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  • Getting Started with ASP.NET Membership, Profile and RoleManager

    - by Ben Griswold
    A new ASP.NET MVC project includes preconfigured Membership, Profile and RoleManager providers right out of the box.  Try it yourself – create a ASP.NET MVC application, crack open the web.config file and have a look.  First, you’ll find the ApplicationServices database connection: <connectionStrings>   <add name="ApplicationServices"        connectionString="data source=.\SQLEXPRESS;Integrated Security=SSPI;AttachDBFilename=|DataDirectory|aspnetdb.mdf;User Instance=true"        providerName="System.Data.SqlClient"/> </connectionStrings>   Notice the connection string is referencing the aspnetdb.mdf database hosted by SQL Express and it’s using integrated security so it’ll just work for you without having to call out a specific database login or anything. Scroll down the file a bit and you’ll find each of the three noted sections: <membership>   <providers>     <clear/>     <add name="AspNetSqlMembershipProvider"          type="System.Web.Security.SqlMembershipProvider, System.Web, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a"          connectionStringName="ApplicationServices"          enablePasswordRetrieval="false"          enablePasswordReset="true"          requiresQuestionAndAnswer="false"          requiresUniqueEmail="false"          passwordFormat="Hashed"          maxInvalidPasswordAttempts="5"          minRequiredPasswordLength="6"          minRequiredNonalphanumericCharacters="0"          passwordAttemptWindow="10"          passwordStrengthRegularExpression=""          applicationName="/"             />   </providers> </membership>   <profile>   <providers>     <clear/>     <add name="AspNetSqlProfileProvider"          type="System.Web.Profile.SqlProfileProvider, System.Web, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a"          connectionStringName="ApplicationServices"          applicationName="/"             />   </providers> </profile>   <roleManager enabled="false">   <providers>     <clear />     <add connectionStringName="ApplicationServices" applicationName="/" name="AspNetSqlRoleProvider" type="System.Web.Security.SqlRoleProvider, System.Web, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a" />     <add applicationName="/" name="AspNetWindowsTokenRoleProvider" type="System.Web.Security.WindowsTokenRoleProvider, System.Web, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a" />   </providers> </roleManager> Really. It’s all there. Still don’t believe me.  Run the application, walk through the registration process and finally login and logout.  Completely functional – and you didn’t have to do a thing! What else?  Well, you can manage your users via the Configuration Manager which is hiding in Visual Studio behind Projects > ASP.NET Configuration. The ASP.NET Web Site Administration Tool isn’t MVC-specific (neither is the Membership, Profile or RoleManager stuff) but it’s neat and I hardly ever see anyone using it.  Here you can set up and edit users, roles, and set access permissions for your site. You can manage application settings, establish your SMTP settings, configure debugging and tracing, define default error page and even take your application offline.  The UI is rather plain-Jane but it works great. And here’s the best of all.  Let’s say you, like most of us, don’t want to run your application on top of the aspnetdb.mdf database.  Let’s suppose you want to use your own database and you’d like to add the membership stuff to it.  Well, that’s easy enough. Take a look inside your [drive:]\%windir%\Microsoft.Net\Framework\v2.0.50727\ folder.  Here you’ll find a bunch of files.  If you were to run the InstallCommon.sql, InstallMembership.sql, InstallRoles.sql and InstallProfile.sql files against the database of your choices, you’d be installing the same membership, profile and role artifacts which are found in the aspnet.db to your own database.  Too much trouble?  Okay. Run [drive:]\%windir%\Microsoft.Net\Framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_regsql.exe from the command line instead.  This will launch the ASP.NET SQL Server Setup Wizard which walks you through the installation of those same database objects into the new or existing database of your choice. You may not always have the luxury of using this tool on your destination server, but you should use it whenever you can.  Last tip: don’t forget to update the ApplicationServices connectionstring to point to your custom database after the setup is complete. At the risk of sounding like a smarty, everything I’ve mentioned in this post has been around for quite a while. The thing is that not everyone has had the opportunity to use it.  And it makes sense. I know I’ve worked on projects which used custom membership services.  Why bother with the out-of-the-box stuff, right?   And the .NET framework is so massive, who can know it all. Well, eventually you might have a chance to architect your own solution using any implementation you’d like or you will have the time to play around with another aspect of the framework.  When you do, think back to this post.

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  • Using the HTML5 &lt;input type=&quot;file&quot; multiple=&quot;multiple&quot;&gt; Tag in ASP.NET

    - by Rick Strahl
    Per HTML5 spec the <input type="file" /> tag allows for multiple files to be picked from a single File upload button. This is actually a very subtle change that's very useful as it makes it much easier to send multiple files to the server without using complex uploader controls. Please understand though, that even though you can send multiple files using the <input type="file" /> tag, the process of how those files are sent hasn't really changed - there's still no progress information or other hooks that allow you to automatically make for a nicer upload experience without additional libraries or code. For that you will still need some sort of library (I'll post an example in my next blog post using plUpload). All the new features allow for is to make it easier to select multiple images from disk in one operation. Where you might have required many file upload controls before to upload several files, one File control can potentially do the job. How it works To create a file input box that allows with multiple file support you can simply do:<form method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data"> <label>Upload Images:</label> <input type="file" multiple="multiple" name="File1" id="File1" accept="image/*" /> <hr /> <input type="submit" id="btnUpload" value="Upload Images" /> </form> Now when the file open dialog pops up - depending on the browser and whether the browser supports it - you can pick multiple files. Here I'm using Firefox using the thumbnail preview I can easily pick images to upload on a form: Note that I can select multiple images in the dialog all of which get stored in the file textbox. The UI for this can be different in some browsers. For example Chrome displays 3 files selected as text next to the Browse… button when I choose three rather than showing any files in the textbox. Most other browsers display the standard file input box and display the multiple filenames as a comma delimited list in the textbox. Note that you can also specify the accept attribute in the <input> tag, which specifies a mime-type to specify what type of content to allow.Here I'm only allowing images (image/*) and the browser complies by just showing me image files to display. Likewise I could use text/* for all text formats registered on the machine or text/xml to only show XML files (which would include xml,xst,xsd etc.). Capturing Files on the Server with ASP.NET When you upload files to an ASP.NET server there are a couple of things to be aware of. When multiple files are uploaded from a single file control, they are assigned the same name. In other words if I select 3 files to upload on the File1 control shown above I get three file form variables named File1. This means I can't easily retrieve files by their name:HttpPostedFileBase file = Request.Files["File1"]; because there will be multiple files for a given name. The above only selects the first file. Instead you can only reliably retrieve files by their index. Below is an example I use in app to capture a number of images uploaded and store them into a database using a business object and EF 4.2.for (int i = 0; i < Request.Files.Count; i++) { HttpPostedFileBase file = Request.Files[i]; if (file.ContentLength == 0) continue; if (file.ContentLength > App.Configuration.MaxImageUploadSize) { ErrorDisplay.ShowError("File " + file.FileName + " is too large. Max upload size is: " + App.Configuration.MaxImageUploadSize); return View("UploadClassic",model); } var image = new ClassifiedsBusiness.Image(); var ms = new MemoryStream(16498); file.InputStream.CopyTo(ms); image.Entered = DateTime.Now; image.EntryId = model.Entry.Id; image.ContentType = "image/jpeg"; image.ImageData = ms.ToArray(); ms.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin); // resize image if necessary and turn into jpeg Bitmap bmp = Imaging.ResizeImage(ms.ToArray(), App.Configuration.MaxImageWidth, App.Configuration.MaxImageHeight); ms.Close(); ms = new MemoryStream(); bmp.Save(ms,ImageFormat.Jpeg); image.ImageData = ms.ToArray(); bmp.Dispose(); ms.Close(); model.Entry.Images.Add(image); } This works great and also allows you to capture input from multiple input controls if you are dealing with browsers that don't support multiple file selections in the file upload control. The important thing here is that I iterate over the files by index, rather than using a foreach loop over the Request.Files collection. The files collection returns key name strings, rather than the actual files (who thought that was good idea at Microsoft?), and so that isn't going to work since you end up getting multiple keys with the same name. Instead a plain for loop has to be used to loop over all files. Another Option in ASP.NET MVC If you're using ASP.NET MVC you can use the code above as well, but you have yet another option to capture multiple uploaded files by using a parameter for your post action method.public ActionResult Save(HttpPostedFileBase[] file1) { foreach (var file in file1) { if (file.ContentLength < 0) continue; // do something with the file }} Note that in order for this to work you have to specify each posted file variable individually in the parameter list. This works great if you have a single file upload to deal with. You can also pass this in addition to your main model to separate out a ViewModel and a set of uploaded files:public ActionResult Edit(EntryViewModel model,HttpPostedFileBase[] uploadedFile) You can also make the uploaded files part of the ViewModel itself - just make sure you use the appropriate naming for the variable name in the HTML document (since there's Html.FileFor() extension). Browser Support You knew this was coming, right? The feature is really nice, but unfortunately not supported universally yet. Once again Internet Explorer is the problem: No shipping version of Internet Explorer supports multiple file uploads. IE10 supposedly will, but even IE9 does not. All other major browsers - Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera - support multi-file uploads in their latest versions. So how can you handle this? If you need to provide multiple file uploads you can simply add multiple file selection boxes and let people either select multiple files with a single upload file box or use multiples. Alternately you can do some browser detection and if IE is used simply show the extra file upload boxes. It's not ideal, but either one of these approaches makes life easier for folks that use a decent browser and leaves you with a functional interface for those that don't. Here's a UI I recently built as an alternate uploader with multiple file upload buttons: I say this is my 'alternate' uploader - for my primary uploader I continue to use an add-in solution. Specifically I use plUpload and I'll discuss how that's implemented in my next post. Although I think that plUpload (and many of the other packaged JavaScript upload solutions) are a better choice especially for large uploads, for simple one file uploads input boxes work well enough. The advantage of this solution is that it's very easy to handle on the server side. Any of the JavaScript controls require special handling for uploads which I'll also discuss in my next post.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in HTML5  ASP.NET  MVC   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); })();

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  • Daily tech links for .net and related technologies - Mar 23-25, 2010

    - by SanjeevAgarwal
    Daily tech links for .net and related technologies - Mar 23-25, 2010 Web Development Introducing Browsers Providers in ASP.NET 4 - osbornm ASP.NET 4.0 Part 14, More Control Over Session State - hmobius Editable MVC Routes (Apache Style) - nberardi ASP.NET Performance Framework - karlseguin Web Design Techniques for Squeezing Images for All They’re Worth - Walter 12 Useful and Free Downloadable Web Design Books - SpeckyBoy Getting Started with Xcode IDE for iPhone Development - keyvan Grid Accordion...(read more)

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  • O&rsquo;Reilly Deal of the Day 10/June/2014 - AngularJS Directives

    - by TATWORTH
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/TATWORTH/archive/2014/06/10/orsquoreilly-deal-of-the-day-10june2014---angularjs-directives.aspxToday’s half-price E-Book offer from O’Reilly at http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9781783280339.do is AngularJS Directives. “AngularJS, propelled by Google, is quickly becoming one of the most popular JavaScript MVC frameworks available, working to invert the development paradigm and bring data-driven modularity to the web frontend. Directives serve as the core building blocks in AngularJS and enable you to create reusable models that mold around your data structures and breathe new life into the intersection of HTML and JavaScript.”

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  • What do you do when a client requires Rich Text Editing on their website?

