Search Results

Search found 6590 results on 264 pages for 'pdf generation'.

Page 135/264 | < Previous Page | 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142  | Next Page >

• Entity Framework: Auto-updating foreign key when setting a new object reference

  - by Adrian Grigore

  Hi, I am porting an existing application from Linq to SQL to Entity Framework 4 (default code generation). One difference I noticed between the two is that a foreign key property are not updated when resetting the object reference. Now I need to decide how to deal with this. For example supposing you have two entity types, Company and Employee. One Company has many Employees. In Linq To SQL, setting the company also sets the company id: var company=new Company(ID=1); var employee=new Employee(); Debug.Assert(employee.CompanyID==0); employee.Company=company; Debug.Assert(employee.CompanyID==1); //Works fine! In Entity Framework (and without using any code template customization) this does not work: var company=new Company(ID=1); var employee=new Employee(); Debug.Assert(employee.CompanyID==0); employee.Company=company; Debug.Assert(employee.CompanyID==1); //Throws, since CompanyID was not updated! How can I make EF behave the same way as LinqToSQL? I had a look at the default code generation T4 template, but I could not figure out how to make the necessary changes.

  Read the article

• How to encapsulate a third party complex object structure?

  - by tangens

  Motivation Currently I'm using the java parser japa to create an abstract syntax tree (AST) of a java file. With this AST I'm doing some code generation (e.g.: if there's an annotation on a method, create some other source files, ...) Problem When my code generation becomes more complex, I've to dive deeper into the structure of the AST (e.g. I have to use visitors to extract some type information of method parameters). But I'm not sure if I want to stay with japa or if I will change the parser library later. Because my code generator uses freemarker (which isn't good at automatic refactoring) I want the interface that it uses to access the AST information to be stable, even if I decide to change the java parser. Question What's the best way to encapsulate complex datastructures of third party libraries? I could create my own datatypes and copy the parts of the AST that I need into these. I could create lots of specialized access methods that work with the AST and create exactly the infos I need (e.g. the fully qualified return type of a method as one string, or the first template parameter of a class). I could create wrapper classes for the japa datastructures I currently need and embed the japa types inside, so that I can delegate requests to the japa types and transform the resulting japa types to my wrapper classes again. Which solution should I take? Are there other (better) solutions to this problem?

  Read the article

• Silverlight Business Application template with WCF is throwing warning.

  - by Manoj

  Hi, I am using the Silvelight Business Application template. I wrote a function which uses Membership.getUserList function to return the user list. I tried exposing it as Service using WCF. But when I try to compile the client side code it throws a warning saying "Client Proxy Generation for user_authentication.Web.Service1 failed'. Why does it happen? The complete warning message is: Warning 4 Client proxy generation for service 'user_authentication.Web.Service1' failed: Generating metadata files... Warning: Unable to load a service with configName 'user_authentication.Web.Service1'. To export a service provide both the assembly containing the service type and an executable with configuration for this service. Details:Either none of the assemblies passed were executables with configuration files or none of the configuration files contained services with the config name 'user_authentication.Web.Service1'. Warning: No metadata files were generated. No service contracts were exported. To export a service, use the /serviceName option. To export data contracts, specify the /dataContractOnly option. This can sometimes occur in certain security contexts, such as when the assembly is loaded over a UNC network file share. If this is the case, try copying the assembly into a trusted environment and running it.

  Read the article

• Advanced All In One .NET Framework (should i go for a software factory ?)

  - by alfredo dobrekk

  Hi, i m starting a new project that would basically take input from user and save them to database among about 30 screens, and i would like to find a framework that will allow the maximum number of these features out of the box : .net c#. windows form. unit testing continuous integration logging screens with lists, combo boxes, text boxes, add, delete, save, cancel that are easy to update when you add a property to your classes or a field to your database. auto completion on controls to help user find its way use of an orm like nhibernate easy multithreading and display of wait screens for user easy undo redo tabbed child windows search forms ability to grant access to some functionnalities according to user profiles mvp/mvvm or whatever design patterns either some code generation from database to c# classe or generation of database schema from c# classes some kind of database versioning / upgrade to easily update database when i release patches to application once in production automatic control resizing code metrics analysis some code generator i can use against my entities that would generate some rough form i can rearrange after code documentation generator ... At this point i have 3 options : Build from scratch on top of clr :( Find functionnalities among several open source framework and use them as a stack for infrastucture Find a "software factory" I know its lot but i really would like to use existing code to build upon so i can focus on business rules. What open source tools would u use to achieve these ?

  Read the article

• Handle complex options with Boost's program_options

  - by R S

  I have a program that generates graphs using different multi-level models. Each multi-level model consists of a generation of a smaller seed graph (say, 50 nodes) which can be created from several models (for example - for each possible edge, choose to include it with probability p). After the seed graph generation, the graph is expanded into a larger one (say 1000 nodes), using one of another set of models. In each of the two stages, each model require a different number of parameters. I would like to be have program_options parse the different possible parameters, according to the names of the models. For example, say I have two seed graphs models: SA, which has 1 parameters, and SB, which has two. Also for the expansion part, I have two models: A and B, again with 1 and 2 parameters, respectively. I would like to be able do something like: ./graph_generator --seed=SA 0.1 --expansion=A 0.2 ./graph_generator --seed=SB 0.1 3 --expansion=A 0.2 ./graph_generator --seed=SA 0.1 --expansion=B 10 20 ./graph_generator --seed=SB 0.1 3 --expansion=B 10 20 and have the parameters parsed correctly. Is that even possible?

  Read the article

• How-To Configure Weblogic, Agile PLM and an F5 LTM

  - by Brian Dunbar

  Agile, Weblogic, and an F5 walk into a bar ... I've got this Agile PLM v 9.3 Running on WebLogic, two managed servers. An F5 BigIP LTM. We're upgrading from Agile v 9.2.1.4 running on OAS. The problem is that while the Windows client works fine the Java client does not. My setup is identical to one outlined in F5's doc: http://www.f5.com/pdf/deployment-guides/bea-bigip45-dg.pdf When I launch the java client it returns this error "Server is not valid or is unavailable." Oracle claims Agile PLM is setup correctly, but won't comment on the specifics of the load balancer. F5 reports the configuration is correct but can't comment on the specifics of the application. I am merely the guy in a vortex of finger-pointing who wants my application to work. It's that or give up on WLS and move back to OAS. Which has it's own problems but at least we know how it works. Any ideas?

  Read the article

• Why is my Current Printer unavailable in Office ?

  - by cros

  Whenever I try to print any document from Microsoft Office 2007 in Windows Vista 64-bit there is a great possibility that the print job will fail with the following error message: Current printer is unavailable. Select another printer. Only problem is no printer works, not even Bullzip PDF Printer. The only way to resolve this that I have found so far is a reboot, but I don't want to do that all the time. I am using Windows Vista 64-bit. I've had the problem using both SP1 and SP2. The problem occurs on both locally installed and network printers, as well as the virtual printer Bullzip PDF Printer. My primary source of the problem has been Excel, but the error has also occurred in Word. Changing the default printer and restarting the Microsoft Office-application solves this temporarily, but not permanently. Google:ing the error message returns a lot of questions but no solutions, so seems like a frequent problem. What could be a permanent solution for this problem? UPDATE: It seems that my problem stems from me opening MS Office applications by opening a document from Total Commander with administrative rights. This somehow makes the applications not find the printers. Opening MS Office applications either from the Start menu or by opening a document in a non-administrator Explorer allows me to print.

  Read the article

• Issue running 32-bit executable on 64-bit Windows

  - by David Murdoch

  I'm using wkhtmltopdf to convert HTML web pages to PDFs. This works perfectly on my 32-bit dev server [unfortunately, I can't ship my machine :-p ]. However, when I deploy to the web application's 64-bit server the following errors are displayed: (running from cmd.exe) C:\>wkhtmltopdf http://www.google.com google.pdf Loading pages (1/5) QFontEngine::loadEngine: GetTextMetrics failed () ] 10% QFontEngineWin: GetTextMetrics failed () QFontEngineWin: GetTextMetrics failed () QFontEngine::loadEngine: GetTextMetrics failed () QFontEngineWin: GetTextMetrics failed () QFontEngineWin: GetTextMetrics failed () QFontEngineWin: GetTextMetrics failed () QFontEngine::loadEngine: GetTextMetrics failed () ] 36% QFontEngineWin: GetTextMetrics failed () QFontEngineWin: GetTextMetrics failed () // ...etc.... and the PDF is created and saved... just WITHOUT text. All form-fields, images, borders, tables, divs, spans, ps, etc are rendered accurately...just void of any text at all. Server information: Windows edition: Windows Server Standard Service Pack 2 Processor: Intel Xeon E5410 @ 2.33GHz 2.33 GHz Memory: 8.00 GB System type: 64-bit Operating System Can anyone give me a clue as to what is happening and how I can fix this? Also, I wasn't sure what to tag/title this question with...so if you can think of better tags/title comment them or edit the question. :-)

  Read the article

• How-To Configure Weblogic, Agile PLM and an F5 LTM

  - by Brian Dunbar

  Agile, Weblogic, and an F5 walk into a bar ... I've got this Agile PLM v 9.3 Running on WebLogic, two managed servers. An F5 BigIP LTM. We're upgrading from Agile v 9.2.1.4 running on OAS. The problem is that while the Windows client works fine the Java client does not. My setup is identical to one outlined in F5's doc: http://www.f5.com/pdf/deployment-guides/bea-bigip45-dg.pdf When I launch the java client it returns this error "Server is not valid or is unavailable." Oracle claims Agile PLM is setup correctly, but won't comment on the specifics of the load balancer. F5 reports the configuration is correct but can't comment on the specifics of the application. I am merely the guy in a vortex of finger-pointing who wants my application to work. It's that or give up on WLS and move back to OAS. Which has it's own problems but at least we know how it works. Any ideas?

