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• How to pass XML to DB using XMLTYPE

  - by James Taylor

  Probably not a common use case but I have seen it pop up from time to time. The question how do I pass XML from a queue or web service and insert it into a DB table using XMLTYPE.In this example I create a basic table with the field PAYLOAD of type XMLTYPE. I then take the full XML payload of the web service and insert it into that database for auditing purposes.I use SOA Suite 11.1.1.2 using composite and mediator to link the web service with the DB adapter.1. Insert Database Objects Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} --Create XML_EXAMPLE_TBL Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} CREATE TABLE XML_EXAMPLE_TBL (PAYLOAD XMLTYPE); Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} --Create procedure LOAD_TEST_XML Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} CREATE or REPLACE PROCEDURE load_test_xml (xmlFile in CLOB) IS   BEGIN     INSERT INTO xml_example_tbl (payload) VALUES (XMLTYPE(xmlFile));   --Handle the exceptions EXCEPTION   WHEN OTHERS THEN     raise_application_error(-20101, 'Exception occurred in loadPurchaseOrder procedure :'||SQLERRM || ' **** ' || xmlFile ); END load_test_xml; / 2. Creating New SOA Project TestXMLTYPE in JDeveloperIn JDeveloper either create a new Application or open an existing Application you want to put this work.Under File -> New -> SOA Tier -> SOA Project   Provide a name for the Project, e.g. TestXMLType Choose Empty Composite When selected Empty Composite click Finish.3. Create Database Connection to Stored ProcedureA Blank composite will be displayed. From the Component Palette drag a Database Adapter to the  External References panel. and configure the Database Adapter Wizard to connect to the DB procedure created above.Provide a service name InsertXML Select a Database connection where you installed the table and procedure above. If it doesn't exist create a new one. Select Call a Stored Procedure or Function then click NextChoose the schema you installed your Procedure in step 1 and query for the LOAD_TEST_XML procedure.Click Next for the remaining screens until you get to the end, then click Finish to complete the database adapter wizard.4. Create the Web Service InterfaceDownload this sample schema that will be used as the input for the web service. It does not matter what schema you use this solution will work with any. Feel free to use your own if required. singleString.xsd Drag from the component palette the Web Service to the Exposed Services panel on the component.Provide a name InvokeXMLLoad for the service, and click the cog icon.Click the magnify glass for the URL to browse to the location where you downloaded the xml schema above.  Import the schema file by selecting the import schema iconBrowse to the location to where you downloaded the singleString.xsd above.Click OK for the Import Schema File, then select the singleString node of the imported schema.Accept all the defaults until you get back to the Web Service wizard screen. The click OK. This step has created a WSDL based on the schema we downloaded earlier.Your composite should now look something like this now.5. Create the Mediator Routing Rules Drag a Mediator component into the middle of the Composite called ComponentsGive the name of Route, and accept the defaultsLink the services up to the Mediator by connecting the reference points so your Composite looks like this.6. Perform Translations between Web Service and the Database Adapter.From the Composite double click the Route Mediator to show the Map Plan. Select the transformation icon to create the XSLT translation file.Choose Create New Mapper File and accept the defaults.From the Component Palette drag the get-content-as-string component into the middle of the translation file.Your translation file should look something like thisNow we need to map the root element of the source 'singleString' to the XMLTYPE of the database adapter, applying the function get-content-as-string.To do this drag the element singleString to the left side of the function get-content-as-string and drag the right side of the get-content-as-string to the XMLFILE element of the database adapter so the mapping looks like this. You have now completed the SOA Component you can now save your work, deploy and test.When you deploy I have assumed that you have the correct database configurations in the WebLogic Console based on the connection you setup connecting to the Stored Procedure. 7. Testing the ApplicationOpen Enterprise Manager and navigate to the TestXMLTYPE Composite and click the Test button. Load some dummy variables in the Input Arguments and click the 'Test Web Service' buttonOnce completed you can run a SQL statement to check the install. In this instance I have just used JDeveloper and opened a SQL WorksheetSQL Statement Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} select * from xml_example_tbl; Result, you should see the full payload in the result.

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• Use Those Extra Mouse Buttons to Increase Efficiency