    - by George Stocker
    As we all know by now, XSS attacks are dangerous and really easy to pull off. Various frameworks make it easy to encode HTML, like ASP.NET MVC does: <%= Html.Encode("string"); %> But what happens when your client requires that they be able to upload their content directly from a Microsoft Word document? Here's the scenario: People can copy and paste content from Microsoft word into a WYSIWYG editor (in this case tinyMCE), and then that information is posted to a web page. The website is public, but only members of that organization will have access to post information to a webpage. What is the best way to handle this requirement? Currently there is no checking done on what the client posts (since only 'trusted' users can post), but I'm not particularly happy with that and would like to lock it down further in case an account is hacked. The platform in question is ASP.NET MVC. The only conceptual method that I'm aware of that meets these requirements is to whitelist HTML tags and let those pass through. Is there another way? If not, is the best way to let them store it in the Database in any form, but only display it properly encoded and stripped of bad tags? NB: The questions differ in that he only assumes there's one way. I'm also asking the following questions: 1. Is there a better way that doesn't rely on HTML Whitelists? 2. Is there a better way that relies on a different view engine? 3. Is there a WYSIWYG editor that includes the ability to whitelist on the fly? 4. Should I even worry about this since it will only be for 'private posting' (Much in the same way that a private blog allows HTML From the author, but since only he can post, it's not an issue)? Edit #2: If suggesting a WYSIWYG editor, it must be free (as in speech, or as in beer). Update: All of the suggestions thus far revolve around a specific Rich Text Editor to use: Only provide an editor as a suggestion if it allows for sanitization of HTML tags; and it fulfills the requirement of accepting pasted documents from a WYSIWYG Editor like Microsoft Word. There are three methods that I know of: 1. Not allow HTML. 2. Allow HTML, but sanitize it 3. Find a Rich Text Editor that sanitizes and allows HTML. The previous questions remain (1-4 above). Related Question Preventing Cross Site Scripting (XSS)

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  • Interesting links week #10

    - by erwin21
    Below a list of interesting links that I found this week: Interaction: The Ultimate 20 Usability Tips for Your Website Frontend: Adobe Releases Flash-to-HTML5 Converter, Codenamed Wallaby Development: 10 Tips for Decreasing Web Page Load Times Ten Things Every WordPress Plugin Developer Should Know Progressive enhancement tutorial with ASP.NET MVC 3 and jQuery Marketing: 5 Tips for SEO & User-Friendly Copy Other: Interested in more interesting links follow me at twitter http://twitter.com/erwingriekspoor

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  • Where and how to reference composite MVP components?

    - by Lea Hayes
    I am learning about the MVP (Model-View-Presenter) Passive View flavour of MVC. I intend to expose events from view interfaces rather than using the observer pattern to remove explicit coupling with presenter. Context: Windows Forms / Client-Side JavaScript. I am led to believe that the MVP (or indeed MVC in general) pattern can be applied at various levels of a user interface ranging from the main "Window" to an embedded "Text Field". For instance, the model to the text field is probably just a string whereas the model to the "Window" contains application specific view state (like a persons name which resides within the contained text field). Given a more complex scenario: Documentation viewer which contains: TOC navigation pane Document view Search pane Since each of these 4 user interface items are complex and can be reused elsewhere it makes sense to design these using MVP. Given that each of these user interface items comprises of 3 components; which component should be nested? where? who instantiates them? Idea #1 - Embed View inside View from Parent View public class DocumentationViewer : Form, IDocumentationViewerView { public DocumentationViewer() { ... // Unclear as to how model and presenter are injected... TocPane = new TocPaneView(); } protected ITocPaneView TocPane { get; private set; } } Idea #2 - Embed Presenter inside View from Parent View public class DocumentationViewer : Form, IDocumentationViewerView { public DocumentationViewer() { ... // This doesn't seem like view logic... var tocPaneModel = new TocPaneModel(); var tocPaneView = new TocPaneView(); TocPane = new TocPanePresenter(tocPaneModel, tocPaneView); } protected TocPanePresenter TocPane { get; private set; } } Idea #3 - Embed View inside View from Parent Presenter public class DocumentationViewer : Form, IDocumentationViewerView { ... // Part of IDocumentationViewerView: public ITocPaneView TocPane { get; set; } } public class DocumentationViewerPresenter { public DocumentationViewerPresenter(DocumentationViewerModel model, IDocumentationViewerView view) { ... var tocPaneView = new TocPaneView(); var tocPaneModel = new TocPaneModel(model.Toc); var tocPanePresenter = new TocPanePresenter(tocPaneModel, tocPaneView); view.TocPane = tocPaneView; } } Some better idea...

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  • Interesting links week #6

    - by erwin21
    Below a list of interesting links that I found this week: Frontend: Understanding CSS Selectors Javascript: Breaking the Web with hash-bangs HTML5 Peeks, Pokes and Pointers Development: 10 Points to Take Care While Building Links for SEO View State decoder ASP.NET MVC Performance Tips Other: Things to Remember Before Launching a Website Tips and Tricks On How To Become a Presentation Ninja 10 Ways to Simplify Your Workday Interested in more interesting links follow me at twitter http://twitter.com/erwingriekspoor

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  • .NET licenses and project worths millions

    - by Ivan Tanasijevic
    I have a question about. NET licenses. I heard that in the case when project becomes worth millions, Microsoft have rights on great percent of this amount. If this is true, then how are things with social network which is built with ASP.NET MVC. Is this the same situation as in the case of the profit coming from selling software, because in this situation profit comes from marketing not from direct selling software.

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  • What are the steps to grouping related classes into packages

    - by user2368481
    I've been googling this for some time, but what I haven't found are the clear steps needed to be taken to group related classes into packages in Java. In my case, I have about a number of .java files that I'd like to group into 3 packages according to the MVC pattern. One package for Model classes, one package for View classes and one package for Controller classes. I've identified which belong in what package, but not sure of the next step.

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  • Interesting links week #51 and #52

    - by erwin21
    Below a list of interesting links that I found this week: Frontend: How to Create a Mobile Version of Your Website 10 tricks that will make your jQuery enabled site go faster Tools and Resources to Test Cross Browser Compatibility of Your Websites 9 Websites to Learn the Basics About html 5 Development: Online web.config security analyzer tool Using 51Degrees.Mobi Foundation for accurate mobile browser detection on ASP.NET MVC 3 Interested in more interesting links follow me at twitter http://twitter.com/erwingriekspoor

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  • How to get around the Circular Reference issue with JSON and Entity

    - by DanScan
    I have been experimenting with creating a website that leverages MVC with JSON for my presentation layer and Entity framework for data model/database. My Issue comes into play with serializing my Model objects into JSON. I am using the code first method to create my database. When doing the code first method a one to many relationship (parent/child) requires the child to have a reference back to the parent. (Example code my be a typo but you get the picture) class parent { public List<child> Children{get;set;} public int Id{get;set;} } class child { public int ParentId{get;set;} [ForeignKey("ParentId")] public parent MyParent{get;set;} public string name{get;set;} } When returning a "parent" object via a JsonResult a circular reference error is thrown because "child" has a property of class parent. I have tried the ScriptIgnore attribute but I lose the ability to look at the child objects. I will need to display information in a parent child view at some point. I have tried to make base classes for both parent and child that do not have a circular reference. Unfortunately when I attempt to send the baseParent and baseChild these are read by the JSON Parser as their derived classes (I am pretty sure this concept is escaping me). Base.baseParent basep = (Base.baseParent)parent; return Json(basep, JsonRequestBehavior.AllowGet); The one solution I have come up with is to create "View" Models. I create simple versions of the database models that do not include the reference to the parent class. These view models each have method to return the Database Version and a constructor that takes the database model as a parameter (viewmodel.name = databasemodel.name). This method seems forced although it works. NOTE:I am posting here because I think this is more discussion worthy. I could leverage a different design pattern to over come this issue or it could be as simple as using a different attribute on my model. In my searching I have not seen a good method to overcome this problem. My end goal would be to have a nice MVC application that heavily leverages JSON for communicating with the server and displaying data. While maintaining a consistant model across layers (or as best as I can come up with).

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  • Examples of different architecture methodologies

    - by Lane
    Is there a resource or site which illustrates building the same application (desktop or web) using several different contrasting architectures? Such as MVP versus MVVM versus MVC, etc. It would be very helpful to see how they look side-by-side using real-world code instead of comparing written theory to written theory. I've often found that something can be described well in a book, but when you go to implement it, the subtleties and weaknesses of the theory become readily apparent.

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  • Upload File to Windows Azure Blob in Chunks through ASP.NET MVC, JavaScript and HTML5

