Matt Pavey

I used Mapedit for the first time today. It's a very simple application but it saved me alot of time today when doing some HTML image mapping on a regional map of the United States earlier today. In the past I've always just opened my image file up in a standard image editor such as Paint or Photoshop and mapped out the coordinates manually and created the image map manually, which isn't that hard to do; however, in some cases if you have a complex area to map, such as a polygon, it can become very cumbersome to record all of the (x, y) coordinates efficiently and accurately.

 

Mapedit is a very simple interface that lets you open the image and map out multiple areas and generate the HTML code with little effort.

 

There have been a few times where I've had to to some tricks to keep a UI from looking "awkward" based on dynamically generated data. For example, if you have a left panel navigation area with a DropDownList in it and the data for the drop down is dynamically generated from records in a database then you probably have encountered issues with the DropDownList automatically resizing itself to account for longer data.

 

One simple fix is to limit the number of characters a user is able to enter for those fields you display in a drop down list; however, that usually isn't practical.

 

Another solution is to simply hard code the width of the drop down list to a specific size. In this case if you have a value that is longer than the size of the drop down you basically just can't see the entire value. Depending on the client this may or may not be ok.

 

Yet another solution would be to find the maximum size that you want to display in the drop down list, and if any values exceed that number, remove those characters and replace with a "...". Again, this is a preference thing and the client may not like the way certain values end up looking.

 

I've got a few situations where using a DIV and some style properties allowed me to keep a DropDownList at a specific width, so it never exceeds the size of the left panel even if there are extremely long values entered; however, upon clicking the drop down list it extends appropriately to show the entire size of the drop down list.

Here's an example of what the code looks like for my particular example:

 

 

Enjoy!