To shim or not to shim, or why telerik radContextMenu will not show over applet in FireFox?

It was a nightmare last night.
I have a Java applet in my pages and needed to display telerik context menu over it when the user right clicks it. So far so good, the component had nice JS events to attach to. I was able to atach to its Click event, find the telerik radContextMenu and call it's showAt(x, y) method. It worked like a charm. I was very happy to have done this in less than 20 minutes as I know mixing different technologies often cause headaches.
I started the project in IE 8, worked just as expected ...
... until I run it in FireFox to see how it looks there.

The telerik radContextMenu wasn't displaying. It take me about an hour to understand that it is displaying but under the Applet DOM object (an hour is relatively fast for me ;). No problems, I will kick some z-indexes and everything will be just fine.
This didn't worked either. So I googled. And google told me what I consider one of the worst news a developer can read - the Applet object is something like the browse button - it exist there and only there and only the way it is and the way the browser developers decided. Or in other words - it will be on top of everything no matter what z-Index will you put there ...
I decided to search for some hacks to apply. And guess what? I found. And guess what the hack is? (it is known as "shim IFrame" or "Shim" or "IFrame shim" not quite sure)
1. You add an IFrame the size of the div you will display over the applet, the IFrame is the only element which respects the z-Index style ...
2. Then you put a div with greater z-Index over the IFrame and this DOM mess should fly ...

Do I look kind of angry? That's ok, because I want to look like I am angry, because I am ...

3-4 hours and still couldn't make it work. I suppose this may have something to do with the layout of my page. When I have some spare time I will try to fix this thing.
One more time - this works perfectly in IE ...
And one more time - it is not Telerik fault too ...

MindFusion diagramming Part 4 - Cancel link creation between specific kinds of shapes

You can check between what kind of shapes the link is created and remove it if you need to do so. I will give you an example on how to cancel the connection between Actor and Actor shapes.

First - add LinkCreatedScript to your diagram and make it point a JavaScript function, here is mine declaration:

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

Now add the onLinkCreated function in the page head :

   <script type="text/javascript">
     function onLinkCreated(diagram, args) {
        var link = args.getLink();
        var shapeOrigin = link.getOrigin().getShape();
        var shapeDestination = link.getDestination().getShape();
        if (shapeDestination.getDisplayName() == 'Actor' && shapeOrigin.getDisplayName() == 'Actor') {
           diagram.getLinks().remove(link);
           alert('Cannot crate link between ' + shapeOrigin.getDisplayName() + ' and ' + shapeDestination.getDisplayName());
        }
     }
   </script>

1. What we did is - we get the link that was just created from the args.
2. We get the Origin and Destination shapes from the link.
3. We then checked their display names and verify they are Actor and Actor.
4. We asked the diagarm object to remove a link, to be more specific - our link, the one that was just created.


I think there may be more elegant ways to achieve this, but currently this is the only I could think of.
Hope it helps somebody out there ...

MindFusion diagramming Part 3 - adding Overview control to the form.

Here is the third part of the tutorial.
Adding overview isn't realy a big deal. You only need to add the following markup in your page (the solution we created in the previous two samples):

<ndiag:Overview Style="position:absolute; top: 320px; height: 180px; left:810px; width:160px;" runat="server" DiagramViewID="diagramView" />

The thing you need to obey here is to give the diagram overview control a correct DiagramViewID property, which should be the ID of the DiagramView control you have on your form.

Here is what we have so far (the tree tutorials combined):