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  • 26 Days: Countdown to Oracle OpenWorld 2012

    - by Michael Snow
    Welcome to our countdown to Oracle OpenWorld! Oracle OpenWorld 2012 is just around the corner. In less than 26 days, San Francisco will be invaded by an expected 50,000 people from all over the world. Here on the Oracle WebCenter team, we’ve all been working to help make the experience a great one for all our WebCenter customers. For a sneak peak  – we’ll be spending this week giving you a teaser of what to look forward to if you are joining us in San Francisco from September 30th through October 4th. We have Oracle WebCenter sessions covering all topics imaginable. Take a look and use the tools we provide to build out your schedule in advance and reserve your seats in your favorite sessions.  That gives you plenty of time to plan for your week with us in San Francisco. If unfortunately, your boss denied your request to attend - there are still some ways that you can join in the experience virtually On-Demand. This year - we are expanding even more up North of Market Street and will be taking over Union Square as well. Check out this map of San Francisco to get a sense of how much of a footprint Oracle OpenWorld has grown to this year. With so much to see and so many sessions to learn from - its no wonder that people get excited. Add to that a good mix of fun and all of the possible WebCenter sessions you could attend - you won't want to sleep at all to take full advantage of such an opportunity. We'll also have our annual WebCenter Customer Appreciation reception - stay tuned this week for some more info on registration to make sure you'll be able to join us. If you've been following the America's Cup at all and believe in EXTREME PERFORMANCE you'll definitely want to take a look at this video from last year's OpenWorld Keynote. 12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Important OpenWorld Links:  Attendee / Presenters Toolkit Oracle Schedule Builder WebCenter Sessions (listed in the catalog under Fusion Middleware as "Portals, Sites, Content, and Collaboration" ) Oracle Music Festival - AMAZING Line up!!  Oracle Customer Appreciation Night -LOOK HERE!! Oracle OpenWorld LIVE On-Demand Here are all the WebCenter sessions broken down by day for your viewing pleasure. Monday, October 1st CON8885 - Simplify CRM Engagement with Contextual Collaboration Are your sales teams disconnected and disengaged? Do you want a tool for easily connecting expertise across your organization and providing visibility into the complete sales process? Do you want a way to enhance and retain organization knowledge? Oracle Social Network is the answer. Attend this session to learn how to make CRM easy, effective, and efficient for use across virtual sales teams. Also learn how Oracle Social Network can drive sales force collaboration with natural conversations throughout the sales cycle, promote sales team productivity through purposeful social networking without the noise, and build cross-team knowledge by integrating conversations with CRM and other business applications. CON8268 - Oracle WebCenter Strategy: Engaging Your Customers. Empowering Your Business Oracle WebCenter is a user engagement platform for social business, connecting people and information. Attend this session to learn about the Oracle WebCenter strategy, and understand where Oracle is taking the platform to help companies engage customers, empower employees, and enable partners. Business success starts with ensuring that everyone is engaged with the right people and the right information and can access what they need through the channel of their choice—Web, mobile, or social. Are you giving customers, employees, and partners the best-possible experience? Come learn how you can! ¶ HOL10208 - Add Social Capabilities to Your Enterprise Applications Oracle Social Network enables you to add real-time collaboration capabilities into your enterprise applications, so that conversations can happen directly within your business systems. In this hands-on lab, you will try out the Oracle Social Network product to collaborate with other attendees, using real-time conversations with document sharing capabilities. Next you will embed social capabilities into a sample Web-based enterprise application, using embedded UI components. Experts will also write simple REST-based integrations, using the Oracle Social Network API to programmatically create social interactions. ¶ CON8893 - Improve Employee Productivity with Intuitive and Social Work Environments Social technologies have already transformed the ways customers, employees, partners, and suppliers communicate and stay informed. Forward-thinking organizations today need technologies and infrastructures to help them advance to the next level and integrate social activities with business applications to deliver a user experience that simplifies business processes and enterprise application engagement. Attend this session to hear from an innovative Oracle Social Network customer and learn how you can improve productivity with intuitive and social work environments and empower your employees with innovative social tools to enable contextual access to content and dynamic personalization of solutions. ¶ CON8270 - Oracle WebCenter Content Strategy and Vision Oracle WebCenter provides a strategic content infrastructure for managing documents, images, e-mails, and rich media files. With a single repository, organizations can address any content use case, such as accounts payable, HR onboarding, document management, compliance, records management, digital asset management, or Website management. In this session, learn about future plans for how Oracle WebCenter will address new use cases as well as new integrations with Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Applications, leveraging your investments by making your users more productive and error-free. ¶ CON8269 - Oracle WebCenter Sites Strategy and Vision Oracle’s Web experience management solution, Oracle WebCenter Sites, enables organizations to use the online channel to drive customer acquisition and brand loyalty. It helps marketers and business users easily create and manage contextually relevant, social, interactive online experiences across multiple channels on a global scale. In this session, learn about future plans for how Oracle WebCenter Sites will provide you with the tools, capabilities, and integrations you need in order to continue to address your customers’ evolving requirements for engaging online experiences and keep moving your business forward. ¶ CON8896 - Living with SharePoint SharePoint is a popular platform, but it’s not always the best fit for Oracle customers. In this session, you’ll discover the technical and nontechnical limitations and pitfalls of SharePoint and learn about Oracle alternatives for collaboration, portals, enterprise and Web content management, social computing, and application integration. The presentation shows you how to integrate with SharePoint when business or IT requirements dictate and covers cloud-based (Office 365) and on-premises versions of SharePoint. Presented by a former Microsoft director of SharePoint product management and backed by independent customer research, this session will prepare you to answer the question “Why don’t we just use SharePoint for that?’ the next time it comes up in your organization. ¶ CON7843 - Content-Enabling Enterprise Processes with Oracle WebCenter Organizations today continually strive to automate business processes, reduce costs, and improve efficiency. Many business processes are content-intensive and unstructured, requiring ad hoc collaboration, and distributed in nature, requiring many approvals and generating huge volumes of paper. In this session, learn how Oracle and SYSTIME have partnered to help a customer content-enable its enterprise with Oracle WebCenter Content and Oracle WebCenter Imaging 11g and integrate them with Oracle Applications. ¶ CON6114 - Tape Robotics’ Newest Superhero: Now Fueled by Oracle Software For small, midsize, and rapidly growing businesses that want the most energy-efficient, scalable storage infrastructure to meet their rapidly growing data demands, Oracle’s most recent addition to its award-winning tape portfolio leverages several pieces of Oracle software. With Oracle Linux, Oracle WebLogic, and Oracle Fusion Middleware tools, the library achieves a higher level of usability than previous products while offering customers a familiar interface for management, plus ease of use. This session examines the competitive advantages of the tape library and how Oracle software raises customer satisfaction. Learn how the combination of Oracle engineered systems, Oracle Secure Backup, and Oracle’s StorageTek tape libraries provide end-to-end coverage of your data. ¶ CON9437 - Mobile Access Management With more than five billion mobile devices on the planet and an increasing number of users using their own devices to access corporate data and applications, securely extending identity management to mobile devices has become a hot topic. This session focuses on how to extend your existing identity management infrastructure and policies to securely and seamlessly enable mobile user access. CON7815 - Customer Experience Online in Cloud: Oracle WebCenter Sites, Oracle ATG Apps, Oracle Exalogic Oracle WebCenter Sites and Oracle’s ATG product line together can provide a compelling marketing and e-commerce experience. When you couple them with the extreme performance of Oracle Exalogic, you’ll see unmatched scalability that provides you with a true cloud-based solution. In this session, you’ll learn how running Oracle WebCenter Sites and ATG applications on Oracle Exalogic delivers both a private and a public cloud experience. Find out what it takes to get these systems working together and delivering engaging Web experiences. Even if you aren’t considering Oracle Exalogic today, the rich Web experience of Oracle WebCenter, paired with the depth of the ATG product line, can provide your business full support, from merchandising through sale completion. ¶ CON8271 - Oracle WebCenter Portal Strategy and Vision To innovate and keep a competitive edge, organizations need to leverage the power of agile and responsive Web applications. Oracle WebCenter Portal enables you to do just that, by delivering intuitive user experiences for enterprise applications to drive innovation with composite applications and mashups. Attend this session to learn firsthand from customers how Oracle WebCenter Portal extends the value of existing enterprise applications, business processes, and content; delivers a superior business user experience; and maximizes limited IT resources. ¶ CON8880 - The Connected Customer Experience Begins with the Online Channel There’s a lot of talk these days about how to connect the customer journey across various touchpoints—from Websites and e-commerce to call centers and in-store—to provide experiences that are more relevant and engaging and ultimately gain competitive edge. Doing it all at once isn’t a realistic objective, so where do you start? Come to this session, and hear about three steps you can take that can help you begin your journey toward delivering the connected customer experience. You’ll hear how Oracle now has an integrated digital marketing platform for your corporate Website, your e-commerce site, your self-service portal, and your marketing and loyalty campaigns, and you’ll learn what you can do today to begin executing on your customer experience initiatives. ¶ GEN11451 - General Session: Building Mobile Applications with Oracle Cloud With the prevalence of smart mobile devices, companies are facing an increased demand to provide access to data and applications from new channels. However, developing applications for mobile devices poses some unique challenges. Come to this session to learn how Oracle addresses these challenges, offering a simpler way to develop and deploy cross-device mobile applications. See how Oracle Cloud enables you to access applications, data, and services from mobile channels in an easier way.  CON8272 - Oracle Social Network Strategy and Vision One key way of increasing employee productivity is by bringing people, processes, and information together—providing new social capabilities to enable business users to quickly correspond and collaborate on business activities. Oracle WebCenter provides a user engagement platform with social and collaborative technologies to empower business users to focus on their key business processes, applications, and content in the context of their role and process. Attend this session to hear how the latest social capabilities in Oracle Social Network are enabling organizations to transform themselves into social businesses.  --- Tuesday, October 2nd HOL10194 - Enterprise Content Management Simplified: Oracle WebCenter Content’s Next-Generation UI Regardless of the nature of your business, unstructured content underpins many of its daily functions. Whether you are working with traditional presentations, spreadsheets, or text documents—or even with digital assets such as images and multimedia files—your content needs to be accessible and manageable in convenient and intuitive ways to make working with the content easier. Additionally, you need the ability to easily share documents with coworkers to facilitate a collaborative working environment. Come to this session to see how Oracle WebCenter Content’s next-generation user interface helps modern knowledge workers easily manage personal and enterprise documents in a collaborative environment.¶ CON8877 - Develop a Mobile Strategy with Oracle WebCenter: Engage Customers, Employees, and Partners Mobile technology has gone from nice-to-have to a cornerstone of user engagement. Mobile access enables users to have information available at their fingertips, enabling them to take action the moment they make a decision, interact in the moment of convenience, and take advantage of new service offerings in their preferred channels. All your employees have your mobile applications in their pocket; now what are you going to do? It is a critical step for companies to think through what their employees, customers, and partners really need on their devices. Attend this session to see how Oracle WebCenter enables you to better engage your customers, employees, and partners by providing a unified experience across multiple channels. ¶ CON9447 - Enabling Access for Hundreds of Millions of Users How do you grow your business by identifying, authenticating, authorizing, and federating users on the Web, leveraging social identity and the open source OAuth protocol? How do you scale your access management solution to support hundreds of millions of users? With social identity support out of the box, Oracle’s access management solution is also benchmarked for 250-million-user deployment according to real-world customer scenarios. In this session, you will learn about the social identity capability and the 250-million-user benchmark testing of Oracle Access Manager and Oracle Adaptive Access Manager running on Oracle Exalogic and Oracle Exadata. ¶ HOL10207 - Build an Intranet Portal with Oracle WebCenter In this hands-on lab, you’ll work with Oracle WebCenter Portal and Oracle WebCenter Content to build out an enterprise portal that maximizes the productivity of teams and individual contributors. Using browser-based tools, you’ll manage site resources such as page styles, templates, and navigation. You’ll edit content stored in Oracle WebCenter Content directly from your portal. You’ll also experience the latest features that promote collaboration, social networking, and personal productivity. ¶ CON2906 - Get Proactive: Best Practices for Maintaining Oracle Fusion Middleware You chose Oracle Fusion Middleware products to help your organization deliver superior business results. Now learn how to take full advantage of your software with all the great tools, resources, and product updates you’re entitled to through Oracle Support. In this session, Oracle product experts provide proven best practices to help you work more efficiently, plan and prepare for upgrades and patching more effectively, and manage risk. Topics include configuration management tools, remote diagnostics, My Oracle Support Community, and My Oracle Support Lifecycle Advisors. New users and Oracle Fusion Middleware experts alike are guaranteed to leave with fresh ideas and practical, easy-to-implement next steps. ¶ CON8878 - Oracle WebCenter’s Cloud Strategy: From Social and Platform Services to Mashups Cloud computing represents a paradigm shift in how we build applications, automate processes, collaborate, and share and in how we secure our enterprise. Additionally, as you adopt cloud-based services in your organization, it’s likely that you will still have many critical on-premises applications running. With these mixed environments, multiple user interfaces, different security, and multiple datasources and content sources, how do you start evolving your strategy to account for these challenges? Oracle WebCenter offers a complete array of technologies enabling you to solve these challenges and prepare you for the cloud. Attend this session to learn how you can use Oracle WebCenter in the cloud as well as create on-premises and cloud application mash-ups. ¶ CON8901 - Optimize Enterprise Business Processes with Oracle WebCenter and Oracle BPM Do you have business processes that span multiple applications? Are you grappling with how to have visibility across these business processes; how to manage content that is associated with these processes; and, most importantly, how to model and optimize these business processes? Attend this session to hear how Oracle WebCenter and Oracle Business Process Management provide a unique set of integrated solutions to provide a composite application dashboard across these business processes and offer a solution for content-centric business processes. ¶ CON8883 - Deliver Engaging Interfaces to Oracle Applications with Oracle WebCenter Critical business processes live within enterprise applications, and application users need to manage and execute these processes as effectively as possible. Oracle provides a comprehensive user engagement platform to increase user productivity and optimize overall processes within Oracle Applications—Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle’s Siebel, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards product families—and third-party applications. Attend this session to learn how you can integrate these applications with Oracle WebCenter to deliver composite application dashboards to your end users—whether they are your customers, partners, or employees—for enhanced usability and Web 2.0–enabled enterprise portals.¶ Wednesday, October 3rd CON8895 - Future-Ready Intranets: How Aramark Re-engineered the Application Landscape There are essential techniques and technologies you can use to deliver employee portals that garner higher productivity, improve business efficiency, and increase user engagement. Attend this session to learn how you can leverage Oracle WebCenter Portal as a user engagement platform for bringing together business process management, enterprise content management, and business intelligence into a highly relevant and integrated experience. Hear how Aramark has leveraged Oracle WebCenter Portal and Oracle WebCenter Content to deliver a unified workspace providing simpler navigation and processing, consolidation of tools, easy access to information, integrated search, and single sign-on. ¶ CON8886 - Content Consolidation: Save Money, Increase Efficiency, and Eliminate Silos Organizations are looking for ways to save money and be more efficient. With content in many different places, it’s difficult to know where to look for a document and whether the document is the most current version. With Oracle WebCenter, content can be consolidated into one best-of-breed repository that is secure, scalable, and integrated with your business processes and applications. Users can find the content they need, where they need it, and ensure that it is the right content. This session covers content challenges that affect your business; content consolidation that can lead to savings in storage and administration costs and can lower risks; and how companies are realizing savings. ¶ CON8911 - Improve Online Experiences for Customers and Partners with Self-Service Portals Are you able to provide your customers and partners an easy-to-use online self-service experience? Are you processing high-volume transactions and struggling with call center bottlenecks or back-end systems that won’t integrate, causing order delays and customer frustration? Are you looking to target content such as product and service offerings to your end users? This session shares approaches to providing targeted delivery as well as strategies and best practices for transforming your business by providing an intuitive user experience for your customers and partners. ¶ CON6156 - Top 10 Ways to Integrate Oracle WebCenter Content This session covers 10 common ways to integrate Oracle WebCenter Content with other enterprise applications and middleware. It discusses out-of-the-box modules that provide expanded features in Oracle WebCenter Content—such as enterprise search, SOA, and BPEL—as well as developer tools you can use to create custom integrations. The presentation also gives guidance on which integration option may work best in your environment. ¶ HOL10207 - Build an Intranet Portal with Oracle WebCenter In this hands-on lab, you’ll work with Oracle WebCenter Portal and Oracle WebCenter Content to build out an enterprise portal that maximizes the productivity of teams and individual contributors. Using browser-based tools, you’ll manage site resources such as page styles, templates, and navigation. You’ll edit content stored in Oracle WebCenter Content directly from your portal. You’ll also experience the latest features that promote collaboration, social networking, and personal productivity. ¶ CON7817 - Migration to Oracle WebCenter Imaging 11g Customers today continually strive to automate business processes, reduce costs, and improve efficiency. The accounts payable process—which is often distributed in nature, requires many approvals, and generates huge volumes of paper invoices—is automated by many customers. In this session, learn how Oracle and SYSTIME have partnered to help a customer migrate its existing Oracle Imaging and Process Management Release 7.6 to the latest Oracle WebCenter Imaging 11g and integrate it with Oracle’s JD Edwards family of products. ¶ CON8910 - How to Engage Customers Across Web, Mobile, and Social Channels Whether on desktops at the office, on tablets at home, or on mobile phones when on the go, today’s customers are always connected. To engage today’s customers, you need to make the online customer experience connected and consistent across a host of devices and multiple channels, including Web, mobile, and social networks. Managing this multichannel environment can result in lots of headaches without the right tools. Attend this session to learn how Oracle WebCenter Sites solves the challenge of multichannel customer engagement. ¶ HOL10206 - Oracle WebCenter Sites 11g: Transforming the Content Contributor Experience Oracle WebCenter Sites 11g makes it easy for marketers and business users to contribute to and manage Websites with the new visual, contextual, and intuitive Web authoring interface. In this hands-on lab, you will create and manage content for a sports-themed Website, using many of the new and enhanced features of the 11g release. ¶ CON8900 - Building Next-Generation Portals: An Interactive Customer Panel Discussion Social and collaborative technologies have changed how people interact, learn, and collaborate, and providing a modern, social Web presence is imperative to remain competitive in today’s market. Can your business benefit from a more collaborative and interactive portal environment for employees, customers, and partners? Attend this session to hear from Oracle WebCenter Portal customers as they share their strategies and best practices for providing users with a modern experience that adapts to their needs and includes personalized access to content in context. The panel also addresses how customers have benefited from creating next-generation portals by migrating from older portal technologies to Oracle WebCenter Portal. ¶ CON9625 - Taking Control of Oracle WebCenter Security Organizations are increasingly looking to extend their Oracle WebCenter portal for social business, to serve external users and provide seamless access to the right information. In particular, many organizations are extending Oracle WebCenter in a business-to-business scenario requiring secure identification and authorization of business partners and their users. This session focuses on how customers are leveraging, securing, and providing access control to Oracle WebCenter portal and mobile solutions. You will learn best practices and hear real-world examples of how to provide flexible and granular access control for Oracle WebCenter deployments, using Oracle Platform Security Services and Oracle Access Management Suite product offerings. ¶ CON8891 - Extending Social into Enterprise Applications and Business Processes Oracle Social Network is an extensible social platform that enables contextual collaboration within enterprise applications and business processes, providing relevant data from across various enterprise systems in one place. Attend this session to see how an Oracle Social Network customer is integrating multiple applications—such as CRM, HCM, and business processes—into Oracle Social Network and Oracle WebCenter to enable individuals and teams to solve complex cross-organizational business problems more effectively by utilizing the social enterprise. ¶ Thursday, October 4th CON8899 - Becoming a Social Business: Stories from the Front Lines of Change What does it really mean to be a social business? How can you change our organization to embrace social approaches? What pitfalls do you need to avoid? In this lively panel discussion, customer and industry thought leaders in social business explore these topics and more as they share their stories of the good, the bad, and the ugly that can happen when embracing social methods and technologies to improve business success. Using moderated questions and open Q&A from the audience, the panel discusses vital topics such as the critical factors for success, the major issues to avoid, how to gain senior executive support for social efforts, how to handle undesired behavior, and how to measure business impact. It takes a thought-provoking look at becoming a social business from the inside. ¶ CON6851 - Oracle WebCenter and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition to Create Vendor Portals Large manufacturers of grocery items routinely find themselves depending on the inventory management expertise of their wholesalers and distributors. Inventory costs can be managed more efficiently by the manufacturers if they have better insight into the inventory levels of items carried by their distributors. This creates a unique opportunity for distributors and wholesalers to leverage this knowledge into a revenue-generating subscription service. Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition and Oracle WebCenter Portal play a key part in enabling creation of business-managed business intelligence portals for vendors. This session discusses one customer that implemented this by leveraging Oracle WebCenter and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition. ¶ CON8879 - Provide a Personalized and Consistent Customer Experience in Your Websites and Portals Your customers engage with your company online in different ways throughout their journey—from prospecting by acquiring information on your corporate Website to transacting through self-service applications on your customer portal—and then the cycle begins again when they look for new products and services. Ensuring that the customer experience is consistent and personalized across online properties—from branding and content to interactions and transactions—can be a daunting task. Oracle WebCenter enables you to speak and interact with your customers with one voice across your Websites and portals by providing an integrated platform for delivery of self-service and engagement that unifies and personalizes the online experience. Learn more in this session. ¶ CON8898 - Land Mines, Potholes, and Dirt Roads: Navigating the Way to ECM Nirvana Ten years ago, people were predicting that by this time in history, we’d be some kind of utopian paperless society. As we all know, we’re not there yet, but are we getting closer? What is keeping companies from driving down the road to enterprise content management bliss? Most people understand that using ECM as a central platform enables organizations to expedite document-centric processes, but most business processes in organizations are still heavily paper-based. Many of these processes could be automated and improved with an ECM platform infrastructure. In this panel discussion, you’ll hear from Oracle WebCenter customers that have already solved some of these challenges as they share their strategies for success and roads to avoid along your journey. ¶ CON8908 - Oracle WebCenter Portal: Creating and Using Content Presenter Templates Oracle WebCenter Portal applications use task flows to display and integrate content stored in the Oracle WebCenter Content server. Among the most flexible task flows is Content Presenter, which renders various types of content on an Oracle WebCenter Portal page. Although Oracle WebCenter Portal comes with a set of predefined Content Presenter templates, developers can create their own templates for specific rendering needs. This session shows the lifecycle of developing Content Presenter task flows, including how to create, package, import, modify at runtime, and use such templates. In addition to simple examples with Oracle Application Development Framework (Oracle ADF) UI elements to render the content, it shows how to use other UI technologies, CSS files, and JavaScript libraries. ¶ CON8897 - Using Web Experience Management to Drive Online Marketing Success Every year, the online channel becomes more imperative for driving organizational top-line revenue, but for many companies, mastering how to best market their products and services in a fast-evolving online world with high customer expectations for personalized experiences can be a complex proposition. Come to this panel discussion, and hear directly from online marketers how they are succeeding today by using Web experience management to drive marketing success, using capabilities such as targeting and optimization, user-generated content, mobile site publishing, and site visitor personalization to deliver engaging online experiences. ¶ CON8892 - Oracle’s Journey to Social Business Social business is a revolution, one that is causing rapidly accelerating change in how companies and customers engage with one another and how employees work together. Oracle’s goal in becoming a social business is to create a socially connected organization in which working collaboratively across geographical locations, lines of business, and management chains is second nature, enabling innovative solutions to business challenges. We can achieve this by connecting the right people, finding the right content, communicating with the right people, collaborating at the right time, and building the right communities in the right context—all ready in the CLOUD. Attend this session to see how Oracle is transforming itself into a social business. ¶  ------------ If you've read all the way to the end here - we are REALLY looking forward to seeing you in San Francisco.

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  • Using the West Wind Web Toolkit to set up AJAX and REST Services

    - by Rick Strahl
    I frequently get questions about which option to use for creating AJAX and REST backends for ASP.NET applications. There are many solutions out there to do this actually, but when I have a choice - not surprisingly - I fall back to my own tools in the West Wind West Wind Web Toolkit. I've talked a bunch about the 'in-the-box' solutions in the past so for a change in this post I'll talk about the tools that I use in my own and customer applications to handle AJAX and REST based access to service resources using the West Wind West Wind Web Toolkit. Let me preface this by saying that I like things to be easy. Yes flexible is very important as well but not at the expense of over-complexity. The goal I've had with my tools is make it drop dead easy, with good performance while providing the core features that I'm after, which are: Easy AJAX/JSON Callbacks Ability to return any kind of non JSON content (string, stream, byte[], images) Ability to work with both XML and JSON interchangeably for input/output Access endpoints via POST data, RPC JSON calls, GET QueryString values or Routing interface Easy to use generic JavaScript client to make RPC calls (same syntax, just what you need) Ability to create clean URLS with Routing Ability to use standard ASP.NET HTTP Stack for HTTP semantics It's all about options! In this post I'll demonstrate most of these features (except XML) in a few simple and short samples which you can download. So let's take a look and see how you can build an AJAX callback solution with the West Wind Web Toolkit. Installing the Toolkit Assemblies The easiest and leanest way of using the Toolkit in your Web project is to grab it via NuGet: West Wind Web and AJAX Utilities (Westwind.Web) and drop it into the project by right clicking in your Project and choosing Manage NuGet Packages from anywhere in the Project.   When done you end up with your project looking like this: What just happened? Nuget added two assemblies - Westwind.Web and Westwind.Utilities and the client ww.jquery.js library. It also added a couple of references into web.config: The default namespaces so they can be accessed in pages/views and a ScriptCompressionModule that the toolkit optionally uses to compress script resources served from within the assembly (namely ww.jquery.js and optionally jquery.js). Creating a new Service The West Wind Web Toolkit supports several ways of creating and accessing AJAX services, but for this post I'll stick to the lower level approach that works from any plain HTML page or of course MVC, WebForms, WebPages. There's also a WebForms specific control that makes this even easier but I'll leave that for another post. So, to create a new standalone AJAX/REST service we can create a new HttpHandler in the new project either as a pure class based handler or as a generic .ASHX handler. Both work equally well, but generic handlers don't require any web.config configuration so I'll use that here. In the root of the project add a Generic Handler. I'm going to call this one StockService.ashx. Once the handler has been created, edit the code and remove all of the handler body code. Then change the base class to CallbackHandler and add methods that have a [CallbackMethod] attribute. Here's the modified base handler implementation now looks like with an added HelloWorld method: using System; using Westwind.Web; namespace WestWindWebAjax { /// <summary> /// Handler implements CallbackHandler to provide REST/AJAX services /// </summary> public class SampleService : CallbackHandler { [CallbackMethod] public string HelloWorld(string name) { return "Hello " + name + ". Time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString(); } } } Notice that the class inherits from CallbackHandler and that the HelloWorld service method is marked up with [CallbackMethod]. We're done here. Services Urlbased Syntax Once you compile, the 'service' is live can respond to requests. All CallbackHandlers support input in GET and POST formats, and can return results as JSON or XML. To check our fancy HelloWorld method we can now access the service like this: http://localhost/WestWindWebAjax/StockService.ashx?Method=HelloWorld&name=Rick which produces a default JSON response - in this case a string (wrapped in quotes as it's JSON): (note by default JSON will be downloaded by most browsers not displayed - various options are available to view JSON right in the browser) If I want to return the same data as XML I can tack on a &format=xml at the end of the querystring which produces: <string>Hello Rick. Time is: 11/1/2011 12:11:13 PM</string> Cleaner URLs with Routing Syntax If you want cleaner URLs for each operation you can also configure custom routes on a per URL basis similar to the way that WCF REST does. To do this you need to add a new RouteHandler to your application's startup code in global.asax.cs one for each CallbackHandler based service you create: protected void Application_Start(object sender, EventArgs e) { CallbackHandlerRouteHandler.RegisterRoutes<StockService>(RouteTable.Routes); } With this code in place you can now add RouteUrl properties to any of your service methods. For the HelloWorld method that doesn't make a ton of sense but here is what a routed clean URL might look like in definition: [CallbackMethod(RouteUrl="stocks/HelloWorld/{name}")] public string HelloWorld(string name) { return "Hello " + name + ". Time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString(); } The same URL I previously used now becomes a bit shorter and more readable with: http://localhost/WestWindWebAjax/HelloWorld/Rick It's an easy way to create cleaner URLs and still get the same functionality. Calling the Service with $.getJSON() Since the result produced is JSON you can now easily consume this data using jQuery's getJSON method. First we need a couple of scripts - jquery.js and ww.jquery.js in the page: <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <link href="Css/Westwind.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> <script src="scripts/jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="scripts/ww.jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> </head> <body> Next let's add a small HelloWorld example form (what else) that has a single textbox to type a name, a button and a div tag to receive the result: <fieldset> <legend>Hello World</legend> Please enter a name: <input type="text" name="txtHello" id="txtHello" value="" /> <input type="button" id="btnSayHello" value="Say Hello (POST)" /> <input type="button" id="btnSayHelloGet" value="Say Hello (GET)" /> <div id="divHelloMessage" class="errordisplay" style="display:none;width: 450px;" > </div> </fieldset> Then to call the HelloWorld method a little jQuery is used to hook the document startup and the button click followed by the $.getJSON call to retrieve the data from the server. <script type="text/javascript"> $(document).ready(function () { $("#btnSayHelloGet").click(function () { $.getJSON("SampleService.ashx", { Method: "HelloWorld", name: $("#txtHello").val() }, function (result) { $("#divHelloMessage") .text(result) .fadeIn(1000); }); });</script> .getJSON() expects a full URL to the endpoint of our service, which is the ASHX file. We can either provide a full URL (SampleService.ashx?Method=HelloWorld&name=Rick) or we can just provide the base URL and an object that encodes the query string parameters for us using an object map that has a property that matches each parameter for the server method. We can also use the clean URL routing syntax, but using the object parameter encoding actually is safer as the parameters will get properly encoded by jQuery. The result returned is whatever the result on the server method is - in this case a string. The string is applied to the divHelloMessage element and we're done. Obviously this is a trivial example, but it demonstrates the basics of getting a JSON response back to the browser. AJAX Post Syntax - using ajaxCallMethod() The previous example allows you basic control over the data that you send to the server via querystring parameters. This works OK for simple values like short strings, numbers and boolean values, but doesn't really work if you need to pass something more complex like an object or an array back up to the server. To handle traditional RPC type messaging where the idea is to map server side functions and results to a client side invokation, POST operations can be used. The easiest way to use this functionality is to use ww.jquery.js and the ajaxCallMethod() function. ww.jquery wraps jQuery's AJAX functions and knows implicitly how to call a CallbackServer method with parameters and parse the result. Let's look at another simple example that posts a simple value but returns something more interesting. Let's start with the service method: [CallbackMethod(RouteUrl="stocks/{symbol}")] public StockQuote GetStockQuote(string symbol) { Response.Cache.SetExpires(DateTime.UtcNow.Add(new TimeSpan(0, 2, 0))); StockServer server = new StockServer(); var quote = server.GetStockQuote(symbol); if (quote == null) throw new ApplicationException("Invalid Symbol passed."); return quote; } This sample utilizes a small StockServer helper class (included in the sample) that downloads a stock quote from Yahoo's financial site via plain HTTP GET requests and formats it into a StockQuote object. Lets create a small HTML block that lets us query for the quote and display it: <fieldset> <legend>Single Stock Quote</legend> Please enter a stock symbol: <input type="text" name="txtSymbol" id="txtSymbol" value="msft" /> <input type="button" id="btnStockQuote" value="Get Quote" /> <div id="divStockDisplay" class="errordisplay" style="display:none; width: 450px;"> <div class="label-left">Company:</div> <div id="stockCompany"></div> <div class="label-left">Last Price:</div> <div id="stockLastPrice"></div> <div class="label-left">Quote Time:</div> <div id="stockQuoteTime"></div> </div> </fieldset> The final result looks something like this:   Let's hook up the button handler to fire the request and fill in the data as shown: $("#btnStockQuote").click(function () { ajaxCallMethod("SampleService.ashx", "GetStockQuote", [$("#txtSymbol").val()], function (quote) { $("#divStockDisplay").show().fadeIn(1000); $("#stockCompany").text(quote.Company + " (" + quote.Symbol + ")"); $("#stockLastPrice").text(quote.LastPrice); $("#stockQuoteTime").text(quote.LastQuoteTime.formatDate("MMM dd, HH:mm EST")); }, onPageError); }); So we point at SampleService.ashx and the GetStockQuote method, passing a single parameter of the input symbol value. Then there are two handlers for success and failure callbacks.  The success handler is the interesting part - it receives the stock quote as a result and assigns its values to various 'holes' in the stock display elements. The data that comes back over the wire is JSON and it looks like this: { "Symbol":"MSFT", "Company":"Microsoft Corpora", "OpenPrice":26.11, "LastPrice":26.01, "NetChange":0.02, "LastQuoteTime":"2011-11-03T02:00:00Z", "LastQuoteTimeString":"Nov. 11, 2011 4:20pm" } which is an object representation of the data. JavaScript can evaluate this JSON string back into an object easily and that's the reslut that gets passed to the success function. The quote data is then applied to existing page content by manually selecting items and applying them. There are other ways to do this more elegantly like using templates, but here we're only interested in seeing how the data is returned. The data in the object is typed - LastPrice is a number and QuoteTime is a date. Note about the date value: JavaScript doesn't have a date literal although the JSON embedded ISO string format used above  ("2011-11-03T02:00:00Z") is becoming fairly standard for JSON serializers. However, JSON parsers don't deserialize dates by default and return them by string. This is why the StockQuote actually returns a string value of LastQuoteTimeString for the same date. ajaxMethodCallback always converts dates properly into 'real' dates and the example above uses the real date value along with a .formatDate() data extension (also in ww.jquery.js) to display the raw date properly. Errors and Exceptions So what happens if your code fails? For example if I pass an invalid stock symbol to the GetStockQuote() method you notice that the code does this: if (quote == null) throw new ApplicationException("Invalid Symbol passed."); CallbackHandler automatically pushes the exception message back to the client so it's easy to pick up the error message. Regardless of what kind of error occurs: Server side, client side, protocol errors - any error will fire the failure handler with an error object parameter. The error is returned to the client via a JSON response in the error callback. In the previous examples I called onPageError which is a generic routine in ww.jquery that displays a status message on the bottom of the screen. But of course you can also take over the error handling yourself: $("#btnStockQuote").click(function () { ajaxCallMethod("SampleService.ashx", "GetStockQuote", [$("#txtSymbol").val()], function (quote) { $("#divStockDisplay").fadeIn(1000); $("#stockCompany").text(quote.Company + " (" + quote.Symbol + ")"); $("#stockLastPrice").text(quote.LastPrice); $("#stockQuoteTime").text(quote.LastQuoteTime.formatDate("MMM dd, hh:mmt")); }, function (error, xhr) { $("#divErrorDisplay").text(error.message).fadeIn(1000); }); }); The error object has a isCallbackError, message and  stackTrace properties, the latter of which is only populated when running in Debug mode, and this object is returned for all errors: Client side, transport and server side errors. Regardless of which type of error you get the same object passed (as well as the XHR instance optionally) which makes for a consistent error retrieval mechanism. Specifying HttpVerbs You can also specify HTTP Verbs that are allowed using the AllowedHttpVerbs option on the CallbackMethod attribute: [CallbackMethod(AllowedHttpVerbs=HttpVerbs.GET | HttpVerbs.POST)] public string HelloWorld(string name) { … } If you're building REST style API's this might be useful to force certain request semantics onto the client calling. For the above if call with a non-allowed HttpVerb the request returns a 405 error response along with a JSON (or XML) error object result. The default behavior is to allow all verbs access (HttpVerbs.All). Passing in object Parameters Up to now the parameters I passed were very simple. But what if you need to send something more complex like an object or an array? Let's look at another example now that passes an object from the client to the server. Keeping with the Stock theme here lets add a method called BuyOrder that lets us buy some shares for a stock. Consider the following service method that receives an StockBuyOrder object as a parameter: [CallbackMethod] public string BuyStock(StockBuyOrder buyOrder) { var server = new StockServer(); var quote = server.GetStockQuote(buyOrder.Symbol); if (quote == null) throw new ApplicationException("Invalid or missing stock symbol."); return string.Format("You're buying {0} shares of {1} ({2}) stock at {3} for a total of {4} on {5}.", buyOrder.Quantity, quote.Company, quote.Symbol, quote.LastPrice.ToString("c"), (quote.LastPrice * buyOrder.Quantity).ToString("c"), buyOrder.BuyOn.ToString("MMM d")); } public class StockBuyOrder { public string Symbol { get; set; } public int Quantity { get; set; } public DateTime BuyOn { get; set; } public StockBuyOrder() { BuyOn = DateTime.Now; } } This is a contrived do-nothing example that simply echoes back what was passed in, but it demonstrates how you can pass complex data to a callback method. On the client side we now have a very simple form that captures the three values on a form: <fieldset> <legend>Post a Stock Buy Order</legend> Enter a symbol: <input type="text" name="txtBuySymbol" id="txtBuySymbol" value="GLD" />&nbsp;&nbsp; Qty: <input type="text" name="txtBuyQty" id="txtBuyQty" value="10" style="width: 50px" />&nbsp;&nbsp; Buy on: <input type="text" name="txtBuyOn" id="txtBuyOn" value="<%= DateTime.Now.ToString("d") %>" style="width: 70px;" /> <input type="button" id="btnBuyStock" value="Buy Stock" /> <div id="divStockBuyMessage" class="errordisplay" style="display:none"></div> </fieldset> The completed form and demo then looks something like this:   The client side code that picks up the input values and assigns them to object properties and sends the AJAX request looks like this: $("#btnBuyStock").click(function () { // create an object map that matches StockBuyOrder signature var buyOrder = { Symbol: $("#txtBuySymbol").val(), Quantity: $("#txtBuyQty").val() * 1, // number Entered: new Date() } ajaxCallMethod("SampleService.ashx", "BuyStock", [buyOrder], function (result) { $("#divStockBuyMessage").text(result).fadeIn(1000); }, onPageError); }); The code creates an object and attaches the properties that match the server side object passed to the BuyStock method. Each property that you want to update needs to be included and the type must match (ie. string, number, date in this case). Any missing properties will not be set but also not cause any errors. Pass POST data instead of Objects In the last example I collected a bunch of values from form variables and stuffed them into object variables in JavaScript code. While that works, often times this isn't really helping - I end up converting my types on the client and then doing another conversion on the server. If lots of input controls are on a page and you just want to pick up the values on the server via plain POST variables - that can be done too - and it makes sense especially if you're creating and filling the client side object only to push data to the server. Let's add another method to the server that once again lets us buy a stock. But this time let's not accept a parameter but rather send POST data to the server. Here's the server method receiving POST data: [CallbackMethod] public string BuyStockPost() { StockBuyOrder buyOrder = new StockBuyOrder(); buyOrder.Symbol = Request.Form["txtBuySymbol"]; ; int qty; int.TryParse(Request.Form["txtBuyQuantity"], out qty); buyOrder.Quantity = qty; DateTime time; DateTime.TryParse(Request.Form["txtBuyBuyOn"], out time); buyOrder.BuyOn = time; // Or easier way yet //FormVariableBinder.Unbind(buyOrder,null,"txtBuy"); var server = new StockServer(); var quote = server.GetStockQuote(buyOrder.Symbol); if (quote == null) throw new ApplicationException("Invalid or missing stock symbol."); return string.Format("You're buying {0} shares of {1} ({2}) stock at {3} for a total of {4} on {5}.", buyOrder.Quantity, quote.Company, quote.Symbol, quote.LastPrice.ToString("c"), (quote.LastPrice * buyOrder.Quantity).ToString("c"), buyOrder.BuyOn.ToString("MMM d")); } Clearly we've made this server method take more code than it did with the object parameter. We've basically moved the parameter assignment logic from the client to the server. As a result the client code to call this method is now a bit shorter since there's no client side shuffling of values from the controls to an object. $("#btnBuyStockPost").click(function () { ajaxCallMethod("SampleService.ashx", "BuyStockPost", [], // Note: No parameters - function (result) { $("#divStockBuyMessage").text(result).fadeIn(1000); }, onPageError, // Force all page Form Variables to be posted { postbackMode: "Post" }); }); The client simply calls the BuyStockQuote method and pushes all the form variables from the page up to the server which parses them instead. The feature that makes this work is one of the options you can pass to the ajaxCallMethod() function: { postbackMode: "Post" }); which directs the function to include form variable POST data when making the service call. Other options include PostNoViewState (for WebForms to strip out WebForms crap vars), PostParametersOnly (default), None. If you pass parameters those are always posted to the server except when None is set. The above code can be simplified a bit by using the FormVariableBinder helper, which can unbind form variables directly into an object: FormVariableBinder.Unbind(buyOrder,null,"txtBuy"); which replaces the manual Request.Form[] reading code. It receives the object to unbind into, a string of properties to skip, and an optional prefix which is stripped off form variables to match property names. The component is similar to the MVC model binder but it's independent of MVC. Returning non-JSON Data CallbackHandler also supports returning non-JSON/XML data via special return types. You can return raw non-JSON encoded strings like this: [CallbackMethod(ReturnAsRawString=true,ContentType="text/plain")] public string HelloWorldNoJSON(string name) { return "Hello " + name + ". Time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString(); } Calling this method results in just a plain string - no JSON encoding with quotes around the result. This can be useful if your server handling code needs to return a string or HTML result that doesn't fit well for a page or other UI component. Any string output can be returned. You can also return binary data. Stream, byte[] and Bitmap/Image results are automatically streamed back to the client. Notice that you should set the ContentType of the request either on the CallbackMethod attribute or using Response.ContentType. This ensures the Web Server knows how to display your binary response. Using a stream response makes it possible to return any of data. Streamed data can be pretty handy to return bitmap data from a method. The following is a method that returns a stock history graph for a particular stock over a provided number of years: [CallbackMethod(ContentType="image/png",RouteUrl="stocks/history/graph/{symbol}/{years}")] public Stream GetStockHistoryGraph(string symbol, int years = 2,int width = 500, int height=350) { if (width == 0) width = 500; if (height == 0) height = 350; StockServer server = new StockServer(); return server.GetStockHistoryGraph(symbol,"Stock History for " + symbol,width,height,years); } I can now hook this up into the JavaScript code when I get a stock quote. At the end of the process I can assign the URL to the service that returns the image into the src property and so force the image to display. Here's the changed code: $("#btnStockQuote").click(function () { var symbol = $("#txtSymbol").val(); ajaxCallMethod("SampleService.ashx", "GetStockQuote", [symbol], function (quote) { $("#divStockDisplay").fadeIn(1000); $("#stockCompany").text(quote.Company + " (" + quote.Symbol + ")"); $("#stockLastPrice").text(quote.LastPrice); $("#stockQuoteTime").text(quote.LastQuoteTime.formatDate("MMM dd, hh:mmt")); // display a stock chart $("#imgStockHistory").attr("src", "stocks/history/graph/" + symbol + "/2"); },onPageError); }); The resulting output then looks like this: The charting code uses the new ASP.NET 4.0 Chart components via code to display a bar chart of the 2 year stock data as part of the StockServer class which you can find in the sample download. The ability to return arbitrary data from a service is useful as you can see - in this case the chart is clearly associated with the service and it's nice that the graph generation can happen off a handler rather than through a page. Images are common resources, but output can also be PDF reports, zip files for downloads etc. which is becoming increasingly more common to be returned from REST endpoints and other applications. Why reinvent? Obviously the examples I've shown here are pretty basic in terms of functionality. But I hope they demonstrate the core features of AJAX callbacks that you need to work through in most applications which is simple: return data, send back data and potentially retrieve data in various formats. While there are other solutions when it comes down to making AJAX callbacks and servicing REST like requests, I like the flexibility my home grown solution provides. Simply put it's still the easiest solution that I've found that addresses my common use cases: AJAX JSON RPC style callbacks Url based access XML and JSON Output from single method endpoint XML and JSON POST support, querystring input, routing parameter mapping UrlEncoded POST data support on callbacks Ability to return stream/raw string data Essentially ability to return ANYTHING from Service and pass anything All these features are available in various solutions but not together in one place. I've been using this code base for over 4 years now in a number of projects both for myself and commercial work and it's served me extremely well. Besides the AJAX functionality CallbackHandler provides, it's also an easy way to create any kind of output endpoint I need to create. Need to create a few simple routines that spit back some data, but don't want to create a Page or View or full blown handler for it? Create a CallbackHandler and add a method or multiple methods and you have your generic endpoints.  It's a quick and easy way to add small code pieces that are pretty efficient as they're running through a pretty small handler implementation. I can have this up and running in a couple of minutes literally without any setup and returning just about any kind of data. Resources Download the Sample NuGet: Westwind Web and AJAX Utilities (Westwind.Web) ajaxCallMethod() Documentation Using the AjaxMethodCallback WebForms Control West Wind Web Toolkit Home Page West Wind Web Toolkit Source Code © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in ASP.NET  jQuery  AJAX   Tweet (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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  • The Incremental Architect&rsquo;s Napkin - #5 - Design functions for extensibility and readability

