To explain my question more i am going to explain what I'm doing.
I am doing my final project at uni and i don't want to be wasting my time so i want to know if this is possible.
I have a digital forensic report that gets filled out by every investigator and it goes to the case officer to review before carrying on with a case. I want to make that easier by creating a html form that can take the investigators notes and put them in the form for them.
Is this possible?
Building such an application is perfectly possible, and without much fuzz, depending on the scope of your target and if you have already built an web application before.
If you just have to upload documents through a web form, and these will be appended to a final document (may be a PDF which will be rendered on the website) such that the case officer will have less work with reviewing as he can just scroll through, this could already do the job.
Since you are not asking about handwriting recognition or OCR, you do not seem to have any specifications on how to do this yet?
Also do you have a legacy system in which you will have to integrate your application? Or is it a greenfield project where you will also build the 'html forms' by yourself?
But you should get your supervisors do their job and get them to define the applications scope for you properly.
Otherwise this might turn into a neverending story via scope creep when you try to recognize all the handwritings on the documents (not just block lettering), have to support a dozen input formats (not just pdf), ...
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I'm using Wix as an e-commerce solution and the way I understand it, I can only add code (not edit current code) to make specific changes to the site. The one change I want to make is to have the ability to authorize/capture PayPal payments at a later date for all the products I am selling.
I've read through the PayPal authorization/capture documentation here but am still confused for my specific use case considering the only button I have is a "Check Out with Paypal" once customers have added products to their cart as opposed to "Buy Now" or some of the other button options available.
Is there a way to easily integrate authorize/capture in this case and if so, can someone help me out with how? Hoping I can make one change no matter how many different products a customer is purchasing that allows me to either capture all or part of the entire purchase amount and void the rest.
I've scoured the internet, but don't feel like anything I've come across is directly applicable. See here and here. The latter link makes it look insanely easy, but again I think the problem lies in the fact that I'm using Wix and can't directly edit existing code.
If anyone can provide directions/code necessary to implement this I'd be extremely grateful. Thanks so much in advance!
Note: It appears Wix integrates with PayPal Standard and all I need is the "Basic Authorization" capability, NOT "Order Authorizations."
The latter link makes it look insanely easy, but again I think the problem lies in the fact that I'm using Wix and can't directly edit existing code.
You've nailed it. It would be that easy, just add the parameter paymentaction=authorization when redirecting to PayPal, but Wix needs to provide a way for this to happen.
Many shopping carts -- especially those that integrate via an API rather than Payments Standard -- have a checkbox in their settings to toggle on authorization mode vs. immediate capture (sale) mode. The reason API-based integrations are much more likely to implement such a setting, is that an API is needed for the shopping cart to be able to capture the authorization at a later point in time. API-less integrations (like payments standard) cannot do the capture themselves (because this requires an API call), and so with standard you'll always need to log into www.paypal.com for the capture later on.
Anyway, there's probably no way forward unless Wix provides you with one.
Wix could well be using an API integration rather than the HTML-only Payments Standard, but the problem is the same: the API needs to specify 'authorization' (instead of 'sale'/'capture'), and from their lack of documenting the feature it does not appear Wix has implemented this.
Most shopping cart/platform providers do support authorization and capture, so you could make the feature request to Wix, and/or consider switching providers if it's a must-have.
On a general note, using authorization and capture adds complexity to payment processing, and the capture is not guaranteed to be successful. You can get a successful authorization and then have the payment fail when you try to capture it (happens in a certain % of cases, when funds are no longer available or the card decides to decline). So in general, you use immediate sale/capture at checkout time (not authorization) unless you have very specific and well-defined business needs to not be capturing up front (and refunding in the case of exceptions).
I'm pretty new to HTML5, and want to know if this is possible.
I want to be able to create a canvas in which I can load an image in it, and then draw on it for other people to see, and allow them to make changes to it as well.
It doesn't have to be super complicated with lots of different tools, just basic stuff. I just want to be able to change the image every now and again.
Is this possible, and if so, can someone point me towards a tutorial of some sort?
Do you already know how to do non-image collaboration?
The way you do collaborative editing of any medium is pretty much the same.
The main difference between one medium and the next is the content of the updates (DOM elements vs. paint events). The other big thing you'll run into has nothing to do with the medium, but whether you want to use AJAX or WebSockets or what have you - this is a question more about the method through which you accomplish the collaboration.
