Another maintenance release for our beloved project, here you’ve the changelog:

- “meta viewport” tag was added to mask’s HTML for a better mobile rendering
- P4A::getMetaViewport() and setMetaViewport() methods were added
- p4a_center_elements() javascript funcion now removes marginLeft/paddingLeft
from the first visible column of the first P4A_Frame widget
- a bug with P4A_Frame and multiple CSS classes was solved
- P4A_Table’s arrow symbols were because the past ones weren’t shown on mobile
devices
- an ob_clean() call was added to P4A_Thumbnail_Generator::outputThumbnail()
method
- Zend Framework was updated to 1.11.10
- P4A_Table’s image cols do not throw exception anymore if the image
does not exist
- P4A_Field_loadSelectByArray helper now supports a second parameter to specify
the array’s primary key field name

Download P4A 3.8.4

A few improvements on different areas, here you’ve the changelog:

- P4A_DB_Navigator now supports query defined sources
- a bug with P4A_Data_Source::saveUploads() was solved
- a bug with P4A_Table’s image cols (without GD installed) was solved
- P4A_DB_Navigator now triggers a beforeclick event
- all p4a_load_js calls were migrated to require.js
- a bug with P4A_DB_Source::deleteRow() called when in newRow state was solved
- p4a_ajax_enable javascript function was added
- a bug with P4A_GD constant default definition was solved
- P4A_Mask::restart() method was added
- Zend Framework was updated to 1.11.7
- translations were updated
- P4A_DB_Source::load() method now checks for duplicate calls and throws an error

Download P4A 3.8.3

This is a minor release but it contains really a lot of great upgrades and fixes, here you’ve the changelog:

- Zend Framework was updated to 1.11.6
- CKEditor was updated to 3.6.0
- jQuery UI was updated to 1.8.11
- requirejs was added
- P4A_Dir_Source automatically sorts files
- P4A_Dir_Source::setPageLimit() calling was disabled
- P4A_Dir_Source’s page limit is now set to 0 (disabled)
- autocomplete values are now sorted and unique
- P4A_Field::getSource() method was added
- p4a_load_js now uses requirejs
- P4A_Field and P4A_Data_Fields now support the “datetime” type
- P4A_Field and P4A_Data_Fields now support the “time” type
- P4A_Object::dropImplement() now turns the action to lowercase
- deprecated method P4A_Object::dropMethod() was removed
- a javascript bug with P4A_DB_Navigator’s drag&drop functionalities was solved
- P4A_DB_Navigator now correctly supports source with non-default DSN

Download P4A 3.8.2

In the last few weeks I’ve been thinking a lot about the future of P4A, there would be a lot of small things to do but I wanted to think about something big enough for a major release jump.

Some time ago we discussed about the rendering layer, at the moment we generate all the HTML and we use our custom CSS + some jQuery/jQuery UI goodness to enhance everithing a little bit. Point is that jQuery UI is growing too slowly and we need something bigger and more RIA oriented, like Dojo, ExtJS or Qooxdoo. We discussed about which one would be better and at the moment I’d go with Dojo, it has a great FLOSS license, it’s supported by a lot of major players, it’s highly modular and it has my preferred way of including modules. At last I cannot avoid talking about the new wonderful “Claro” graphical theme, simply amazing.

So I started coding some of P4A’s widgets just to test something out and everything was pretty easy, I’d choose to use the declarative syntax because it was the fastest way to have everything running but now I’m running into a few major problems.

First of all I faced a performance issue, maybe it’s due to dojo’s declarative syntax I chose and I should definetively do a comparison test with the programmatic syntax (also if I do not like generating javascript too much). Another problem is due to the fact that most P4A developers tend to use the easiest P4A’s AJAX stack, which actually redraws all the mask (the body tag) without a full page refresh. To do the dojo has to redraw all the widgets in the mask and so the performance issue is not only visible during the first page loading but on every page redrawing. The user would see the page flicker (if we decide to hide the DOM while dojo is rendering) or the unstyled elements for a sec and than the styled widgets. This is not the best way to go…

But here we’ve the most critical issue, every time the page is redesigned (not using a full page refresh) we’ve a noticable memory leak, dojo keeps allocating memory and this is very very bad. That’s not a dojo problem, I mean, I replease the DOM nodes and recall the dojo parser, but the previously built dojo objects are not removed from memory. Actually I hoped that dojo would have recognized that an element was already parsed but this is not happening. Thus we would have to destroy all dojo objects before redrawing them but this operation will make the page flickering longer.