    - by Shaun
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/shaunxu/archive/2013/07/01/upload-file-to-windows-azure-blob-in-chunks-through-asp.net.aspxMany people are using Windows Azure Blob Storage to store their data in the cloud. Blob storage provides 99.9% availability with easy-to-use API through .NET SDK and HTTP REST. For example, we can store JavaScript files, images, documents in blob storage when we are building an ASP.NET web application on a Web Role in Windows Azure. Or we can store our VHD files in blob and mount it as a hard drive in our cloud service. If you are familiar with Windows Azure, you should know that there are two kinds of blob: page blob and block blob. The page blob is optimized for random read and write, which is very useful when you need to store VHD files. The block blob is optimized for sequential/chunk read and write, which has more common usage. Since we can upload block blob in blocks through BlockBlob.PutBlock, and them commit them as a whole blob with invoking the BlockBlob.PutBlockList, it is very powerful to upload large files, as we can upload blocks in parallel, and provide pause-resume feature. There are many documents, articles and blog posts described on how to upload a block blob. Most of them are focus on the server side, which means when you had received a big file, stream or binaries, how to upload them into blob storage in blocks through .NET SDK.  But the problem is, how can we upload these large files from client side, for example, a browser. This questioned to me when I was working with a Chinese customer to help them build a network disk production on top of azure. The end users upload their files from the web portal, and then the files will be stored in blob storage from the Web Role. My goal is to find the best way to transform the file from client (end user’s machine) to the server (Web Role) through browser. In this post I will demonstrate and describe what I had done, to upload large file in chunks with high speed, and save them as blocks into Windows Azure Blob Storage.   Traditional Upload, Works with Limitation The simplest way to implement this requirement is to create a web page with a form that contains a file input element and a submit button. 1: @using (Html.BeginForm("About", "Index", FormMethod.Post, new { enctype = "multipart/form-data" })) 2: { 3: <input type="file" name="file" /> 4: <input type="submit" value="upload" /> 5: } And then in the backend controller, we retrieve the whole content of this file and upload it in to the blob storage through .NET SDK. We can split the file in blocks and upload them in parallel and commit. The code had been well blogged in the community. 1: [HttpPost] 2: public ActionResult About(HttpPostedFileBase file) 3: { 4: var container = _client.GetContainerReference("test"); 5: container.CreateIfNotExists(); 6: var blob = container.GetBlockBlobReference(file.FileName); 7: var blockDataList = new Dictionary<string, byte[]>(); 8: using (var stream = file.InputStream) 9: { 10: var blockSizeInKB = 1024; 11: var offset = 0; 12: var index = 0; 13: while (offset < stream.Length) 14: { 15: var readLength = Math.Min(1024 * blockSizeInKB, (int)stream.Length - offset); 16: var blockData = new byte[readLength]; 17: offset += stream.Read(blockData, 0, readLength); 18: blockDataList.Add(Convert.ToBase64String(BitConverter.GetBytes(index)), blockData); 19:  20: index++; 21: } 22: } 23:  24: Parallel.ForEach(blockDataList, (bi) => 25: { 26: blob.PutBlock(bi.Key, new MemoryStream(bi.Value), null); 27: }); 28: blob.PutBlockList(blockDataList.Select(b => b.Key).ToArray()); 29:  30: return RedirectToAction("About"); 31: } This works perfect if we selected an image, a music or a small video to upload. But if I selected a large file, let’s say a 6GB HD-movie, after upload for about few minutes the page will be shown as below and the upload will be terminated. In ASP.NET there is a limitation of request length and the maximized request length is defined in the web.config file. It’s a number which less than about 4GB. So if we want to upload a really big file, we cannot simply implement in this way. Also, in Windows Azure, a cloud service network load balancer will terminate the connection if exceed the timeout period. From my test the timeout looks like 2 - 3 minutes. Hence, when we need to upload a large file we cannot just use the basic HTML elements. Besides the limitation mentioned above, the simple HTML file upload cannot provide rich upload experience such as chunk upload, pause and pause-resume. So we need to find a better way to upload large file from the client to the server.   Upload in Chunks through HTML5 and JavaScript In order to break those limitation mentioned above we will try to upload the large file in chunks. This takes some benefit to us such as - No request size limitation: Since we upload in chunks, we can define the request size for each chunks regardless how big the entire file is. - No timeout problem: The size of chunks are controlled by us, which means we should be able to make sure request for each chunk upload will not exceed the timeout period of both ASP.NET and Windows Azure load balancer. It was a big challenge to upload big file in chunks until we have HTML5. There are some new features and improvements introduced in HTML5 and we will use them to implement our solution.   In HTML5, the File interface had been improved with a new method called “slice”. It can be used to read part of the file by specifying the start byte index and the end byte index. For example if the entire file was 1024 bytes, file.slice(512, 768) will read the part of this file from the 512nd byte to 768th byte, and return a new object of interface called "Blob”, which you can treat as an array of bytes. In fact,  a Blob object represents a file-like object of immutable, raw data. The File interface is based on Blob, inheriting blob functionality and expanding it to support files on the user's system. For more information about the Blob please refer here. File and Blob is very useful to implement the chunk upload. We will use File interface to represent the file the user selected from the browser and then use File.slice to read the file in chunks in the size we wanted. For example, if we wanted to upload a 10MB file with 512KB chunks, then we can read it in 512KB blobs by using File.slice in a loop.   Assuming we have a web page as below. User can select a file, an input box to specify the block size in KB and a button to start upload. 1: <div> 2: <input type="file" id="upload_files" name="files[]" /><br /> 3: Block Size: <input type="number" id="block_size" value="512" name="block_size" />KB<br /> 4: <input type="button" id="upload_button_blob" name="upload" value="upload (blob)" /> 5: </div> Then we can have the JavaScript function to upload the file in chunks when user clicked the button. 1: <script type="text/javascript"> 1: 2: $(function () { 3: $("#upload_button_blob").click(function () { 4: }); 5: });</script> Firstly we need to ensure the client browser supports the interfaces we are going to use. Just try to invoke the File, Blob and FormData from the “window” object. If any of them is “undefined” the condition result will be “false” which means your browser doesn’t support these premium feature and it’s time for you to get your browser updated. FormData is another new feature we are going to use in the future. It could generate a temporary form for us. We will use this interface to create a form with chunk and associated metadata when invoked the service through ajax. 1: $("#upload_button_blob").click(function () { 2: // assert the browser support html5 3: if (window.File && window.Blob && window.FormData) { 4: alert("Your brwoser is awesome, let's rock!"); 5: } 6: else { 7: alert("Oh man plz update to a modern browser before try is cool stuff out."); 8: return; 9: } 10: }); Each browser supports these interfaces by their own implementation and currently the Blob, File and File.slice are supported by Chrome 21, FireFox 13, IE 10, Opera 12 and Safari 5.1 or higher. After that we worked on the files the user selected one by one since in HTML5, user can select multiple files in one file input box. 1: var files = $("#upload_files")[0].files; 2: for (var i = 0; i < files.length; i++) { 3: var file = files[i]; 4: var fileSize = file.size; 5: var fileName = file.name; 6: } Next, we calculated the start index and end index for each chunks based on the size the user specified from the browser. We put them into an array with the file name and the index, which will be used when we upload chunks into Windows Azure Blob Storage as blocks since we need to specify the target blob name and the block index. At the same time we will store the list of all indexes into another variant which will be used to commit blocks into blob in Azure Storage once all chunks had been uploaded successfully. 1: $("#upload_button_blob").click(function () { 2: // assert the browser support html5 3: ... ... 4: // start to upload each files in chunks 5: var files = $("#upload_files")[0].files; 6: for (var i = 0; i < files.length; i++) { 7: var file = files[i]; 8: var fileSize = file.size; 9: var fileName = file.name; 10:  11: // calculate the start and end byte index for each blocks(chunks) 12: // with the index, file name and index list for future using 13: var blockSizeInKB = $("#block_size").val(); 14: var blockSize = blockSizeInKB * 1024; 15: var blocks = []; 16: var offset = 0; 17: var index = 0; 18: var list = ""; 19: while (offset < fileSize) { 20: var start = offset; 21: var end = Math.min(offset + blockSize, fileSize); 22:  23: blocks.push({ 24: name: fileName, 25: index: index, 26: start: start, 27: end: end 28: }); 29: list += index + ","; 30:  31: offset = end; 32: index++; 33: } 34: } 35: }); Now we have all chunks’ information ready. The next step should be upload them one by one to the server side, and at the server side when received a chunk it will upload as a block into Blob Storage, and finally commit them with the index list through BlockBlobClient.PutBlockList. But since all these invokes are ajax calling, which means not synchronized call. So we need to introduce a new JavaScript library to help us coordinate the asynchronize operation, which named “async.js”. You can download this JavaScript library here, and you can find the document here. I will not explain this library too much in this post. We will put all procedures we want to execute as a function array, and pass into the proper function defined in async.js to let it help us to control the execution sequence, in series or in parallel. Hence we will define an array and put the function for chunk upload into this array. 1: $("#upload_button_blob").click(function () { 2: // assert the browser support html5 3: ... ... 4:  5: // start to upload each files in chunks 6: var files = $("#upload_files")[0].files; 7: for (var i = 0; i < files.length; i++) { 8: var file = files[i]; 9: var fileSize = file.size; 10: var fileName = file.name; 11: // calculate the start and end byte index for each blocks(chunks) 12: // with the index, file name and index list for future using 13: ... ... 14:  15: // define the function array and push all chunk upload operation into this array 16: blocks.forEach(function (block) { 17: putBlocks.push(function (callback) { 18: }); 19: }); 20: } 21: }); 22: }); As you can see, I used File.slice method to read each chunks based on the start and end byte index we calculated previously, and constructed a temporary HTML form with the file name, chunk index and chunk data through another new feature in HTML5 named FormData. Then post this form to the backend server through jQuery.ajax. This is the key part of our solution. 1: $("#upload_button_blob").click(function () { 2: // assert the browser support html5 3: ... ... 4: // start to upload each files in chunks 5: var files = $("#upload_files")[0].files; 6: for (var i = 0; i < files.length; i++) { 7: var file = files[i]; 8: var fileSize = file.size; 9: var fileName = file.name; 10: // calculate the start and end byte index for each blocks(chunks) 11: // with the index, file name and index list for future using 12: ... ... 13: // define the function array and push all chunk upload operation into this array 14: blocks.forEach(function (block) { 15: putBlocks.push(function (callback) { 16: // load blob based on the start and end index for each chunks 17: var blob = file.slice(block.start, block.end); 18: // put the file name, index and blob into a temporary from 19: var fd = new FormData(); 20: fd.append("name", block.name); 21: fd.append("index", block.index); 22: fd.append("file", blob); 23: // post the form to backend service (asp.net mvc controller action) 24: $.ajax({ 25: url: "/Home/UploadInFormData", 26: data: fd, 27: processData: false, 28: contentType: "multipart/form-data", 29: type: "POST", 30: success: function (result) { 31: if (!result.success) { 32: alert(result.error); 33: } 34: callback(null, block.index); 35: } 36: }); 37: }); 38: }); 39: } 40: }); Then we will invoke these functions one by one by using the async.js. And once all functions had been executed successfully I invoked another ajax call to the backend service to commit all these chunks (blocks) as the blob in Windows Azure Storage. 1: $("#upload_button_blob").click(function () { 2: // assert the browser support html5 3: ... ... 4: // start to upload each files in chunks 5: var files = $("#upload_files")[0].files; 6: for (var i = 0; i < files.length; i++) { 7: var file = files[i]; 8: var fileSize = file.size; 9: var fileName = file.name; 10: // calculate the start and end byte index for each blocks(chunks) 11: // with the index, file name and index list for future using 12: ... ... 13: // define the function array and push all chunk upload operation into this array 14: ... ... 15: // invoke the functions one by one 16: // then invoke the commit ajax call to put blocks into blob in azure storage 17: async.series(putBlocks, function (error, result) { 18: var data = { 19: name: fileName, 20: list: list 21: }; 22: $.post("/Home/Commit", data, function (result) { 23: if (!result.success) { 24: alert(result.error); 25: } 26: else { 27: alert("done!"); 28: } 29: }); 30: }); 31: } 32: }); That’s all in the client side. The outline of our logic would be - Calculate the start and end byte index for each chunks based on the block size. - Defined the functions of reading the chunk form file and upload the content to the backend service through ajax. - Execute the functions defined in previous step with “async.js”. - Commit the chunks by invoking the backend service in Windows Azure Storage finally.   