  Read the article

• Shell command slow when using pipe, fast with intermediate file

  - by plang

  Does anyone understand this huge difference in processing time, when using an intermediate file, or when using a pipe? I'm converting tiff to pdf using standard tools on a fresh debian squeeze server. A standard way of doing this is to convert to ps first. Without pipe: root@web5:~# time tiff2ps test.tif > test.ps real 0m0.860s user 0m0.744s sys 0m0.112s root@web5:~# time ps2pdf13 -sPAPERSIZE=a4 test.ps > test.pdf real 0m0.667s user 0m0.612s sys 0m0.060s With pipe: root@web5:~# time tiff2ps test.tif | ps2pdf13 -sPAPERSIZE=a4 - > test.pdf real 1m6.098s user 0m15.861s sys 0m50.9 During the last command, gs process is at 100% all the time. Update: Here is an strace output for the ps generation: root@web5:~# strace tiff2ps test.tif > test.ps execve("/usr/bin/tiff2ps", ["tiff2ps", "test.tif"], [/* 28 vars */]) = 0 brk(0) = 0x1395000 access("/etc/ld.so.nohwcap", F_OK) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) mmap(NULL, 8192, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x7fb5a1937000 access("/etc/ld.so.preload", R_OK) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/etc/ld.so.cache", O_RDONLY) = 3 fstat(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=21735, ...}) = 0 mmap(NULL, 21735, PROT_READ, MAP_PRIVATE, 3, 0) = 0x7fb5a1931000 close(3) = 0 access("/etc/ld.so.nohwcap", F_OK) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/usr/lib/libtiff.so.4", O_RDONLY) = 3 read(3, "\177ELF\2\1\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\3\0>\0\1\0\0\0P\200\0\0\0\0\0\0"..., 832) = 832 fstat(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=405128, ...}) = 0 mmap(NULL, 2501416, PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0) = 0x7fb5a14b9000 mprotect(0x7fb5a151a000, 2093056, PROT_NONE) = 0 mmap(0x7fb5a1719000, 12288, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0x60000) = 0x7fb5a1719000 close(3) = 0 access("/etc/ld.so.nohwcap", F_OK) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/usr/lib/libjpeg.so.62", O_RDONLY) = 3 read(3, "\177ELF\2\1\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\3\0>\0\1\0\0\0\3408\0\0\0\0\0\0"..., 832) = 832 fstat(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=145048, ...}) = 0 mmap(NULL, 2240080, PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0) = 0x7fb5a1296000 mprotect(0x7fb5a12b9000, 2093056, PROT_NONE) = 0 mmap(0x7fb5a14b8000, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0x22000) = 0x7fb5a14b8000 close(3) = 0 access("/etc/ld.so.nohwcap", F_OK) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/usr/lib/libz.so.1", O_RDONLY) = 3 read(3, "\177ELF\2\1\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\3\0>\0\1\0\0\0\260\"\0\0\0\0\0\0"..., 832) = 832 fstat(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=93936, ...}) = 0 mmap(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x7fb5a1930000 mmap(NULL, 2188976, PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0) = 0x7fb5a107f000 mprotect(0x7fb5a1096000, 2093056, PROT_NONE) = 0 mmap(0x7fb5a1295000, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0x16000) = 0x7fb5a1295000 close(3) = 0 access("/etc/ld.so.nohwcap", F_OK) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/lib/libm.so.6", O_RDONLY) = 3 read(3, "\177ELF\2\1\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\3\0>\0\1\0\0\0\360>\0\0\0\0\0\0"..., 832) = 832 fstat(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=530736, ...}) = 0 mmap(NULL, 2625768, PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0) = 0x7fb5a0dfd000 mprotect(0x7fb5a0e7d000, 2097152, PROT_NONE) = 0 mmap(0x7fb5a107d000, 8192, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0x80000) = 0x7fb5a107d000 close(3) = 0 access("/etc/ld.so.nohwcap", F_OK) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/lib/libc.so.6", O_RDONLY) = 3 read(3, "\177ELF\2\1\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\3\0>\0\1\0\0\0\240\355\1\0\0\0\0\0"..., 832) = 832 fstat(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0755, st_size=1437064, ...}) = 0 mmap(NULL, 3545160, PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0) = 0x7fb5a0a9b000 mprotect(0x7fb5a0bf4000, 2093056, PROT_NONE) = 0 mmap(0x7fb5a0df3000, 20480, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0x158000) = 0x7fb5a0df3000 mmap(0x7fb5a0df8000, 18504, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x7fb5a0df8000 close(3) = 0 mmap(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x7fb5a192f000 mmap(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x7fb5a192e000 mmap(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x7fb5a192d000 arch_prctl(ARCH_SET_FS, 0x7fb5a192e700) = 0 mprotect(0x7fb5a0df3000, 16384, PROT_READ) = 0 mprotect(0x7fb5a107d000, 4096, PROT_READ) = 0 mprotect(0x7fb5a1939000, 4096, PROT_READ) = 0 munmap(0x7fb5a1931000, 21735) = 0 open("test.tif", O_RDONLY) = 3 brk(0) = 0x1395000 brk(0x13b6000) = 0x13b6000 read(3, "II*\0\10\0\0\0", 8) = 8 fstat(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=1825656, ...}) = 0 mmap(NULL, 1825656, PROT_READ, MAP_SHARED, 3, 0) = 0x7fb5a176f000 open("/proc/meminfo", O_RDONLY) = 4 fstat(4, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0444, st_size=0, ...}) = 0 mmap(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x7fb5a1936000 read(4, "MemTotal: 2090844 kB\nMemF"..., 1024) = 1024 close(4) = 0 munmap(0x7fb5a1936000, 4096) = 0 write(2, "TIFFReadDirectory: ", 19TIFFReadDirectory: ) = 19 write(2, "Warning, ", 9Warning, ) = 9 write(2, "test.tif: wrong data type 7 for "..., 59test.tif: wrong data type 7 for "RichTIFFIPTC"; tag ignored) = 59 write(2, ".\n", 2. ) = 2 gettimeofday({1334836895, 374666}, NULL) = 0 fstat(1, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0664, st_size=0, ...}) = 0 mmap(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x7fb5a1936000 open("/etc/localtime", O_RDONLY) = 4 fstat(4, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=1892, ...}) = 0 fstat(4, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=1892, ...}) = 0 mmap(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x7fb5a1935000 read(4, "TZif2\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\4\0\0\0\4\0\0\0\0"..., 4096) = 1892 lseek(4, -1217, SEEK_CUR) = 675 read(4, "TZif2\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\6\0\0\0\6\0\0\0\0"..., 4096) = 1217 close(4) = 0 munmap(0x7fb5a1935000, 4096) = 0 write(1, "%!PS-Adobe-3.0 EPSF-3.0\n%%Creato"..., 4096) = 4096 write(1, "fffffffffffffffffffffffffffff\nff"..., 4096) = 4096 write(1, "ffffffffffffffffffff\nfffffffffff"..., 4096) = 4096 write(1, "fffffffffff\nffffffffffffffffffff"..., 4096) = 4096 write(1, "ff\nfffffffffffffffffffffffffffff"..., 4096) = 4096 write(1, "ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff"..., 4096) = 4096 write(1, "ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff"..., 4096) = 4096 write(1, "ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff"..., 4096) = 4096 write(1, "ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff"..., 4096) = 4096 write(1, "ffffffffffffffffffffffff\nfffffff"..., 4096) = 4096 Here is an strace output for the piped version: PS generation seems to be much slower when output is piped into ps2pdf13. root@web5:~# strace tiff2ps test.tif | ps2pdf13 -sPAPERSIZE=a4 - > test.pdf execve("/usr/bin/tiff2ps", ["tiff2ps", "test.tif"], [/* 28 vars */]) = 0 brk(0) = 0x1b97000 access("/etc/ld.so.nohwcap", F_OK) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) mmap(NULL, 8192, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x7f9208bb1000 access("/etc/ld.so.preload", R_OK) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/etc/ld.so.cache", O_RDONLY) = 3 fstat(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=21735, ...}) = 0 mmap(NULL, 21735, PROT_READ, MAP_PRIVATE, 3, 0) = 0x7f9208bab000 close(3) = 0 access("/etc/ld.so.nohwcap", F_OK) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/usr/lib/libtiff.so.4", O_RDONLY) = 3 read(3, "\177ELF\2\1\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\3\0>\0\1\0\0\0P\200\0\0\0\0\0\0"..., 832) = 832 fstat(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=405128, ...}) = 0 mmap(NULL, 2501416, PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0) = 0x7f9208733000 mprotect(0x7f9208794000, 2093056, PROT_NONE) = 0 mmap(0x7f9208993000, 12288, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0x60000) = 0x7f9208993000 close(3) = 0 access("/etc/ld.so.nohwcap", F_OK) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/usr/lib/libjpeg.so.62", O_RDONLY) = 3 read(3, "\177ELF\2\1\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\3\0>\0\1\0\0\0\3408\0\0\0\0\0\0"..., 832) = 832 fstat(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=145048, ...}) = 0 mmap(NULL, 2240080, PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0) = 0x7f9208510000 mprotect(0x7f9208533000, 2093056, PROT_NONE) = 0 mmap(0x7f9208732000, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0x22000) = 0x7f9208732000 close(3) = 0 access("/etc/ld.so.nohwcap", F_OK) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/usr/lib/libz.so.1", O_RDONLY) = 3 read(3, "\177ELF\2\1\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\3\0>\0\1\0\0\0\260\"\0\0\0\0\0\0"..., 832) = 832 fstat(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=93936, ...}) = 0 mmap(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x7f9208baa000 mmap(NULL, 2188976, PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0) = 0x7f92082f9000 mprotect(0x7f9208310000, 2093056, PROT_NONE) = 0 mmap(0x7f920850f000, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0x16000) = 0x7f920850f000 close(3) = 0 access("/etc/ld.so.nohwcap", F_OK) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/lib/libm.so.6", O_RDONLY) = 3 read(3, "\177ELF\2\1\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\3\0>\0\1\0\0\0\360>\0\0\0\0\0\0"..., 832) = 832 fstat(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=530736, ...}) = 0 mmap(NULL, 2625768, PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0) = 0x7f9208077000 mprotect(0x7f92080f7000, 2097152, PROT_NONE) = 0 mmap(0x7f92082f7000, 8192, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0x80000) = 0x7f92082f7000 close(3) = 0 access("/etc/ld.so.nohwcap", F_OK) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/lib/libc.so.6", O_RDONLY) = 3 read(3, "\177ELF\2\1\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\3\0>\0\1\0\0\0\240\355\1\0\0\0\0\0"..., 832) = 832 fstat(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0755, st_size=1437064, ...}) = 0 mmap(NULL, 3545160, PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0) = 0x7f9207d15000 mprotect(0x7f9207e6e000, 2093056, PROT_NONE) = 0 mmap(0x7f920806d000, 20480, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0x158000) = 0x7f920806d000 mmap(0x7f9208072000, 18504, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x7f9208072000 close(3) = 0 mmap(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x7f9208ba9000 mmap(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x7f9208ba8000 mmap(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x7f9208ba7000 arch_prctl(ARCH_SET_FS, 0x7f9208ba8700) = 0 mprotect(0x7f920806d000, 16384, PROT_READ) = 0 mprotect(0x7f92082f7000, 4096, PROT_READ) = 0 mprotect(0x7f9208bb3000, 4096, PROT_READ) = 0 munmap(0x7f9208bab000, 21735) = 0 open("test.tif", O_RDONLY) = 3 brk(0) = 0x1b97000 brk(0x1bb8000) = 0x1bb8000 read(3, "II*\0\10\0\0\0", 8) = 8 fstat(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=1825656, ...}) = 0 mmap(NULL, 1825656, PROT_READ, MAP_SHARED, 3, 0) = 0x7f92089e9000 open("/proc/meminfo", O_RDONLY) = 4 fstat(4, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0444, st_size=0, ...}) = 0 mmap(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x7f9208bb0000 read(4, "MemTotal: 2090844 kB\nMemF"..., 1024) = 1024 close(4) = 0 munmap(0x7f9208bb0000, 4096) = 0 write(2, "TIFFReadDirectory: ", 19TIFFReadDirectory: ) = 19 write(2, "Warning, ", 9Warning, ) = 9 write(2, "test.tif: wrong data type 7 for "..., 59test.tif: wrong data type 7 for "RichTIFFIPTC"; tag ignored) = 59 write(2, ".\n", 2. ) = 2 gettimeofday({1334836513, 114140}, NULL) = 0 fstat(1, {st_mode=S_IFIFO|0600, st_size=0, ...}) = 0 mmap(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x7f9208bb0000 open("/etc/localtime", O_RDONLY) = 4 fstat(4, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=1892, ...}) = 0 fstat(4, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=1892, ...}) = 0 mmap(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x7f9208baf000 read(4, "TZif2\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\4\0\0\0\4\0\0\0\0"..., 4096) = 1892 lseek(4, -1217, SEEK_CUR) = 675 read(4, "TZif2\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\6\0\0\0\6\0\0\0\0"..., 4096) = 1217 close(4) = 0 munmap(0x7f9208baf000, 4096) = 0 write(1, "%!PS-Adobe-3.0 EPSF-3.0\n%%Creato"..., 4096) = 4096 write(1, "fffffffffffffffffffffffffffff\nff"..., 4096) = 4096 write(1, "ffffffffffffffffffff\nfffffffffff"..., 4096) = 4096 write(1, "fffffffffff\nffffffffffffffffffff"..., 4096) = 4096 write(1, "ff\nfffffffffffffffffffffffffffff"..., 4096) = 4096 write(1, "ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff"..., 4096) = 4096 write(1, "ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff"..., 4096) = 4096 write(1, "ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff"..., 4096) = 4096 write(1, "ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff"..., 4096) = 4096 ...etc...

