jscalendar release notes

This release compiled at Monday, 7 Mar 2005 (19:06).

1.0

• Added support for multiple dates selection. In this mode the calendar will allow the user to select more than one date, and will maintain an array of selected dates that can be investigated from your custom handlers. Sample in multiple-dates.html.
• Support for “day info”. Using this feature you can display custom information for certain dates. Sample in dayinfo.html. Note that if the text is really big the calendar layout might appear somehow broken; this is something that should be easy to fix in the CSS file.
• Clicking on “Today” will now close the calendar if the current date is already selected.
• The “first day of week” setting can now be defined in the language file--after all, it is locale-specific. The new parameter is “Calendar._FD”. Language files should be updated, but the calendar will not complain nor fail to function if the parameter is not present.
• Some fixes to make the thing work in Safari. It now seems to be properly supported, please let me know if you encounter any problems.
• New skin: Aqua theme, appropriate for MacOSX fan sites :-) This theme is located in “skins/aqua/theme.css” (in the future, all themes will go to this directory).
• Bug fixes.
  • Keyboard operation now functions normally when the calendar is displaying days from adjacent months; it might even work correctly for months containing disabled dates :). This fix was originally developed under contract for The Zapatec Calendar. Zapatec kindly allowed us to include the bugfixes back in the open source calendar.
  • Fixed the time selection bug: the previous version would reset the time to current time when a new date was clicked.
  • Parsing hours like "12:XX pm" would wrongfully replace "pm" with "am"--fixed.
  • Fixed critical bugs in parseDate function that would initialize the calendar with 'NaN' values in all cells if the string to be parsed is not a valid date.
  • The golbal variable that we are using was renamed to “_dynarch_popupCalendar” to minimize the risk of name clashes. It's still difficult to get rid of it.
  • Added z-index property to drop-down menus style.
  • The calendar will update an input field even in flat mode, if an input field was passed. Also, the “showOthers” parameter will be effective in both popup and flat mode.
  • Others, probably.
• Documentation & sample files updated.

0.9.6

• "Smart" (TM :-) positioning algorithm. The new algorithm will try to keep the calendar in the browser view, which is helpful in situations when the input field is near the bottom or the right edge. This code is only tested with IE and Mozilla, but it should work with other browsers too. Many thanks to Sunny Chowdhury for sponsoring this feature!
• Support for IE5/Win is back. I also want to thank Janusz Piwowarski for keeping his eye on the CVS ;-) He reviewed my IE5-related changes and sent me a much cleaner patch.
• The calendar will now allow any day of week to be "the first day of week". This was requested long time ago, by someone whose name I forgot (sorry). The reason was that in certain countries weeks start on Saturday. So I thought that instead of having a "mondayFirst" and a "saturdayFirst" parameter, :-), it's better to have a "firstDayOfWeek" parameter; now it's present and its meaning is: "0 for Sunday", "1 for Monday", "2 for Tuesday", etc. The equivalent parameter for Calendar.setup is "firstDay". The end user can also change it very easy: click on the day name in the calendar display.
• The above feature triggered one important change: the notion of "weekend" is now defined in the language file. Added parameters:

            Calendar._TT["WEEKEND"] = "0,6";
            Calendar._TT["DAY_FIRST"] = "Display %s first";

  "WEEKEND" specifies a string with comma-separated numbers from 0 to 7; they define what days are marked as "weekend". 5 and 6 mean, of course, "Sunday" and "Saturday". Day first is the tooltip displayed when a day name is hovered; "%s" will get replaced with the day name. Updated languages are "en" and "ro", which I maintain. Please note that languages wich are not updated will not work. If yours is one of them, please consider fixing it and sending me the fix so that I can include it in the distro.
• The calendar can now display days from the months adjacent to the currently displayed one. This is optional, of course, and the parameter name is "showsOtherMonths" (or "showOthers" in Calendar.setup). All theme files were updated.
• Displays "Time:" near the time selector, only if defined in the language file.
• Some bugs fixed in the date parsing code (which has also been rewritten a little bit cleaner).
• Calendar.setup will now configure the calendar to trigger the input fields' "onchange" event, if specified, when a date is selected.
• New parameter in Calendar.setup: "cache" (defaults to false). If set to true then the popup calendar object will be "cached", meaning, it will be created only once, no matter how many input fields are there in the page. Sometimes this is not desirable, which is why I've added this parameter. Please note that it defaults to "false" (thus the default behavior has changed).
• Added a simple PHP wrapper. It provides code which loads all the required scripts and theme file, and one function which creates and configures an input field for date input. It takes care of creating and assigning unique ID-s for the calendar fields and it also creates the "Calendar.setup" code. Functions to create more specialized fields can be added very easily. This feature was requested by the FreeMED.org project (thanks for donating!).

Wow, there were quite some changes :-D Enjoy it!

