Another Happy Web Design Client

Thank you Arno for your business and all the best with your ventures. Congratulations on your new web site www.cashcentre.co.za !!

What Arno van den Heever had to say about our service:

“It has been a pleasure working with Erhard from Ernic.  He showed a lot of patience and gave us exactly what we were looking for.”

For quality web design and development services contact Erhard on 083 656 4309.

Login Manager Updated! The one-click login tool for web developers and system administrators!

Thanks for all the feedback from users using Login Manager to keep their login details safe and in one place. For those of you that do not have a login manager yet, please try out my free login manager it’s available for download here.

Apart from the normal Remote Desktop, cPanel, WebMail and other basic login types you can store on Login Manager, you can also add automatic login for custom web forms like your admin form of your CMS system. Here’s a short article on how to do it:

1.       From the Login Manager menu, select Add Login->Web Form

2.       Go to your login page with your browser

3.       Right-click, view source and locate the <form> tag.

4.       The property we set on Login Manager is the form method, in this case it’s set to POST.


5.       I can also see from the source there’s no action URL, so this page posts to itself when the login button is pressed and therefore we can set the action URL to the URL you entered to get to the login page.

6.       Then we locate the input tags to get their form field names so that we can set them up in Login Manager with the correct pre-defined values. In this case the username and password:



7.       Once everything is filled out in Login Manager click ok.


8.       That’s it. Now login your custom website from Login Manager with a two clicks.

 

I am trying to create a flawless free Login Manager that helps you with your everyday administrative tasks by providing quick access to all your client’s logins with a single one-click. If you find any problems or have any suggestions to improve this project send me an email to erhard@ernic.co.za

To download your own free copy click here.

How to page through Microsoft SQL records, as you would by using a LIMIT function on MySQL

There’s really only one feature I that I miss from MySQL when developing web applications with a Microsoft SQL backend, and that is the limit function that restricts the index and number of records returned with a SQL Query.

I suppose there are a few options to look at here; I know a few developers suggest using a nested SELECT and the TOP keyword, then ordering the records in a descending way from a second select and using a TOP from there as well. Basically selecting the records you need by in reversing the result set and using TOP to pull the 10 or so out that you’re interested in.

There are also a few others but the one above seems to be the common trend. After lying awake for about 3 hours last night I found a much simpler solution and thought I’d share it with the world. This may not be sufficient on very large record sets but works well in my environment.

To demonstrate I’ll use only a single table called OrgMember with:

OrgMemberID INT PK

FirstName VARCHAR(50)

LastName VARCHAR(50)

To make things a little simpler I created a stored procedure for this particular table. You’ll have to create one like this for each of the tables that you want paging on or, improve this to cater for any table you want.

CREATE PROCEDURE SelectOrgMemberWithPaging

      – Add the parameters for the stored procedure here  

      @Where VARCHAR(500),

      @OrderBy VARCHAR(500),

      @FromRecord INT,

      @Limit INT 

 

Nothing special to the declaration of the stored proc. I am making provision for the passing the WHERE clause on the query I select as well as an order by. This is if I don’t want to select and page through all the records but only, the Smiths for example. Then follows the rest of my stored proc:

 

AS

BEGIN

      – SET NOCOUNT ON added to prevent extra result sets from

      – interfering with SELECT statements.

      SET NOCOUNT ON;

 

 

      DECLARE @SQL VARCHAR(2000)

 

      SET @SQL = ‘DECLARE @TempOrgMember TABLE (     

                        RecordIndex INT identity,

                        OrgMemberID INT,

                        Email VARCHAR(50),

                        FirstName VARCHAR(50),

                        LastName VARCHAR(50)

                        );

 

                        INSERT INTO @TempOrgMember SELECT OrgMemberID,Email,FirstName,LastName FROM OrgMember ‘ + @Where + ‘ ‘ + @OrderBy +

                        SELECT * FROM @TempOrgMember WHERE RecordIndex >= ‘ + CAST(@FromRecord AS VARCHAR) + ‘ AND RecordIndex <= ‘ + CAST((@FromRecord + @Limit - 1) AS VARCHAR)

      EXEC (@SQL)

END

GO

 

And that’s it. Let me explain:

I create a temporary in-memory table to store the results of my SQL query, but I also include a first identity field for the records. This is the key of my paging stored proc. Each record will get a unique sequential index as they are inserted into the table from the SELECT I run.

Then, I insert the records into my temp table by doing a normal select from the source table with the WHERE and ORDERBY clauses attached.

Finally, I select from the temp table where RecordIndex (the unique sequential key) for each record is bigger than or equal to the FromRecord and smaller or equal to the FromRecord + LimitBy indicator.

Makes sense doesn’t it? I didn’t test for efficiency but in this project with the records we’ll be processing it should work just fine.

EXEC SelectOrgMemberWithPaging ,,200,10

 

Custom Designed E-Commerce Website Solutions

Are you looking for an easy and affordable e-commerce solution to sell your products online? Well look no further!

I am proud to announce that my business partnered up with a leading payment processing service and assembled a complete shopping cart solution to enable your business to trade online without you having to sell the house.

Your frontend shopping cart will be custom designed accordance to your company brand and we’ll include all the features that you need, even the functions don’t exist yet in our package we’ll custom build it to suit your requirements.

Some of the features that come standard out of the box:

  • Administration / Backend Functionality
  • Supports unlimited products and categories
  • Products-to-categories structure
  • Categories-to-categories structure
  • Add/Edit/Remove categories, products, manufacturers, customers, and reviews
  • Support for physical (shippable) and virtual (downloadable) products
  • Administration area secured with a username and password defined during installation
  • Contact customers directly via email or newsletters
  • Easily backup and restore the database
  • Print invoices and packaging lists from the order screen
  • Statistics for products and customers
  • Select what to display, and in what order, in the product listing page
  • Support for static and dynamic banners with full statistics

Customer / Frontend Functionality

  • All orders stored in the database for fast and efficient retrieval
  • Customers can view their order history and order statuses
  • Customers can maintain their accounts
  • Addressbook for multiple shipping and billing addresses
  • Temporary shopping cart for guests and permanent shopping cart for customers
  • Fast and friendly quick search and advanced search features
  • Product reviews for an interactive shopping experience
  • Forseen checkout procedure
  • Secure transactions with SSL
  • Number of products in each category can be shown or hidden
  • Global and per-category bestseller lists
  • Display what other customers have ordered with the current product shown
  • Breadcrumb trail for easy site navigation

Product Functionality

  • Dynamic product attributes relationship
  • HTML based product descriptions
  • Automated display of specials
  • Control if out of stock products can still be shown and are available for purchase
  • Customers can subscribe to products to receive related emails/newsletters

Payment Gateway Integration

The beauty of our e-commerce solution is that you don’t need to go through the hassle of signing up for a merchant account with a bank.

Your store will be able to accept credit card payments online that will be transferred to your account a monthly basis.

How much will it cost?

The total cost of the solution will depend on your own specific design and functional requirements. The average solution costs around R 7000.00 all inclusive. There are no monthly minimums to transact and no monthly fees or contracts.

Need more information?

Contact Erhard Smit on 083 656 4309 or erhard@ernic.co.za for more information to get your own e-commerce web store online in the next week.