jQuery & ASP: creating a "more" button with AJAX (part 2)

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As explained in my previous post, today we are going to create the page needed to update our names list, when the "more" button is pressed.

I believe you followed me in the previous article. If not, please read it before continuing, because otherwise you won't understand what I'm writing here.

Creating the more.asp page

As said, we now need to create the more.asp document. In this page we will get the updates for our list and pass them to the AJAX request. The more_updates div will be changed and a new "more" button created, if the end of the recordset is not already reached.

jQuery & ASP: creating a "more" button with AJAX (part 1)

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On many web sites, we can see lists of news, updates, notifications and similiar elements with a "more" button. That button will add elements to the list when pressed. I believe you saw something similar, used especially on Social Networks like Facebook or Twitter.

In the following article we will create a "more" button using jQuery and getting the list of elements from a database, using ASP. The project has two ASP pages, one containing the list and the jQuery code (AJAX), and the second with the code needed to update the list.

Let's start building the first page.

ASP: call functions and subroutines

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With ASP, one of the main features we do like a lot is the possibility of creating procedures. There are two types of procedures: sub and functions.
Subroutines have a specific syntax:

<%
sub sub_name()
... ...
end sub
%>

and they don't output a result.

On the other hand, functions have the same syntax, but they output a result:

<%
function func_name()
... ...
end function
%>

Let's see how they work!

CSS: word-wrap, how to use it

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Word wrap is an almost obscure CSS property. It's rarely used, but it can save your day sometimes. So, to get to the point, which one of the two following boxes do you prefer?

ThisIsAVeryLongTextThatWon'tBreakUnlessForcedToDoSo

ThisIsAVeryLongTextThatWillBreakBecauseWasForcedToDoSo

I bet you prefer the second one. How to do it? Just one line of code! Follow me...

jQuery: embedding videos

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Ever wanted to embed a video in your blog or web site? I must admit I don't really like videos on web sites, however I understand that some sites heavily rely on videos. Usually when I open a home page, the presence of multiple videos - starting automatically - makes me go away. But, I do appreciate if an internal page offers the possibility of viewing a short video or animation... on demand.

Anyway, if you need to embed videos in your pages, here is a list of jQuery plugins that might be of some help.

CSS: cross browser gradient (a tutorial)

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I've already talked about CSS gradients in the past, but mainly together with other CSS features like box-shadow or border-radius. In the following article we will create only gradients for a simple box... and we are going to make it work for any browser. This time no compatibility issue, then.

The style
This time I will start straight from the code. Afterward I am going to explain how we can customize it, understanding what's behind.

.gradient {
  background-color: #444444;
  background-image: -webkit-gradient(linear, left top, left bottom, from(#444444), to(#999999));
  background-image: -webkit-linear-gradient(top, #444444, #999999);
  background-image: -moz-linear-gradient(top, #444444, #999999);
  background-image: -ms-linear-gradient(top, #444444, #999999);
  background-image: -o-linear-gradient(top, #444444, #999999);
  background-image: linear-gradient(top, #444444, #999999);
  filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient(startColorStr='#444444', EndColorStr='#999999');
  height: 200px;
  width: 200px;
  color: white
}

The result for the above code will be the following box:

This is the styled div with our gradient.
As you can see, the background has a gradient going from top to bottom, from colour #444444 to color #999999.
Let's now go on with the explanation of the style

Outlook: how to view the content of a pst file

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As explained in one of my previous posts, it is highly recomended to perform maintenance on your Exchange Server. Using tools like ExMerge, you can archive old mails or mails for closed mailboxes and thus reduce storage size. But what happens when we need to view the content of the resulting PST file?
First of all, we can always open the PST with Outlook. However we can use a separate tool to achieve that: Outlook PST Viewer.

The software is very simple to use and completely free.

• View PST files without having MS Outlook installed.
• Open & view password protected .pst files without a password.
• View Outlook messages, OLE embedded objects without MAPI or Outlook.
• View PST files with exact email formatting.
• View PST files & restore all its meta data like To, Cc, Bcc, From, Sent & Received date.
• Reads PST files and extracts all MAPI properties.
• View PST files with Internet header.
• Software recovers Rich Text, HTML or Text formatting of emails stored in PST files.

Because it is free, you can always give it a try. Download it here.