    - by Ralf Westphal
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/theArchitectsNapkin/archive/2014/08/24/the-incremental-architectrsquos-napkin---5---design-functions-for.aspx The functionality of programs is entered via Entry Points. So what we´re talking about when designing software is a bunch of functions handling the requests represented by and flowing in through those Entry Points. Designing software thus consists of at least three phases: Analyzing the requirements to find the Entry Points and their signatures Designing the functionality to be executed when those Entry Points get triggered Implementing the functionality according to the design aka coding I presume, you´re familiar with phase 1 in some way. And I guess you´re proficient in implementing functionality in some programming language. But in my experience developers in general are not experienced in going through an explicit phase 2. “Designing functionality? What´s that supposed to mean?” you might already have thought. Here´s my definition: To design functionality (or functional design for short) means thinking about… well, functions. You find a solution for what´s supposed to happen when an Entry Point gets triggered in terms of functions. A conceptual solution that is, because those functions only exist in your head (or on paper) during this phase. But you may have guess that, because it´s “design” not “coding”. And here is, what functional design is not: It´s not about logic. Logic is expressions (e.g. +, -, && etc.) and control statements (e.g. if, switch, for, while etc.). Also I consider calling external APIs as logic. It´s equally basic. It´s what code needs to do in order to deliver some functionality or quality. Logic is what´s doing that needs to be done by software. Transformations are either done through expressions or API-calls. And then there is alternative control flow depending on the result of some expression. Basically it´s just jumps in Assembler, sometimes to go forward (if, switch), sometimes to go backward (for, while, do). But calling your own function is not logic. It´s not necessary to produce any outcome. Functionality is not enhanced by adding functions (subroutine calls) to your code. Nor is quality increased by adding functions. No performance gain, no higher scalability etc. through functions. Functions are not relevant to functionality. Strange, isn´t it. What they are important for is security of investment. By introducing functions into our code we can become more productive (re-use) and can increase evolvability (higher unterstandability, easier to keep code consistent). That´s no small feat, however. Evolvable code can hardly be overestimated. That´s why to me functional design is so important. It´s at the core of software development. To sum this up: Functional design is on a level of abstraction above (!) logical design or algorithmic design. Functional design is only done until you get to a point where each function is so simple you are very confident you can easily code it. Functional design an logical design (which mostly is coding, but can also be done using pseudo code or flow charts) are complementary. Software needs both. If you start coding right away you end up in a tangled mess very quickly. Then you need back out through refactoring. Functional design on the other hand is bloodless without actual code. It´s just a theory with no experiments to prove it. But how to do functional design? An example of functional design Let´s assume a program to de-duplicate strings. The user enters a number of strings separated by commas, e.g. a, b, a, c, d, b, e, c, a. And the program is supposed to clear this list of all doubles, e.g. a, b, c, d, e. There is only one Entry Point to this program: the user triggers the de-duplication by starting the program with the string list on the command line C:\>deduplicate "a, b, a, c, d, b, e, c, a" a, b, c, d, e …or by clicking on a GUI button. This leads to the Entry Point function to get called. It´s the program´s main function in case of the batch version or a button click event handler in the GUI version. That´s the physical Entry Point so to speak. It´s inevitable. What then happens is a three step process: Transform the input data from the user into a request. Call the request handler. Transform the output of the request handler into a tangible result for the user. Or to phrase it a bit more generally: Accept input. Transform input into output. Present output. This does not mean any of these steps requires a lot of effort. Maybe it´s just one line of code to accomplish it. Nevertheless it´s a distinct step in doing the processing behind an Entry Point. Call it an aspect or a responsibility - and you will realize it most likely deserves a function of its own to satisfy the Single Responsibility Principle (SRP). Interestingly the above list of steps is already functional design. There is no logic, but nevertheless the solution is described - albeit on a higher level of abstraction than you might have done yourself. But it´s still on a meta-level. The application to the domain at hand is easy, though: Accept string list from command line De-duplicate Present de-duplicated strings on standard output And this concrete list of processing steps can easily be transformed into code:static void Main(string[] args) { var input = Accept_string_list(args); var output = Deduplicate(input); Present_deduplicated_string_list(output); } Instead of a big problem there are three much smaller problems now. If you think each of those is trivial to implement, then go for it. You can stop the functional design at this point. But maybe, just maybe, you´re not so sure how to go about with the de-duplication for example. Then just implement what´s easy right now, e.g.private static string Accept_string_list(string[] args) { return args[0]; } private static void Present_deduplicated_string_list( string[] output) { var line = string.Join(", ", output); Console.WriteLine(line); } Accept_string_list() contains logic in the form of an API-call. Present_deduplicated_string_list() contains logic in the form of an expression and an API-call. And then repeat the functional design for the remaining processing step. What´s left is the domain logic: de-duplicating a list of strings. How should that be done? Without any logic at our disposal during functional design you´re left with just functions. So which functions could make up the de-duplication? Here´s a suggestion: De-duplicate Parse the input string into a true list of strings. Register each string in a dictionary/map/set. That way duplicates get cast away. Transform the data structure into a list of unique strings. Processing step 2 obviously was the core of the solution. That´s where real creativity was needed. That´s the core of the domain. But now after this refinement the implementation of each step is easy again:private static string[] Parse_string_list(string input) { return input.Split(',') .Select(s => s.Trim()) .ToArray(); } private static Dictionary<string,object> Compile_unique_strings(string[] strings) { return strings.Aggregate( new Dictionary<string, object>(), (agg, s) => { agg[s] = null; return agg; }); } private static string[] Serialize_unique_strings( Dictionary<string,object> dict) { return dict.Keys.ToArray(); } With these three additional functions Main() now looks like this:static void Main(string[] args) { var input = Accept_string_list(args); var strings = Parse_string_list(input); var dict = Compile_unique_strings(strings); var output = Serialize_unique_strings(dict); Present_deduplicated_string_list(output); } I think that´s very understandable code: just read it from top to bottom and you know how the solution to the problem works. It´s a mirror image of the initial design: Accept string list from command line Parse the input string into a true list of strings. Register each string in a dictionary/map/set. That way duplicates get cast away. Transform the data structure into a list of unique strings. Present de-duplicated strings on standard output You can even re-generate the design by just looking at the code. Code and functional design thus are always in sync - if you follow some simple rules. But about that later. And as a bonus: all the functions making up the process are small - which means easy to understand, too. So much for an initial concrete example. Now it´s time for some theory. Because there is method to this madness ;-) The above has only scratched the surface. Introducing Flow Design Functional design starts with a given function, the Entry Point. Its goal is to describe the behavior of the program when the Entry Point is triggered using a process, not an algorithm. An algorithm consists of logic, a process on the other hand consists just of steps or stages. Each processing step transforms input into output or a side effect. Also it might access resources, e.g. a printer, a database, or just memory. Processing steps thus can rely on state of some sort. This is different from Functional Programming, where functions are supposed to not be stateful and not cause side effects.[1] In its simplest form a process can be written as a bullet point list of steps, e.g. Get data from user Output result to user Transform data Parse data Map result for output Such a compilation of steps - possibly on different levels of abstraction - often is the first artifact of functional design. It can be generated by a team in an initial design brainstorming. Next comes ordering the steps. What should happen first, what next etc.? Get data from user Parse data Transform data Map result for output Output result to user That´s great for a start into functional design. It´s better than starting to code right away on a given function using TDD. Please get me right: TDD is a valuable practice. But it can be unnecessarily hard if the scope of a functionn is too large. But how do you know beforehand without investing some thinking? And how to do this thinking in a systematic fashion? My recommendation: For any given function you´re supposed to implement first do a functional design. Then, once you´re confident you know the processing steps - which are pretty small - refine and code them using TDD. You´ll see that´s much, much easier - and leads to cleaner code right away. For more information on this approach I call “Informed TDD” read my book of the same title. Thinking before coding is smart. And writing down the solution as a bunch of functions possibly is the simplest thing you can do, I´d say. It´s more according to the KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) principle than returning constants or other trivial stuff TDD development often is started with. So far so good. A simple ordered list of processing steps will do to start with functional design. As shown in the above example such steps can easily be translated into functions. Moving from design to coding thus is simple. However, such a list does not scale. Processing is not always that simple to be captured in a list. And then the list is just text. Again. Like code. That means the design is lacking visuality. Textual representations need more parsing by your brain than visual representations. Plus they are limited in their “dimensionality”: text just has one dimension, it´s sequential. Alternatives and parallelism are hard to encode in text. In addition the functional design using numbered lists lacks data. It´s not visible what´s the input, output, and state of the processing steps. That´s why functional design should be done using a lightweight visual notation. No tool is necessary to draw such designs. Use pen and paper; a flipchart, a whiteboard, or even a napkin is sufficient. Visualizing processes The building block of the functional design notation is a functional unit. I mostly draw it like this: Something is done, it´s clear what goes in, it´s clear what comes out, and it´s clear what the processing step requires in terms of state or hardware. Whenever input flows into a functional unit it gets processed and output is produced and/or a side effect occurs. Flowing data is the driver of something happening. That´s why I call this approach to functional design Flow Design. It´s about data flow instead of control flow. Control flow like in algorithms is of no concern to functional design. Thinking about control flow simply is too low level. Once you start with control flow you easily get bogged down by tons of details. That´s what you want to avoid during design. Design is supposed to be quick, broad brush, abstract. It should give overview. But what about all the details? As Robert C. Martin rightly said: “Programming is abot detail”. Detail is a matter of code. Once you start coding the processing steps you designed you can worry about all the detail you want. Functional design does not eliminate all the nitty gritty. It just postpones tackling them. To me that´s also an example of the SRP. Function design has the responsibility to come up with a solution to a problem posed by a single function (Entry Point). And later coding has the responsibility to implement the solution down to the last detail (i.e. statement, API-call). TDD unfortunately mixes both responsibilities. It´s just coding - and thereby trying to find detailed implementations (green phase) plus getting the design right (refactoring). To me that´s one reason why TDD has failed to deliver on its promise for many developers. Using functional units as building blocks of functional design processes can be depicted very easily. Here´s the initial process for the example problem: For each processing step draw a functional unit and label it. Choose a verb or an “action phrase” as a label, not a noun. Functional design is about activities, not state or structure. Then make the output of an upstream step the input of a downstream step. Finally think about the data that should flow between the functional units. Write the data above the arrows connecting the functional units in the direction of the data flow. Enclose the data description in brackets. That way you can clearly see if all flows have already been specified. Empty brackets mean “no data is flowing”, but nevertheless a signal is sent. A name like “list” or “strings” in brackets describes the data content. Use lower case labels for that purpose. A name starting with an upper case letter like “String” or “Customer” on the other hand signifies a data type. If you like, you also can combine descriptions with data types by separating them with a colon, e.g. (list:string) or (strings:string[]). But these are just suggestions from my practice with Flow Design. You can do it differently, if you like. Just be sure to be consistent. Flows wired-up in this manner I call one-dimensional (1D). Each functional unit just has one input and/or one output. A functional unit without an output is possible. It´s like a black hole sucking up input without producing any output. Instead it produces side effects. A functional unit without an input, though, does make much sense. When should it start to work? What´s the trigger? That´s why in the above process even the first processing step has an input. If you like, view such 1D-flows as pipelines. Data is flowing through them from left to right. But as you can see, it´s not always the same data. It get´s transformed along its passage: (args) becomes a (list) which is turned into (strings). The Principle of Mutual Oblivion A very characteristic trait of flows put together from function units is: no functional units knows another one. They are all completely independent of each other. Functional units don´t know where their input is coming from (or even when it´s gonna arrive). They just specify a range of values they can process. And they promise a certain behavior upon input arriving. Also they don´t know where their output is going. They just produce it in their own time independent of other functional units. That means at least conceptually all functional units work in parallel. Functional units don´t know their “deployment context”. They now nothing about the overall flow they are place in. They are just consuming input from some upstream, and producing output for some downstream. That makes functional units very easy to test. At least as long as they don´t depend on state or resources. I call this the Principle of Mutual Oblivion (PoMO). Functional units are oblivious of others as well as an overall context/purpose. They are just parts of a whole focused on a single responsibility. How the whole is built, how a larger goal is achieved, is of no concern to the single functional units. By building software in such a manner, functional design interestingly follows nature. Nature´s building blocks for organisms also follow the PoMO. The cells forming your body do not know each other. Take a nerve cell “controlling” a muscle cell for example:[2] The nerve cell does not know anything about muscle cells, let alone the specific muscel cell it is “attached to”. Likewise the muscle cell does not know anything about nerve cells, let a lone a specific nerve cell “attached to” it. Saying “the nerve cell is controlling the muscle cell” thus only makes sense when viewing both from the outside. “Control” is a concept of the whole, not of its parts. Control is created by wiring-up parts in a certain way. Both cells are mutually oblivious. Both just follow a contract. One produces Acetylcholine (ACh) as output, the other consumes ACh as input. Where the ACh is going, where it´s coming from neither cell cares about. Million years of evolution have led to this kind of division of labor. And million years of evolution have produced organism designs (DNA) which lead to the production of these different cell types (and many others) and also to their co-location. The result: the overall behavior of an organism. How and why this happened in nature is a mystery. For our software, though, it´s clear: functional and quality requirements needs to be fulfilled. So we as developers have to become “intelligent designers” of “software cells” which we put together to form a “software organism” which responds in satisfying ways to triggers from it´s environment. My bet is: If nature gets complex organisms working by following the PoMO, who are we to not apply this recipe for success to our much simpler “machines”? So my rule is: Wherever there is functionality to be delivered, because there is a clear Entry Point into software, design the functionality like nature would do it. Build it from mutually oblivious functional units. That´s what Flow Design is about. In that way it´s even universal, I´d say. Its notation can also be applied to biology: Never mind labeling the functional units with nouns. That´s ok in Flow Design. You´ll do that occassionally for functional units on a higher level of abstraction or when their purpose is close to hardware. Getting a cockroach to roam your bedroom takes 1,000,000 nerve cells (neurons). Getting the de-duplication program to do its job just takes 5 “software cells” (functional units). Both, though, follow the same basic principle. Translating functional units into code Moving from functional design to code is no rocket science. In fact it´s straightforward. There are two simple rules: Translate an input port to a function. Translate an output port either to a return statement in that function or to a function pointer visible to that function. The simplest translation of a functional unit is a function. That´s what you saw in the above example. Functions are mutually oblivious. That why Functional Programming likes them so much. It makes them composable. Which is the reason, nature works according to the PoMO. Let´s be clear about one thing: There is no dependency injection in nature. For all of an organism´s complexity no DI container is used. Behavior is the result of smooth cooperation between mutually oblivious building blocks. Functions will often be the adequate translation for the functional units in your designs. But not always. Take for example the case, where a processing step should not always produce an output. Maybe the purpose is to filter input. Here the functional unit consumes words and produces words. But it does not pass along every word flowing in. Some words are swallowed. Think of a spell checker. It probably should not check acronyms for correctness. There are too many of them. Or words with no more than two letters. Such words are called “stop words”. In the above picture the optionality of the output is signified by the astrisk outside the brackets. It means: Any number of (word) data items can flow from the functional unit for each input data item. It might be none or one or even more. This I call a stream of data. Such behavior cannot be translated into a function where output is generated with return. Because a function always needs to return a value. So the output port is translated into a function pointer or continuation which gets passed to the subroutine when called:[3]void filter_stop_words( string word, Action<string> onNoStopWord) { if (...check if not a stop word...) onNoStopWord(word); } If you want to be nitpicky you might call such a function pointer parameter an injection. And technically you´re right. Conceptually, though, it´s not an injection. Because the subroutine is not functionally dependent on the continuation. Firstly continuations are procedures, i.e. subroutines without a return type. Remember: Flow Design is about unidirectional data flow. Secondly the name of the formal parameter is chosen in a way as to not assume anything about downstream processing steps. onNoStopWord describes a situation (or event) within the functional unit only. Translating output ports into function pointers helps keeping functional units mutually oblivious in cases where output is optional or produced asynchronically. Either pass the function pointer to the function upon call. Or make it global by putting it on the encompassing class. Then it´s called an event. In C# that´s even an explicit feature.class Filter { public void filter_stop_words( string word) { if (...check if not a stop word...) onNoStopWord(word); } public event Action<string> onNoStopWord; } When to use a continuation and when to use an event dependens on how a functional unit is used in flows and how it´s packed together with others into classes. You´ll see examples further down the Flow Design road. Another example of 1D functional design Let´s see Flow Design once more in action using the visual notation. How about the famous word wrap kata? Robert C. Martin has posted a much cited solution including an extensive reasoning behind his TDD approach. So maybe you want to compare it to Flow Design. The function signature given is:string WordWrap(string text, int maxLineLength) {...} That´s not an Entry Point since we don´t see an application with an environment and users. Nevertheless it´s a function which is supposed to provide a certain functionality. The text passed in has to be reformatted. The input is a single line of arbitrary length consisting of words separated by spaces. The output should consist of one or more lines of a maximum length specified. If a word is longer than a the maximum line length it can be split in multiple parts each fitting in a line. Flow Design Let´s start by brainstorming the process to accomplish the feat of reformatting the text. What´s needed? Words need to be assembled into lines Words need to be extracted from the input text The resulting lines need to be assembled into the output text Words too long to fit in a line need to be split Does sound about right? I guess so. And it shows a kind of priority. Long words are a special case. So maybe there is a hint for an incremental design here. First let´s tackle “average words” (words not longer than a line). Here´s the Flow Design for this increment: The the first three bullet points turned into functional units with explicit data added. As the signature requires a text is transformed into another text. See the input of the first functional unit and the output of the last functional unit. In between no text flows, but words and lines. That´s good to see because thereby the domain is clearly represented in the design. The requirements are talking about words and lines and here they are. But note the asterisk! It´s not outside the brackets but inside. That means it´s not a stream of words or lines, but lists or sequences. For each text a sequence of words is output. For each sequence of words a sequence of lines is produced. The asterisk is used to abstract from the concrete implementation. Like with streams. Whether the list of words gets implemented as an array or an IEnumerable is not important during design. It´s an implementation detail. Does any processing step require further refinement? I don´t think so. They all look pretty “atomic” to me. And if not… I can always backtrack and refine a process step using functional design later once I´ve gained more insight into a sub-problem. Implementation The implementation is straightforward as you can imagine. The processing steps can all be translated into functions. Each can be tested easily and separately. Each has a focused responsibility. And the process flow becomes just a sequence of function calls: Easy to understand. It clearly states how word wrapping works - on a high level of abstraction. And it´s easy to evolve as you´ll see. Flow Design - Increment 2 So far only texts consisting of “average words” are wrapped correctly. Words not fitting in a line will result in lines too long. Wrapping long words is a feature of the requested functionality. Whether it´s there or not makes a difference to the user. To quickly get feedback I decided to first implement a solution without this feature. But now it´s time to add it to deliver the full scope. Fortunately Flow Design automatically leads to code following the Open Closed Principle (OCP). It´s easy to extend it - instead of changing well tested code. How´s that possible? Flow Design allows for extension of functionality by inserting functional units into the flow. That way existing functional units need not be changed. The data flow arrow between functional units is a natural extension point. No need to resort to the Strategy Pattern. No need to think ahead where extions might need to be made in the future. I just “phase in” the remaining processing step: Since neither Extract words nor Reformat know of their environment neither needs to be touched due to the “detour”. The new processing step accepts the output of the existing upstream step and produces data compatible with the existing downstream step. Implementation - Increment 2 A trivial implementation checking the assumption if this works does not do anything to split long words. The input is just passed on: Note how clean WordWrap() stays. The solution is easy to understand. A developer looking at this code sometime in the future, when a new feature needs to be build in, quickly sees how long words are dealt with. Compare this to Robert C. Martin´s solution:[4] How does this solution handle long words? Long words are not even part of the domain language present in the code. At least I need considerable time to understand the approach. Admittedly the Flow Design solution with the full implementation of long word splitting is longer than Robert C. Martin´s. At least it seems. Because his solution does not cover all the “word wrap situations” the Flow Design solution handles. Some lines would need to be added to be on par, I guess. But even then… Is a difference in LOC that important as long as it´s in the same ball park? I value understandability and openness for extension higher than saving on the last line of code. Simplicity is not just less code, it´s also clarity in design. But don´t take my word for it. Try Flow Design on larger problems and compare for yourself. What´s the easier, more straightforward way to clean code? And keep in mind: You ain´t seen all yet ;-) There´s more to Flow Design than described in this chapter. In closing I hope I was able to give you a impression of functional design that makes you hungry for more. To me it´s an inevitable step in software development. Jumping from requirements to code does not scale. And it leads to dirty code all to quickly. Some thought should be invested first. Where there is a clear Entry Point visible, it´s functionality should be designed using data flows. Because with data flows abstraction is possible. For more background on why that´s necessary read my blog article here. For now let me point out to you - if you haven´t already noticed - that Flow Design is a general purpose declarative language. It´s “programming by intention” (Shalloway et al.). Just write down how you think the solution should work on a high level of abstraction. This breaks down a large problem in smaller problems. And by following the PoMO the solutions to those smaller problems are independent of each other. So they are easy to test. Or you could even think about getting them implemented in parallel by different team members. Flow Design not only increases evolvability, but also helps becoming more productive. All team members can participate in functional design. This goes beyon collective code ownership. We´re talking collective design/architecture ownership. Because with Flow Design there is a common visual language to talk about functional design - which is the foundation for all other design activities.   PS: If you like what you read, consider getting my ebook “The Incremental Architekt´s Napkin”. It´s where I compile all the articles in this series for easier reading. I like the strictness of Function Programming - but I also find it quite hard to live by. And it certainly is not what millions of programmers are used to. Also to me it seems, the real world is full of state and side effects. So why give them such a bad image? That´s why functional design takes a more pragmatic approach. State and side effects are ok for processing steps - but be sure to follow the SRP. Don´t put too much of it into a single processing step. ? Image taken from www.physioweb.org ? My code samples are written in C#. C# sports typed function pointers called delegates. Action is such a function pointer type matching functions with signature void someName(T t). Other languages provide similar ways to work with functions as first class citizens - even Java now in version 8. I trust you find a way to map this detail of my translation to your favorite programming language. I know it works for Java, C++, Ruby, JavaScript, Python, Go. And if you´re using a Functional Programming language it´s of course a no brainer. ? Taken from his blog post “The Craftsman 62, The Dark Path”. ?

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  • A way of doing real-world test-driven development (and some thoughts about it)

    - by Thomas Weller
    Lately, I exchanged some arguments with Derick Bailey about some details of the red-green-refactor cycle of the Test-driven development process. In short, the issue revolved around the fact that it’s not enough to have a test red or green, but it’s also important to have it red or green for the right reasons. While for me, it’s sufficient to initially have a NotImplementedException in place, Derick argues that this is not totally correct (see these two posts: Red/Green/Refactor, For The Right Reasons and Red For The Right Reason: Fail By Assertion, Not By Anything Else). And he’s right. But on the other hand, I had no idea how his insights could have any practical consequence for my own individual interpretation of the red-green-refactor cycle (which is not really red-green-refactor, at least not in its pure sense, see the rest of this article). This made me think deeply for some days now. In the end I found out that the ‘right reason’ changes in my understanding depending on what development phase I’m in. To make this clear (at least I hope it becomes clear…) I started to describe my way of working in some detail, and then something strange happened: The scope of the article slightly shifted from focusing ‘only’ on the ‘right reason’ issue to something more general, which you might describe as something like  'Doing real-world TDD in .NET , with massive use of third-party add-ins’. This is because I feel that there is a more general statement about Test-driven development to make:  It’s high time to speak about the ‘How’ of TDD, not always only the ‘Why’. Much has been said about this, and me myself also contributed to that (see here: TDD is not about testing, it's about how we develop software). But always justifying what you do is very unsatisfying in the long run, it is inherently defensive, and it costs time and effort that could be used for better and more important things. And frankly: I’m somewhat sick and tired of repeating time and again that the test-driven way of software development is highly preferable for many reasons - I don’t want to spent my time exclusively on stating the obvious… So, again, let’s say it clearly: TDD is programming, and programming is TDD. Other ways of programming (code-first, sometimes called cowboy-coding) are exceptional and need justification. – I know that there are many people out there who will disagree with this radical statement, and I also know that it’s not a description of the real world but more of a mission statement or something. But nevertheless I’m absolutely sure that in some years this statement will be nothing but a platitude. Side note: Some parts of this post read as if I were paid by Jetbrains (the manufacturer of the ReSharper add-in – R#), but I swear I’m not. Rather I think that Visual Studio is just not production-complete without it, and I wouldn’t even consider to do professional work without having this add-in installed... The three parts of a software component Before I go into some details, I first should describe my understanding of what belongs to a software component (assembly, type, or method) during the production process (i.e. the coding phase). Roughly, I come up with the three parts shown below:   First, we need to have some initial sort of requirement. This can be a multi-page formal document, a vague idea in some programmer’s brain of what might be needed, or anything in between. In either way, there has to be some sort of requirement, be it explicit or not. – At the C# micro-level, the best way that I found to formulate that is to define interfaces for just about everything, even for internal classes, and to provide them with exhaustive xml comments. The next step then is to re-formulate these requirements in an executable form. This is specific to the respective programming language. - For C#/.NET, the Gallio framework (which includes MbUnit) in conjunction with the ReSharper add-in for Visual Studio is my toolset of choice. The third part then finally is the production code itself. It’s development is entirely driven by the requirements and their executable formulation. This is the delivery, the two other parts are ‘only’ there to make its production possible, to give it a decent quality and reliability, and to significantly reduce related costs down the maintenance timeline. So while the first two parts are not really relevant for the customer, they are very important for the developer. The customer (or in Scrum terms: the Product Owner) is not interested at all in how  the product is developed, he is only interested in the fact that it is developed as cost-effective as possible, and that it meets his functional and non-functional requirements. The rest is solely a matter of the developer’s craftsmanship, and this is what I want to talk about during the remainder of this article… An example To demonstrate my way of doing real-world TDD, I decided to show the development of a (very) simple Calculator component. The example is deliberately trivial and silly, as examples always are. I am totally aware of the fact that real life is never that simple, but I only want to show some development principles here… The requirement As already said above, I start with writing down some words on the initial requirement, and I normally use interfaces for that, even for internal classes - the typical question “intf or not” doesn’t even come to mind. I need them for my usual workflow and using them automatically produces high componentized and testable code anyway. To think about their usage in every single situation would slow down the production process unnecessarily. So this is what I begin with: namespace Calculator {     /// <summary>     /// Defines a very simple calculator component for demo purposes.     /// </summary>     public interface ICalculator     {         /// <summary>         /// Gets the result of the last successful operation.         /// </summary>         /// <value>The last result.</value>         /// <remarks>         /// Will be <see langword="null" /> before the first successful operation.         /// </remarks>         double? LastResult { get; }       } // interface ICalculator   } // namespace Calculator So, I’m not beginning with a test, but with a sort of code declaration - and still I insist on being 100% test-driven. There are three important things here: Starting this way gives me a method signature, which allows to use IntelliSense and AutoCompletion and thus eliminates the danger of typos - one of the most regular, annoying, time-consuming, and therefore expensive sources of error in the development process. In my understanding, the interface definition as a whole is more of a readable requirement document and technical documentation than anything else. So this is at least as much about documentation than about coding. The documentation must completely describe the behavior of the documented element. I normally use an IoC container or some sort of self-written provider-like model in my architecture. In either case, I need my components defined via service interfaces anyway. - I will use the LinFu IoC framework here, for no other reason as that is is very simple to use. The ‘Red’ (pt. 1)   First I create a folder for the project’s third-party libraries and put the LinFu.Core dll there. Then I set up a test project (via a Gallio project template), and add references to the Calculator project and the LinFu dll. Finally I’m ready to write the first test, which will look like the following: namespace Calculator.Test {     [TestFixture]     public class CalculatorTest     {         private readonly ServiceContainer container = new ServiceContainer();           [Test]         public void CalculatorLastResultIsInitiallyNull()         {             ICalculator calculator = container.GetService<ICalculator>();               Assert.IsNull(calculator.LastResult);         }       } // class CalculatorTest   } // namespace Calculator.Test       This is basically the executable formulation of what the interface definition states (part of). Side note: There’s one principle of TDD that is just plain wrong in my eyes: I’m talking about the Red is 'does not compile' thing. How could a compiler error ever be interpreted as a valid test outcome? I never understood that, it just makes no sense to me. (Or, in Derick’s terms: this reason is as wrong as a reason ever could be…) A compiler error tells me: Your code is incorrect, but nothing more.  Instead, the ‘Red’ part of the red-green-refactor cycle has a clearly defined meaning to me: It means that the test works as intended and fails only if its assumptions are not met for some reason. Back to our Calculator. When I execute the above test with R#, the Gallio plugin will give me this output: So this tells me that the test is red for the wrong reason: There’s no implementation that the IoC-container could load, of course. So let’s fix that. With R#, this is very easy: First, create an ICalculator - derived type:        Next, implement the interface members: And finally, move the new class to its own file: So far my ‘work’ was six mouse clicks long, the only thing that’s left to do manually here, is to add the Ioc-specific wiring-declaration and also to make the respective class non-public, which I regularly do to force my components to communicate exclusively via interfaces: This is what my Calculator class looks like as of now: using System; using LinFu.IoC.Configuration;   namespace Calculator {     [Implements(typeof(ICalculator))]     internal class Calculator : ICalculator     {         public double? LastResult         {             get             {                 throw new NotImplementedException();             }         }     } } Back to the test fixture, we have to put our IoC container to work: [TestFixture] public class CalculatorTest {     #region Fields       private readonly ServiceContainer container = new ServiceContainer();       #endregion // Fields       #region Setup/TearDown       [FixtureSetUp]     public void FixtureSetUp()     {        container.LoadFrom(AppDomain.CurrentDomain.BaseDirectory, "Calculator.dll");     }       ... Because I have a R# live template defined for the setup/teardown method skeleton as well, the only manual coding here again is the IoC-specific stuff: two lines, not more… The ‘Red’ (pt. 2) Now, the execution of the above test gives the following result: This time, the test outcome tells me that the method under test is called. And this is the point, where Derick and I seem to have somewhat different views on the subject: Of course, the test still is worthless regarding the red/green outcome (or: it’s still red for the wrong reasons, in that it gives a false negative). But as far as I am concerned, I’m not really interested in the test outcome at this point of the red-green-refactor cycle. Rather, I only want to assert that my test actually calls the right method. If that’s the case, I will happily go on to the ‘Green’ part… The ‘Green’ Making the test green is quite trivial. Just make LastResult an automatic property:     [Implements(typeof(ICalculator))]     internal class Calculator : ICalculator     {         public double? LastResult { get; private set; }     }         One more round… Now on to something slightly more demanding (cough…). Let’s state that our Calculator exposes an Add() method:         ...   /// <summary>         /// Adds the specified operands.         /// </summary>         /// <param name="operand1">The operand1.</param>         /// <param name="operand2">The operand2.</param>         /// <returns>The result of the additon.</returns>         /// <exception cref="ArgumentException">         /// Argument <paramref name="operand1"/> is &lt; 0.<br/>         /// -- or --<br/>         /// Argument <paramref name="operand2"/> is &lt; 0.         /// </exception>         double Add(double operand1, double operand2);       } // interface ICalculator A remark: I sometimes hear the complaint that xml comment stuff like the above is hard to read. That’s certainly true, but irrelevant to me, because I read xml code comments with the CR_Documentor tool window. And using that, it looks like this:   Apart from that, I’m heavily using xml code comments (see e.g. here for a detailed guide) because there is the possibility of automating help generation with nightly CI builds (using MS Sandcastle and the Sandcastle Help File Builder), and then publishing the results to some intranet location.  This way, a team always has first class, up-to-date technical documentation at hand about the current codebase. (And, also very important for speeding up things and avoiding typos: You have IntelliSense/AutoCompletion and R# support, and the comments are subject to compiler checking…).     Back to our Calculator again: Two more R# – clicks implement the Add() skeleton:         ...           public double Add(double operand1, double operand2)         {             throw new NotImplementedException();         }       } // class Calculator As we have stated in the interface definition (which actually serves as our requirement document!), the operands are not allowed to be negative. So let’s start implementing that. Here’s the test: [Test] [Row(-0.5, 2)] public void AddThrowsOnNegativeOperands(double operand1, double operand2) {     ICalculator calculator = container.GetService<ICalculator>();       Assert.Throws<ArgumentException>(() => calculator.Add(operand1, operand2)); } As you can see, I’m using a data-driven unit test method here, mainly for these two reasons: Because I know that I will have to do the same test for the second operand in a few seconds, I save myself from implementing another test method for this purpose. Rather, I only will have to add another Row attribute to the existing one. From the test report below, you can see that the argument values are explicitly printed out. This can be a valuable documentation feature even when everything is green: One can quickly review what values were tested exactly - the complete Gallio HTML-report (as it will be produced by the Continuous Integration runs) shows these values in a quite clear format (see below for an example). Back to our Calculator development again, this is what the test result tells us at the moment: So we’re red again, because there is not yet an implementation… Next we go on and implement the necessary parameter verification to become green again, and then we do the same thing for the second operand. To make a long story short, here’s the test and the method implementation at the end of the second cycle: // in CalculatorTest:   [Test] [Row(-0.5, 2)] [Row(295, -123)] public void AddThrowsOnNegativeOperands(double operand1, double operand2) {     ICalculator calculator = container.GetService<ICalculator>();       Assert.Throws<ArgumentException>(() => calculator.Add(operand1, operand2)); }   // in Calculator: public double Add(double operand1, double operand2) {     if (operand1 < 0.0)     {         throw new ArgumentException("Value must not be negative.", "operand1");     }     if (operand2 < 0.0)     {         throw new ArgumentException("Value must not be negative.", "operand2");     }     throw new NotImplementedException(); } So far, we have sheltered our method from unwanted input, and now we can safely operate on the parameters without further caring about their validity (this is my interpretation of the Fail Fast principle, which is regarded here in more detail). Now we can think about the method’s successful outcomes. First let’s write another test for that: [Test] [Row(1, 1, 2)] public void TestAdd(double operand1, double operand2, double expectedResult) {     ICalculator calculator = container.GetService<ICalculator>();       double result = calculator.Add(operand1, operand2);       Assert.AreEqual(expectedResult, result); } Again, I’m regularly using row based test methods for these kinds of unit tests. The above shown pattern proved to be extremely helpful for my development work, I call it the Defined-Input/Expected-Output test idiom: You define your input arguments together with the expected method result. There are two major benefits from that way of testing: In the course of refining a method, it’s very likely to come up with additional test cases. In our case, we might add tests for some edge cases like ‘one of the operands is zero’ or ‘the sum of the two operands causes an overflow’, or maybe there’s an external test protocol that has to be fulfilled (e.g. an ISO norm for medical software), and this results in the need of testing against additional values. In all these scenarios we only have to add another Row attribute to the test. Remember that the argument values are written to the test report, so as a side-effect this produces valuable documentation. (This can become especially important if the fulfillment of some sort of external requirements has to be proven). So your test method might look something like that in the end: [Test, Description("Arguments: operand1, operand2, expectedResult")] [Row(1, 1, 2)] [Row(0, 999999999, 999999999)] [Row(0, 0, 0)] [Row(0, double.MaxValue, double.MaxValue)] [Row(4, double.MaxValue - 2.5, double.MaxValue)] public void TestAdd(double operand1, double operand2, double expectedResult) {     ICalculator calculator = container.GetService<ICalculator>();       double result = calculator.Add(operand1, operand2);       Assert.AreEqual(expectedResult, result); } And this will produce the following HTML report (with Gallio):   Not bad for the amount of work we invested in it, huh? - There might be scenarios where reports like that can be useful for demonstration purposes during a Scrum sprint review… The last requirement to fulfill is that the LastResult property is expected to store the result of the last operation. I don’t show this here, it’s trivial enough and brings nothing new… And finally: Refactor (for the right reasons) To demonstrate my way of going through the refactoring portion of the red-green-refactor cycle, I added another method to our Calculator component, namely Subtract(). Here’s the code (tests and production): // CalculatorTest.cs:   [Test, Description("Arguments: operand1, operand2, expectedResult")] [Row(1, 1, 0)] [Row(0, 999999999, -999999999)] [Row(0, 0, 0)] [Row(0, double.MaxValue, -double.MaxValue)] [Row(4, double.MaxValue - 2.5, -double.MaxValue)] public void TestSubtract(double operand1, double operand2, double expectedResult) {     ICalculator calculator = container.GetService<ICalculator>();       double result = calculator.Subtract(operand1, operand2);       Assert.AreEqual(expectedResult, result); }   [Test, Description("Arguments: operand1, operand2, expectedResult")] [Row(1, 1, 0)] [Row(0, 999999999, -999999999)] [Row(0, 0, 0)] [Row(0, double.MaxValue, -double.MaxValue)] [Row(4, double.MaxValue - 2.5, -double.MaxValue)] public void TestSubtractGivesExpectedLastResult(double operand1, double operand2, double expectedResult) {     ICalculator calculator = container.GetService<ICalculator>();       calculator.Subtract(operand1, operand2);       Assert.AreEqual(expectedResult, calculator.LastResult); }   ...   // ICalculator.cs: /// <summary> /// Subtracts the specified operands. /// </summary> /// <param name="operand1">The operand1.</param> /// <param name="operand2">The operand2.</param> /// <returns>The result of the subtraction.</returns> /// <exception cref="ArgumentException"> /// Argument <paramref name="operand1"/> is &lt; 0.<br/> /// -- or --<br/> /// Argument <paramref name="operand2"/> is &lt; 0. /// </exception> double Subtract(double operand1, double operand2);   ...   // Calculator.cs:   public double Subtract(double operand1, double operand2) {     if (operand1 < 0.0)     {         throw new ArgumentException("Value must not be negative.", "operand1");     }       if (operand2 < 0.0)     {         throw new ArgumentException("Value must not be negative.", "operand2");     }       return (this.LastResult = operand1 - operand2).Value; }   Obviously, the argument validation stuff that was produced during the red-green part of our cycle duplicates the code from the previous Add() method. So, to avoid code duplication and minimize the number of code lines of the production code, we do an Extract Method refactoring. One more time, this is only a matter of a few mouse clicks (and giving the new method a name) with R#: Having done that, our production code finally looks like that: using System; using LinFu.IoC.Configuration;   namespace Calculator {     [Implements(typeof(ICalculator))]     internal class Calculator : ICalculator     {         #region ICalculator           public double? LastResult { get; private set; }           public double Add(double operand1, double operand2)         {             ThrowIfOneOperandIsInvalid(operand1, operand2);               return (this.LastResult = operand1 + operand2).Value;         }           public double Subtract(double operand1, double operand2)         {             ThrowIfOneOperandIsInvalid(operand1, operand2);               return (this.LastResult = operand1 - operand2).Value;         }           #endregion // ICalculator           #region Implementation (Helper)           private static void ThrowIfOneOperandIsInvalid(double operand1, double operand2)         {             if (operand1 < 0.0)             {                 throw new ArgumentException("Value must not be negative.", "operand1");             }               if (operand2 < 0.0)             {                 throw new ArgumentException("Value must not be negative.", "operand2");             }         }           #endregion // Implementation (Helper)       } // class Calculator   } // namespace Calculator But is the above worth the effort at all? It’s obviously trivial and not very impressive. All our tests were green (for the right reasons), and refactoring the code did not change anything. It’s not immediately clear how this refactoring work adds value to the project. Derick puts it like this: STOP! Hold on a second… before you go any further and before you even think about refactoring what you just wrote to make your test pass, you need to understand something: if your done with your requirements after making the test green, you are not required to refactor the code. I know… I’m speaking heresy, here. Toss me to the wolves, I’ve gone over to the dark side! Seriously, though… if your test is passing for the right reasons, and you do not need to write any test or any more code for you class at this point, what value does refactoring add? Derick immediately answers his own question: So why should you follow the refactor portion of red/green/refactor? When you have added code that makes the system less readable, less understandable, less expressive of the domain or concern’s intentions, less architecturally sound, less DRY, etc, then you should refactor it. I couldn’t state it more precise. From my personal perspective, I’d add the following: You have to keep in mind that real-world software systems are usually quite large and there are dozens or even hundreds of occasions where micro-refactorings like the above can be applied. It’s the sum of them all that counts. And to have a good overall quality of the system (e.g. in terms of the Code Duplication Percentage metric) you have to be pedantic on the individual, seemingly trivial cases. My job regularly requires the reading and understanding of ‘foreign’ code. So code quality/readability really makes a HUGE difference for me – sometimes it can be even the difference between project success and failure… Conclusions The above described development process emerged over the years, and there were mainly two things that guided its evolution (you might call it eternal principles, personal beliefs, or anything in between): Test-driven development is the normal, natural way of writing software, code-first is exceptional. So ‘doing TDD or not’ is not a question. And good, stable code can only reliably be produced by doing TDD (yes, I know: many will strongly disagree here again, but I’ve never seen high-quality code – and high-quality code is code that stood the test of time and causes low maintenance costs – that was produced code-first…) It’s the production code that pays our bills in the end. (Though I have seen customers these days who demand an acceptance test battery as part of the final delivery. Things seem to go into the right direction…). The test code serves ‘only’ to make the production code work. But it’s the number of delivered features which solely counts at the end of the day - no matter how much test code you wrote or how good it is. With these two things in mind, I tried to optimize my coding process for coding speed – or, in business terms: productivity - without sacrificing the principles of TDD (more than I’d do either way…).  As a result, I consider a ratio of about 3-5/1 for test code vs. production code as normal and desirable. In other words: roughly 60-80% of my code is test code (This might sound heavy, but that is mainly due to the fact that software development standards only begin to evolve. The entire software development profession is very young, historically seen; only at the very beginning, and there are no viable standards yet. If you think about software development as a kind of casting process, where the test code is the mold and the resulting production code is the final product, then the above ratio sounds no longer extraordinary…) Although the above might look like very much unnecessary work at first sight, it’s not. With the aid of the mentioned add-ins, doing all the above is a matter of minutes, sometimes seconds (while writing this post took hours and days…). The most important thing is to have the right tools at hand. Slow developer machines or the lack of a tool or something like that - for ‘saving’ a few 100 bucks -  is just not acceptable and a very bad decision in business terms (though I quite some times have seen and heard that…). Production of high-quality products needs the usage of high-quality tools. This is a platitude that every craftsman knows… The here described round-trip will take me about five to ten minutes in my real-world development practice. I guess it’s about 30% more time compared to developing the ‘traditional’ (code-first) way. But the so manufactured ‘product’ is of much higher quality and massively reduces maintenance costs, which is by far the single biggest cost factor, as I showed in this previous post: It's the maintenance, stupid! (or: Something is rotten in developerland.). In the end, this is a highly cost-effective way of software development… But on the other hand, there clearly is a trade-off here: coding speed vs. code quality/later maintenance costs. The here described development method might be a perfect fit for the overwhelming majority of software projects, but there certainly are some scenarios where it’s not - e.g. if time-to-market is crucial for a software project. So this is a business decision in the end. It’s just that you have to know what you’re doing and what consequences this might have… Some last words First, I’d like to thank Derick Bailey again. His two aforementioned posts (which I strongly recommend for reading) inspired me to think deeply about my own personal way of doing TDD and to clarify my thoughts about it. I wouldn’t have done that without this inspiration. I really enjoy that kind of discussions… I agree with him in all respects. But I don’t know (yet?) how to bring his insights into the described production process without slowing things down. The above described method proved to be very “good enough” in my practical experience. But of course, I’m open to suggestions here… My rationale for now is: If the test is initially red during the red-green-refactor cycle, the ‘right reason’ is: it actually calls the right method, but this method is not yet operational. Later on, when the cycle is finished and the tests become part of the regular, automated Continuous Integration process, ‘red’ certainly must occur for the ‘right reason’: in this phase, ‘red’ MUST mean nothing but an unfulfilled assertion - Fail By Assertion, Not By Anything Else!

