Re: Popup Calendar - Show and Tell

[Nathan Andelin <nandelin@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Over time, I've had different thoughts about popup calendars.  A couple 
years ago I wrote an RPG program that generated date-picker HTML and 
used ADDDUR and SUBDUR op codes to increment and decrement month and 
year.  Each time a user selected a different month or year, the browser 
sent and the server processed another request, and downloaded the new 
HTML.  It worked fine, but generated quite a bit of server I/O and HTML 
streams - not great for constrained bandwidth.

Then I learned about AJAX and considered modifying the RPG program to 
download a more streamlined response instead of an entire page refresh. 
And that's what I think I'll do at some point, when the content on the 
calendar needs to be database driven.  For example, certain dates may 
not be available, or I might want to expand the calendar to include 
appointments.

But for now, it's just a simple date picker.  Some of the basic features 
I wanted were the ability to drag the inline frame around the screen and 
reposition it, and to show the input field label in the title area of 
the popup (when selecting the date sometimes you forget which input 
element you're changing), and to have the calendar to expand or shrink 
according to the size of the inline frame, and to have a dropdown list 
to select a particular month, and a few other things.

At least I understand the code now.  Actually the code for handling the 
drag and drop effect is something I found on the Web and written by a 
guy named Matt Kruse - a better Javascript programmer than me.

Nathan.