Marcus Goluch

Hi Simon, I thank you for your time to explain this. The idea of using a database and not the frog data store would allow for more complex interactions between other on site facilities. Unfortunately the data store will not do the things I am looking into. I think I might have something I wrote in node over the past few years that might be of interest. It is an SQL wrapper that turns databases into node js class objects and allows you to send full query's in json to the server from the client. I would be happy to discuss this further if you are interested.

Thanks for your response Graham. I would love to get some technical details that is for sure. In regards to the pandemic putting Frog code on the back burner again, I can understand that. I would still love to see Frog Code get itself out of beta.

Hi, I am going to ask a few questions regarding widget development: what DB software do you use (mogo, mysql, plaintext)? what npm module is used to manage this database? with out using any thing like frog forms, frog data viewer, csv files, frog documents of any kind. Could I please get access to give my widgets an actual database table? Can we get the ability to read console print outs from the server side code execution of widgets? Can we please get some form of API access for the server side part of EJS templates, mainly for use with databases. Essentially as somebody who has limited experience developing web apps, I find that the current widget system of having to hack in things from locally hosted files, or using the client to connect to a Document based database hosted on 365 is too janky. Client side access for rendering inside an EJS template is exactly what I want but I don't have the tools available to do the really cool stuff I want to do. In a nut shell you can't watch Doctor Who on BBC one if you have a Television, but no TV channels. EJS is our television but right now we have no decent channels to watch. I know, I make a post about this every year but, Frog Code seriously needs to start being worked on again, right now we can not even delete our demo widget projects. I think Frog Code needs a road map and a clear plan, or it needs to be removed if you have no plans on finishing this feature. Sorry to sound like a brat, but I feel this is a seriously huge missed opportunity. Thank you

Thanks Graham. Err, how do i delete a frog code project again?

Hey all, Been trying to make a new widget this morning but hit a snag,. Maybe I am just Rusty but I doubt I could be this Rusty. So I made a new widget, that should say After clicking save and hitting the preview button, I expect to see in big lettering the words Hello Humans - I am here to drink your rum. What I actually get is a page with a text widget on. But my actual widget is not on the page and I am unable to see the widget to add to the page. Am I being thick or is this broken?

Azure SSO sounds like it will do exactly what I am sugesting. Thank you

Says my email address is not registered still, I have submitted my email on the registration form how ever and submitted.

Hi @Graham Quince thanks for responding. I would love to go post this over on the ideas portal, but unfortunately that website has never worked for me. I am still unable to figure out how to register as the register button seemingly does nothing. Thank you

@Graham Quince I appreciate the adfs system does this, but adfs is something Microsoft are phasing out with there push for Azure. Come next year my school will be moving to azure, but we are already thinking of removing the adfs server because 365 no longer requires you to handle logins this way. On top of that we have found that when dealing with multiple aliases, staff and students just get utterly confused when asked to sign in via adfs, meaning this is not a solution that we as a school would ever be allowed to implement. I would highly recommend looking into moving to adding a 365 oAuth solution. If it where possible to write login logic with plugins I would attempt to write something up myself. Thanks

I was unaware of this, will look into it. Thank you

Hi Frog Team, I have a suggestion for something that could prove very beneficial to frog. In fact during this time of remote teaching this could be a slight game changer. At Broadway we are trying to do as much as we can though frog, unfortunately when it comes to remote teaching zoom is the answer. I'm not going to debate zoom vs teams here but frankly I wish we where able to use teams. The reason we do not use teams is because the kids would have to sign in to both frog and 365 to access there class. Where as with zoom we can generate a link ahead of time and post it on frog, no zoom login required. So, this got me thinking. Now I have recently been doing a lot of work in my personal life with oAuth for various platforms, so when it hit me i felt it was just supper obvious. Right now you can log into frog using an active directory account, What if we could log into frog using our active directory account but instead of going via AD we went via oAuth2 on 365? This could be an additional option. The benefit of this is now that, instead of logging into frog they now log into 365 and frog (via AD) at the same time. So, now I can embed a MS streams video, a MS teams link, an outlook calendar, (etc)... But instead of having to sign into 365, I am all ready signed in from when i logged into the platform and now I am directly taken to the link my teacher has posted. The benefit here on top, is that you can grab each users access and refresh tokens store them and use them to do even cooler things, but in theory you don's even need to keep these tokens unless you wish to use the MS 365 API's.

Good question, answer ofc not. I just set up a rule on the page for the widget that disables the widget for students, hopefully that prevents the widget from getting passed down to the cleint and thus prevents the data. This is why we need a real API guys, you know server side scripting on top of client side. You know like Node.js perhaps?

I wish the staff on our site would use that, we tried this but the staff did not wish to use it.

Hi everybody. So the new school year started and as always the teachers are sending year 7 students to my door every day. After 3 class loads of kids asking for user names and passwords I decided something had to be done. Obviously placing an excel document in a shared area was simply too complicated for the staff. So I took to HTML, picked up a few new tricks and began work on a new frog code widget that I would like to share today. This widget allows you to search though your year 7 students account information to find their username and password with out sending them to I.T. Adding the data is quite simple, you just need to convert the data to json and copy paste it into the widgets settings. You can also click a username and it will hide very thing else but that 1 students data, good for when you just want to show the kid your screen but not show them the other students account details. What do you guys think?

Unfortunately that information is not helpful. See, it looks like frog creates a special canvas layer over the top of frog to witch the windows are parented to. All my attempts of opening a dialog on the canvas yield no usable results. This means there must be a function somewhere that tells frog to make this canvas and then create the window on top. That is what I am after.