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  • Why should you choose Oracle WebLogic 12c instead of JBoss EAP 6?

    - by Ricardo Ferreira
    In this post, I will cover some technical differences between Oracle WebLogic 12c and JBoss EAP 6, which was released a couple days ago from Red Hat. This article claims to help you in the evaluation of key points that you should consider when choosing for an Java EE application server. In the following sections, I will present to you some important aspects that most customers ask us when they are seriously evaluating for an middleware infrastructure, specially if you are considering JBoss for some reason. I would suggest that you keep the following question in mind while you are reading the points: "Why should I choose JBoss instead of WebLogic?" 1) Multi Datacenter Deployment and Clustering - D/R ("Disaster & Recovery") architecture support is embedded on the WebLogic Server 12c product. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no direct D/R support included, Red Hat relies on third-part tools with higher prices. When you consider a middleware solution to host your business critical application, you should worry with every architectural aspect that are related with the solution. Fail-over support is one little aspect of a truly reliable solution. If you do not worry about D/R, your solution will not be reliable. Having said that, with Red Hat and JBoss EAP 6, you have this extra cost that will increase considerably the total cost of ownership of the solution. As we commonly hear from analysts, open-source are not so cheaper when you start seeing the big picture. - WebLogic Server 12c supports advanced LAN clustering, detection of death servers and have a common alert framework. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has limited LAN clustering support with no server death detection. They do not generate any alerts when servers goes down (only if you buy JBoss ON which is a separated technology, but until now does not support JBoss EAP 6) and manual intervention are required when servers goes down. In most cases, admin people must rely on "kill -9", "tail -f someFile.log" and "ps ax | grep java" commands to manage failures and clustering anomalies. - WebLogic Server 12c supports the concept of Node Manager, which is a separated process that runs on the physical | virtual servers that allows extend the administration of the cluster to WebLogic managed servers that are often distributed across multiple machines and geographic locations. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no equivalent technology. Whole server instances must be managed individually. - WebLogic Server 12c Node Manager supports Coherence to boost performance when managing servers. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no similar technology. There is no way to coordinate JBoss and infiniband instances provided by JBoss using high throughput and low latency protocols like InfiniBand. The Node Manager feature also allows another very important feature that JBoss EAP lacks: secure the administration. When using WebLogic Node Manager, all the administration tasks are sent to the managed servers in a secure tunel protected by a certificate, which means that the transport layer that separates the WebLogic administration console from the managed servers are secured by SSL. - WebLogic Server 12c are now integrated with OTD ("Oracle Traffic Director") which is a web server technology derived from the former Sun iPlanet Web Server. This software complements the web server support offered by OHS ("Oracle HTTP Server"). Using OTD, WebLogic instances are load-balanced by a high powerful software that knows how to handle SDP ("Socket Direct Protocol") over InfiniBand, which boost performance when used with engineered systems technologies like Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand only offers support to Apache Web Server with custom modules created to deal with JBoss clusters, but only across standard TCP/IP networks.  2) Application and Runtime Diagnostics - WebLogic Server 12c have diagnostics capabilities embedded on the server called WLDF ("WebLogic Diagnostic Framework") so there is no need to rely on third-part tools. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no diagnostics capabilities. Their only diagnostics tool is the log generated by the application server. Admin people are encouraged to analyse thousands of log lines to find out what is going on. - WebLogic Server 12c complement WLDF with JRockit MC ("Mission Control"), which provides to administrators and developers a complete insight about the JVM performance, behavior and possible bottlenecks. WebLogic Server 12c also have an classloader analysis tool embedded, and even a log analyzer tool that enables administrators and developers to view logs of multiple servers at the same time. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand relies on third-part tools to do something similar. Again, only log searching are offered to find out whats going on. - WebLogic Server 12c offers end-to-end traceability and monitoring available through Oracle EM ("Enterprise Manager"), including monitoring of business transactions that flows through web servers, ESBs, application servers and database servers, all of this with high deep JVM analysis and diagnostics. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand, even using JBoss ON ("Operations Network"), which is a separated technology, does not support those features. Red Hat relies on third-part tools to provide direct Oracle database traceability across JVMs. One of those tools are Oracle EM for non-Oracle middleware that manage JBoss, Tomcat, Websphere and IIS transparently. - WebLogic Server 12c with their JRockit support offers a tool called JRockit Flight Recorder, which can give developers a complete visibility of a certain period of application production monitoring with zero extra overhead. This automatic recording allows you to deep analyse threads latency, memory leaks, thread contention, resource utilization, stack overflow damages and GC ("Garbage Collection") cycles, to observe in real time stop-the-world phenomenons, generational, reference count and parallel collects and mutator threads analysis. JBoss EAP 6 don't even dream to support something similar, even because they don't have their own JVM. 3) Application Server Administration - WebLogic Server 12c offers a complete administration console complemented with scripting and macro-like recording capabilities. A single WebLogic console can managed up to hundreds of WebLogic servers belonging to the same domain. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has a limited console and provides a XML centric administration. JBoss, after ten years, started the development of a rudimentary centralized administration that still leave a lot of administration tasks aside, so admin people and developers must touch scripts and XML configuration files for most advanced and even simple administration tasks. This lead applications to error prone and risky deployments. Even using JBoss ON, JBoss EAP are not able to offer decent administration features for admin people which must be high skilled in JBoss internal architecture and its managing capabilities. - Oracle EM is available to manage multiple domains, databases, application servers, operating systems and virtualization, with a complete end-to-end visibility. JBoss ON does not provide management capabilities across the complete architecture, only basic monitoring. Even deployment must be done aside JBoss ON which does no integrate well with others softwares than JBoss. Until now, JBoss ON does not supports JBoss EAP 6, so even their minimal support for JBoss are not available for JBoss EAP 6 leaving customers uncovered and subject to high skilled JBoss admin people. - WebLogic Server 12c has the same administration model whatever is the topology selected by the customer. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand differentiates between two operational models: standalone-mode and domain-mode, that are not consistent with each other. Depending on the mode used, the administration skill is different. - WebLogic Server 12c has no point-of-failures processes, and it does not need to define any specialized server. Domain model in WebLogic is available for years (at least ten years or more) and is production proven. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand needs special processes to garantee JBoss integrity, the PC ("Process-Controller") and the HC ("Host-Controller"). Different from WebLogic, the domain model in JBoss is quite new (one year at tops) of maturity, and need to mature considerably until start doing things like WebLogic domain model does. - WebLogic Server 12c supports parallel deployment model which enables some artifacts being deployed at the same time. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand does not have any similar feature. Every deployment are done atomically in the containers. This means that if you have a huge EAR (an EAR of 120 MB of size for instance) and deploy onto JBoss EAP 6, this EAR will take some minutes in order to starting accept thread requests. The same EAR deployed onto WebLogic Server 12c will reduce the deployment time at least in 2X compared to JBoss. 4) Support and Upgrades - WebLogic Server 12c has patch management available. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no patch management available, each JBoss EAP instance should be patched manually. To achieve such feature, you need to buy a separated technology called JBoss ON ("Operations Network") that manage this type of stuff. But until now, JBoss ON does not support JBoss EAP 6 so, in practice, JBoss EAP 6 does not have this feature. - WebLogic Server 12c supports previuous WebLogic domains without any reconfiguration since its kernel is robust and mature since its creation in 1995. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has a proven lack of supportability between JBoss AS 4, 5, 6 and 7. Different kernels and messaging engines were implemented in JBoss stack in the last five years reveling their incapacity to create a well architected and proven middleware technology. - WebLogic Server 12c has patch prescription based on customer configuration. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no such capability. People need to create ticket supports and have their installations revised by Red Hat support guys to gain some patch prescription from them. - Oracle WebLogic Server independent of the version has 8 years of support of new patches and has lifetime release of existing patches beyond that. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand provides patches for a specific application server version up to 5 years after the release date. JBoss EAP 4 and previous versions had only 4 years. A good question that Red Hat will argue to answer is: "what happens when you find issues after year 5"?  5) RAC ("Real Application Clusters") Support - WebLogic Server 12c ships with a specific JDBC driver to leverage Oracle RAC clustering capabilities (Fast-Application-Notification, Transaction Affinity, Fast-Connection-Failover, etc). Oracle JDBC thin driver are also available. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand ships only the standard Oracle JDBC thin driver. Load balancing with Oracle RAC are not supported. Manual intervention in case of planned or unplanned RAC downtime are necessary. In JBoss EAP 6, situation does not reestablish automatically after downtime. - WebLogic Server 12c has a feature called Active GridLink for Oracle RAC which provides up to 3X performance on OLTP applications. This seamless integration between WebLogic and Oracle database enable more value added to critical business applications leveraging their investments in Oracle database technology and Oracle middleware. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no performance gains at all, even when admin people implement some kind of connection-pooling tuning. - WebLogic Server 12c also supports transaction and web session affinity to the Oracle RAC, which provides aditional gains of performance. This is particularly interesting if you are creating a reliable solution that are distributed not only in an LAN cluster, but into a different data center. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no such support. 6) Standards and Technology Support - WebLogic Server 12c is fully Java EE 6 compatible and production ready since december of 2011. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand became fully compatible with Java EE 6 only in the community version after three months, and production ready only in a few days considering that this article was written in June of 2012. Red Hat says that they are the masters of innovation and technology proliferation, but compared with Oracle and even other proprietary vendors like IBM, they historically speaking are lazy to deliver the most newest technologies and standards adherence. - Oracle is the steward of Java, driving innovation into the platform from commercial and open-source vendors. Red Hat on the other hand does not have its own JVM and relies on third-part JVMs to complete their application server offer. 95% of Red Hat customers are using Oracle HotSpot as JVM, which means that without Oracle involvement, their support are limited exclusively to the application server layer and we all know that most problems are happens in the JVM layer. - WebLogic Server 12c supports natively JDK 7, which empower developers to explore the maximum of the Java platform productivity when writing code. This feature differentiate WebLogic from others application servers (except GlassFish that are also managed by Oracle) because the usage of JDK 7 introduce such remarkable productivity features like the "try-with-resources" enhancement, catching multiple exceptions with one try block, Strings in the switch statements, JVM improvements in terms of JDBC, I/O, networking, security, concurrency and of course, the most important feature of Java 7: native support for multiple non-Java languages. More features regarding JDK 7 can be found here. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand does not support JDK 7 officially, they comment in their community version that "Java SE 7 can be used with JBoss 7" which does not gives you any guarantees of enterprise support for JDK 7. - Oracle WebLogic Server 12c supports integration with Spring framework allowing Spring applications to use WebLogic special transaction manager, exposing bean interfaces to WebLogic MBeans to take advantage of all WebLogic monitoring and administration advantages. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no special integration with Spring. In fact, Red Hat offers a suspicious package called "JBoss Web Platform" that in theory supports Spring, but in practice this package does not offers any special integration. It is just a facility for Red Hat customers to have support from both JBoss and Spring technology using the same customer support. 7) Lightweight Development - Oracle WebLogic Server 12c and Oracle GlassFish are completely integrated and can share applications without any modifications. Starting with the 12c version, WebLogic now understands natively GlassFish deployment descriptors and specific configurations in order to offer you a truly and reliable migration path from a community Java EE application server to a enterprise middleware product like WebLogic. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no support to natively reuse an existing (or still in development) application from JBoss AS community server. Users of JBoss suffer of critical issues during deployment time that includes: changing the libraries and dependencies of the application, patching the DTD or XSD deployment descriptors, refactoring of the application layers due classloading issues and anomalies, rebuilding of persistence, business and web layers due issues with "usage of the certified version of an certain dependency" or "frameworks that Red Hat potentially does not recommend" etc. If you have the culture or enterprise IT directive of developing Java EE applications using community middleware to in a certain future, transition to enterprise (supported by a vendor) middleware, Oracle WebLogic plus Oracle GlassFish offers you a more sustainable solution. - WebLogic Server 12c has a very light ZIP distribution (less than 165 MB). JBoss EAP 6 ZIP size is around 130 MB, together with JBoss ON you have more 100 MB resulting in a higher download footprint. This is particularly interesting if you plan to use automated setup of application server instances (for example, to rapidly setup a development or staging environment) using Maven or Hudson. - WebLogic Server 12c has a complete integration with Maven allowing developers to setup WebLogic domains with few commands. Tasks like downloading WebLogic, installation, domain creation, data sources deployment are completely integrated. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has a limited offer integration with those tools.  - WebLogic Server 12c has a startup mode called WLX that turns-off EJB, JMS and JCA containers leaving enabled only the web container with Java EE 6 web profile. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no such feature, you need to disable manually the containers that you do not want to use. - WebLogic Server 12c supports fastswap, which enables you to change classes without redeployment. This is particularly interesting if you are developing patches for the application that is already deployed and you do not want to redeploy the entire application. This is the same behavior that most application servers offers to JSP pages, but with WebLogic Server 12c, you have the same feature for Java classes in general. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no such support. Even JBoss EAP 5 does not support this until now. 8) JMS and Messaging - WebLogic Server 12c has a proven and high scalable JMS implementation since its initial release in 1995. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has a still immature technology called HornetQ, which was introduced in JBoss EAP 5 replacing everything that was implemented in the previous versions. Red Hat loves to introduce new technologies across JBoss versions, playing around with customers and their investments. And when they are asked about why they have changed the implementation and caused such a mess, their answer is always: "the previous implementation was inadequate and not aligned with the community strategy so we are creating a new a improved one". This Red Hat practice leads to uncomfortable investments that in a near future (sometimes less than a year) will be affected in someway. - WebLogic Server 12c has troubleshooting and monitoring features included on the WebLogic console and WLDF. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no direct monitoring on the console, activity is reflected only on the logs, no debug logs available in case of JMS issues. - WebLogic Server 12c has extremely good performance and scalability. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has a JMS storage mechanism relying on Oracle database or MySQL. This means that if an issue in production happens and Red Hat affirms that an performance issue is happening due to database problems, they will not support you on the performance issue. They will orient you to call Oracle instead. - WebLogic Server 12c supports messaging enterprise features like SAF ("Store and Forward"), Distributed Queues/Topics and Foreign JMS providers support that leverage JMS implementations without compromise developer code making things completely transparent. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand do not even dream to support such features. 9) Caching and Grid - Coherence, which is the leading and most mature data grid technology from Oracle, is available since early 2000 and was integrated with WebLogic in 2009. Coherence and WebLogic clusters can be both managed from WebLogic administrative console. Even Node Manager supports Coherence. JBoss on the other hand discontinued JBoss Cache, which was their caching implementation just like they did with the messaging implementation (JBossMQ) which was a issue for long term customers. JBoss EAP 6 ships InfiniSpan version 1.0 which is immature and lack a proven record of successful cases and reliability. - WebLogic Server 12c has a feature called ActiveCache which uses Coherence to, without any code changes, replicate HTTP sessions from both WebLogic and other application servers like JBoss, Tomcat, Websphere, GlassFish and even Microsoft IIS. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand does have such support and even when they do in the future, they probably will support only their own application server. - Coherence can be used to manage both L1 and L2 cache levels, providing support to Oracle TopLink and others JPA compliant implementations, even Hibernate. JBoss EAP 6 and Infinispan on the other hand supports only Hibernate. And most important of all: Infinispan does not have any successful case of L1 or L2 caching level support using Hibernate, which lead us to reflect about its viability. 10) Performance - WebLogic Server 12c is certified with Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud and can run unchanged applications at this engineered system. This approach can benefit customers from Exalogic optimization's of both kernel and JVM layers to boost performance in terms of 10X for web, OLTP, JMS and grid applications. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no investment on engineered systems: customers do not have the choice to deploy on a Java ultra fast system if their project becomes relevant and performance issues are detected. - WebLogic Server 12c maintains a performance gain across each new release: starting on WebLogic 5.1, the overall performance gain has been close to 4X, which close to a 20% gain release by release. JBoss on the other hand does not provide SPECJAppServer or SPECJEnterprise performance benchmarks. Their so called "performance gains" remains hidden in their customer environments, which lead us to think if it is true or not since we will never get access to those environments. - WebLogic Server 12c has industry performance benchmarks with submissions across platforms and configurations leading SPECJ. Oracle WebLogic leads SPECJAppServer performance in multiple categories, fitting all customer topologies like: dual-node, single-node, multi-node and multi-node with RAC. JBoss... again, does not provide any SPECJAppServer performance benchmarks. - WebLogic Server 12c has a feature called work manager which allows your application to embrace new performance levels based on critical resource utilization of the CPUs usage. Work managers prioritizes work and allocates threads based on an execution model that takes into account administrator-defined parameters and actual run-time performance and throughput. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no compared feature and probably they never will. Not supporting such feature like work managers, JBoss EAP 6 forces admin people and specially developers to uncover performance gains in a intrusive way, rewriting the code and doing performance refactorings. 11) Professional Services Support - WebLogic Server 12c and any other technology sold by Oracle give customers the possibility of hire OCS ("Oracle Consulting Services") to manage critical scenarios, deployment assistance of new applications, high skilled consultancy of architecture, best practices and people allocation together with customer teams. All OCS services are available without any restrictions, having the customer bought software from Oracle or just starting their implementation before any acquisition. JBoss EAP 6 or Red Hat to be more specifically, only offers professional services if you buy subscriptions from them. If you are developing a new critical application for your business and need the help of Red Hat for a serious issue or architecture decision, they will probably say: "OK... I can help you but after you buy subscriptions from me". Red Hat also does not allows their professional services consultants to manage environments that uses community based software. They will probably force you to first buy a subscription, download their "enterprise" version and them, optionally hire their consultants. - Oracle provides you our university to educate your team into our technologies, including of course specialized trainings of WebLogic application server. At any time and location, you can hire Oracle to train your team so you get trustful knowledge according to your specific needs. Certifications for the products are also available if your technical people desire to differentiate themselves as professionals. Red Hat on the other hand have a limited pool of resources to train your team in their technologies. Basically they are selling training and certification for RHEL ("Red Hat Enterprise Linux") but if you demand more specialized training in JBoss middleware, they will probably connect you to some "certified" partner localized training since they are apparently discontinuing their education center, at least here in Brazil. They were not able to reproduce their success with RHEL education to their middleware division since they need first sell the subscriptions to after gives you specialized training. And again, they only offer you specialized training based on their enterprise version (EAP in the case of JBoss) which means that the courses will be a quite outdated. There are reports of developers that took official training's from Red Hat at this year (2012) and in a certain JBoss advanced course, Red Hat supposedly covered JBossMQ as the messaging subsystem, and even the printed material provided was based on JBossMQ since the training was created for JBoss EAP 4.3. 12) Encouraging Transparency without Ulterior Motives - WebLogic Server 12c like any other software from Oracle can be downloaded any time from anywhere, you should only possess an OTN ("Oracle Technology Network") credential and you can download any enterprise software how many times you want. And is not some kind of "trial" version. It is the official binaries that will be running for ever in your data center. Oracle does not encourages the usage of "specific versions" of our software. The binaries you buy from Oracle are the same binaries anyone in the world could download and use for testing and personal education. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand are not available for download unless you buy a subscription and get access to the Red Hat enterprise repositories. If you need to test, learn or just start creating your application using Red Hat's middleware software, you should download it from the community website. You are not allowed to download the enterprise version that, according to Red Hat are more secure, reliable and robust. But no one of us want to start the development of a software with an unsecured, unreliable and not scalable middleware right? So what you do? You are "invited" by Red Hat to buy subscriptions from them to get access to the "cool" version of the software. - WebLogic Server 12c prices are publicly available in the Oracle website. If you want to know right now how much WebLogic will cost to your organization, just click here and get access to our price list. In the case of WebLogic, check out the "US Oracle Technology Commercial Price List". Oracle also encourages you to get in touch with a sales representative to discuss discounts that would make possible the investment into our technology. But you are not required to do this, only if you are interested in buying our technology or maybe you want to discuss some discount scenarios. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand does not have its cost publicly available in Red Hat's website or in any other media, at least is not so easy to get such information. The only link you will possibly find in their website is a "Contact a Sales Representative" link. This is not a very good relationship between an customer and an vendor. This is not an example of transparency, mainly when the software are sold as open. In this situations, customers expects to see the software prices publicly available, so they can have the chance to decide, based on the existing features of the software, if the cost is fair or not. Conclusion Oracle WebLogic is the most mature, secure, reliable and scalable Java EE application server of the market, and have a proven record of success around the globe to prove it's majority. Don't lose the chance to discover today how WebLogic could fit your needs and sustain your global IT middleware strategy, no matter if your strategy are completely based on the Cloud or not.

