Wherein ‘element’ is the html you wish to insert and ‘value’ is what the associated weight of the element I’m inserting. For now it compares the weight value to the DOM text within the other children.

$.fn.insertSort = function(element, value) {
  selector = this;
  if ($(selector).length > 0) {
    $(selector).attr("inserted", "false");
    $(selector).children().each(function() {
      if (parseInt($(this).text()) > parseInt(value)) {
        $(this).before(element);
        $(selector).attr("inserted", "true");
        return false;
      }
    });
    if ($(selector).attr("inserted") == "false") {
      $(selector).append(element);
    }
  } else {
    $(selector).append(element);
  }
  $(selector).removeAttr("inserted");
};

It should be noted that this is an insertion sort. It’d be good to extend the plugin to be able to sort an existing piece of html for any parent/child relationship. Possibly with the ability to specify a particular level of depth?

So for a given country (and that country’s ID or country code) you might want to find all the regions in that country. Which are usually used to populate a dropdown menu on the address selection pages or shipping tax pages.

$collection = Mage::getModel('directory/region')->getResourceCollection()
->addCountryFilter($this->getCountryId())
->load();

It’s great when ORM works for a developer. The problem with Magento I find is the complete lack of documentation. I only discovered the above technique after 20 minutes of grepping the app/code/core directory…

And remember to use Magento’s log method:

foreach($collection as $region) {

Mage::log(print_r($region, true));

}

Note some of the more useful attributes of that $region object are:

• $region->default_name
• $region->code

Which give responses along the lines of South Australia and SA, respectively.

To check the details we required the student’s surname and access to the University of Melbourne email directory. Not terribly difficult but it did require those selling the keys to open a bookmarked page, enter the surname, browse the search results.

In order to improve accountability and the tracking of the purchases I decided to develop the website to allow the sellers (i.e. the users of the system) to more effectively manage the selling of keys to students. This improved management would hopefully:

• Stop students from purchasing multiple keys wherein not entitled.
• Make sure only eligible students were purchasing keys.

The first problem was easily solved by uniquely identifying the students and using the database. I won’t go into how this was solved as it is fairly trivial. The cool part was the checking of student’s eligibility for the keys.

Students are only eligible if they are enrolled in certain courses (Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Science, Melbourne Model IT degrees). At first I linked to the Unimelb email directory on the student creation page. However, I decided I’d like a solution wherein the user did not even need to leave the website.

Hence, I developed the following Javascript (with jQuery support) to enable an embedded extraction of the Unimelb email directory’s data:

\\ A small anchor element with id 'email_check' sits next to the surname input field on the page:
$("#email_check").click(function()
{
  \\ The embedded results from the extraction are placed in a div with id 'check_list':
  $("#check_list").html("");

  \\ The surname input field has id 'surname_field', jQuery allows us to access the value attribute:
  var surname = $("#surname_field").attr("value");

  \\ .get is a jQuery Ajax function. We're going to invoke another page on the site, parse.php
  \\ and give it the surname we're interested in. The function argument is a callback for when
  \\ the Ajax call is complete. The returned page data is a string called 'page_data'.
  $.get("./parse.php?surname=" + surname, function(page_data)
  {
    \\ From the page_data we want to look at each of the results. The data is luckily
    \\ grouped within <tr> elements with the class 'vcard':
    $("tr.vcard", page_data).each(function ()
    {
      \\ Within these <tr> elements are the full names of the students and their courses,
      \\ kept in <td> elements with classes 'fn' and 'org', respectively.
      var fullname = $("td.fn", this).text();
      var course = $("td.org", this).text();

      \\ Finally we want return this data to the actual page of our website.
      \\ Using the append function we can drop new HTML into the existing dom:
      $("#check_list").append("<li><label>" + fullname + "</label>" + course + "</li>");
    });
  });
});

Accessing the off-site web page (the Unimelb email directory) was achieved via the parse.php page on my site, which took the form of:

<?php
  $surname = $_GET['surname'];

  $file = fopen("http://www.unimelb.edu.au/cgi-bin/mail/email.pl?name=".$surname, "r");

  while(!feof($file))
  {
    echo fgets($file);
  }
  fclose($file);
?>

The results work quite well. Users of the system are able to easily search for a student’s surname without having to leave the comforts of our website!

Now if anyone is caught selling keys inappropriately there are absolutely no excuses