Save Chunks as Blocks into Blob Storage In above we finished the client size JavaScript code. It uploaded the file in chunks to the backend service which we are going to implement in this step. We will use ASP.NET MVC as our backend service, and it will receive the chunks, upload into Windows Azure Bob Storage in blocks, then finally commit as one blob. As in the client side we uploaded chunks by invoking the ajax call to the URL "/Home/UploadInFormData", I created a new action under the Index controller and it only accepts HTTP POST request. 1: [HttpPost] 2: public JsonResult UploadInFormData() 3: { 4: var error = string.Empty; 5: try 6: { 7: } 8: catch (Exception e) 9: { 10: error = e.ToString(); 11: } 12:  13: return new JsonResult() 14: { 15: Data = new 16: { 17: success = string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(error), 18: error = error 19: } 20: }; 21: } Then I retrieved the file name, index and the chunk content from the Request.Form object, which was passed from our client side. And then, used the Windows Azure SDK to create a blob container (in this case we will use the container named “test”.) and create a blob reference with the blob name (same as the file name). Then uploaded the chunk as a block of this blob with the index, since in Blob Storage each block must have an index (ID) associated with so that finally we can put all blocks as one blob by specifying their block ID list. 1: [HttpPost] 2: public JsonResult UploadInFormData() 3: { 4: var error = string.Empty; 5: try 6: { 7: var name = Request.Form["name"]; 8: var index = int.Parse(Request.Form["index"]); 9: var file = Request.Files[0]; 10: var id = Convert.ToBase64String(BitConverter.GetBytes(index)); 11:  12: var container = _client.GetContainerReference("test"); 13: container.CreateIfNotExists(); 14: var blob = container.GetBlockBlobReference(name); 15: blob.PutBlock(id, file.InputStream, null); 16: } 17: catch (Exception e) 18: { 19: error = e.ToString(); 20: } 21:  22: return new JsonResult() 23: { 24: Data = new 25: { 26: success = string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(error), 27: error = error 28: } 29: }; 30: } Next, I created another action to commit the blocks into blob once all chunks had been uploaded. Similarly, I retrieved the blob name from the Request.Form. I also retrieved the chunks ID list, which is the block ID list from the Request.Form in a string format, split them as a list, then invoked the BlockBlob.PutBlockList method. After that our blob will be shown in the container and ready to be download. 1: [HttpPost] 2: public JsonResult Commit() 3: { 4: var error = string.Empty; 5: try 6: { 7: var name = Request.Form["name"]; 8: var list = Request.Form["list"]; 9: var ids = list 10: .Split(',') 11: .Where(id => !string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(id)) 12: .Select(id => Convert.ToBase64String(BitConverter.GetBytes(int.Parse(id)))) 13: .ToArray(); 14:  15: var container = _client.GetContainerReference("test"); 16: container.CreateIfNotExists(); 17: var blob = container.GetBlockBlobReference(name); 18: blob.PutBlockList(ids); 19: } 20: catch (Exception e) 21: { 22: error = e.ToString(); 23: } 24:  25: return new JsonResult() 26: { 27: Data = new 28: { 29: success = string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(error), 30: error = error 31: } 32: }; 33: } Now we finished all code we need. The whole process of uploading would be like this below. Below is the full client side JavaScript code. 1: <script type="text/javascript" src="~/Scripts/async.js"></script> 2: <script type="text/javascript"> 3: $(function () { 4: $("#upload_button_blob").click(function () { 5: // assert the browser support html5 6: if (window.File && window.Blob && window.FormData) { 7: alert("Your brwoser is awesome, let's rock!"); 8: } 9: else { 10: alert("Oh man plz update to a modern browser before try is cool stuff out."); 11: return; 12: } 13:  14: // start to upload each files in chunks 15: var files = $("#upload_files")[0].files; 16: for (var i = 0; i < files.length; i++) { 17: var file = files[i]; 18: var fileSize = file.size; 19: var fileName = file.name; 20:  21: // calculate the start and end byte index for each blocks(chunks) 22: // with the index, file name and index list for future using 23: var blockSizeInKB = $("#block_size").val(); 24: var blockSize = blockSizeInKB * 1024; 25: var blocks = []; 26: var offset = 0; 27: var index = 0; 28: var list = ""; 29: while (offset < fileSize) { 30: var start = offset; 31: var end = Math.min(offset + blockSize, fileSize); 32:  33: blocks.push({ 34: name: fileName, 35: index: index, 36: start: start, 37: end: end 38: }); 39: list += index + ","; 40:  41: offset = end; 42: index++; 43: } 44:  45: // define the function array and push all chunk upload operation into this array 46: var putBlocks = []; 47: blocks.forEach(function (block) { 48: putBlocks.push(function (callback) { 49: // load blob based on the start and end index for each chunks 50: var blob = file.slice(block.start, block.end); 51: // put the file name, index and blob into a temporary from 52: var fd = new FormData(); 53: fd.append("name", block.name); 54: fd.append("index", block.index); 55: fd.append("file", blob); 56: // post the form to backend service (asp.net mvc controller action) 57: $.ajax({ 58: url: "/Home/UploadInFormData", 59: data: fd, 60: processData: false, 61: contentType: "multipart/form-data", 62: type: "POST", 63: success: function (result) { 64: if (!result.success) { 65: alert(result.error); 66: } 67: callback(null, block.index); 68: } 69: }); 70: }); 71: }); 72:  73: // invoke the functions one by one 74: // then invoke the commit ajax call to put blocks into blob in azure storage 75: async.series(putBlocks, function (error, result) { 76: var data = { 77: name: fileName, 78: list: list 79: }; 80: $.post("/Home/Commit", data, function (result) { 81: if (!result.success) { 82: alert(result.error); 83: } 84: else { 85: alert("done!"); 86: } 87: }); 88: }); 89: } 90: }); 91: }); 92: </script> And below is the full ASP.NET MVC controller code. 1: public class HomeController : Controller 2: { 3: private CloudStorageAccount _account; 4: private CloudBlobClient _client; 5:  6: public HomeController() 7: : base() 8: { 9: _account = CloudStorageAccount.Parse(CloudConfigurationManager.GetSetting("DataConnectionString")); 10: _client = _account.CreateCloudBlobClient(); 11: } 12:  13: public ActionResult Index() 14: { 15: ViewBag.Message = "Modify this template to jump-start your ASP.NET MVC application."; 16:  17: return View(); 18: } 19:  20: [HttpPost] 21: public JsonResult UploadInFormData() 22: { 23: var error = string.Empty; 24: try 25: { 26: var name = Request.Form["name"]; 27: var index = int.Parse(Request.Form["index"]); 28: var file = Request.Files[0]; 29: var id = Convert.ToBase64String(BitConverter.GetBytes(index)); 30:  31: var container = _client.GetContainerReference("test"); 32: container.CreateIfNotExists(); 33: var blob = container.GetBlockBlobReference(name); 34: blob.PutBlock(id, file.InputStream, null); 35: } 36: catch (Exception e) 37: { 38: error = e.ToString(); 39: } 40:  41: return new JsonResult() 42: { 43: Data = new 44: { 45: success = string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(error), 46: error = error 47: } 48: }; 49: } 50:  51: [HttpPost] 52: public JsonResult Commit() 53: { 54: var error = string.Empty; 55: try 56: { 57: var name = Request.Form["name"]; 58: var list = Request.Form["list"]; 59: var ids = list 60: .Split(',') 61: .Where(id => !string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(id)) 62: .Select(id => Convert.ToBase64String(BitConverter.GetBytes(int.Parse(id)))) 63: .ToArray(); 64:  65: var container = _client.GetContainerReference("test"); 66: container.CreateIfNotExists(); 67: var blob = container.GetBlockBlobReference(name); 68: blob.PutBlockList(ids); 69: } 70: catch (Exception e) 71: { 72: error = e.ToString(); 73: } 74:  75: return new JsonResult() 76: { 77: Data = new 78: { 79: success = string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(error), 80: error = error 81: } 82: }; 83: } 84: } And if we selected a file from the browser we will see our application will upload chunks in the size we specified to the server through ajax call in background, and then commit all chunks in one blob. Then we can find the blob in our Windows Azure Blob Storage.   Optimized by Parallel Upload In previous example we just uploaded our file in chunks. This solved the problem that ASP.NET MVC request content size limitation as well as the Windows Azure load balancer timeout. But it might introduce the performance problem since we uploaded chunks in sequence. In order to improve the upload performance we could modify our client side code a bit to make the upload operation invoked in parallel. The good news is that, “async.js” library provides the parallel execution function. If you remembered the code we invoke the service to upload chunks, it utilized “async.series” which means all functions will be executed in sequence. Now we will change this code to “async.parallel”. This will invoke all functions in parallel. 1: $("#upload_button_blob").click(function () { 2: // assert the browser support html5 3: ... ... 4: // start to upload each files in chunks 5: var files = $("#upload_files")[0].files; 6: for (var i = 0; i < files.length; i++) { 7: var file = files[i]; 8: var fileSize = file.size; 9: var fileName = file.name; 10: // calculate the start and end byte index for each blocks(chunks) 11: // with the index, file name and index list for future using 12: ... ... 13: // define the function array and push all chunk upload operation into this array 14: ... ... 15: // invoke the functions one by one 16: // then invoke the commit ajax call to put blocks into blob in azure storage 17: async.parallel(putBlocks, function (error, result) { 18: var data = { 19: name: fileName, 20: list: list 21: }; 22: $.post("/Home/Commit", data, function (result) { 23: if (!result.success) { 24: alert(result.error); 25: } 26: else { 27: alert("done!"); 28: } 29: }); 30: }); 31: } 32: }); In this way all chunks will be uploaded to the server side at the same time to maximize the bandwidth usage. This should work if the file was not very large and the chunk size was not very small. But for large file this might introduce another problem that too many ajax calls are sent to the server at the same time. So the best solution should be, upload the chunks in parallel with maximum concurrency limitation. The code below specified the concurrency limitation to 4, which means at the most only 4 ajax calls could be invoked at the same time. 1: $("#upload_button_blob").click(function () { 2: // assert the browser support html5 3: ... ... 4: // start to upload each files in chunks 5: var files = $("#upload_files")[0].files; 6: for (var i = 0; i < files.length; i++) { 7: var file = files[i]; 8: var fileSize = file.size; 9: var fileName = file.name; 10: // calculate the start and end byte index for each blocks(chunks) 11: // with the index, file name and index list for future using 12: ... ... 13: // define the function array and push all chunk upload operation into this array 14: ... ... 15: // invoke the functions one by one 16: // then invoke the commit ajax call to put blocks into blob in azure storage 17: async.parallelLimit(putBlocks, 4, function (error, result) { 18: var data = { 19: name: fileName, 20: list: list 21: }; 22: $.post("/Home/Commit", data, function (result) { 23: if (!result.success) { 24: alert(result.error); 25: } 26: else { 27: alert("done!"); 28: } 29: }); 30: }); 31: } 32: });   Summary In this post we discussed how to upload files in chunks to the backend service and then upload them into Windows Azure Blob Storage in blocks. We focused on the frontend side and leverage three new feature introduced in HTML 5 which are - File.slice: Read part of the file by specifying the start and end byte index. - Blob: File-like interface which contains the part of the file content. - FormData: Temporary form element that we can pass the chunk alone with some metadata to the backend service. Then we discussed the performance consideration of chunk uploading. Sequence upload cannot provide maximized upload speed, but the unlimited parallel upload might crash the browser and server if too many chunks. So we finally came up with the solution to upload chunks in parallel with the concurrency limitation. We also demonstrated how to utilize “async.js” JavaScript library to help us control the asynchronize call and the parallel limitation.   Regarding the chunk size and the parallel limitation value there is no “best” value. You need to test vary composition and find out the best one for your particular scenario. It depends on the local bandwidth, client machine cores and the server side (Windows Azure Cloud Service Virtual Machine) cores, memory and bandwidth. Below is one of my performance test result. The client machine was Windows 8 IE 10 with 4 cores. I was using Microsoft Cooperation Network. The web site was hosted on Windows Azure China North data center (in Beijing) with one small web role (1.7GB 1 core CPU, 1.75GB memory with 100Mbps bandwidth). The test cases were - Chunk size: 512KB, 1MB, 2MB, 4MB. - Upload Mode: Sequence, parallel (unlimited), parallel with limit (4 threads, 8 threads). - Chunk Format: base64 string, binaries. - Target file: 100MB. - Each case was tested 3 times. Below is the test result chart. Some thoughts, but not guidance or best practice: - Parallel gets better performance than series. - No significant performance improvement between parallel 4 threads and 8 threads. - Transform with binaries provides better performance than base64. - In all cases, chunk size in 1MB - 2MB gets better performance.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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  • Using HTML 5 SessionState to save rendered Page Content