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  • value types in the vm

    - by john.rose
    value types in the vm p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Times} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 14.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Times} p.p3 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 12.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Times} p.p4 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 15.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Times} p.p5 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Courier} p.p6 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Courier; min-height: 17.0px} p.p7 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Times; min-height: 18.0px} p.p8 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 36.0px; text-indent: -36.0px; font: 14.0px Times; min-height: 18.0px} p.p9 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 12.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Times; min-height: 18.0px} p.p10 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 12.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Times; color: #000000} li.li1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Times} li.li7 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Times; min-height: 18.0px} span.s1 {font: 14.0px Courier} span.s2 {color: #000000} span.s3 {font: 14.0px Courier; color: #000000} ol.ol1 {list-style-type: decimal} Or, enduring values for a changing world. Introduction A value type is a data type which, generally speaking, is designed for being passed by value in and out of methods, and stored by value in data structures. The only value types which the Java language directly supports are the eight primitive types. Java indirectly and approximately supports value types, if they are implemented in terms of classes. For example, both Integer and String may be viewed as value types, especially if their usage is restricted to avoid operations appropriate to Object. In this note, we propose a definition of value types in terms of a design pattern for Java classes, accompanied by a set of usage restrictions. We also sketch the relation of such value types to tuple types (which are a JVM-level notion), and point out JVM optimizations that can apply to value types. This note is a thought experiment to extend the JVM’s performance model in support of value types. The demonstration has two phases.  Initially the extension can simply use design patterns, within the current bytecode architecture, and in today’s Java language. But if the performance model is to be realized in practice, it will probably require new JVM bytecode features, changes to the Java language, or both.  We will look at a few possibilities for these new features. An Axiom of Value In the context of the JVM, a value type is a data type equipped with construction, assignment, and equality operations, and a set of typed components, such that, whenever two variables of the value type produce equal corresponding values for their components, the values of the two variables cannot be distinguished by any JVM operation. Here are some corollaries: A value type is immutable, since otherwise a copy could be constructed and the original could be modified in one of its components, allowing the copies to be distinguished. Changing the component of a value type requires construction of a new value. The equals and hashCode operations are strictly component-wise. If a value type is represented by a JVM reference, that reference cannot be successfully synchronized on, and cannot be usefully compared for reference equality. A value type can be viewed in terms of what it doesn’t do. We can say that a value type omits all value-unsafe operations, which could violate the constraints on value types.  These operations, which are ordinarily allowed for Java object types, are pointer equality comparison (the acmp instruction), synchronization (the monitor instructions), all the wait and notify methods of class Object, and non-trivial finalize methods. The clone method is also value-unsafe, although for value types it could be treated as the identity function. Finally, and most importantly, any side effect on an object (however visible) also counts as an value-unsafe operation. A value type may have methods, but such methods must not change the components of the value. It is reasonable and useful to define methods like toString, equals, and hashCode on value types, and also methods which are specifically valuable to users of the value type. Representations of Value Value types have two natural representations in the JVM, unboxed and boxed. An unboxed value consists of the components, as simple variables. For example, the complex number x=(1+2i), in rectangular coordinate form, may be represented in unboxed form by the following pair of variables: /*Complex x = Complex.valueOf(1.0, 2.0):*/ double x_re = 1.0, x_im = 2.0; These variables might be locals, parameters, or fields. Their association as components of a single value is not defined to the JVM. Here is a sample computation which computes the norm of the difference between two complex numbers: double distance(/*Complex x:*/ double x_re, double x_im,         /*Complex y:*/ double y_re, double y_im) {     /*Complex z = x.minus(y):*/     double z_re = x_re - y_re, z_im = x_im - y_im;     /*return z.abs():*/     return Math.sqrt(z_re*z_re + z_im*z_im); } A boxed representation groups component values under a single object reference. The reference is to a ‘wrapper class’ that carries the component values in its fields. (A primitive type can naturally be equated with a trivial value type with just one component of that type. In that view, the wrapper class Integer can serve as a boxed representation of value type int.) The unboxed representation of complex numbers is practical for many uses, but it fails to cover several major use cases: return values, array elements, and generic APIs. The two components of a complex number cannot be directly returned from a Java function, since Java does not support multiple return values. The same story applies to array elements: Java has no ’array of structs’ feature. (Double-length arrays are a possible workaround for complex numbers, but not for value types with heterogeneous components.) By generic APIs I mean both those which use generic types, like Arrays.asList and those which have special case support for primitive types, like String.valueOf and PrintStream.println. Those APIs do not support unboxed values, and offer some problems to boxed values. Any ’real’ JVM type should have a story for returns, arrays, and API interoperability. The basic problem here is that value types fall between primitive types and object types. Value types are clearly more complex than primitive types, and object types are slightly too complicated. Objects are a little bit dangerous to use as value carriers, since object references can be compared for pointer equality, and can be synchronized on. Also, as many Java programmers have observed, there is often a performance cost to using wrapper objects, even on modern JVMs. Even so, wrapper classes are a good starting point for talking about value types. If there were a set of structural rules and restrictions which would prevent value-unsafe operations on value types, wrapper classes would provide a good notation for defining value types. This note attempts to define such rules and restrictions. Let’s Start Coding Now it is time to look at some real code. Here is a definition, written in Java, of a complex number value type. @ValueSafe public final class Complex implements java.io.Serializable {     // immutable component structure:     public final double re, im;     private Complex(double re, double im) {         this.re = re; this.im = im;     }     // interoperability methods:     public String toString() { return "Complex("+re+","+im+")"; }     public List<Double> asList() { return Arrays.asList(re, im); }     public boolean equals(Complex c) {         return re == c.re && im == c.im;     }     public boolean equals(@ValueSafe Object x) {         return x instanceof Complex && equals((Complex) x);     }     public int hashCode() {         return 31*Double.valueOf(re).hashCode()                 + Double.valueOf(im).hashCode();     }     // factory methods:     public static Complex valueOf(double re, double im) {         return new Complex(re, im);     }     public Complex changeRe(double re2) { return valueOf(re2, im); }     public Complex changeIm(double im2) { return valueOf(re, im2); }     public static Complex cast(@ValueSafe Object x) {         return x == null ? ZERO : (Complex) x;     }     // utility methods and constants:     public Complex plus(Complex c)  { return new Complex(re+c.re, im+c.im); }     public Complex minus(Complex c) { return new Complex(re-c.re, im-c.im); }     public double abs() { return Math.sqrt(re*re + im*im); }     public static final Complex PI = valueOf(Math.PI, 0.0);     public static final Complex ZERO = valueOf(0.0, 0.0); } This is not a minimal definition, because it includes some utility methods and other optional parts.  The essential elements are as follows: The class is marked as a value type with an annotation. The class is final, because it does not make sense to create subclasses of value types. The fields of the class are all non-private and final.  (I.e., the type is immutable and structurally transparent.) From the supertype Object, all public non-final methods are overridden. The constructor is private. Beyond these bare essentials, we can observe the following features in this example, which are likely to be typical of all value types: One or more factory methods are responsible for value creation, including a component-wise valueOf method. There are utility methods for complex arithmetic and instance creation, such as plus and changeIm. There are static utility constants, such as PI. The type is serializable, using the default mechanisms. There are methods for converting to and from dynamically typed references, such as asList and cast. The Rules In order to use value types properly, the programmer must avoid value-unsafe operations.  A helpful Java compiler should issue errors (or at least warnings) for code which provably applies value-unsafe operations, and should issue warnings for code which might be correct but does not provably avoid value-unsafe operations.  No such compilers exist today, but to simplify our account here, we will pretend that they do exist. A value-safe type is any class, interface, or type parameter marked with the @ValueSafe annotation, or any subtype of a value-safe type.  If a value-safe class is marked final, it is in fact a value type.  All other value-safe classes must be abstract.  The non-static fields of a value class must be non-public and final, and all its constructors must be private. Under the above rules, a standard interface could be helpful to define value types like Complex.  Here is an example: @ValueSafe public interface ValueType extends java.io.Serializable {     // All methods listed here must get redefined.     // Definitions must be value-safe, which means     // they may depend on component values only.     List<? extends Object> asList();     int hashCode();     boolean equals(@ValueSafe Object c);     String toString(); } //@ValueSafe inherited from supertype: public final class Complex implements ValueType { … The main advantage of such a conventional interface is that (unlike an annotation) it is reified in the runtime type system.  It could appear as an element type or parameter bound, for facilities which are designed to work on value types only.  More broadly, it might assist the JVM to perform dynamic enforcement of the rules for value types. Besides types, the annotation @ValueSafe can mark fields, parameters, local variables, and methods.  (This is redundant when the type is also value-safe, but may be useful when the type is Object or another supertype of a value type.)  Working forward from these annotations, an expression E is defined as value-safe if it satisfies one or more of the following: The type of E is a value-safe type. E names a field, parameter, or local variable whose declaration is marked @ValueSafe. E is a call to a method whose declaration is marked @ValueSafe. E is an assignment to a value-safe variable, field reference, or array reference. E is a cast to a value-safe type from a value-safe expression. E is a conditional expression E0 ? E1 : E2, and both E1 and E2 are value-safe. Assignments to value-safe expressions and initializations of value-safe names must take their values from value-safe expressions. A value-safe expression may not be the subject of a value-unsafe operation.  In particular, it cannot be synchronized on, nor can it be compared with the “==” operator, not even with a null or with another value-safe type. In a program where all of these rules are followed, no value-type value will be subject to a value-unsafe operation.  Thus, the prime axiom of value types will be satisfied, that no two value type will be distinguishable as long as their component values are equal. More Code To illustrate these rules, here are some usage examples for Complex: Complex pi = Complex.valueOf(Math.PI, 0); Complex zero = pi.changeRe(0);  //zero = pi; zero.re = 0; ValueType vtype = pi; @SuppressWarnings("value-unsafe")   Object obj = pi; @ValueSafe Object obj2 = pi; obj2 = new Object();  // ok List<Complex> clist = new ArrayList<Complex>(); clist.add(pi);  // (ok assuming List.add param is @ValueSafe) List<ValueType> vlist = new ArrayList<ValueType>(); vlist.add(pi);  // (ok) List<Object> olist = new ArrayList<Object>(); olist.add(pi);  // warning: "value-unsafe" boolean z = pi.equals(zero); boolean z1 = (pi == zero);  // error: reference comparison on value type boolean z2 = (pi == null);  // error: reference comparison on value type boolean z3 = (pi == obj2);  // error: reference comparison on value type synchronized (pi) { }  // error: synch of value, unpredictable result synchronized (obj2) { }  // unpredictable result Complex qq = pi; qq = null;  // possible NPE; warning: “null-unsafe" qq = (Complex) obj;  // warning: “null-unsafe" qq = Complex.cast(obj);  // OK @SuppressWarnings("null-unsafe")   Complex empty = null;  // possible NPE qq = empty;  // possible NPE (null pollution) The Payoffs It follows from this that either the JVM or the java compiler can replace boxed value-type values with unboxed ones, without affecting normal computations.  Fields and variables of value types can be split into their unboxed components.  Non-static methods on value types can be transformed into static methods which take the components as value parameters. Some common questions arise around this point in any discussion of value types. Why burden the programmer with all these extra rules?  Why not detect programs automagically and perform unboxing transparently?  The answer is that it is easy to break the rules accidently unless they are agreed to by the programmer and enforced.  Automatic unboxing optimizations are tantalizing but (so far) unreachable ideal.  In the current state of the art, it is possible exhibit benchmarks in which automatic unboxing provides the desired effects, but it is not possible to provide a JVM with a performance model that assures the programmer when unboxing will occur.  This is why I’m writing this note, to enlist help from, and provide assurances to, the programmer.  Basically, I’m shooting for a good set of user-supplied “pragmas” to frame the desired optimization. Again, the important thing is that the unboxing must be done reliably, or else programmers will have no reason to work with the extra complexity of the value-safety rules.  There must be a reasonably stable performance model, wherein using a value type has approximately the same performance characteristics as writing the unboxed components as separate Java variables. There are some rough corners to the present scheme.  Since Java fields and array elements are initialized to null, value-type computations which incorporate uninitialized variables can produce null pointer exceptions.  One workaround for this is to require such variables to be null-tested, and the result replaced with a suitable all-zero value of the value type.  That is what the “cast” method does above. Generically typed APIs like List<T> will continue to manipulate boxed values always, at least until we figure out how to do reification of generic type instances.  Use of such APIs will elicit warnings until their type parameters (and/or relevant members) are annotated or typed as value-safe.  Retrofitting List<T> is likely to expose flaws in the present scheme, which we will need to engineer around.  Here are a couple of first approaches: public interface java.util.List<@ValueSafe T> extends Collection<T> { … public interface java.util.List<T extends Object|ValueType> extends Collection<T> { … (The second approach would require disjunctive types, in which value-safety is “contagious” from the constituent types.) With more transformations, the return value types of methods can also be unboxed.  This may require significant bytecode-level transformations, and would work best in the presence of a bytecode representation for multiple value groups, which I have proposed elsewhere under the title “Tuples in the VM”. But for starters, the JVM can apply this transformation under the covers, to internally compiled methods.  This would give a way to express multiple return values and structured return values, which is a significant pain-point for Java programmers, especially those who work with low-level structure types favored by modern vector and graphics processors.  The lack of multiple return values has a strong distorting effect on many Java APIs. Even if the JVM fails to unbox a value, there is still potential benefit to the value type.  Clustered computing systems something have copy operations (serialization or something similar) which apply implicitly to command operands.  When copying JVM objects, it is extremely helpful to know when an object’s identity is important or not.  If an object reference is a copied operand, the system may have to create a proxy handle which points back to the original object, so that side effects are visible.  Proxies must be managed carefully, and this can be expensive.  On the other hand, value types are exactly those types which a JVM can “copy and forget” with no downside. Array types are crucial to bulk data interfaces.  (As data sizes and rates increase, bulk data becomes more important than scalar data, so arrays are definitely accompanying us into the future of computing.)  Value types are very helpful for adding structure to bulk data, so a successful value type mechanism will make it easier for us to express richer forms of bulk data. Unboxing arrays (i.e., arrays containing unboxed values) will provide better cache and memory density, and more direct data movement within clustered or heterogeneous computing systems.  They require the deepest transformations, relative to today’s JVM.  There is an impedance mismatch between value-type arrays and Java’s covariant array typing, so compromises will need to be struck with existing Java semantics.  It is probably worth the effort, since arrays of unboxed value types are inherently more memory-efficient than standard Java arrays, which rely on dependent pointer chains. It may be sufficient to extend the “value-safe” concept to array declarations, and allow low-level transformations to change value-safe array declarations from the standard boxed form into an unboxed tuple-based form.  Such value-safe arrays would not be convertible to Object[] arrays.  Certain connection points, such as Arrays.copyOf and System.arraycopy might need additional input/output combinations, to allow smooth conversion between arrays with boxed and unboxed elements. Alternatively, the correct solution may have to wait until we have enough reification of generic types, and enough operator overloading, to enable an overhaul of Java arrays. Implicit Method Definitions The example of class Complex above may be unattractively complex.  I believe most or all of the elements of the example class are required by the logic of value types. If this is true, a programmer who writes a value type will have to write lots of error-prone boilerplate code.  On the other hand, I think nearly all of the code (except for the domain-specific parts like plus and minus) can be implicitly generated. Java has a rule for implicitly defining a class’s constructor, if no it defines no constructors explicitly.  Likewise, there are rules for providing default access modifiers for interface members.  Because of the highly regular structure of value types, it might be reasonable to perform similar implicit transformations on value types.  Here’s an example of a “highly implicit” definition of a complex number type: public class Complex implements ValueType {  // implicitly final     public double re, im;  // implicitly public final     //implicit methods are defined elementwise from te fields:     //  toString, asList, equals(2), hashCode, valueOf, cast     //optionally, explicit methods (plus, abs, etc.) would go here } In other words, with the right defaults, a simple value type definition can be a one-liner.  The observant reader will have noticed the similarities (and suitable differences) between the explicit methods above and the corresponding methods for List<T>. Another way to abbreviate such a class would be to make an annotation the primary trigger of the functionality, and to add the interface(s) implicitly: public @ValueType class Complex { … // implicitly final, implements ValueType (But to me it seems better to communicate the “magic” via an interface, even if it is rooted in an annotation.) Implicitly Defined Value Types So far we have been working with nominal value types, which is to say that the sequence of typed components is associated with a name and additional methods that convey the intention of the programmer.  A simple ordered pair of floating point numbers can be variously interpreted as (to name a few possibilities) a rectangular or polar complex number or Cartesian point.  The name and the methods convey the intended meaning. But what if we need a truly simple ordered pair of floating point numbers, without any further conceptual baggage?  Perhaps we are writing a method (like “divideAndRemainder”) which naturally returns a pair of numbers instead of a single number.  Wrapping the pair of numbers in a nominal type (like “QuotientAndRemainder”) makes as little sense as wrapping a single return value in a nominal type (like “Quotient”).  What we need here are structural value types commonly known as tuples. For the present discussion, let us assign a conventional, JVM-friendly name to tuples, roughly as follows: public class java.lang.tuple.$DD extends java.lang.tuple.Tuple {      double $1, $2; } Here the component names are fixed and all the required methods are defined implicitly.  The supertype is an abstract class which has suitable shared declarations.  The name itself mentions a JVM-style method parameter descriptor, which may be “cracked” to determine the number and types of the component fields. The odd thing about such a tuple type (and structural types in general) is it must be instantiated lazily, in response to linkage requests from one or more classes that need it.  The JVM and/or its class loaders must be prepared to spin a tuple type on demand, given a simple name reference, $xyz, where the xyz is cracked into a series of component types.  (Specifics of naming and name mangling need some tasteful engineering.) Tuples also seem to demand, even more than nominal types, some support from the language.  (This is probably because notations for non-nominal types work best as combinations of punctuation and type names, rather than named constructors like Function3 or Tuple2.)  At a minimum, languages with tuples usually (I think) have some sort of simple bracket notation for creating tuples, and a corresponding pattern-matching syntax (or “destructuring bind”) for taking tuples apart, at least when they are parameter lists.  Designing such a syntax is no simple thing, because it ought to play well with nominal value types, and also with pre-existing Java features, such as method parameter lists, implicit conversions, generic types, and reflection.  That is a task for another day. Other Use Cases Besides complex numbers and simple tuples there are many use cases for value types.  Many tuple-like types have natural value-type representations. These include rational numbers, point locations and pixel colors, and various kinds of dates and addresses. Other types have a variable-length ‘tail’ of internal values. The most common example of this is String, which is (mathematically) a sequence of UTF-16 character values. Similarly, bit vectors, multiple-precision numbers, and polynomials are composed of sequences of values. Such types include, in their representation, a reference to a variable-sized data structure (often an array) which (somehow) represents the sequence of values. The value type may also include ’header’ information. Variable-sized values often have a length distribution which favors short lengths. In that case, the design of the value type can make the first few values in the sequence be direct ’header’ fields of the value type. In the common case where the header is enough to represent the whole value, the tail can be a shared null value, or even just a null reference. Note that the tail need not be an immutable object, as long as the header type encapsulates it well enough. This is the case with String, where the tail is a mutable (but never mutated) character array. Field types and their order must be a globally visible part of the API.  The structure of the value type must be transparent enough to have a globally consistent unboxed representation, so that all callers and callees agree about the type and order of components  that appear as parameters, return types, and array elements.  This is a trade-off between efficiency and encapsulation, which is forced on us when we remove an indirection enjoyed by boxed representations.  A JVM-only transformation would not care about such visibility, but a bytecode transformation would need to take care that (say) the components of complex numbers would not get swapped after a redefinition of Complex and a partial recompile.  Perhaps constant pool references to value types need to declare the field order as assumed by each API user. This brings up the delicate status of private fields in a value type.  It must always be possible to load, store, and copy value types as coordinated groups, and the JVM performs those movements by moving individual scalar values between locals and stack.  If a component field is not public, what is to prevent hostile code from plucking it out of the tuple using a rogue aload or astore instruction?  Nothing but the verifier, so we may need to give it more smarts, so that it treats value types as inseparable groups of stack slots or locals (something like long or double). My initial thought was to make the fields always public, which would make the security problem moot.  But public is not always the right answer; consider the case of String, where the underlying mutable character array must be encapsulated to prevent security holes.  I believe we can win back both sides of the tradeoff, by training the verifier never to split up the components in an unboxed value.  Just as the verifier encapsulates the two halves of a 64-bit primitive, it can encapsulate the the header and body of an unboxed String, so that no code other than that of class String itself can take apart the values. Similar to String, we could build an efficient multi-precision decimal type along these lines: public final class DecimalValue extends ValueType {     protected final long header;     protected private final BigInteger digits;     public DecimalValue valueOf(int value, int scale) {         assert(scale >= 0);         return new DecimalValue(((long)value << 32) + scale, null);     }     public DecimalValue valueOf(long value, int scale) {         if (value == (int) value)             return valueOf((int)value, scale);         return new DecimalValue(-scale, new BigInteger(value));     } } Values of this type would be passed between methods as two machine words. Small values (those with a significand which fits into 32 bits) would be represented without any heap data at all, unless the DecimalValue itself were boxed. (Note the tension between encapsulation and unboxing in this case.  It would be better if the header and digits fields were private, but depending on where the unboxing information must “leak”, it is probably safer to make a public revelation of the internal structure.) Note that, although an array of Complex can be faked with a double-length array of double, there is no easy way to fake an array of unboxed DecimalValues.  (Either an array of boxed values or a transposed pair of homogeneous arrays would be reasonable fallbacks, in a current JVM.)  Getting the full benefit of unboxing and arrays will require some new JVM magic. Although the JVM emphasizes portability, system dependent code will benefit from using machine-level types larger than 64 bits.  For example, the back end of a linear algebra package might benefit from value types like Float4 which map to stock vector types.  This is probably only worthwhile if the unboxing arrays can be packed with such values. More Daydreams A more finely-divided design for dynamic enforcement of value safety could feature separate marker interfaces for each invariant.  An empty marker interface Unsynchronizable could cause suitable exceptions for monitor instructions on objects in marked classes.  More radically, a Interchangeable marker interface could cause JVM primitives that are sensitive to object identity to raise exceptions; the strangest result would be that the acmp instruction would have to be specified as raising an exception. @ValueSafe public interface ValueType extends java.io.Serializable,         Unsynchronizable, Interchangeable { … public class Complex implements ValueType {     // inherits Serializable, Unsynchronizable, Interchangeable, @ValueSafe     … It seems possible that Integer and the other wrapper types could be retro-fitted as value-safe types.  This is a major change, since wrapper objects would be unsynchronizable and their references interchangeable.  It is likely that code which violates value-safety for wrapper types exists but is uncommon.  It is less plausible to retro-fit String, since the prominent operation String.intern is often used with value-unsafe code. We should also reconsider the distinction between boxed and unboxed values in code.  The design presented above obscures that distinction.  As another thought experiment, we could imagine making a first class distinction in the type system between boxed and unboxed representations.  Since only primitive types are named with a lower-case initial letter, we could define that the capitalized version of a value type name always refers to the boxed representation, while the initial lower-case variant always refers to boxed.  For example: complex pi = complex.valueOf(Math.PI, 0); Complex boxPi = pi;  // convert to boxed myList.add(boxPi); complex z = myList.get(0);  // unbox Such a convention could perhaps absorb the current difference between int and Integer, double and Double. It might also allow the programmer to express a helpful distinction among array types. As said above, array types are crucial to bulk data interfaces, but are limited in the JVM.  Extending arrays beyond the present limitations is worth thinking about; for example, the Maxine JVM implementation has a hybrid object/array type.  Something like this which can also accommodate value type components seems worthwhile.  On the other hand, does it make sense for value types to contain short arrays?  And why should random-access arrays be the end of our design process, when bulk data is often sequentially accessed, and it might make sense to have heterogeneous streams of data as the natural “jumbo” data structure.  These considerations must wait for another day and another note. More Work It seems to me that a good sequence for introducing such value types would be as follows: Add the value-safety restrictions to an experimental version of javac. Code some sample applications with value types, including Complex and DecimalValue. Create an experimental JVM which internally unboxes value types but does not require new bytecodes to do so.  Ensure the feasibility of the performance model for the sample applications. Add tuple-like bytecodes (with or without generic type reification) to a major revision of the JVM, and teach the Java compiler to switch in the new bytecodes without code changes. A staggered roll-out like this would decouple language changes from bytecode changes, which is always a convenient thing. A similar investigation should be applied (concurrently) to array types.  In this case, it seems to me that the starting point is in the JVM: Add an experimental unboxing array data structure to a production JVM, perhaps along the lines of Maxine hybrids.  No bytecode or language support is required at first; everything can be done with encapsulated unsafe operations and/or method handles. Create an experimental JVM which internally unboxes value types but does not require new bytecodes to do so.  Ensure the feasibility of the performance model for the sample applications. Add tuple-like bytecodes (with or without generic type reification) to a major revision of the JVM, and teach the Java compiler to switch in the new bytecodes without code changes. That’s enough musing me for now.  Back to work!

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  • iPhone SDK vs Windows Phone 7 Series SDK Challenge, Part 1: Hello World!

    In this series, I will be taking sample applications from the iPhone SDK and implementing them on Windows Phone 7 Series.  My goal is to do as much of an apples-to-apples comparison as I can.  This series will be written to not only compare and contrast how easy or difficult it is to complete tasks on either platform, how many lines of code, etc., but Id also like it to be a way for iPhone developers to either get started on Windows Phone 7 Series development, or for developers in general to learn the platform. Heres my methodology: Run the iPhone SDK app in the iPhone Simulator to get a feel for what it does and how it works, without looking at the implementation Implement the equivalent functionality on Windows Phone 7 Series using Silverlight. Compare the two implementations based on complexity, functionality, lines of code, number of files, etc. Add some functionality to the Windows Phone 7 Series app that shows off a way to make the scenario more interesting or leverages an aspect of the platform, or uses a better design pattern to implement the functionality. You can download Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone CTP here, and the Expression Blend 4 Beta here. Hello World! Of course no first post would be allowed if it didnt focus on the hello world scenario.  The iPhone SDK follows that tradition with the Your First iPhone Application walkthrough.  I will say that the developer documentation for iPhone is pretty good.  There are plenty of walkthoughs and they break things down into nicely sized steps and do a good job of bringing the user along.  As expected, this application is quite simple.  It comprises of a text box, a label, and a button.  When you push the button, the label changes to Hello plus the  word you typed into the text box.  Makes perfect sense for a starter application.  Theres not much to this but it covers a few basic elements: Laying out basic UI Handling user input Hooking up events Formatting text     So, lets get started building a similar app for Windows Phone 7 Series! Implementing the UI: UI in Silverlight (and therefore Windows Phone 7) is defined in XAML, which is a declarative XML language also used by WPF on the desktop.  For anyone thats familiar with similar types of markup, its relatively straightforward to learn, but has a lot of power in it once you get it figured out.  Well talk more about that. This UI is very simple.  When I look at this, I note a couple of things: Elements are arranged vertically They are all centered So, lets create our Application and then start with the UI.  Once you have the the VS 2010 Express for Windows Phone tool running, create a new Windows Phone Project, and call it Hello World: Once created, youll see the designer on one side and your XAML on the other: Now, we can create our UI in one of three ways: Use the designer in Visual Studio to drag and drop the components Use the designer in Expression Blend 4 to drag and drop the components Enter the XAML by hand in either of the above Well start with (1), then kind of move to (3) just for instructional value. To develop this UI in the designer: First, delete all of the markup between inside of the Grid element (LayoutRoot).  You should be left with just this XAML for your MainPage.xaml (i shortened all the xmlns declarations below for brevity): 1: <phoneNavigation:PhoneApplicationPage 2: x:Class="HelloWorld.MainPage" 3: xmlns="...[snip]" 4: FontFamily="{StaticResource PhoneFontFamilyNormal}" 5: FontSize="{StaticResource PhoneFontSizeNormal}" 6: Foreground="{StaticResource PhoneForegroundBrush}"> 7:   8: <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="{StaticResource PhoneBackgroundBrush}"> 9:   10: </Grid> 11:   12: </phoneNavigation:PhoneApplicationPage> .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }   Well be adding XAML at line 9, so thats the important part. Now, Click on the center area of the phone surface Open the Toolbox and double click StackPanel Double click TextBox Double click TextBlock Double click Button That will create the necessary UI elements but they wont be arranged quite right.  Well fix it in a second.    Heres the XAML that we end up with: 1: <StackPanel Height="100" HorizontalAlignment="Left" Margin="10,10,0,0" Name="stackPanel1" VerticalAlignment="Top" Width="200"> 2: <TextBox Height="32" Name="textBox1" Text="TextBox" Width="100" /> 3: <TextBlock Height="23" Name="textBlock1" Text="TextBlock" /> 4: <Button Content="Button" Height="70" Name="button1" Width="160" /> 5: </StackPanel> .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } The designer does its best at guessing what we want, but in this case we want things to be a bit simpler. So well just clean it up a bit.  We want the items to be centered and we want them to have a little bit of a margin on either side, so heres what we end up with.  Ive also made it match the values and style from the iPhone app: 1: <StackPanel Margin="10"> 2: <TextBox Name="textBox1" HorizontalAlignment="Stretch" Text="You" TextAlignment="Center"/> 3: <TextBlock Name="textBlock1" HorizontalAlignment="Center" Margin="0,100,0,0" Text="Hello You!" /> 4: <Button Name="button1" HorizontalAlignment="Center" Margin="0,150,0,0" Content="Hello"/> 5: </StackPanel> .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Now lets take a look at what weve done there. Line 1: We removed all of the formatting from the StackPanel, except for Margin, as thats all we need.  Since our parent element is a Grid, by default the StackPanel will be sized to fit in that space.  The Margin says that we want to reserve 10 pixels on each side of the StackPanel. Line 2: Weve set the HorizontalAlignment of the TextBox to Stretch, which says that it should fill its parents size horizontally.  We want to do this so the TextBox is always full-width.  We also set TextAlignment to Center, to center the text. Line 3: In contrast to the TextBox above, we dont care how wide the TextBlock is, just so long as it is big enough for its text.  Thatll happen automatically, so we just set its Horizontal alignment to Center.  We also set a Margin above the TextBlock of 100 pixels to bump it down a bit, per the iPhone UI. Line 4: We do the same things here as in Line 3. Heres how the UI looks in the designer: Believe it or not, were almost done! Implementing the App Logic Now, we want the TextBlock to change its text when the Button is clicked.  In the designer, double click the Button to be taken to the Event Handler for the Buttons Click event.  In that event handler, we take the Text property from the TextBox, and format it into a string, then set it into the TextBlock.  Thats it! 1: private void button1_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) 2: { 3: string name = textBox1.Text; 4:   5: // if there isn't a name set, just use "World" 6: if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(name)) 7: { 8: name = "World"; 9: } 10:   11: // set the value into the TextBlock 12: textBlock1.Text = String.Format("Hello {0}!", name); 13:   14: } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } We use the String.Format() method to handle the formatting for us.    Now all thats left is to test the app in the Windows Phone Emulator and verify it does what we think it does! And it does! Comparing against the iPhone Looking at the iPhone example, there are basically three things that you have to touch as the developer: 1) The UI in the Nib file 2) The app delegate 3) The view controller Counting lines is a bit tricky here, but to try to keep this even, Im going to only count lines of code that I could not have (or would not have) generated with the tooling.  Meaning, Im not counting XAML and Im not counting operations that happen in the Nib file with the XCode designer tool.  So in the case of the above, even though I modified the XAML, I could have done all of those operations using the visual designer tool.  And normally I would have, but the XAML is more instructive (and less steps!).  Im interested in things that I, as the developer have to figure out in code.  Im also not counting lines that just have a curly brace on them, or lines that are generated for me (e.g. method names that are generated for me when I make a connection, etc.) So, by that count, heres what I get from the code listing for the iPhone app found here: HelloWorldAppDelegate.h: 6 HelloWorldAppDelegate.m: 12 MyViewController.h: 8 MyViewController.m: 18 Which gives me a grand total of about 44 lines of code on iPhone.  I really do recommend looking at the iPhone code for a comparison to the above. Now, for the Windows Phone 7 Series application, the only code I typed was in the event handler above Main.Xaml.cs: 4 So a total of 4 lines of code on Windows Phone 7.  And more importantly, the process is just A LOT simpler.  For example, I was surprised that the User Interface Designer in XCode doesnt automatically create instance variables for me and wire them up to the corresponding elements.  I assumed I wouldnt have to write this code myself (and risk getting it wrong!).  I dont need to worry about view controllers or anything.  I just write my code.  This blog post up to this point has covered almost every aspect of this apps development in a few pages.  The iPhone tutorial has 5 top level steps with 2-3 sub sections of each. Now, its worth pointing out that the iPhone development model uses the Model View Controller (MVC) pattern, which is a very flexible and powerful pattern that enforces proper separation of concerns.  But its fairly complex and difficult to understand when you first walk up to it.  Here at Microsoft weve dabbled in MVC a bit, with frameworks like MFC on Visual C++ and with the ASP.NET MVC framework now.  Both are very powerful frameworks.  But one of the reasons weve stayed away from MVC with client UI frameworks is that its difficult to tool.  We havent seen the type of value that beats double click, write code! for the broad set of scenarios. Another thing to think about is how many of those lines of code were focused on my apps functionality?.  Or, the converse of How many lines of code were boilerplate plumbing?  In both examples, the actual number of functional code lines is similar.  I count most of them in MyViewController.m, in the changeGreeting method.  Its about 7 lines of code that do the work of taking the value from the TextBox and putting it into the label.  Versus 4 on the Windows Phone 7 side.  But, unfortunately, on iPhone I still have to write that other 37 lines of code, just to get there. 10% of the code, 1 file instead of 4, its just much simpler. Making Some Tweaks It turns out, I can actually do this application with ZERO  lines of code, if Im willing to change the spec a bit. The data binding functionality in Silverlight is incredibly powerful.  And what I can do is databind the TextBoxs value directly to the TextBlock.  Take some time looking at this XAML below.  Youll see that I have added another nested StackPanel and two more TextBlocks.  Why?  Because thats how I build that string, and the nested StackPanel will lay things out Horizontally for me, as specified by the Orientation property. 1: <StackPanel Margin="10"> 2: <TextBox Name="textBox1" HorizontalAlignment="Stretch" Text="You" TextAlignment="Center"/> 3: <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal" HorizontalAlignment="Center" Margin="0,100,0,0" > 4: <TextBlock Text="Hello " /> 5: <TextBlock Name="textBlock1" Text="{Binding ElementName=textBox1, Path=Text}" /> 6: <TextBlock Text="!" /> 7: </StackPanel> 8: <Button Name="button1" HorizontalAlignment="Center" Margin="0,150,0,0" Content="Hello" Click="button1_Click" /> 9: </StackPanel> .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Now, the real action is there in the bolded TextBlock.Text property: Text="{Binding ElementName=textBox1, Path=Text}" .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } That does all the heavy lifting.  It sets up a databinding between the TextBox.Text property on textBox1 and the TextBlock.Text property on textBlock1. As I change the text of the TextBox, the label updates automatically. In fact, I dont even need the button any more, so I could get rid of that altogether.  And no button means no event handler.  No event handler means no C# code at all.  Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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  • Decompiling a *.DLL to assembly for .net in delphi 4

    - by Lex Dean
    I love my Delphi 4 but at the same time I see the need to talk to windows .net This is a recompiled dll that I found on sourceforge.net/projects/delphinet/ (DelphiNet03.zip) by some nice people that fund the dll from some were. The real answer is to make this dll so that fits into Delphi as true Delphi code, and not a dll clip on. So we can make objects that use dot net in Delphi. Because I’m not an assembly freak, I’m freaking out a little with a wee sweek for help! 1/ How do I link the asm code with the data info at the bottom of this code. Can some one show me which calls to look for to make this link to data. 2/ I need to find the beginning of all the procedures and functions, but I cannot find a ‘RET’ statement. And what line is the beginning statement in this code. 3/ How do I identify were the jump statements go to, put them into Delphi format In this code it looks I can do:- jle 402890h \1000:00402854 7e3a add [eax], al \1000:00402856 0000 …………………………………………….. or ch, [edi+3eh] \1000:0040288d 0a6f3e xrefs first: 1000:00402854 number : 1 \; add [eax], al \1000:00402890 0000 //******************************* jle @@21 \\1000:00402854 7e3a add [eax], al \\1000:00402856 0000 …………………………………………….. or ch, [edi+3eh] \1000:0040288d 0a6f3e xrefs first: 1000:00402854 number : 1 \; @@21 add [eax], al \1000:00402890 0000 Is that a correct conversion. I think a xrefs first: 1000:004021d1 number : 1 is the best to follow 4/ I need a good reference on 8086 up assembly code that I can print out and get to learn properly. I found this asm decomplier of http://www.cronos.cc/ that is so similar to Delphi that it only needs a little more convertion to get it into Delphi asm I think. It’s only taken me 3 hours to get the file into TMemo and to write a few lines to chop the line over in a stream and reload the memo. Help please Email: [email protected] xrefs first: 1000:004041ae number : 1 \\; dd 4190h \\1000:00402000 90410000 dd 00h \\1000:00402004 00000000 dec eax \\1000:00402008 48 add [eax], al \\1000:00402009 0000 add [edx], al \\1000:0040200b 0002 add [eax], al \\1000:0040200d 0000 add [eax-2bffffd2h], al \\1000:0040200f 00802e0000d4 adc al, [eax] \\1000:00402015 1200 add [ecx], al \\1000:00402017 0001 add [eax], al \\1000:00402019 0000 add [eax], al \\1000:0040201b 0000 add [eax], al \\1000:0040201d 0000 add [eax], al \\1000:0040201f 0000 add [eax], al \\1000:00402021 0000 add [eax], al \\1000:00402023 0000 add [eax], al \\1000:00402025 0000 add [eax], al \\1000:00402027 0000 add [eax], al \\1000:00402029 0000 add [eax], al \\1000:0040202b 0000 add [eax], al \\1000:0040202d 0000 add [eax], al \\1000:0040202f 0000 add [eax], al \\1000:00402031 0000 add [eax], al \\1000:00402033 0000 add [eax], al \\1000:00402035 0000 add [eax], al \\1000:00402037 0000 add [eax], al \\1000:00402039 0000 add [eax], al \\1000:0040203b 0000 add [eax], al \\1000:0040203d 0000 add [eax], al \\1000:0040203f 0000 add [eax], al \\1000:00402041 0000 add [eax], al \\1000:00402043 0000 add [eax], al \\1000:00402045 0000 add [eax], al \\1000:00402047 0000 add [eax], al \\1000:00402049 0000 add [eax], al \\1000:0040204b 0000 add [eax], al \\1000:0040204d 0000 add [ebx], dl \\1000:0040204f 0013 xor [eax+eax], al \\1000:00402051 300400 or al, [ecx] \\1000:00402054 0a01 add [eax], al \\1000:00402056 0000 add [eax], eax \\1000:00402058 0100 add [ecx], dl \\1000:0040205a 0011 push cs \\1000:0040205c 0e add al, 50h \\1000:0040205d 0450 mov gs, [ecx+05h] \\1000:0040205f 8e6905 push eax \\1000:00402062 50 mov gs, [ecx+2eh] \\1000:00402063 8e692e add eax, f938h \\1000:00402066 0538f90000 add [ebx], al \\1000:0040206b 0003 jc 402070h \\1000:0040206d 7201 add [eax], al \\1000:0040206f 0000 jo 40209bh \\1000:00402071 7028 add al, [eax] \\1000:00402073 0200 add [edx], cl \\1000:00402075 000a sub eax, 36f0408h \\1000:00402077 2d08046f03 add [eax], al \\1000:0040207c 0000 or ch, [ebx] \\1000:0040207e 0a2b push es \\1000:00402080 06 add al, 6fh \\1000:00402081 046f add al, 00h \\1000:00402083 0400 add [edx], cl \\1000:00402085 000a adc eax, [edi] \\1000:00402087 1307 push ss \\1000:00402089 16 adc ecx, [eax] \\1000:0040208a 1308 cmp cl, cl \\1000:0040208c 38c9 add [eax], al \\1000:0040208e 0000 add [ecx], dl \\1000:00402090 0011 pop es \\1000:00402092 07 adc [eax], ecx \\1000:00402093 1108 callf 056f:060a9a08h \\1000:00402095 9a0a066f05 add [eax], al \\1000:0040209a 0000 or cl, [ebx] \\1000:0040209c 0a0b push es \\1000:0040209e 06 outsd \\1000:0040209f 6f push es \\1000:004020a0 06 add [eax], al \\1000:004020a1 0000 or al, [ebx] \\1000:004020a3 0a03 sub [edx], al \\1000:004020a5 2802 add [eax], al \\1000:004020a7 0000 or bh, [ecx] \\1000:004020a9 0a39 movsd \\1000:004020ab a5 add [eax], al \\1000:004020ac 0000 add [edi], al \\1000:004020ae 0007 mov gs, [ecx+0eh] \\1000:004020b0 8e690e add al, 50h \\1000:004020b3 0450 mov gs, [ecx+40h] \\1000:004020b5 8e6940 cwde \\1000:004020b8 98 add [eax], al \\1000:004020b9 0000 add [edi], dl \\1000:004020bb 0017 or al, 16h \\1000:004020bd 0c16 or eax, 9072b2bh \\1000:004020bf 0d2b2b0709 callf 0000:076f9a09h \\1000:004020c4 9a6f070000 or ch, [edi+08h] \\1000:004020c9 0a6f08 add [eax], al \\1000:004020cc 0000 or ch, [eax+ebx] \\1000:004020ce 0a2c18 push cs \\1000:004020d1 0e add al, 50h \\1000:004020d2 0450 or [edx+d72h], ebx \\1000:004020d4 099a720d0000 jo 402104h \\1000:004020da 7028 or [eax], eax \\1000:004020dc 0900 add [edx], cl \\1000:004020de 000a add dl, cs:[esi] \\1000:004020e0 2e0216 or al, 08h \\1000:004020e3 0c08 sub eax, 90c2b02h \\1000:004020e5 2d022b0c09 pop ss \\1000:004020ea 17 pop eax \\1000:004020eb 58 or eax, 50040e09h \\1000:004020ec 0d090e0450 mov gs, [ecx+32h] \\1000:004020f1 8e6932 int 08h \\1000:004020f4 cd08 sub al, 5ch \\1000:004020f6 2c5c push ss \\1000:004020f8 16 adc eax, [ebx+ebp] \\1000:004020f9 13042b dec esi \\1000:004020fc 4e push cs \\1000:004020fd 0e add al, 50h \\1000:004020fe 0450 adc [edx+ebx*4], eax \\1000:00402100 11049a jc 402112h \\1000:00402103 720d add [eax], al \\1000:00402105 0000 jo 402131h \\1000:00402107 7028 or [eax], eax \\1000:00402109 0900 add [edx], cl \\1000:0040210b 000a xor esi, [esi] \\1000:0040210d 3336 pop es \\1000:0040210f 07 adc [edx+ebx*4], eax \\1000:00402110 11049a outsd \\1000:00402113 6f pop es \\1000:00402114 07 add [eax], al \\1000:00402115 0000 or ch, [edi+0ah] \\1000:00402117 0a6f0a add [eax], al \\1000:0040211a 0000 or dl, [ebx] \\1000:0040211c 0a13 push es \\1000:0040211e 06 add eax, 9a041150h \\1000:0040211f 055011049a sub [ebx], cl \\1000:00402124 280b add [eax], al \\1000:00402126 0000 or dl, [edx] \\1000:00402128 0a12 push es \\1000:0040212a 06 adc al, [c28h] \\1000:0040212b 1205280c0000 xrefs first: 1000:00402107 number : 1 \\; or ch, [edx+eax] \\1000:00402131 0a2c02 sub ebx, [esi] \\1000:00402134 2b1e push cs \\1000:00402136 0e add al, 50h \\1000:00402137 0450 adc [edi+eax], eax \\1000:00402139 110407 adc [edx+ebx*4], eax \\1000:0040213c 11049a outsd \\1000:0040213f 6f pop es \\1000:00402140 07 add [eax], al \\1000:00402141 0000 or ah, [edx+58170411h] \\1000:00402143 0aa211041758 adc eax, [ecx+edx] \\1000:00402149 130411 add al, 0eh \\1000:0040214c 040e add al, 50h \\1000:0040214e 0450 mov gs, [ecx+32h] \\1000:00402150 8e6932 test eax, 58170811h \\1000:00402153 a911081758 adc ecx, [eax] \\1000:00402158 1308 adc [eax], ecx \\1000:0040215a 1108 adc [edi], eax \\1000:0040215c 1107 mov gs, [ecx+3fh] \\1000:0040215e 8e693f sub al, ffh \\1000:00402161 2cff db ff \\1000:00402163 ff jmp [edx] \\1000:00402164 ff2a add [eax], al \\1000:00402166 0000 adc esi, [eax] \\1000:00402168 1330 add eax, 8100h \\1000:0040216a 0500810000 add [edx], al \\1000:0040216f 0002 add [eax], al \\1000:00402171 0000 adc [edx+esi*2], eax \\1000:00402173 110472 xor eax, [eax] \\1000:00402176 3300 add [eax+28h], dh \\1000:00402178 007028 add al, [eax] \\1000:0040217b 0200 add [edx], cl \\1000:0040217d 000a sub al, 09h \\1000:0040217f 2c09 add ebp, [eax] \\1000:00402181 0328 or eax, a0a0000h \\1000:00402183 0d00000a0a sub eax, [edi] \\1000:00402188 2b07 add al, 28h \\1000:0040218a 0428 push cs \\1000:0040218c 0e add [eax], al \\1000:0040218d 0000 or cl, [edx] \\1000:0040218f 0a0a push es \\1000:00402191 06 add eax, f6f1717h \\1000:00402192 0517176f0f add [eax], al \\1000:00402197 0000 or cl, [ebx] \\1000:00402199 0a0b push ss \\1000:0040219b 16 lea eax, [edx] \\1000:0040219c 8d02 add [eax], al \\1000:0040219e 0000 add [esi+ecx], ecx \\1000:004021a0 010c0e add al, 2ch \\1000:004021a3 042c push cs \\1000:004021a5 260e add al, 8eh \\1000:004021a7 048e c160d imul edi, [eax+28dh], d160c01h \\1000:004021a9 69b88d020000010c sub edx, [eax] \\1000:004021b3 2b10 or [ecx], cl \\1000:004021b5 0809 push cs \\1000:004021b7 0e add al, 09h \\1000:004021b8 0409 callf 0000:106f9a09h \\1000:004021ba 9a6f100000 or ah, [edx+d581709h] \\1000:004021bf 0aa20917580d or [esi], ecx \\1000:004021c5 090e add al, 8eh \\1000:004021c7 048e imul esi, [edx], 17202e9h \\1000:004021c9 6932e9027201 add [eax], al \\1000:004021cf 0000 jo 4021dah \\1000:004021d1 7007 db 0f \\1000:004021d3 0f add al, 12h \\1000:004021d4 0412 add ch, [eax] \\1000:004021d6 0228 add [eax], eax \\1000:004021d8 0100 xrefs first: 1000:004021d1 number : 1 \\; add [esi], al \\1000:004021da 0006 pop es \\1000:004021dc 07 or [edi+11h], ch \\1000:004021dd 086f11 add [eax], al \\1000:004021e0 0000 or dl, [ebx] \\1000:004021e2 0a13 add al, 11h \\1000:004021e4 0411 add al, 0eh \\1000:004021e6 040e add al, 6fh \\1000:004021e8 046f adc al, [eax] \\1000:004021ea 1200 add [edx], cl \\1000:004021ec 000a adc eax, [511002bh] \\1000:004021ee 13052b001105 sub al, [eax] \\1000:004021f4 2a00 add [eax], al \\1000:004021f6 0000 adc esi, [eax] \\1000:004021f8 1330 add eax, 4e00h \\1000:004021fa 05004e0000 add [ebx], al \\1000:004021ff 0003 add [eax], al \\1000:00402201 0000 adc [ebx], eax \\1000:00402203 1103 outsd \\1000:00402205 6f adc [eax], al \\1000:00402206 1000 add [edx], cl \\1000:00402208 000a or al, [8db8698eh] \\1000:0040220a 0a058e69b88d add al, [eax] \\1000:00402210 0200 add [ecx], al \\1000:00402212 0001 or edx, [esi] \\1000:00402214 0b16 or al, 2bh \\1000:00402216 0c2b db 0f \\1000:00402218 0f pop es \\1000:00402219 07 or [106f9a08h], al \\1000:0040221a 0805089a6f10 add [eax], al \\1000:00402220 0000 or ah, [edx+c581708h] \\1000:00402222 0aa20817580c or [eb32698eh], al \\1000:00402228 08058e6932eb add al, [esi+eax] \\1000:0040222e 020406 lsl edx, [edx] \\1000:00402231 0f0312 add [eax], ebp \\1000:00402234 0128 add [eax], eax \\1000:00402236 0100 add [esi], al \\1000:00402238 0006 push es \\1000:0040223a 06 add al, 07h \\1000:0040223b 0407 outsd \\1000:0040223d 6f adc eax, [eax] \\1000:0040223e 1300 add [edx], cl \\1000:00402240 000a or eax, 6f050309h \\1000:00402242 0d0903056f adc al, 00h \\1000:00402247 1400 add [edx], cl \\1000:00402249 000a adc eax, [ebx+ebp] \\1000:0040224b 13042b add [ecx], dl \\1000:0040224e 0011 add al, 2ah \\1000:00402250 042a add [eax], al \\1000:00402252 0000 adc esi, [eax] \\1000:00402254 1330 add eax, 7600h \\1000:00402256 0500760000 add [eax+eax], al \\1000:0040225b 000400 add [ecx], dl \\1000:0040225e 0011 add al, 72h \\1000:00402260 0472 xor eax, [eax] \\1000:00402262 3300 add [eax+28h], dh \\1000:00402264 007028 add al, [eax] \\1000:00402267 0200 add [edx], cl \\1000:00402269 000a sub al, 09h \\1000:0040226b 2c09 add ebp, [eax] \\1000:0040226d 0328 or eax, a0a0000h \\1000:0040226f 0d00000a0a sub eax, [edi] \\1000:00402274 2b07 add al, 28h \\1000:00402276 0428 push cs \\1000:00402278 0e add [eax], al \\1000:00402279 0000 or cl, [edx] \\1000:0040227b 0a0a push es \\1000:0040227d 06 add eax, f6f1717h \\1000:0040227e 0517176f0f add [eax], al \\1000:00402283 0000 or cl, [ebx] \\1000:00402285 0a0b push cs \\1000:00402287 0e add eax, 8db8698eh \\1000:00402288 058e69b88d add al, [eax] \\1000:0040228d 0200 add [ecx], al \\1000:0040228f 0001 or al, 16h \\1000:00402291 0c16 or eax, 908102bh \\1000:00402293 0d2b100809 push cs \\1000:00402298 0e add eax, 106f9a09h \\1000:00402299 05099a6f10 add [eax], al \\1000:0040229e 0000 or ah, [edx+d581709h] \\1000:004022a0 0aa20917580d or [esi], ecx \\1000:004022a6 090e add eax, e932698eh \\1000:004022a8 058e6932e9 add cl, [esi] \\1000:004022ad 020e add al, 07h \\1000:004022af 0407 db 0f \\1000:004022b1 0f add eax, 1280212h \\1000:004022b2 0512022801 add [eax], al \\1000:004022b7 0000 push es \\1000:004022b9 06 pop es \\1000:004022ba 07 push cs \\1000:004022bb 0e add al, 08h \\1000:004022bc 0408 outsd \\1000:004022be 6f adc eax, [eax] \\1000:004022bf 1300 add [edx], cl \\1000:004022c1 000a adc eax, [ecx+edx] \\1000:004022c3 130411 add al, 14h \\1000:004022c6 0414 push cs \\1000:004022c8 0e add eax, 146fh \\1000:004022c9 056f140000 or dl, [ebx] \\1000:004022ce 0a13 add eax, 511002bh \\1000:004022d0 052b001105 sub al, [eax] \\1000:004022d5 2a00 add [ebx], dl \\1000:004022d7 0013 xor [eax+eax], al \\1000:004022d9 300400 jbe 4022deh \\1000:004022dc 7600 xrefs first: 1000:004022dc number : 1 \\; add fs:[esi+45h], cl \\1000:004034fc 64004e45 push esp \\1000:00403500 54 dec ecx \\1000:00403501 49 xrefs first: 1000:004034b2 number : 1 \\; outsb \\1000:00403502 6e jbe 403574h \\1000:00403503 766f imul esp, [ebp+43h], 6ch \\1000:00403505 6b65436c popad \\1000:00403509 61 jnc 40357fh \\1000:0040350a 7373 dec ebp \\1000:0040350c 4d jz 403578h \\1000:0040350d 657468 outsd \\1000:00403510 6f add fs:[esi+45h], cl \\1000:00403511 64004e45 push esp \\1000:00403515 54 push ebx \\1000:00403516 53 jz 40355fh \\1000:00403517 657445 outsb \\1000:0040351a 6e jnz 40358ah \\1000:0040351b 756d push esi \\1000:0040351d 56 xrefs first: 1000:004034b7 number : 1 \\; popad \\1000:0040351e 61 insb \\1000:0040351f 6c jnz 403587h \\1000:00403520 7565 add [esi+45h], cl \\1000:00403522 004e45 push esp \\1000:00403525 54 inc edi \\1000:00403526 47 db 65 ;'e' \\1000:00403527 65 xrefs first: 1000:004034be number : 1 \\; db 74 ;'t' \\1000:00403528 74 db 50 ;'p' \\1000:00403529 50 db 72 ;'r' \\1000:0040352a 72 db 6f ;'o' \\1000:0040352b 6f db 70 ;'p' \\1000:0040352c 70 db 65 ;'e' \\1000:0040352d 65 db 72 ;'r' \\1000:0040352e 72 db 74 ;'t' \\1000:0040352f 74 db 79 ;'y' \\1000:00403530 79 db 00 \\1000:00403531 00 db 4e ;'n' \\1000:00403532 4e db 45 ;'e' \\1000:00403533 45 db 54 ;'t' \\1000:00403534 54 db 47 ;'g' \\1000:00403535 47 db 65 ;'e' \\1000:00403536 65 db 74 ;'t' \\1000:00403537 74 db 46 ;'f' \\1000:00403538 46 db 69 ;'i' \\1000:00403539 69 db 65 ;'e' \\1000:0040353a 65 db 6c ;'l' \\1000:0040353b 6c db 64 ;'d' \\1000:0040353c 64 db 00 \\1000:0040353d 00 could not fit the rest in because of Stack overflow limitions

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  • while I scroll between the layout it takes too long to be able to scroll between the gallerie's pictures. Is there any way to reduce this time?