  Read the article

• Windows 2003 R2 zip program blocking EXE file

  - by Harvey Kwok

  I have a Windows 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition SP2 32-bit machine with all latest patch (as of 1-6-2011). It's a VM. I have a zip file, including a pdf file, a txt file and a exe file. If I copy the zip file onto the machine via a shared network drive, I can unzip all the files properly without problems. If I put the zip file on my web server and then I download it from there, I can only unzip the pdf file and txt file. The exe file is silently ignored. I searched the web and found somebody reporting similar issue on XP. If I right click on the zip file downloaded from the web server, at the bottom of the general page, it has a warning message saying that "This file came from antoher computer and might be blocked to help protect this computer" I understand that I can solve the problem by simply clicking the "Unblock" button and extract the file again. The things that bothering me is that why the warning message says "might be blocked"? I tried downloading the same zip file from the same web server on to my Windows 7 box with latest patch. It also shows the same warning message. However, even with the warning message, I can extract all the files properly without clicking the "Unblock" button. Is it a bug in Windows 2003 R2 SP1? Is there any security settings controlling this? How likely will the end user seeing this problem? I want to dig into this because I am worrying people downloading my zip file from my web server might see similar problems. The first thought coming to the user's mind will be the zip file is somehow corrupted. Honestly, I didn't know this "Unblock" feature in Windows before I run into this problem. EDIT I just tried it on another Windows 2003 R2 SP1 machine. The zip program doesn't block the EXE file on that machine either. Both Windows 2003 R2 SP1 machines are joining to the same forest.

  Read the article

• Adobe e-book reader ("Digital Editions") not downloading on Mac OS X

  - by doug

  i recently bought a couple of books from ebooks.com, which i thought would be ordinary pdf files. After paying for them, and downloading them, you learn that while they are pdf files, they come with a lot of DRM baggage. The most conspicuous is that you can only view these files using an Adobe ebook reader called Adobe Digital Editions. (Note: this is not the ordinary Adobe Acrobat Reader, or anything close--it's a dedicated app for reading DRM-laden files. Fine--i'll know better next time. Still, i paid for these books and there's only one way i can actually read them, which happens to be an App that i seem to be unable to download. Here's the error message i get: "Couldn't write the application to the hard disk. Please verify the hard disk is available and try again" I've tried on several different browsers. My rig is a MBP, OS X 10.6.2. I've also checked the Adobe boards and this doesn't appear to be a known issue, nor could i find anything on their discussion forums. And just to be sure, i've checked my hard disk--no problems, plenty of space, and i have no problem, nor have i ever downloading other apps.

  Read the article

• mod_rpaf with apache error_log

  - by Camden S.

  I'm using mod-rpaf with Apache 2.4 and it's working properly (showing the real client IP's) in my Apache access_log... but not in my error_log. My error log just shows the client IP address of the proxy server (my load balancer in this case) Here's an example of what I see in my error_log where 123.123.123.123 is the IP of my load balancer/proxy. == /usr/local/apache2/logs/error_log <== [Tue Jun 05 20:24:31.027525 2012] [access_compat:error] [pid 9145:tid 140485731845888] [client 123.123.123.123:20396] AH01797: client denied by server configuration: /wwwroot/private/secret.pdf The exact same request produces the following in my access_log where 456.456.456.456 is a real client IP (not the IP of the load balancer). 456.456.456.456 - - [05/Jun/2012:20:24:31 +0000] "GET /wwwroot/private/secret.pdf HTTP/1.1" 403 228 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.7; rv:12.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/12.0" Here's my httpd.conf entry: # RPAF LoadModule rpaf_module modules/mod_rpaf-2.0.so RPAFenable On RPAFproxy_ips 127.0.0.1 123.123.123.123 RPAFsethostname On RPAFheader X-Forwarded-For What do I need to do to get the real IP addresses showing in my Apache error_log?

  Read the article

• Deleting certain files sits at "preparing to recycle" on Windows 7?

  - by Rachel

  We recently setup one of our users with a brand new Windows 7 computer, however she is unable to delete certain files. With some testing, I found I cannot move, rename, or view properties of these files either. When trying to delete the file, it just sits at the "Preparing to recycle" popup, however the "from" section says "Discovering items..." Clicking "More Details" on the popup shows me that it can't find the file name or where it's recycling from: Other notes... All the affected files are .pdf files that get created via a scanner. Other pdf files are fine. Opening the files works fine. I can open the file, Save As a new file, and delete the new one just fine Trying to delete the file via command prompt just sits there Rebooting the computer will let me manipulate the files like normal, however this user is responsible for scanning hundreds of documents a day and I'd rather not have to tell her to reboot her computer to delete files. The user is part of the administrator group on the computer The Owner of the affected files is the user attrib of files is just A

  Read the article

• IIS / Virtual Directory authentication.

  - by Chris L

  I have an IIS(v6)/Windows 2003/.Net 3.5(app code, libraries etc.) server hosting a website at www.mywebsite.com mapped to E:\Inetpub\wwwroot\mywebsite, we also have a virtual directory (VirtDir) mapped out to E:\Inetpub\wwwroot\mywebsite\files (although in theory this could be in a different directory or a separate machine) where we store a customer's files(a bunch of .pdf & .xls). Currently to access a file you can enter into the url something like: www.mywebsite.com/VirtDir/Customer/myFile.pdf and get access to the file. The problem is the user doesn't have to log into www.mywebsite.com to get access to the file, we would prefer them to log in first. We would like the user to login via the mywebsite and if valid, let them download files from the virtual directory. The www.mywebsite.com and VirtDir are separate sites on the same farm. Allow Anon Access, and Integrated Windows Authentication both enabled. I'm more of a developer and less of a Sys Admin, but hopefully I'm in the right spot, any help would be appreciated.

  Read the article

• Acrobat 9 Pro - shortcut key failure

  - by Rick G

  I create numerous Acrobat PDF files from MS Word documents via Acrobat 9 Pro. I often need to print a single page from an Acrobat PDF file. I normally use the keyboard shortcut Control-P (Print Dialog) and ALT-U (current page). I recently set up a new PC with Windows 7, and this shortcut combination does not work. When I press ALT-U, it moves the highlight to the correct item, but does not select the radio button. If I press the Enter key, then I print the entire document instead of the current page - VERY annoying! It looks like there is an error in the design of the Print dialog for Acrobat. There are two items which have ALT-U as the keyboard shortcut. They are "Current page" in the Print range frame, and "Summarize comments". I have been able to use Control-P (Print Dialog) and ALT-U (current page) with no problems on virtual machines and older computers running Windows XP. Maybe I installed some software on the new PC that is messing up the keyboard shortcut. Is there any way to figure out the culprit - or is this a known problem with Acrobat?

  Read the article

• how to remove background layer of djvu file

  - by Jon

  Hello, I've downloaded some files from the Internet Archive. They come in different file formats and most of the time I use pdf. However, sometimes the scans are saves in colour instead of b/w. This makes it difficult/impossible to read on a dedicated ebook reader. In that case I downloaded the djvu files as on the PC you can select which layer (color, bw,fore,back) one would like to see. Selecting the bw gives excellent results. However, the ebook reader does not has this option. The question is, how can I remove /extract a layer from the djvu file and save only this layer. So far I've tried the following two approaches: 1) select bw in the djvu viewer on the PC and printed to postscript file. Followed by a ps2pdf conversion. This works, but generates a fairly large pdf file. Sure, I can again upload it to any2djvu but it just seems to much manual work for each file. 2) I tried the shared annotation feature and said (mode bw). This works on the PC as desired but is ignored on the ebook reader as the other layers are still present. Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

  Read the article

• RAID 6 that can read with least 1000 Mbit/s?

