Chris Halverson’s Blog

Update: This has been solved. For some reason 18 months ago I couldn’t find anybody to do this. I searched high and low for a couple of days. Now I put it up on my blog and 2 hours later have a solution. You guys rock. Anyway, the quest has been solved, no more reward is available. You can, however, work on it to make it better, but it’s on your own dime Thanks go to Brian at The Virtual Nuts!

There’s a little money available here, read on for more information. All you JavaScript or web developers may be interested. Plus you didn’t want to do anything like play poker or anything anyway, right? I promise, real post coming this weekend.

While I’m a decent Java programmer, my JavaScript, and in particular DOM manipulation, skills are a bit lacking. I have written a Java servlet based timecard application for my work. I added some JavaScript voodoo to handle automatically changing some SELECT boxes. I basically copied the functionality from other sites, so I’m not even totally sure how it works.

Sample Page

Yes, it looks like crap, but I’m not going to bother with the stylesheet. Don’t bug me about layout unless you can make this type of thing “work” better by changing it. Nobody has any problems with the layout, so that is the lowest priority.

Here’s my dilema: I want to have a button beside each row that allows the user to copy the row’s content to another new table row. The new row would need to be appended to the table and have a new “id” number associated with each form element. I need the content to be dynamic again, just in case they’re dumb (not a stretch) and decide that copying isn’t really what they wanted. Obviously the user will want to change some things such as the date, but in general it’s to help the people who have a pretty straightforward timecard.

If you think you can make this work, please get me a working copy. Note that some of the stuff will continue to by “hardcoded” into the JS code because it’s used in multiple places. I don’t want or need AJAX to look up projects, there’s already things I do for that. I have marked these variables in the source. I just want the ability to copy a row keeping values intact. I may be interested in an AJAX “delete row” function though, but I can probably get that to work (plus there’s no corresponding “delete line item” method yet).

I’ve left everything in there as it is generated by the servlet. That means there’s technically a lot of extra stuff that kind of is in the way but that way you can also look at optimization issues and you can see what the whole page is really like.

The “Add row” is new, but seems to be working in testing. That particular button may be moved when it’s pushed into production. I’m not sure using the “innerHTML” is the right thing to do, but it works. If you have a better way, please let me know.

If you can get me a working version, I’ll pay you $50. I know this isn’t much based on freelance wages, but since I don’t really need this functionality, and since I’m basically funding it myself, it’s all I’m willing to pay. Plus, if somebody really knows what they’re doing, it shouldn’t take too long (assuming it’s possible). If, however, you can streamline things and make it quicker and more robust, I will pay up to $100 at my discretion. This is open to anybody who reads this blog. If you know somebody who may be able to do this, send it to them. I don’t care who it is that can make this work.

Using freely available JavaScript toolkits is fine, but they must work in a Java servlet environment (I’m using straight servlets, not Struts, Spring or anything). The application also must work with Firefox and Internet Explorer. If it doesn’t work with one of them, it’s no good to me.

Each row must have a unique “id” embedded in it, you’ll see what I mean if you look at the source. I need this to keep the various parts of the entry bundled together. Don’t give me a new row without it.

No payment if you cannot get it to work, I don’t care how much time you spent on it trying to get it to work. Also, the original functionality must still work in the same manner (ie. the correct boxes get selected).

All of the work will be owned by my company. You will be doing this as if you were a contractor. You will NOT retain any rights whatsoever to the code.

If you have any questions, feel free to email or IM me, or leave a comment (but then check back).

All decisions are final and made exclusively by me.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 15th, 2005 at 11:39 am and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.