Today … is the first day after my trip in Greece. Well it’s hard to be in good mood after a holiday and I couldn’t code as fast as I want for these first days, but this is another story.

I would like to share here some information about a marketing tool which I just saw. It’s called ClickHeat.
What is the main purpose of that tool? People which using already Google Analytics could see many things which are the same, but in fact there are differences which I am going to mention.
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When I started with CakePHP, my first project includes also Autocomplete functionality for some fields. Of course I start using default Ajax Helper provided from the library. The main problem was that in most of the cases I needed the ID of the string which I searched. The best example is the Country list which is very easy to be accessed with Autocomplete, but instead to messing up with strings as usual developer I wanted to have the ID of the specified country. I used some kind of hack by adding callback function onComplete, which checks the selection in the Autocomplete field, and by this selection set hidden ID field, but as you can imagine this is not the best choice, first of all because it’s a hack - you rely on a sting which already sound as a hack /imagine if you are searching in a list there are some duplicated entries - examples are too many/ and second if you rely on callback this mean that you need another second or two for the second responce. Anyway, by giving this examples just wanted to convince you once again that Autocomplete helper with Key and Value related are really necessary in the projects /or at least that’s what I am thinking./

Well so far the default Autocomplete helper doesn’t provide such functionality. That’s why I created this helper which solves this problem partly. Why partly? You will see the answer of this in Strict Autocomplete with Scriptaculous (Part II)
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Yesterday I found AjaxRain - Great collection with 600+ Ajax or Javascript code snipets and examples.
I like that site from the first look, because everything in it is clean, neat and usefull. I really like sites having visible preview of the functionality as well as direct link to the example - it just show you the code in action. Everyday there are few new snippets/examples so I think this is one of the good sources for Ajax or Javascript expiration.

These days when I showed my example to some friends I realized that in fact even the second example had potential bugs. In fact not a bug, but missing functionality which could mislead the user while using the component.

What I found: When the user prefer to type instead of selecting the value from the list, then it’s possible to have “nothing selected” in ID field, but in fact the user have feeling that he select the correct value. This is extremely valid when the options are short and typing 3-4 chars which in fact is more convenient to type instead of selecting.
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These days I saw an article about Instant Javascript Library. I was surprised how easy is to build eye-candy gallery looking like real album photos. The usage of gallery is very easy - just include the script file and add class of every image and that’s it. Of course there are many customizations and extras, but I am leaving this to your imagination.
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Today a friend of mine sent me that EditGrid site. These guys really working hard. The interface working really neat and cover everything /everything that regular user needs on his work with a Grid/. As far I can see they loading part of the grid with Ajax and this way the application is not so heavy, as in other applications which load everything in one. The have also API to integrate with external applications/sites. Impressive!

I am using Scriptaculous for Autocomplete control, but in the example provided there is no way to select strict value.

Let me explain what I mean: Go to autocomplete example and try to select an entry in first group of fields. Well everything looking fine.
Then try to modify the entry, for example remove the last char from the field. and press somewhere on the web page /with the mouse/. Well as you can see this didn’t clear the value from ID field and in the real example, when the ID field is hidden, users could have wrong impression that the field is selected, they change it, but their change is not applied … and the complication occur.
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