  - by Diblo Dk

  I purchased a Dell PERC 6/i which I expected to be able to read with 1000 Mbps. There is not much to do now, but there are some things I wanted knowledge about for another time. I have configured it with four 2 TByte drives and RAID 6. It have 256 MByt ram and transfer rate of 300 Mbps. The benchmark test showed: Min read rate: 136.3 Mbps Max read rate: 329,6 Mbps Avg read rate: 242,2 Mbps What could I had done to get at least 1000 Mbps? Is it normal for internal and external RAID controllers to have a lower transfer rate eg. 300 Mbps? (I did not noticed at the time that it was not 3 Gbps) How would a RAID 10 had performed compared to RAID 6 or 5? Would it have been better to use software RAID (Linux) with the internal 3 Gbps SATA controller? UPDATE: The drives is SATA III 6 Gbps. http://www.seagate.com/files/staticfiles/docs/pdf/datasheet/disc/desktop-hdd-data-sheet-ds1770-1-1212us.pdf (2TB)

  Read the article

• 404 with serving static files in a custom nginx configuration

  - by code90

  In my nginx configuration, I have the following: location /admin/ { alias /usr/share/php/wtlib_4/apps/admin/; location ~* .*\.php$ { try_files $uri $uri/ @php_admin; } location ~* \.(js|css|png|jpg|jpeg|gif|ico|pdf|zip|rar|air)$ { expires 7d; access_log off; } } location ~ ^/admin/modules/([^/]+)(.*\.(html|js|json|css|png|jpg|jpeg|gif|ico|pdf|zip|rar|air))$ { alias /usr/share/php/wtlib_4/modules/$1/admin/$2; } location ~ ^/admin/modules/([^/]+)(.*)$ { try_files $uri @php_admin_modules; } location @php_admin { if ($fastcgi_script_name ~ /admin(/.*\.php)$) { set $valid_fastcgi_script_name $1; } fastcgi_pass $byr_pass; fastcgi_index index.php; fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /usr/share/php/wtlib_4/apps/admin$valid_fastcgi_script_name; fastcgi_param REDIRECT_STATUS 200; include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params; } location @php_admin_modules { if ($fastcgi_script_name ~ /admin/modules/([^/]+)(.*)$) { set $byr_module $1; set $byr_rest $2; } fastcgi_pass $byr_pass; fastcgi_index index.php; fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /usr/share/php/wtlib_4/modules/$byr_module/admin$byr_rest; fastcgi_param REDIRECT_STATUS 200; include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params; } Following is the requested url which ends up with "404": http://www.{domainname}.com/admin/modules/cms/styles/cms.css Following is the error log: [error] 19551#0: *28 open() "/usr/share/php/wtlib_4/apps/admin/modules/cms/styles/cms.css" failed (2: No such file or directory), client: xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx, server: {domainname}.com, request: "GET /admin/modules/cms/styles/cms.css HTTP/1.1", host: "www.{domainname}.com" Following urls works fine: http://www.{domainname}.com/admin/modules/store/?a=manage http://www.{domainname}.com/admin/modules/cms/?a=cms.load Can anyone see what the problem could be? Thanks. PS. I am trying to migrate existing sites from apache to nginx.

  Read the article

• How can I read PDFs with e-reader on a Lenovo tablet?

  - by Jack M

  This is my first time using a tablet and I'm totally lost - this must be what computers look like to old people. This is a Lenovo Thinkpad tablet. I don't see a specific model number on it (it was passed down to me second hand). What I'd like to do is read a PDF. I'm fairly certain I successfully transferred the PDF onto the tablet via an SD card, and I noticed this thing has an app called "eReader" on it, so I started that up. All I see are empty bookshelves, and no obvious buttons or settings anywhere. I saw in multiple places that you have to, as one site puts it: ...copy and paste the relevant files into the eBooks folder and they will appear on the eReader shelf for your consumption... But I have no idea how to: Access the file system. Locate the eBooks folder. Copy and paste files. Will I need a file explorer app? If so, how can I install that given that my only method of getting data onto this tablet is an SD card (no wireless internet).

  Read the article

• How can I diagnose what's causing Outlook 2007 when sending an attachment to fail with error 800CCC0F even though the message was sent?

  - by James

  As the title suggests, I've got an issue where outlook 2007 is reporting it failed to send email with error 800ccc0f (unexpectedly terminated connection) but only with attachments. The email is actually sent, but outlook keeps retrying (stays in the outbox), generating more emails to the original recipient (which do get delivered) I've got QMail on the server side supporting a half dozen domains. It doesn't appear to matter which account I send from. I can successfully send attachments via alternate mail clients (webmail, thunderbird) while outlook is failing, or send messages without attachments; so it's seemingly not the accounts themselves or serverside, which leaves outlook as the culprit. There doesn't appear to be any pattern to the failures, and it's not consistent (I successfully sent an attachment as recently as 3 weeks ago) so I'm at a loss as to where to look. Qmail logs don't look any different between successes and failures. Has anybody seen this before/have a solution? UPDATE : It appears it's only PDF files that this occurs with, so I'm even more stumped. I can send html/docx/txt and zip, UNLESS the zip file contains a pdf ... whiskey tango foxtrot

  Read the article

• Printer irregularly producing garbage output

  - by John Gardeniers

  Every now and then instead of getting the proper output we get numerous pages, mostly with just a single line, of output which appears to be the raw PCL. My theory is that this happens when the first byte or two of the document is somehow not received by the printer, which then doesn't know how to interpret the rest and does it's best by spitting it out as text. This is a problem I've seen many times over the years but has been popping up more often since we upgraded to Win 7 64 bit, which introduced a number of headaches because of the HP lack of real support for 64 bits. It also appears to happen most often when printing PDF files. We have tried several different PDF readers in addition to Adobe's own but that hasn't helped. While we mainly use HP printers, and the problem is not limited to any particular model, I've also seen it happen on other brands, albeit to a lesser extent. I've also been unable to discern a difference between printers used via a print server or those connected directly by IP address. It also happens to USB attached printers. Because of the erratic nature of this problem there is precious little I can think of to try and debug it, so I'm after any ideas that might help to eliminate it.

  Read the article

• How do I get the PreviewDialog of Apache FOP to actually display my document?

  - by JRSofty

  Search as I may I have not found a solution to my problem here and I'm hoping the combined minds of StackOverflow will push me in the right direction. My problem is as follows, I'm developing a print and print preview portion of a messaging system's user agent. I was given specific XSLT templates that after transforming XML will produce a Formatting Objects document. With Apache FOP I've been able to render the FO document into PDF which is all fine and good, but I would also like to display it in a print preview dialog. Apache FOP contains such a class called PreviewDialog which requires in its constructor a FOUserAgent, which I can generate, and an object implementing the Renderable Interface. The Renderable Interface has one implementing class in the FOP package which is called InputHandler which takes in its constructor a standard io File object. Now here is where the trouble begins. I'm currently storing the FO document as a temp file and pass this as a File object to an InputHandler instance which is then passed to the PreviewDialog. I see the dialog appear on my screen and along the bottom in a status bar it says that it is generating the document, and that is all it does. Here is the code I'm trying to use. It isn't production code so it's not pretty: import java.io.BufferedOutputStream; import java.io.File; import java.io.FileNotFoundException; import java.io.FileOutputStream; import java.io.IOException; import java.io.OutputStream; import java.util.Random; import javax.xml.transform.Result; import javax.xml.transform.Source; import javax.xml.transform.Transformer; import javax.xml.transform.TransformerConfigurationException; import javax.xml.transform.TransformerException; import javax.xml.transform.TransformerFactory; import javax.xml.transform.sax.SAXResult; import javax.xml.transform.stream.StreamResult; import javax.xml.transform.stream.StreamSource; import org.apache.fop.apps.FOPException; import org.apache.fop.apps.FOUserAgent; import org.apache.fop.apps.Fop; import org.apache.fop.apps.FopFactory; import org.apache.fop.cli.InputHandler; import org.apache.fop.render.awt.viewer.PreviewDialog; public class PrintPreview { public void showPreview(final File xslt, final File xmlSource) { boolean err = false; OutputStream out = null; Transformer transformer = null; final String tempFileName = this.getTempDir() + this.generateTempFileName(); final String tempFoFile = tempFileName + ".fo"; final String tempPdfFile = tempFileName + ".pdf"; System.out.println(tempFileName); final TransformerFactory transformFactory = TransformerFactory .newInstance(); final FopFactory fopFactory = FopFactory.newInstance(); try { transformer = transformFactory .newTransformer(new StreamSource(xslt)); final Source src = new StreamSource(xmlSource); out = new FileOutputStream(tempFoFile); final Result res = new StreamResult(out); transformer.transform(src, res); System.out.println("XSLT Transform Completed"); } catch (final TransformerConfigurationException e) { err = true; e.printStackTrace(); } catch (final FileNotFoundException e) { err = true; e.printStackTrace(); } catch (final TransformerException e) { err = true; e.printStackTrace(); } finally { if (out != null) { try { out.close(); } catch (final IOException e) { // TODO Auto-generated catch block e.printStackTrace(); } } } System.out.println("Initializing Preview"); transformer = null; out = null; final File fo = new File(tempFoFile); final File pdf = new File(tempPdfFile); if (!err) { final FOUserAgent ua = fopFactory.newFOUserAgent(); try { transformer = transformFactory.newTransformer(); out = new FileOutputStream(pdf); out = new BufferedOutputStream(out); final Fop fop = fopFactory.newFop( MimeConstants.MIME_PDF, ua, out); final Source foSrc = new StreamSource(fo); final Result foRes = new SAXResult(fop.getDefaultHandler()); transformer.transform(foSrc, foRes); System.out.println("Transformation Complete"); } catch (final FOPException e) { err = true; e.printStackTrace(); } catch (final FileNotFoundException e) { err = true; e.printStackTrace(); } catch (final TransformerException e) { err = true; e.printStackTrace(); } finally { if (out != null) { try { out.close(); } catch (final IOException e) { // TODO Auto-generated catch block e.printStackTrace(); } } } if (!err) { System.out.println("Attempting to Preview"); final InputHandler inputHandler = new InputHandler(fo); PreviewDialog.createPreviewDialog(ua, inputHandler, true); } } // perform the clean up // f.delete(); } private String getTempDir() { final String p = "java.io.tmpdir"; return System.getProperty(p); } private String generateTempFileName() { final String charset = "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz1234567890abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz1234567890"; final StringBuffer sb = new StringBuffer(); Random r = new Random(); int seed = r.nextInt(); r = new Random(seed); for (int i = 0; i < 8; i++) { final int n = r.nextInt(71); seed = r.nextInt(); sb.append(charset.charAt(n)); r = new Random(seed); } return sb.toString(); } } Any help on this would be appreciated.

  Read the article

• Where does ASP.NET Web API Fit?