So I am at it again, my next frog widget. Here I am working inside a html widget prototyping before i take this to frog code. Now I know the answer to my question is probably use an APP, but there are reasons as to why I will not be using an app for this so please try to avoid that as an answer. What I need to do is find a way to create a new frog window, like the preferences and users window, from inside of java script simulating an app. @Graham Quince I will leave this one for you to answer as I am sure you can ask a developer how the javascript code creates these windows clientside, so I am dynamically pump one full of my own awesomeness. Thanks guys

@Graham Quince did you ever pickup the new package? Would hate to think that people are stil using my older less awesome content.

Whilst this video shows me how to make changes on a per user basis and I can do bulk changes via csv. It would be much better to have an option to change this based on group membership instead. Otherwise it I would like to see an Administration staff profile added to frog, or even better to make this platform fluid you could give us the ability to create and delete profile types?

Howdy. I just spoke to frog support who said to raise this here. So under the network drive preferences we have a section for setting the home drive path of each user profile type. Admin Govenor Other Parent Student Staff This is problematic as on our site we don't have just 1 location for home drives. See here on our site under AD we separate Teaching Staff from Admin Staff. Admin staff being HR, Attendance, SLT etc and not frog administrators. So whilst all our teachers home drives are located "\\EG-Data01\staff\{username}" all our Admin staffs home drives are located "\\EG-Data02\admins\{username}". Now since Teaching staff and Admin staff need to be in the staff profile, whilst teaching staff can access there home drive, admin staff can not as it points to an invalid location. What we need is the ability to define the home drives based on user groups and not user profiles. Additional we also need the ability to plainly import this location directly from the users AD profile. Anyway this is pretty obvious stuff and I am unsure as to why it was not set up like this to begin with., honestly profiles are useless and should just be merged with user groups, currently the inability to add or remove additional profiles is preventing frog from being adaptable. Slowly starting to lose faith in you guys.

This is brilliant and believe me I will attempt to make good use of this, but its not what I had in mind. Lets take a real world example. Fog 3 had room controls and it was brilliant (then a ms update broke it). I want to re-implement this feature into frogos and this is how I would go about this: Call Frog and plead/beg for them to install a proxy package for centOS. Back up plan, write my own in php or js. Direct student traffic though the proxies port. Create a frog app for the new proxy, with a php back end. Create a mysql db and bit of scripting magic to implement proxy rules based on the db. The data base would need to consist of a table for each room and machine. Need to know what member of staff is controlling the room. Create a control panel for teachers and admin in the newly created frog app using js. I would need to safely query the db from js via calling a function on the apps back end. I would also need to send data back when a teacher changes a setting. Test it till it breaks and fix it. repeat 6 & 7 again. Call Frog and show them. This is one simple example, I am not saying you guys should allow us to go about installing Linux packages on the box. My point being this, if we had the ability to write some back end php for a frog app. Then maybe the community can work with frog, on some of frogs next big features, just look at the work we are all-ready doing. @Graham Quince This is the reason why I love frog and wan't to get into doing more with it. So why is frog code on the back burner? Anyway, that's just an example and a quick plea. i doubt i'm going to attempt a new room controls.

Hi all, After using frog code to do some pretty fun things, i think its time to mention some of its weakness that I feel need to be addressed. In the frog code editor, you can not delete an application or package by right clicking its name. When creating new packages/pages the file browser (left side menu) closes all its nodes. The default demo application shows you nothing about why you would want to use it over a widget. There is no server level to widgets or applications, this is holding the platform back more then you guys know. If I wanted to create a simple chat application, I could create the chat window as either a widget or application but will have no way to take a message from student A and pass it to students B and C. If I wanted to create a classroom voting system, I have no way of saving which students have responded let alone what their vote was and as before I can't even get that data to the server. Create a 365 spreadsheet set it to shared and then use java script on the user client to alter the spread sheet via a widget? First, I can press f12 and get that documents url. Second, I can then use this url to have unrepresented access to read and alter that data. Thirdly, this way of doing it is absurd. I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news, whilst having all this client-side functionality is amazing, without access to communicate and save data then we might as well stick to html widgets. All round, I think we need to have either a php or java script implementation server side. Allowing us to create data containers weather that be in a frog specific way or with db access, sql or similar. We then need to be able to implement an ajax or jquery method to allow the client application and server applications to talk. I am not saying I want unrepresented access to the server, I know that we techies could do a lot of damage with full php access such as reading copyrighted read files in frogs source code. However, sand boxing the server side scripting environment shouldn't be too difficult as this is commonly done in apis. I hope that many of the user here are in agreement with what I have to say, please don't take this the wrong way. I love your platform and I want to work more with it, but all the things I want to do currently are not doable. Thank you

@Graham Quince New version has been tried and tested, when ever your ready to update. Would also be interested in knowing how many sites have started to use this?

So, next week I will be testing an update for this package that should hopefully be ready for @Graham Quinceto repackage next Wednesday. Here are the changes: In the widgets settings is now an option to enable / disable copy paste redirection for the rdc session. Gateway rules can now be given an order of priority on the drop down menu by prefixing the rules title with (<integer>) e.g "(2)Users Gateway Rule". Prefixes are removed from the drop down menu, the lowest value always comes first and 0 will always be the default selected option. If a rule is not prefixed but the rules name matches the users name or the users display name it will be priority 0. Let me know if their is anything else you guys would like to see added to this, I shall have Quincy post the updated package next week. Thank you all.

Worked on my phone so maybe it's just my browser.

This is the bit where the little girl in me gets loud and excited about people using my cool new widget. @Graham Quinceplease note that the url 'https://www.frogeducation.com' takes me ages to load no matter where i attempt to access it from. 90% of the time the page times out, this has been doing that for at least the last 2 weeks. I have also tried from home as well as on site, I think the website may be having issues.