jQuery.NeatUpload – Examples refactored

jQuery.NeatUpload – Release 0.4

I’ve been using the jquery plugin for neatupload and the bugs keep coming up, well, that’s the developer’s life. Catching bugs is an ability that every developer must have and more than that, do not shame on, but be proud of.
This time I’ve improved the error handling when the server send as response some no comprehensive, for instance, there is a limit set in web.config for the maximum file size to upload and when the client attempts to send a file bigger than the limit, the server replies with some bizarre response.
As part of the mechanism implemented, it expects the HTML response for parse it and determine what to do, I mean, send information to the client indicating whether the request failed or not. Sometimes the HTML sent by the server was impossible to read because of some mysterious JavaScript error “Access denied”. I had no time for digging deeper in this matter, so I try-catch it and just a little extra setup in order to be consequent and ready. The release 0.4 can be downloaded here.

jQuery.NeatUpload – Examples refactored

In order to prepare for launch a new release of NeatUpload including these JavaScript features I’ve been doing some refactoring in the samples I published a few months ago. The first thing I’ll do is to apologize with the WebForms people, because I’ve let them in the road with the examples, just the part 1. Now the updated versions have both implementations WebForms and MVC3. Of course these new versions also have applied the bugfix mentioned above.
There’s something new in the web.config files, this time they are prepared for either IIS6 or IIS7+ and highly commented (well, this is questionable and relative to anyone’s need) every setting needed for set up NeatUpload even clarifying the confusing and inconsistent size units that Microsoft has implemented in both versions of IIS, they are in bytes and Kilobytes respectively.
Before describe what’s in these examples, I want to alert you about something that I’ve been dealing with many times and that has been cause of mysterious error in production scenarios. There is a setting in web.config that indicates the maximum time that IIS can wait before it shuts down the thread and return time out error. This is under and it’s expressed in seconds, this is especially useful when the files to be uploaded are really big.

What’s in the examples?

• Default values: Shows how to use the minimum setup code and use the default values.
• Changed Add and Upload texts: Shows how to change the texts for the elements that add and/or upload items rather than the default internal texts.
• Changed Add and Upload elements: Shows how to change the default link for add and/or upload element by custom elements like buttons.
• Custom cancel elements. Part 1: Shows how to change the cancel element by creating a simple new element inline and binding it to the internal click event.
• Custom cancel elements. Part 2: Shows how to change the cancel element by cloning a complex element and binding it to the internal click event.
• Start Upload Automatically: Show how to start automatically the upload without using a queue and adding one by one. This example uses just add element.
• Show Progress Bar: Shows how to use a more cute visual feedback by styling up a progress bar that indicates the progress and changes the color if an error occurs.
• Validating Data: Shows how to intercept the action of send the file to the server by performing validations to the associated data.
• Sending extra Data: Shows how to send associated data along with the file by serializing it as JSON and how to receive it properly on the server.

à la prochaine mes amis!