  - by Rick Strahl

  With the pending release of ASP.NET MVC 4 and the new ASP.NET Web API, there has been a lot of discussion of where the new Web API technology fits in the ASP.NET Web stack. There are a lot of choices to build HTTP based applications available now on the stack - we've come a long way from when WebForms and Http Handlers/Modules where the only real options. Today we have WebForms, MVC, ASP.NET Web Pages, ASP.NET AJAX, WCF REST and now Web API as well as the core ASP.NET runtime to choose to build HTTP content with. Web API definitely squarely addresses the 'API' aspect - building consumable services - rather than HTML content, but even to that end there are a lot of choices you have today. So where does Web API fit, and when doesn't it? But before we get into that discussion, let's talk about what a Web API is and why we should care. What's a Web API? HTTP 'APIs' (Microsoft's new terminology for a service I guess)  are becoming increasingly more important with the rise of the many devices in use today. Most mobile devices like phones and tablets run Apps that are using data retrieved from the Web over HTTP. Desktop applications are also moving in this direction with more and more online content and synching moving into even traditional desktop applications. The pending Windows 8 release promises an app like platform for both the desktop and other devices, that also emphasizes consuming data from the Cloud. Likewise many Web browser hosted applications these days are relying on rich client functionality to create and manipulate the browser user interface, using AJAX rather than server generated HTML data to load up the user interface with data. These mobile or rich Web applications use their HTTP connection to return data rather than HTML markup in the form of JSON or XML typically. But an API can also serve other kinds of data, like images or other binary files, or even text data and HTML (although that's less common). A Web API is what feeds rich applications with data. ASP.NET Web API aims to service this particular segment of Web development by providing easy semantics to route and handle incoming requests and an easy to use platform to serve HTTP data in just about any content format you choose to create and serve from the server. But .NET already has various HTTP Platforms The .NET stack already includes a number of technologies that provide the ability to create HTTP service back ends, and it has done so since the very beginnings of the .NET platform. From raw HTTP Handlers and Modules in the core ASP.NET runtime, to high level platforms like ASP.NET MVC, Web Forms, ASP.NET AJAX and the WCF REST engine (which technically is not ASP.NET, but can integrate with it), you've always been able to handle just about any kind of HTTP request and response with ASP.NET. The beauty of the raw ASP.NET platform is that it provides you everything you need to build just about any type of HTTP application you can dream up from low level APIs/custom engines to high level HTML generation engine. ASP.NET as a core platform clearly has stood the test of time 10+ years later and all other frameworks like Web API are built on top of this ASP.NET core. However, although it's possible to create Web APIs / Services using any of the existing out of box .NET technologies, none of them have been a really nice fit for building arbitrary HTTP based APIs. Sure, you can use an HttpHandler to create just about anything, but you have to build a lot of plumbing to build something more complex like a comprehensive API that serves a variety of requests, handles multiple output formats and can easily pass data up to the server in a variety of ways. Likewise you can use ASP.NET MVC to handle routing and creating content in various formats fairly easily, but it doesn't provide a great way to automatically negotiate content types and serve various content formats directly (it's possible to do with some plumbing code of your own but not built in). Prior to Web API, Microsoft's main push for HTTP services has been WCF REST, which was always an awkward technology that had a severe personality conflict, not being clear on whether it wanted to be part of WCF or purely a separate technology. In the end it didn't do either WCF compatibility or WCF agnostic pure HTTP operation very well, which made for a very developer-unfriendly environment. Personally I didn't like any of the implementations at the time, so much so that I ended up building my own HTTP service engine (as part of the West Wind Web Toolkit), as have a few other third party tools that provided much better integration and ease of use. With the release of Web API for the first time I feel that I can finally use the tools in the box and not have to worry about creating and maintaining my own toolkit as Web API addresses just about all the features I implemented on my own and much more. ASP.NET Web API provides a better HTTP Experience ASP.NET Web API differentiates itself from the previous Microsoft in-box HTTP service solutions in that it was built from the ground up around the HTTP protocol and its messaging semantics. Unlike WCF REST or ASP.NET AJAX with ASMX, it’s a brand new platform rather than bolted on technology that is supposed to work in the context of an existing framework. The strength of the new ASP.NET Web API is that it combines the best features of the platforms that came before it, to provide a comprehensive and very usable HTTP platform. Because it's based on ASP.NET and borrows a lot of concepts from ASP.NET MVC, Web API should be immediately familiar and comfortable to most ASP.NET developers. Here are some of the features that Web API provides that I like: Strong Support for URL Routing to produce clean URLs using familiar MVC style routing semantics Content Negotiation based on Accept headers for request and response serialization Support for a host of supported output formats including JSON, XML, ATOM Strong default support for REST semantics but they are optional Easily extensible Formatter support to add new input/output types Deep support for more advanced HTTP features via HttpResponseMessage and HttpRequestMessage classes and strongly typed Enums to describe many HTTP operations Convention based design that drives you into doing the right thing for HTTP Services Very extensible, based on MVC like extensibility model of Formatters and Filters Self-hostable in non-Web applications  Testable using testing concepts similar to MVC Web API is meant to handle any kind of HTTP input and produce output and status codes using the full spectrum of HTTP functionality available in a straight forward and flexible manner. Looking at the list above you can see that a lot of functionality is very similar to ASP.NET MVC, so many ASP.NET developers should feel quite comfortable with the concepts of Web API. The Routing and core infrastructure of Web API are very similar to how MVC works providing many of the benefits of MVC, but with focus on HTTP access and manipulation in Controller methods rather than HTML generation in MVC. There’s much improved support for content negotiation based on HTTP Accept headers with the framework capable of detecting automatically what content the client is sending and requesting and serving the appropriate data format in return. This seems like such a little and obvious thing, but it's really important. Today's service backends often are used by multiple clients/applications and being able to choose the right data format for what fits best for the client is very important. While previous solutions were able to accomplish this using a variety of mixed features of WCF and ASP.NET, Web API combines all this functionality into a single robust server side HTTP framework that intrinsically understands the HTTP semantics and subtly drives you in the right direction for most operations. And when you need to customize or do something that is not built in, there are lots of hooks and overrides for most behaviors, and even many low level hook points that allow you to plug in custom functionality with relatively little effort. No Brainers for Web API There are a few scenarios that are a slam dunk for Web API. If your primary focus of an application or even a part of an application is some sort of API then Web API makes great sense. HTTP ServicesIf you're building a comprehensive HTTP API that is to be consumed over the Web, Web API is a perfect fit. You can isolate the logic in Web API and build your application as a service breaking out the logic into controllers as needed. Because the primary interface is the service there's no confusion of what should go where (MVC or API). Perfect fit. Primary AJAX BackendsIf you're building rich client Web applications that are relying heavily on AJAX callbacks to serve its data, Web API is also a slam dunk. Again because much if not most of the business logic will probably end up in your Web API service logic, there's no confusion over where logic should go and there's no duplication. In Single Page Applications (SPA), typically there's very little HTML based logic served other than bringing up a shell UI and then filling the data from the server with AJAX which means the business logic required for data retrieval and data acceptance and validation too lives in the Web API. Perfect fit. Generic HTTP EndpointsAnother good fit are generic HTTP endpoints that to serve data or handle 'utility' type functionality in typical Web applications. If you need to implement an image server, or an upload handler in the past I'd implement that as an HTTP handler. With Web API you now have a well defined place where you can implement these types of generic 'services' in a location that can easily add endpoints (via Controller methods) or separated out as more full featured APIs. Granted this could be done with MVC as well, but Web API seems a clearer and more well defined place to store generic application services. This is one thing I used to do a lot of in my own libraries and Web API addresses this nicely. Great fit. Mixed HTML and AJAX Applications: Not a clear Choice  For all the commonality that Web API and MVC share they are fundamentally different platforms that are independent of each other. A lot of people have asked when does it make sense to use MVC vs. Web API when you're dealing with typical Web application that creates HTML and also uses AJAX functionality for rich functionality. While it's easy to say that all 'service'/AJAX logic should go into a Web API and all HTML related generation into MVC, that can often result in a lot of code duplication. Also MVC supports JSON and XML result data fairly easily as well so there's some confusion where that 'trigger point' is of when you should switch to Web API vs. just implementing functionality as part of MVC controllers. Ultimately there's a tradeoff between isolation of functionality and duplication. A good rule of thumb I think works is that if a large chunk of the application's functionality serves data Web API is a good choice, but if you have a couple of small AJAX requests to serve data to a grid or autocomplete box it'd be overkill to separate out that logic into a separate Web API controller. Web API does add overhead to your application (it's yet another framework that sits on top of core ASP.NET) so it should be worth it .Keep in mind that MVC can generate HTML and JSON/XML and just about any other content easily and that functionality is not going away, so just because you Web API is there it doesn't mean you have to use it. Web API is not a full replacement for MVC obviously either since there's not the same level of support to feed HTML from Web API controllers (although you can host a RazorEngine easily enough if you really want to go that route) so if you're HTML is part of your API or application in general MVC is still a better choice either alone or in combination with Web API. I suspect (and hope) that in the future Web API's functionality will merge even closer with MVC so that you might even be able to mix functionality of both into single Controllers so that you don't have to make any trade offs, but at the moment that's not the case. Some Issues To think about Web API is similar to MVC but not the Same Although Web API looks a lot like MVC it's not the same and some common functionality of MVC behaves differently in Web API. For example, the way single POST variables are handled is different than MVC and doesn't lend itself particularly well to some AJAX scenarios with POST data. Code Duplication I already touched on this in the Mixed HTML and Web API section, but if you build an MVC application that also exposes a Web API it's quite likely that you end up duplicating a bunch of code and - potentially - infrastructure. You may have to create authentication logic both for an HTML application and for the Web API which might need something different altogether. More often than not though the same logic is used, and there's no easy way to share. If you implement an MVC ActionFilter and you want that same functionality in your Web API you'll end up creating the filter twice. AJAX Data or AJAX HTML On a recent post's comments, David made some really good points regarding the commonality of MVC and Web API's and its place. One comment that caught my eye was a little more generic, regarding data services vs. HTML services. David says: I see a lot of merit in the combination of Knockout.js, client side templates and view models, calling Web API for a responsive UI, but sometimes late at night that still leaves me wondering why I would no longer be using some of the nice tooling and features that have evolved in MVC ;-) You know what - I can totally relate to that. On the last Web based mobile app I worked on, we decided to serve HTML partials to the client via AJAX for many (but not all!) things, rather than sending down raw data to inject into the DOM on the client via templating or direct manipulation. While there are definitely more bytes on the wire, with this, the overhead ended up being actually fairly small if you keep the 'data' requests small and atomic. Performance was often made up by the lack of client side rendering of HTML. Server rendered HTML for AJAX templating gives so much better infrastructure support without having to screw around with 20 mismatched client libraries. Especially with MVC and partials it's pretty easy to break out your HTML logic into very small, atomic chunks, so it's actually easy to create small rendering islands that can be used via composition on the server, or via AJAX calls to small, tight partials that return HTML to the client. Although this is often frowned upon as to 'heavy', it worked really well in terms of developer effort as well as providing surprisingly good performance on devices. There's still plenty of jQuery and AJAX logic happening on the client but it's more manageable in small doses rather than trying to do the entire UI composition with JavaScript and/or 'not-quite-there-yet' template engines that are very difficult to debug. This is not an issue directly related to Web API of course, but something to think about especially for AJAX or SPA style applications. Summary Web API is a great new addition to the ASP.NET platform and it addresses a serious need for consolidation of a lot of half-baked HTTP service API technologies that came before it. Web API feels 'right', and hits the right combination of usability and flexibility at least for me and it's a good fit for true API scenarios. However, just because a new platform is available it doesn't meant that other tools or tech that came before it should be discarded or even upgraded to the new platform. There's nothing wrong with continuing to use MVC controller methods to handle API tasks if that's what your app is running now - there's very little to be gained by upgrading to Web API just because. But going forward Web API clearly is the way to go, when building HTTP data interfaces and it's good to see that Microsoft got this one right - it was sorely needed! Resources ASP.NET Web API AspConf Ask the Experts Session (first 5 minutes) © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in Web Api   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (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); })();

  Read the article

• Is there a Telecommunications Reference Architecture?

  - by raul.goycoolea

  @font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }@font-face { font-family: "Courier New"; }@font-face { font-family: "Wingdings"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraph, li.MsoListParagraph, div.MsoListParagraph { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }ol { margin-bottom: 0cm; }ul { margin-bottom: 0cm; } Abstract   Reference architecture provides needed architectural information that can be provided in advance to an enterprise to enable consistent architectural best practices. Enterprise Reference Architecture helps business owners to actualize their strategies, vision, objectives, and principles. It evaluates the IT systems, based on Reference Architecture goals, principles, and standards. It helps to reduce IT costs by increasing functionality, availability, scalability, etc. Telecom Reference Architecture provides customers with the flexibility to view bundled service bills online with the provision of multiple services. It provides real-time, flexible billing and charging systems, to handle complex promotions, discounts, and settlements with multiple parties. This paper attempts to describe the Reference Architecture for the Telecom Enterprises. It lays the foundation for a Telecom Reference Architecture by articulating the requirements, drivers, and pitfalls for telecom service providers. It describes generic reference architecture for telecom enterprises and moves on to explain how to achieve Enterprise Reference Architecture by using SOA.   Introduction   A Reference Architecture provides a methodology, set of practices, template, and standards based on a set of successful solutions implemented earlier. These solutions have been generalized and structured for the depiction of both a logical and a physical architecture, based on the harvesting of a set of patterns that describe observations in a number of successful implementations. It helps as a reference for the various architectures that an enterprise can implement to solve various problems. It can be used as the starting point or the point of comparisons for various departments/business entities of a company, or for the various companies for an enterprise. It provides multiple views for multiple stakeholders.   Major artifacts of the Enterprise Reference Architecture are methodologies, standards, metadata, documents, design patterns, etc.   Purpose of Reference Architecture   In most cases, architects spend a lot of time researching, investigating, defining, and re-arguing architectural decisions. It is like reinventing the wheel as their peers in other organizations or even the same organization have already spent a lot of time and effort defining their own architectural practices. This prevents an organization from learning from its own experiences and applying that knowledge for increased effectiveness.   Reference architecture provides missing architectural information that can be provided in advance to project team members to enable consistent architectural best practices.   Enterprise Reference Architecture helps an enterprise to achieve the following at the abstract level:   ·       Reference architecture is more of a communication channel to an enterprise ·       Helps the business owners to accommodate to their strategies, vision, objectives, and principles. ·       Evaluates the IT systems based on Reference Architecture Principles ·       Reduces IT spending through increasing functionality, availability, scalability, etc ·       A Real-time Integration Model helps to reduce the latency of the data updates Is used to define a single source of Information ·       Provides a clear view on how to manage information and security ·       Defines the policy around the data ownership, product boundaries, etc. ·       Helps with cost optimization across project and solution portfolios by eliminating unused or duplicate investments and assets ·       Has a shorter implementation time and cost   Once the reference architecture is in place, the set of architectural principles, standards, reference models, and best practices ensure that the aligned investments have the greatest possible likelihood of success in both the near term and the long term (TCO).     Common pitfalls for Telecom Service Providers   Telecom Reference Architecture serves as the first step towards maturity for a telecom service provider. During the course of our assignments/experiences with telecom players, we have come across the following observations – Some of these indicate a lack of maturity of the telecom service provider:   ·       In markets that are growing and not so mature, it has been observed that telcos have a significant amount of in-house or home-grown applications. In some of these markets, the growth has been so rapid that IT has been unable to cope with business demands. Telcos have shown a tendency to come up with workarounds in their IT applications so as to meet business needs. ·       Even for core functions like provisioning or mediation, some telcos have tried to manage with home-grown applications. ·       Most of the applications do not have the required scalability or maintainability to sustain growth in volumes or functionality. ·       Applications face interoperability issues with other applications in the operator's landscape. Integrating a new application or network element requires considerable effort on the part of the other applications. ·       Application boundaries are not clear, and functionality that is not in the initial scope of that application gets pushed onto it. This results in the development of the multiple, small applications without proper boundaries. ·       Usage of Legacy OSS/BSS systems, poor Integration across Multiple COTS Products and Internal Systems. Most of the Integrations are developed on ad-hoc basis and Point-to-Point Integration. ·       Redundancy of the business functions in different applications • Fragmented data across the different applications and no integrated view of the strategic data • Lot of performance Issues due to the usage of the complex integration across OSS and BSS systems   However, this is where the maturity of the telecom industry as a whole can be of help. The collaborative efforts of telcos to overcome some of these problems have resulted in bodies like the TM Forum. They have come up with frameworks for business processes, data, applications, and technology for telecom service providers. These could be a good starting point for telcos to clean up their enterprise landscape.   Industry Trends in Telecom Reference Architecture   Telecom reference architectures are evolving rapidly because telcos are facing business and IT challenges.   “The reality is that there probably is no killer application, no silver bullet that the telcos can latch onto to carry them into a 21st Century.... Instead, there are probably hundreds – perhaps thousands – of niche applications.... And the only way to find which of these works for you is to try out lots of them, ramp up the ones that work, and discontinue the ones that fail.” – Martin Creaner President & CTO TM Forum.   The following trends have been observed in telecom reference architecture:   ·       Transformation of business structures to align with customer requirements ·       Adoption of more Internet-like technical architectures. The Web 2.0 concept is increasingly being used. ·       Virtualization of the traditional operations support system (OSS) ·       Adoption of SOA to support development of IP-based services ·       Adoption of frameworks like Service Delivery Platforms (SDPs) and IP Multimedia Subsystem ·       (IMS) to enable seamless deployment of various services over fixed and mobile networks ·       Replacement of in-house, customized, and stove-piped OSS/BSS with standards-based COTS products ·       Compliance with industry standards and frameworks like eTOM, SID, and TAM to enable seamless integration with other standards-based products   Drivers of Reference Architecture   The drivers of the Reference Architecture are Reference Architecture Goals, Principles, and Enterprise Vision and Telecom Transformation. The details are depicted below diagram. @font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoCaption, li.MsoCaption, div.MsoCaption { margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; font-size: 9pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: rgb(79, 129, 189); font-weight: bold; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; } Figure 1. Drivers for Reference Architecture @font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }@font-face { font-family: "Courier New"; }@font-face { font-family: "Wingdings"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraph, li.MsoListParagraph, div.MsoListParagraph { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }ol { margin-bottom: 0cm; }ul { margin-bottom: 0cm; } Today’s telecom reference architectures should seamlessly integrate traditional legacy-based applications and transition to next-generation network technologies (e.g., IP multimedia subsystems). This has resulted in new requirements for flexible, real-time billing and OSS/BSS systems and implications on the service provider’s organizational requirements and structure.   Telecom reference architectures are today expected to:   ·       Integrate voice, messaging, email and other VAS over fixed and mobile networks, back end systems ·       Be able to provision multiple services and service bundles • Deliver converged voice, video and data services ·       Leverage the existing Network Infrastructure ·       Provide real-time, flexible billing and charging systems to handle complex promotions, discounts, and settlements with multiple parties. ·       Support charging of advanced data services such as VoIP, On-Demand, Services (e.g.  Video), IMS/SIP Services, Mobile Money, Content Services and IPTV. ·       Help in faster deployment of new services • Serve as an effective platform for collaboration between network IT and business organizations ·       Harness the potential of converging technology, networks, devices and content to develop multimedia services and solutions of ever-increasing sophistication on a single Internet Protocol (IP) ·       Ensure better service delivery and zero revenue leakage through real-time balance and credit management ·       Lower operating costs to drive profitability   Enterprise Reference Architecture   The Enterprise Reference Architecture (RA) fills the gap between the concepts and vocabulary defined by the reference model and the implementation. Reference architecture provides detailed architectural information in a common format such that solutions can be repeatedly designed and deployed in a consistent, high-quality, supportable fashion. This paper attempts to describe the Reference Architecture for the Telecom Application Usage and how to achieve the Enterprise Level Reference Architecture using SOA.   • Telecom Reference Architecture • Enterprise SOA based Reference Architecture   Telecom Reference Architecture   Tele Management Forum’s New Generation Operations Systems and Software (NGOSS) is an architectural framework for organizing, integrating, and implementing telecom systems. NGOSS is a component-based framework consisting of the following elements:   ·       The enhanced Telecom Operations Map (eTOM) is a business process framework. ·       The Shared Information Data (SID) model provides a comprehensive information framework that may be specialized for the needs of a particular organization. ·       The Telecom Application Map (TAM) is an application framework to depict the functional footprint of applications, relative to the horizontal processes within eTOM. ·       The Technology Neutral Architecture (TNA) is an integrated framework. TNA is an architecture that is sustainable through technology changes.   NGOSS Architecture Standards are:   ·       Centralized data ·       Loosely coupled distributed systems ·       Application components/re-use  ·       A technology-neutral system framework with technology specific implementations ·       Interoperability to service provider data/processes ·       Allows more re-use of business components across multiple business scenarios ·       Workflow automation   The traditional operator systems architecture consists of four layers,   ·       Business Support System (BSS) layer, with focus toward customers and business partners. Manages order, subscriber, pricing, rating, and billing information. ·       Operations Support System (OSS) layer, built around product, service, and resource inventories. ·       Networks layer – consists of Network elements and 3rd Party Systems. ·       Integration Layer – to maximize application communication and overall solution flexibility.   Reference architecture for telecom enterprises is depicted below. @font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }@font-face { font-family: "Courier New"; }@font-face { font-family: "Wingdings"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoCaption, li.MsoCaption, div.MsoCaption { margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; font-size: 9pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: rgb(79, 129, 189); font-weight: bold; }p.MsoListParagraph, li.MsoListParagraph, div.MsoListParagraph { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }ol { margin-bottom: 0cm; }ul { margin-bottom: 0cm; } Figure 2. Telecom Reference Architecture   The major building blocks of any Telecom Service Provider architecture are as follows:   1. Customer Relationship Management   CRM encompasses the end-to-end lifecycle of the customer: customer initiation/acquisition, sales, ordering, and service activation, customer care and support, proactive campaigns, cross sell/up sell, and retention/loyalty.   CRM also includes the collection of customer information and its application to personalize, customize, and integrate delivery of service to a customer, as well as to identify opportunities for increasing the value of the customer to the enterprise.   The key functionalities related to Customer Relationship Management are   ·       Manage the end-to-end lifecycle of a customer request for products. ·       Create and manage customer profiles. ·       Manage all interactions with customers – inquiries, requests, and responses. ·       Provide updates to Billing and other south bound systems on customer/account related updates such as customer/ account creation, deletion, modification, request bills, final bill, duplicate bills, credit limits through Middleware. ·       Work with Order Management System, Product, and Service Management components within CRM. ·       Manage customer preferences – Involve all the touch points and channels to the customer, including contact center, retail stores, dealers, self service, and field service, as well as via any media (phone, face to face, web, mobile device, chat, email, SMS, mail, the customer's bill, etc.). ·       Support single interface for customer contact details, preferences, account details, offers, customer premise equipment, bill details, bill cycle details, and customer interactions.   CRM applications interact with customers through customer touch points like portals, point-of-sale terminals, interactive voice response systems, etc. The requests by customers are sent via fulfillment/provisioning to billing system for ordering processing.   2. Billing and Revenue Management   Billing and Revenue Management handles the collection of appropriate usage records and production of timely and accurate bills – for providing pre-bill usage information and billing to customers; for processing their payments; and for performing payment collections. In addition, it handles customer inquiries about bills, provides billing inquiry status, and is responsible for resolving billing problems to the customer's satisfaction in a timely manner. This process grouping also supports prepayment for services.   The key functionalities provided by these applications are   ·       To ensure that enterprise revenue is billed and invoices delivered appropriately to customers. ·       To manage customers’ billing accounts, process their payments, perform payment collections, and monitor the status of the account balance. ·       To ensure the timely and effective fulfillment of all customer bill inquiries and complaints. ·       Collect the usage records from mediation and ensure appropriate rating and discounting of all usage and pricing. ·       Support revenue sharing; split charging where usage is guided to an account different from the service consumer. ·       Support prepaid and post-paid rating. ·       Send notification on approach / exceeding the usage thresholds as enforced by the subscribed offer, and / or as setup by the customer. ·       Support prepaid, post paid, and hybrid (where some services are prepaid and the rest of the services post paid) customers and conversion from post paid to prepaid, and vice versa. ·       Support different billing function requirements like charge prorating, promotion, discount, adjustment, waiver, write-off, account receivable, GL Interface, late payment fee, credit control, dunning, account or service suspension, re-activation, expiry, termination, contract violation penalty, etc. ·       Initiate direct debit to collect payment against an invoice outstanding. ·       Send notification to Middleware on different events; for example, payment receipt, pre-suspension, threshold exceed, etc.   Billing systems typically get usage data from mediation systems for rating and billing. They get provisioning requests from order management systems and inquiries from CRM systems. Convergent and real-time billing systems can directly get usage details from network elements.   3. Mediation   Mediation systems transform/translate the Raw or Native Usage Data Records into a general format that is acceptable to billing for their rating purposes.   The following lists the high-level roles and responsibilities executed by the Mediation system in the end-to-end solution.   ·       Collect Usage Data Records from different data sources – like network elements, routers, servers – via different protocol and interfaces. ·       Process Usage Data Records – Mediation will process Usage Data Records as per the source format. ·       Validate Usage Data Records from each source. ·       Segregates Usage Data Records coming from each source to multiple, based on the segregation requirement of end Application. ·       Aggregates Usage Data Records based on the aggregation rule if any from different sources. ·       Consolidates multiple Usage Data Records from each source. ·       Delivers formatted Usage Data Records to different end application like Billing, Interconnect, Fraud Management, etc. ·       Generates audit trail for incoming Usage Data Records and keeps track of all the Usage Data Records at various stages of mediation process. ·       Checks duplicate Usage Data Records across files for a given time window.   4. Fulfillment   This area is responsible for providing customers with their requested products in a timely and correct manner. It translates the customer's business or personal need into a solution that can be delivered using the specific products in the enterprise's portfolio. This process informs the customers of the status of their purchase order, and ensures completion on time, as well as ensuring a delighted customer. These processes are responsible for accepting and issuing orders. They deal with pre-order feasibility determination, credit authorization, order issuance, order status and tracking, customer update on customer order activities, and customer notification on order completion. Order management and provisioning applications fall into this category.   The key functionalities provided by these applications are   ·       Issuing new customer orders, modifying open customer orders, or canceling open customer orders; ·       Verifying whether specific non-standard offerings sought by customers are feasible and supportable; ·       Checking the credit worthiness of customers as part of the customer order process; ·       Testing the completed offering to ensure it is working correctly; ·       Updating of the Customer Inventory Database to reflect that the specific product offering has been allocated, modified, or cancelled; ·       Assigning and tracking customer provisioning activities; ·       Managing customer provisioning jeopardy conditions; and ·       Reporting progress on customer orders and other processes to customer.   These applications typically get orders from CRM systems. They interact with network elements and billing systems for fulfillment of orders.   5. Enterprise Management   This process area includes those processes that manage enterprise-wide activities and needs, or have application within the enterprise as a whole. They encompass all business management processes that   ·       Are necessary to support the whole of the enterprise, including processes for financial management, legal management, regulatory management, process, cost, and quality management, etc.;   ·       Are responsible for setting corporate policies, strategies, and directions, and for providing guidelines and targets for the whole of the business, including strategy development and planning for areas, such as Enterprise Architecture, that are integral to the direction and development of the business;   ·       Occur throughout the enterprise, including processes for project management, performance assessments, cost assessments, etc.     (i) Enterprise Risk Management:   Enterprise Risk Management focuses on assuring that risks and threats to the enterprise value and/or reputation are identified, and appropriate controls are in place to minimize or eliminate the identified risks. The identified risks may be physical or logical/virtual. Successful risk management ensures that the enterprise can support its mission critical operations, processes, applications, and communications in the face of serious incidents such as security threats/violations and fraud attempts. Two key areas covered in Risk Management by telecom operators are:   ·       Revenue Assurance: Revenue assurance system will be responsible for identifying revenue loss scenarios across components/systems, and will help in rectifying the problems. The following lists the high-level roles and responsibilities executed by the Revenue Assurance system in the end-to-end solution. o   Identify all usage information dropped when networks are being upgraded. o   Interconnect bill verification. o   Identify where services are routinely provisioned but never billed. o   Identify poor sales policies that are intensifying collections problems. o   Find leakage where usage is sent to error bucket and never billed for. o   Find leakage where field service, CRM, and network build-out are not optimized.   ·       Fraud Management: Involves collecting data from different systems to identify abnormalities in traffic patterns, usage patterns, and subscription patterns to report suspicious activity that might suggest fraudulent usage of resources, resulting in revenue losses to the operator.   The key roles and responsibilities of the system component are as follows:   o   Fraud management system will capture and monitor high usage (over a certain threshold) in terms of duration, value, and number of calls for each subscriber. The threshold for each subscriber is decided by the system and fixed automatically. o   Fraud management will be able to detect the unauthorized access to services for certain subscribers. These subscribers may have been provided unauthorized services by employees. The component will raise the alert to the operator the very first time of such illegal calls or calls which are not billed. o   The solution will be to have an alarm management system that will deliver alarms to the operator/provider whenever it detects a fraud, thus minimizing fraud by catching it the first time it occurs. o   The Fraud Management system will be capable of interfacing with switches, mediation systems, and billing systems   (ii) Knowledge Management   This process focuses on knowledge management, technology research within the enterprise, and the evaluation of potential technology acquisitions.   Key responsibilities of knowledge base management are to   ·       Maintain knowledge base – Creation and updating of knowledge base on ongoing basis. ·       Search knowledge base – Search of knowledge base on keywords or category browse ·       Maintain metadata – Management of metadata on knowledge base to ensure effective management and search. ·       Run report generator. ·       Provide content – Add content to the knowledge base, e.g., user guides, operational manual, etc.   (iii) Document Management   It focuses on maintaining a repository of all electronic documents or images of paper documents relevant to the enterprise using a system.   (iv) Data Management   It manages data as a valuable resource for any enterprise. For telecom enterprises, the typical areas covered are Master Data Management, Data Warehousing, and Business Intelligence. It is also responsible for data governance, security, quality, and database management.   Key responsibilities of Data Management are   ·       Using ETL, extract the data from CRM, Billing, web content, ERP, campaign management, financial, network operations, asset management info, customer contact data, customer measures, benchmarks, process data, e.g., process inputs, outputs, and measures, into Enterprise Data Warehouse. ·       Management of data traceability with source, data related business rules/decisions, data quality, data cleansing data reconciliation, competitors data – storage for all the enterprise data (customer profiles, products, offers, revenues, etc.) ·       Get online update through night time replication or physical backup process at regular frequency. ·       Provide the data access to business intelligence and other systems for their analysis, report generation, and use.   (v) Business Intelligence   It uses the Enterprise Data to provide the various analysis and reports that contain prospects and analytics for customer retention, acquisition of new customers due to the offers, and SLAs. It will generate right and optimized plans – bolt-ons for the customers.   The following lists the high-level roles and responsibilities executed by the Business Intelligence system at the Enterprise Level:   ·       It will do Pattern analysis and reports problem. ·       It will do Data Analysis – Statistical analysis, data profiling, affinity analysis of data, customer segment wise usage patterns on offers, products, service and revenue generation against services and customer segments. ·       It will do Performance (business, system, and forecast) analysis, churn propensity, response time, and SLAs analysis. ·       It will support for online and offline analysis, and report drill down capability. ·       It will collect, store, and report various SLA data. ·       It will provide the necessary intelligence for marketing and working on campaigns, etc., with cost benefit analysis and predictions.   It will advise on customer promotions with additional services based on loyalty and credit history of customer   ·       It will Interface with Enterprise Data Management system for data to run reports and analysis tasks. It will interface with the campaign schedules, based on historical success evidence.   (vi) Stakeholder and External Relations Management   It manages the enterprise's relationship with stakeholders and outside entities. Stakeholders include shareholders, employee organizations, etc. Outside entities include regulators, local community, and unions. Some of the processes within this grouping are Shareholder Relations, External Affairs, Labor Relations, and Public Relations.   (vii) Enterprise Resource Planning   It is used to manage internal and external resources, including tangible assets, financial resources, materials, and human resources. Its purpose is to facilitate the flow of information between all business functions inside the boundaries of the enterprise and manage the connections to outside stakeholders. ERP systems consolidate all business operations into a uniform and enterprise wide system environment.   The key roles and responsibilities for Enterprise System are given below:   ·        It will handle responsibilities such as core accounting, financial, and management reporting. ·       It will interface with CRM for capturing customer account and details. ·       It will interface with billing to capture the billing revenue and other financial data. ·       It will be responsible for executing the dunning process. Billing will send the required feed to ERP for execution of dunning. ·       It will interface with the CRM and Billing through batch interfaces. Enterprise management systems are like horizontals in the enterprise and typically interact with all major telecom systems. E.g., an ERP system interacts with CRM, Fulfillment, and Billing systems for different kinds of data exchanges.   6. External Interfaces/Touch Points   The typical external parties are customers, suppliers/partners, employees, shareholders, and other stakeholders. External interactions from/to a Service Provider to other parties can be achieved by a variety of mechanisms, including:   ·       Exchange of emails or faxes ·       Call Centers ·       Web Portals ·       Business-to-Business (B2B) automated transactions   These applications provide an Internet technology driven interface to external parties to undertake a variety of business functions directly for themselves. These can provide fully or partially automated service to external parties through various touch points.   