  - by Mark Virtue

  Did you know that the most commonly used mouse actions are clicking a window’s “Close” button (the X in the top-right corner), and clicking the “Back” button (in a browser and various other programs)?  How much time do you spend every day locating the Close button or the Back button with your mouse so that you can click on them?  And what about that mouse you’re using – how many buttons does it have, besides the two main ones?  Most mouses these days have at least four (including the scroll-wheel, which a lot of people don’t realize is also a button as well).  Why not assign those extra buttons to your most common mouse actions, and save yourself a bundle of mousing-around time every day? If your mouse was manufactured by one of the “premium” mouse manufacturers (Microsoft, Logitech, etc), it almost certain came with driver software to allow you to customize your mouse’s controls and take advantage of your mouse’s special features.  Microsoft, for example, provides driver software called IntelliPoint (link below), while Logitech provides SetPoint.  It’s possible that your mouse has some extra buttons but doesn’t come with its own driver software (the author is using a Microsoft Bluetooth Notebook Mouse 5000, which amazingly is not supported by the Microsoft IntelliPoint software!).  If your mouse falls into this category, you can use a marvelous free product called X-Mouse Button Control, from Highresolution Enterprises (link below).  It provides a truly amazing array of mouse configuration options, including assigning actions to buttons on a per-application basis. Once X-Mouse Button Control is downloaded, its setup process is quite straightforward. Once downloaded, you can start the program via Start / Highresolution Enterprises / X-Mouse Button Control.  You will find the program’s icon in the system tray: Right-click on the icon and select Setup from the pop-up menu.  The program’s configuration window appears: It’s extremely unlikely that we will want to change the functionality of our mouse’s two main buttons (left and right), so instead we’ll look at the rest of the options on the right side of the window.  The Middle Button refers to either the third, middle button (found on some old mouses), or the pressing of the wheel itself, as a button (if you didn’t know you could press your wheel like a button, try it out now).  Mouse Button 4 and Mouse Button 5 usually refer to the extra buttons found on the side of the mouse, often near your thumb. So what can we use these extra mouse buttons for?  Well, clearly Close and Back are two obvious candidates.  Each of these can be found by selecting them from the drop-down menu next to each button field: Once the two options are chosen, the window will look something like this: If you’re not interested in choosing Back or Close, you may like to try some of the other options in the list, including: Cut, Copy and Paste Undo Show the Desktop Next/Previous track (for media playback) Open any program Simulate any keystroke or combination of keystrokes ….and many other options.  Explore the drop-down list to see them all. You may decide, for example, that closing the current document (as opposed to the current program) would be a good use for Mouse Button 5.  In other words, we need to simulate the keypress of Ctrl-F4.  Let’s see how we achieve this. First we select Simulated Keystrokes from the drop-down list: The Simulated Keystrokes window opens: The instructions on the page are pretty comprehensive.  If you want to simulate the Ctrl-F4 keystroke, you need to type {CTRL}{F4} into the box: …and then click OK. Assigning Actions to Buttons on a Per-Application Basis One of the most powerful features of X-Mouse Button Control is the ability to assign actions to buttons on a per-application basis.  This means that if we have a particular program open, then our mouse will behave differently – our buttons will do different things. For example, when we have Windows Media Player open, for example, we may wish to have buttons assigned to Play/Pause, Next track and Previous track, as well as changing the volume with the mouse!  This is easy with X-Mouse Button Control.  We start by opening Windows Media Player.  This makes the next step easier.  Then we return to X-Mouse Button Control and add a new “configuration”.  This is done by clicking the Add button: A window opens containing a list of all running programs, including our recently opened Windows Media Player: We select Windows Media Player and click OK.  A new, blank “configuration” is created: We repeat the earlier steps to assign buttons to Play/Pause, Next track and Previous track, and assign scrolling the wheel to alter the volume:   To save all our changes and close the window, we click Apply. Now spend a few minutes thinking of all the applications you use the most, and what are the most common simple tasks you perform in each of those applications.  Those tasks are then perfect candidates for per-application button assignments. There are many more configuration options and capabilities of X-Mouse Button Control – too many to list here.  We encourage you to spend a bit of time exploring the Setup window.  Then, most important of all, don’t forget to use your new mouse buttons!  Get into the habit of using them, and then after a while you’ll start to wonder how you ever tolerated the laborious, tedious, time-consuming process of actually locating each window’s Close button… Download X-Mouse Button Control Highresolution Enterprise Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Add Specialized Toolbar Buttons to Firefox the Easy WayBoost Your Mouse Pointing Accuracy in WindowsMake Mouse Navigation Faster in WindowsVista Style Popup Previews for Firefox TabsStupid Geek Tricks: Using the Quick Zoom Feature in Outlook TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Download Videos from Hulu Pixels invade Manhattan Convert PDF files to ePub to read on your iPad Hide Your Confidential Files Inside Images Get Wildlife Photography Tips at BBC’s PhotoMasterClasses Mashpedia is a Real-time Encyclopedia

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• How to Upload a file from client to server using OFBIZ?

  - by SIVAKUMAR.J

  I'm new to ofbiz so try to keep your answer as simple as possibly. If you can give examples that would be kind. My problem is I created a project inside the ofbiz/hot-deploy folder namely productionmgntSystem. Inside the folder ofbiz\hot-deploy\productionmgntSystem\webapp\productionmgntSystem I created a file app_details_1.ftl. The following are the code of this file <html> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"> <title>Insert title here</title> <script TYPE="TEXT/JAVASCRIPT" language=""JAVASCRIPT"> function uploadFile() { //alert("Before calling upload.jsp"); window.location='<@ofbizUrl>testing_service1</@ofbizUrl>' } </script> </head> <!-- <form action="<@ofbizUrl>testing_service1</@ofbizUrl>" enctype="multipart/form-data" name="app_details_frm"> --> <form action="<@ofbizUrl>logout1</@ofbizUrl>" enctype="multipart/form-data" name="app_details_frm"> <center style="height: 299px; "> <table border="0" style="height: 177px; width: 788px"> <tr style="height: 115px; "> <td style="width: 103px; "> <td style="width: 413px; "><h1>APPLICATION DETAILS</h1> <td style="width: 55px; "> </tr> <tr> <td style="width: 125px; ">Application name : </td> <td> <input name="app_name_txt" id="txt_1" value=" " /> </td> </tr> <tr> <td style="width: 125px; ">Excell sheet &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;: </td> <td> <input type="file" name="filename"/> </td> </tr> <tr> <td> <!-- <input type="button" name="logout1_cmd" value="Logout" onclick="logout1()"/> --> <input type="submit" name="logout_cmd" value="logout"/> </td> <td> <!-- <input type="submit" name="upload_cmd" value="Submit" /> --> <input type="button" name="upload1_cmd" value="Upload" onclick="uploadFile()"/> </td> </tr> </table> </center> </form> </html> the following coding is present in the file ofbiz\hot-deploy\productionmgntSystem\webapp\productionmgntSystem\WEB-INF\controller.xml ...... ....... ........ <request-map uri="testing_service1"> <security https="true" auth="true"/> <event type="java" path="org.ofbiz.productionmgntSystem.web_app_req.WebServices1" invoke="testingService"/> <response name="ok" type="view" value="ok_view"/> <response name="exception" type="view" value="exception_view"/> </request-map> .......... ............ .......... <view-map name="ok_view" type="ftl" page="ok_view.ftl"/> <view-map name="exception_view" type="ftl" page="exception_view.ftl"/> ................ ............. ............. The following are the coding present in the file ofbiz\hot-deploy\productionmgntSystem\src\org\ofbiz\productionmgntSystem\web_app_req\WebServices1.java package org.ofbiz.productionmgntSystem.web_app_req; import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest; import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletResponse; import java.io.DataInputStream; import java.io.FileOutputStream; import java.io.IOException; public class WebServices1 { public static String testingService(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) { //int i=0; String result="ok"; System.out.println("\n\n\t*************************************\n\tInside WebServices1.testingService(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response)- Start"); String contentType=request.getContentType(); System.out.println("\n\n\t*************************************\n\tInside WebServices1.testingService(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response)- contentType : "+contentType); String str=new String(); // response.setContentType("text/html"); //PrintWriter writer; if ((contentType != null) && (contentType.indexOf("multipart/form-data") >= 0)) { System.out.println("\n\n\t**********************************\n\tInside WebServices1.testingService(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) after if (contentType != null)"); try { // writer=response.getWriter(); System.out.println("\n\n\t**********************************\n\tInside WebServices1.testingService(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) - try Start"); DataInputStream in = new DataInputStream(request.getInputStream()); int formDataLength = request.getContentLength(); byte dataBytes[] = new byte[formDataLength]; int byteRead = 0; int totalBytesRead = 0; //this loop converting the uploaded file into byte code while (totalBytesRead < formDataLength) { byteRead = in.read(dataBytes, totalBytesRead,formDataLength); totalBytesRead += byteRead; } String file = new String(dataBytes); //for saving the file name String saveFile = file.substring(file.indexOf("filename=\"") + 10); saveFile = saveFile.substring(0, saveFile.indexOf("\n")); saveFile = saveFile.substring(saveFile.lastIndexOf("\\")+ 1,saveFile.indexOf("\"")); int lastIndex = contentType.lastIndexOf("="); String boundary = contentType.substring(lastIndex + 1,contentType.length()); int pos; //extracting the index of file pos = file.indexOf("filename=\""); pos = file.indexOf("\n", pos) + 1; pos = file.indexOf("\n", pos) + 1; pos = file.indexOf("\n", pos) + 1; int boundaryLocation = file.indexOf(boundary, pos) - 4; int startPos = ((file.substring(0, pos)).getBytes()).length; int endPos = ((file.substring(0, boundaryLocation)).getBytes()).length; //creating a new file with the same name and writing the content in new file FileOutputStream fileOut = new FileOutputStream("/"+saveFile); fileOut.write(dataBytes, startPos, (endPos - startPos)); fileOut.flush(); fileOut.close(); System.out.println("\n\n\t**********************************\n\tInside WebServices1.testingService(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) - try End"); } catch(IOException ioe) { System.out.println("\n\n\t*********************************\n\tInside WebServices1.testingService(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) - Catch IOException"); //ioe.printStackTrace(); return("exception"); } catch(Exception ex) { System.out.println("\n\n\t*********************************\n\tInside WebServices1.testingService(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) - Catch Exception"); return("exception"); } } else { System.out.println("\n\n\t********************************\n\tInside WebServices1.testingService(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) else part"); result="exception"; } System.out.println("\n\n\t*************************************\n\tInside WebServices1.testingService(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response)- End"); return(result); } } I want to upload a file to the server. The file is get from user " tag in the "app_details_1.ftl" file & it is updated into the server by using the method "testingService(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response)" in the class "WebServices1". But the file is not uploaded. Give me a good solution for uploading a file to the server.

