nivoSlider Effects Demo

All nivoSlider Effects

• sliceDown
• sliceDownLeft
• sliceDownRight
• sliceUp
• sliceUpLeft
• sliceUpRight
• sliceUpDown
• sliceUpDownLeft
• fold
• fade
• random
• slideInRight
• slideInLeft
• boxRandom
• boxRain
• boxRainReverse
• boxRainGrow
• boxRainGrowReverse

Well, it did download the files but it also created a Git repository in my vendors structure. I could work around it by excluding it during deployment but I wanted to see if I can fetch the library without it.

Worked great but, composer didn’t include this library in its autoloading files. Mhm…

It turned out that if you link a library as a package composer won’t look for its composer.json. It didn’t matter that it existed and had instructions for autoloading – composer didn’t expect it there and didn’t try looking. So the solution was to include autoloading instructions into my project’s composer.json:

I wish this was mentioned in the documentation.

What finally helped was to delete content of C:\Windows\System32\config\systemprofile\AppData\Local\AltdriveWBHomeService\tmp. I suppose the hanging backup was interrupted when I shut the computer down a few days ago, and some files were left in an inconsistent state.

Edit: New location is C:\ProgramData\AltdriveWBHomeService\tmp

Here’s what I knew would work, but I didn’t like:

The trouble is that I have to remember to bind navModel in page-1.js and all page-x scripts.

I didn’t want page-1.js to care about elements that are on every page.

Solution 1: Component

navigation.js:

page-1.js:

This worked well but I didn’t like the extra markup. Also, I actually have several islands and I didn’t like having to define a component for each.

Solution 2:  Custom binding handler

navigation.js:

page-1.js:

Nice and smooth. One handler takes care of all islands, all I have to do is to define a global variable for each view model.

The interesting javascript part is just the configuration. Your validation rules and model bindings/observables are the usual:

Don’t clear errors with clearError() if you reuse your form and if you set messagesOnModified to true (default value).

Now why. Say you have a Create Thingy form with a field for the new thingy name. Name is obligatory but you don’t want the creating experience to start with an error message. So you keep messagesOnModified at true.

User opens the dialog, chooses a name that is invalid and then gives up – clicks Cancel. Then following a sudden outburst of creativity, he opens the dialog again. At this point, you want the old invalid attempt to be gone, all errors cleared.

My solution was to clear the form values on hidden.bs.modal, reset isModified(false) and get rid of errors with clearErrors(). Well, it turned out that if the user submitted the form immediately, with an empty value, it passed as valid!

The culprit was clearErrors() – it not only removes the error message but also marks the model as valid! So the right procedure here is to use error(null) instead of clearErrors().

The thing is that PhpStorm comes with its own copy of JRE and it will use it unless your environment variables tell it that there’s Java already installed on your system. For full details look into C:\Program Files (x86)\JetBrains\PhpStorm 8.0.1\bin\PhpStorm.bat but what worked for me was simply to set environment variable JAVA_HOME and run PhpStorm64.exe located in the same directory. In my particular case JAVA_HOME=C:\Program Files\Java\jre1.8.0_20.

When you “delete” an e-mail address or a contact using the CtCt website (called GUI) it’s actually only hidden, remaining in the database. It no longer counts towards your quota so for all practical purposes, we can call it deleted. Now, how do you do that with API?

First off, do NOT use what the documentation calls deleting an individual contact. You would not hide the contact from GUI – you would unsubscribe it (and it would even remain visible). There’s a huge difference between deleting/hiding and unsubscribing. A hidden contact can be brought back to the land of living and sent e-mails to, while an unsubscribed contact cannot – not without some mouse clicking from the contact himself. Definitely not in an automated way via API.

So if your goal is to give your user an option to subscribe to your newsletter from within your website, then to change his mind and unsubscribe – and then to change his mind again and subscribe back – do not use the DELETE method for deleting his CtCt contact because you wouldn’t be able to subscribe it back.

What you want to do instead, is called remove from all lists. Doing it via API is not the same thing as with the website so please bear in mind that I’m only talking about API now. When you remove a contact from all lists, its status is magically changed to REMOVED – both the contact’s and its e-mail address’ status will change. And guess what, it will actually disappear from the website, just as if you clicked More Actions / Delete on the CtCt website. Not very straight forward, is it.

before

after

To remove a contact from all lists, update it with an empty array for its lists property. The documentation is currently misleading when it says that lists require at least one list. Notice that it’s referring to method POST which is used for creating a new contact. Not for method PUT, used for updating.

You don’t have to worry about PUT/POST if you’re using the SDK. Simply call updateContact(). Or use deleteContactFromLists() which calls DELETE on an undocumented service https://api.constantcontact.com/v2/contacts/{contactId}/lists. These methods exist for both ConstantContact class and ContactService class.

Do you wonder what happens when you remove a contact from all lists using the website (GUI)? Nothing magical. Its status, and all its e-mail addresses’ status will remain ACTIVE.

You can either use ListService directly, or through an overarching ConstantContact object. Note that the $limit parameter will actually return $limit + 1 contacts. The max value of 500 will yield 501 contacts.

with ConstantContact object

ListService directly

So now I could connect remotely both from my IDE (via JDBC) and from my local mysql client but to my surprise, I was still getting access denied from mysqldump. Mhm…

mysqldump: Got error: 1045: Access denied for user 'myusername'@'my.new.ip.address' (using password: YES) when using LOCK TABLES

I verified that myusername indeed had permissions for locking tables. And I was able to make an alternate dump with Adminer and load the dump into my local database. (There was just one unrelated error with an empty view definition.)

To cut the story short, the problem was in the view. It was defined remotely from my old ip address and it stuck with the view in DEFINER. For the view to work, its definer must have access to the database – which in my case it didn’t because I had already revoked access to my old ip address. So now I couldn’t see the view definition, or use it, getting access denied for the old ip address.

It dawned on me that the “unrelated error” in my Adminer dump probably wasn’t that unrelated. Adminer defines dummy tables for views before dropping them and replacing them with a real view. And the error was triggered when it attempted to create a table with no attributes.

Obviously, it failed to get a definition of the view defined from the old address and thus it couldn’t get its attributes either.

It’s really unfortunate that I was getting access denied for my new ip address when dumping with mysqldump while in fact, access was being denied to the old ip address. The whole thing with DEFINER and its ip address seems rather silly, if you ask me.

Anyway, the solution was to recreate the faulty view from my new ip address (I actually used Adminer to create it from localhost) and all was good then.