Matthew Decker of Wayne State University has taken the time to rewrite some of the code for the Assignment Calculator in order to make it easier to install for everyone. We have now replaced the old versions of the AC downloads with Matt's new versions.
The biggest change in Matt's new versions is that he changed the appropriate variables througout the code to specifically pull from GET or POST allowing global variables to be off. This was a common problem caused by the fact that the original AC was written with global variables turned on. Many institutions install PHP without global variables turned on for security reasons. The U of M Libraries was not one of those institutions!
So, a special thanks to Matt Decker for reworking and improving the code for all! Thanks a million Matt!
Thanks to RIT for making some improvements to the code. We've added it to the Open Source distributed on this site.
Here's a message from Jon Jiras explaining more:
"Our web master Patrick Haney (pwhwml@rit.edu) rewrote the utils.js file
the Univeristy of Minnesota uses for date validation on the assignment
calculator. I think he improved it considerably. Feel free to use it
and/or incorporate it into the general distrubution of the assignement
calculator.
Instead of complaining to the user that they entered a month or date
with a leading zero, Patrick's script simply removes the leading zero
and continues normally. It allows users to enter leading zeros (or not)
-- whichever they prefer -- without poping up an error message. In
addition, it still does not allow the user to enter invalid months,
dates greater then the number of days in the specified month, or alpha
characters. And it gives much more descriptive error messages whenever
one of these events happens.
Thanks for a great program! It's getting rave reviews here. We'll
probably add the email features soon.
Jon Jiras
Library Software Specialist
Wallace Library
Rochester Institute of Technology
Rochester, NY 14623
585-475-7737
jjjwml@rit.edu