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• Customize the Five Windows Folder Templates

  - by Mark Virtue

  Are you’re particular about the way Windows Explorer presents each folder’s contents? Here we show you how to take advantage of Explorer’s built-in templates, which cuts down the time it takes to do customizations. Note: The techniques in this article apply to Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7. When opening a folder for the first time in Windows Explorer, we are presented with a standard default view of the files and folders in that folder. It may be that the items are presented are perfectly fine, but on the other hand, we may want to customize the view.  The aspects of it that we can customize are the following: The display type (list view, details, tiles, thumbnails, etc) Which columns are displayed, and in which order The widths of the visible columns The order in which the files and folders are sorted Any file groupings Thankfully, Windows offers us a shortcut.  A particular folder’s settings can be used as a “template” for other, similar folders.  In fact, we can store up to five separate sets of folder presentation configurations.  Once we save the settings for a particular template, that template can then be applied to other folders. Customize Your First Folder We’ll start by setting up the first of our templates – the default one.  Once we create this template and apply it, the vast majority of the folders in our file system will change to match it, so it’s important that we set it up very carefully.  The first step in creating and applying the template is to customize one folder with the settings that all the rest will have. Choose a folder that is typical of the folders that you wish to have this default template.  Select it in Windows Explorer.  To ensure that it is a suitable candidate, right-click the folder name and select Properties, then go to the Customize tab.  Ensure that this folder is marked as General Items.  If it is not, either choose a different folder or select General Items from the list. Click OK.  Now we’re ready to customize our first folder. Changing the way one single folder is presented is straightforward.  We start with the folder’s display type.  Click the Change your view button in the top-right corner of every Explorer window. Each time you click the button, the folder’s view cycles to the next view type.  Alternatively you can click the little down-arrow next to the button to see all the display types at once, and select the one you want. Click the view you want, or drag the slider next to the one you want. If you have chosen Details, then the next thing you may wish to change is which columns are displayed, and the order of these.  To choose which columns are displayed, simply right-click on any column heading.  A list of the columns currently being display appears. Simply uncheck a column if you don’t want it displayed, and check the columns that you want displayed.  If you want some information displayed about your files that is not listed here, then click the More… button for a full list of file attributes. There’s a lot of them! To change the order of the columns that are currently being displayed, simply click on a column heading and drag it to where you think it should be.  To change the width of a column, click the line that represents the right-hand edge of the column and drag it left or right. To sort by a column, click once on that column.  To reverse the sort-order, click that same column again. To change the groupings of the files in the folder, right-click in a blank area of the folder, select Group by, and select the appropriate column. Apply This Default Template to All Similar Folders Once you have the folder exactly the way you want it, we now use this folder as our default template for most of the folders in our file system.  To do this, ensure that you are still in the folder you just customized, and then, from the Organize menu in Explorer, click on Folder and search options. Then select the View tab and click the Apply to Folders button. After you’ve clicked OK, visit some of the other folders in your file system.  You should see that most have taken on these new settings. What we’ve just done, in effect, is we have customized the General Items template.  This is one of five templates that Windows Explorer uses to display folder contents.  The five templates are called (in Windows 7): General Items Documents Pictures Music Videos When a folder is opened, Windows Explorer examines the contents to see if it can automatically determine which folder template to use to display the folder contents.  If it is not obvious that the folder contents falls into any of the last four templates, then Windows Explorer chooses the General Items template.  That’s why most of the folders in your file system are shown using the General Items template. Changing the Other Four Templates If you want to adjust the other four templates, the process is very similar to what we’ve just done.  If you wanted to change the “Music” template, for example, the steps would be as follows: Select a folder that contains music items Apply the existing Music template to the folder (even if it doesn’t look like you want it to) Customize the folder to your personal preferences Apply the new template to all “Music” folders A fifth step would be:  When you open a folder that contains music items but is not automatically displayed using the Music template, you manually select the Music template for that folder. First, select a folder that contains music items.  It will probably be displayed using the existing Music template: Next, ensure that it is using the Music template.  If it’s not, then manually select the Music template. Next, customize the folder to suit your personal preferences (here we’ve added a couple of columns, and sorted by Artist). Now we can set this view to be our Music template.  Choose Organize, then the View tab, and click the Apply to Folders button. Note: The only folders that will inherit these settings are the ones that are currently (or will soon be) using the Music template. Now, if you have any folder that contains music items, and you want it to inherit all of these settings, then right-click the folder name, choose Properties, and select that this folder should use the Music template.  You can also cehck the box entitled Also apply this template to all subfolders if you want to save yourself even more time with all the sub-folders. Conclusion It’s neat to be able to set up templates for your folder views like this.  It’s a shame that Microsoft didn’t take the concept just a little further and allow you to create as many templates as you want. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Fix For When Windows Explorer in Vista Stops Showing File NamesCustomize the Windows 7 or Vista Send To MenuFix for New Contact Group Button Not Displaying in VistaWhy Did Windows Vista’s Music Folder Icon Turn Yellow?Make Your Last Minute Holiday Cards with Microsoft Word TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Office 2010 reviewed in depth by Ed Bott FoxClocks adds World Times in your Statusbar (Firefox) Have Fun Editing Photo Editing with Citrify Outlook Connector Upgrade Error Gadfly is a cool Twitter/Silverlight app Enable DreamScene in Windows 7

