My friend Matt Jones is one of the design leads on Dopplr, “an online tool for business travelers.” It’s a rather slick utility for anybody who does a lot of traveling and wants to share that information with others, connect up in various cities, track their travels, etc. That’s not all it does, but those are the very basics of it.

Anyway, Matt has an excited post out on their blog about some new features they just added – mainly the ability for you to not only send in your trip information via E-mail, SMS, or Twitter, but you can literally forward eTickets and various other itinerary confirmations from airlines and bookers straight to Dopplr, and have it enter all the trip info for you. Check out the slick video demonstration!

This is a huge ease-of-use improvement to their already great service, cutting down on double entry and making manual entry much easier. If you’re a reader of our site, or you use our tools, you’ll know we’re total geeks for streaming information into tools and using command-line interfaces. Nice job, fellas!

We use the Rails auto_complete plugin in both PingMe and Tempo, and while it’s incredibly handy, it takes a little bit of hacking to use it on a page where it will be used more than once. In the main time screen on Tempo any of the entries can be opened for editing, meaning more than one can be open at once, and each has its own auto complete field for tags:

Similarly in PingMe, we’ve got a list of pings on the screen, each a potential edit form (more than one can be edited at once), with auto complete on the tags field:

In this situation, when each form has the text_field_with_auto_complete in use, each has the same DOM ID: object_method, so ping_tags in PingMe and entry_tags in Tempo. Screwy things happen when you try to remotely update a DOM ID used more than once on a page, and those screwy things tend to change based on your browser, but basically the auto_complete plugin out-of-the-box will not work in this scenario.

We got around this by doing a bit of monkey patching to the auto complete plugin. This is what the initial text_field_with_auto_complete method looks like inside the plugin’s auto_complete_macros_helper.rb:

def text_field_with_auto_complete(object, method, tag_options = {}, completion_options = {})
    (completion_options[:skip_style] ? "" : auto_complete_stylesheet) +
    text_field(object, method, tag_options) +
    content_tag("div", "", :id => "#{object}_#{method}_auto_complete", :class => "auto_complete") +
    auto_complete_field("#{object}_#{method}", { :url => { :action => "auto_complete_for_#{object}_#{method}" } }.update(completion_options))
end

What we do is add an extra, optional parameter to this method that accepts an id, that we then patch in as the dom id we’ll use:

module AutoCompleteMacrosHelper
  def text_field_with_auto_complete(object, method, tag_options = {}, completion_options = {}, object_id = nil)
    field_id = (object_id.nil?) ? "#{object}_#{method}" : "#{object}_#{object_id}_#{method}"
    (completion_options[:skip_style] ? "" : auto_complete_stylesheet) +
    text_field(object, method, tag_options.merge({:id => field_id})) +
    content_tag("div", "", :id => "#{field_id}_auto_complete", :class => "auto_complete") +
    auto_complete_field(field_id, { :url => { :action => "auto_complete_for_#{object}_#{method}" } }.update(completion_options))
  end
end

Now, on the form/template itself, we use this to generate the text field and type ahead div (we’re using HAML, not RHTML):

= text_field_with_auto_complete :entry, :tag_s, {:size => 50}, { :indicator => "entry_#{entry.id}_tag_s_form_loader", :frequency => 0.4, :tokens => ' ' }, entry.id
= image_tag 'loading.gif', {:id => "entry_#{entry.id}_tag_s_form_loader", :style => 'display: none;'}
.auto_complete{:id => "entry_#{entry.id}_tag_s_auto_complete", :style => "display: none;"}

You’ll notice that each dom id is of the format entry_#id_tag_s_*.

In our controller, we have a few things that we need, nothing that complex:

auto_complete_for :entry, :tag_s

  def auto_complete_for_entry_tag_s
    unless params[:entry].nil? || params[:entry][:tag_s].blank?
      tags = @current_user.tags.collect{|tag| tag.name.downcase.index(params[:ping][:tag_s].downcase) == 0 ? tag.name : nil}.compact
      render :partial => 'autocomplete', :locals => { :items => tags }
    end
  end

Finally, we create a partial called ‘_autocomplete.haml’ that cranks through the items when the suggestions are displayed:

%ul.autocomplete_list
  - items.each do |item|
    %li.autocomplete_item= h item

Happily, this isn’t very different from the way the plugin recommends you do things, but allows you to support more than one field on the page at once when you have multiple instances of an object. I’m actually a bit surprised that there isn’t an inherent facility in the plugin for this, but it’s good learning for anyone looking to see how it’s done.

I should note that the above doesn’t denote how we really select out the set of tags for a user in Tempo, but it’s a simple example of how one might do it ;-)

With the new smart timers, I no longer need PingMe to remind me to sum up my time for the day. Thanks, old buddy!

(Although the street cleaning reminders are still pretty clutch…)

Git log commits remind me of summer afternoons. Like last week.

(Guess who hasn’t updated his time in a bit?)

((The new timer helps keep me straight nowadays!))

A very simple open-source support ticket system, transparently integrated with e-mail, that isn’t written in Python would be a fantastic thing to have and use.