    - by Mateo
    Hello, this is my first question here, though I've being reading this forum for quite a while. Most of the answers to my doubts are from here :) Getting back on topic. I'm developing an Android application. I'm drawing a dynamic layout that are basically Galleries, inside a LinearLayout, inside a ScrollView, inside a RelativeLayout. The ScrollView is a must, because I'm drawing a dynamic amount of galleries that most probably will not fit on the screen. When I scroll inside the layout, I have to wait 3/4 seconds until the ScrollView "deactivates" to be able to scroll inside the galleries. What I want to do is to reduce this time to a minimum. Preferably I would like to be able to scroll inside the galleries as soon as I lift my finger from the screen, though anything lower than 2 seconds would be great as well. I've being googling around for a solution but all I could find until now where layout tutorials that didn't tackle this particular issue. I was hoping someone here knows if this is possible and if so to give me some hints on how to do so. I would prefer not to do my own ScrollView to solve this. But if that is the only way I would appreciate some help because I'm not really sure how would I solve this issue by doing that. this is my layout: public class PicturesL extends Activity implements OnClickListener, OnItemClickListener, OnItemLongClickListener { private ArrayList<ImageView> imageView = new ArrayList<ImageView>(); private StringBuilder PicsDate = new StringBuilder(); private CaWaApplication application; private long ListID; private ArrayList<Gallery> gallery = new ArrayList<Gallery>(); private ArrayList<Bitmap> Thumbails = new ArrayList<Bitmap>(); private String idioma; private ArrayList<Long> Days = new ArrayList<Long>(); private long oldDay; private long oldThumbsLoaded; private ArrayList<Long> ThumbailsDays = new ArrayList<Long>(); private ArrayList<ArrayList<Long>> IDs = new ArrayList<ArrayList<Long>>(); @Override public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstancedState) { super.onCreate(savedInstancedState); RelativeLayout layout = new RelativeLayout(this); ScrollView scroll = new ScrollView(this); LinearLayout realLayout = new LinearLayout(this); ArrayList<TextView> texts = new ArrayList<TextView>(); Button TakePic = new Button(this); idioma = com.mateloft.cawa.prefs.getLang(this); if (idioma.equals("en")) { TakePic.setText("Take Picture"); } else if (idioma.equals("es")) { TakePic.setText("Sacar Foto"); } RelativeLayout.LayoutParams scrollLP = new RelativeLayout.LayoutParams(RelativeLayout.LayoutParams.FILL_PARENT, RelativeLayout.LayoutParams.FILL_PARENT); layout.addView(scroll, scrollLP); realLayout.setOrientation(LinearLayout.VERTICAL); realLayout.setLayoutParams(new LayoutParams(LayoutParams.FILL_PARENT, LayoutParams.FILL_PARENT)); scroll.addView(realLayout); TakePic.setId(67); TakePic.setOnClickListener(this); application = (CaWaApplication) getApplication(); ListID = getIntent().getExtras().getLong("listid"); getAllThumbailsOfID(); LinearLayout.LayoutParams TakeLP = new LinearLayout.LayoutParams(LinearLayout.LayoutParams.WRAP_CONTENT, LinearLayout.LayoutParams.WRAP_CONTENT); realLayout.addView(TakePic); oldThumbsLoaded = 0; int galler = 100; for (int z = 0; z < Days.size(); z++) { ThumbailsManager croppedThumbs = new ThumbailsManager(Thumbails, oldThumbsLoaded, ThumbailsDays.get(z)); oldThumbsLoaded = ThumbailsDays.get(z); texts.add(new TextView(this)); texts.get(z).setText("Day " + Days.get(z).toString()); gallery.add(new Gallery(this)); gallery.get(z).setAdapter(new ImageAdapter(this, croppedThumbs.getGallery(), 250, 175, true, ListID)); gallery.get(z).setOnItemClickListener(this); gallery.get(z).setOnItemLongClickListener(this); gallery.get(z).setId(galler); galler++; realLayout.addView(texts.get(z)); realLayout.addView(gallery.get(z)); } Log.d("PicturesL", "ListID: " + ListID); setContentView(layout); } private void getAllThumbailsOfID() { ArrayList<ModelPics> Pictures = new ArrayList<ModelPics>(); ArrayList<String> ThumbailsPath = new ArrayList<String>(); Pictures = application.dataManager.selectAllPics(); long thumbpathloaded = 0; int currentID = 0; for (int x = 0; x < Pictures.size(); x++) { if (Pictures.get(x).walkname == ListID) { if (Days.size() == 0) { Days.add(Pictures.get(x).day); oldDay = Pictures.get(x).day; IDs.add(new ArrayList<Long>()); currentID = 0; } if (oldDay != Pictures.get(x).day) { oldDay = Pictures.get(x).day; ThumbailsDays.add(thumbpathloaded); Days.add(Pictures.get(x).day); IDs.add(new ArrayList<Long>()); currentID++; } StringBuilder tpath = new StringBuilder(); tpath.append(Pictures.get(x).path.substring(0, Pictures.get(x).path.length() - 4)); tpath.append("-t.jpg"); IDs.get(currentID).add(Pictures.get(x).id); ThumbailsPath.add(tpath.toString()); thumbpathloaded++; if (x == Pictures.size() - 1) { Log.d("PicturesL", "El ultimo de los arrays, tamaño: " + Days.size()); ThumbailsDays.add(thumbpathloaded); } } } for (int y = 0; y < ThumbailsPath.size(); y++) { Thumbails.add(BitmapFactory.decodeFile(ThumbailsPath.get(y))); } } I had a memory leak on another activity when screen orientation changed that was making it slower, now it is working better. The scroller is not locking up. But sometimes, when it stops scrolling, it takes a few seconds (2/3) to disable itself. I just want it to be a little more dynamic, is there any way to override the listener and make it stop scrolling ON_ACTION_UP or something like that? I don't want to use the listview because I want to have each gallery separated by other views, now I just have text, but I will probably separate them with images with a different size than the galleries. I'm not really sure if this is possible with a listadapter and a listview, I assumed that a view can only handle only one type of object, so I'm using a scrollview of a layout, if I'm wrong please correct me :) Also this activity works as a preview or selecting the pictures you want to view in full size and manage their values. So its working only with thumbnails. Each one weights 40 kb. Guessing that is very unlikely that a user gets more than 1000~1500 pictures in this view, i thought that the activity wouldn't use more than 40~50 mb of ram in this case, adding 10 more if I open the fullsized view. So I guessed as well most devices are able to display this view in full size. If it doesn't work on low-end devices my plan was to add an option in the app preferences to let user chop this view according to some database values. And a last reason is that during most of this activity "life-cycle" (the app has pics that are relevant to the view, when it ends the value that selects which pictures are displayed has to change and no more pictures are added inside this instance of this activity); the view will be unpopulated, so most of the time showing everything wont cost much, just at the end of its cycle That was more or less what I thought at the time i created this layout. I'm open to any sort of suggestion or opinion, I just created this layout a few days ago and I'm trying to see if it can work right, because it suits my app needs. Though if there is a better way i would love to hear it Thanks Mateo

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  • Multiple errors while adding searching to app

    - by Thijs
    Hi, I'm fairly new at iOS programming, but I managed to make a (in my opinion quite nice) app for the app store. The main function for my next update will be a search option for the app. I followed a tutorial I found on the internet and adapted it to fit my app. I got back quite some errors, most of which I managed to fix. But now I'm completely stuck and don't know what to do next. I know it's a lot to ask, but if anyone could take a look at the code underneath, it would be greatly appreciated. Thanks! // // RootViewController.m // GGZ info // // Created by Thijs Beckers on 29-12-10. // Copyright 2010 __MyCompanyName__. All rights reserved. // #import "RootViewController.h" // Always import the next level view controller header(s) #import "CourseCodes.h" @implementation RootViewController @synthesize dataForCurrentLevel, tableViewData; #pragma mark - #pragma mark View lifecycle // OVERRIDE METHOD - (void)viewDidLoad { [super viewDidLoad]; // Go get the data for the app... // Create a custom string that points to the right location in the app bundle NSString *pathToPlist = [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:@"SCSCurriculum" ofType:@"plist"]; // Now, place the result into the dictionary property // Note that we must retain it to keep it around dataForCurrentLevel = [[NSDictionary dictionaryWithContentsOfFile:pathToPlist] retain]; // Place the top level keys (the program codes) in an array for the table view // Note that we must retain it to keep it around // NSDictionary has a really useful instance method - allKeys // The allKeys method returns an array with all of the keys found in (this level of) a dictionary tableViewData = [[[dataForCurrentLevel allKeys] sortedArrayUsingSelector:@selector(caseInsensitiveCompare:)] retain]; //Initialize the copy array. copyListOfItems = [[NSMutableArray alloc] init]; // Set the nav bar title self.title = @"GGZ info"; //Add the search bar self.tableView.tableHeaderView = searchBar; searchBar.autocorrectionType = UITextAutocorrectionTypeNo; searching = NO; letUserSelectRow = YES; } /* - (void)viewWillAppear:(BOOL)animated { [super viewWillAppear:animated]; } */ /* - (void)viewDidAppear:(BOOL)animated { [super viewDidAppear:animated]; } */ /* - (void)viewWillDisappear:(BOOL)animated { [super viewWillDisappear:animated]; } */ /* - (void)viewDidDisappear:(BOOL)animated { [super viewDidDisappear:animated]; } */ //RootViewController.m - (void) searchBarTextDidBeginEditing:(UISearchBar *)theSearchBar { searching = YES; letUserSelectRow = NO; self.tableView.scrollEnabled = NO; //Add the done button. self.navigationItem.rightBarButtonItem = [[[UIBarButtonItem alloc] initWithBarButtonSystemItem:UIBarButtonSystemItemDone target:self action:@selector(doneSearching_Clicked:)] autorelease]; } - (NSIndexPath *)tableView :(UITableView *)theTableView willSelectRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath { if(letUserSelectRow) return indexPath; else return nil; } //RootViewController.m - (void)searchBar:(UISearchBar *)theSearchBar textDidChange:(NSString *)searchText { //Remove all objects first. [copyListOfItems removeAllObjects]; if([searchText length] &gt; 0) { searching = YES; letUserSelectRow = YES; self.tableView.scrollEnabled = YES; [self searchTableView]; } else { searching = NO; letUserSelectRow = NO; self.tableView.scrollEnabled = NO; } [self.tableView reloadData]; } //RootViewController.m - (void) searchBarSearchButtonClicked:(UISearchBar *)theSearchBar { [self searchTableView]; } - (void) searchTableView { NSString *searchText = searchBar.text; NSMutableArray *searchArray = [[NSMutableArray alloc] init]; for (NSDictionary *dictionary in listOfItems) { NSArray *array = [dictionary objectForKey:@"Countries"]; [searchArray addObjectsFromArray:array]; } for (NSString *sTemp in searchArray) { NSRange titleResultsRange = [sTemp rangeOfString:searchText options:NSCaseInsensitiveSearch]; if (titleResultsRange.length &gt; 0) [copyListOfItems addObject:sTemp]; } [searchArray release]; searchArray = nil; } //RootViewController.m - (void) doneSearching_Clicked:(id)sender { searchBar.text = @""; [searchBar resignFirstResponder]; letUserSelectRow = YES; searching = NO; self.navigationItem.rightBarButtonItem = nil; self.tableView.scrollEnabled = YES; [self.tableView reloadData]; } //RootViewController.m - (NSInteger)numberOfSectionsInTableView:(UITableView *)tableView { if (searching) return 1; else return [listOfItems count]; } // Customize the number of rows in the table view. - (NSInteger)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView numberOfRowsInSection:(NSInteger)section { if (searching) return [copyListOfItems count]; else { //Number of rows it should expect should be based on the section NSDictionary *dictionary = [listOfItems objectAtIndex:section]; NSArray *array = [dictionary objectForKey:@"Countries"]; return [array count]; } } - (NSString *)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView titleForHeaderInSection:(NSInteger)section { if(searching) return @""; if(section == 0) return @"Countries to visit"; else return @"Countries visited"; } // Customize the appearance of table view cells. - (UITableViewCell *)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView cellForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath { static NSString *CellIdentifier = @"Cell"; UITableViewCell *cell = [tableView dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier:CellIdentifier]; if (cell == nil) { cell = [[[UITableViewCell alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectZero reuseIdentifier:CellIdentifier] autorelease]; } // Set up the cell... if(searching) cell.text = [copyListOfItems objectAtIndex:indexPath.row]; else { //First get the dictionary object NSDictionary *dictionary = [listOfItems objectAtIndex:indexPath.section]; NSArray *array = [dictionary objectForKey:@"Countries"]; NSString *cellValue = [array objectAtIndex:indexPath.row]; cell.text = cellValue; } return cell; } - (void)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView didSelectRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath { //Get the selected country NSString *selectedCountry = nil; if(searching) selectedCountry = [copyListOfItems objectAtIndex:indexPath.row]; else { NSDictionary *dictionary = [listOfItems objectAtIndex:indexPath.section]; NSArray *array = [dictionary objectForKey:@"Countries"]; selectedCountry = [array objectAtIndex:indexPath.row]; } //Initialize the detail view controller and display it. DetailViewController *dvController = [[DetailViewController alloc] initWithNibName:@"DetailView" bundle:[NSBundle mainBundle]]; dvController.selectedCountry = selectedCountry; [self.navigationController pushViewController:dvController animated:YES]; [dvController release]; dvController = nil; } //RootViewController.m - (void) searchBarTextDidBeginEditing:(UISearchBar *)theSearchBar { //Add the overlay view. if(ovController == nil) ovController = [[OverlayViewController alloc] initWithNibName:@"OverlayView" bundle:[NSBundle mainBundle]]; CGFloat yaxis = self.navigationController.navigationBar.frame.size.height; CGFloat width = self.view.frame.size.width; CGFloat height = self.view.frame.size.height; //Parameters x = origion on x-axis, y = origon on y-axis. CGRect frame = CGRectMake(0, yaxis, width, height); ovController.view.frame = frame; ovController.view.backgroundColor = [UIColor grayColor]; ovController.view.alpha = 0.5; ovController.rvController = self; [self.tableView insertSubview:ovController.view aboveSubview:self.parentViewController.view]; searching = YES; letUserSelectRow = NO; self.tableView.scrollEnabled = NO; //Add the done button. self.navigationItem.rightBarButtonItem = [[[UIBarButtonItem alloc] initWithBarButtonSystemItem:UIBarButtonSystemItemDone target:self action:@selector(doneSearching_Clicked:)] autorelease]; } // Override to allow orientations other than the default portrait orientation. - (BOOL)shouldAutorotateToInterfaceOrientation:(UIInterfaceOrientation)interfaceOrientation { // Return YES for supported orientations. return YES; } - (void)didReceiveMemoryWarning { // Releases the view if it doesn't have a superview. [super didReceiveMemoryWarning]; // Relinquish ownership any cached data, images, etc that aren't in use. } - (void)viewDidUnload { // Relinquish ownership of anything that can be recreated in viewDidLoad or on demand. // For example: self.myOutlet = nil; } - (void)dealloc { [dataForCurrentLevel release]; [tableViewData release]; [super dealloc]; } #pragma mark - #pragma mark Table view methods // DATA SOURCE METHOD - (NSInteger)numberOfSectionsInTableView:(UITableView *)tableView { return 1; } // DATA SOURCE METHOD - (NSInteger)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView numberOfRowsInSection:(NSInteger)section { // How many rows should be displayed? return [tableViewData count]; } // DELEGATE METHOD - (UITableViewCell *)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView cellForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath { // Cell reuse block static NSString *CellIdentifier = @"Cell"; UITableViewCell *cell = [tableView dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier:CellIdentifier]; if (cell == nil) { cell = [[[UITableViewCell alloc] initWithStyle:UITableViewCellStyleDefault reuseIdentifier:CellIdentifier] autorelease]; } // Configure the cell's contents - we want the program code, and a disclosure indicator cell.textLabel.text = [tableViewData objectAtIndex:indexPath.row]; cell.accessoryType = UITableViewCellAccessoryDisclosureIndicator; return cell; } //RootViewController.m - (void)searchBar:(UISearchBar *)theSearchBar textDidChange:(NSString *)searchText { //Remove all objects first. [copyListOfItems removeAllObjects]; if([searchText length] &gt; 0) { [ovController.view removeFromSuperview]; searching = YES; letUserSelectRow = YES; self.tableView.scrollEnabled = YES; [self searchTableView]; } else { [self.tableView insertSubview:ovController.view aboveSubview:self.parentViewController.view]; searching = NO; letUserSelectRow = NO; self.tableView.scrollEnabled = NO; } [self.tableView reloadData]; } //RootViewController.m - (void) doneSearching_Clicked:(id)sender { searchBar.text = @""; [searchBar resignFirstResponder]; letUserSelectRow = YES; searching = NO; self.navigationItem.rightBarButtonItem = nil; self.tableView.scrollEnabled = YES; [ovController.view removeFromSuperview]; [ovController release]; ovController = nil; [self.tableView reloadData]; } // DELEGATE METHOD - (void)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView didSelectRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath { // In any navigation-based application, you follow the same pattern: // 1. Create an instance of the next-level view controller // 2. Configure that instance, with settings and data if necessary // 3. Push it on to the navigation stack // In this situation, the next level view controller is another table view // Therefore, we really don't need a nib file (do you see a CourseCodes.xib? no, there isn't one) // So, a UITableViewController offers an initializer that programmatically creates a view // 1. Create the next level view controller // ======================================== CourseCodes *nextVC = [[CourseCodes alloc] initWithStyle:UITableViewStylePlain]; // 2. Configure it... // ================== // It needs data from the dictionary - the "value" for the current "key" (that was tapped) NSDictionary *nextLevelDictionary = [dataForCurrentLevel objectForKey:[tableViewData objectAtIndex:indexPath.row]]; nextVC.dataForCurrentLevel = nextLevelDictionary; // Set the view title nextVC.title = [tableViewData objectAtIndex:indexPath.row]; // 3. Push it on to the navigation stack // ===================================== [self.navigationController pushViewController:nextVC animated:YES]; // Memory manage it [nextVC release]; } /* // Override to support conditional editing of the table view. - (BOOL)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView canEditRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath { // Return NO if you do not want the specified item to be editable. return YES; } */ /* // Override to support editing the table view. - (void)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView commitEditingStyle:(UITableViewCellEditingStyle)editingStyle forRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath { if (editingStyle == UITableViewCellEditingStyleDelete) { // Delete the row from the data source. [tableView deleteRowsAtIndexPaths:[NSArray arrayWithObject:indexPath] withRowAnimation:UITableViewRowAnimationFade]; } else if (editingStyle == UITableViewCellEditingStyleInsert) { // Create a new instance of the appropriate class, insert it into the array, and add a new row to the table view. } } */ /* // Override to support rearranging the table view. - (void)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView moveRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)fromIndexPath toIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)toIndexPath { } */ /* // Override to support conditional rearranging of the table view. - (BOOL)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView canMoveRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath { // Return NO if you do not want the item to be re-orderable. return YES; } */ @end

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  • Turning PHP page calling Zend functions procedurally into Zend Framework MVC-help!

    - by Joel
    Hi guys, I posted much of this question, but if didn't include all the Zend stuff because I thought it'd be overkill, but now I'm thinking it's not easy to figure out an OO way of doing this without that code... So with that said, please forgive the verbose code. I'm learning how to use MVC and OO in general, and I have a website that is all in PHP but most of the pages are basic static pages. I have already converted them all to views in Zend Framework, and have the Controller and layout set. All is good there. The one remaining page I have is the main reason I did this...it in fact uses Zend library (for gData connection and pulling info from a Google Calendar and displaying it on the page. I don't know enough about this to know where to begin to refactor the code to fit in the Zend Framework MVC model. Any help would be greatly appreciated!! .phtml view page: <div id="dhtmltooltip" align="left"></div> <script src="../js/tooltip.js" type="text/javascript"> </script> <div id="container"> <div id="conten"> <a name="C4"></a> <?php function get_desc_second_part(&$value) { list(,$val_b) = explode('==',$value); $value = trim($val_b); } function filterEventDetails($contentText) { $data = array(); foreach($contentText as $row) { if(strstr($row, 'When: ')) { ##cleaning "when" string to get date in the format "May 28, 2009"## $data['duration'] = str_replace('When: ','',$row); list($when, ) = explode(' to ',$data['duration']); $data['when'] = substr($when,4); if(strlen($data['when'])>13) $data['when'] = trim(str_replace(strrchr($data['when'], ' '),'',$data['when'])); $data['duration'] = substr($data['duration'], 0, strlen($data['duration'])-4); //trimming time zone identifier (UTC etc.) } if(strstr($row, 'Where: ')) { $data['where'] = str_replace('Where: ','',$row); //pr($row); //$where = strstr($row, 'Where: '); //pr($where); } if(strstr($row, 'Event Description: ')) { $event_desc = str_replace('Event Description: ','',$row); //$event_desc = strstr($row, 'Event Description: '); ## Filtering event description and extracting venue, ticket urls etc from it. //$event_desc = str_replace('Event Description: ','',$contentText[3]); $event_desc_array = explode('|',$event_desc); array_walk($event_desc_array,'get_desc_second_part'); //pr($event_desc_array); $data['venue_url'] = $event_desc_array[0]; $data['details'] = $event_desc_array[1]; $data['tickets_url'] = $event_desc_array[2]; $data['tickets_button'] = $event_desc_array[3]; $data['facebook_url'] = $event_desc_array[4]; $data['facebook_icon'] = $event_desc_array[5]; } } return $data; } // load library require_once 'Zend/Loader.php'; Zend_Loader::loadClass('Zend_Gdata'); Zend_Loader::loadClass('Zend_Gdata_ClientLogin'); Zend_Loader::loadClass('Zend_Gdata_Calendar'); Zend_Loader::loadClass('Zend_Http_Client'); // create authenticated HTTP client for Calendar service $gcal = Zend_Gdata_Calendar::AUTH_SERVICE_NAME; $user = "[email protected]"; $pass = "xxxxxxxx"; $client = Zend_Gdata_ClientLogin::getHttpClient($user, $pass, $gcal); $gcal = new Zend_Gdata_Calendar($client); $query = $gcal->newEventQuery(); $query->setUser('[email protected]'); $secondary=true; $query->setVisibility('private'); $query->setProjection('basic'); $query->setOrderby('starttime'); $query->setSortOrder('ascending'); //$query->setFutureevents('true'); $startDate=date('Y-m-d h:i:s'); $endDate="2015-12-31"; $query->setStartMin($startDate); $query->setStartMax($endDate); $query->setMaxResults(30); try { $feed = $gcal->getCalendarEventFeed($query); } catch (Zend_Gdata_App_Exception $e) { echo "Error: " . $e->getResponse(); } ?> <h1><?php echo $feed->title; ?></h1> <?php echo $feed->totalResults; ?> event(s) found. <table width="90%" border="3" align="center"> <tr> <td width="20%" align="center" valign="middle"><b>;DATE</b></td> <td width="25%" align="center" valign="middle"><b>VENUE</b></td> <td width="20%" align="center" valign="middle"><b>CITY</b></td> <td width="20%" align="center" valign="middle"><b>DETAILS</b></td> <td width="15%" align="center" valign="middle"><b>LINKS</b></td> </tr> <?php if((int)$feed->totalResults>0) { //checking if at least one event is there in this date range foreach ($feed as $event) { //iterating through all events //pr($event);die; $contentText = stripslashes($event->content->text); //striping any escape character $contentText = preg_replace('/\<br \/\>[\n\t\s]{1,}\<br \/\>/','<br />',stripslashes($event->content->text)); //replacing multiple breaks with a single break //die(); $contentText = explode('<br />',$contentText); //splitting data by break tag $eventData = filterEventDetails($contentText); $when = $eventData['when']; $where = $eventData['where']; $duration = $eventData['duration']; $venue_url = $eventData['venue_url']; $details = $eventData['details']; $tickets_url = $eventData['tickets_url']; $tickets_button = $eventData['tickets_button']; $facebook_url = $eventData['facebook_url']; $facebook_icon = $eventData['facebook_icon']; $title = stripslashes($event->title); echo '<tr>'; echo '<td width="20%" align="center" valign="middle" nowrap="nowrap">'; echo $when; echo '</td>'; echo '<td width="20%" align="center" valign="middle">'; if($venue_url!='') { echo '<a href="'.$venue_url.'" target="_blank">'.$title.'</a>'; } else { echo $title; } echo '</td>'; echo '<td width="20%" align="center" valign="middle">'; echo $where; echo '</td>'; echo '<td width="20%" align="center" valign="middle">'; $details = str_replace("\n","<br>",htmlentities($details)); $duration = str_replace("\n","<br>",$duration); $detailed_description = "<b>When</b>: <br>".$duration."<br><br>"; $detailed_description .= "<b>Description</b>: <br>".$details; echo '<a href="javascript:void(0);" onmouseover="ddrivetip(\''.$detailed_description.'\')" onmouseout="hideddrivetip()" onclick="return false">View Details</a>'; echo '</td>'; echo '<td width="20%" valign="middle">'; if(trim($tickets_url) !='' && trim($tickets_button)!='') { echo '<a href="'.$tickets_url.'" target="_blank"><img src="'.$tickets_button.'" border="0" ></a>'; } if(trim($facebook_url) !='' && trim($facebook_icon)!='') { echo '<a href="'.$facebook_url.'" target="_blank"><img src="'.$facebook_icon.'" border="0" ></a>'; } else { echo '......'; } echo '</td>'; echo '</tr>'; } } else { //else show 'no event found' message echo '<tr>'; echo '<td width="100%" align="center" valign="middle" colspan="5">'; echo "No event found"; echo '</td>'; } ?> </table> <h3><a href="#pastevents">Scroll down for a list of past shows.</a></h3> <br /> <a name="pastevents"></a> <ul class="pastShows"> <?php $startDate='2005-01-01'; $endDate=date('Y-m-d'); /*$gcal = Zend_Gdata_Calendar::AUTH_SERVICE_NAME; $user = "[email protected]"; $pass = "silverroof10"; $client = Zend_Gdata_ClientLogin::getHttpClient($user, $pass, $gcal); $gcal = new Zend_Gdata_Calendar($client); $query = $gcal->newEventQuery(); $query->setUser('[email protected]'); $query->setVisibility('private'); $query->setProjection('basic');*/ $query->setOrderby('starttime'); $query->setSortOrder('descending'); $query->setFutureevents('false'); $query->setStartMin($startDate); $query->setStartMax($endDate); $query->setMaxResults(1000); try { $feed = $gcal->getCalendarEventFeed($query); } catch (Zend_Gdata_App_Exception $e) { echo "Error: " . $e->getResponse(); } if((int)$feed->totalResults>0) { //checking if at least one event is there in this date range foreach ($feed as $event) { //iterating through all events $contentText = stripslashes($event->content->text); //striping any escape character $contentText = preg_replace('/\<br \/\>[\n\t\s]{1,}\<br \/\>/','<br />',stripslashes($event->content->text)); //replacing multiple breaks with a single break $contentText = explode('<br />',$contentText); //splitting data by break tag $eventData = filterEventDetails($contentText); $when = $eventData['when']; $where = $eventData['where']; $duration = $eventData['duration']; $title = stripslashes($event->title); echo '<li class="pastShows">' . $when . " - " . $title . ", " . $where . '</li>'; } } ?> </div> </div>

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  • PHP issue json_decode echo array

    - by dfdf
    <?php $string = file_get_contents("http://www.reddit.com/r/news.json"); $array = json_decode($string, true); echo $array['data'][0]['children'][0]['data'][0]['title'][0]; ?> I've got a problem- the code doesn't echo anything. I'm kinda new to json_decode, so any help is appreciated :-) Edit: As a response to a comment, here's what print_r results to: Array ( [kind] => Listing [data] => Array ( [modhash] => [children] => Array ( [0] => Array ( [kind] => t3 [data] => Array ( [domain] => syracuse.com [banned_by] => [media_embed] => Array ( ) [subreddit] => news [selftext_html] => [selftext] => [likes] => [secure_media] => [link_flair_text] => [id] => 1qdtqr [secure_media_embed] => Array ( ) [clicked] => [stickied] => [author] => cadencehz [media] => [score] => 1552 [approved_by] => [over_18] => [hidden] => [thumbnail] => [subreddit_id] => t5_2qh3l [edited] => [link_flair_css_class] => [author_flair_css_class] => [downs] => 978 [saved] => [is_self] => [permalink] => /r/news/comments/1qdtqr/thousands_defend_grocery_store_employee_with/ [name] => t3_1qdtqr [created] => 1384215998 [url] => http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf/2013/11/thousands_come_to_defense_of_clay_wegmans_employee_with_aspergers_syndrome_after.html#incart_m-rpt-2 [author_flair_text] => [title] => Thousands defend grocery store employee with Asperger's syndrome after customer yells at him for being too slow [created_utc] => 1384187198 [ups] => 2530 [num_comments] => 401 [visited] => [num_reports] => [distinguished] => ) ) [1] => Array ( [kind] => t3 [data] => Array ( [domain] => bostonherald.com [banned_by] => [media_embed] => Array ( ) [subreddit] => news [selftext_html] => [selftext] => [likes] => [secure_media] => [link_flair_text] => [id] => 1qddl6 [secure_media_embed] => Array ( ) [clicked] => [stickied] => [author] => boxofrain [media] => [score] => 2086 [approved_by] => [over_18] => [hidden] => [thumbnail] => [subreddit_id] => t5_2qh3l [edited] => [link_flair_css_class] => [author_flair_css_class] => [downs] => 2556 [saved] => [is_self] => [permalink] => /r/news/comments/1qddl6/motorcycle_stolen_in_1961_found_is_recovered_and/ [name] => t3_1qddl6 [created] => 1384199801 [url] => http://bostonherald.com/news_opinion/offbeat_news/2013/11/man_glad_stolen_motorcycle_found_after_46_years [author_flair_text] => [title] => Motorcycle stolen in 1961 found is recovered and will be returned to it 73 year old owner. [created_utc] => 1384171001 [ups] => 4642 [num_comments] => 141 [visited] => [num_reports] => [distinguished] => ) ) [2] => Array ( [kind] => t3 [data] => Array ( [domain] => hosted.ap.org [banned_by] => [media_embed] => Array ( ) [subreddit] => news [selftext_html] => [selftext] => [likes] => [secure_media] => [link_flair_text] => [id] => 1qe6gp [secure_media_embed] => Array ( ) [clicked] => [stickied] => [author] => donkey-kick [media] => [score] => 415 [approved_by] => [over_18] => [hidden] => [thumbnail] => [subreddit_id] => t5_2qh3l [edited] => [link_flair_css_class] => [author_flair_css_class] => [downs] => 334 [saved] => [is_self] => [permalink] => /r/news/comments/1qe6gp/atheist_mega_churches_take_hold_in_the_us_and/ [name] => t3_1qe6gp [created] => 1384224670 [url] => http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_ATHEIST_MEGACHURCH?SITE=AP&amp;SECTION=HOME&amp;TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&amp;CTIME=2013-11-10-17-03-15 [author_flair_text] => [title] => Atheist Mega Churches take hold in the US and around the world. [created_utc] => 1384195870 [ups] => 749 [num_comments] => 368 [visited] => [num_reports] => [distinguished] => ) ) [3] => Array ( [kind] => t3 [data] => Array ( [domain] => abcnews.go.com [banned_by] => [media_embed] => Array ( ) [subreddit] => news [selftext_html] => [selftext] => [likes] => [secure_media] => [link_flair_text] => [id] => 1qdie4 [secure_media_embed] => Array ( ) [clicked] => [stickied] => [author] => Hoosier_made [media] => [score] => 984 [approved_by] => [over_18] => [hidden] => [thumbnail] => [subreddit_id] => t5_2qh3l [edited] => [link_flair_css_class] => [author_flair_css_class] => [downs] => 400 [saved] => [is_self] => [permalink] => /r/news/comments/1qdie4/abc_news_amy_robach_has_mammogram_live_on_gma/ [name] => t3_1qdie4 [created] => 1384206209 [url] => http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/health/2013/11/11/abc-news-amy-robach-reveals-breast-cancer-diagnosis/ [author_flair_text] => [title] => ABC News’ Amy Robach has mammogram live on GMA. Results Reveal Breast Cancer Diagnosis. [created_utc] => 1384177409 [ups] => 1384 [num_comments] => 130 [visited] => [num_reports] => [distinguished] => ) ) // ECT... I CUT HERE BECAUSE IT WENT ON FOR A WHILE [after] => t3_1qdinr [before] => ) ) Here's the url to the exact output, I had to trim the code to fit the character limit so maybe there's something I messed up ! :P Okay: Link goes here...

