Alexandre Mathieu

The blog of Alexandre "iksela" Mathieu. Terrific!

[iksela]

Get rid of password expiration on Oracle

Oracle can be a real pain sometimes... Here's a snippet that will get rid of the horrible "password will expire in 7 days" message.... ALTER PROFILE DEFAULT LIMIT PASSWORD_LIFE_TIME UNLIMITED; Don't thank me, thank [these guys](https://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=854154).

[iksela]

Quick and painless fake SMTP server

While testing a mail functionnality in my current project, I felt the need to have a "fake" SMTP server at hand.

I found a good solution with Papercut, it's a Windows application emulating a SMTP server.

I found the log (smtp.log) to be particularly useful.

[iksela]

Localize "Previous/Next/Done" buttons on an iPhone project

For my latest project, I'm developping a cross-platform mobile application using PhoneGap/Cordova (which I heavily recommend!).

Anyway, I came across a problem: I couldn't find how to get the "Previous/Next/Done" buttons on the iPhone keyboard to show up in my phone's language.

The solution is quite easy: under Xcode4, go to your Project, Info tab, then add your country in the localizations part. That's it!

[iksela]

Remote validation with JQuery Validation Plugin

JQuery Validation Plugin is a great piece of work. Recently, I put a remote validation in place and thought this could be useful to someone:

First declare the validation rule. The remote option will point to a PHP script that will do the validation check. The message will be displayed if the validation fails.

Here's the PHP part:

This straightforward example should get you going for more complex situations!

[iksela]

Custom DQL functions: NVL, CONVERT, TO_NUMBER

I've recently started using Doctrine 2, a very good PHP ORM. However, their database abstraction politic means that vendor-specific SQL is not supported natively.

BUT, as they did their job right, you can use user defined DQL functions to extend the capacities of Doctrine 2.

I'll be posting three custom DQL functions I coded for Oracle SQL. The code itself is pretty much self-explanatory, and these examples should help if you needed those functions or if you want to develop others. Don't hesitate to add more in the comments!

The first is NVL, a very useful function to have a "fallback" column if the first is null:

Then, we have CONVERT, that can be used to make accent-insensitive searches:

Lastly, I give you TO_NUMBER, which I found very useful when sorting codes stored in VARCHARs:

When you have created your DQL functions, don't forget to register them with Doctrine!

[iksela]

Using JQuery UI Tabs and DataTables TableTools

When using TableTools with DataTables, I found out that flash buttons wouldn't work if the table was hidden at initialisation time.

Allan Jardine provided a fix in the latest nightly in the form of new API functions.

Here's how I did it:

When a tab is shown, we iterate through all the TableTools instances and check if a resize is needed, if it is, we do it!

[iksela]

Display TableTools buttons as JQueryUI buttons with an icon

TableTools provides a JQueryUI compatibility. However, I found it limited, in the way that standard JUI buttons look better and can embed an icon.

How to achieve this? First we need to define a custom function:

We then use the fnInit function to call this function, passing the "ui-icon-print" as a parameter:

That's it!

[iksela]

Customising DataTables TableTools print view

The newest release (2.0.0) of TableTools for DataTables introduces a print view, which I immediately thought to be very useful.

Problem is, the default view is not necessarily satisfactory, and one might want to customise the output a bit.

Let's get down to business!

First we need to create the print CSS, it will overload some styles in print and print view:

Then we edit our html file:

Finally, the initialisation for our datatable:

As you will have understood, the fnClick function is the place to add all your other customisation during the print view. Don't forget to clean it up!