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• jQuery Templates - XHTML Validation

  - by hajan

  Many developers have already asked me about this. How to make XHTML valid the web page which uses jQuery Templates. Maybe you have already tried, and I don't know what are your results but here is my opinion regarding this. By default, Visual Studio.NET adds the xhtml1-transitional.dtd schema <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> So, if you try to validate your page which has jQuery Templates against this schema, your page won't be XHTML valid. Why? It's because when creating templates, we use HTML tags inside <script> ... </script> block. Yes, I know that the script block has type="text/html" but it's not supported in this schema, thus it's not valid. Let's try validate the following code Code <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" > <head>     <title>jQuery Templates :: XHTML Validation</title>     <script src="http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jQuery/jquery-1.4.4.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>     <script src="http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jquery.templates/beta1/jquery.tmpl.js" type="text/javascript"></script>          <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">         $(function () {             var attendees = [                 { Name: "Hajan", Surname: "Selmani", speaker: true, phones: [070555555, 071888999, 071222333] },                 { Name: "Denis", Surname: "Manski", phones: [070555555, 071222333] }             ];             $("#myTemplate").tmpl(attendees).appendTo("#attendeesList");         });     </script>     <script id="myTemplate" type="text/html">          <li>             ${Name} ${Surname}             {{if speaker}}                 (<font color="red">speaks</font>)             {{else}}                 (attendee)             {{/if}}         </li>     </script>      </head>     <body>     <ol id="attendeesList"></ol> </body> </html> To validate it, go to http://validator.w3.org/#validate_by_input and copy paste the code rendered on client-side browser (it’s almost the same, only the template is rendered inside OL so LI tags are created for each item). Press CHECK and you will get: Result: 1 Errors, 2 warning(s)  The error message says: Validation Output: 1 Error Line 21, Column 13: document type does not allow element "li" here <li> Yes, the <li> HTML element is not allowed inside the <script>, so how to make it valid? FIRST: Using <![CDATA][…]]> The first thing that came in my mind was the CDATA. So, by wrapping any HTML tag which is in script blog, inside <![CDATA[ ........ ]]> it will make our code valid. However, the problem is that the template won't render since the template tags {} cannot get evaluated if they are inside CDATA. Ok, lets try with another approach. SECOND: HTML5 validation Well, if we just remove the strikethrough part bellow of the !DOPCTYPE <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> our template is going to be checked as HTML5 and will be valid. Ok, there is another approach I've also tried: THIRD: Separate template to an external file We can separate the template to external file. I didn’t show how to do this previously, so here is the example. 1. Add HTML file with name Template.html in your ASPX website. 2. Place your defined template there without <script> tag Content inside Template.html <li>     ${Name} ${Surname}     {{if speaker}}         (<font color="red">speaks</font>)     {{else}}         (attendee)     {{/if}} </li> 3. Call the HTML file using $.get() jQuery ajax method and render the template with data using $.tmpl() function. $.get("/Templates/Template.html", function (template) {     $.tmpl(template, attendees).appendTo("#attendeesList"); }); So the complete code is: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" > <head>     <title>jQuery Templates :: XHTML Validation</title>     <script src="http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jQuery/jquery-1.4.4.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>     <script src="http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jquery.templates/beta1/jquery.tmpl.js" type="text/javascript"></script>          <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">         $(function () {             var attendees = [                 { Name: "Hajan", Surname: "Selmani", speaker: true, phones: [070555555, 071888999, 071222333] },                 { Name: "Denis", Surname: "Manski", phones: [070555555, 071222333] }             ];             $.get("/Templates/Template.html", function (template) {                 $.tmpl(template, attendees).appendTo("#attendeesList");             });         });     </script>      </head>     <body>     <ol id="attendeesList"></ol> </body> </html> This document was successfully checked as XHTML 1.0 Transitional! Result: Passed If you have any additional methods for XHTML validation, you can share it :). Thanks,Hajan

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• RequestValidation Changes in ASP.NET 4.0