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  • Agile Development

    - by James Oloo Onyango
    Alot of literature has and is being written about agile developement and its surrounding philosophies. In my quest to find the best way to express the importance of agile methodologies, i have found Robert C. Martin's "A Satire Of Two Companies" to be both the most concise and thorough! Enjoy the read! Rufus Inc Project Kick Off Your name is Bob. The date is January 3, 2001, and your head still aches from the recent millennial revelry. You are sitting in a conference room with several managers and a group of your peers. You are a project team leader. Your boss is there, and he has brought along all of his team leaders. His boss called the meeting. "We have a new project to develop," says your boss's boss. Call him BB. The points in his hair are so long that they scrape the ceiling. Your boss's points are just starting to grow, but he eagerly awaits the day when he can leave Brylcream stains on the acoustic tiles. BB describes the essence of the new market they have identified and the product they want to develop to exploit this market. "We must have this new project up and working by fourth quarter October 1," BB demands. "Nothing is of higher priority, so we are cancelling your current project." The reaction in the room is stunned silence. Months of work are simply going to be thrown away. Slowly, a murmur of objection begins to circulate around the conference table.   His points give off an evil green glow as BB meets the eyes of everyone in the room. One by one, that insidious stare reduces each attendee to quivering lumps of protoplasm. It is clear that he will brook no discussion on this matter. Once silence has been restored, BB says, "We need to begin immediately. How long will it take you to do the analysis?" You raise your hand. Your boss tries to stop you, but his spitwad misses you and you are unaware of his efforts.   "Sir, we can't tell you how long the analysis will take until we have some requirements." "The requirements document won't be ready for 3 or 4 weeks," BB says, his points vibrating with frustration. "So, pretend that you have the requirements in front of you now. How long will you require for analysis?" No one breathes. Everyone looks around to see whether anyone has some idea. "If analysis goes beyond April 1, we have a problem. Can you finish the analysis by then?" Your boss visibly gathers his courage: "We'll find a way, sir!" His points grow 3 mm, and your headache increases by two Tylenol. "Good." BB smiles. "Now, how long will it take to do the design?" "Sir," you say. Your boss visibly pales. He is clearly worried that his 3 mms are at risk. "Without an analysis, it will not be possible to tell you how long design will take." BB's expression shifts beyond austere.   "PRETEND you have the analysis already!" he says, while fixing you with his vacant, beady little eyes. "How long will it take you to do the design?" Two Tylenol are not going to cut it. Your boss, in a desperate attempt to save his new growth, babbles: "Well, sir, with only six months left to complete the project, design had better take no longer than 3 months."   "I'm glad you agree, Smithers!" BB says, beaming. Your boss relaxes. He knows his points are secure. After a while, he starts lightly humming the Brylcream jingle. BB continues, "So, analysis will be complete by April 1, design will be complete by July 1, and that gives you 3 months to implement the project. This meeting is an example of how well our new consensus and empowerment policies are working. Now, get out there and start working. I'll expect to see TQM plans and QIT assignments on my desk by next week. Oh, and don't forget that your crossfunctional team meetings and reports will be needed for next month's quality audit." "Forget the Tylenol," you think to yourself as you return to your cubicle. "I need bourbon."   Visibly excited, your boss comes over to you and says, "Gosh, what a great meeting. I think we're really going to do some world shaking with this project." You nod in agreement, too disgusted to do anything else. "Oh," your boss continues, "I almost forgot." He hands you a 30-page document. "Remember that the SEI is coming to do an evaluation next week. This is the evaluation guide. You need to read through it, memorize it, and then shred it. It tells you how to answer any questions that the SEI auditors ask you. It also tells you what parts of the building you are allowed to take them to and what parts to avoid. We are determined to be a CMM level 3 organization by June!"   You and your peers start working on the analysis of the new project. This is difficult because you have no requirements. But from the 10-minute introduction given by BB on that fateful morning, you have some idea of what the product is supposed to do.   Corporate process demands that you begin by creating a use case document. You and your team begin enumerating use cases and drawing oval and stick diagrams. Philosophical debates break out among the team members. There is disagreement as to whether certain use cases should be connected with <<extends>> or <<includes>> relationships. Competing models are created, but nobody knows how to evaluate them. The debate continues, effectively paralyzing progress.   After a week, somebody finds the iceberg.com Web site, which recommends disposing entirely of <<extends>> and <<includes>> and replacing them with <<precedes>> and <<uses>>. The documents on this Web site, authored by Don Sengroiux, describes a method known as stalwart-analysis, which claims to be a step-by-step method for translating use cases into design diagrams. More competing use case models are created using this new scheme, but again, people can't agree on how to evaluate them. The thrashing continues. More and more, the use case meetings are driven by emotion rather than by reason. If it weren't for the fact that you don't have requirements, you'd be pretty upset by the lack of progress you are making. The requirements document arrives on February 15. And then again on February 20, 25, and every week thereafter. Each new version contradicts the previous one. Clearly, the marketing folks who are writing the requirements, empowered though they might be, are not finding consensus.   At the same time, several new competing use case templates have been proposed by the various team members. Each template presents its own particularly creative way of delaying progress. The debates rage on. On March 1, Prudence Putrigence, the process proctor, succeeds in integrating all the competing use case forms and templates into a single, all-encompassing form. Just the blank form is 15 pages long. She has managed to include every field that appeared on all the competing templates. She also presents a 159- page document describing how to fill out the use case form. All current use cases must be rewritten according to the new standard.   You marvel to yourself that it now requires 15 pages of fill-in-the-blank and essay questions to answer the question: What should the system do when the user presses Return? The corporate process (authored by L. E. Ott, famed author of "Holistic Analysis: A Progressive Dialectic for Software Engineers") insists that you discover all primary use cases, 87 percent of all secondary use cases, and 36.274 percent of all tertiary use cases before you can complete analysis and enter the design phase. You have no idea what a tertiary use case is. So in an attempt to meet this requirement, you try to get your use case document reviewed by the marketing department, which you hope will know what a tertiary use case is.   Unfortunately, the marketing folks are too busy with sales support to talk to you. Indeed, since the project started, you have not been able to get a single meeting with marketing, which has provided a never-ending stream of changing and contradictory requirements documents.   While one team has been spinning endlessly on the use case document, another team has been working out the domain model. Endless variations of UML documents are pouring out of this team. Every week, the model is reworked.   The team members can't decide whether to use <<interfaces>> or <<types>> in the model. A huge disagreement has been raging on the proper syntax and application of OCL. Others on the team just got back from a 5-day class on catabolism, and have been producing incredibly detailed and arcane diagrams that nobody else can fathom.   On March 27, with one week to go before analysis is to be complete, you have produced a sea of documents and diagrams but are no closer to a cogent analysis of the problem than you were on January 3. **** And then, a miracle happens.   **** On Saturday, April 1, you check your e-mail from home. You see a memo from your boss to BB. It states unequivocally that you are done with the analysis! You phone your boss and complain. "How could you have told BB that we were done with the analysis?" "Have you looked at a calendar lately?" he responds. "It's April 1!" The irony of that date does not escape you. "But we have so much more to think about. So much more to analyze! We haven't even decided whether to use <<extends>> or <<precedes>>!" "Where is your evidence that you are not done?" inquires your boss, impatiently. "Whaaa . . . ." But he cuts you off. "Analysis can go on forever; it has to be stopped at some point. And since this is the date it was scheduled to stop, it has been stopped. Now, on Monday, I want you to gather up all existing analysis materials and put them into a public folder. Release that folder to Prudence so that she can log it in the CM system by Monday afternoon. Then get busy and start designing."   As you hang up the phone, you begin to consider the benefits of keeping a bottle of bourbon in your bottom desk drawer. They threw a party to celebrate the on-time completion of the analysis phase. BB gave a colon-stirring speech on empowerment. And your boss, another 3 mm taller, congratulated his team on the incredible show of unity and teamwork. Finally, the CIO takes the stage to tell everyone that the SEI audit went very well and to thank everyone for studying and shredding the evaluation guides that were passed out. Level 3 now seems assured and will be awarded by June. (Scuttlebutt has it that managers at the level of BB and above are to receive significant bonuses once the SEI awards level 3.)   As the weeks flow by, you and your team work on the design of the system. Of course, you find that the analysis that the design is supposedly based on is flawedno, useless; no, worse than useless. But when you tell your boss that you need to go back and work some more on the analysis to shore up its weaker sections, he simply states, "The analysis phase is over. The only allowable activity is design. Now get back to it."   So, you and your team hack the design as best you can, unsure of whether the requirements have been properly analyzed. Of course, it really doesn't matter much, since the requirements document is still thrashing with weekly revisions, and the marketing department still refuses to meet with you.     The design is a nightmare. Your boss recently misread a book named The Finish Line in which the author, Mark DeThomaso, blithely suggested that design documents should be taken down to code-level detail. "If we are going to be working at that level of detail," you ask, "why don't we simply write the code instead?" "Because then you wouldn't be designing, of course. And the only allowable activity in the design phase is design!" "Besides," he continues, "we have just purchased a companywide license for Dandelion! This tool enables 'Round the Horn Engineering!' You are to transfer all design diagrams into this tool. It will automatically generate our code for us! It will also keep the design diagrams in sync with the code!" Your boss hands you a brightly colored shrinkwrapped box containing the Dandelion distribution. You accept it numbly and shuffle off to your cubicle. Twelve hours, eight crashes, one disk reformatting, and eight shots of 151 later, you finally have the tool installed on your server. You consider the week your team will lose while attending Dandelion training. Then you smile and think, "Any week I'm not here is a good week." Design diagram after design diagram is created by your team. Dandelion makes it very difficult to draw these diagrams. There are dozens and dozens of deeply nested dialog boxes with funny text fields and check boxes that must all be filled in correctly. And then there's the problem of moving classes between packages. At first, these diagram are driven from the use cases. But the requirements are changing so often that the use cases rapidly become meaningless. Debates rage about whether VISITOR or DECORATOR design patterns should be used. One developer refuses to use VISITOR in any form, claiming that it's not a properly object-oriented construct. Someone refuses to use multiple inheritance, since it is the spawn of the devil. Review meetings rapidly degenerate into debates about the meaning of object orientation, the definition of analysis versus design, or when to use aggregation versus association. Midway through the design cycle, the marketing folks announce that they have rethought the focus of the system. Their new requirements document is completely restructured. They have eliminated several major feature areas and replaced them with feature areas that they anticipate customer surveys will show to be more appropriate. You tell your boss that these changes mean that you need to reanalyze and redesign much of the system. But he says, "The analysis phase is system. But he says, "The analysis phase is over. The only allowable activity is design. Now get back to it."   You suggest that it might be better to create a simple prototype to show to the marketing folks and even some potential customers. But your boss says, "The analysis phase is over. The only allowable activity is design. Now get back to it." Hack, hack, hack, hack. You try to create some kind of a design document that might reflect the new requirements documents. However, the revolution of the requirements has not caused them to stop thrashing. Indeed, if anything, the wild oscillations of the requirements document have only increased in frequency and amplitude.   You slog your way through them.   On June 15, the Dandelion database gets corrupted. Apparently, the corruption has been progressive. Small errors in the DB accumulated over the months into bigger and bigger errors. Eventually, the CASE tool just stopped working. Of course, the slowly encroaching corruption is present on all the backups. Calls to the Dandelion technical support line go unanswered for several days. Finally, you receive a brief e-mail from Dandelion, informing you that this is a known problem and that the solution is to purchase the new version, which they promise will be ready some time next quarter, and then reenter all the diagrams by hand.   ****   Then, on July 1 another miracle happens! You are done with the design!   Rather than go to your boss and complain, you stock your middle desk drawer with some vodka.   **** They threw a party to celebrate the on-time completion of the design phase and their graduation to CMM level 3. This time, you find BB's speech so stirring that you have to use the restroom before it begins. New banners and plaques are all over your workplace. They show pictures of eagles and mountain climbers, and they talk about teamwork and empowerment. They read better after a few scotches. That reminds you that you need to clear out your file cabinet to make room for the brandy. You and your team begin to code. But you rapidly discover that the design is lacking in some significant areas. Actually, it's lacking any significance at all. You convene a design session in one of the conference rooms to try to work through some of the nastier problems. But your boss catches you at it and disbands the meeting, saying, "The design phase is over. The only allowable activity is coding. Now get back to it."   ****   The code generated by Dandelion is really hideous. It turns out that you and your team were using association and aggregation the wrong way, after all. All the generated code has to be edited to correct these flaws. Editing this code is extremely difficult because it has been instrumented with ugly comment blocks that have special syntax that Dandelion needs in order to keep the diagrams in sync with the code. If you accidentally alter one of these comments, the diagrams will be regenerated incorrectly. It turns out that "Round the Horn Engineering" requires an awful lot of effort. The more you try to keep the code compatible with Dandelion, the more errors Dandelion generates. In the end, you give up and decide to keep the diagrams up to date manually. A second later, you decide that there's no point in keeping the diagrams up to date at all. Besides, who has time?   Your boss hires a consultant to build tools to count the number of lines of code that are being produced. He puts a big thermometer graph on the wall with the number 1,000,000 on the top. Every day, he extends the red line to show how many lines have been added. Three days after the thermometer appears on the wall, your boss stops you in the hall. "That graph isn't growing quickly enough. We need to have a million lines done by October 1." "We aren't even sh-sh-sure that the proshect will require a m-million linezh," you blather. "We have to have a million lines done by October 1," your boss reiterates. His points have grown again, and the Grecian formula he uses on them creates an aura of authority and competence. "Are you sure your comment blocks are big enough?" Then, in a flash of managerial insight, he says, "I have it! I want you to institute a new policy among the engineers. No line of code is to be longer than 20 characters. Any such line must be split into two or more preferably more. All existing code needs to be reworked to this standard. That'll get our line count up!"   You decide not to tell him that this will require two unscheduled work months. You decide not to tell him anything at all. You decide that intravenous injections of pure ethanol are the only solution. You make the appropriate arrangements. Hack, hack, hack, and hack. You and your team madly code away. By August 1, your boss, frowning at the thermometer on the wall, institutes a mandatory 50-hour workweek.   Hack, hack, hack, and hack. By September 1st, the thermometer is at 1.2 million lines and your boss asks you to write a report describing why you exceeded the coding budget by 20 percent. He institutes mandatory Saturdays and demands that the project be brought back down to a million lines. You start a campaign of remerging lines. Hack, hack, hack, and hack. Tempers are flaring; people are quitting; QA is raining trouble reports down on you. Customers are demanding installation and user manuals; salespeople are demanding advance demonstrations for special customers; the requirements document is still thrashing, the marketing folks are complaining that the product isn't anything like they specified, and the liquor store won't accept your credit card anymore. Something has to give.    On September 15, BB calls a meeting. As he enters the room, his points are emitting clouds of steam. When he speaks, the bass overtones of his carefully manicured voice cause the pit of your stomach to roll over. "The QA manager has told me that this project has less than 50 percent of the required features implemented. He has also informed me that the system crashes all the time, yields wrong results, and is hideously slow. He has also complained that he cannot keep up with the continuous train of daily releases, each more buggy than the last!" He stops for a few seconds, visibly trying to compose himself. "The QA manager estimates that, at this rate of development, we won't be able to ship the product until December!" Actually, you think it's more like March, but you don't say anything. "December!" BB roars with such derision that people duck their heads as though he were pointing an assault rifle at them. "December is absolutely out of the question. Team leaders, I want new estimates on my desk in the morning. I am hereby mandating 65-hour work weeks until this project is complete. And it better be complete by November 1."   As he leaves the conference room, he is heard to mutter: "Empowermentbah!" * * * Your boss is bald; his points are mounted on BB's wall. The fluorescent lights reflecting off his pate momentarily dazzle you. "Do you have anything to drink?" he asks. Having just finished your last bottle of Boone's Farm, you pull a bottle of Thunderbird from your bookshelf and pour it into his coffee mug. "What's it going to take to get this project done? " he asks. "We need to freeze the requirements, analyze them, design them, and then implement them," you say callously. "By November 1?" your boss exclaims incredulously. "No way! Just get back to coding the damned thing." He storms out, scratching his vacant head.   A few days later, you find that your boss has been transferred to the corporate research division. Turnover has skyrocketed. Customers, informed at the last minute that their orders cannot be fulfilled on time, have begun to cancel their orders. Marketing is re-evaluating whether this product aligns with the overall goals of the company. Memos fly, heads roll, policies change, and things are, overall, pretty grim. Finally, by March, after far too many sixty-five hour weeks, a very shaky version of the software is ready. In the field, bug-discovery rates are high, and the technical support staff are at their wits' end, trying to cope with the complaints and demands of the irate customers. Nobody is happy.   In April, BB decides to buy his way out of the problem by licensing a product produced by Rupert Industries and redistributing it. The customers are mollified, the marketing folks are smug, and you are laid off.     Rupert Industries: Project Alpha   Your name is Robert. The date is January 3, 2001. The quiet hours spent with your family this holiday have left you refreshed and ready for work. You are sitting in a conference room with your team of professionals. The manager of the division called the meeting. "We have some ideas for a new project," says the division manager. Call him Russ. He is a high-strung British chap with more energy than a fusion reactor. He is ambitious and driven but understands the value of a team. Russ describes the essence of the new market opportunity the company has identified and introduces you to Jane, the marketing manager, who is responsible for defining the products that will address it. Addressing you, Jane says, "We'd like to start defining our first product offering as soon as possible. When can you and your team meet with me?" You reply, "We'll be done with the current iteration of our project this Friday. We can spare a few hours for you between now and then. After that, we'll take a few people from the team and dedicate them to you. We'll begin hiring their replacements and the new people for your team immediately." "Great," says Russ, "but I want you to understand that it is critical that we have something to exhibit at the trade show coming up this July. If we can't be there with something significant, we'll lose the opportunity."   "I understand," you reply. "I don't yet know what it is that you have in mind, but I'm sure we can have something by July. I just can't tell you what that something will be right now. In any case, you and Jane are going to have complete control over what we developers do, so you can rest assured that by July, you'll have the most important things that can be accomplished in that time ready to exhibit."   Russ nods in satisfaction. He knows how this works. Your team has always kept him advised and allowed him to steer their development. He has the utmost confidence that your team will work on the most important things first and will produce a high-quality product.   * * *   "So, Robert," says Jane at their first meeting, "How does your team feel about being split up?" "We'll miss working with each other," you answer, "but some of us were getting pretty tired of that last project and are looking forward to a change. So, what are you people cooking up?" Jane beams. "You know how much trouble our customers currently have . . ." And she spends a half hour or so describing the problem and possible solution. "OK, wait a second" you respond. "I need to be clear about this." And so you and Jane talk about how this system might work. Some of her ideas aren't fully formed. You suggest possible solutions. She likes some of them. You continue discussing.   During the discussion, as each new topic is addressed, Jane writes user story cards. Each card represents something that the new system has to do. The cards accumulate on the table and are spread out in front of you. Both you and Jane point at them, pick them up, and make notes on them as you discuss the stories. The cards are powerful mnemonic devices that you can use to represent complex ideas that are barely formed.   At the end of the meeting, you say, "OK, I've got a general idea of what you want. I'm going to talk to the team about it. I imagine they'll want to run some experiments with various database structures and presentation formats. Next time we meet, it'll be as a group, and we'll start identifying the most important features of the system."   A week later, your nascent team meets with Jane. They spread the existing user story cards out on the table and begin to get into some of the details of the system. The meeting is very dynamic. Jane presents the stories in the order of their importance. There is much discussion about each one. The developers are concerned about keeping the stories small enough to estimate and test. So they continually ask Jane to split one story into several smaller stories. Jane is concerned that each story have a clear business value and priority, so as she splits them, she makes sure that this stays true.   The stories accumulate on the table. Jane writes them, but the developers make notes on them as needed. Nobody tries to capture everything that is said; the cards are not meant to capture everything but are simply reminders of the conversation.   As the developers become more comfortable with the stories, they begin writing estimates on them. These estimates are crude and budgetary, but they give Jane an idea of what the story will cost.   At the end of the meeting, it is clear that many more stories could be discussed. It is also clear that the most important stories have been addressed and that they represent several months worth of work. Jane closes the meeting by taking the cards with her and promising to have a proposal for the first release in the morning.   * * *   The next morning, you reconvene the meeting. Jane chooses five cards and places them on the table. "According to your estimates, these cards represent about one perfect team-week's worth of work. The last iteration of the previous project managed to get one perfect team-week done in 3 real weeks. If we can get these five stories done in 3 weeks, we'll be able to demonstrate them to Russ. That will make him feel very comfortable about our progress." Jane is pushing it. The sheepish look on her face lets you know that she knows it too. You reply, "Jane, this is a new team, working on a new project. It's a bit presumptuous to expect that our velocity will be the same as the previous team's. However, I met with the team yesterday afternoon, and we all agreed that our initial velocity should, in fact, be set to one perfectweek for every 3 real-weeks. So you've lucked out on this one." "Just remember," you continue, "that the story estimates and the story velocity are very tentative at this point. We'll learn more when we plan the iteration and even more when we implement it."   Jane looks over her glasses at you as if to say "Who's the boss around here, anyway?" and then smiles and says, "Yeah, don't worry. I know the drill by now."Jane then puts 15 more cards on the table. She says, "If we can get all these cards done by the end of March, we can turn the system over to our beta test customers. And we'll get good feedback from them."   You reply, "OK, so we've got our first iteration defined, and we have the stories for the next three iterations after that. These four iterations will make our first release."   "So," says Jane, can you really do these five stories in the next 3 weeks?" "I don't know for sure, Jane," you reply. "Let's break them down into tasks and see what we get."   So Jane, you, and your team spend the next several hours taking each of the five stories that Jane chose for the first iteration and breaking them down into small tasks. The developers quickly realize that some of the tasks can be shared between stories and that other tasks have commonalities that can probably be taken advantage of. It is clear that potential designs are popping into the developers' heads. From time to time, they form little discussion knots and scribble UML diagrams on some cards.   Soon, the whiteboard is filled with the tasks that, once completed, will implement the five stories for this iteration. You start the sign-up process by saying, "OK, let's sign up for these tasks." "I'll take the initial database generation." Says Pete. "That's what I did on the last project, and this doesn't look very different. I estimate it at two of my perfect workdays." "OK, well, then, I'll take the login screen," says Joe. "Aw, darn," says Elaine, the junior member of the team, "I've never done a GUI, and kinda wanted to try that one."   "Ah, the impatience of youth," Joe says sagely, with a wink in your direction. "You can assist me with it, young Jedi." To Jane: "I think it'll take me about three of my perfect workdays."   One by one, the developers sign up for tasks and estimate them in terms of their own perfect workdays. Both you and Jane know that it is best to let the developers volunteer for tasks than to assign the tasks to them. You also know full well that you daren't challenge any of the developers' estimates. You know these people, and you trust them. You know that they are going to do the very best they can.   The developers know that they can't sign up for more perfect workdays than they finished in the last iteration they worked on. Once each developer has filled his or her schedule for the iteration, they stop signing up for tasks.   Eventually, all the developers have stopped signing up for tasks. But, of course, tasks are still left on the board.   "I was worried that that might happen," you say, "OK, there's only one thing to do, Jane. We've got too much to do in this iteration. What stories or tasks can we remove?" Jane sighs. She knows that this is the only option. Working overtime at the beginning of a project is insane, and projects where she's tried it have not fared well.   So Jane starts to remove the least-important functionality. "Well, we really don't need the login screen just yet. We can simply start the system in the logged-in state." "Rats!" cries Elaine. "I really wanted to do that." "Patience, grasshopper." says Joe. "Those who wait for the bees to leave the hive will not have lips too swollen to relish the honey." Elaine looks confused. Everyone looks confused. "So . . .," Jane continues, "I think we can also do away with . . ." And so, bit by bit, the list of tasks shrinks. Developers who lose a task sign up for one of the remaining ones.   The negotiation is not painless. Several times, Jane exhibits obvious frustration and impatience. Once, when tensions are especially high, Elaine volunteers, "I'll work extra hard to make up some of the missing time." You are about to correct her when, fortunately, Joe looks her in the eye and says, "When once you proceed down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny."   In the end, an iteration acceptable to Jane is reached. It's not what Jane wanted. Indeed, it is significantly less. But it's something the team feels that can be achieved in the next 3 weeks.   And, after all, it still addresses the most important things that Jane wanted in the iteration. "So, Jane," you say when things had quieted down a bit, "when can we expect acceptance tests from you?" Jane sighs. This is the other side of the coin. For every story the development team implements,   Jane must supply a suite of acceptance tests that prove that it works. And the team needs these long before the end of the iteration, since they will certainly point out differences in the way Jane and the developers imagine the system's behaviour.   "I'll get you some example test scripts today," Jane promises. "I'll add to them every day after that. You'll have the entire suite by the middle of the iteration."   * * *   The iteration begins on Monday morning with a flurry of Class, Responsibilities, Collaborators sessions. By midmorning, all the developers have assembled into pairs and are rapidly coding away. "And now, my young apprentice," Joe says to Elaine, "you shall learn the mysteries of test-first design!"   "Wow, that sounds pretty rad," Elaine replies. "How do you do it?" Joe beams. It's clear that he has been anticipating this moment. "OK, what does the code do right now?" "Huh?" replied Elaine, "It doesn't do anything at all; there is no code."   "So, consider our task; can you think of something the code should do?" "Sure," Elaine said with youthful assurance, "First, it should connect to the database." "And thereupon, what must needs be required to connecteth the database?" "You sure talk weird," laughed Elaine. "I think we'd have to get the database object from some registry and call the Connect() method. "Ah, astute young wizard. Thou perceives correctly that we requireth an object within which we can cacheth the database object." "Is 'cacheth' really a word?" "It is when I say it! So, what test can we write that we know the database registry should pass?" Elaine sighs. She knows she'll just have to play along. "We should be able to create a database object and pass it to the registry in a Store() method. And then we should be able to pull it out of the registry with a Get() method and make sure it's the same object." "Oh, well said, my prepubescent sprite!" "Hay!" "So, now, let's write a test function that proves your case." "But shouldn't we write the database object and registry object first?" "Ah, you've much to learn, my young impatient one. Just write the test first." "But it won't even compile!" "Are you sure? What if it did?" "Uh . . ." "Just write the test, Elaine. Trust me." And so Joe, Elaine, and all the other developers began to code their tasks, one test case at a time. The room in which they worked was abuzz with the conversations between the pairs. The murmur was punctuated by an occasional high five when a pair managed to finish a task or a difficult test case.   As development proceeded, the developers changed partners once or twice a day. Each developer got to see what all the others were doing, and so knowledge of the code spread generally throughout the team.   Whenever a pair finished something significant whether a whole task or simply an important part of a task they integrated what they had with the rest of the system. Thus, the code base grew daily, and integration difficulties were minimized.   The developers communicated with Jane on a daily basis. They'd go to her whenever they had a question about the functionality of the system or the interpretation of an acceptance test case.   Jane, good as her word, supplied the team with a steady stream of acceptance test scripts. The team read these carefully and thereby gained a much better understanding of what Jane expected the system to do. By the beginning of the second week, there was enough functionality to demonstrate to Jane. She watched eagerly as the demonstration passed test case after test case. "This is really cool," Jane said as the demonstration finally ended. "But this doesn't seem like one-third of the tasks. Is your velocity slower than anticipated?"   You grimace. You'd been waiting for a good time to mention this to Jane but now she was forcing the issue. "Yes, unfortunately, we are going more slowly than we had expected. The new application server we are using is turning out to be a pain to configure. Also, it takes forever to reboot, and we have to reboot it whenever we make even the slightest change to its configuration."   Jane eyes you with suspicion. The stress of last Monday's negotiations had still not entirely dissipated. She says, "And what does this mean to our schedule? We can't slip it again, we just can't. Russ will have a fit! He'll haul us all into the woodshed and ream us some new ones."   You look Jane right in the eyes. There's no pleasant way to give someone news like this. So you just blurt out, "Look, if things keep going like they're going, we're not going to be done with everything by next Friday. Now it's possible that we'll figure out a way to go faster. But, frankly, I wouldn't depend on that. You should start thinking about one or two tasks that could be removed from the iteration without ruining the demonstration for Russ. Come hell or high water, we are going to give that demonstration on Friday, and I don't think you want us to choose which tasks to omit."   "Aw forchrisakes!" Jane barely manages to stifle yelling that last word as she stalks away, shaking her head. Not for the first time, you say to yourself, "Nobody ever promised me project management would be easy." You are pretty sure it won't be the last time, either.   Actually, things went a bit better than you had hoped. The team did, in fact, have to drop one task from the iteration, but Jane had chosen wisely, and the demonstration for Russ went without a hitch. Russ was not impressed with the progress, but neither was he dismayed. He simply said, "This is pretty good. But remember, we have to be able to demonstrate this system at the trade show in July, and at this rate, it doesn't look like you'll have all that much to show." Jane, whose attitude had improved dramatically with the completion of the iteration, responded to Russ by saying, "Russ, this team is working hard, and well. When July comes around, I am confident that we'll have something significant to demonstrate. It won't be everything, and some of it may be smoke and mirrors, but we'll have something."   Painful though the last iteration was, it had calibrated your velocity numbers. The next iteration went much better. Not because your team got more done than in the last iteration but simply because the team didn't have to remove any tasks or stories in the middle of the iteration.   By the start of the fourth iteration, a natural rhythm has been established. Jane, you, and the team know exactly what to expect from one another. The team is running hard, but the pace is sustainable. You are confident that the team can keep up this pace for a year or more.   The number of surprises in the schedule diminishes to near zero; however, the number of surprises in the requirements does not. Jane and Russ frequently look over the growing system and make recommendations or changes to the existing functionality. But all parties realize that these changes take time and must be scheduled. So the changes do not cause anyone's expectations to be violated. In March, there is a major demonstration of the system to the board of directors. The system is very limited and is not yet in a form good enough to take to the trade show, but progress is steady, and the board is reasonably impressed.   The second release goes even more smoothly than the first. By now, the team has figured out a way to automate Jane's acceptance test scripts. The team has also refactored the design of the system to the point that it is really easy to add new features and change old ones. The second release was done by the end of June and was taken to the trade show. It had less in it than Jane and Russ would have liked, but it did demonstrate the most important features of the system. Although customers at the trade show noticed that certain features were missing, they were very impressed overall. You, Russ, and Jane all returned from the trade show with smiles on your faces. You all felt as though this project was a winner.   Indeed, many months later, you are contacted by Rufus Inc. That company had been working on a system like this for its internal operations. Rufus has canceled the development of that system after a death-march project and is negotiating to license your technology for its environment.   Indeed, things are looking up!

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  • Fitting an Image to Screen on Rotation iPhone / iPad ?

    - by user356937
    I have been playing around with one of the iPhone examples from Apple' web site (ScrollViewSuite) . I am trying to tweak it a bit so that when I rotate the the iPad the image will fit into the screen in landscape mode vertical. I have been successful in getting the image to rotate, but the image is larger than the height of the landscape screen, so the bottom is below the screen. I would like to image to scale to the height of the landscape screen. I have been playing around with various autoSizingMask attributes without success. The imageView is called "zoomView" this is the actual image which loads into a scrollView called imageScrollView. I am trying to achieve the screen to rotate and look like this.... olsonvox.com/photos/correct.png However, this is what My screen is looking like. olsonvox.com/photos/incorrect.png I would really appreciate some advice or guidance. Below is the RootViewController.m for the project. Blade # import "RootViewController.h" #define ZOOM_VIEW_TAG 100 #define ZOOM_STEP 1.5 #define THUMB_HEIGHT 150 #define THUMB_V_PADDING 25 #define THUMB_H_PADDING 25 #define CREDIT_LABEL_HEIGHT 25 #define AUTOSCROLL_THRESHOLD 30 @interface RootViewController (ViewHandlingMethods) - (void)toggleThumbView; - (void)pickImageNamed:(NSString *)name; - (NSArray *)imageNames; - (void)createThumbScrollViewIfNecessary; - (void)createSlideUpViewIfNecessary; @end @interface RootViewController (AutoscrollingMethods) - (void)maybeAutoscrollForThumb:(ThumbImageView *)thumb; - (void)autoscrollTimerFired:(NSTimer *)timer; - (void)legalizeAutoscrollDistance; - (float)autoscrollDistanceForProximityToEdge:(float)proximity; @end @interface RootViewController (UtilityMethods) - (CGRect)zoomRectForScale:(float)scale withCenter:(CGPoint)center; @end @implementation RootViewController - (void)loadView { [super loadView]; imageScrollView = [[UIScrollView alloc] initWithFrame:[[self view]bounds]]; // this code makes the image resize to the width and height properly. imageScrollView.autoresizingMask = UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleHeight | UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleLeftMargin | UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleRightMargin| UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleBottomMargin| UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleBottomMargin; // TRY SETTNG CENTER HERE SOMEHOW&gt;.... [imageScrollView setBackgroundColor:[UIColor blackColor]]; [imageScrollView setDelegate:self]; [imageScrollView setBouncesZoom:YES]; [[self view] addSubview:imageScrollView]; [self toggleThumbView]; // intitializes with the first image. [self pickImageNamed:@"lookbook1"]; } - (void)dealloc { [imageScrollView release]; [slideUpView release]; [thumbScrollView release]; [super dealloc]; } #pragma mark UIScrollViewDelegate methods - (UIView *)viewForZoomingInScrollView:(UIScrollView *)scrollView { UIView *view = nil; if (scrollView == imageScrollView) { view = [imageScrollView viewWithTag:ZOOM_VIEW_TAG]; } return view; } /************************************** NOTE **************************************/ /* The following delegate method works around a known bug in zoomToRect:animated: */ /* In the next release after 3.0 this workaround will no longer be necessary */ /**********************************************************************************/ - (void)scrollViewDidEndZooming:(UIScrollView *)scrollView withView:(UIView *)view atScale:(float)scale { [scrollView setZoomScale:scale+0.01 animated:NO]; [scrollView setZoomScale:scale animated:NO]; } #pragma mark TapDetectingImageViewDelegate methods - (void)tapDetectingImageView:(TapDetectingImageView *)view gotSingleTapAtPoint:(CGPoint)tapPoint { // Single tap shows or hides drawer of thumbnails. [self toggleThumbView]; } - (void)tapDetectingImageView:(TapDetectingImageView *)view gotDoubleTapAtPoint:(CGPoint)tapPoint { // double tap zooms in float newScale = [imageScrollView zoomScale] * ZOOM_STEP; CGRect zoomRect = [self zoomRectForScale:newScale withCenter:tapPoint]; [imageScrollView zoomToRect:zoomRect animated:YES]; } - (void)tapDetectingImageView:(TapDetectingImageView *)view gotTwoFingerTapAtPoint:(CGPoint)tapPoint { // two-finger tap zooms out float newScale = [imageScrollView zoomScale] / ZOOM_STEP; CGRect zoomRect = [self zoomRectForScale:newScale withCenter:tapPoint]; [imageScrollView zoomToRect:zoomRect animated:YES]; } #pragma mark ThumbImageViewDelegate methods - (void)thumbImageViewWasTapped:(ThumbImageView *)tiv { [self pickImageNamed:[tiv imageName]]; [self toggleThumbView]; } - (void)thumbImageViewStartedTracking:(ThumbImageView *)tiv { [thumbScrollView bringSubviewToFront:tiv]; } // CONTROLS DRAGGING AND DROPPING THUMBNAILS... - (void)thumbImageViewMoved:(ThumbImageView *)draggingThumb { // check if we've moved close enough to an edge to autoscroll, or far enough away to stop autoscrolling [self maybeAutoscrollForThumb:draggingThumb]; /* The rest of this method handles the reordering of thumbnails in the thumbScrollView. See */ /* ThumbImageView.h and ThumbImageView.m for more information about how this works. */ // we'll reorder only if the thumb is overlapping the scroll view if (CGRectIntersectsRect([draggingThumb frame], [thumbScrollView bounds])) { BOOL draggingRight = [draggingThumb frame].origin.x &gt; [draggingThumb home].origin.x ? YES : NO; /* we're going to shift over all the thumbs who live between the home of the moving thumb */ /* and the current touch location. A thumb counts as living in this area if the midpoint */ /* of its home is contained in the area. */ NSMutableArray *thumbsToShift = [[NSMutableArray alloc] init]; // get the touch location in the coordinate system of the scroll view CGPoint touchLocation = [draggingThumb convertPoint:[draggingThumb touchLocation] toView:thumbScrollView]; // calculate minimum and maximum boundaries of the affected area float minX = draggingRight ? CGRectGetMaxX([draggingThumb home]) : touchLocation.x; float maxX = draggingRight ? touchLocation.x : CGRectGetMinX([draggingThumb home]); // iterate through thumbnails and see which ones need to move over for (ThumbImageView *thumb in [thumbScrollView subviews]) { // skip the thumb being dragged if (thumb == draggingThumb) continue; // skip non-thumb subviews of the scroll view (such as the scroll indicators) if (! [thumb isMemberOfClass:[ThumbImageView class]]) continue; float thumbMidpoint = CGRectGetMidX([thumb home]); if (thumbMidpoint &gt;= minX &amp;&amp; thumbMidpoint &lt;= maxX) { [thumbsToShift addObject:thumb]; } } // shift over the other thumbs to make room for the dragging thumb. (if we're dragging right, they shift to the left) float otherThumbShift = ([draggingThumb home].size.width + THUMB_H_PADDING) * (draggingRight ? -1 : 1); // as we shift over the other thumbs, we'll calculate how much the dragging thumb's home is going to move float draggingThumbShift = 0.0; // send each of the shifting thumbs to its new home for (ThumbImageView *otherThumb in thumbsToShift) { CGRect home = [otherThumb home]; home.origin.x += otherThumbShift; [otherThumb setHome:home]; [otherThumb goHome]; draggingThumbShift += ([otherThumb frame].size.width + THUMB_H_PADDING) * (draggingRight ? 1 : -1); } // change the home of the dragging thumb, but don't send it there because it's still being dragged CGRect home = [draggingThumb home]; home.origin.x += draggingThumbShift; [draggingThumb setHome:home]; } } - (void)thumbImageViewStoppedTracking:(ThumbImageView *)tiv { // if the user lets go of the thumb image view, stop autoscrolling [autoscrollTimer invalidate]; autoscrollTimer = nil; } #pragma mark Autoscrolling methods - (void)maybeAutoscrollForThumb:(ThumbImageView *)thumb { autoscrollDistance = 0; // only autoscroll if the thumb is overlapping the thumbScrollView if (CGRectIntersectsRect([thumb frame], [thumbScrollView bounds])) { CGPoint touchLocation = [thumb convertPoint:[thumb touchLocation] toView:thumbScrollView]; float distanceFromLeftEdge = touchLocation.x - CGRectGetMinX([thumbScrollView bounds]); float distanceFromRightEdge = CGRectGetMaxX([thumbScrollView bounds]) - touchLocation.x; if (distanceFromLeftEdge &lt; AUTOSCROLL_THRESHOLD) { autoscrollDistance = [self autoscrollDistanceForProximityToEdge:distanceFromLeftEdge] * -1; // if scrolling left, distance is negative } else if (distanceFromRightEdge &lt; AUTOSCROLL_THRESHOLD) { autoscrollDistance = [self autoscrollDistanceForProximityToEdge:distanceFromRightEdge]; } } // if no autoscrolling, stop and clear timer if (autoscrollDistance == 0) { [autoscrollTimer invalidate]; autoscrollTimer = nil; } // otherwise create and start timer (if we don't already have a timer going) else if (autoscrollTimer == nil) { autoscrollTimer = [NSTimer scheduledTimerWithTimeInterval:(1.0 / 60.0) target:self selector:@selector(autoscrollTimerFired:) userInfo:thumb repeats:YES]; } } - (float)autoscrollDistanceForProximityToEdge:(float)proximity { // the scroll distance grows as the proximity to the edge decreases, so that moving the thumb // further over results in faster scrolling. return ceilf((AUTOSCROLL_THRESHOLD - proximity) / 5.0); } - (void)legalizeAutoscrollDistance { // makes sure the autoscroll distance won't result in scrolling past the content of the scroll view float minimumLegalDistance = [thumbScrollView contentOffset].x * -1; float maximumLegalDistance = [thumbScrollView contentSize].width - ([thumbScrollView frame].size.width + [thumbScrollView contentOffset].x); autoscrollDistance = MAX(autoscrollDistance, minimumLegalDistance); autoscrollDistance = MIN(autoscrollDistance, maximumLegalDistance); } - (void)autoscrollTimerFired:(NSTimer*)timer { [self legalizeAutoscrollDistance]; // autoscroll by changing content offset CGPoint contentOffset = [thumbScrollView contentOffset]; contentOffset.x += autoscrollDistance; [thumbScrollView setContentOffset:contentOffset]; // adjust thumb position so it appears to stay still ThumbImageView *thumb = (ThumbImageView *)[timer userInfo]; [thumb moveByOffset:CGPointMake(autoscrollDistance, 0)]; } #pragma mark View handling methods - (void)toggleThumbView { [self createSlideUpViewIfNecessary]; // no-op if slideUpView has already been created CGRect frame = [slideUpView frame]; if (thumbViewShowing) { frame.origin.y = 0; } else { frame.origin.y = -225; } [UIView beginAnimations:nil context:nil]; [UIView setAnimationDuration:0.3]; [slideUpView setFrame:frame]; [UIView commitAnimations]; thumbViewShowing = !thumbViewShowing; } - (void)pickImageNamed:(NSString *)name { // first remove previous image view, if any [[imageScrollView viewWithTag:ZOOM_VIEW_TAG] removeFromSuperview]; UIImage *image = [UIImage imageNamed:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@.jpg", name]]; TapDetectingImageView *zoomView = [[TapDetectingImageView alloc] initWithImage:image]; zoomView.autoresizingMask = UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleWidth ; [zoomView setDelegate:self]; [zoomView setTag:ZOOM_VIEW_TAG]; [imageScrollView addSubview:zoomView]; [imageScrollView setContentSize:[zoomView frame].size]; [zoomView release]; // choose minimum scale so image width fits screen float minScale = [imageScrollView frame].size.width / [zoomView frame].size.width; [imageScrollView setMinimumZoomScale:minScale]; [imageScrollView setZoomScale:minScale]; [imageScrollView setContentOffset:CGPointZero]; } - (NSArray *)imageNames { // the filenames are stored in a plist in the app bundle, so create array by reading this plist NSString *path = [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:@"Images" ofType:@"plist"]; NSData *plistData = [NSData dataWithContentsOfFile:path]; NSString *error; NSPropertyListFormat format; NSArray *imageNames = [NSPropertyListSerialization propertyListFromData:plistData mutabilityOption:NSPropertyListImmutable format:&amp;format errorDescription:&amp;error]; if (!imageNames) { NSLog(@"Failed to read image names. Error: %@", error); [error release]; } return imageNames; } - (void)createSlideUpViewIfNecessary { if (!slideUpView) { [self createThumbScrollViewIfNecessary]; CGRect bounds = [[self view] bounds]; float thumbHeight = [thumbScrollView frame].size.height; float labelHeight = CREDIT_LABEL_HEIGHT; // create label giving credit for images UILabel *creditLabel = [[UILabel alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectMake(0, thumbHeight, bounds.size.width, labelHeight)]; [creditLabel setBackgroundColor:[UIColor clearColor]]; [creditLabel setTextColor:[UIColor whiteColor]]; // [creditLabel setFont:[UIFont fontWithName:@"Helvetica" size:16]]; // [creditLabel setText:@"SAMPLE TEXT"]; [creditLabel setTextAlignment:UITextAlignmentCenter]; // create container view that will hold scroll view and label CGRect frame = CGRectMake(0.0, -225.00, bounds.size.width+256, thumbHeight + labelHeight); slideUpView.autoresizingMask = UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleWidth | UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleTopMargin; slideUpView = [[UIView alloc] initWithFrame:frame]; [slideUpView setBackgroundColor:[UIColor blackColor]]; [slideUpView setOpaque:NO]; [slideUpView setAlpha:.75]; [[self view] addSubview:slideUpView]; // add subviews to container view [slideUpView addSubview:thumbScrollView]; [slideUpView addSubview:creditLabel]; [creditLabel release]; } } - (void)createThumbScrollViewIfNecessary { if (!thumbScrollView) { float scrollViewHeight = THUMB_HEIGHT + THUMB_V_PADDING; float scrollViewWidth = [[self view] bounds].size.width; thumbScrollView = [[UIScrollView alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectMake(0, 0, scrollViewWidth, scrollViewHeight)]; [thumbScrollView setCanCancelContentTouches:NO]; [thumbScrollView setClipsToBounds:NO]; // now place all the thumb views as subviews of the scroll view // and in the course of doing so calculate the content width float xPosition = THUMB_H_PADDING; for (NSString *name in [self imageNames]) { UIImage *thumbImage = [UIImage imageNamed:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@_thumb.jpg", name]]; if (thumbImage) { ThumbImageView *thumbView = [[ThumbImageView alloc] initWithImage:thumbImage]; [thumbView setDelegate:self]; [thumbView setImageName:name]; CGRect frame = [thumbView frame]; frame.origin.y = THUMB_V_PADDING; frame.origin.x = xPosition; [thumbView setFrame:frame]; [thumbView setHome:frame]; [thumbScrollView addSubview:thumbView]; [thumbView release]; xPosition += (frame.size.width + THUMB_H_PADDING); } } [thumbScrollView setContentSize:CGSizeMake(xPosition, scrollViewHeight)]; } } #pragma mark Utility methods - (CGRect)zoomRectForScale:(float)scale withCenter:(CGPoint)center { CGRect zoomRect; // the zoom rect is in the content view's coordinates. // At a zoom scale of 1.0, it would be the size of the imageScrollView's bounds. // As the zoom scale decreases, so more content is visible, the size of the rect grows. zoomRect.size.height = [imageScrollView frame].size.height / scale; zoomRect.size.width = [imageScrollView frame].size.width / scale; // choose an origin so as to get the right center. zoomRect.origin.x = center.x - (zoomRect.size.width / 2.0); zoomRect.origin.y = center.y - (zoomRect.size.height / 2.0); return zoomRect; } #pragma mark - #pragma mark Rotation support // Ensure that the view controller supports rotation and that the split view can therefore show in both portrait and landscape. - (BOOL)shouldAutorotateToInterfaceOrientation:(UIInterfaceOrientation)interfaceOrientation { return YES; } @end