The essential concept is (from the user's perspective):
Submit my own changes
Check periodically via AJAX to see if anyone else has made changes, or use WebSockets/long polling to be notified immediately of changes from others
Update each person's view with the changes from other users
Figure out a way to resolve conflicts if two changes are incompatible, if this applies to your problem
Provide some way for users to "undo" things
Not to blow my own horn, but last year I wrote a collaborative scratch paper/brainstorming app called cortex, and I blogged about each commit and how I figured out how to do the realtime collaboration. I did it in Rails using an AJAX approach, but the concepts I used for real-time collaboration are applicable to most any app that wants to take a similar approach. This post includes a video simulating two users collaborating on the same page, and how soon/how often updates from one client are shown on the other client browswer.
cortex isn't the prettiest or most advanced thing in the world, but I think it's a good intro app to get the concepts down. It may not even be the best designed (it was my first collaboration app), but I use it nearly every day and it seems to work well enough.
We found some code being inserted into emails sent by our proprietary email system and have no idea of its provenance.
My company sends a lot of bulk email for clients. (We follow all the best practice protocols to ensure we're not spammers.) The system is proprietary, based on open source code. Customers have a GUI to enter content, similar to the big guys like MailChimp and the like.
A staff member brought a UI challenge with the GUI to me, using a client's bulk email as an example. I dug into the source to see if they had some exotic CSS that might be affecting my interface, when I noticed the following tag:
<custom name="opencounter" type="tracking"> </custom>
My interface certainly doesn't insert that code into an email.
What is opencounter? Who's technology is it? Does it have a valid reason for being used on our (proprietary) email system?
It appears that "opencounter" is a proprietary counting mechanism used by Exact Target's bulk mailing system. Apparently, the client was copy/pasting from an old campaign done on ExactTarget to move the design to our system. It is therefore safe for me to remove.
My best guess is that it is something that is auto-substituted to put in some tracking information into the individual e-mails. I'd suggest doing some tests on "bulk" e-mails you've set up just to yourself. Put some known content immediately either side of it and then send yourself this e-mail and view the source to see if its been substituted with anything. e.g.
XXX<custom name="opencounter" type="tracking"> </custom>YYY
If the final output has XXXYYY or something then you'll know its a tracker in the bulk e-mailer. If it outputs as is you can probably safely assume you can get rid of it. If it gets rid of it completely then it may be used for some kind of processing on the server but I'm not sure what that might be...
The other thing you can do is to do a search of your entire codebase for "opencounter" to see if there are any references to it.
One final thought: Does your customer interface allow them to put in HTML directly or is it just a gui? It occurs to me that if they used a previous bulk e-mailer then it might be something specific to that one that got copied over if its not in yours.
We had a similar situation and traced it back to a user who was utilizing a third-party WYSIWYG tool to develop code that they then pasted into our CMS. It's a harmless issue, but it points to the need to improve our tool so that others don't feel like they have to use another editor.
I'm trying to choose between a couple of different HTML parsers for a project I am working on, part of which accepts HTML input from the client.
I've built a simple automated test for each one, to see if they fit my needs. I have a large number of real-life HTML fragments to test, but they aren't enough for testing for safety, since they (probably) do not contain any malicious code.
I don't mind reviewing the outputs by hand.
My question is, is there a freely available database or list of HTML snippets containing malformed HTML and scripts intended for testing for XSS?
The ha.ckers XSS cheatsheet is pretty comprehensive, and was the catalyst for me to build a whitelist based sanitiser into jsoup.
Google's home page seems to be malformed, maybe you can use that?
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=www.google.com&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/11/its-a-malformed-world.html
I built html-sanitizer-testbed for exactly this purpose. It consists of two components:
A suite of tests, that are designed to check the security of a HTML sanitizer. I have collected every tricky case I've been able to find. It includes everything on the ha.ckers.org XSS cheatsheet, as well as many other test cases I've collected over the years. Over the years I've analyzed dozens of HTML sanitizers (most of them were vulnerable), and added a test case for every security vulnerability I've ever found, so this is a pretty nice collection.
Also, it provides some test automation functionality, so that you don't need to review the outputs by hand: you can fire up a browser and check whether the browser seems to have executed any Javascript in the outputs of the sanitizer (in which case the sanitizer is broken). This part is not 100% reliable and comes with no guarantees whatsoever, so for maximum effectiveness, you might want to review the outputs by hand. However, it has worked pretty well for me so far.
