Facebook to outlook

First, Facebook as a very successful social networking website already contains a lot of information that we need and that will save us a lot of work not only to get this information but to use it as well.

Second, as you already know, we all work in the morning sometimes we don’t have time to turn around and certainly don’t have time to open up a browser window and typing the Facebook URL and start logging in, it seems a lot of time which sometimes we don’t have. But yet we would like to update our personal status on Facebook. So how can I do that without wasting all that time?!

The solution is pretty easy, we all have outlook opened up since the very first second you boot up your computer at work as all work related mails comes through outlook, so why don’t we make it a bit funny and use it to update our status.

The “Facebook to Outlook” plug-in consists of two main features

1. Friends to Contacts.
2. Update my status.
3. Send notification messages.

So in this post I’m gonna walkthrough how to make the first plug-in as the rest is pretty much the same. Okay, let’s go

Friends to Contacts:

As a Facebook user I have a lot of friends on Facebook and those friends already published their information and I would like to have those friends in my outlook contact list. So instead of writing down the information of my Facebook friends I just thought it will be nice to have a button that I can click and it does all the work of getting my friends information and adding them to my outlook contact list.

The bad thing is the Facebook REST services don’t allow you to get the email address of friends but I guess it’s better to just modify an existing friend and add the email instead of adding the entire contact information.

Getting friend’s information from Facebook.

To get started developing applications with the Facebook API, you first need to register your application and get an API key from Facebook which will allow you to connect to their site and download data. Their Get Started page will lead you through the process.

Now that you have an API key, you can start developing. While you can connect to Facebook and get the information manually through HTTP REST calls,

Okay we first need to get the list of facebook friends:

Next, we bind the friends list FriendSelected event, to allow the user to select his friends he wishes to add as outlook friends

Next, we add some code to the SelectedIndexChanged list to allow a user to remove a friend he already selected.

Finally, we write the code to move the facebook friends to our outlook contacts.

and the final output is

Beckham

“jQuery is a JavaScript library that takes this motto to heart: Writing JavaScript code should be fun. jQuery achieves this goal by taking common, repetitive, tasks, stripping out all the unnecessary markup, and leaving them short, smart and understandable.”

there are a lot of jQuery plugins such as facebox.

there is also a 2 plugins that are very cute and neat:

1- The Table Sorter Plugin

2- The table search plugin.

today i’m gonna use these plugins to allow sorting and searching for the grid view control at the client side ( No Postback)

okay, Let’s start,

first of all you need to download the jQuery, Quick Search & Table Sorter plugins.

1- Create a webpage and put in a GridView control.

2- bind your gridview to a data source. in my case i’ll use a SQL Data source, that connects to the northwind db and get some information from the [Customers] table.

3- Now the cool part to enable the search into the grid view just add this nice piece of js code

just make sure to add the js files that you downloaded

4- To enable sorting is a bit tricky as the table sorter plugin is working with the standard HTML table with and tags but the grid view renders only without tag.

Okaay, how can we make the gridview renders the tag ??? We can do that by this line of code which tells the grid view to render the header row as tag.

Now to make your grid sortable at the client side just add this line

now you can search and sort your grid at the client.

Source Code

Beckham

For more information about PLINQO
Check out Paul welter’s post here.

Beckham

Ofcourse it has some drawback such as the last word of the line might be splitted.but you can put “-” or something like this at the end of the line.

Hope this is helpfu, The source code is attached.

Beckham

Okay, here is the deal:-

Grid view enable automatic sorting that allows you to sort you data in the grid view without writing any code but sadly this automatic sorting is enabled only for Grid View that’s bounded to a DataSourceControl (i.e. SqlDataSource, ObjectDataSource).
You can’t do that with grid view that’s bounded to an IEnumerable collection, why?
Because actually the grid view uses the DataSourceControl to sort the data for it.

So how can I sort my gridview that’s bounded to a IEnumerable collection? You can reconstruct your collection as a table and then pass that table to a data view and sort these data using that data view sorting and then bind your grid view to the data view like that :->

This is the defenition of our customer class that will be used to fill our collection.
Notic: The serializable attribute only so we can save our list of cutomers to the ViewState.

We will need to keep track of our current sort expression and direction so we can use it later in resorting the list.

Her we fill our list of customers with some dummy data.

Change the sort direction from Ascending to Descending and vice versa.

Look at our Sorting event handler see how much code we wrote to get this done. Is this the only way to do that ?? Noooo, we can do that very easily using LINQ without creating a table or a data view.

LINQ To The Rescue:-
See all that code we wrote to create a table and fill the table with data and then creating the creating the data view, well we don’t need all of that.
We will use the Order by extension method to sort our IEnumerable collection.
ex: -

Well that’s great and everything but dude you hard coded the sort expression “customer.Id” what will I do if the user clicks on the Name column? Well you can continue hard coding and write an order by statement for each column you have and select the appropriate statement using switch case based on the user’s selections.
Dude that’s horrible I don’t like hard coding, Is there anyway else like passing the property name as a variable? Well, No you can’t pass the property name as a variable but yes there is another way,  You can use reflection to get the property name dynamically

Here is our Sorting event handler after using Orderby and reflection :-

Beckham