2014. We visited Academy Press to discuss the next major upgrade to Printwiser Estimating. The new capital-energy summary estimate upgrade would provide an alternative method of calculating the summary estimate working sheet items, including providing for cost of capital and cost of energy, among other features. The proposal was submitted the following week.
2040. We investigated the inability of CodeIgniter 4 to run on a local system, having run on a server: Instead of displaying the page for the demo application it was showing the directory listing. It turned out to be a filename issue as we had been using htaccess for the Apache options file instead of .htaccess in the project directory, which explained why its contents were being ignored. However afterward, a nicely formatted screen with
2073. WEB241: We began implementing relational search, so now placing < or = or > before the text when searching will do an equality or relational search. We resolved the issue of CodeIgniter 4 appearing not to work properly locally—turned out due to a missing setting in the php.ini file—and moved on to preparing WEB241 to work with it, creating a new database file and making necessary changes to the PHP code files, reading the web-based reference as we went on. After a couple of days or so the conversion was completed, so it was time to upload to the new secure server.
2143. We uploaded the CodeIgniter 4 version of WEB241 to the new server and resolved all the issues that arose, followed by re-routing visits to the first server and finally general testing. After uploading the new WEB241 files to the server and deleting unused files there—like the CodeIgniter 3 files and the demo application files created for CodeIgniter 4—we encountered about 5 different issues before things started looking and working right. First there was a report the PHP function filemtime() to obtain a file’s modification date failed, so we decided to use a constant date. There was a connection issue as the database was said not to be found, in the CodeIgniter log file, after ‘internal server error’ got reported on the browser’s console. This was because the host for the database wasn’t localhost as usual but something else, and after we specified it, the connection worked. There was an issue with the routing, as the server was appending text to the URL, so we had to get rid of this in the JavaScript file. We’d read before on Bit.ly’s site that the destination for a shortened link could be changed later, and had thought to do so, but now on realizing this was only for paid accounts, starting at $8 per month, we did our own re-direction by replacing the index.php file on the former server, with a short one that simply switched to the new server. When we thought we were done, we began to encounter new issues. The searching failed to work on two phones, which was serious, and even on the desktop for some browsers. Eventually we found out we didn’t upload needed Bootstrap and jQuery JavaScript files and were not using their web versions. In the coming days a major new search feature was added to the application.
2165. A new IT officer of another Printwiser client reported their need to change the estimator’s system, that would require installing Printwiser on the new system. Over the next few days we advised on the installation requirements. The IT officer was unable to locate the right client installer for their Printwiser 8.1 database. The one he found was for version 7.5 and after guiding him through the installation procedure, that version advised upgrading to 8.1 on attempt to start it, as it would not work with their database as we earlier stipulated. So eventually we emailed them the v8.1 client installer.
2202. Work resumed on the next release version of LwriterGF, with the implementation of the A3 paper size for pallet labels. Completed after a couple of days, the executable was built as version 1.01. There was no preset A3 label in PowerBuilder so we used the A4 label while setting A3 as the paper size. We had time to look into the PHP file modified function filemtime() that failed on the server for WEB241 that first day, and realized it was a Linux directory name case-sensitivity issue (CI 3 used views while CI 4 used Views) so quickly fixed it.
2261. We created the setup installer for LwriterGF, and in order to test it in a different machine environment we began looking into setting up virtual machines on a Windows 7 system, downloading and installing some. Microsoft’s latest virtual machine facility (Hyper-V) was only available on Windows 10 and above. A Virtual PC used to be available for Windows 7, but no longer available for download at their site. The alternatives we checked were VirtualBox and QEMU. VirtualBox could not be installed as it required the Microsoft Visual C++ 2019 Redistributable Package that wasn’t on the machine. The latest QEMU couldn’t be installed but we got an older version that did.
2283. Worked on implementing page view counter in WEB241 along with a database-specific use-cookie option, so now we would no longer have different CodeIgniter controller and model files on the server on account of the cookie issue. We uploaded the installer for LwriterGF and sent the email with download link to the client.
2294. WEB241: We uploaded the latest changes to the server. Finding out we couldn’t create database procedures there, we implemented the needed procedure in PHP and then added an option in the database to activate it.