Tips for building a decent HTA/HTML application

This post includes some basic tips to consider while building a HTA/HTML application. Clearly I am no Web guru knowledgeable of the various technologies that make the Web zip and zing. Here are my 2 cents

Any HTML page will contain tags for e.g

etc.

Any self-respecting Web page will include a vertical or a horizontal menu. For this you would need to use a Cascade Style Sheet (CSS). Rather than re-inventing the wheel do re-use the cool menu items & CSS style sheets at the following site http://www.dynamicdrive.com/style/layouts/

You will also be adding textboxes, radio buttons, submit  and reset buttons. Assuming you have all the form controls in a single form you need to use the following

Consider a form

Enter the file name containing the server list (srvr_list.txt) :

For this to get the input from the text box use

file = form1.servers.value

Using a radio button is a little tricky. Radio buttons belong to a group and the way to handle this in VBscript is as follows

           

Include subdirectories

            Yes   

            No

This is done by iterating through the radio button list

for each radio in form1.Radio1

    If radio.checked = true Then

        

         If radio.value = "Yes" then

                  objInputFormat.recurse = -1

         ElseIf radio.value = "No" Then                 

                   objInputFormat.recurse = 0

         End If

    End if

Next

Handling a Submit requires that you handle the onClick action as below

This indicates that when you click the Submit button you will invoke the subroutine fileSize

A Reset button is of type “reset”. As long as you enclose all the controls in a single form hitting the reset button will clear all the controls.

Populating output in a table: To populate output dynamically in a table I used MS Tabular Data Control (TDC) when the output is written to a CSV file. The cool thing about this is that it automatically paginates output and display “n” entries per page instantaneously. I had tried various thing like populating using DOM, InnerHTML but all of those failed miserably when the o/p was very large. With TDC I can display ~30K entries instantaneously from a CSV file.

This is done as below

The CLASSID is the TDC control. Make sure you choose the correct delimiters and text qualifiers. Populate your CSV file.

You then need to connect this with Datasrc as below

                   
Number

                   
Path

                   
File Size

                   
Last Write Time

                                                           

                                                           

           

           

           

           

           

Add cool first,previous,next and last buttons as follows

 

       

       

       

       

       

Finally in your sub routine which you invoke to populate the table make sure you rebind your table with the new data as below

       data2.DataURL = ""

         data2.DataURL = "c:\\files.csv"

         data2.reset()

This is shown below