MindFusion diagramming Part 2 - adding shapes list

In the previous example, I show you how to add simple diagram to your web forms. Now I am going to show you how to add a simple shapes list, containing all the shapes that comes with the MindFusion product.

It is very simple, actually, only 1-2 lines of markup:

<ndiag:ShapeListBox ID="shapeList" runat="server" Style="left: 810px; width: 160px; position: absolute; top: 1px; height: 320px; background-color: white" />

This should be added to the code you built in the previous example : http://donchevp.blogspot.com/2009/04/mindfusion-diagramming-part-1-adding.html.

Let's see what we got now:

MindFusion diagramming Part 1 - adding simple diagram to the form.

We worked quite a bit with this product and I must say it is a good one.
It can be used to easilly draw diagrams. It has a lot of built-in shapes and a designer to draw new one.
Let's add a digaram on the form.
First of all, download the product from here : http://mindfusion.eu/download-netdiagram.html and install them.
Add the following lines to your web.config:

In page / controls section, add the following:
<add tagPrefix="ndiag" namespace="MindFusion.Diagramming.WebForms" assembly="MindFusion.Diagramming.WebForms"/>

Then add reference to :
MindFusion.Common
MindFusion.Diagramming
MindFusion.Diagramming.WebForms

Open your page and add the following markup to create a diagram:

<ndiag:DiagramView ID="diagramView" runat="server" Style="left: 0px; width: 800px;
position: absolute; top: 0px; height: 505px" Behavior="DrawControls" BackColor="White" AllowInplaceEdit="true" />

I added few additional properties to decorate and set behaviours. We will discuss them later. I also allowed InplaceEdit, which means that when you double click on a shape, you will be able to edit the text.
Finally, copy the JDiagram.jar into your root directory (you can place it in a directory of your choice, but you will need to set the JarLocation property to point to this file.

Let's see what we did so far:





Pretty nice for 1 minute of work, huh?
There is more ;). This product seems to come from Bulgaria, so there will be no problem with it :).

Make telerik controls work with IE 8

A friend of mine told me she has problems running telerik controls under Internet Explorer 8. I recalled reading somewhere there is a tag you need to add to your page in order to force IE 8 behave like IE 7 (where telerik controls work great), I did some search and here is the tag:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7" />

Add it to your pages head section and you should be ok with telerik controls.

Edit: as Veskoni commented out, telerik controls are fully compaitable with IE 8 since Q1 2009 SP1, so it will be a lot better to upgrade to that version (or above).

Using JavaScript functions over a string in C#.

I needed to find a way to invoke the real escape / unescape javascript function over a string in C#.
It appeared to be easy to do so by using the Microsoft.JScript namespace classes.

Add a reference to it and then you can simply do something like this:

string escaped = Microsoft.JScript.GlobalObject.escape("This will be JS escaped for sure!");

"escaped" variable will then have the value of :

This%20will%20be%20JS%20escaped%20for%20sure%21

I am still very new to this namespace, there were a lot of things to find out there ...

Check it out. It may appear to be very useful for those of you who are processing JS on-the-fly...