  - by Rick Strahl

  There’s been a change in the way the ValidateRequest attribute on WebForms works in ASP.NET 4.0. I noticed this today while updating a post on my WebLog all of which contain raw HTML and so all pretty much trigger request validation. I recently upgraded this app from ASP.NET 2.0 to 4.0 and it’s now failing to update posts. At first this was difficult to track down because of custom error handling in my app – the custom error handler traps the exception and logs it with only basic error information so the full detail of the error was initially hidden. After some more experimentation in development mode the error that occurs is the typical ASP.NET validate request error (‘A potentially dangerous Request.Form value was detetected…’) which looks like this in ASP.NET 4.0: At first when I got this I was real perplexed as I didn’t read the entire error message and because my page does have: <%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeBehind="NewEntry.aspx.cs" Inherits="Westwind.WebLog.NewEntry" MasterPageFile="~/App_Templates/Standard/AdminMaster.master" ValidateRequest="false" EnableEventValidation="false" EnableViewState="false" %> WTF? ValidateRequest would seem like it should be enough, but alas in ASP.NET 4.0 apparently that setting alone is no longer enough. Reading the fine print in the error explains that you need to explicitly set the requestValidationMode for the application back to V2.0 in web.config: <httpRuntime executionTimeout="300" requestValidationMode="2.0" /> Kudos for the ASP.NET team for putting up a nice error message that tells me how to fix this problem, but excuse me why the heck would you change this behavior to require an explicit override to an optional and by default disabled page level switch? You’ve just made a relatively simple fix to a solution a nasty morass of hard to discover configuration settings??? The original way this worked was perfectly discoverable via attributes in the page. Now you can set this setting in the page and get completely unexpected behavior and you are required to set what effectively amounts to a backwards compatibility flag in the configuration file. It turns out the real reason for the .config flag is that the request validation behavior has moved from WebForms pipeline down into the entire ASP.NET/IIS request pipeline and is now applied against all requests. Here’s what the breaking changes page from Microsoft says about it: The request validation feature in ASP.NET provides a certain level of default protection against cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. In previous versions of ASP.NET, request validation was enabled by default. However, it applied only to ASP.NET pages (.aspx files and their class files) and only when those pages were executing. In ASP.NET 4, by default, request validation is enabled for all requests, because it is enabled before the BeginRequest phase of an HTTP request. As a result, request validation applies to requests for all ASP.NET resources, not just .aspx page requests. This includes requests such as Web service calls and custom HTTP handlers. Request validation is also active when custom HTTP modules are reading the contents of an HTTP request. As a result, request validation errors might now occur for requests that previously did not trigger errors. To revert to the behavior of the ASP.NET 2.0 request validation feature, add the following setting in the Web.config file: <httpRuntime requestValidationMode="2.0" /> However, we recommend that you analyze any request validation errors to determine whether existing handlers, modules, or other custom code accesses potentially unsafe HTTP inputs that could be XSS attack vectors. Ok, so ValidateRequest of the form still works as it always has but it’s actually the ASP.NET Event Pipeline, not WebForms that’s throwing the above exception as request validation is applied to every request that hits the pipeline. Creating the runtime override removes the HttpRuntime checking and restores the WebForms only behavior. That fixes my immediate problem but still leaves me wondering especially given the vague wording of the above explanation. One thing that’s missing in the description is above is one important detail: The request validation is applied only to application/x-www-form-urlencoded POST content not to all inbound POST data. When I first read this this freaked me out because it sounds like literally ANY request hitting the pipeline is affected. To make sure this is not really so I created a quick handler: public class Handler1 : IHttpHandler { public void ProcessRequest(HttpContext context) { context.Response.ContentType = "text/plain"; context.Response.Write("Hello World <hr>" + context.Request.Form.ToString()); } public bool IsReusable { get { return false; } } } and called it with Fiddler by posting some XML to the handler using a default form-urlencoded POST content type: and sure enough – hitting the handler also causes the request validation error and 500 server response. Changing the content type to text/xml effectively fixes the problem however, bypassing the request validation filter so Web Services/AJAX handlers and custom modules/handlers that implement custom protocols aren’t affected as long as they work with special input content types. It also looks that multipart encoding does not trigger event validation of the runtime either so this request also works fine: POST http://rasnote/weblog/handler1.ashx HTTP/1.1 Content-Type: multipart/form-data; boundary=------7cf2a327f01ae User-Agent: West Wind Internet Protocols 5.53 Host: rasnote Content-Length: 40 Pragma: no-cache <xml>asdasd</xml>--------7cf2a327f01ae *That* probably should trigger event validation – since it is a potential HTML form submission, but it doesn’t. New Runtime Feature, Global Scope Only? Ok, so request validation is now a runtime feature but sadly it’s a feature that’s scoped to the ASP.NET Runtime – effective scope to the entire running application/app domain. You can still manually force validation using Request.ValidateInput() which gives you the option to do this in code, but that realistically will only work with the requestValidationMode set to V2.0 as well since the 4.0 mode auto-fires before code ever gets a chance to intercept the call. Given all that, the new setting in ASP.NET 4.0 seems to limit options and makes things more difficult and less flexible. Of course Microsoft gets to say ASP.NET is more secure by default because of it but what good is that if you have to turn off this flag the very first time you need to allow one single request that bypasses request validation??? This is really shortsighted design… <sigh>© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in ASP.NET  

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• Enabling Service Availability in WCF Services

