Pop ups react different from TP-WEB

Thomas Hayes

Hi Everyone
I have an odd problem that I can't figure out. When I active a pop up page on my panel it works fine but when I try the same button from the web-panel I loose the top of my pop up. What I have is a pop up overtop of a pop up. The top section shows what monitor is being controlled and the bottom the actual controls. By selection the monitor the bottom changes from the controls for one monitor to the other.

DHawthorne

I haven't done many web panels, I hate them . However, there is a very real niche that they fill and are indespensible in it. But I have found there are several things that just don't work the same way they do on an actual panel. Fonts are an obvious one, since the font has to be installed on the computer displaying it - but even when it is, some fonts jsut don't display the same. Several border types and button shapes also don't look the same.

I don't have an answer to your exact problem though, I haven't run into that one. I'm not sure if it's at all helpful, but as a rule of thumb, I dumb down web panels as much as I can to minimize such idiosyncrasies, and to minimize display response latency. Perhaps in your case it would just be easier to do a full page flip, duplicating the controls that are common , and replacing the differing ones rather than using a popup.

Thomas Hayes

Hi Dave
Thanks for the info. I knew about the fonts issue but this is the first time I've seen this problem. I thought it was something I was doing wrong. I ended up modifing the pop up pages so that the adjustments and monitor controlled are all on the same page and all I end up doing is pop up page flips depending what monitor the client wants to control. I just found a few more glitches that I am trying to fix with the web pages. I suspect the problem lies with the conversion to HTML. It's to bad these glitches exist because the web-pages are very important to my help desk staff(saves me a lot of walking too) when a client doesn't know where the 3 button from the left on the top row is.

Irvine_Kyle

Another weird thing is that sometimes pages with spaces in their name will be HTML converted to %20. So say you have a popup with page name 'my page' the HTML sonversion will change it to my%20page.xml which means your send PPON cmds might not work. I've had other flaky issues with Web panels, especially with maintaining a solid connection.

Thomas Hayes

That I believe has to do with the HTML conversion. It reads the 'space' as a value. I can only hope as technology advances that it will be less troubled by these conversions.

DHawthorne

Originally posted by Thomas Hayes
That I believe has to do with the HTML conversion. It reads the 'space' as a value. I can only hope as technology advances that it will be less troubled by these conversions.

Actually, it's because UNIX filenames aren't supposed to have spaces in them, or any of quite a few normal keyboard symbol characters. A URL (which is what a web based panel page winds up as) is nothing more than a request for a file on a web server, and most of them are UNIX based. Everything else you are supposed to represent with % + the ASCII value in hex, hence the %20 for a space. Since this is just too much for the end user, browsers and applications allow spaces in a URL, but any imbedded URL in a web page will fail a validation test if it contains them. Ironically, it rarely prevents them from working, but such it is.

But anyway, it's not a limit of technology, it's adherence to a naming standard.

shr00m-dew

I was told at training one time that the HTML conversion addition to TP3 was done by one guy in one night. I think it went something like "Wouldn't it be nice if..."... "I'll look into it..."

So, considering how few bugs have come up, I'd say it's not that bad..

Kevin D.

HARMAN_icraigie

If you want some real funky things to happen convert to HTML a TP file with video buttons that have popups and the clock/date readout overlayed.