D
Dan
Hi all, I'm experimenting with some web apps with asp.net and I'd like to
ask what could be the best approach to perform some admittedly odd tasks: I
have a .net class library which is used to ease the input of special texts
for non-Latin alphabets with all the diacritics required. This library is a
generic tool which relies on its knowledge of the writing system, so that
e.g. I can ask it "take the letter a and add it a grave accent" to get back
the character "à", and so forth for any combination of diacritics (add,
remove, replace, etc.). The class does not necessarily operate with Unicode
characters as this is a requirement (it must be able to do the same things
also with arbitrarily encoded fonts).
Given this class, I can easily build a (non-asp) .net form which uses it to
let the user input texts with diacritics: e.g. I can trap the keyboard
messages to let some keys combinations work as commands which add or remove
diacritics, and/or add some buttons which do the same (e.g. a button to add
or remove an acute accent, one to add or remove a grave accent, and so
forth). Another requirement for such input forms is that diacritics must be
typed *after* the letter (in other terms, the typed character before the
cursor must be converted into something different: e.g. first type "a" and
then add it a grave accent, which means replacing the typed "a" with "à"),
so that I cannot just create a customized keyboard ime, also because the
text encoding cannot be limited to Unicode, and I need a
platform-independent component.
A such form works fine in a .net application, my question is: would it be
possible to transfer a similar functionality into asp.net? I should create a
web form to input such texts with all the facilities for combining letters
and diacritics in a totally platform-independent way, so the client should
rely on the class library located on the server. Anyway this means I'll have
to perform a roundtrip whenever the user wants to modified a typed character
to add or remove diacritic(s) to it: e.g. I type "a" and then click on a
button which passes the character before the cursor ("a") to the server
together with the request to add a grave accent to it to get back "à", which
must be replaced to the original text. Of course this does not sound not
very practical as it requires a roundtrip for each character modification,
and even with this approach I'd probably have some implementation problems
(e.g. how to get cursor position for a textarea server control? and would it
be possible to trap keys combinations?). Afaik, I cannot think of any other
way of doing such things with asp.net given that the text-processing
functionality must reside on the server side to ensure platform independency
and avoid any installation by web clients. Could anyone give me any hint
about this? Is there any technique somewhat related to asp.net I could think
of for helping solve such a problem, or should I stick with
platform-dependent solutions on the client side?
Thanks in advance!
ask what could be the best approach to perform some admittedly odd tasks: I
have a .net class library which is used to ease the input of special texts
for non-Latin alphabets with all the diacritics required. This library is a
generic tool which relies on its knowledge of the writing system, so that
e.g. I can ask it "take the letter a and add it a grave accent" to get back
the character "à", and so forth for any combination of diacritics (add,
remove, replace, etc.). The class does not necessarily operate with Unicode
characters as this is a requirement (it must be able to do the same things
also with arbitrarily encoded fonts).
Given this class, I can easily build a (non-asp) .net form which uses it to
let the user input texts with diacritics: e.g. I can trap the keyboard
messages to let some keys combinations work as commands which add or remove
diacritics, and/or add some buttons which do the same (e.g. a button to add
or remove an acute accent, one to add or remove a grave accent, and so
forth). Another requirement for such input forms is that diacritics must be
typed *after* the letter (in other terms, the typed character before the
cursor must be converted into something different: e.g. first type "a" and
then add it a grave accent, which means replacing the typed "a" with "à"),
so that I cannot just create a customized keyboard ime, also because the
text encoding cannot be limited to Unicode, and I need a
platform-independent component.
A such form works fine in a .net application, my question is: would it be
possible to transfer a similar functionality into asp.net? I should create a
web form to input such texts with all the facilities for combining letters
and diacritics in a totally platform-independent way, so the client should
rely on the class library located on the server. Anyway this means I'll have
to perform a roundtrip whenever the user wants to modified a typed character
to add or remove diacritic(s) to it: e.g. I type "a" and then click on a
button which passes the character before the cursor ("a") to the server
together with the request to add a grave accent to it to get back "à", which
must be replaced to the original text. Of course this does not sound not
very practical as it requires a roundtrip for each character modification,
and even with this approach I'd probably have some implementation problems
(e.g. how to get cursor position for a textarea server control? and would it
be possible to trap keys combinations?). Afaik, I cannot think of any other
way of doing such things with asp.net given that the text-processing
functionality must reside on the server side to ensure platform independency
and avoid any installation by web clients. Could anyone give me any hint
about this? Is there any technique somewhat related to asp.net I could think
of for helping solve such a problem, or should I stick with
platform-dependent solutions on the client side?
Thanks in advance!