Typical characteristics of these touch points are   ·       Pre-integrated self-service system, including stand-alone web framework or integration front end with a portal engine ·       Self services layer exposing atomic web services/APIs for reuse by multiple systems across the architectural environment ·       Portlets driven connectivity exposing data and services interoperability through a portal engine or web application   These touch points mostly interact with the CRM systems for requests, inquiries, and responses.   7. Middleware   The component will be primarily responsible for integrating the different systems components under a common platform. It should provide a Standards-Based Platform for building Service Oriented Architecture and Composite Applications. The following lists the high-level roles and responsibilities executed by the Middleware component in the end-to-end solution.   ·       As an integration framework, covering to and fro interfaces ·       Provide a web service framework with service registry. ·       Support SOA framework with SOA service registry. ·       Each of the interfaces from / to Middleware to other components would handle data transformation, translation, and mapping of data points. ·       Receive data from the caller / activate and/or forward the data to the recipient system in XML format. ·       Use standard XML for data exchange. ·       Provide the response back to the service/call initiator. ·       Provide a tracking until the response completion. ·       Keep a store transitional data against each call/transaction. ·       Interface through Middleware to get any information that is possible and allowed from the existing systems to enterprise systems; e.g., customer profile and customer history, etc. ·       Provide the data in a common unified format to the SOA calls across systems, and follow the Enterprise Architecture directive. ·       Provide an audit trail for all transactions being handled by the component.   8. Network Elements   The term Network Element means a facility or equipment used in the provision of a telecommunications service. Such terms also includes features, functions, and capabilities that are provided by means of such facility or equipment, including subscriber numbers, databases, signaling systems, and information sufficient for billing and collection or used in the transmission, routing, or other provision of a telecommunications service.   Typical network elements in a GSM network are Home Location Register (HLR), Intelligent Network (IN), Mobile Switching Center (MSC), SMS Center (SMSC), and network elements for other value added services like Push-to-talk (PTT), Ring Back Tone (RBT), etc.   Network elements are invoked when subscribers use their telecom devices for any kind of usage. These elements generate usage data and pass it on to downstream systems like mediation and billing system for rating and billing. They also integrate with provisioning systems for order/service fulfillment.   9. 3rd Party Applications   3rd Party systems are applications like content providers, payment gateways, point of sale terminals, and databases/applications maintained by the Government.   Depending on applicability and the type of functionality provided by 3rd party applications, the integration with different telecom systems like CRM, provisioning, and billing will be done.   10. Service Delivery Platform   A service delivery platform (SDP) provides the architecture for the rapid deployment, provisioning, execution, management, and billing of value added telecom services. SDPs are based on the concept of SOA and layered architecture. They support the delivery of voice, data services, and content in network and device-independent fashion. They allow application developers to aggregate network capabilities, services, and sources of content. SDPs typically contain layers for web services exposure, service application development, and network abstraction.   SOA Reference Architecture   SOA concept is based on the principle of developing reusable business service and building applications by composing those services, instead of building monolithic applications in silos. It’s about bridging the gap between business and IT through a set of business-aligned IT services, using a set of design principles, patterns, and techniques.   In an SOA, resources are made available to participants in a value net, enterprise, line of business (typically spanning multiple applications within an enterprise or across multiple enterprises). It consists of a set of business-aligned IT services that collectively fulfill an organization’s business processes and goals. We can choreograph these services into composite applications and invoke them through standard protocols. SOA, apart from agility and reusability, enables:   ·       The business to specify processes as orchestrations of reusable services ·       Technology agnostic business design, with technology hidden behind service interface ·       A contractual-like interaction between business and IT, based on service SLAs ·       Accountability and governance, better aligned to business services ·       Applications interconnections untangling by allowing access only through service interfaces, reducing the daunting side effects of change ·       Reduced pressure to replace legacy and extended lifetime for legacy applications, through encapsulation in services   ·       A Cloud Computing paradigm, using web services technologies, that makes possible service outsourcing on an on-demand, utility-like, pay-per-usage basis   The following section represents the Reference Architecture of logical view for the Telecom Solution. The new custom built application needs to align with this logical architecture in the long run to achieve EA benefits.   Packaged implementation applications, such as ERP billing applications, need to expose their functions as service providers (as other applications consume) and interact with other applications as service consumers.   COT applications need to expose services through wrappers such as adapters to utilize existing resources and at the same time achieve Enterprise Architecture goal and objectives.   The following are the various layers for Enterprise level deployment of SOA. This diagram captures the abstract view of Enterprise SOA layers and important components of each layer. Layered architecture means decomposition of services such that most interactions occur between adjacent layers. However, there is no strict rule that top layers should not directly communicate with bottom layers.   The diagram below represents the important logical pieces that would result from overall SOA transformation. @font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }@font-face { font-family: "Courier New"; }@font-face { font-family: "Wingdings"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoCaption, li.MsoCaption, div.MsoCaption { margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; font-size: 9pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: rgb(79, 129, 189); font-weight: bold; }p.MsoListParagraph, li.MsoListParagraph, div.MsoListParagraph { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }ol { margin-bottom: 0cm; }ul { margin-bottom: 0cm; } Figure 3. Enterprise SOA Reference Architecture 1.          Operational System Layer: This layer consists of all packaged applications like CRM, ERP, custom built applications, COTS based applications like Billing, Revenue Management, Fulfilment, and the Enterprise databases that are essential and contribute directly or indirectly to the Enterprise OSS/BSS Transformation.   ERP holds the data of Asset Lifecycle Management, Supply Chain, and Advanced Procurement and Human Capital Management, etc.   CRM holds the data related to Order, Sales, and Marketing, Customer Care, Partner Relationship Management, Loyalty, etc.   Content Management handles Enterprise Search and Query. Billing application consists of the following components:   ·       Collections Management, Customer Billing Management, Invoices, Real-Time Rating, Discounting, and Applying of Charges ·       Enterprise databases will hold both the application and service data, whether structured or unstructured.   MDM - Master data majorly consists of Customer, Order, Product, and Service Data.     2.          Enterprise Component Layer:   This layer consists of the Application Services and Common Services that are responsible for realizing the functionality and maintaining the QoS of the exposed services. This layer uses container-based technologies such as application servers to implement the components, workload management, high availability, and load balancing.   Application Services: This Service Layer enables application, technology, and database abstraction so that the complex accessing logic is hidden from the other service layers. This is a basic service layer, which exposes application functionalities and data as reusable services. The three types of the Application access services are:   ·       Application Access Service: This Service Layer exposes application level functionalities as a reusable service between BSS to BSS and BSS to OSS integration. This layer is enabled using disparate technology such as Web Service, Integration Servers, and Adaptors, etc.   ·       Data Access Service: This Service Layer exposes application data services as a reusable reference data service. This is done via direct interaction with application data. and provides the federated query.   ·       Network Access Service: This Service Layer exposes provisioning layer as a reusable service from OSS to OSS integration. This integration service emphasizes the need for high performance, stateless process flows, and distributed design.   Common Services encompasses management of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data such as information services, portal services, interaction services, infrastructure services, and security services, etc.   3.          Integration Layer:   This consists of service infrastructure components like service bus, service gateway for partner integration, service registry, service repository, and BPEL processor. Service bus will carry the service invocation payloads/messages between consumers and providers. The other important functions expected from it are itinerary based routing, distributed caching of routing information, transformations, and all qualities of service for messaging-like reliability, scalability, and availability, etc. Service registry will hold all contracts (wsdl) of services, and it helps developers to locate or discover service during design time or runtime.   • BPEL processor would be useful in orchestrating the services to compose a complex business scenario or process. • Workflow and business rules management are also required to support manual triggering of certain activities within business process. based on the rules setup and also the state machine information. Application, data, and service mediation layer typically forms the overall composite application development framework or SOA Framework.   4.          Business Process Layer: These are typically the intermediate services layer and represent Shared Business Process Services. At Enterprise Level, these services are from Customer Management, Order Management, Billing, Finance, and Asset Management application domains.   5.          Access Layer: This layer consists of portals for Enterprise and provides a single view of Enterprise information management and dashboard services.   6.          Channel Layer: This consists of various devices; applications that form part of extended enterprise; browsers through which users access the applications.   7.          Client Layer: This designates the different types of users accessing the enterprise applications. The type of user typically would be an important factor in determining the level of access to applications.   8.          Vertical pieces like management, monitoring, security, and development cut across all horizontal layers Management and monitoring involves all aspects of SOA-like services, SLAs, and other QoS lifecycle processes for both applications and services surrounding SOA governance.     9.          EA Governance, Reference Architecture, Roadmap, Principles, and Best Practices:   EA Governance is important in terms of providing the overall direction to SOA implementation within the enterprise. This involves board-level involvement, in addition to business and IT executives. At a high level, this involves managing the SOA projects implementation, managing SOA infrastructure, and controlling the entire effort through all fine-tuned IT processes in accordance with COBIT (Control Objectives for Information Technology).   Devising tools and techniques to promote reuse culture, and the SOA way of doing things needs competency centers to be established in addition to training the workforce to take up new roles that are suited to SOA journey.   Conclusions   Reference Architectures can serve as the basis for disparate architecture efforts throughout the organization, even if they use different tools and technologies. Reference architectures provide best practices and approaches in the independent way a vendor deals with technology and standards. Reference Architectures model the abstract architectural elements for an enterprise independent of the technologies, protocols, and products that are used to implement an SOA. Telecom enterprises today are facing significant business and technology challenges due to growing competition, a multitude of services, and convergence. Adopting architectural best practices could go a long way in meeting these challenges. The use of SOA-based architecture for communication to each of the external systems like Billing, CRM, etc., in OSS/BSS system has made the architecture very loosely coupled, with greater flexibility. Any change in the external systems would be absorbed at the Integration Layer without affecting the rest of the ecosystem. The use of a Business Process Management (BPM) tool makes the management and maintenance of the business processes easy, with better performance in terms of lead time, quality, and cost. Since the Architecture is based on standards, it will lower the cost of deploying and managing OSS/BSS applications over their lifecycles.

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142  | Next Page >