    - by Rick Strahl
    HTML 5 SessionState and LocalStorage are very useful and super easy to use to manage client side state. For building rich client side or SPA style applications it's a vital feature to be able to cache user data as well as HTML content in order to swap pages in and out of the browser's DOM. What might not be so obvious is that you can also use the sessionState and localStorage objects even in classic server rendered HTML applications to provide caching features between pages. These APIs have been around for a long time and are supported by most relatively modern browsers and even all the way back to IE8, so you can use them safely in your Web applications. SessionState and LocalStorage are easy The APIs that make up sessionState and localStorage are very simple. Both object feature the same API interface which  is a simple, string based key value store that has getItem, setItem, removeitem, clear and  key methods. The objects are also pseudo array objects and so can be iterated like an array with  a length property and you have array indexers to set and get values with. Basic usage  for storing and retrieval looks like this (using sessionStorage, but the syntax is the same for localStorage - just switch the objects):// set var lastAccess = new Date().getTime(); if (sessionStorage) sessionStorage.setItem("myapp_time", lastAccess.toString()); // retrieve in another page or on a refresh var time = null; if (sessionStorage) time = sessionStorage.getItem("myapp_time"); if (time) time = new Date(time * 1); else time = new Date(); sessionState stores data that is browser session specific and that has a liftetime of the active browser session or window. Shut down the browser or tab and the storage goes away. localStorage uses the same API interface, but the lifetime of the data is permanently stored in the browsers storage area until deleted via code or by clearing out browser cookies (not the cache). Both sessionStorage and localStorage space is limited. The spec is ambiguous about this - supposedly sessionStorage should allow for unlimited size, but it appears that most WebKit browsers support only 2.5mb for either object. This means you have to be careful what you store especially since other applications might be running on the same domain and also use the storage mechanisms. That said 2.5mb worth of character data is quite a bit and would go a long way. The easiest way to get a feel for how sessionState and localStorage work is to look at a simple example. You can go check out the following example online in Plunker: http://plnkr.co/edit/0ICotzkoPjHaWa70GlRZ?p=preview which looks like this: Plunker is an online HTML/JavaScript editor that lets you write and run Javascript code and similar to JsFiddle, but a bit cleaner to work in IMHO (thanks to John Papa for turning me on to it). The sample has two text boxes with counts that update session/local storage every time you click the related button. The counts are 'cached' in Session and Local storage. The point of these examples is that both counters survive full page reloads, and the LocalStorage counter survives a complete browser shutdown and restart. Go ahead and try it out by clicking the Reload button after updating both counters and then shutting down the browser completely and going back to the same URL (with the same browser). What you should see is that reloads leave both counters intact at the counted values, while a browser restart will leave only the local storage counter intact. The code to deal with the SessionStorage (and LocalStorage not shown here) in the example is isolated into a couple of wrapper methods to simplify the code: function getSessionCount() { var count = 0; if (sessionStorage) { var count = sessionStorage.getItem("ss_count"); count = !count ? 0 : count * 1; } $("#txtSession").val(count); return count; } function setSessionCount(count) { if (sessionStorage) sessionStorage.setItem("ss_count", count.toString()); } These two functions essentially load and store a session counter value. The two key methods used here are: sessionStorage.getItem(key); sessionStorage.setItem(key,stringVal); Note that the value given to setItem and return by getItem has to be a string. If you pass another type you get an error. Don't let that limit you though - you can easily enough store JSON data in a variable so it's quite possible to pass complex objects and store them into a single sessionStorage value:var user = { name: "Rick", id="ricks", level=8 } sessionStorage.setItem("app_user",JSON.stringify(user)); to retrieve it:var user = sessionStorage.getItem("app_user"); if (user) user = JSON.parse(user); Simple! If you're using the Chrome Developer Tools (F12) you can also check out the session and local storage state on the Resource tab:   You can also use this tool to refresh or remove entries from storage. What we just looked at is a purely client side implementation where a couple of counters are stored. For rich client centric AJAX applications sessionStorage and localStorage provide a very nice and simple API to store application state while the application is running. But you can also use these storage mechanisms to manage server centric HTML applications when you combine server rendering with some JavaScript to perform client side data caching. You can both store some state information and data on the client (ie. store a JSON object and carry it forth between server rendered HTML requests) or you can use it for good old HTTP based caching where some rendered HTML is saved and then restored later. Let's look at the latter with a real life example. Why do I need Client-side Page Caching for Server Rendered HTML? I don't know about you, but in a lot of my existing server driven applications I have lists that display a fair amount of data. Typically these lists contain links to then drill down into more specific data either for viewing or editing. You can then click on a link and go off to a detail page that provides more concise content. So far so good. But now you're done with the detail page and need to get back to the list, so you click on a 'bread crumbs trail' or an application level 'back to list' button and… …you end up back at the top of the list - the scroll position, the current selection in some cases even filters conditions - all gone with the wind. You've left behind the state of the list and are starting from scratch in your browsing of the list from the top. Not cool! Sound familiar? This a pretty common scenario with server rendered HTML content where it's so common to display lists to drill into, only to lose state in the process of returning back to the original list. Look at just about any traditional forums application, or even StackOverFlow to see what I mean here. Scroll down a bit to look at a post or entry, drill in then use the bread crumbs or tab to go back… In some cases returning to the top of a list is not a big deal. On StackOverFlow that sort of works because content is turning around so quickly you probably want to actually look at the top posts. Not always though - if you're browsing through a list of search topics you're interested in and drill in there's no way back to that position. Essentially anytime you're actively browsing the items in the list, that's when state becomes important and if it's not handled the user experience can be really disrupting. Content Caching If you're building client centric SPA style applications this is a fairly easy to solve problem - you tend to render the list once and then update the page content to overlay the detail content, only hiding the list temporarily until it's used again later. It's relatively easy to accomplish this simply by hiding content on the page and later making it visible again. But if you use server rendered content, hanging on to all the detail like filters, selections and scroll position is not quite as easy. Or is it??? This is where sessionStorage comes in handy. What if we just save the rendered content of a previous page, and then restore it when we return to this page based on a special flag that tells us to use the cached version? Let's see how we can do this. A real World Use Case Recently my local ISP asked me to help out with updating an ancient classifieds application. They had a very busy, local classifieds app that was originally an ASP classic application. The old app was - wait for it: frames based - and even though I lobbied against it, the decision was made to keep the frames based layout to allow rapid browsing of the hundreds of posts that are made on a daily basis. The primary reason they wanted this was precisely for the ability to quickly browse content item by item. While I personally hate working with Frames, I have to admit that the UI actually works well with the frames layout as long as you're running on a large desktop screen. You can check out the frames based desktop site here: http://classifieds.gorge.net/ However when I rebuilt the app I also added a secondary view that doesn't use frames. The main reason for this of course was for mobile displays which work horribly with frames. So there's a somewhat mobile friendly interface to the interface, which ditches the frames and uses some responsive design tweaking for mobile capable operation: http://classifeds.gorge.net/mobile  (or browse the base url with your browser width under 800px)   Here's what the mobile, non-frames view looks like:   As you can see this means that the list of classifieds posts now is a list and there's a separate page for drilling down into the item. And of course… originally we ran into that usability issue I mentioned earlier where the browse, view detail, go back to the list cycle resulted in lost list state. Originally in mobile mode you scrolled through the list, found an item to look at and drilled in to display the item detail. Then you clicked back to the list and BAM - you've lost your place. Because there are so many items added on a daily basis the full list is never fully loaded, but rather there's a "Load Additional Listings"  entry at the button. Not only did we originally lose our place when coming back to the list, but any 'additionally loaded' items are no longer there because the list was now rendering  as if it was the first page hit. The additional listings, and any filters, the selection of an item all were lost. Major Suckage! Using Client SessionStorage to cache Server Rendered Content To work around this problem I decided to cache the rendered page content from the list in SessionStorage. Anytime the list renders or is updated with Load Additional Listings, the page HTML is cached and stored in Session Storage. Any back links from the detail page or the login or write entry forms then point back to the list page with a back=true query string parameter. If the server side sees this parameter it doesn't render the part of the page that is cached. Instead the client side code retrieves the data from the sessionState cache and simply inserts it into the page. It sounds pretty simple, and the overall the process is really easy, but there are a few gotchas that I'll discuss in a minute. But first let's look at the implementation. Let's start with the server side here because that'll give a quick idea of the doc structure. As I mentioned the server renders data from an ASP.NET MVC view. On the list page when returning to the list page from the display page (or a host of other pages) looks like this: https://classifieds.gorge.net/list?back=True The query string value is a flag, that indicates whether the server should render the HTML. Here's what the top level MVC Razor view for the list page looks like:@model MessageListViewModel @{ ViewBag.Title = "Classified Listing"; bool isBack = !string.IsNullOrEmpty(Request.QueryString["back"]); } <form method="post" action="@Url.Action("list")"> <div id="SizingContainer"> @if (!isBack) { @Html.Partial("List_CommandBar_Partial", Model) <div id="PostItemContainer" class="scrollbox" xstyle="-webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch;"> @Html.Partial("List_Items_Partial", Model) @if (Model.RequireLoadEntry) { <div class="postitem loadpostitems" style="padding: 15px;"> <div id="LoadProgress" class="smallprogressright"></div> <div class="control-progress"> Load additional listings... </div> </div> } </div> } </div> </form> As you can see the query string triggers a conditional block that if set is simply not rendered. The content inside of #SizingContainer basically holds  the entire page's HTML sans the headers and scripts, but including the filter options and menu at the top. In this case this makes good sense - in other situations the fact that the menu or filter options might be dynamically updated might make you only cache the list rather than essentially the entire page. In this particular instance all of the content works and produces the proper result as both the list along with any filter conditions in the form inputs are restored. Ok, let's move on to the client. On the client there are two page level functions that deal with saving and restoring state. Like the counter example I showed earlier, I like to wrap the logic to save and restore values from sessionState into a separate function because they are almost always used in several places.page.saveData = function(id) { if (!sessionStorage) return; var data = { id: id, scroll: $("#PostItemContainer").scrollTop(), html: $("#SizingContainer").html() }; sessionStorage.setItem("list_html",JSON.stringify(data)); }; page.restoreData = function() { if (!sessionStorage) return; var data = sessionStorage.getItem("list_html"); if (!data) return null; return JSON.parse(data); }; The data that is saved is an object which contains an ID which is the selected element when the user clicks and a scroll position. These two values are used to reset the scroll position when the data is used from the cache. Finally the html from the #SizingContainer element is stored, which makes for the bulk of the document's HTML. In this application the HTML captured could be a substantial bit of data. If you recall, I mentioned that the server side code renders a small chunk of data initially and then gets more data if the user reads through the first 50 or so items. The rest of the items retrieved can be rather sizable. Other than the JSON deserialization that's Ok. Since I'm using SessionStorage the storage space has no immediate limits. Next is the core logic to handle saving and restoring the page state. At first though this would seem pretty simple, and in some cases it might be, but as the following code demonstrates there are a few gotchas to watch out for. Here's the relevant code I use to save and restore:$( function() { … var isBack = getUrlEncodedKey("back", location.href); if (isBack) { // remove the back key from URL setUrlEncodedKey("back", "", location.href); var data = page.restoreData(); // restore from sessionState if (!data) { // no data - force redisplay of the server side default list window.location = "list"; return; } $("#SizingContainer").html(data.html); var el = $(".postitem[data-id=" + data.id + "]"); $(".postitem").removeClass("highlight"); el.addClass("highlight"); $("#PostItemContainer").scrollTop(data.scroll); setTimeout(function() { el.removeClass("highlight"); }, 2500); } else if (window.noFrames) page.saveData(null); // save when page loads $("#SizingContainer").on("click", ".postitem", function() { var id = $(this).attr("data-id"); if (!id) return true; if (window.noFrames) page.saveData(id); var contentFrame = window.parent.frames["Content"]; if (contentFrame) contentFrame.location.href = "show/" + id; else window.location.href = "show/" + id; return false; }); … The code starts out by checking for the back query string flag which triggers restoring from the client cache. If cached the cached data structure is read from sessionStorage. It's important here to check if data was returned. If the user had back=true on the querystring but there is no cached data, he likely bookmarked this page or otherwise shut down the browser and came back to this URL. In that case the server didn't render any detail and we have no cached data, so all we can do is redirect to the original default list view using window.location. If we continued the page would render no data - so make sure to always check the cache retrieval result. Always! If there is data the it's loaded and the data.html data is restored back into the document by simply injecting the HTML back into the document's #SizingContainer element:$("#SizingContainer").html(data.html); It's that simple and it's quite quick even with a fully loaded list of additional items and on a phone. The actual HTML data is stored to the cache on every page load initially and then again when the user clicks on an element to navigate to a particular listing. The former ensures that the client cache always has something in it, and the latter updates with additional information for the selected element. For the click handling I use a data-id attribute on the list item (.postitem) in the list and retrieve the id from that. That id is then used to navigate to the actual entry as well as storing that Id value in the saved cached data. The id is used to reset the selection by searching for the data-id value in the restored elements. The overall process of this save/restore process is pretty straight forward and it doesn't require a bunch of code, yet it yields a huge improvement in the usability of the site on mobile devices (or anybody who uses the non-frames view). Some things to watch out for As easy as it conceptually seems to simply store and retrieve cached content, you have to be quite aware what type of content you are caching. The code above is all that's specific to cache/restore cycle and it works, but it took a few tweaks to the rest of the script code and server code to make it all work. There were a few gotchas that weren't immediately obvious. Here are a few things to pay attention to: Event Handling Logic Timing of manipulating DOM events Inline Script Code Bookmarking to the Cache Url when no cache exists Do you have inline script code in your HTML? That script code isn't going to run if you restore from cache and simply assign or it may not run at the time you think it would normally in the DOM rendering cycle. JavaScript Event Hookups The biggest issue I ran into with this approach almost immediately is that originally I had various static event handlers hooked up to various UI elements that are now cached. If you have an event handler like:$("#btnSearch").click( function() {…}); that works fine when the page loads with server rendered HTML, but that code breaks when you now load the HTML from cache. Why? Because the elements you're trying to hook those events to may not actually be there - yet. Luckily there's an easy workaround for this by using deferred events. With jQuery you can use the .on() event handler instead:$("#SelectionContainer").on("click","#btnSearch", function() {…}); which monitors a parent element for the events and checks for the inner selector elements to handle events on. This effectively defers to runtime event binding, so as more items are added to the document bindings still work. For any cached content use deferred events. Timing of manipulating DOM Elements Along the same lines make sure that your DOM manipulation code follows the code that loads the cached content into the page so that you don't manipulate DOM elements that don't exist just yet. Ideally you'll want to check for the condition to restore cached content towards the top of your script code, but that can be tricky if you have components or other logic that might not all run in a straight line. Inline Script Code Here's another small problem I ran into: I use a DateTime Picker widget I built a while back that relies on the jQuery date time picker. I also created a helper function that allows keyboard date navigation into it that uses JavaScript logic. Because MVC's limited 'object model' the only way to embed widget content into the page is through inline script. This code broken when I inserted the cached HTML into the page because the script code was not available when the component actually got injected into the page. As the last bullet - it's a matter of timing. There's no good work around for this - in my case I pulled out the jQuery date picker and relied on native <input type="date" /> logic instead - a better choice these days anyway, especially since this view is meant to be primarily to serve mobile devices which actually support date input through the browser (unlike desktop browsers of which only WebKit seems to support it). Bookmarking Cached Urls When you cache HTML content you have to make a decision whether you cache on the client and also not render that same content on the server. In the Classifieds app I didn't render server side content so if the user comes to the page with back=True and there is no cached content I have to a have a Plan B. Typically this happens when somebody ends up bookmarking the back URL. The easiest and safest solution for this scenario is to ALWAYS check the cache result to make sure it exists and if not have a safe URL to go back to - in this case to the plain uncached list URL which amounts to effectively redirecting. This seems really obvious in hindsight, but it's easy to overlook and not see a problem until much later, when it's not obvious at all why the page is not rendering anything. Don't use <body> to replace Content Since we're practically replacing all the HTML in the page it may seem tempting to simply replace the HTML content of the <body> tag. Don't. The body tag usually contains key things that should stay in the page and be there when it loads. Specifically script tags and elements and possibly other embedded content. It's best to create a top level DOM element specifically as a placeholder container for your cached content and wrap just around the actual content you want to replace. In the app above the #SizingContainer is that container. Other Approaches The approach I've used for this application is kind of specific to the existing server rendered application we're running and so it's just one approach you can take with caching. However for server rendered content caching this is a pattern I've used in a few apps to retrofit some client caching into list displays. In this application I took the path of least resistance to the existing server rendering logic. Here are a few other ways that come to mind: Using Partial HTML Rendering via AJAXInstead of rendering the page initially on the server, the page would load empty and the client would render the UI by retrieving the respective HTML and embedding it into the page from a Partial View. This effectively makes the initial rendering and the cached rendering logic identical and removes the server having to decide whether this request needs to be rendered or not (ie. not checking for a back=true switch). All the logic related to caching is made on the client in this case. Using JSON Data and Client RenderingThe hardcore client option is to do the whole UI SPA style and pull data from the server and then use client rendering or databinding to pull the data down and render using templates or client side databinding with knockout/angular et al. As with the Partial Rendering approach the advantage is that there's no difference in the logic between pulling the data from cache or rendering from scratch other than the initial check for the cache request. Of course if the app is a  full on SPA app, then caching may not be required even - the list could just stay in memory and be hidden and reactivated. I'm sure there are a number of other ways this can be handled as well especially using  AJAX. AJAX rendering might simplify the logic, but it also complicates search engine optimization since there's no content loaded initially. So there are always tradeoffs and it's important to look at all angles before deciding on any sort of caching solution in general. State of the Session SessionState and LocalStorage are easy to use in client code and can be integrated even with server centric applications to provide nice caching features of content and data. In this post I've shown a very specific scenario of storing HTML content for the purpose of remembering list view data and state and making the browsing experience for lists a bit more friendly, especially if there's dynamically loaded content involved. If you haven't played with sessionStorage or localStorage I encourage you to give it a try. There's a lot of cool stuff that you can do with this beyond the specific scenario I've covered here… Resources Overview of localStorage (also applies to sessionStorage) Web Storage Compatibility Modernizr Test Suite© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2013Posted in JavaScript  HTML5  ASP.NET  MVC   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); })();