  - by cibrax

  It is very important for the enterprise to know which services are operational at any given point. There are many factors that can affect the availability of the services, some of them are external like a database not responding or any dependant service not working. However, in some cases, you only want to know whether a service is up or down, so a simple heart-beat mechanism with “Ping” messages would do the trick. Unfortunately, WCF does not provide a built-in mechanism to support this functionality, and you probably don’t to implement a “Ping” operation in any service that you have out there. For solving this in a generic way, there is a WCF extensibility point that comes to help us, the “Operation Invokers”. In a nutshell, an operation invoker is the class responsible invoking the service method with a set of parameters and generate the output parameters with the return value. What I am going to do here is to implement a custom operation invoker that intercepts any call to the service, and detects whether a “Ping” header was attached to the message. If the “Ping” header is detected, the operation invoker returns a new header to tell the client that the service is alive, and the real operation execution is omitted. In that way, we have a simple heart beat mechanism based on the messages that include a "Ping” header, so the client application can determine at any point whether the service is up or down. My operation invoker wraps the default implementation attached by default to any operation by WCF. internal class PingOperationInvoker : IOperationInvoker { IOperationInvoker innerInvoker; object[] outputs = null; object returnValue = null; public const string PingHeaderName = "Ping"; public const string PingHeaderNamespace = "http://tellago.serviceModel"; public PingOperationInvoker(IOperationInvoker innerInvoker, OperationDescription description) { this.innerInvoker = innerInvoker; outputs = description.SyncMethod.GetParameters() .Where(p => p.IsOut) .Select(p => DefaultForType(p.ParameterType)).ToArray(); var returnValue = DefaultForType(description.SyncMethod.ReturnType); } private static object DefaultForType(Type targetType) { return targetType.IsValueType ? Activator.CreateInstance(targetType) : null; } public object Invoke(object instance, object[] inputs, out object[] outputs) { object returnValue; if (Invoke(out returnValue, out outputs)) { return returnValue; } else { return this.innerInvoker.Invoke(instance, inputs, out outputs); } } private bool Invoke(out object returnValue, out object[] outputs) { object untypedProperty = null; if (OperationContext.Current .IncomingMessageProperties.TryGetValue(HttpRequestMessageProperty.Name, out untypedProperty)) { var httpRequestProperty = untypedProperty as HttpRequestMessageProperty; if (httpRequestProperty != null) { if (httpRequestProperty.Headers[PingHeaderName] != null) { outputs = this.outputs; if (OperationContext.Current .IncomingMessageProperties.TryGetValue(HttpRequestMessageProperty.Name, out untypedProperty)) { var httpResponseProperty = untypedProperty as HttpResponseMessageProperty; httpResponseProperty.Headers.Add(PingHeaderName, "Ok"); } returnValue = this.returnValue; return true; } } } var headers = OperationContext.Current.IncomingMessageHeaders; if (headers.FindHeader(PingHeaderName, PingHeaderNamespace) > -1) { outputs = this.outputs; MessageHeader<string> header = new MessageHeader<string>("Ok"); var untyped = header.GetUntypedHeader(PingHeaderName, PingHeaderNamespace); OperationContext.Current.OutgoingMessageHeaders.Add(untyped); returnValue = this.returnValue; return true; } returnValue = null; outputs = null; return false; } } The implementation above looks for the “Ping” header either in the Http Request or the Soap message. The next step is to implement a behavior for attaching this operation invoker to the services we want to monitor. [AttributeUsage(AttributeTargets.Method | AttributeTargets.Class, AllowMultiple = false, Inherited = true)] public class PingBehavior : Attribute, IServiceBehavior, IOperationBehavior { public void AddBindingParameters(ServiceDescription serviceDescription, ServiceHostBase serviceHostBase, Collection<ServiceEndpoint> endpoints, BindingParameterCollection bindingParameters) { } public void ApplyDispatchBehavior(ServiceDescription serviceDescription, ServiceHostBase serviceHostBase) { } public void Validate(ServiceDescription serviceDescription, ServiceHostBase serviceHostBase) { foreach (var endpoint in serviceDescription.Endpoints) { foreach (var operation in endpoint.Contract.Operations) { if (operation.Behaviors.Find<PingBehavior>() == null) operation.Behaviors.Add(this); } } } public void AddBindingParameters(OperationDescription operationDescription, BindingParameterCollection bindingParameters) { } public void ApplyClientBehavior(OperationDescription operationDescription, ClientOperation clientOperation) { } public void ApplyDispatchBehavior(OperationDescription operationDescription, DispatchOperation dispatchOperation) { dispatchOperation.Invoker = new PingOperationInvoker(dispatchOperation.Invoker, operationDescription); } public void Validate(OperationDescription operationDescription) { } } As an operation invoker can only be added in an “operation behavior”, a trick I learned in the past is that you can implement a service behavior as well and use the “Validate” method to inject it in all the operations, so the final configuration is much easier and cleaner. You only need to decorate the service with a simple attribute to enable the “Ping” functionality. [PingBehavior] public class HelloWorldService : IHelloWorld { public string Hello(string name) { return "Hello " + name; } } On the other hand, the client application needs to send a dummy message with a “Ping” header to detect whether the service is available or not. In order to simplify this task, I created a extension method in the WCF client channel to do this work. public static class ClientChannelExtensions { const string PingNamespace = "http://tellago.serviceModel"; const string PingName = "Ping"; public static bool IsAvailable<TChannel>(this IClientChannel channel, Action<TChannel> operation) { try { using (OperationContextScope scope = new OperationContextScope(channel)) { MessageHeader<string> header = new MessageHeader<string>(PingName); var untyped = header.GetUntypedHeader(PingName, PingNamespace); OperationContext.Current.OutgoingMessageHeaders.Add(untyped); try { operation((TChannel)channel); var headers = OperationContext.Current.IncomingMessageHeaders; if (headers.Any(h => h.Name == PingName && h.Namespace == PingNamespace)) { return true; } else { return false; } } catch (CommunicationException) { return false; } } } catch (Exception) { return false; } } } This extension method basically adds a “Ping” header to the request message, executes the operation passed as argument (Action<TChannel> operation), and looks for the corresponding “Ping” header in the response to see the results. The client application can use this extension with a single line of code, var client = new ServiceReference.HelloWorldClient(); var isAvailable = client.InnerChannel.IsAvailable<IHelloWorld>((c) => c.Hello(null)); The “isAvailable” variable will tell the client application whether the service is available or not. You can download the complete implementation from this location.    

