When viewing a completed Project’s tasks, although the amount of recorded time was being displayed correctly, the list was missing the first task. Also, when sorting the list by clicking any of the column headings, the wrong template was being served.

These bugs have now been squashed.

If you are experiencing problems accessing your data following this weekend’s minor system tweaks ( for example, you are seeing a message along the lines of ‘You have no open projects listed in the database‘ ) please do the following:

• Log out of adderuppa
• Delete any cookies relating to adderuppa.com or timer.adderuppa.com
• Log in as normal

This should fix the issue.

This was the problem:

I was storing an array in a cookie using php’s serialize() function then retrieving it by using the unserialize() function. Simple enough, and it was working perfectly on my local development machine.

However, although the string seemed, on the face of it, to be being stored without a problem on the live server, the unserialize() function was not returning an array. In fact, it was not returning anything.

The reason, as ever in these kinds of hair-pulling situations, was a simple one. magic_quotes_gpc was set to on on the live server, meaning that quotes were being escaped, meaning that unserialize() went bang.

The solution:

function RetrieveCookieArray($cookie) {
return get_magic_quotes_gpc() ? unserialize(stripslashes($cookie)) :
unserialize($cookie);
}

Adderuppa now remembers your list ordering, and section viewing preferences.

This is done automatically, you do not need to create these settings. Every time you order a list by one of the available headings, or show or hide a page section, the page will be displayed in exactly the same formation the next time you view it. These settings are remembered from session to session.

Thanks to Web Sight for the suggestion.

When IE7 first appeared I downloaded it to run some tests, but noticed some odd and very annoying behaviour in my old version of Dreamweaver MX6 immediately after installing it, javascript errors being reported at every turn. Not having the time to investigate properly, and reading that IE7 was causing all sorts of problems at the time, I uninstalled it and the Dreamweaver problems vanished.

Recently, however, I needed to download it again to check some sites, and again, the old errors returned immediately. They were varied, but the most persistent was :

While executing Browse_Back enabled in toolbars.xml, a javascript error occurred.

As before, I couldn’t find much reference to the problem, but then stumbled upon this page, which links to this help file on Adobe’s site, which blames a .dll that Dreamweaver and IE7 share. The help file is for a different, but similar problem, but following the instructions solved my particular problem too.

One of the changes made during the latest user interface upgrade was to substitute a clicked form button for an animated gif, to indicate that something was going on behind the scenes. This had a few knock-on effects, the most annoying of which was a persistent javascript error, ‘document.FORM_NAME has no properties‘, when trying to submit the form using form.submit(), or read a form’s contents with javascript.

After the usual round of hair-pulling, I realised that the problem was down to the fact that I had been defining the button as an input type. Using an image instead, and triggering the submit via an onclick() event removed the problem.

Most of the time.

For some reason, sometimes, submitting a form using document.FORM_NAME.submit() triggered the same error. Using document.forms.FORM_NAME.submit() did the trick.

While working through the system during the latest User Interface overhaul a few bugs were noticed and squashed. These include :

• Project task list styling was breaking when sorting by recorded time
• Task edit - changes to Client dropdown were not being recorded
• Project start date was not being recorded when adding a new project

More User Interface updates were uploaded over the weekend. Aside from a number of minor cosmetic changes to styling, there are two key changes to the layout and how the system registers interaction.

All functional links have now been moved to the far right of the page to keep them in one place for ease of navigation. This includes the expand / collapse buttons, which have been replaced with simple blue text links, in keeping with the other action links.

Also, an animated gif now appears whenever links or buttons that activate a change in a page’s content are clicked. This has the benefit of showing that something is happening, useful when the service is being accessed via a slow connection.

Every now and then you need to record blocks of time that you haven’t been able to time with the timer, such as meeting a client on the golf course, or staring at the car in front while stuck in a jam on the way to missing the meeting.

Previously, you had to assign a task to a project, start the timer then stop it, then edit the timed events to reflect the time spent watering at the 19th hole. Now, these miscellaneous events have a section all to themselves, making the whole process of recording them many times simpler.

Thanks to leap media for the suggestion.

I will be uploading some further changes to the user interface this weekend ( 21st and 22nd June ), and will need to prevent access to the site while testing. Interruptions will be kept to a minimum, but may be spread across both days for short periods at a time.