Debugging the Umbraco Tag Cloud package
Donnerstag, 18. März 2010, Christoph Ertl

Debugging the Umbraco Tag Cloud package would be great. But it’s not possible and not necessary.
However, one thing is really helpful when having problems with the counted nodes. Checking which nodes are counted.

Over time I’ve got repeated mails regarding having problems with counting the nodes. The problem often was a wrong or misunderstood result of the xpath expression. The “problem” with the RenderTags method is, that it just returns a result and you have no glue which nodes where counted.

A very easy way to check if your statements counts the nodes you want to count is the following.

After your code for the cloud

<xsl:value-of
select="TagCloud.Helper:RenderTags($currentPage/..., 'categories', '', 6)"
disable-output-escaping="yes" />

you place a for-each with the xpath statement you pass as first parameter to RenderTags.

<xsl:for-each select="$currentPage/...">
<xsl:value-of select="current()/@nodeName"/><br/>
</xsl:for-each>

With this code you get a list of nodes which are calculated within the tag cloud calculator. There you should see where the problem is located.

ATTENTION: It is very important that you place this code at the same template where the tag cloud code is placed because the result depends on the node this template is executed on. It’s all about the hierarchy of your nodes!

Umbraco, XSLT Comments

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Keyboard layout - again
Sonntag, 14. März 2010, Christoph Ertl

It seems that keyboard layouts are my new favorite topic. Well, it’s really annoying when working with notebooks and searching for keys or pressing some weird combinations because of different positions of keys.

A few days ago I had to work with a notebook with another strange keyboard layout. As I realized afterwards it’s not that unusual on notebooks.

The annoying point about the layout was the position of the Fn key. I’m used to open the Windows menu using the shortcut Strg-Esc (Ctrl-Esc). On the notebook the most left key was the Fn key instead of the expected Ctrl key. Pressing the Fn key is usually not such a problem. But have a look at the Esc key.

So guess what. I shutted down the notebook more than once.

Keybaord layout Comments

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Autohotkey key remapping
Samstag, 06. Februar 2010, Christoph Ertl

In my last post I used SharpKeys to remap the keyboard layout because of my intensive use of home and end keys. Great deal. Works really fine.
But this solution has one major drawback. At the office I use an external keyboard. In this case I have the inverse of the annoying keyboard layout.

Changing the keyboard mapping to the current situation with SharpKeys is not a solution as the steps would be

Start SharpKeys
Enter/Remove mapping 1
Enter/Remove mapping 2
Enter/Remove mapping 3
Enter/Remove mapping 4
Write to registry
Logout
Login

It’s takes time, is stupid work and is error prone.

So I started searching again and found the tool called AutoHotkey. This tool supports anything around keystrokes, running macros and many more. And it also provides key remapping. The first intention was to forget the solution with SharpKeys and use AutoHotkey instead. But it’s not that simple.

Pro SharpKeys:

The settings are written to the registry.
The application doesn’t have to run to get the mapping work.

Pro AutoHotkey:

Easy to change settings.

The double remapping solution

The solution that' fits best for me is as follows:

Using SharpKeys to remap the keyboard to work best with the keyboard of the notebook. Let’s call it “Device settings”.
This is the default setting of my device and no application is running to get this mapping done.
Using AutoHotkey to remap to original keys when using an external keyboard. Let’s call it “External settings”.
This mode needs an application to run. With external power supply and a very small footprint this is really no problem.

The Steps to switch to External settings or back to Device settings are: