrote about his fix, the PageTag code has grown to include a mention of this method which was presumably not in the previous version of ClientConfigElement.

ClientConfigElement clientConfig =
        Application.getClientConfig(pageContext.getServletContext());
// set the context path used by some Alfresco script objects
if (clientConfig != null && clientConfig.getCheckContextAgainstPath())  {
   out.write("setCheckContextAgainstPath(true);");
}

To get around it I compiled the new version of ClientConfigElement.java and copied it into alfresco-web-client-3.2.jar. This fixed the problem and Alfresco does not contain the scary text in the footer.

Wartime Saltby

These are some pictures of Saltby during the war. US paratroopers went from here to Normandy on the eve of D day. There are troop carrying gliders there too.