If you recall my article from a few days ago, you’ll know I’m working on an EVE TIA app in my spare time. The first public fruits of this labour have just gone online in the shape of a simple shopping list application over at http://bit.ly/4f3soi (if you don’t know anything about EVE try searching for tritanium)
I thought I’d take a little time to describe how it all works. The initial page load brings in all the base HTML + javascript needed for the app, and as people search for items calls are made back to the MVC app through JQuery to retrieve results as JSON objects. Selected results are then rendered into HTML in JS and slipped into the DOM via JQuery. Once the user has built up a sizeable list they can generate a link to serialize the list into a query string that looks a bit like:
?id=34:10000000:2.73!17636:1:1000000000!2420:5:100000
This contains all the item ids, quantities and unit prices entered, and obviously can grow to some considerable length for large lists. Therefore I feed this URL through the Bit.ly JS library to produce a nice neat little link like :
http://bit.ly/1lYZjB
Only took a couple of evenings to put it all together (although don’t look at my JS, it’s stinky). My experience of building it has shown me I need to learn a lot more about javascript, that JQuery is a MUST for all serious web development, and I need to find some kind of databinding layer for JS (Caliburn has spoilt me in the WPF ecosystem).
EDIT : whoops – broke the list link by changing domain names, put a redirect on the main link but not the list : http://bit.ly/2WFvfc