We are building an offline version of our online store.
This is for reps to take with them on a tablet when they are out. The reason it needs to be offline is because there will be no connection in a lot of the places and we aren't using tablets with 3/4g connectivity.We use Windows 8.1/RT based tablets.
Since php relies on a server and the tablets cannot be installed with xampp or the like, I have rebuilt the site using html and css.
So far this works and has some flexibility in it. The website is turned into an application using googles create application button in its tools (though technically it's not really an application). It has all the product info, pictures and videos the reps need. Another advantage to this is that the application and files are stored on a one drive cloud account shared to all the tablets. This way, I can update the app/website from my machine and have it up to date on all the reps machines. This current set up works for now but we are looking to add some more functionality.
What we want is a button on each product that will let a rep add an amount of that particular product to a quote form. Because each product sits on a different page, it can't be in the one page form. So as the rep is pressing the buttons on each product, they are getting stored somewhere. Then at the end, the rep can turn all those values into a word doc/pdf/excel by hitting a final submit button.
I have looked at web storage in html 5 but still not quite sure if I can get what I need using it.
Going through the explination here:
http://diveintohtml5.info/storage.html
looks like sites can store info but not sure how to turn this into a form or document at the end. This document is what the reps will email back to the head office.
Has anyone got any pointers on what I could do. Since the site/app has been created in html already, I would like to just build into the existing framework. Are there any other pieces of software that I could use? I do remember using spreadsheet converter to turn an excel file into a web form that exported a pdf but the form needs to be on a single page.
All help appreciated.
Thanks
Related
So, this is the present flow (the happy path): Reach site, scan barcode tag via the app, app asks me to confirm site address - I confirm, I get my safety and site checklists.
My problem is that the barcodes don't always work. Sometimes they have been placed where I can't reach, or they are dirty and won't scan properly, or there isn't enough light, or my scanner is playing up, a whole load of issues.
I want to have a digital "check in" process. This is the flow in my head:
Reach site, open my app, app verifies my location, and I get my safety and site checklists.
What do you guys think? How can I have a digital check in that verifies that I was at the location on the right time without having to scan stuff or be stuck because there's no network?
At present, we also have a manual entry form. This is the bare minimum that we do on our site visits (things that are done across all sites). We use this option if we are not able to get an internet connection.
First off - our needs don't require any sort of interaction with the web view, we simply want to display content from the web.
Situation: we want to make a glorified slide show that pulls in web content. We were intending on having a list of templates shown to the user on the TV app, they can pick one, and then the appropriate URL is hit for that template (which would live on the web). The web portion would handle things from there, navigating to a new URL every X seconds (which just displays the next set of data in the same template)
In learning that web views are restricted, and you can't sneak an app submission by apple while utilizing a web view, we've hit a dead end. Having hundreds of templates that are all hard coded doesn't seem maintainable for us to do, plus we can't deliver a new template to users (er.. clients) without going through the potentially lengthy app approval process every time.
Does anyone have any other bright ideas for storing templates on the web, maybe even in a data format, that we can download and interpret/parse in-app to know where to position image views, labels, etc?
Thanks for any suggestions!
I know I'm a little late to the party, but I wanted to answer your secondary question. It is absolutely possible to load TVML files from the web without updating the tvOS submitted app. We have a published tvOS app that is currently doing this.
As I recall, the tvOS app we submitted is very basic, with the only real change being the TVBaseURL. We placed all of our TVJS files on Google App Engine and the TVML files are in the GAE Storage bucket, so the TVBaseURL points to the public URL for those files. I have a cron job that reads an API and dynamically builds the TVML files several times a day. When the TVOS app runs, it loads the files from the GAE Storage bucket. The real benefit is that I can update the TVML layout and add or delete screens as needed without ever needing to go through the app submission process.
First time post here, so forgive me for any bad etiquette/format.
I will preface by saying:
I have (over the last few months) been developing an iOS app for work. To be more specific, I am developing an inventory app to track bar inventory (liquor, beer, wine, etc). I can give more specifics on request if needed. I have most of the functionality done, only a couple more things I would like to implement. Eventually I will be porting it to Android as well.
At the moment, I have the model objects being archived to the local filesystem for saving and loading of data. However, my goal would be to database the model objects with the ability to display the information on a webpage. My logic is that no matter where the user is, he/she will be able to sign in to a service using a username and password, and view correctly formatted current/past inventories online. This is to allow the ability for a bartender to record the inventory, and have the bar manager view the inventory instances without having to have the physical device that recorded the inventory in his/her possession.