I welcome feedback and contributions.
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How do you implement user documentation in Access? I've never bothered with formal user documentation in the past; I tend to rely on good interface design to guide users (or so I tell myself). But I'd really like to know what people smarter than me are doing...
Here are things I think I would consider important (in order):
Simplicity: it needs to be simple enough that it can be updated easily as the code changes, otherwise the documentation will end up out of sync
Screen shots: a picture's worth a thousand words; screen shots must be easily integrated into the documentation
Integration: the user can get to the relevant part of the documentation with as little effort as possible; ie, pressing F1 on a form brings up help for that form vs. opening a help file and having to navigate a table of contents
Searchable: full-text search capabilities would be nice
Other considerations:
Online vs. local: local would be faster/more reliable, but online would be always available plus search engine indexable (allowing use of google site: searches and providing some SEO benefit as well)
User Editable: how much do you allow users to make changes to the documentation: full access (ie, wiki), no access, moderated forums, etc.
Version control: text-based formats are more conducive to versioning than say, an Access table with help text inside the mdb
Exportable to PDF: seems like a nice-to-have
In Access I've never created end user documentation. No wait, I did once about 12 years ago. And I paid someone to write the manual along with screen shots. I did also have the hlp files, etc, etc. But I don't recall the details now.
Now for the Auto FE Updater, where appropriate, I have a text control which is underlned and blue which the user can then click on. The code then opens up their web browser to the appropriate page on my website using the ShellExecute API Much simpler for me than trying to figure out some kind of help system that would work for both offline and online. I also update the ToolTip control to put in the exact URL so they can see where they are going to go if they click on the text control. That's a VB 6 program but close enough for your requirements.
You may find HTML Help suitable.
I don't produce documentation for my client projects unless the client pays me big $$$ for it, as it's extremely difficult. I often guide users in producing in-house materials that document procedures and standards, but in general, I design my apps for EASE OF USE.
That is in contrast to EASE OF LEARNING.
EASE OF USE and EASE OF LEARNING often conflict with each other, as a UI design that makes it really easy to perform a task the first time often gets in the way once the user is accustomed to how things work.
However, it's important to design the UI with two things in mind:
things that are done on a daily basis don't need to be easy to learn -- they need to be really fast and friendly for the person who already knows how to use the app. I have a 10+20 rule -- 10 minutes of training and 20 minutes of use and the user will never forget how to use it.
things that are done only very seldom should be designed with a UI that is transparent and easy and doesn't require the user to remember anything at all. These kinds of tasks are great candidates for wizard-style interfaces that step the user through the process and provide hints and tips as text along the way.
I also have a number of UI design conventions that I implement throughout an app. The example that springs to mind is that any subform that is a datasheet or continuous form has a doubleclick event that when activated opens a popup form with the full details for the selected record. Once users grasp this convention, they will assume that any subform is doubleclickable in order to navigate to the detail.
There are other such conventions, but that's the basic idea, i.e., to implement similar behaviors in similar contexts so that if a user learns to do something in one context, when she finds herself in a different place with a similar UI, the things learned in the original context are transferrable in terms of basic UI behavior.
You will need to do two things:
Create a help file with topic-ID's for all of the topics
Link this help file to your access database, and link the topics
We have had very good results with http://www.helpandmanual.com/. From one single source, you can create any sort of help file that you want: pdf, online, chm, hlp, xml, ... It has a screenshot tool integrated.
Every topic can have it's own ID and you can just link your access forms / controls to this ID.
I have done a very similar thing to Tony. Its kind of a user generated content type thing let me explain.
The database contains a table with a list of the form names and then the path of a help file (word doc) that corresponds with that form.
Certain users have access to a form that allows them to say what help file corresponds to each form
Each form then has a help button so when the user clicks on it they open up the correct help file.
This way it is totally flexible, if they just want one big help file then all the links point to that but if the users want to put the effort in then they can make a file for each one. As they help files are separate from the DB storage is not a problem and also help files can be changed without having to recompile the application.
You could merge this idea with Tony’s and have the help files online if you wanted. I just find this a nice design pattern
I recently stumbled upon TiddlyWiki and have been thinking about using that as a backend to the systems Kevin and Tony described.