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  • Novo Suporte para Combinação e Minificação de Arquivos JavaScript e CSS (Série de posts sobre a ASP.NET 4.5)

    - by Leniel Macaferi
    Este é o sexto post de uma série de posts que estou escrevendo sobre a ASP.NET 4.5. Os próximos lançamentos do .NET e Visual Studio incluem vários novos e ótimos recursos e capacidades. Com a ASP.NET 4.5 você vai ver um monte de melhorias realmente emocionantes em formulários da Web ( Web Forms ) e MVC - assim como no núcleo da base de código da ASP.NET, no qual estas tecnologias são baseadas. O post de hoje cobre um pouco do trabalho que estamos realizando para adicionar suporte nativo para combinação e minificação de arquivos JavaScript e CSS dentro da ASP.NET - o que torna mais fácil melhorar o desempenho das aplicações. Este recurso pode ser utilizado por todas as aplicações ASP.NET, incluindo tanto a ASP.NET MVC quanto a ASP.NET Web Forms. Noções básicas sobre Combinação e Minificação Como mais e mais pessoas usando dispositivos móveis para navegar na web, está se tornando cada vez mais importante que os websites e aplicações que construímos tenham um bom desempenho neles. Todos nós já tentamos carregar sites em nossos smartphones - apenas para, eventualmente, desistirmos em meio à frustração porque os mesmos são carregados lentamente através da lenta rede celular. Se o seu site/aplicação carrega lentamente assim, você está provavelmente perdendo clientes em potencial por causa do mau desempenho/performance. Mesmo com máquinas desktop poderosas, o tempo de carregamento do seu site e o desempenho percebido podem contribuir enormemente para a percepção do cliente. A maioria dos websites hoje em dia são construídos com múltiplos arquivos de JavaScript e CSS para separar o código e para manter a base de código coesa. Embora esta seja uma boa prática do ponto de vista de codificação, muitas vezes isso leva a algumas consequências negativas no tocante ao desempenho geral do site. Vários arquivos de JavaScript e CSS requerem múltiplas solicitações HTTP provenientes do navegador - o que pode retardar o tempo de carregamento do site.  Exemplo Simples A seguir eu abri um site local no IE9 e gravei o tráfego da rede usando as ferramentas do desenvolvedor nativas do IE (IE Developer Tools) que podem ser acessadas com a tecla F12. Como mostrado abaixo, o site é composto por 5 arquivos CSS e 4 arquivos JavaScript, os quais o navegador tem que fazer o download. Cada arquivo é solicitado separadamente pelo navegador e retornado pelo servidor, e o processo pode levar uma quantidade significativa de tempo proporcional ao número de arquivos em questão. Combinação A ASP.NET está adicionando um recurso que facilita a "união" ou "combinação" de múltiplos arquivos CSS e JavaScript em menos solicitações HTTP. Isso faz com que o navegador solicite muito menos arquivos, o que por sua vez reduz o tempo que o mesmo leva para buscá-los. A seguir está uma versão atualizada do exemplo mostrado acima, que tira vantagem desta nova funcionalidade de combinação de arquivos (fazendo apenas um pedido para JavaScript e um pedido para CSS): O navegador agora tem que enviar menos solicitações ao servidor. O conteúdo dos arquivos individuais foram combinados/unidos na mesma resposta, mas o conteúdo dos arquivos permanece o mesmo - por isso o tamanho do arquivo geral é exatamente o mesmo de antes da combinação (somando o tamanho dos arquivos separados). Mas note como mesmo em uma máquina de desenvolvimento local (onde a latência da rede entre o navegador e o servidor é mínima), o ato de combinar os arquivos CSS e JavaScript ainda consegue reduzir o tempo de carregamento total da página em quase 20%. Em uma rede lenta a melhora de desempenho seria ainda maior. Minificação A próxima versão da ASP.NET também está adicionando uma nova funcionalidade que facilita reduzir ou "minificar" o tamanho do download do conteúdo. Este é um processo que remove espaços em branco, comentários e outros caracteres desnecessários dos arquivos CSS e JavaScript. O resultado é arquivos menores, que serão enviados e carregados no navegador muito mais rapidamente. O gráfico a seguir mostra o ganho de desempenho que estamos tendo quando os processos de combinação e minificação dos arquivos são usados ??em conjunto: Mesmo no meu computador de desenvolvimento local (onde a latência da rede é mínima), agora temos uma melhoria de desempenho de 40% a partir de onde originalmente começamos. Em redes lentas (e especialmente com clientes internacionais), os ganhos seriam ainda mais significativos. Usando Combinação e Minificação de Arquivos dentro da ASP.NET A próxima versão da ASP.NET torna realmente fácil tirar proveito da combinação e minificação de arquivos dentro de projetos, possibilitando ganhos de desempenho como os que foram mostrados nos cenários acima. A forma como ela faz isso, te permite evitar a execução de ferramentas personalizadas/customizadas, como parte do seu processo de construção da aplicação/website - ao invés disso, a ASP.NET adicionou suporte no tempo de execução/runtime para que você possa executar a combinação/minificação dos arquivos dinamicamente (cacheando os resultados para ter certeza de que a performance seja realmente satisfatória). Isto permite uma experiência de desenvolvimento realmente limpa e torna super fácil começar a tirar proveito destas novas funcionalidades. Vamos supor que temos um projeto simples com 4 arquivos JavaScript e 6 arquivos CSS: Combinando e Minificando os Arquivos CSS Digamos que você queira referenciar em uma página todas as folhas de estilo que estão dentro da pasta "Styles" mostrada acima. Hoje você tem que adicionar múltiplas referências para os arquivos CSS para obter todos eles - o que se traduziria em seis requisições HTTP separadas: O novo recurso de combinação/minificação agora permite que você combine e minifique todos os arquivos CSS da pasta Styles - simplesmente enviando uma solicitação de URL para a pasta (neste caso, "styles"), com um caminho adicional "/css" na URL. Por exemplo:    Isso fará com que a ASP.NET verifique o diretório, combine e minifique os arquivos CSS que estiverem dentro da pasta, e envie uma única resposta HTTP para o navegador com todo o conteúdo CSS. Você não precisa executar nenhuma ferramenta ou pré-processamento para obter esse comportamento. Isso te permite separar de maneira limpa seus estilos em arquivos CSS separados e condizentes com cada funcionalidade da aplicação mantendo uma experiência de desenvolvimento extremamente limpa - e mesmo assim você não terá um impacto negativo de desempenho no tempo de execução da aplicação. O designer do Visual Studio também vai honrar a lógica de combinação/minificação - assim você ainda terá uma experiência WYSWIYG no designer dentro VS. Combinando e Minificando os Arquivos JavaScript Como a abordagem CSS mostrada acima, se quiséssemos combinar e minificar todos os nossos arquivos de JavaScript em uma única resposta, poderíamos enviar um pedido de URL para a pasta (neste caso, "scripts"), com um caminho adicional "/js":   Isso fará com que a ASP.NET verifique o diretório, combine e minifique os arquivos com extensão .js dentro dele, e envie uma única resposta HTTP para o navegador com todo o conteúdo JavaScript. Mais uma vez - nenhuma ferramenta customizada ou etapas de construção foi necessária para obtermos esse comportamento. Este processo funciona em todos os navegadores. Ordenação dos Arquivos dentro de um Pacote Por padrão, quando os arquivos são combinados pela ASP.NET, eles são ordenados em ordem alfabética primeiramente, exatamente como eles são mostrados no Solution Explorer. Em seguida, eles são automaticamente reorganizados de modo que as bibliotecas conhecidas e suas extensões personalizadas, tais como jQuery, MooTools e Dojo sejam carregadas antes de qualquer outra coisa. Assim, a ordem padrão para a combinação dos arquivos da pasta Scripts, como a mostrada acima será: jquery-1.6.2.js jquery-ui.js jquery.tools.js a.js Por padrão, os arquivos CSS também são classificados em ordem alfabética e depois são reorganizados de forma que o arquivo reset.css e normalize.css (se eles estiverem presentes na pasta) venham sempre antes de qualquer outro arquivo. Assim, o padrão de classificação da combinação dos arquivos da pasta "Styles", como a mostrada acima será: reset.css content.css forms.css globals.css menu.css styles.css A ordenação/classificação é totalmente personalizável, e pode ser facilmente alterada para acomodar a maioria dos casos e qualquer padrão de nomenclatura que você prefira. O objetivo com a experiência pronta para uso, porém, é ter padrões inteligentes que você pode simplesmente usar e ter sucesso com os mesmos. Qualquer número de Diretórios/Subdiretórios é Suportado No exemplo acima, nós tivemos apenas uma única pasta "Scripts" e "Styles" em nossa aplicação. Isso funciona para alguns tipos de aplicação (por exemplo, aplicações com páginas simples). Muitas vezes, porém, você vai querer ter múltiplos pacotes/combinações de arquivos CSS/JS dentro de sua aplicação - por exemplo: um pacote "comum", que tem o núcleo dos arquivos JS e CSS que todas as páginas usam, e então arquivos específicos para páginas ou seções que não são utilizados globalmente. Você pode usar o suporte à combinação/minificação em qualquer número de diretórios ou subdiretórios em seu projeto - isto torna mais fácil estruturar seu código de forma a maximizar os benefícios da combinação/minificação dos arquivos. Cada diretório por padrão pode ser acessado como um pacote separado e endereçável através de uma URL.  Extensibilidade para Combinação/Minificação de Arquivos O suporte da ASP.NET para combinar e minificar é construído com extensibilidade em mente e cada parte do processo pode ser estendido ou substituído. Regras Personalizadas Além de permitir a abordagem de empacotamento - baseada em diretórios - que vem pronta para ser usada, a ASP.NET também suporta a capacidade de registrar pacotes/combinações personalizadas usando uma nova API de programação que estamos expondo.  O código a seguir demonstra como você pode registrar um "customscript" (script personalizável) usando código dentro da classe Global.asax de uma aplicação. A API permite que você adicione/remova/filtre os arquivos que farão parte do pacote de maneira muito granular:     O pacote personalizado acima pode ser referenciado em qualquer lugar dentro da aplicação usando a referência de <script> mostrada a seguir:     Processamento Personalizado Você também pode substituir os pacotes padrão CSS e JavaScript para suportar seu próprio processamento personalizado dos arquivos do pacote (por exemplo: regras personalizadas para minificação, suporte para Saas, LESS ou sintaxe CoffeeScript, etc). No exemplo mostrado a seguir, estamos indicando que queremos substituir as transformações nativas de minificação com classes MyJsTransform e MyCssTransform personalizadas. Elas são subclasses dos respectivos minificadores padrão para CSS e JavaScript, e podem adicionar funcionalidades extras:     O resultado final desta extensibilidade é que você pode se plugar dentro da lógica de combinação/minificação em um nível profundo e fazer algumas coisas muito legais com este recurso. Vídeo de 2 Minutos sobre Combinação e Minificacão de Arquivos em Ação Mads Kristensen tem um ótimo vídeo de 90 segundo (em Inglês) que demonstra a utilização do recurso de Combinação e Minificação de Arquivos. Você pode assistir o vídeo de 90 segundos aqui. Sumário O novo suporte para combinação e minificação de arquivos CSS e JavaScript dentro da próxima versão da ASP.NET tornará mais fácil a construção de aplicações web performáticas. Este recurso é realmente fácil de usar e não requer grandes mudanças no seu fluxo de trabalho de desenvolvimento existente. Ele também suporta uma rica API de extensibilidade que permite a você personalizar a lógica da maneira que você achar melhor. Você pode facilmente tirar vantagem deste novo suporte dentro de aplicações baseadas em ASP.NET MVC e ASP.NET Web Forms. Espero que ajude, Scott P.S. Além do blog, eu uso o Twitter para disponibilizar posts rápidos e para compartilhar links.Lidar com o meu Twitter é: @scottgu Texto traduzido do post original por Leniel Macaferi. google_ad_client = "pub-8849057428395760"; /* 728x90, created 2/15/09 */ google_ad_slot = "4706719075"; google_ad_width = 728; google_ad_height = 90;