So here is my question:
Without being too general, what kind of service would I need to pull this off? I have a good amount of relevant front-end experience, specifically with iOS, Objective-C, HTML and CSS. However, I have ZERO experience on the back-end. I have researched around the internet, and I am aware of things such as cloud databases, web hosting and MySQL, etc. However, I cannot seem to find a definitive answer without asking my specific question. I suppose I would just like to be pointed in the right direction before investing money and time into a service that may prove useless to my cause.
Any resources and help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!
There's not a definitive answer and you have a lot of options.
For me, the simplest is to set up a server with a database incorporated (mysql for example) and with a web service (written in PHP for example) that manages the database and queries on that.
Online you can find tons of guide on how to write a script in PHP that manages a database:
http://www.freewebmasterhelp.com/tutorials/phpmysql/2
For the iOS part you can follow also this guide:
http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/software-engineer/create-your-own-web-service-for-an-ios-app-part-one/
Good luck!
Per the title, I am looking for a tool or some sort of initiative that's already been undertaken by other developers to simply grab data off of websites so one can navigate them without looking at them in the browser. I am fully aware of how most pages work so what I would like to do is just look at the data that's being pulled from them per windows technology that's already (hopefully) been written. Does this make sense? Here is an example of what I would like to see in a tool:
a windows interface that gives me data about a webpage (menus, submenus,
button names/captions, etc...
be able to execute transactions on those pages by specifying what to do
through the tool's interface (click button, download image, etc..)
does anyone know of a tool out there to do such things?
The closest "program" that comes to mind is
WWW::Mechanize
Advertised as
Handy web browsing in a Perl object
This can in fact be used on Windows, however you
will need Perl.
Our web analytics package includes detailed information about user's activity within a page, and we show (click/scroll/interaction) visualizations in an overlay atop the web page. Currently this is an IFrame containing a live rendering of the page.
Since pages change over time, older data no longer corresponds to the current layout of the page. We would like to run a spider to occasionally take snapshots of the pages, allowing us to maintain a record of interactions with various versions of the page.
We have a working implementation of this (Linux), but the snapshot process is a hideous Python/JavaScript/HTML hack which opens a Firefox window, screenshotting and scrolling and merging and saving to a file. This requires us to install the X stack on our normally headless servers, and takes over a minute per page.
We would prefer a headless implementation with performance closer to that of the rendering time in a regular web browser, but haven't found anything.
There's some movement towards building something using Mozilla source as a starting point, but that seems like overkill to me, as well as a maintenance nightmare if we try to keep it up to date.
Suggestions?
An article on Digital Inspiration points towards CutyCapt which is cross-platform and uses the Webkit rendering engine as well as IECapt which uses the present IE rendering engine and requires Windows, natch. Nothing off the top of my head which uses Gecko, Firefox's rendering engine.
I doubt you're going to be able to get away from X, however. Since CutyCapt requires Qt, it requires either X or a Windows installation. And, similarly, IECapt will require Windows (or Wine if you want to try to run it under Linux, and then you're back to needing X). I doubt you'll be able to find a rendering engine which doesn't require Qt, Gtk, GDI, or Cocoa, and therefore requires a full install of display libraries.
Why not store the HTML that is sent out to the client? You could then use that to redisplay in a webbrowser as a page to show what it looked like.
Using your webanalytics data about use actions, you could they use that to default the combo boxes, fields etc to the values the client would have had, even change the CSS on buttons, etc, to mark them as being pushed.
As a benefit, you don't need the X stack, don't need to do any crawling or storing of images.
EDIT (Re Andrew Moore):
This is were you store the current CSS/images under a version number. Place an easily parsable version number in a comment in the HTML. If you change your CSS/images and use the existing names, increment the version number in the HTML output sent out.
The system that stores the HTML will know that it needs to grab a new copy and store under a new number. When redisplaying, it simply uses the version number to determine which CSS/image set to use.
We currently have a system here that uses a very similiar system so we can track users actions and provide better support when they call our help desk, as they can bring up the users session and follow what they did, even some-what live.
you can even code it to auto-censor sensitive fields when it is stored.
depending on the specifics of your needs perhaps you could get away with using one of the many free webpage thumbnail services? snapcasa, for example lets you generate thousands per month / no charge no advertizing .. (not ever used, just googled 'free thumbnail service') to find this.
just a thot