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• OS Analytics - Deep Dive Into Your OS

  - by Eran_Steiner

  Enterprise Manager Ops Center provides a feature called "OS Analytics". This feature allows you to get a better understanding of how the Operating System is being utilized. You can research the historical usage as well as real time data. This post will show how you can benefit from OS Analytics and how it works behind the scenes. We will have a call to discuss this blog - please join us!Date: Thursday, November 1, 2012Time: 11:00 am, Eastern Daylight Time (New York, GMT-04:00)1. Go to https://oracleconferencing.webex.com/oracleconferencing/j.php?ED=209833067&UID=1512092402&PW=NY2JhMmFjMmFh&RT=MiMxMQ%3D%3D2. If requested, enter your name and email address.3. If a password is required, enter the meeting password: oracle1234. Click "Join". To join the teleconference:Call-in toll-free number:       1-866-682-4770  (US/Canada)      Other countries:                https://oracle.intercallonline.com/portlets/scheduling/viewNumbers/viewNumber.do?ownerNumber=5931260&audioType=RP&viewGa=true&ga=ONConference Code:       7629343#Security code:            7777# Here is quick summary of what you can do with OS Analytics in Ops Center: View historical charts and real time value of CPU, memory, network and disk utilization Find the top CPU and Memory processes in real time or at a certain historical day Determine proper monitoring thresholds based on historical data View Solaris services status details Drill down into a process details View the busiest zones if applicable Where to start To start with OS Analytics, choose the OS asset in the tree and click the Analytics tab. You can see the CPU utilization, Memory utilization and Network utilization, along with the current real time top 5 processes in each category (click the image to see a larger version):  In the above screen, you can click each of the top 5 processes to see a more detailed view of that process. Here is an example of one of the processes: One of the cool things is that you can see the process tree for this process along with some port binding and open file descriptors. On Solaris machines with zones, you get an extra level of tabs, allowing you to get more information on the different zones: This is a good way to see the busiest zones. For example, one zone may not take a lot of CPU but it can consume a lot of memory, or perhaps network bandwidth. To see the detailed Analytics for each of the zones, simply click each of the zones in the tree and go to its Analytics tab. Next, click the "Processes" tab to see real time information of all the processes on the machine: An interesting column is the "Target" column. If you configured Ops Center to work with Enterprise Manager Cloud Control, then the two products will talk to each other and Ops Center will display the correlated target from Cloud Control in this table. If you are only using Ops Center - this column will remain empty. Next, if you view a Solaris machine, you will have a "Services" tab: By default, all services will be displayed, but you can choose to display only certain states, for example, those in maintenance or the degraded ones. You can highlight a service and choose to view the details, where you can see the Dependencies, Dependents and also the location of the service log file (not shown in the picture as you need to scroll down to see the log file). The "Threshold" tab is particularly helpful - you can view historical trends of different monitored values and based on the graph - determine what the monitoring values should be: You can ask Ops Center to suggest monitoring levels based on the historical values or you can set your own. The different colors in the graph represent the current set levels: Red for critical, Yellow for warning and Blue for Information, allowing you to quickly see how they're positioned against real data. It's important to note that when looking at longer periods, Ops Center smooths out the data and uses averages. So when looking at values such as CPU Usage, try shorter time frames which are more detailed, such as one hour or one day. Applying new monitoring values When first applying new values to monitored attributes - a popup will come up asking if it's OK to get you out of the current Monitoring Policy. This is OK if you want to either have custom monitoring for a specific machine, or if you want to use this current machine as a "Gold image" and extract a Monitoring Policy from it. You can later apply the new Monitoring Policy to other machines and also set it as a default Monitoring Profile. Once you're done with applying the different monitoring values, you can review and change them in the "Monitoring" tab. You can also click the "Extract a Monitoring Policy" in the actions pane on the right to save all the new values to a new Monitoring Policy, which can then be found under "Plan Management" -> "Monitoring Policies". Visiting the past Under the "History" tab you can "go back in time". This is very helpful when you know that a machine was busy a few hours ago (perhaps in the middle of the night?), but you were not around to take a look at it in real time. Here's a view into yesterday's data on one of the machines: You can see an interesting CPU spike happening at around 3:30 am along with some memory use. In the bottom table you can see the top 5 CPU and Memory consumers at the requested time. Very quickly you can see that this spike is related to the Solaris 11 IPS repository synchronization process using the "pkgrecv" command. The "time machine" doesn't stop here - you can also view historical data to determine which of the zones was the busiest at a given time: Under the hood The data collected is stored on each of the agents under /var/opt/sun/xvm/analytics/historical/ An "os.zip" file exists for the main OS. Inside you will find many small text files, named after the Epoch time stamp in which they were taken If you have any zones, there will be a file called "guests.zip" containing the same small files for all the zones, as well as a folder with the name of the zone along with "os.zip" in it If this is the Enterprise Controller or the Proxy Controller, you will have folders called "proxy" and "sat" in which you will find the "os.zip" for that controller The actual script collecting the data can be viewed for debugging purposes as well: On Linux, the location is: /opt/sun/xvmoc/private/os_analytics/collect On Solaris, the location is /opt/SUNWxvmoc/private/os_analytics/collect If you would like to redirect all the standard error into a file for debugging, touch the following file and the output will go into it: # touch /tmp/.collect.stderr   The temporary data is collected under /var/opt/sun/xvm/analytics/.collectdb until it is zipped. If you would like to review the properties for the Analytics, you can view those per each agent in /opt/sun/n1gc/lib/XVM.properties. Find the section "Analytics configurable properties for OS and VSC" to view the Analytics specific values. I hope you find this helpful! Please post questions in the comments below. Eran Steiner

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• ASP.NET MVC JavaScript Routing

