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Convert string or int to enum

Enum's a great, but you may be wondering how you can turn an integer or string value into the corresponding enum. For example you may have an api that's being sent XML or JSON, and then you need to turn one of the values within that into an enum to set on an object in your code.

Well it's very simple. If you have a string do this:

1YourEnum foo = (YourEnum) Enum.Parse(typeof(YourEnum), yourString);

or if you have an int do this (you could also just do the first example with a ToString() on the end.

1YourEnum foo = (YourEnum)yourInt;

HTML5 Series - Forms

Forms haven't really changed in functionality since they were first invented, but with HTML5 the browser is going to add a lot of the functionality you've previously been hand coding through JavaScript/jQuery.

HTML5 now supports things like setting a field to be required or adding some html text that disappears when you click in the field. Some of the new tags include:

  • required - Determines if the field must be filled in
  • placeholder - Text to be displayed before the user enters a value
  • autofocus - Default the curser to the field with this set
  • pattern - A regex expression to validate the field
  • min / max - Specify the min and max values that can be entered

For more visit the HTML5 form attributes page on W3Schools

There are also new input types that will restrict the data that can be entered and the way the field is rendered such as:

  • colour
  • date
  • datetime
  • email
  • month
  • number
  • range
  • search
  • tel
  • time
  • url
  • week

For more view is the HTML5 form input types page on W3Schools

HTML5 Series - Semantic Tags

Before HTML5 the HTML for your page's layout was probably primarily made up of a lot of div tags with id's a class's to give them a visual structure and layout. It might look something like this...

1<div id="header">My Site Name</div>
2<div id="content">Bla bla bla site content......</div>
3<div id="footer">Privacy policy, copywrite info etc</div>

This though has 2 problems. Firstly it's not great for computers like search engines or screen readers to understand as everything is a div. There is extra code you can add to improve on this (have a look at Scheme.org). Secondly your code isn't very, again because everything is a div.

HTML5 however introduces new semantic tags like <header>and
<footer> to make your data more structured. So the above example would become...

1<header>My Site Name</header>
2<article>Bla bla bla site content......</article>
3<footer>Privacy policy, copywrite info etc</footer>

Other tags are as follows:

Tag Description

<article> For external content, like text from a news-article, blog, forum, or any other content from an external source

<aside> For content aside from the content it is placed in. The aside content should be related to the surrounding content

<details> For describing details about a document, or parts of a document

<summary> A caption, or summary, inside the details element

<figure> For grouping a section of stand-alone content, could be a video

<figcaption> The caption of the figure section

<footer> For a footer of a document or section, could include the name of the author, the date of the document, contact information, or copyright information

<header> For an introduction of a document or section, could include navigation

<hgroup> For a section of headings, using

<h1> to <h6>, where the largest is the main heading of the section, and the others are sub-headings

<mark> For text that should be highlighted

<meter> For a measurement, used only if the maximum and minimum values are known

<nav> For a section of navigation

<progress> The state of a work in progress

<section> For a section in a document. Such as chapters, headers, footers, or any other sections of the document

<time> For defining a time or a date, or both

URL parameters with Javascript

So this took me by surprise the other day. JavaScript doesn't have a function to retrieve a URL parameter value. i.e. There is no Request.Querystring command! Of course it wouldn't start Request as it's executing on the browser rather than the server but you would have thought there would be a built in command to do it.

After a bit of searching though I came across this script that does it:

1// Read a page's GET URL variables and return them as an associative array.
2function getUrlVars()
3{
4  var vars = [], hash;
5  var hashes = window.location.href.slice(window.location.href.indexOf('?') + 1).split('&amp;amp;');
6  for(var i = 0; i &amp;lt; hashes.length; i++)
7  {
8      hash = hashes[i].split('=');
9      vars.push(hash[0]);
10      vars[hash[0]] = hash[1];
11  }
12  return vars;
13}

The function returns an array/object containing the parameters and their values. e.g. The following URL:

http://www.example.com/?Name=Tim&Sex=Male

Would return:

1{
2    "Name": "Tim",
3    "Sex": "Male"
4}

To use it in your code you would write

1var name = getUrlVars()["Name"];

And that's it