0.9.5

This release's primary goal is to fix a wrong license statement which can be found in some files from 0.9.4. For instance in README or calendar.js, the statement was that the code is distributed under the GNU GPL; that's because I had plans to change the license, then changed my mind but unfortunately I committed files so. I am sorry for this inconvenience, please use the latest (0.9.5) release which is fully covered by LGPL.

Other changes:

• Fixed an annoying bug that prevented the calendar to display correctly when it was configured for an input field inside a scrolling area. Many thanks to Ian Barrack (Simban.com) who pointed it up and donated quite some money for the Calendar project!
• All examples use UTF-8 now; the translations may not be all up-to-date, but I strongly suggest everyone to use UTF-8; other encodings are a plain mess. So far I know for sure that Romanian translation will work with UTF-8 and not anymore with ISO-8859-2. Other translations are probably usable under UTF-8, but if your preferred language isn't... ;-) please make it and send it to me for inclusion.
• Fixed small bug in the documentation (one footnote didn't appear where it should have).
• Updated translations: DE, ES, HU, IT, RO. Thanks to everyone who sent translations!

0.9.4

New stuff

• Supports time selection. Yes. ;-) This work has been largely sponsored by Himanshukumar Shah (thank you!). See the docs and example files for details on how to setup.
• Easy to link 2 or more fields by using the new onUpdate parameter of Calendar.setup. This is useful, say, to automatically set a value in a second field based on the value selected in the first field. See the documentation and first sample in simple-1.html.
• Other Calendar.setup low-level parameters, for those wanting to have the complete control: onSelect and onClose. The handlers are called when something is selected in the calendar or when the calendar is closed.
• The translation files can optionally include the short day names and the short month names. That's because in some languages, like German, the short form is not the first 3 letters of the entire name but only the first 2. Also in other languages short names can't be as easily derived from the full name by just calling substr, so this patch solves the problem.
• Implemented a nice way to make some dates "special" (look different). Specifically, the setDisabledHandler method was replaced with the more general setDateStatusHandler method (the old one is still available for backwards compatibility but will be removed). More details about this in the documentation. Also see simple-3.html for a live sample.
• Date parsing and formatting engine is now rewritten and supports a subset of strftime format specifiers from ANSI C. This makes it possible to use dates like "YYYYMMDD" (the corresponding format for this would be "%Y%m%d"). Details in the documentation. Please note that the new engine is not compatibile with older calendar releases!
• Along with the new date parser I workarounded an unpleasant crash that occurred in IE when certain accented characters appeared in the texts. I think German was one of the language with such problems, and the workaround was to use the letter without an accent. Well, now you can translate to whatever you want.
• "Fixes" (I mean, "horrible workarounds") for Konqueror (and hopefully Safari). Unfortunately, this otherwise excellent browser still has some bugs that keep the calendar from working exactly as it should.. But they're going to be fixed, right? ;-)
• CSS themes got pretty much modified too so if you wrote your theme you need to update it. Aside for the time selector support, the CSS themes contain a simple hack that makes the navigation buttons show a little arrow in the lower-right corner which indicates that if one holds the mouse a menu will appear.

Translation files

The translation files need to be updated in order for the calendar to work properly. Currently the only updated files are calendar-en.js (main file) and calendar-ro.js (well, yes, I am a Romanian ;-).

Specifically, they need the following:

• Correct date format, according with the new format specifiers introduced in 0.9.4. Details about the available format specifiers in the documentation
• Short day or month names, if required. If they can be derived by taking the first N letters of the full name then a simple Calendar._SDN_len = N or Calendar._SMN_len = N will suffice. If N is 3 then nothing needs to be done as we take it for granted if no other option is offered ;-)
• We have some new texts that shows short usage information as well as copyright information.

If your favorite language is not there yet, or it is but not updated according to the main calendar-en.js file, then please consider translating calendar-en.js and send the translation back to me so that I include it in the official distribution.

Bug status

Check SourceForge, I didn't keep track. However, there were a lot of bugfixes.

0.9.3

New stuff

• Opera 7 compatibility — keyboard navigation is still not available; text selection can't be disabled, leading to an ugly effect when walking through the month/year menus.
• Ability to align the calendar relative to the input field (or any other element). Vertical: top, center, bottom. Horizontal: left, center, right. This is established as a new parameter for showAtElement.
• Added dateClicked property (boolean). This can be inspected in the "onSelect" handler to determine if a date was really clicked or the user only changed month/year using the menus. You need to check this for "single-click" calendars and only close/hide the calendar if it's true.
• Full documentation in HTML and PDF format is now available in the distribution archive.
• New language definition files: HU, HR, PT, ZH. Thanks those who submitted!

Bug status

This covers only those bugs that have been reported at SourceForge.

1. #703,238 — fixed
2. #703,814 — fixed
3. #716,777 — closed (was fixed already in 0.9.2-1)
4. #723,335 — fixed
5. #715,122 — feature request; implemented.
6. #721,206 — fixed (added "refresh()" function)
7. #721,833 — fixed (bug concerning the "yy" format parsing)
8. #721,833 — won't fix (we won't set the time to midnight; time might actually be useful when we implement support for time selection).