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  • client problems - misaligned expectations & not following SDLC protocols

    - by louism
    hi guys, im having some serious problems with a client on a project - i could use some advice please the short version i have been working with this client now for almost 6 months without any problems (a classified website project in the range of 500 hours) over the last few days things have drastically deteriorated to the point where ive had to place the project on-hold whilst i work-out what to do (this has pissed the client off even more) to be simplistic, the root cause of the issue is this: the client doesnt read the specs i make for him, i code the feature, he than wants to change things, i tell him its not to the agreed spec and that that change will have to be postponed and possibly charged for, he gets upset and rants saying 'hes paid for the feature' and im not keeping to the agreement (<- misalignment of expectations) i think the root cause of the root cause is my clients failure to take my SDLC protocols seriously. i have a bug tracking system in place which he practically refuses to use (he still emails me bugs), he doesnt seem to care to much for the protocols i use for dealing with scope creep and change control the whole situation came to a head recently where he 'cracked it' (an aussie term for being fed-up). the more terms like 'postponed for post-launch implementation', 'costed feature addition', and 'not to agreed spec' i kept using, the worse it got finally, he began to bully me - basically insisting i shut-up and do the work im being paid for. i wrote a long-winded email explaining how wrong he was on all these different points, and explaining what all the SDLC protocols do to protect the success of the project. than i deleted that email and wrote a new one in the new email, i suggested as a solution i write up a list of grievances we both had. we than review the list and compromise on different points: he gets some things he wants, i get some things i want. sometimes youve got to give ground to get ground his response to this suggestion was flat-out refusal, and a restatement that i should just get on with the work ive been paid to do so there you have the very subjective short version. if you have the time and inclination, the long version may be a little less bias as it has the email communiques between me and my client the long version (with background) the long version works by me showing you the email communiques which lead to the situation coming to a head. so here it is, judge for yourself where the trouble started... 1. client asked me why something was missing from a feature i just uploaded, my response was to show him what was in the spec: it basically said the item he was looking for was never going to be included 2. [clients response...] Memo Louis, We are following your own title fields and keeping a consistent layout. Why the big fuss about not adding "Part". It simply replaces "model" and is consistent with your current title fields. 3. [my response...] hi [client], the 'part' field appeared to me as a redundancy / mistake. i requested clarification but never received any in a timely manner (about 2 weeks ago) the specification for this feature also indicated it wasnt going to be included: RE: "Why the big fuss about not adding "Part" " it may not appear so, but it would actually be a lot of work for me to now add a 'Part' field it could take me up to 15-20 minutes to properly explain why its such a big undertaking to do this, but i would prefer to use that time instead to work on completing your v1.1 features as a simplistic explanation - it connects to the change in paradigm from a 'generic classified ad' model to a 'specific attributes for specific categories' model basically, i am saying it is a big fuss, but i understand that it doesnt look that way - after all, it is just one ity-bitty field :) if you require a fuller explanation, please let me know and i will commit the time needed to write that out also, if you recall when we first started on the project, i said that with the effort/time required for features, you would likely not know off the top of your head. you may think something is really complex, but in reality its quite simple, you might think something is easy - but it could actually be a massive trauma to code (which is the case here with the 'Part' field). if you also recalled, i said the best course of action is to just ask, and i would let you know on a case-by-case basis 4. [email from me to client...] hi [client], the online catalogue page is now up live (see my email from a few days ago for information on how it works) note: the window of opportunity for input/revisions on what data the catalogue stores has now closed (as i have put the code up live now) RE: the UI/layout of the online catalogue page you may still do visual/ui tweaks to the page at the moment (this window for input/revisions will close in a couple of days time) 5. [email from client to me...] *(note: i had put up the feature & asked the client to review it, never heard back from them for a few days)* Memo Louis, Here you go again. CLOSED without a word of input from the customer. I don't think so. I will reply tomorrow regarding the content and functionality we require from this feature. 5. [from me to client...] hi [client]: RE: from my understanding, you are saying that the mini-sale yard control would change itself based on the fact someone was viewing for parts & accessories <- is that correct? this change is outside the scope of the v1.1 mini-spec and therefore will need to wait 'til post launch for costing/implementation 6. [email from client to me...] Memo Louis, Following your v1.1 mini-spec and all your time paid in full for the work selected. We need to make the situation clear. There will be no further items held for post-launch. Do not expect us to pay for any further items other than those we have agreed upon. You have undertaken to complete the Parts and accessories feature as follows. Obviously, as part of this process the "mini search" will be effected, and will require "adaption to make sense". 7. [email from me to client...] hi [client], RE: "There will be no further items held for post-launch. Do not expect us to pay for any further items other than those we have agreed upon." a few points to consider: 1) the specification for the 'parts & accessories' feature was as follows: (i.e. [what] "...we have agreed upon.") 2) you have received the 'parts & accessories' feature free of charge (you have paid $0 for it). ive spent two days coding that feature as a gesture of good will i would request that you please consider these two facts carefully and sincerely 8. [email from client to me...] Memo Louis, I don't see how you are giving us anything for free. From your original fee proposal you have deleted more than 30 hours of included features. Your title "shelved features". Further you have charged us twice by adding back into the site, at an addition cost, some of those "shelved features" features. See v1.1 mini-spec. Did include in your original fee proposal a change request budget but then charge without discussion items included in v1.1 mini-spec. Included a further Features test plan for a regression test, a fee of 10 hours that would not have been required if the "shelved features" were not left out of the agreed fee proposal. I have made every attempt to satisfy your your uneven business sense by offering you everything your heart desired, in the v1.1 mini-spec, to be left once again with your attitude of "its too hard, lets leave it for post launch". I am no longer accepting anything less than what we have contracted you to do. That is clearly defined in v1.1 mini-spec, and you are paid in advance for delivering those items as an acceptable function. a few notes about the above email... i had to cull features from the original spec because it didnt fit into the budget. i explained this to the client at the start of the project (he wanted more features than he had budget hours to do them all) nothing has been charged for twice, i didnt charge the client for culled features. im charging him to now do those culled features the draft version of the project schedule included a change request budget of 10 hours, but i had to remove that to meet the budget (the client may not have been aware of this to be fair to them) what the client refers to as my attitude of 'too hard/leave it for post-launch', i called a change request protocol and a method for keeping scope creep under control 9. [email from me to client...] hi [client], RE: "...all your grievances..." i had originally written out a long email response; it was fantastic, it had all these great points of how 'you were wrong' and 'i was right', you would of loved it (and by 'loved it', i mean it would of just infuriated you more) so, i decided to deleted it start over, for two reasons: 1) a long email is being disrespectful of your time (youre a busy businessman with things to do) 2) whos wrong or right gets us no closer to fixing the problems we are experiencing what i propose is this... i prepare a bullet point list of your grievances and my grievances (yes, im unhappy too about how things are going - and it has little to do with money) i submit this list to you for you to add to as necessary we then both take a good hard look at this list, and we decide which areas we are willing to give ground on as an example, the list may look something like this: "louis, you keep taking away features you said you would do" [your grievance 2] [your grievance 3] [your grievance ...] "[client], i feel you dont properly read the specs i prepare for you..." [my grievance 2] [my grievance 3] [my grievance ...] if you are willing to give this a try, let me know will it work? who knows. but if it doesnt, we can always go back to arguing some more :) obviously, this will only work if you are willing to give it a genuine try, and you can accept that you may have to 'give some ground to get some ground' what do you think? 10. [email from client to me ...] Memo Louis, Instead of wasting your time listing grievances, I would prefer you complete the items in v1.1 mini-spec, to a satisfactory conclusion. We almost had the website ready for launch until you brought the v1.1 mini-spec into the frame. Obviously I expected you could complete the v1.1 mini-spec in a two-week time frame as you indicated and give the site a more profession presentation. Most of the problems have been caused by you not following our instructions, but deciding to do what you feel like at the time. And then arguing with us how the missing information is not necessary. For instance "Parts and Accessories". Why on earth would you leave out the parts heading, when it ties-in with the fields you have already developed. It replaces "model" and is just as important in the context of information that appears in the "Details" panel. We are at a stage where the the v1.1 mini-spec needs to be completed without further time wasting and the site is complete (subject to all features working). We are on standby at this end to do just that. Let me know when you are back, working on the site and we will process and complete each v1.1 mini-spec, item by item, until the job is complete. 11. [last email from me to client...] hi [client], based on this reply, and your demonstrated unwillingness to compromise/give any ground on issues at hand, i have decided to place your project on-hold for the moment i will be considering further options on how to over-come our challenges over the next few days i will contact you by monday 17/may to discuss any new options i have come up with, and if i believe it is appropriate to restart work on your project at that point or not told you it was long... what do you think?

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  • Bulk inserting best way to about it? + Helping me understand fully what I found so far

    - by chobo2
    Hi So I saw this post here and read it and it seems like bulk copy might be the way to go. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/682015/whats-the-best-way-to-bulk-database-inserts-from-c I still have some questions and want to know how things actually work. So I found 2 tutorials. http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/MultipleInsertsIn1dbTrip.aspx#_Toc196622241 http://www.codeproject.com/KB/linq/BulkOperations_LinqToSQL.aspx First way uses 2 ado.net 2.0 features. BulkInsert and BulkCopy. the second one uses linq to sql and OpenXML. This sort of appeals to me as I am using linq to sql already and prefer it over ado.net. However as one person pointed out in the posts what he just going around the issue at the cost of performance( nothing wrong with that in my opinion) First I will talk about the 2 ways in the first tutorial I am using VS2010 Express, .net 4.0, MVC 2.0, SQl Server 2005 Is ado.net 2.0 the most current version? Based on the technology I am using, is there some updates to what I am going to show that would improve it somehow? Is there any thing that these tutorial left out that I should know about? BulkInsert I am using this table for all the examples. CREATE TABLE [dbo].[TBL_TEST_TEST] ( ID INT IDENTITY(1,1) PRIMARY KEY, [NAME] [varchar](50) ) SP Code USE [Test] GO /****** Object: StoredProcedure [dbo].[sp_BatchInsert] Script Date: 05/19/2010 15:12:47 ******/ SET ANSI_NULLS ON GO SET QUOTED_IDENTIFIER ON GO ALTER PROCEDURE [dbo].[sp_BatchInsert] (@Name VARCHAR(50) ) AS BEGIN INSERT INTO TBL_TEST_TEST VALUES (@Name); END C# Code /// <summary> /// Another ado.net 2.0 way that uses a stored procedure to do a bulk insert. /// Seems slower then "BatchBulkCopy" way and it crashes when you try to insert 500,000 records in one go. /// http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/MultipleInsertsIn1dbTrip.aspx#_Toc196622241 /// </summary> private static void BatchInsert() { // Get the DataTable with Rows State as RowState.Added DataTable dtInsertRows = GetDataTable(); SqlConnection connection = new SqlConnection(connectionString); SqlCommand command = new SqlCommand("sp_BatchInsert", connection); command.CommandType = CommandType.StoredProcedure; command.UpdatedRowSource = UpdateRowSource.None; // Set the Parameter with appropriate Source Column Name command.Parameters.Add("@Name", SqlDbType.VarChar, 50, dtInsertRows.Columns[0].ColumnName); SqlDataAdapter adpt = new SqlDataAdapter(); adpt.InsertCommand = command; // Specify the number of records to be Inserted/Updated in one go. Default is 1. adpt.UpdateBatchSize = 1000; connection.Open(); int recordsInserted = adpt.Update(dtInsertRows); connection.Close(); } So first thing is the batch size. Why would you set a batch size to anything but the number of records you are sending? Like I am sending 500,000 records so I did a Batch size of 500,000. Next why does it crash when I do this? If I set it to 1000 for batch size it works just fine. System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException was unhandled Message="A transport-level error has occurred when sending the request to the server. (provider: Shared Memory Provider, error: 0 - No process is on the other end of the pipe.)" Source=".Net SqlClient Data Provider" ErrorCode=-2146232060 Class=20 LineNumber=0 Number=233 Server="" State=0 StackTrace: at System.Data.Common.DbDataAdapter.UpdatedRowStatusErrors(RowUpdatedEventArgs rowUpdatedEvent, BatchCommandInfo[] batchCommands, Int32 commandCount) at System.Data.Common.DbDataAdapter.UpdatedRowStatus(RowUpdatedEventArgs rowUpdatedEvent, BatchCommandInfo[] batchCommands, Int32 commandCount) at System.Data.Common.DbDataAdapter.Update(DataRow[] dataRows, DataTableMapping tableMapping) at System.Data.Common.DbDataAdapter.UpdateFromDataTable(DataTable dataTable, DataTableMapping tableMapping) at System.Data.Common.DbDataAdapter.Update(DataTable dataTable) at TestIQueryable.Program.BatchInsert() in C:\Users\a\Downloads\TestIQueryable\TestIQueryable\TestIQueryable\Program.cs:line 124 at TestIQueryable.Program.Main(String[] args) in C:\Users\a\Downloads\TestIQueryable\TestIQueryable\TestIQueryable\Program.cs:line 16 InnerException: Time it took to insert 500,000 records with insert batch size of 1000 took "2 mins and 54 seconds" Of course this is no official time I sat there with a stop watch( I am sure there are better ways but was too lazy to look what they where) So I find that kinda slow compared to all my other ones(expect the linq to sql insert one) and I am not really sure why. Next I looked at bulkcopy /// <summary> /// An ado.net 2.0 way to mass insert records. This seems to be the fastest. /// http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/MultipleInsertsIn1dbTrip.aspx#_Toc196622241 /// </summary> private static void BatchBulkCopy() { // Get the DataTable DataTable dtInsertRows = GetDataTable(); using (SqlBulkCopy sbc = new SqlBulkCopy(connectionString, SqlBulkCopyOptions.KeepIdentity)) { sbc.DestinationTableName = "TBL_TEST_TEST"; // Number of records to be processed in one go sbc.BatchSize = 500000; // Map the Source Column from DataTabel to the Destination Columns in SQL Server 2005 Person Table // sbc.ColumnMappings.Add("ID", "ID"); sbc.ColumnMappings.Add("NAME", "NAME"); // Number of records after which client has to be notified about its status sbc.NotifyAfter = dtInsertRows.Rows.Count; // Event that gets fired when NotifyAfter number of records are processed. sbc.SqlRowsCopied += new SqlRowsCopiedEventHandler(sbc_SqlRowsCopied); // Finally write to server sbc.WriteToServer(dtInsertRows); sbc.Close(); } } This one seemed to go really fast and did not even need a SP( can you use SP with bulk copy? If you can would it be better?) BatchCopy had no problem with a 500,000 batch size.So again why make it smaller then the number of records you want to send? I found that with BatchCopy and 500,000 batch size it took only 5 seconds to complete. I then tried with a batch size of 1,000 and it only took 8 seconds. So much faster then the bulkinsert one above. Now I tried the other tutorial. USE [Test] GO /****** Object: StoredProcedure [dbo].[spTEST_InsertXMLTEST_TEST] Script Date: 05/19/2010 15:39:03 ******/ SET ANSI_NULLS ON GO SET QUOTED_IDENTIFIER ON GO ALTER PROCEDURE [dbo].[spTEST_InsertXMLTEST_TEST](@UpdatedProdData nText) AS DECLARE @hDoc int exec sp_xml_preparedocument @hDoc OUTPUT,@UpdatedProdData INSERT INTO TBL_TEST_TEST(NAME) SELECT XMLProdTable.NAME FROM OPENXML(@hDoc, 'ArrayOfTBL_TEST_TEST/TBL_TEST_TEST', 2) WITH ( ID Int, NAME varchar(100) ) XMLProdTable EXEC sp_xml_removedocument @hDoc C# code. /// <summary> /// This is using linq to sql to make the table objects. /// It is then serailzed to to an xml document and sent to a stored proedure /// that then does a bulk insert(I think with OpenXML) /// http://www.codeproject.com/KB/linq/BulkOperations_LinqToSQL.aspx /// </summary> private static void LinqInsertXMLBatch() { using (TestDataContext db = new TestDataContext()) { TBL_TEST_TEST[] testRecords = new TBL_TEST_TEST[500000]; for (int count = 0; count < 500000; count++) { TBL_TEST_TEST testRecord = new TBL_TEST_TEST(); testRecord.NAME = "Name : " + count; testRecords[count] = testRecord; } StringBuilder sBuilder = new StringBuilder(); System.IO.StringWriter sWriter = new System.IO.StringWriter(sBuilder); XmlSerializer serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(TBL_TEST_TEST[])); serializer.Serialize(sWriter, testRecords); db.insertTestData(sBuilder.ToString()); } } So I like this because I get to use objects even though it is kinda redundant. I don't get how the SP works. Like I don't get the whole thing. I don't know if OPENXML has some batch insert under the hood but I do not even know how to take this example SP and change it to fit my tables since like I said I don't know what is going on. I also don't know what would happen if the object you have more tables in it. Like say I have a ProductName table what has a relationship to a Product table or something like that. In linq to sql you could get the product name object and make changes to the Product table in that same object. So I am not sure how to take that into account. I am not sure if I would have to do separate inserts or what. The time was pretty good for 500,000 records it took 52 seconds The last way of course was just using linq to do it all and it was pretty bad. /// <summary> /// This is using linq to sql to to insert lots of records. /// This way is slow as it uses no mass insert. /// Only tried to insert 50,000 records as I did not want to sit around till it did 500,000 records. /// http://www.codeproject.com/KB/linq/BulkOperations_LinqToSQL.aspx /// </summary> private static void LinqInsertAll() { using (TestDataContext db = new TestDataContext()) { db.CommandTimeout = 600; for (int count = 0; count < 50000; count++) { TBL_TEST_TEST testRecord = new TBL_TEST_TEST(); testRecord.NAME = "Name : " + count; db.TBL_TEST_TESTs.InsertOnSubmit(testRecord); } db.SubmitChanges(); } } I did only 50,000 records and that took over a minute to do. So I really narrowed it done to the linq to sql bulk insert way or bulk copy. I am just not sure how to do it when you have relationship for either way. I am not sure how they both stand up when doing updates instead of inserts as I have not gotten around to try it yet. I don't think I will ever need to insert/update more than 50,000 records at one type but at the same time I know I will have to do validation on records before inserting so that will slow it down and that sort of makes linq to sql nicer as your got objects especially if your first parsing data from a xml file before you insert into the database. Full C# code using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using System.Xml.Serialization; using System.Data; using System.Data.SqlClient; namespace TestIQueryable { class Program { private static string connectionString = ""; static void Main(string[] args) { BatchInsert(); Console.WriteLine("done"); } /// <summary> /// This is using linq to sql to to insert lots of records. /// This way is slow as it uses no mass insert. /// Only tried to insert 50,000 records as I did not want to sit around till it did 500,000 records. /// http://www.codeproject.com/KB/linq/BulkOperations_LinqToSQL.aspx /// </summary> private static void LinqInsertAll() { using (TestDataContext db = new TestDataContext()) { db.CommandTimeout = 600; for (int count = 0; count < 50000; count++) { TBL_TEST_TEST testRecord = new TBL_TEST_TEST(); testRecord.NAME = "Name : " + count; db.TBL_TEST_TESTs.InsertOnSubmit(testRecord); } db.SubmitChanges(); } } /// <summary> /// This is using linq to sql to make the table objects. /// It is then serailzed to to an xml document and sent to a stored proedure /// that then does a bulk insert(I think with OpenXML) /// http://www.codeproject.com/KB/linq/BulkOperations_LinqToSQL.aspx /// </summary> private static void LinqInsertXMLBatch() { using (TestDataContext db = new TestDataContext()) { TBL_TEST_TEST[] testRecords = new TBL_TEST_TEST[500000]; for (int count = 0; count < 500000; count++) { TBL_TEST_TEST testRecord = new TBL_TEST_TEST(); testRecord.NAME = "Name : " + count; testRecords[count] = testRecord; } StringBuilder sBuilder = new StringBuilder(); System.IO.StringWriter sWriter = new System.IO.StringWriter(sBuilder); XmlSerializer serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(TBL_TEST_TEST[])); serializer.Serialize(sWriter, testRecords); db.insertTestData(sBuilder.ToString()); } } /// <summary> /// An ado.net 2.0 way to mass insert records. This seems to be the fastest. /// http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/MultipleInsertsIn1dbTrip.aspx#_Toc196622241 /// </summary> private static void BatchBulkCopy() { // Get the DataTable DataTable dtInsertRows = GetDataTable(); using (SqlBulkCopy sbc = new SqlBulkCopy(connectionString, SqlBulkCopyOptions.KeepIdentity)) { sbc.DestinationTableName = "TBL_TEST_TEST"; // Number of records to be processed in one go sbc.BatchSize = 500000; // Map the Source Column from DataTabel to the Destination Columns in SQL Server 2005 Person Table // sbc.ColumnMappings.Add("ID", "ID"); sbc.ColumnMappings.Add("NAME", "NAME"); // Number of records after which client has to be notified about its status sbc.NotifyAfter = dtInsertRows.Rows.Count; // Event that gets fired when NotifyAfter number of records are processed. sbc.SqlRowsCopied += new SqlRowsCopiedEventHandler(sbc_SqlRowsCopied); // Finally write to server sbc.WriteToServer(dtInsertRows); sbc.Close(); } } /// <summary> /// Another ado.net 2.0 way that uses a stored procedure to do a bulk insert. /// Seems slower then "BatchBulkCopy" way and it crashes when you try to insert 500,000 records in one go. /// http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/MultipleInsertsIn1dbTrip.aspx#_Toc196622241 /// </summary> private static void BatchInsert() { // Get the DataTable with Rows State as RowState.Added DataTable dtInsertRows = GetDataTable(); SqlConnection connection = new SqlConnection(connectionString); SqlCommand command = new SqlCommand("sp_BatchInsert", connection); command.CommandType = CommandType.StoredProcedure; command.UpdatedRowSource = UpdateRowSource.None; // Set the Parameter with appropriate Source Column Name command.Parameters.Add("@Name", SqlDbType.VarChar, 50, dtInsertRows.Columns[0].ColumnName); SqlDataAdapter adpt = new SqlDataAdapter(); adpt.InsertCommand = command; // Specify the number of records to be Inserted/Updated in one go. Default is 1. adpt.UpdateBatchSize = 500000; connection.Open(); int recordsInserted = adpt.Update(dtInsertRows); connection.Close(); } private static DataTable GetDataTable() { // You First need a DataTable and have all the insert values in it DataTable dtInsertRows = new DataTable(); dtInsertRows.Columns.Add("NAME"); for (int i = 0; i < 500000; i++) { DataRow drInsertRow = dtInsertRows.NewRow(); string name = "Name : " + i; drInsertRow["NAME"] = name; dtInsertRows.Rows.Add(drInsertRow); } return dtInsertRows; } static void sbc_SqlRowsCopied(object sender, SqlRowsCopiedEventArgs e) { Console.WriteLine("Number of records affected : " + e.RowsCopied.ToString()); } } }

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  • How I can add JScroll bar to NavigableImagePanel which is an Image panel with an small navigation vi

    - by Sarah Kho
    Hi, I have the following NavigableImagePanel, it is under BSD license and I found it in the web. What I want to do with this panel is as follow: I want to add a JScrollPane to it in order to show images in their full size and let the users to re-center the image using the small navigation panel. Right now, the panel resize the images to fit them in the current panel size. I want it to load the image in its real size and let users to navigate to different parts of the image using the navigation panel. Source code for the panel: import java.awt.AWTEvent; import java.awt.BorderLayout; import java.awt.Color; import java.awt.Dimension; import java.awt.Graphics; import java.awt.Graphics2D; import java.awt.GraphicsEnvironment; import java.awt.Image; import java.awt.Point; import java.awt.Rectangle; import java.awt.RenderingHints; import java.awt.Toolkit; import java.awt.event.ComponentAdapter; import java.awt.event.ComponentEvent; import java.awt.event.MouseAdapter; import java.awt.event.MouseEvent; import java.awt.event.MouseMotionListener; import java.awt.event.MouseWheelEvent; import java.awt.event.MouseWheelListener; import java.awt.image.BufferedImage; import java.io.File; import java.io.IOException; import java.util.Arrays; import javax.imageio.ImageIO; import javax.swing.JFrame; import javax.swing.JOptionPane; import javax.swing.JPanel; import javax.swing.SwingUtilities; /** * @author pxt * */ public class NavigableImagePanel extends JPanel { /** * <p>Identifies a change to the zoom level.</p> */ public static final String ZOOM_LEVEL_CHANGED_PROPERTY = "zoomLevel"; /** * <p>Identifies a change to the zoom increment.</p> */ public static final String ZOOM_INCREMENT_CHANGED_PROPERTY = "zoomIncrement"; /** * <p>Identifies that the image in the panel has changed.</p> */ public static final String IMAGE_CHANGED_PROPERTY = "image"; private static final double SCREEN_NAV_IMAGE_FACTOR = 0.15; // 15% of panel's width private static final double NAV_IMAGE_FACTOR = 0.3; // 30% of panel's width private static final double HIGH_QUALITY_RENDERING_SCALE_THRESHOLD = 1.0; private static final Object INTERPOLATION_TYPE = RenderingHints.VALUE_INTERPOLATION_BILINEAR; private double zoomIncrement = 0.2; private double zoomFactor = 1.0 + zoomIncrement; private double navZoomFactor = 1.0 + zoomIncrement; private BufferedImage image; private BufferedImage navigationImage; private int navImageWidth; private int navImageHeight; private double initialScale = 0.0; private double scale = 0.0; private double navScale = 0.0; private int originX = 0; private int originY = 0; private Point mousePosition; private Dimension previousPanelSize; private boolean navigationImageEnabled = true; private boolean highQualityRenderingEnabled = true; private WheelZoomDevice wheelZoomDevice = null; private ButtonZoomDevice buttonZoomDevice = null; /** * <p>Defines zoom devices.</p> */ public static class ZoomDevice { /** * <p>Identifies that the panel does not implement zooming, * but the component using the panel does (programmatic zooming method).</p> */ public static final ZoomDevice NONE = new ZoomDevice("none"); /** * <p>Identifies the left and right mouse buttons as the zooming device.</p> */ public static final ZoomDevice MOUSE_BUTTON = new ZoomDevice("mouseButton"); /** * <p>Identifies the mouse scroll wheel as the zooming device.</p> */ public static final ZoomDevice MOUSE_WHEEL = new ZoomDevice("mouseWheel"); private String zoomDevice; private ZoomDevice(String zoomDevice) { this.zoomDevice = zoomDevice; } public String toString() { return zoomDevice; } } //This class is required for high precision image coordinates translation. private class Coords { public double x; public double y; public Coords(double x, double y) { this.x = x; this.y = y; } public int getIntX() { return (int)Math.round(x); } public int getIntY() { return (int)Math.round(y); } public String toString() { return "[Coords: x=" + x + ",y=" + y + "]"; } } private class WheelZoomDevice implements MouseWheelListener { public void mouseWheelMoved(MouseWheelEvent e) { Point p = e.getPoint(); boolean zoomIn = (e.getWheelRotation() < 0); if (isInNavigationImage(p)) { if (zoomIn) { navZoomFactor = 1.0 + zoomIncrement; } else { navZoomFactor = 1.0 - zoomIncrement; } zoomNavigationImage(); } else if (isInImage(p)) { if (zoomIn) { zoomFactor = 1.0 + zoomIncrement; } else { zoomFactor = 1.0 - zoomIncrement; } zoomImage(); } } } private class ButtonZoomDevice extends MouseAdapter { public void mouseClicked(MouseEvent e) { Point p = e.getPoint(); if (SwingUtilities.isRightMouseButton(e)) { if (isInNavigationImage(p)) { navZoomFactor = 1.0 - zoomIncrement; zoomNavigationImage(); } else if (isInImage(p)) { zoomFactor = 1.0 - zoomIncrement; zoomImage(); } } else { if (isInNavigationImage(p)) { navZoomFactor = 1.0 + zoomIncrement; zoomNavigationImage(); } else if (isInImage(p)) { zoomFactor = 1.0 + zoomIncrement; zoomImage(); } } } } /** * <p>Creates a new navigable image panel with no default image and * the mouse scroll wheel as the zooming device.</p> */ public NavigableImagePanel() { setOpaque(false); addComponentListener(new ComponentAdapter() { public void componentResized(ComponentEvent e) { if (scale > 0.0) { if (isFullImageInPanel()) { centerImage(); } else if (isImageEdgeInPanel()) { scaleOrigin(); } if (isNavigationImageEnabled()) { createNavigationImage(); } repaint(); } previousPanelSize = getSize(); } }); addMouseListener(new MouseAdapter() { public void mousePressed(MouseEvent e) { if (SwingUtilities.isLeftMouseButton(e)) { if (isInNavigationImage(e.getPoint())) { Point p = e.getPoint(); displayImageAt(p); } } } public void mouseClicked(MouseEvent e){ if (e.getClickCount() == 2) { resetImage(); } } }); addMouseMotionListener(new MouseMotionListener() { public void mouseDragged(MouseEvent e) { if (SwingUtilities.isLeftMouseButton(e) && !isInNavigationImage(e.getPoint())) { Point p = e.getPoint(); moveImage(p); } } public void mouseMoved(MouseEvent e) { //we need the mouse position so that after zooming //that position of the image is maintained mousePosition = e.getPoint(); } }); setZoomDevice(ZoomDevice.MOUSE_WHEEL); } /** * <p>Creates a new navigable image panel with the specified image * and the mouse scroll wheel as the zooming device.</p> */ public NavigableImagePanel(BufferedImage image) throws IOException { this(); setImage(image); } private void addWheelZoomDevice() { if (wheelZoomDevice == null) { wheelZoomDevice = new WheelZoomDevice(); addMouseWheelListener(wheelZoomDevice); } } private void addButtonZoomDevice() { if (buttonZoomDevice == null) { buttonZoomDevice = new ButtonZoomDevice(); addMouseListener(buttonZoomDevice); } } private void removeWheelZoomDevice() { if (wheelZoomDevice != null) { removeMouseWheelListener(wheelZoomDevice); wheelZoomDevice = null; } } private void removeButtonZoomDevice() { if (buttonZoomDevice != null) { removeMouseListener(buttonZoomDevice); buttonZoomDevice = null; } } /** * <p>Sets a new zoom device.</p> * * @param newZoomDevice specifies the type of a new zoom device. */ public void setZoomDevice(ZoomDevice newZoomDevice) { if (newZoomDevice == ZoomDevice.NONE) { removeWheelZoomDevice(); removeButtonZoomDevice(); } else if (newZoomDevice == ZoomDevice.MOUSE_BUTTON) { removeWheelZoomDevice(); addButtonZoomDevice(); } else if (newZoomDevice == ZoomDevice.MOUSE_WHEEL) { removeButtonZoomDevice(); addWheelZoomDevice(); } } /** * <p>Gets the current zoom device.</p> */ public ZoomDevice getZoomDevice() { if (buttonZoomDevice != null) { return ZoomDevice.MOUSE_BUTTON; } else if (wheelZoomDevice != null) { return ZoomDevice.MOUSE_WHEEL; } else { return ZoomDevice.NONE; } } //Called from paintComponent() when a new image is set. private void initializeParams() { double xScale = (double)getWidth() / image.getWidth(); double yScale = (double)getHeight() / image.getHeight(); initialScale = Math.min(xScale, yScale); scale = initialScale; //An image is initially centered centerImage(); if (isNavigationImageEnabled()) { createNavigationImage(); } } //Centers the current image in the panel. private void centerImage() { originX = (int)(getWidth() - getScreenImageWidth()) / 2; originY = (int)(getHeight() - getScreenImageHeight()) / 2; } //Creates and renders the navigation image in the upper let corner of the panel. private void createNavigationImage() { //We keep the original navigation image larger than initially //displayed to allow for zooming into it without pixellation effect. navImageWidth = (int)(getWidth() * NAV_IMAGE_FACTOR); navImageHeight = navImageWidth * image.getHeight() / image.getWidth(); int scrNavImageWidth = (int)(getWidth() * SCREEN_NAV_IMAGE_FACTOR); int scrNavImageHeight = scrNavImageWidth * image.getHeight() / image.getWidth(); navScale = (double)scrNavImageWidth / navImageWidth; navigationImage = new BufferedImage(navImageWidth, navImageHeight, image.getType()); Graphics g = navigationImage.getGraphics(); g.drawImage(image, 0, 0, navImageWidth, navImageHeight, null); } /** * <p>Sets an image for display in the panel.</p> * * @param image an image to be set in the panel */ public void setImage(BufferedImage image) { BufferedImage oldImage = this.image; this.image = image; //Reset scale so that initializeParameters() is called in paintComponent() //for the new image. scale = 0.0; firePropertyChange(IMAGE_CHANGED_PROPERTY, (Image)oldImage, (Image)image); repaint(); } /** * <p>resets an image to the centre of the panel</p> * */ public void resetImage() { BufferedImage oldImage = this.image; this.image = image; //Reset scale so that initializeParameters() is called in paintComponent() //for the new image. scale = 0.0; firePropertyChange(IMAGE_CHANGED_PROPERTY, (Image)oldImage, (Image)image); repaint(); } /** * <p>Tests whether an image uses the standard RGB color space.</p> */ public static boolean isStandardRGBImage(BufferedImage bImage) { return bImage.getColorModel().getColorSpace().isCS_sRGB(); } //Converts this panel's coordinates into the original image coordinates private Coords panelToImageCoords(Point p) { return new Coords((p.x - originX) / scale, (p.y - originY) / scale); } //Converts the original image coordinates into this panel's coordinates private Coords imageToPanelCoords(Coords p) { return new Coords((p.x * scale) + originX, (p.y * scale) + originY); } //Converts the navigation image coordinates into the zoomed image coordinates private Point navToZoomedImageCoords(Point p) { int x = p.x * getScreenImageWidth() / getScreenNavImageWidth(); int y = p.y * getScreenImageHeight() / getScreenNavImageHeight(); return new Point(x, y); } //The user clicked within the navigation image and this part of the image //is displayed in the panel. //The clicked point of the image is centered in the panel. private void displayImageAt(Point p) { Point scrImagePoint = navToZoomedImageCoords(p); originX = -(scrImagePoint.x - getWidth() / 2); originY = -(scrImagePoint.y - getHeight() / 2); repaint(); } //Tests whether a given point in the panel falls within the image boundaries. private boolean isInImage(Point p) { Coords coords = panelToImageCoords(p); int x = coords.getIntX(); int y = coords.getIntY(); return (x >= 0 && x < image.getWidth() && y >= 0 && y < image.getHeight()); } //Tests whether a given point in the panel falls within the navigation image //boundaries. private boolean isInNavigationImage(Point p) { return (isNavigationImageEnabled() && p.x < getScreenNavImageWidth() && p.y < getScreenNavImageHeight()); } //Used when the image is resized. private boolean isImageEdgeInPanel() { if (previousPanelSize == null) { return false; } return (originX > 0 && originX < previousPanelSize.width || originY > 0 && originY < previousPanelSize.height); } //Tests whether the image is displayed in its entirety in the panel. private boolean isFullImageInPanel() { return (originX >= 0 && (originX + getScreenImageWidth()) < getWidth() && originY >= 0 && (originY + getScreenImageHeight()) < getHeight()); } /** * <p>Indicates whether the high quality rendering feature is enabled.</p> * * @return true if high quality rendering is enabled, false otherwise. */ public boolean isHighQualityRenderingEnabled() { return highQualityRenderingEnabled; } /** * <p>Enables/disables high quality rendering.</p> * * @param enabled enables/disables high quality rendering */ public void setHighQualityRenderingEnabled(boolean enabled) { highQualityRenderingEnabled = enabled; } //High quality rendering kicks in when when a scaled image is larger //than the original image. In other words, //when image decimation stops and interpolation starts. private boolean isHighQualityRendering() { return (highQualityRenderingEnabled && scale > HIGH_QUALITY_RENDERING_SCALE_THRESHOLD); } /** * <p>Indicates whether navigation image is enabled.<p> * * @return true when navigation image is enabled, false otherwise. */ public boolean isNavigationImageEnabled() { return navigationImageEnabled; } /** * <p>Enables/disables navigation with the navigation image.</p> * <p>Navigation image should be disabled when custom, programmatic navigation * is implemented.</p> * * @param enabled true when navigation image is enabled, false otherwise. */ public void setNavigationImageEnabled(boolean enabled) { navigationImageEnabled = enabled; repaint(); } //Used when the panel is resized private void scaleOrigin() { originX = originX * getWidth() / previousPanelSize.width; originY = originY * getHeight() / previousPanelSize.height; repaint(); } //Converts the specified zoom level to scale. private double zoomToScale(double zoom) { return initialScale * zoom; } /** * <p>Gets the current zoom level.</p> * * @return the current zoom level */ public double getZoom() { return scale / initialScale; } /** * <p>Sets the zoom level used to display the image.</p> * <p>This method is used in programmatic zooming. The zooming center is * the point of the image closest to the center of the panel. * After a new zoom level is set the image is repainted.</p> * * @param newZoom the zoom level used to display this panel's image. */ public void setZoom(double newZoom) { Point zoomingCenter = new Point(getWidth() / 2, getHeight() / 2); setZoom(newZoom, zoomingCenter); } /** * <p>Sets the zoom level used to display the image, and the zooming center, * around which zooming is done.</p> * <p>This method is used in programmatic zooming. * After a new zoom level is set the image is repainted.</p> * * @param newZoom the zoom level used to display this panel's image. */ public void setZoom(double newZoom, Point zoomingCenter) { Coords imageP = panelToImageCoords(zoomingCenter); if (imageP.x < 0.0) { imageP.x = 0.0; } if (imageP.y < 0.0) { imageP.y = 0.0; } if (imageP.x >= image.getWidth()) { imageP.x = image.getWidth() - 1.0; } if (imageP.y >= image.getHeight()) { imageP.y = image.getHeight() - 1.0; } Coords correctedP = imageToPanelCoords(imageP); double oldZoom = getZoom(); scale = zoomToScale(newZoom); Coords panelP = imageToPanelCoords(imageP); originX += (correctedP.getIntX() - (int)panelP.x); originY += (correctedP.getIntY() - (int)panelP.y); firePropertyChange(ZOOM_LEVEL_CHANGED_PROPERTY, new Double(oldZoom), new Double(getZoom())); repaint(); } /** * <p>Gets the current zoom increment.</p> * * @return the current zoom increment */ public double getZoomIncrement() { return zoomIncrement; } /** * <p>Sets a new zoom increment value.</p> * * @param newZoomIncrement new zoom increment value */ public void setZoomIncrement(double newZoomIncrement) { double oldZoomIncrement = zoomIncrement; zoomIncrement = newZoomIncrement; firePropertyChange(ZOOM_INCREMENT_CHANGED_PROPERTY, new Double(oldZoomIncrement), new Double(zoomIncrement)); } //Zooms an image in the panel by repainting it at the new zoom level. //The current mouse position is the zooming center. private void zoomImage() { Coords imageP = panelToImageCoords(mousePosition); double oldZoom = getZoom(); scale *= zoomFactor; Coords panelP = imageToPanelCoords(imageP); originX += (mousePosition.x - (int)panelP.x); originY += (mousePosition.y - (int)panelP.y); firePropertyChange(ZOOM_LEVEL_CHANGED_PROPERTY, new Double(oldZoom), new Double(getZoom())); repaint(); } //Zooms the navigation image private void zoomNavigationImage() { navScale *= navZoomFactor; repaint(); } /** * <p>Gets the image origin.</p> * <p>Image origin is defined as the upper, left corner of the image in * the panel's coordinate system.</p> * @return the point of the upper, left corner of the image in the panel's coordinates * system. */ public Point getImageOrigin() { return new Point(originX, originY); } /** * <p>Sets the image origin.</p> * <p>Image origin is defined as the upper, left corner of the image in * the panel's coordinate system. After a new origin is set, the image is repainted. * This method is used for programmatic image navigation.</p>

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  • build error with boost spirit grammar (boost 1.43 and g++ 4.4.1) part II

