Sunday, June 10, 2012

Free Credit Report

A good credit score is important for securing loans or incurring other types of debt.

According to the Federal Trade Commission, the Fair Credit Reporting Act includes a provision whereby the big three credit reporting companies (Equifax, TransUnion, and Experian) must provide you, free of charge, a copy of your credit report annually.

The easiest way to get the ball rolling is to visit the official site, AnnualCreditReport.com, and fill out their form. 




Eventually you'll be forwarded to each credit reporting site, in turn, to input some answers to security questions. Then you can either view your report online, or download it in PDF form. You can also view the report in printer-friendly format, then use a free utility like Cute PDF Writer to "print" the report to a PDF file.

I had no idea one could obtain a completely FREE report of your credit history from the big three companies in this way, so score one for government working for the people.




Friday, June 1, 2012

Obtain Element Coordinates Using JQuery

I'm working on a project with ASP.NET and JQuery where I need to be able to obtain the coordinates for a div element in response to a button click. I found an example here, but I wanted to get not just the top and left values, but be able to obtain coordinates of all four corners.

To do this, I make use of JQuery's position, height, and width functions, then simply use some arithmetic to obtain the coordinates and finally display them. 

Here's an example. First, the markup:
<%@ Page Title="Home Page" Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeFile="Default.aspx.cs" Inherits="_Default" %>

Div Coordinates





I am a div.

Now, the code behind: 

protected void Button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
     Label1.Text = "Top Left: " + hfTop.Value + ", " + hfLeft.Value;
     Label2.Text = "Top Right: " + hfTop.Value + ", " + hfRight.Value;
     Label3.Text = "Bottom Left: " + hfBottom.Value + ", " + hfLeft.Value;
     Label4.Text = "Bottom Right: " + hfBottom.Value + ", " + hfRight.Value;
}



In a nutshell, the button click first triggers the OnClientClick event, which calls the JQuery functions to populate the values of the HiddenField objects. Then, the OnClick method takes those values and concatenates them in the code behind into coordinate pairs to display as the label text.
In cases where we need specific coordinates of each corner of a div element in response to a click event, this method works nicely.