Re: Popup Calendar - Show and Tell

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.