Dia Diagram Mac OSX Yosemite Fix

Dia Diagram Mac OSX Yosemite Fix

I use the Dia tool for all my diagramming work. I have worked with many tools, but find Dia the easiest to use and is the most responsive, apart from it being a great OpenSource tool :).

I recently upgraded to the new Mac Operating System Yosemite and I could no longer use Dia. Each time I clicked on the Dia icon, it would jump up & down and do nothing. I finally tried opening the app via the command line, which gave me the following error:

The domain/default pair of (.GlobalPreferences, AppleCollationOrder) does not exist

The error trace ended with GTK warning - could not open display.

I could not find anything on the internet that was Dia specific, so I thought of writing this blog, in hope of helping someone in the same situation as me. So here is what I did:

1. Goto your Applications directory where Dia.app exists (mine was located at: /Applications)
2. Right click the icon and click on Show Package Contents
3. Goto the directory Dia.app/Contents/Resources/bin
4. Edit the file dia, in your favourite text editor.
5. After line 39, add the line: export DISPLAY=:0
6. Save and exit.
7. Close XQuartz if its running.
8. Now Dia should come up.
9. If it does not come up, try restarting your computer.

If not, try and add the line - export DISPLAY=:0 to your ~/.bash_profile, re-login and hopefully you should have Dia working once again. 

Let me know if this helped you out :)

The red rectangle shows where I put the DISPLAY variable for Dia to start responding.

jQuery Ajax script for multipart/form-data POST method

So, I searched an eternity for a script that uses AJAX to post a HTML form using multipart/form-data, dynamically. AJAX, to the best of my knowledge, does not have any built in support to create the multipart from the HTML elements in the form. Frustrated, I whipped up this script.

Suppose, you have multiple forms inside a HTML page. The forms need to use the POST method with the enctype set to multipart/form-data:

Example HTML,

The script follows the following algorithm:

a) On submit, call form submit handler.

b) Retrieve url information from the action attribute of the form element.

c) For ever element in the form, create its respective multipart.

d) Combine multiparts and use AJAX functions to POST the form.

All you need to do to run this script, is link your HTML code to the jQuery library and add this script to the head. Voila!! You can then POST your forms using multiparts :).

Note: This code as of now does NOT support file uploads, I will whip that part up when I need it. I hope this helps someone.

//When the DOM is ready

$(document).ready(function(){

//When the submit button is clicked

$('form').submit(function(event) {

strPath =$('form').attr('action')

//Check if the action attribute is set

if(strPath){

//This is to prevent the default submit behaviour of button

event.preventDefault()

//Get content from form as multipart

strContent = $.getMultipartData('#'+this.id);

//Do ajax call for posting to server

$.ajax({

type:'POST',

url:'',

contentType: 'multipart/form-data; boundary='+strContent[0],

data: strContent[1],

success: function(msg){

alert("data is:"+msg)

}

})

}else{

alert('Please fix action attribute in form');

}

});

});

$.getMultipartData = function(frmName){

//Start multipart formatting

var initBoundary= $.randomString();

var strBoundary = "--" + initBoundary;

var strMultipartBody = "";

var strCRLF = "\\r\\n";

//Create multipart for each element of the form

jQuery.each($(frmName).serializeArray(),function(){

strMultipartBody +=

strBoundary

+ strCRLF

+ "Content-Disposition: form-data; name=\\"" + $(this).attr('name') + "\\""

+ strCRLF

+ strCRLF

+ $(this).val()

+strCRLF;

});

//End the body by delimiting it

strMultipartBody += strBoundary + "--" + strCRLF;

//Return boundary without -- and the multipart content

return [initBoundary,strMultipartBody];

};

$.randomString = function() {

var chars = "0123456789ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXTZabcdefghiklmnopqrstuvwxyz";

var string_length = 8;

var randomstring = '';

for (var i=0; i<string_length; i++) {

var rnum = Math.floor(Math.random() * chars.length);

randomstring += chars.substring(rnum,rnum+1);

}

return randomstring;

};