Conclusions? Hard to tell at the moment. I think I want to try a different way doing a quick test using only dojo’s CSS instead of the whole javascripts also because in a P4A application all the events have to be managen by the server and not by the client. I’ll try to do this kind of test ASAP and let you know some more considerations about this topic.

A bugfix release for the 3.8.x serie, if you’re using P4A be sure to update to the new release, here you’ve the changelog:

- jQuery was updated to 1.4.4
- a bug with multiple p4a_load_js calls (with the same url and within the
same loading cycle) was solved
- a bug with MSSQL and query limits was fixed (thanks to Diego Fattori)
- CKEditor was updated to 3.5
- P4A_DB_Source::getRowPosition() now returns 1 if the query throws an error
- P4A_DB_Source::addHaving(), setHaving() and getHaving() methods were added
- Zend Framework was updated to 1.11.2
- a bug with P4A::restart() method was fixed (thanks to Daniel Carrero)
- a bug with P4A_Data_Source::saveUploads() and custom file paths was solved
- a new technique to unload CKEditor was implemented

Download P4A 3.8.1

- UPDATE: due to a SourceForge downtime P4A 3.8.1 tarballs can’t be downloaded at the moment, I’ll update this post when everything will be up again, in the meanwhile you can check out the P4A SVN (tags/3.8.1).

- UPDATE 2: SF should have fixed the problem, P4A 3.8.1 packages are available right now.

It took me a couple of month to work on this release, we’ve a pretty long changelog you’ve to be sure to check out because we’ve a lot of important changes that may impact your upgrades.

One of the most important things is that now P4A supports MS SQL, it was quite easy but surely we need a stronger user base to test out every possible scenario. The next big thing is that MySQL connections are now UTF-8 safe, it could hurt your existing applications so please check out the notes in the changelog before upgrating.

- !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
- !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
- !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
- P4A_DB’s connection charset is now set to UTF 8
This could lead to possible data corruption, if you’re upgrading from a
previous release and you’re using MySQL or PostgreSQL (Oracle and SQLite
should not be involved in this change) you’ve to be sure to convert the DB
charset to UTF-8 before editing data in your P4A applications.

ALWAYS DO BACKUPS BEFORE ANYTHING ELSE!!!

For MySQL we used this procedure to migrate our DBs:
mysqldump –default-character-set=latin1 DBNAME > dump.sql
open dump.sql and replace this line
/*!40101 SET NAMES latin1 */;
with
/*!40101 SET NAMES utf8 */;
mysql NEWDBNAME < dump.sql
- !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
- !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
- !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
- Support For MS SQL was added, check out the README file
- AJAX STACK REVERTED TO XML (instead of JSON) due to the bugs with jQuery::form
- README file was updated
- CKEditor was updated to 3.4.1
- a new strategy to avoid CKEDITOR loading problems was implemented
- P4A_Data_Fields::getSchemaTableField now correctly handles calculated fields
- a bug with P4A_I18N::format and time fields was fixed
- P4A::__construct() now has a "cache" param, simply pass a Zend_Cache object
to override all Zend_Cache configurations inside P4A
- P4A::getCache() method was added
- P4A_I18N now uses P4A::getCache() to pass an overridden Zend_Cache object to
Zend_Locale_Data
- a bug with "onreturnpress" and IE was fixed
- a bug with multicple CKEditor instances (loaded via AJAX call) and IE
was solved
- CKEditor's forcePasteAsPlainText option was enabled again
- jQuery::form was updated to 2.49
- jQuery was updated to 1.4.3
- file upload percentage and speed is shown while uploading
(if PECL uploadprogress is available, APC not implemented beacuse it does
not work with PHP CGI)
- a bug with autocomplete and HTML tags (in the value) was fixed
- a bug with autocomplete loading was fixed (thank to Lorenzo Valori)
- a bug with CKEDITOR and AJAX was fixed

