Friday, beautiful Friday.

• Mozilla Raindrop – As with Google Wave, this “exploration in messaging innovation” may be a solution in source of a problem, but I’ll probably give it a try when it’s somewhat less alpha.
• Rails 2.3.4 and SWFUpload – Rack Middleware for Flash Uploads that Degrade Gracefully – An updated solution for one of the peskiest Rails UI issues.

The last couple of days have been a lesson in why I don’t like doing Enterprisey XML stuff.

• swfupload_fu – Plugin for easy integration of swfupload with Rails.
• Swirrl – New online service for storing any sort of freeform data.
• GitX 0.7 – New release of this OS X git GUI.

This error is to do with the maximum file upload size allowed by ASP as global setting. By default the max size is set to 200KB.

To change this setting you need to edit the MetaBase.xml file located under c:\windows\system32\inetsrv\

1. Stop IIS
2. Open c:\windows\system32\inetsrv\MetaBase.xml
3. Search for “AspMaxRequestEntityAllowed”
4. Change the value to 1073741824 (one gigabyte) or some other maximum value that’s valid for your setup
5. Save and close the file
6. Start IIS

The universe seems to be telling me to shift more towards sales and PM. I’m not sure I want to take the hint.

SWFUpload is a very handy tool, if you had to upload multiple files. More info on SWFUpload and implementation details can be found at http://www.swfupload.org/

With SWFUPload once the file is uploaded there is no actual implementation (i have come across ) to delete file once uploaded. I have implemented this using asp.net, but it wont be hard to convert that to different web technologies. In this implementation i have used jquery (http://jquery.com/) to handle delete file-function.

Some of the files are modified  for demostration purpose. You can enhance it accordingly. In this example i havn’t created any custom control to keep things simple, but there are many implementation of SWFUPload as asp.net custom control.

(fileprogress.js)

The logic is quite simple to delete the files. Once the files are uploaded setComplete function is invoked & in that, we will need to attach a DIV & an anchor tag for delete link.

(deletefile.ashx)

Attached are all the zip files created in VS.NET 2008.

• Handler.ashx is for uploading & checking if file exists
• deletefile.ashx for file deletion
• fileprogress.js modified for attaching deletion event
• handlers.js modifed for checking server response on file exists
• swfupload.js modified (FILE_ALREADY_EXISTS             : 300)
• swfupload.queue.js  not modified.

(default.aspx)

Download source code here

Have you ever been to sites that don’t have a progress bar when you upload a large file? It’s very frustrating not knowing the upload progress of large files. Many just think the download has hung up and quits the site.

As a consequence I’ve been trying to implement a progress bar for uploading large images. After Googling around I came upon SWFUpload. It’s a hybrid  Flash/Javascript library that handles file uploads and of course it can display a progress bar. Implementing it is more difficult than I thought.

The problem is that you can’t just copy and paste SWFUpload code into your application. Proper implementation requires knowledge of Javascript and my knowledge of it barely scratches the surface!

I think I’m making progress – I’ll make a post once about this topic again when I successfully implement it.