Monthly Archives: August 2012

iPhone does it again – Find my iPhone sends police directly to a robbery in progress

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It’s a well known fact to the tech community or maybe the apple community that the devices can be located, locked, or even wiped clean from anywhere by using Apple’s Find My iPhone feature. This feature extends to the iPad and now with the mountain lion release your desktop as well if you configure it correctly. However, this seems to be a feature that some criminals are in the dark about, for the second in as many weeks police in Maryland have located a stolen iPhone using this service. The first, of course is the case of the New York Times reporter David Pogue’s stolen phone in the case made famous over the internet. In that case authorities found the phone ditched in a backyard in Prince George’s county. The second case happened in Frederick, Maryland where a phone that was stolen from a vehicle parked outside the common market led police to the MARC train commuter parking lot behind the local Target where police found a running car with the door open and the suspect ducking behind two other cars in the lot. Turns out that the iPhone was not the only thing stolen, so was the car, another purse in the car that was stolen from the commuter lot, a GPS, and perhaps the cocaine that the suspect was carrying. Read more about both cases by clicking these links to the Washington Post and Frederick News Post articles.

Extjs 4.1 UX that will allow multiple remote sorting on columns, and display multiple directional icons

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Why?

Ok, so I have come across the need to perform multiple sorting on many occasions, and like most people got a little frustrated with the drag and drop toolbar method that is given in the Extjs examples. I wanted something that the user would intuitively understand since they were used to clicking rows to perform sorting anyway, and I wanted them to see what was being sorted in the same manner that the native sort works. You know that small blue triangle in your column header. It became apparent that this would be a feature that could be used over and over again as this is a really common request so I put together this UX for your Extjs 4.1 grids. I did not do any testing on versions prior to 4.1, so maybe it will work for those, maybe not, consider that fair warning.

Where to get the InlineRemoteMultiSort UX

https://github.com/jmcdonald69124/extjs-multisort-ux

How to use the InlineRemoteMultiSort UX

In your javascript code please make sure you place the files in the following folder, where extjs could be the root of your extjs distribution:

extjs/src/ux/ folder, and place the CSS file in the extjs/src/ux/css folder.

In your grid add the plugin, and pass it the initial ‘default’ sort values.

plugins : [
Ext.create('Ext.ux.InlineRemoteMultiSort', {
 defaultSorters: [
 {property:'col1',   direction:'ASC'},
 {property:'col2',   direction:'ASC'},
 {property:'col3',   direction:'ASC'}
    // ....
 ]
})
]

Of course this assumes that you set your path to the ux folder correctly in your MVC app.js file.

On the server watch out for the following values that are passed in a parameter called ‘sort’:

sort:[
{'item':'col1','direction':'ASC'},
{'item':'col2','direction':'ASC'},
{'item':'col3','direction':'ASC'}
]

If you are using Cold Fusion for your back end code you can parse the incoming form value with this code:

<cfset sorters = deserializeJSON(#form.sort#) />

Watch out for the following

This code will pass a set of brackets [ ] if there are no sorters, please handle this on the server side.

Paging poses a set of issues that will require that the query return the rows that are needed by the page the user is viewing. If you intend to use paging please see this post and pay particular attention to how it uses the start and page number
http://www.learnsomethings.com/2011/11/06/php-code-for-paging-and-remote-filtering-extjs4-grids/ .