Download P4A 3.8.0

Another 3.6 serie release, let’s take a look at the changelog

- P4A_Field::setSource() now correctly handles null param
- CKEditor was updated to 3.4
- P4A_DB_Source::getRowPosition() now correctly handles multivalue fields
(bug #3057839)
- forcing IE to use his latest rendering engine
- some javascript fixes were applied to make IE ajax system work
- Zend Framework was updated to 1.10.8
- P4A_I18N now correcly handles 3 chars languages (like “fil”)
- translations were updated
- Filipino translation was added (thanks to Elin Eon)

Download P4A 3.6.2

The first bugfix spin after the 3.6 rollout, let’s take a look at the changelog

- P4A_DB_Source::load() now returns an object also when setQuery() is used
- P4A_DB_Source::load()’s autosequence creation now checks that the field
exists before calling the setSequence()
- a bug with P4A_Redirect_To_Url and P4A_Redirect_To_File was solved
(bug #3039449)
- better focus management for P4A_Grid
- a bug with AJAX javascript returning and html entities was solved

Download P4A 3.6.1

It’s time for a big P4A release before the summer vacation :)

The changelog is really long as usual but there are no explosive changes or new features, the main focus was porting from the old FCKEditor to the new CKEditor 3.3 (that now has come to a complete and stable feature set).

I also worked on updating all various softwares we embed (Zend Framework and jQuery plugins), fixing some bugs and reworking the AJAX stack.

After CreaLabs (the company I previously own) closure don’t worry, I’ll still continue to work and support P4A, I’ll keep using it for all my jobs and I also have some big plan for the future releases :)

So here you’ve the full changelog:

- Zend Framework was updated to 1.10.3
- FCKEditor was dropped and CKEditor 3.3 was added
- all AJAX stack was rewritten to use JSON instead of XML
- in full AJAX environment external javascripts are loaded only if
they were not loaded before
- in full AJAX environment widgets can now execute javascript code before
or after the HTML substitution
- focus internal management was rewritten
- P4A_Mask::setLeftSidebarWidth(), setRightSidebarWidth(),
getLeftSidebarWidth() and getRightSidebarWidth() methods were added
- jQuery::form was updated to 2.43
- jQuery was updated to 1.4.2
- jQuery UI was updated to 1.8.1
- jQuery::autocomplete plugin was replaced by jQuery UI autocomplete
- mask’s right sidebar is now shown correctly
- P4A_Data_Source::exportToCSV() deprecated method was removed
- P4A::isPopupOpened() deprecated method was removed
- P4A_Mask::unsetFocus() deprecated method was removed
- P4A_Mask::displayText() deprecated method was removed
- P4A_Table::setHeader() deprecated method was removed
- P4A_Box::setValue() and getValue() deprecated methods ware removed
- P4A_DB::getAll(), queryAll(), getRow(), queryRow(), getCol(), queryCol(),
getOne() and queryOne() deprecated methods ware removed
- P4A_Output_File now supports the “new window” param
- P4A_DB_Source::rowByPk() method now returns the retrieved row
- pt_BR translation was added to products_catalogue sample application
(thanks to Cassiano Faria)
- es_MX translation was added to products_catalogue sample application
(thanks to Edgar Joel)
- Yahoo CSS reset was updated to 3.1.0
- P4A_I18N::normalize() $num_of_decimals params now has a default value
- P4A_Table_Rows’ onformat event now passes a 5th parameter to the interceptor
method, this param is the complete row
- P4A_DB_Navigator::setRootLabel() and getRootLabel() methods were added
- P4A_DB_Navigator::allowMovementToRoot() method now supports a 2nd param
(root element label)
- P4A_DB_Source::getRowPosition() now adds “GROUP BY” clause
- default CSS font is now “Verdana,Arial,sans-serif” to match
jQuery::UI settings

Download P4A 3.6.0
Have fun!

Changelog:

- Zend Framework was updated to 1.10.1
- P4A_Data_Source::exportToCSV() method was marked as deprecated
- P4A_Data_Source::exportAsCSV() now can be called directly from an event handler
- translations were updated

Download P4A 3.4.4