    - by lurscher
    I'm having issues getting a small spirit/qi grammar to compile. i am using boost 1.43 and g++ 4.4.1. the input grammar header: inputGrammar.h #include <boost/config/warning_disable.hpp> #include <boost/spirit/include/qi.hpp> #include <boost/spirit/include/phoenix_core.hpp> #include <boost/spirit/include/phoenix_operator.hpp> #include <boost/spirit/include/phoenix_fusion.hpp> #include <boost/spirit/include/phoenix_stl.hpp> #include <boost/fusion/include/adapt_struct.hpp> #include <boost/variant/recursive_variant.hpp> #include <boost/foreach.hpp> #include <iostream> #include <fstream> #include <string> #include <vector> namespace sp = boost::spirit; namespace qi = boost::spirit::qi; using namespace boost::spirit::ascii; //using namespace boost::spirit::arg_names; namespace fusion = boost::fusion; namespace phoenix = boost::phoenix; using phoenix::at_c; using phoenix::push_back; template< typename Iterator , typename ExpressionAST > struct InputGrammar : qi::grammar<Iterator, ExpressionAST(), space_type> { InputGrammar() : InputGrammar::base_type( block ) { tag = sp::lexeme[+(alpha) [sp::_val += sp::_1]];//[+(char_ - '<') [_val += _1]]; block = sp::lit("block") [ at_c<0>(sp::_val) = sp::_1] >> "(" >> *instruction[ push_back( at_c<1>(sp::_val) , sp::_1 ) ] >> ")"; command = tag [ at_c<0>(sp::_val) = sp::_1] >> "(" >> *instruction [ push_back( at_c<1>(sp::_val) , sp::_1 )] >> ")"; instruction = ( command | tag ) [sp::_val = sp::_1]; } qi::rule< Iterator , std::string() , space_type > tag; qi::rule< Iterator , ExpressionAST() , space_type > block; qi::rule< Iterator , ExpressionAST() , space_type > function_def; qi::rule< Iterator , ExpressionAST() , space_type > command; qi::rule< Iterator , ExpressionAST() , space_type > instruction; }; the test build program: #include <iostream> #include <string> #include <vector> using namespace std; //my grammar #include <InputGrammar.h> struct MockExpressionNode { std::string name; std::vector< MockExpressionNode > operands; typedef std::vector< MockExpressionNode >::iterator iterator; typedef std::vector< MockExpressionNode >::const_iterator const_iterator; iterator begin() { return operands.begin(); } const_iterator begin() const { return operands.begin(); } iterator end() { return operands.end(); } const_iterator end() const { return operands.end(); } bool is_leaf() const { return ( operands.begin() == operands.end() ); } }; BOOST_FUSION_ADAPT_STRUCT( MockExpressionNode, (std::string, name) (std::vector<MockExpressionNode>, operands) ) int const tabsize = 4; void tab(int indent) { for (int i = 0; i < indent; ++i) std::cout << ' '; } template< typename ExpressionNode > struct ExpressionNodePrinter { ExpressionNodePrinter(int indent = 0) : indent(indent) { } void operator()(ExpressionNode const& node) const { cout << " tag: " << node.name << endl; for (int i=0 ; i < node.operands.size() ; i++ ) { tab( indent ); cout << " arg "<<i<<": "; ExpressionNodePrinter(indent + 2)( node.operands[i]); cout << endl; } } int indent; }; int test() { MockExpressionNode root; InputGrammar< string::const_iterator , MockExpressionNode > g; std::string litA = "litA"; std::string litB = "litB"; std::string litC = "litC"; std::string litD = "litD"; std::string litE = "litE"; std::string litF = "litF"; std::string source = litA+"( "+litB+" ,"+litC+" , "+ litD+" ( "+litE+", "+litF+" ) "+ " )"; string::const_iterator iter = source.begin(); string::const_iterator end = source.end(); bool r = qi::phrase_parse( iter , end , g , space , root ); ExpressionNodePrinter< MockExpressionNode > np; np( root ); }; int main() { test(); } finally, the build error is the following: (the full error trace is 20 times bigger than the allowed size for a stackoverflow question, so i posted the full version of it at http://codepad.org/Q74IVCUc) /usr/bin/make -f nbproject/Makefile-linux_amd64_devel.mk SUBPROJECTS= .build-conf make[1]: se ingresa al directorio `/home/mineq/NetBeansProjects/InputParserTests' /usr/bin/make -f nbproject/Makefile-linux_amd64_devel.mk dist/linux_amd64_devel/GNU-Linux-x86/vpuinputparsertests make[2]: se ingresa al directorio `/home/mineq/NetBeansProjects/InputParserTests' mkdir -p build/linux_amd64_devel/GNU-Linux-x86 rm -f build/linux_amd64_devel/GNU-Linux-x86/tests_main.o.d g++ `llvm-config --cxxflags` `pkg-config --cflags unittest-cpp` `pkg-config --cflags boost-1.43` `pkg-config --cflags boost-coroutines` -c -g -I../InputParser -MMD -MP -MF build/linux_amd64_devel/GNU-Linux-x86/tests_main.o.d -o build/linux_amd64_devel/GNU-Linux-x86/tests_main.o tests_main.cpp from /home/mineq/third_party/boost_1_43_0/boost/spirit/include/phoenix_operator.hpp:11, from ../InputParser/InputGrammar.h:14, from tests_main.cpp:14: /home/mineq/third_party/boost_1_43_0/boost/spirit/home/phoenix/operator/self.hpp: In instantiation of ‘const int boost::phoenix::result_of_assign<MockExpressionNode&, boost::variant<MockExpressionNode, std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> >, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_>&>::size’: In file included from /home/mineq/third_party/boost_1_43_0/boost/spirit/home/phoenix/operator.hpp:16, /home/mineq/third_party/boost_1_43_0/boost/spirit/home/phoenix/operator/self.hpp:27: instantiated from ‘const int boost::phoenix::result_of_assign<MockExpressionNode&, boost::variant<MockExpressionNode, std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> >, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_>&>::index’ /home/mineq/third_party/boost_1_43_0/boost/spirit/home/phoenix/operator/self.hpp:27: instantiated from ‘boost::phoenix::result_of_assign<MockExpressionNode&, boost::variant<MockExpressionNode, std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> >, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_>&>’ /home/mineq/third_party/boost_1_43_0/boost/mpl/eval_if.hpp:38: instantiated from ‘boost::mpl::eval_if<boost::mpl::or_<boost::phoenix::is_actor<MockExpressionNode&>, boost::phoenix::is_actor<boost::variant<MockExpressionNode, std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> >, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_>&>, mpl_::bool_<false>, mpl_::bool_<false>, mpl_::bool_<false> >, boost::phoenix::re_curry<boost::phoenix::assign_eval, MockExpressionNode&, boost::variant<MockExpressionNode, std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> >, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_>&, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_>, boost::phoenix::result_of_assign<MockExpressionNode&, boost::variant<MockExpressionNode, std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> >, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_>&> >’ /home/mineq/third_party/boost_1_43_0/boost/spirit/home/phoenix/operator/self.hpp:69: instantiated from ‘boost::phoenix::assign_eval::result<boost::phoenix::basic_environment<boost::fusion::vector1<boost::variant<MockExpressionNode, std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> >, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_>&>, boost::spirit::context<boost::fusion::cons<MockExpressionNode&, boost::fusion::nil>, boost::fusion::vector0<void> >, bool, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_>, boost::spirit::attribute<0>, boost::spirit::argument<0> >’ /home/mineq/third_party/boost_1_43_0/boost/spirit/home/phoenix/core/detail/composite_eval.hpp:89: instantiated from ‘boost::phoenix::detail::composite_eval<2>::result<boost::phoenix::composite<boost::phoenix::assign_eval, boost::fusion::vector<boost::spirit::attribute<0>, boost::spirit::argument<0>, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_> >, boost::phoenix::basic_environment<boost::fusion::vector1<boost::variant<MockExpressionNode, std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> >, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_>&>, boost::spirit::context<boost::fusion::cons<MockExpressionNode&, boost::fusion::nil>, boost::fusion::vector0<void> >, bool, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_> >’ /home/mineq/third_party/boost_1_43_0/boost/spirit/home/phoenix/core/composite.hpp:61: instantiated from ‘boost::phoenix::composite<boost::phoenix::assign_eval, boost::fusion::vector<boost::spirit::attribute<0>, boost::spirit::argument<0>, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_> >::result<boost::phoenix::basic_environment<boost::fusion::vector1<boost::variant<MockExpressionNode, std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> >, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_>&>, boost::spirit::context<boost::fusion::cons<MockExpressionNode&, boost::fusion::nil>, boost::fusion::vector0<void> >, bool, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_> >’ /home/mineq/third_party/boost_1_43_0/boost/spirit/home/phoenix/core/actor.hpp:56: instantiated from ‘boost::phoenix::eval_result<boost::phoenix::composite<boost::phoenix::assign_eval, boost::fusion::vector<boost::spirit::attribute<0>, boost::spirit::argument<0>, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_> >, boost::phoenix::basic_environment<boost::fusion::vector1<boost::variant<MockExpressionNode, std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> >, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_>&>, boost::spirit::context<boost::fusion::cons<MockExpressionNode&, boost::fusion::nil>, boost::fusion::vector0<void> >, bool, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_> >’ /home/mineq/third_party/boost_1_43_0/boost/spirit/home/phoenix/core/actor.hpp:65: instantiated from ‘boost::phoenix::actor<boost::phoenix::composite<boost::phoenix::assign_eval, boost::fusion::vector<boost::spirit::attribute<0>, boost::spirit::argument<0>, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_> > >::result<boost::phoenix::actor<boost::phoenix::composite<boost::phoenix::assign_eval, boost::fusion::vector<boost::spirit::attribute<0>, boost::spirit::argument<0>, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_> > >(boost::fusion::vector1<boost::variant<MockExpressionNode, std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> >, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_>&>&, boost::spirit::context<boost::fusion::cons<MockExpressionNode&, boost::fusion::nil>, boost::fusion::vector0<void> >&, bool&)>’ /home/mineq/third_party/boost_1_43_0/boost/spirit/home/support/action_dispatch.hpp:44: instantiated from ‘bool boost::spirit::traits::action_dispatch<Component>::operator()(const boost::phoenix::actor<Eval>&, Attribute&, Context&) [with Eval = boost::phoenix::composite<boost::phoenix::assign_eval, boost::fusion::vector<boost::spirit::attribute<0>, boost::spirit::argument<0>, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_> >, Attribute = boost::variant<MockExpressionNode, std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> >, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_, boost::detail::variant::void_>, Context = boost::spirit::context<boost::fusion::cons<MockExpressionNode&, boost::fusion::nil>, boost::fusion::vector0<void> >, Component = boost::spirit::qi::alternative<boost::fusion::cons<boost::spirit::qi::reference<const boost::spirit::qi::rule<__gnu_cxx::__normal_iterator<const char*, std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> > >, MockExpressionNode(), boost::proto::exprns_::expr<boost::proto::tag::terminal, boost::proto::argsns_::term<boost::spirit::tag::char_code<boost::spirit::tag::space, boost::spirit::char_encoding::ascii> >, 0l>, boost::fusion::unused_type, boost::fusion::unused_type> >, boost::fusion::cons<boost::spirit::qi::reference<const boost::spirit::qi::rule<__gnu_cxx::__normal_iterator<const char*, std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> > >, std::string(), boost::proto::exprns_::expr<boost::proto::tag::terminal, boost::proto::argsns_::term<boost::spirit::tag::char_code<boost::spirit::tag::space, boost::spirit::char_encoding::ascii> >, 0l>, boost::fusion::unused_type, boost::fusion::unused_type> >, boost::fusion::nil> > >]’ /home/mineq/third_party/boost_1_43_0/boost/spirit/home/qi/action/action.hpp:62: instantiated from ‘bool boost::spirit::qi::action<Subject, Action>::parse(Iterator&, const Iterator&, Context&, const Skipper&, Attribute&) const [with Iterator = __gnu_cxx::__normal_iterator<const char*, std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> > >, Context = boost::spirit::context<boost::fusion::cons<MockExpressionNode&, boost::fusion::nil>, boost::fusion::vector0<void> >, Skipper = boost::spirit::qi::char_class<boost::spirit::tag::char_code<boost::spirit::tag::space, boost::spirit::char_encoding::ascii> >, Attribute = const boost::fusion::unused_type, Subject = boost::spirit::qi::alternative<boost::fusion::cons<boost::spirit::qi::reference<const boost::spirit::qi::rule<__gnu_cxx::__normal_iterator<const char*, std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> > >, MockExpressionNode(), boost::proto::exprns_::expr<boost::proto::tag::terminal, boost::proto::argsns_::term<boost::spirit::tag::char_code<boost::spirit::tag::space, boost::spirit::char_encoding::ascii> >, 0l>, boost::fusion::unused_type, boost::fusion::unused_type> >, boost::fusion::cons<boost::spirit::qi::reference<const boost::spirit::qi::rule<__gnu_cxx::__normal_iterator<const char*, std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> > >, std::string(), boost::proto::exprns_::expr<boost::proto::tag::terminal, boost::proto::argsns_::term<boost::spirit::tag::char_code<boost::spirit::tag::space, boost::spirit::char_encoding::ascii> >, 0l>, boost::fusion::unused_type, boost::fusion::unused_type> >, boost::fusion::nil> > >, Action = boost::phoenix::actor<boost::phoenix::composite<boost::phoenix::assign_eval, boost::fusion::vector<boost::spirit::attribute<0>, boost::spirit::argument<0>, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_> > >]’ /home/mineq/third_party/boost_1_43_0/boost/spirit/home/qi/nonterminal/detail/parser_binder.hpp:33: instantiated from ‘bool boost::spirit::qi::detail::parser_binder<Parser, Auto>::call(Iterator&, const Iterator&, Context&, const Skipper&, mpl_::true_) const [with Iterator = __gnu_cxx::__normal_iterator<const char*, std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> > >, Skipper = boost::spirit::qi::char_class<boost::spirit::tag::char_code<boost::spirit::tag::space, boost::spirit::char_encoding::ascii> >, Context = boost::spirit::context<boost::fusion::cons<MockExpressionNode&, boost::fusion::nil>, boost::fusion::vector0<void> >, Parser = boost::spirit::qi::action<boost::spirit::qi::alternative<boost::fusion::cons<boost::spirit::qi::reference<const boost::spirit::qi::rule<__gnu_cxx::__normal_iterator<const char*, std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> > >, MockExpressionNode(), boost::proto::exprns_::expr<boost::proto::tag::terminal, boost::proto::argsns_::term<boost::spirit::tag::char_code<boost::spirit::tag::space, boost::spirit::char_encoding::ascii> >, 0l>, boost::fusion::unused_type, boost::fusion::unused_type> >, boost::fusion::cons<boost::spirit::qi::reference<const boost::spirit::qi::rule<__gnu_cxx::__normal_iterator<const char*, std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> > >, std::string(), boost::proto::exprns_::expr<boost::proto::tag::terminal, boost::proto::argsns_::term<boost::spirit::tag::char_code<boost::spirit::tag::space, boost::spirit::char_encoding::ascii> >, 0l>, boost::fusion::unused_type, boost::fusion::unused_type> >, boost::fusion::nil> > >, boost::phoenix::actor<boost::phoenix::composite<boost::phoenix::assign_eval, boost::fusion::vector<boost::spirit::attribute<0>, boost::spirit::argument<0>, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_, boost::fusion::void_> > > >, Auto = mpl_::bool_<false>]’ /home/mineq/third_party/boost_1_43_0/boost/spirit/home/qi/nonterminal/detail/parser_binder.hpp:53: instantiated from ‘bool boost::spirit::qi::detail::parser_binder<Parser, Auto>::operator()(Iterator&, const Iterator&, Context&, const Skipper&) const [with Iterator = __gnu_cxx::__normal_iterator<const char*, std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> > >, Skipper = boost::spirit::qi::char_class<boost::spirit::tag::char_code<boost::spirit::tag::space, boost::spirit::char_encoding::ascii> >, Context = boost::spirit::context<boost::fusion::cons<MockExpressionNode&, boost::fusion::nil>, boost::fusion::vector0<void> >, Parser = boost::spirit::qi::action<boost::spirit::qi::alternative<boost::fusion::cons<boost::spirit::qi::reference<const boost::spirit::qi::rule<__gnu_cxx::__normal_iterator<const char*, std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> > >, MockExpressionNode(), boost::proto::exprns_::expr<boost::proto::tag::terminal, boost::proto::argsns_::term<boost::spirit::tag::char_code<boost::spirit::tag::space, boost::spirit::char_encoding::ascii> >, 0l>, boost::fusion::unused_type, boost::fusion::unused_type> >, boost::fusion::cons<boost::spirit::qi::reference<const boost::spirit::qi::rule<__gnu_cxx::__normal_iterator<const char*, std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> > >, std::string(), boost::proto::exprns_::expr<boost::proto::tag::terminal, boost::proto::argsns_::term<boost::spirit::tag::char_code<boost::spirit::tag::space, boost::spirit::char_encoding::ascii> >, 0l>, boost::fusion::unused_type, boost::fusion::unused_type> >, boost::fusion::nil> > >, ... ... more errors but i had to truncate to fit the 30k limit make[2]: *** [build/linux_amd64_devel/GNU-Linux-x86/tests_main.o] Error 1 make[2]: se sale del directorio `/home/mineq/NetBeansProjects/InputParserTests' make[1]: *** [.build-conf] Error 2 make[1]: se sale del directorio `/home/mineq/NetBeansProjects/InputParserTests' make: *** [.build-impl] Error 2 BUILD FAILED (exit value 2, total time: 2m 13s)

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  • What are good design practices when working with Entity Framework

    - by AD
    This will apply mostly for an asp.net application where the data is not accessed via soa. Meaning that you get access to the objects loaded from the framework, not Transfer Objects, although some recommendation still apply. This is a community post, so please add to it as you see fit. Applies to: Entity Framework 1.0 shipped with Visual Studio 2008 sp1. Why pick EF in the first place? Considering it is a young technology with plenty of problems (see below), it may be a hard sell to get on the EF bandwagon for your project. However, it is the technology Microsoft is pushing (at the expense of Linq2Sql, which is a subset of EF). In addition, you may not be satisfied with NHibernate or other solutions out there. Whatever the reasons, there are people out there (including me) working with EF and life is not bad.make you think. EF and inheritance The first big subject is inheritance. EF does support mapping for inherited classes that are persisted in 2 ways: table per class and table the hierarchy. The modeling is easy and there are no programming issues with that part. (The following applies to table per class model as I don't have experience with table per hierarchy, which is, anyway, limited.) The real problem comes when you are trying to run queries that include one or many objects that are part of an inheritance tree: the generated sql is incredibly awful, takes a long time to get parsed by the EF and takes a long time to execute as well. This is a real show stopper. Enough that EF should probably not be used with inheritance or as little as possible. Here is an example of how bad it was. My EF model had ~30 classes, ~10 of which were part of an inheritance tree. On running a query to get one item from the Base class, something as simple as Base.Get(id), the generated SQL was over 50,000 characters. Then when you are trying to return some Associations, it degenerates even more, going as far as throwing SQL exceptions about not being able to query more than 256 tables at once. Ok, this is bad, EF concept is to allow you to create your object structure without (or with as little as possible) consideration on the actual database implementation of your table. It completely fails at this. So, recommendations? Avoid inheritance if you can, the performance will be so much better. Use it sparingly where you have to. In my opinion, this makes EF a glorified sql-generation tool for querying, but there are still advantages to using it. And ways to implement mechanism that are similar to inheritance. Bypassing inheritance with Interfaces First thing to know with trying to get some kind of inheritance going with EF is that you cannot assign a non-EF-modeled class a base class. Don't even try it, it will get overwritten by the modeler. So what to do? You can use interfaces to enforce that classes implement some functionality. For example here is a IEntity interface that allow you to define Associations between EF entities where you don't know at design time what the type of the entity would be. public enum EntityTypes{ Unknown = -1, Dog = 0, Cat } public interface IEntity { int EntityID { get; } string Name { get; } Type EntityType { get; } } public partial class Dog : IEntity { // implement EntityID and Name which could actually be fields // from your EF model Type EntityType{ get{ return EntityTypes.Dog; } } } Using this IEntity, you can then work with undefined associations in other classes // lets take a class that you defined in your model. // that class has a mapping to the columns: PetID, PetType public partial class Person { public IEntity GetPet() { return IEntityController.Get(PetID,PetType); } } which makes use of some extension functions: public class IEntityController { static public IEntity Get(int id, EntityTypes type) { switch (type) { case EntityTypes.Dog: return Dog.Get(id); case EntityTypes.Cat: return Cat.Get(id); default: throw new Exception("Invalid EntityType"); } } } Not as neat as having plain inheritance, particularly considering you have to store the PetType in an extra database field, but considering the performance gains, I would not look back. It also cannot model one-to-many, many-to-many relationship, but with creative uses of 'Union' it could be made to work. Finally, it creates the side effet of loading data in a property/function of the object, which you need to be careful about. Using a clear naming convention like GetXYZ() helps in that regards. Compiled Queries Entity Framework performance is not as good as direct database access with ADO (obviously) or Linq2SQL. There are ways to improve it however, one of which is compiling your queries. The performance of a compiled query is similar to Linq2Sql. What is a compiled query? It is simply a query for which you tell the framework to keep the parsed tree in memory so it doesn't need to be regenerated the next time you run it. So the next run, you will save the time it takes to parse the tree. Do not discount that as it is a very costly operation that gets even worse with more complex queries. There are 2 ways to compile a query: creating an ObjectQuery with EntitySQL and using CompiledQuery.Compile() function. (Note that by using an EntityDataSource in your page, you will in fact be using ObjectQuery with EntitySQL, so that gets compiled and cached). An aside here in case you don't know what EntitySQL is. It is a string-based way of writing queries against the EF. Here is an example: "select value dog from Entities.DogSet as dog where dog.ID = @ID". The syntax is pretty similar to SQL syntax. You can also do pretty complex object manipulation, which is well explained [here][1]. Ok, so here is how to do it using ObjectQuery< string query = "select value dog " + "from Entities.DogSet as dog " + "where dog.ID = @ID"; ObjectQuery<Dog> oQuery = new ObjectQuery<Dog>(query, EntityContext.Instance)); oQuery.Parameters.Add(new ObjectParameter("ID", id)); oQuery.EnablePlanCaching = true; return oQuery.FirstOrDefault(); The first time you run this query, the framework will generate the expression tree and keep it in memory. So the next time it gets executed, you will save on that costly step. In that example EnablePlanCaching = true, which is unnecessary since that is the default option. The other way to compile a query for later use is the CompiledQuery.Compile method. This uses a delegate: static readonly Func<Entities, int, Dog> query_GetDog = CompiledQuery.Compile<Entities, int, Dog>((ctx, id) => ctx.DogSet.FirstOrDefault(it => it.ID == id)); or using linq static readonly Func<Entities, int, Dog> query_GetDog = CompiledQuery.Compile<Entities, int, Dog>((ctx, id) => (from dog in ctx.DogSet where dog.ID == id select dog).FirstOrDefault()); to call the query: query_GetDog.Invoke( YourContext, id ); The advantage of CompiledQuery is that the syntax of your query is checked at compile time, where as EntitySQL is not. However, there are other consideration... Includes Lets say you want to have the data for the dog owner to be returned by the query to avoid making 2 calls to the database. Easy to do, right? EntitySQL string query = "select value dog " + "from Entities.DogSet as dog " + "where dog.ID = @ID"; ObjectQuery<Dog> oQuery = new ObjectQuery<Dog>(query, EntityContext.Instance)).Include("Owner"); oQuery.Parameters.Add(new ObjectParameter("ID", id)); oQuery.EnablePlanCaching = true; return oQuery.FirstOrDefault(); CompiledQuery static readonly Func<Entities, int, Dog> query_GetDog = CompiledQuery.Compile<Entities, int, Dog>((ctx, id) => (from dog in ctx.DogSet.Include("Owner") where dog.ID == id select dog).FirstOrDefault()); Now, what if you want to have the Include parametrized? What I mean is that you want to have a single Get() function that is called from different pages that care about different relationships for the dog. One cares about the Owner, another about his FavoriteFood, another about his FavotireToy and so on. Basicly, you want to tell the query which associations to load. It is easy to do with EntitySQL public Dog Get(int id, string include) { string query = "select value dog " + "from Entities.DogSet as dog " + "where dog.ID = @ID"; ObjectQuery<Dog> oQuery = new ObjectQuery<Dog>(query, EntityContext.Instance)) .IncludeMany(include); oQuery.Parameters.Add(new ObjectParameter("ID", id)); oQuery.EnablePlanCaching = true; return oQuery.FirstOrDefault(); } The include simply uses the passed string. Easy enough. Note that it is possible to improve on the Include(string) function (that accepts only a single path) with an IncludeMany(string) that will let you pass a string of comma-separated associations to load. Look further in the extension section for this function. If we try to do it with CompiledQuery however, we run into numerous problems: The obvious static readonly Func<Entities, int, string, Dog> query_GetDog = CompiledQuery.Compile<Entities, int, string, Dog>((ctx, id, include) => (from dog in ctx.DogSet.Include(include) where dog.ID == id select dog).FirstOrDefault()); will choke when called with: query_GetDog.Invoke( YourContext, id, "Owner,FavoriteFood" ); Because, as mentionned above, Include() only wants to see a single path in the string and here we are giving it 2: "Owner" and "FavoriteFood" (which is not to be confused with "Owner.FavoriteFood"!). Then, let's use IncludeMany(), which is an extension function static readonly Func<Entities, int, string, Dog> query_GetDog = CompiledQuery.Compile<Entities, int, string, Dog>((ctx, id, include) => (from dog in ctx.DogSet.IncludeMany(include) where dog.ID == id select dog).FirstOrDefault()); Wrong again, this time it is because the EF cannot parse IncludeMany because it is not part of the functions that is recognizes: it is an extension. Ok, so you want to pass an arbitrary number of paths to your function and Includes() only takes a single one. What to do? You could decide that you will never ever need more than, say 20 Includes, and pass each separated strings in a struct to CompiledQuery. But now the query looks like this: from dog in ctx.DogSet.Include(include1).Include(include2).Include(include3) .Include(include4).Include(include5).Include(include6) .[...].Include(include19).Include(include20) where dog.ID == id select dog which is awful as well. Ok, then, but wait a minute. Can't we return an ObjectQuery< with CompiledQuery? Then set the includes on that? Well, that what I would have thought so as well: static readonly Func<Entities, int, ObjectQuery<Dog>> query_GetDog = CompiledQuery.Compile<Entities, int, string, ObjectQuery<Dog>>((ctx, id) => (ObjectQuery<Dog>)(from dog in ctx.DogSet where dog.ID == id select dog)); public Dog GetDog( int id, string include ) { ObjectQuery<Dog> oQuery = query_GetDog(id); oQuery = oQuery.IncludeMany(include); return oQuery.FirstOrDefault; } That should have worked, except that when you call IncludeMany (or Include, Where, OrderBy...) you invalidate the cached compiled query because it is an entirely new one now! So, the expression tree needs to be reparsed and you get that performance hit again. So what is the solution? You simply cannot use CompiledQueries with parametrized Includes. Use EntitySQL instead. This doesn't mean that there aren't uses for CompiledQueries. It is great for localized queries that will always be called in the same context. Ideally CompiledQuery should always be used because the syntax is checked at compile time, but due to limitation, that's not possible. An example of use would be: you may want to have a page that queries which two dogs have the same favorite food, which is a bit narrow for a BusinessLayer function, so you put it in your page and know exactly what type of includes are required. Passing more than 3 parameters to a CompiledQuery Func is limited to 5 parameters, of which the last one is the return type and the first one is your Entities object from the model. So that leaves you with 3 parameters. A pitance, but it can be improved on very easily. public struct MyParams { public string param1; public int param2; public DateTime param3; } static readonly Func<Entities, MyParams, IEnumerable<Dog>> query_GetDog = CompiledQuery.Compile<Entities, MyParams, IEnumerable<Dog>>((ctx, myParams) => from dog in ctx.DogSet where dog.Age == myParams.param2 && dog.Name == myParams.param1 and dog.BirthDate > myParams.param3 select dog); public List<Dog> GetSomeDogs( int age, string Name, DateTime birthDate ) { MyParams myParams = new MyParams(); myParams.param1 = name; myParams.param2 = age; myParams.param3 = birthDate; return query_GetDog(YourContext,myParams).ToList(); } Return Types (this does not apply to EntitySQL queries as they aren't compiled at the same time during execution as the CompiledQuery method) Working with Linq, you usually don't force the execution of the query until the very last moment, in case some other functions downstream wants to change the query in some way: static readonly Func<Entities, int, string, IEnumerable<Dog>> query_GetDog = CompiledQuery.Compile<Entities, int, string, IEnumerable<Dog>>((ctx, age, name) => from dog in ctx.DogSet where dog.Age == age && dog.Name == name select dog); public IEnumerable<Dog> GetSomeDogs( int age, string name ) { return query_GetDog(YourContext,age,name); } public void DataBindStuff() { IEnumerable<Dog> dogs = GetSomeDogs(4,"Bud"); // but I want the dogs ordered by BirthDate gridView.DataSource = dogs.OrderBy( it => it.BirthDate ); } What is going to happen here? By still playing with the original ObjectQuery (that is the actual return type of the Linq statement, which implements IEnumerable), it will invalidate the compiled query and be force to re-parse. So, the rule of thumb is to return a List< of objects instead. static readonly Func<Entities, int, string, IEnumerable<Dog>> query_GetDog = CompiledQuery.Compile<Entities, int, string, IEnumerable<Dog>>((ctx, age, name) => from dog in ctx.DogSet where dog.Age == age && dog.Name == name select dog); public List<Dog> GetSomeDogs( int age, string name ) { return query_GetDog(YourContext,age,name).ToList(); //<== change here } public void DataBindStuff() { List<Dog> dogs = GetSomeDogs(4,"Bud"); // but I want the dogs ordered by BirthDate gridView.DataSource = dogs.OrderBy( it => it.BirthDate ); } When you call ToList(), the query gets executed as per the compiled query and then, later, the OrderBy is executed against the objects in memory. It may be a little bit slower, but I'm not even sure. One sure thing is that you have no worries about mis-handling the ObjectQuery and invalidating the compiled query plan. Once again, that is not a blanket statement. ToList() is a defensive programming trick, but if you have a valid reason not to use ToList(), go ahead. There are many cases in which you would want to refine the query before executing it. Performance What is the performance impact of compiling a query? It can actually be fairly large. A rule of thumb is that compiling and caching the query for reuse takes at least double the time of simply executing it without caching. For complex queries (read inherirante), I have seen upwards to 10 seconds. So, the first time a pre-compiled query gets called, you get a performance hit. After that first hit, performance is noticeably better than the same non-pre-compiled query. Practically the same as Linq2Sql When you load a page with pre-compiled queries the first time you will get a hit. It will load in maybe 5-15 seconds (obviously more than one pre-compiled queries will end up being called), while subsequent loads will take less than 300ms. Dramatic difference, and it is up to you to decide if it is ok for your first user to take a hit or you want a script to call your pages to force a compilation of the queries. Can this query be cached? { Dog dog = from dog in YourContext.DogSet where dog.ID == id select dog; } No, ad-hoc Linq queries are not cached and you will incur the cost of generating the tree every single time you call it. Parametrized Queries Most search capabilities involve heavily parametrized queries. There are even libraries available that will let you build a parametrized query out of lamba expressions. The problem is that you cannot use pre-compiled queries with those. One way around that is to map out all the possible criteria in the query and flag which one you want to use: public struct MyParams { public string name; public bool checkName; public int age; public bool checkAge; } static readonly Func<Entities, MyParams, IEnumerable<Dog>> query_GetDog = CompiledQuery.Compile<Entities, MyParams, IEnumerable<Dog>>((ctx, myParams) => from dog in ctx.DogSet where (myParams.checkAge == true && dog.Age == myParams.age) && (myParams.checkName == true && dog.Name == myParams.name ) select dog); protected List<Dog> GetSomeDogs() { MyParams myParams = new MyParams(); myParams.name = "Bud"; myParams.checkName = true; myParams.age = 0; myParams.checkAge = false; return query_GetDog(YourContext,myParams).ToList(); } The advantage here is that you get all the benifits of a pre-compiled quert. The disadvantages are that you most likely will end up with a where clause that is pretty difficult to maintain, that you will incur a bigger penalty for pre-compiling the query and that each query you run is not as efficient as it could be (particularly with joins thrown in). Another way is to build an EntitySQL query piece by piece, like we all did with SQL. protected List<Dod> GetSomeDogs( string name, int age) { string query = "select value dog from Entities.DogSet where 1 = 1 "; if( !String.IsNullOrEmpty(name) ) query = query + " and dog.Name == @Name "; if( age > 0 ) query = query + " and dog.Age == @Age "; ObjectQuery<Dog> oQuery = new ObjectQuery<Dog>( query, YourContext ); if( !String.IsNullOrEmpty(name) ) oQuery.Parameters.Add( new ObjectParameter( "Name", name ) ); if( age > 0 ) oQuery.Parameters.Add( new ObjectParameter( "Age", age ) ); return oQuery.ToList(); } Here the problems are: - there is no syntax checking during compilation - each different combination of parameters generate a different query which will need to be pre-compiled when it is first run. In this case, there are only 4 different possible queries (no params, age-only, name-only and both params), but you can see that there can be way more with a normal world search. - Noone likes to concatenate strings! Another option is to query a large subset of the data and then narrow it down in memory. This is particularly useful if you are working with a definite subset of the data, like all the dogs in a city. You know there are a lot but you also know there aren't that many... so your CityDog search page can load all the dogs for the city in memory, which is a single pre-compiled query and then refine the results protected List<Dod> GetSomeDogs( string name, int age, string city) { string query = "select value dog from Entities.DogSet where dog.Owner.Address.City == @City "; ObjectQuery<Dog> oQuery = new ObjectQuery<Dog>( query, YourContext ); oQuery.Parameters.Add( new ObjectParameter( "City", city ) ); List<Dog> dogs = oQuery.ToList(); if( !String.IsNullOrEmpty(name) ) dogs = dogs.Where( it => it.Name == name ); if( age > 0 ) dogs = dogs.Where( it => it.Age == age ); return dogs; } It is particularly useful when you start displaying all the data then allow for filtering. Problems: - Could lead to serious data transfer if you are not careful about your subset. - You can only filter on the data that you returned. It means that if you don't return the Dog.Owner association, you will not be able to filter on the Dog.Owner.Name So what is the best solution? There isn't any. You need to pick the solution that works best for you and your problem: - Use lambda-based query building when you don't care about pre-compiling your queries. - Use fully-defined pre-compiled Linq query when your object structure is not too complex. - Use EntitySQL/string concatenation when the structure could be complex and when the possible number of different resulting queries are small (which means fewer pre-compilation hits). - Use in-memory filtering when you are working with a smallish subset of the data or when you had to fetch all of the data on the data at first anyway (if the performance is fine with all the data, then filtering in memory will not cause any time to be spent in the db). Singleton access The best way to deal with your context and entities accross all your pages is to use the singleton pattern: public sealed class YourContext { private const string instanceKey = "On3GoModelKey"; YourContext(){} public static YourEntities Instance { get { HttpContext context = HttpContext.Current; if( context == null ) return Nested.instance; if (context.Items[instanceKey] == null) { On3GoEntities entity = new On3GoEntities(); context.Items[instanceKey] = entity; } return (YourEntities)context.Items[instanceKey]; } } class Nested { // Explicit static constructor to tell C# compiler // not to mark type as beforefieldinit static Nested() { } internal static readonly YourEntities instance = new YourEntities(); } } NoTracking, is it worth it? When executing a query, you can tell the framework to track the objects it will return or not. What does it mean? With tracking enabled (the default option), the framework will track what is going on with the object (has it been modified? Created? Deleted?) and will also link objects together, when further queries are made from the database, which is what is of interest here. For example, lets assume that Dog with ID == 2 has an owner which ID == 10. Dog dog = (from dog in YourContext.DogSet where dog.ID == 2 select dog).FirstOrDefault(); //dog.OwnerReference.IsLoaded == false; Person owner = (from o in YourContext.PersonSet where o.ID == 10 select dog).FirstOrDefault(); //dog.OwnerReference.IsLoaded == true; If we were to do the same with no tracking, the result would be different. ObjectQuery<Dog> oDogQuery = (ObjectQuery<Dog>) (from dog in YourContext.DogSet where dog.ID == 2 select dog); oDogQuery.MergeOption = MergeOption.NoTracking; Dog dog = oDogQuery.FirstOrDefault(); //dog.OwnerReference.IsLoaded == false; ObjectQuery<Person> oPersonQuery = (ObjectQuery<Person>) (from o in YourContext.PersonSet where o.ID == 10 select o); oPersonQuery.MergeOption = MergeOption.NoTracking; Owner owner = oPersonQuery.FirstOrDefault(); //dog.OwnerReference.IsLoaded == false; Tracking is very useful and in a perfect world without performance issue, it would always be on. But in this world, there is a price for it, in terms of performance. So, should you use NoTracking to speed things up? It depends on what you are planning to use the data for. Is there any chance that the data your query with NoTracking can be used to make update/insert/delete in the database? If so, don't use NoTracking because associations are not tracked and will causes exceptions to be thrown. In a page where there are absolutly no updates to the database, you can use NoTracking. Mixing tracking and NoTracking is possible, but it requires you to be extra careful with updates/inserts/deletes. The problem is that if you mix then you risk having the framework trying to Attach() a NoTracking object to the context where another copy of the same object exist with tracking on. Basicly, what I am saying is that Dog dog1 = (from dog in YourContext.DogSet where dog.ID == 2).FirstOrDefault(); ObjectQuery<Dog> oDogQuery = (ObjectQuery<Dog>) (from dog in YourContext.DogSet where dog.ID == 2 select dog); oDogQuery.MergeOption = MergeOption.NoTracking; Dog dog2 = oDogQuery.FirstOrDefault(); dog1 and dog2 are 2 different objects, one tracked and one not. Using the detached object in an update/insert will force an Attach() that will say "Wait a minute, I do already have an object here with the same database key. Fail". And when you Attach() one object, all of its hierarchy gets attached as well, causing problems everywhere. Be extra careful. How much faster is it with NoTracking It depends on the queries. Some are much more succeptible to tracking than other. I don't have a fast an easy rule for it, but it helps. So I should use NoTracking everywhere then? Not exactly. There are some advantages to tracking object. The first one is that the object is cached, so subsequent call for that object will not hit the database. That cache is only valid for the lifetime of the YourEntities object, which, if you use the singleton code above, is the same as the page lifetime. One page request == one YourEntity object. So for multiple calls for the same object, it will load only once per page request. (Other caching mechanism could extend that). What happens when you are using NoTracking and try to load the same object multiple times? The database will be queried each time, so there is an impact there. How often do/should you call for the same object during a single page request? As little as possible of course, but it does happens. Also remember the piece above about having the associations connected automatically for your? You don't have that with NoTracking, so if you load your data in multiple batches, you will not have a link to between them: ObjectQuery<Dog> oDogQuery = (ObjectQuery<Dog>)(from dog in YourContext.DogSet select dog); oDogQuery.MergeOption = MergeOption.NoTracking; List<Dog> dogs = oDogQuery.ToList(); ObjectQuery<Person> oPersonQuery = (ObjectQuery<Person>)(from o in YourContext.PersonSet select o); oPersonQuery.MergeOption = MergeOption.NoTracking; List<Person> owners = oPersonQuery.ToList(); In this case, no dog will have its .Owner property set. Some things to keep in mind when you are trying to optimize the performance. No lazy loading, what am I to do? This can be seen as a blessing in disguise. Of course it is annoying to load everything manually. However, it decreases the number of calls to the db and forces you to think about when you should load data. The more you can load in one database call the better. That was always true, but it is enforced now with this 'feature' of EF. Of course, you can call if( !ObjectReference.IsLoaded ) ObjectReference.Load(); if you want to, but a better practice is to force the framework to load the objects you know you will need in one shot. This is where the discussion about parametrized Includes begins to make sense. Lets say you have you Dog object public class Dog { public Dog Get(int id) { return YourContext.DogSet.FirstOrDefault(it => it.ID == id ); } } This is the type of function you work with all the time. It gets called from all over the place and once you have that Dog object, you will do very different things to it in different functions. First, it should be pre-compiled, because you will call that very often. Second, each different pages will want to have access to a different subset of the Dog data. Some will want the Owner, some the FavoriteToy, etc. Of course, you could call Load() for each reference you need anytime you need one. But that will generate a call to the database each time. Bad idea. So instead, each page will ask for the data it wants to see when it first request for the Dog object: static public Dog Get(int id) { return GetDog(entity,"");} static public Dog Get(int id, string includePath) { string query = "select value o " + " from YourEntities.DogSet as o " +

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