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  • New Bundling and Minification Support (ASP.NET 4.5 Series)

    - by ScottGu
    This is the sixth in a series of blog posts I'm doing on ASP.NET 4.5. The next release of .NET and Visual Studio include a ton of great new features and capabilities.  With ASP.NET 4.5 you'll see a bunch of really nice improvements with both Web Forms and MVC - as well as in the core ASP.NET base foundation that both are built upon. Today’s post covers some of the work we are doing to add built-in support for bundling and minification into ASP.NET - which makes it easy to improve the performance of applications.  This feature can be used by all ASP.NET applications, including both ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET Web Forms solutions. Basics of Bundling and Minification As more and more people use mobile devices to surf the web, it is becoming increasingly important that the websites and apps we build perform well with them. We’ve all tried loading sites on our smartphones – only to eventually give up in frustration as it loads slowly over a slow cellular network.  If your site/app loads slowly like that, you are likely losing potential customers because of bad performance.  Even with powerful desktop machines, the load time of your site and perceived performance can make an enormous customer perception. Most websites today are made up of multiple JavaScript and CSS files to separate the concerns and keep the code base tight. While this is a good practice from a coding point of view, it often has some unfortunate consequences for the overall performance of the website.  Multiple JavaScript and CSS files require multiple HTTP requests from a browser – which in turn can slow down the performance load time.  Simple Example Below I’ve opened a local website in IE9 and recorded the network traffic using IE’s built-in F12 developer tools. As shown below, the website consists of 5 CSS and 4 JavaScript files which the browser has to download. Each file is currently requested separately by the browser and returned by the server, and the process can take a significant amount of time proportional to the number of files in question. Bundling ASP.NET is adding a feature that makes it easy to “bundle” or “combine” multiple CSS and JavaScript files into fewer HTTP requests. This causes the browser to request a lot fewer files and in turn reduces the time it takes to fetch them.   Below is an updated version of the above sample that takes advantage of this new bundling functionality (making only one request for the JavaScript and one request for the CSS): The browser now has to send fewer requests to the server. The content of the individual files have been bundled/combined into the same response, but the content of the files remains the same - so the overall file size is exactly the same as before the bundling.   But notice how even on a local dev machine (where the network latency between the browser and server is minimal), the act of bundling the CSS and JavaScript files together still manages to reduce the overall page load time by almost 20%.  Over a slow network the performance improvement would be even better. Minification The next release of ASP.NET is also adding a new feature that makes it easy to reduce or “minify” the download size of the content as well.  This is a process that removes whitespace, comments and other unneeded characters from both CSS and JavaScript. The result is smaller files, which will download and load in a browser faster.  The graph below shows the performance gain we are seeing when both bundling and minification are used together: Even on my local dev box (where the network latency is minimal), we now have a 40% performance improvement from where we originally started.  On slow networks (and especially with international customers), the gains would be even more significant. Using Bundling and Minification inside ASP.NET The upcoming release of ASP.NET makes it really easy to take advantage of bundling and minification within projects and see performance gains like in the scenario above. The way it does this allows you to avoid having to run custom tools as part of your build process –  instead ASP.NET has added runtime support to perform the bundling/minification for you dynamically (caching the results to make sure perf is great).  This enables a really clean development experience and makes it super easy to start to take advantage of these new features. Let’s assume that we have a simple project that has 4 JavaScript files and 6 CSS files: Bundling and Minifying the .css files Let’s say you wanted to reference all of the stylesheets in the “Styles” folder above on a page.  Today you’d have to add multiple CSS references to get all of them – which would translate into 6 separate HTTP requests: The new bundling/minification feature now allows you to instead bundle and minify all of the .css files in the Styles folder – simply by sending a URL request to the folder (in this case “styles”) with an appended “/css” path after it.  For example:    This will cause ASP.NET to scan the directory, bundle and minify the .css files within it, and send back a single HTTP response with all of the CSS content to the browser.  You don’t need to run any tools or pre-processor to get this behavior.  This enables you to cleanly separate your CSS into separate logical .css files and maintain a very clean development experience – while not taking a performance hit at runtime for doing so.  The Visual Studio designer will also honor the new bundling/minification logic as well – so you’ll still get a WYSWIYG designer experience inside VS as well. Bundling and Minifying the JavaScript files Like the CSS approach above, if we wanted to bundle and minify all of our JavaScript into a single response we could send a URL request to the folder (in this case “scripts”) with an appended “/js” path after it:   This will cause ASP.NET to scan the directory, bundle and minify the .js files within it, and send back a single HTTP response with all of the JavaScript content to the browser.  Again – no custom tools or builds steps were required in order to get this behavior.  And it works with all browsers. Ordering of Files within a Bundle By default, when files are bundled by ASP.NET they are sorted alphabetically first, just like they are shown in Solution Explorer. Then they are automatically shifted around so that known libraries and their custom extensions such as jQuery, MooTools and Dojo are loaded before anything else. So the default order for the merged bundling of the Scripts folder as shown above will be: Jquery-1.6.2.js Jquery-ui.js Jquery.tools.js a.js By default, CSS files are also sorted alphabetically and then shifted around so that reset.css and normalize.css (if they are there) will go before any other file. So the default sorting of the bundling of the Styles folder as shown above will be: reset.css content.css forms.css globals.css menu.css styles.css The sorting is fully customizable, though, and can easily be changed to accommodate most use cases and any common naming pattern you prefer.  The goal with the out of the box experience, though, is to have smart defaults that you can just use and be successful with. Any number of directories/sub-directories supported In the example above we just had a single “Scripts” and “Styles” folder for our application.  This works for some application types (e.g. single page applications).  Often, though, you’ll want to have multiple CSS/JS bundles within your application – for example: a “common” bundle that has core JS and CSS files that all pages use, and then page specific or section specific files that are not used globally. You can use the bundling/minification support across any number of directories or sub-directories in your project – this makes it easy to structure your code so as to maximize the bunding/minification benefits.  Each directory by default can be accessed as a separate URL addressable bundle.  Bundling/Minification Extensibility ASP.NET’s bundling and minification support is built with extensibility in mind and every part of the process can be extended or replaced. Custom Rules In addition to enabling the out of the box - directory-based - bundling approach, ASP.NET also supports the ability to register custom bundles using a new programmatic API we are exposing.  The below code demonstrates how you can register a “customscript” bundle using code within an application’s Global.asax class.  The API allows you to add/remove/filter files that go into the bundle on a very granular level:     The above custom bundle can then be referenced anywhere within the application using the below <script> reference:     Custom Processing You can also override the default CSS and JavaScript bundles to support your own custom processing of the bundled files (for example: custom minification rules, support for Saas, LESS or Coffeescript syntax, etc). In the example below we are indicating that we want to replace the built-in minification transforms with a custom MyJsTransform and MyCssTransform class. They both subclass the CSS and JavaScript minifier respectively and can add extra functionality:     The end result of this extensibility is that you can plug-into the bundling/minification logic at a deep level and do some pretty cool things with it. 2 Minute Video of Bundling and Minification in Action Mads Kristensen has a great 90 second video that shows off using the new Bundling and Minification feature.  You can watch the 90 second video here. Summary The new bundling and minification support within the next release of ASP.NET will make it easier to build fast web applications.  It is really easy to use, and doesn’t require major changes to your existing dev workflow.  It is also supports a rich extensibility API that enables you to customize it however you want. You can easily take advantage of this new support within ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET Web Pages based applications. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I use Twitter to-do quick posts and share links. My Twitter handle is: @scottgu

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  • MVC Portable Area Modules *Without* MasterPages

    - by Steve Michelotti
    Portable Areas from MvcContrib provide a great way to build modular and composite applications on top of MVC. In short, portable areas provide a way to distribute MVC binary components as simple .NET assemblies where the aspx/ascx files are actually compiled into the assembly as embedded resources. I’ve blogged about Portable Areas in the past including this post here which talks about embedding resources and you can read more of an intro to Portable Areas here. As great as Portable Areas are, the question that seems to come up the most is: what about MasterPages? MasterPages seems to be the one thing that doesn’t work elegantly with portable areas because you specify the MasterPage in the @Page directive and it won’t use the same mechanism of the view engine so you can’t just embed them as resources. This means that you end up referencing a MasterPage that exists in the host application but not in your portable area. If you name the ContentPlaceHolderId’s correctly, it will work – but it all seems a little fragile. Ultimately, what I want is to be able to build a portable area as a module which has no knowledge of the host application. I want to be able to invoke the module by a full route on the user’s browser and it gets invoked and “automatically appears” inside the application’s visual chrome just like a MasterPage. So how could we accomplish this with portable areas? With this question in mind, I looked around at what other people are doing to address similar problems. Specifically, I immediately looked at how the Orchard team is handling this and I found it very compelling. Basically Orchard has its own custom layout/theme framework (utilizing a custom view engine) that allows you to build your module without any regard to the host. You simply decorate your controller with the [Themed] attribute and it will render with the outer chrome around it: 1: [Themed] 2: public class HomeController : Controller Here is the slide from the Orchard talk at this year MIX conference which shows how it conceptually works:   It’s pretty cool stuff.  So I figure, it must not be too difficult to incorporate this into the portable areas view engine as an optional piece of functionality. In fact, I’ll even simplify it a little – rather than have 1) Document.aspx, 2) Layout.ascx, and 3) <view>.ascx (as shown in the picture above); I’ll just have the outer page be “Chrome.aspx” and then the specific view in question. The Chrome.aspx not only takes the place of the MasterPage, but now since we’re no longer constrained by the MasterPage infrastructure, we have the choice of the Chrome.aspx living in the host or inside the portable areas as another embedded resource! Disclaimer: credit where credit is due – much of the code from this post is me re-purposing the Orchard code to suit my needs. To avoid confusion with Orchard, I’m going to refer to my implementation (which will be based on theirs) as a Chrome rather than a Theme. The first step I’ll take is to create a ChromedAttribute which adds a flag to the current HttpContext to indicate that the controller designated Chromed like this: 1: [Chromed] 2: public class HomeController : Controller The attribute itself is an MVC ActionFilter attribute: 1: public class ChromedAttribute : ActionFilterAttribute 2: { 3: public override void OnActionExecuting(ActionExecutingContext filterContext) 4: { 5: var chromedAttribute = GetChromedAttribute(filterContext.ActionDescriptor); 6: if (chromedAttribute != null) 7: { 8: filterContext.HttpContext.Items[typeof(ChromedAttribute)] = null; 9: } 10: } 11:   12: public static bool IsApplied(RequestContext context) 13: { 14: return context.HttpContext.Items.Contains(typeof(ChromedAttribute)); 15: } 16:   17: private static ChromedAttribute GetChromedAttribute(ActionDescriptor descriptor) 18: { 19: return descriptor.GetCustomAttributes(typeof(ChromedAttribute), true) 20: .Concat(descriptor.ControllerDescriptor.GetCustomAttributes(typeof(ChromedAttribute), true)) 21: .OfType<ChromedAttribute>() 22: .FirstOrDefault(); 23: } 24: } With that in place, we only have to override the FindView() method of the custom view engine with these 6 lines of code: 1: public override ViewEngineResult FindView(ControllerContext controllerContext, string viewName, string masterName, bool useCache) 2: { 3: if (ChromedAttribute.IsApplied(controllerContext.RequestContext)) 4: { 5: var bodyView = ViewEngines.Engines.FindPartialView(controllerContext, viewName); 6: var documentView = ViewEngines.Engines.FindPartialView(controllerContext, "Chrome"); 7: var chromeView = new ChromeView(bodyView, documentView); 8: return new ViewEngineResult(chromeView, this); 9: } 10:   11: // Just execute normally without applying Chromed View Engine 12: return base.FindView(controllerContext, viewName, masterName, useCache); 13: } If the view engine finds the [Chromed] attribute, it will invoke it’s own process – otherwise, it’ll just defer to the normal web forms view engine (with masterpages). The ChromeView’s primary job is to independently set the BodyContent on the view context so that it can be rendered at the appropriate place: 1: public class ChromeView : IView 2: { 3: private ViewEngineResult bodyView; 4: private ViewEngineResult documentView; 5:   6: public ChromeView(ViewEngineResult bodyView, ViewEngineResult documentView) 7: { 8: this.bodyView = bodyView; 9: this.documentView = documentView; 10: } 11:   12: public void Render(ViewContext viewContext, System.IO.TextWriter writer) 13: { 14: ChromeViewContext chromeViewContext = ChromeViewContext.From(viewContext); 15:   16: // First render the Body view to the BodyContent 17: using (var bodyViewWriter = new StringWriter()) 18: { 19: var bodyViewContext = new ViewContext(viewContext, bodyView.View, viewContext.ViewData, viewContext.TempData, bodyViewWriter); 20: this.bodyView.View.Render(bodyViewContext, bodyViewWriter); 21: chromeViewContext.BodyContent = bodyViewWriter.ToString(); 22: } 23: // Now render the Document view 24: this.documentView.View.Render(viewContext, writer); 25: } 26: } The ChromeViewContext (code excluded here) mainly just has a string property for the “BodyContent” – but it also makes sure to put itself in the HttpContext so it’s available. Finally, we created a little extension method so the module’s view can be rendered in the appropriate place: 1: public static void RenderBody(this HtmlHelper htmlHelper) 2: { 3: ChromeViewContext chromeViewContext = ChromeViewContext.From(htmlHelper.ViewContext); 4: htmlHelper.ViewContext.Writer.Write(chromeViewContext.BodyContent); 5: } At this point, the other thing left is to decide how we want to implement the Chrome.aspx page. One approach is the copy/paste the HTML from the typical Site.Master and change the main content placeholder to use the HTML helper above – this way, there are no MasterPages anywhere. Alternatively, we could even have Chrome.aspx utilize the MasterPage if we wanted (e.g., in the case where some pages are Chromed and some pages want to use traditional MasterPage): 1: <%@ Page Title="" Language="C#" MasterPageFile="~/Views/Shared/Site.Master" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage" %> 2: <asp:Content ID="Content2" ContentPlaceHolderID="MainContent" runat="server"> 3: <% Html.RenderBody(); %> 4: </asp:Content> At this point, it’s all academic. I can create a controller like this: 1: [Chromed] 2: public class WidgetController : Controller 3: { 4: public ActionResult Index() 5: { 6: return View(); 7: } 8: } Then I’ll just create Index.ascx (a partial view) and put in the text “Inside my widget”. Now when I run the app, I can request the full route (notice the controller name of “widget” in the address bar below) and the HTML from my Index.ascx will just appear where it is supposed to.   This means no more warnings for missing MasterPages and no more need for your module to have knowledge of the host’s MasterPage placeholders. You have the option of using the Chrome.aspx in the host or providing your own while embedding it as an embedded resource itself. I’m curious to know what people think of this approach. The code above was done with my own local copy of MvcContrib so it’s not currently something you can download. At this point, these are just my initial thoughts – just incorporating some ideas for Orchard into non-Orchard apps to enable building modular/composite apps more easily. Additionally, on the flip side, I still believe that Portable Areas have potential as the module packaging story for Orchard itself.   What do you think?

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  • How to pass an enum to Html.RadioButtonFor to get a list of radio buttons in MVC 2 RC 2, C#

    - by Matt W
    Hi, I'm trying to render a radio button list in MVC 2 RC 2 (C#) using the following line: <%= Html.RadioButtonFor(model => Enum.GetNames(typeof(DataCarry.ProtocolEnum)), null) %> but it's just giving me the following exception at runtime: Templates can be used only with field access, property access, single-dimension array index, or single-parameter custom indexer expressions. Is this possible and if so, how, please? Thanks, Matt.

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  • ASP.NET MVC: What is the lifetime of a Controller instance?

    - by Kivin
    I was unable to find any documentation on the MSDN site. Is the lifetime (construction and disposition) of the Controller object defined in the ASP.NET MVC Spec? The reason for this question is to determine whether or not it is safe to store contextual information in Controller members/properties or whether using the HttpContext would be more appropriate.

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