  - by zowens

  Have you ever done this sort of thing in your ASP.NET MVC view? The weird thing about this isn’t the alert function, it’s the code block containing the Url formation using the ASP.NET MVC UrlHelper. The terrible thing about this experience is the obvious lack of IntelliSense and this ugly inline JavaScript code. Inline JavaScript isn’t portable to other pages beyond the current page of execution. It is generally considered bad practice to use inline JavaScript in your public-facing pages. How ludicrous would it be to copy and paste the entire jQuery code base into your pages…? Not something you’d ever consider doing. The problem is that your URLs have to be generated by ASP.NET at runtime and really can’t be copied to your JavaScript code without some trickery. How about this? Does the hard-coded URL bother you? It really bothers me. The typical solution to this whole routing in JavaScript issue is to just hard-code your URLs into your JavaScript files and call it done. But what if your URLs change? You have to now go an track down the places in JavaScript and manually replace them. What if you get the pattern wrong? Do you have tests around it? This isn’t something you should have to worry about.   The Solution To Our Problems The solution is to port routing over to JavaScript. Does that sound daunting to you? It’s actually not very hard, but I decided to create my own generator that will do all the work for you. What I have created is a very basic port of the route formation feature of ASP.NET routing. It will generate the formatted URLs based on your routing patterns. Here’s how you’d do this: Does that feel familiar? It looks a lot like something you’d do inside of your ASP.NET MVC views… but this is inside of a JavaScript file… just a plain ol’ .js file.  Your first question might be why do you have to have that “.toUrl()” thing. The reason is that I wanted to make POST and GET requests dead simple. Here’s how you’d do a POST request (and the same would work with a GET request):   The first parameter is extra data passed to the post request and the second parameter is a function that handles the success of the POST request. If you’re familiar with jQuery’s Ajax goodness, you’ll know how to use it. (if not, check out http://api.jquery.com/jQuery.Post/ and the parameters are essentially the same). But we still haven’t gotten rid of the magic strings. We still have controller names and action names represented as strings. This is going to blow your mind… If you’ve seen T4MVC, this will look familiar. We’re essentially doing the same sort of thing with my JavaScript router, but we’re porting the concept to JavaScript. The good news is that parameters to the controllers are directly reflected in the action function, just like T4MVC. And the even better news… IntlliSense is easily transferred to the JavaScript version if you’re using Visual Studio as your JavaScript editor. The additional data parameter gives you the ability to pass extra routing data to the URL formatter.   About the Magic You may be wondering how this all work. It’s actually quite simple. I’ve built a simple jQuery pluggin (called routeManager) that hangs off the main jQuery namespace and routes all the URLs. Every time your solution builds, a routing file will be generated with this pluggin, all your route and controller definitions along with your documentation. Then by the power of Visual Studio, you get some really slick IntelliSense that is hard to live without. But there are a few steps you have to take before this whole thing is going to work. First and foremost, you need a reference to the JsRouting.Core.dll to your projects containing controllers or routes. Second, you have to specify your routes in a bit of a non-standard way. See, we can’t just pull routes out of your App_Start in your Global.asax. We force you to build a route source like this: The way we determine the routes is by pulling in all RouteSources and generating routes based upon the mapped routes. There are various reasons why we can’t use RouteCollection (different post for another day)… but in this case, you get the same route mapping experience. Converting the RouteSource to a RouteCollection is trivial (there’s an extension method for that). Next thing you have to do is generate a documentation XML file. This is done by going to the project settings, going to the build tab and clicking the checkbox. (this isn’t required, but nice to have). The final thing you need to do is hook up the generation mechanism. Pop open your project file and look for the AfterBuild step. Now change the build step task to look like this: The “PathToOutputExe” is the path to the JsRouting.Output.exe file. This will change based on where you put the EXE. The “PathToOutputJs” is a path to the output JavaScript file. The “DicrectoryOfAssemblies” is a path to the directory containing controller and routing DLLs. The JsRouting.Output.exe executable pulls in all these assemblies and scans them for controllers and route sources.   Now that wasn’t too bad, was it :)   The State of the Project This is definitely not complete… I have a lot of plans for this little project of mine. For starters, I need to look at the generation mechanism. Either I will be creating a utility that will do the project file manipulation or I will go a different direction. I’d like some feedback on this if you feel partial either way. Another thing I don’t support currently is areas. While this wouldn’t be too hard to support, I just don’t use areas and I wanted something up quickly (this is, after all, for a current project of mine). I’ll be adding support shortly. There are a few things that I haven’t covered in this post that I will most certainly be covering in another post, such as routing constraints and how these will be translated to JavaScript. I decided to open source this whole thing, since it’s a nice little utility I think others should really be using. Currently we’re using ASP.NET MVC 2, but it should work with MVC 3 as well. I’ll upgrade it as soon as MVC 3 is released. Along those same lines, I’m investigating how this could be put on the NuGet feed. Show me the Bits! OK, OK! The code is posted on my GitHub account. Go nuts. Tell me what you think. Tell me what you want. Tell me that you hate it. All feedback is welcome! https://github.com/zowens/ASP.NET-MVC-JavaScript-Routing

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• Try a sample: Using the counter predicate for event sampling

  - by extended_events

  Extended Events offers a rich filtering mechanism, called predicates, that allows you to reduce the number of events you collect by specifying criteria that will be applied during event collection. (You can find more information about predicates in Using SQL Server 2008 Extended Events (by Jonathan Kehayias)) By evaluating predicates early in the event firing sequence we can reduce the performance impact of collecting events by stopping event collection when the criteria are not met. You can specify predicates on both event fields and on a special object called a predicate source. Predicate sources are similar to action in that they typically are related to some type of global information available from the server. You will find that many of the actions available in Extended Events have equivalent predicate sources, but actions and predicates sources are not the same thing. Applying predicates, whether on a field or predicate source, is very similar to what you are used to in T-SQL in terms of how they work; you pick some field/source and compare it to a value, for example, session_id = 52. There is one predicate source that merits special attention though, not just for its special use, but for how the order of predicate evaluation impacts the behavior you see. I’m referring to the counter predicate source. The counter predicate source gives you a way to sample a subset of events that otherwise meet the criteria of the predicate; for example you could collect every other event, or only every tenth event. Simple CountingThe counter predicate source works by creating an in memory counter that increments every time the predicate statement is evaluated. Here is a simple example with my favorite event, sql_statement_completed, that only collects the second statement that is run. (OK, that’s not much of a sample, but this is for demonstration purposes. Here is the session definition: CREATE EVENT SESSION counter_test ON SERVERADD EVENT sqlserver.sql_statement_completed    (ACTION (sqlserver.sql_text)    WHERE package0.counter = 2)ADD TARGET package0.ring_bufferWITH (MAX_DISPATCH_LATENCY = 1 SECONDS) You can find general information about the session DDL syntax in BOL and from Pedro’s post Introduction to Extended Events. The important part here is the WHERE statement that defines that I only what the event where package0.count = 2; in other words, only the second instance of the event. Notice that I need to provide the package name along with the predicate source. You don’t need to provide the package name if you’re using event fields, only for predicate sources. Let’s say I run the following test queries: -- Run three statements to test the sessionSELECT 'This is the first statement'GOSELECT 'This is the second statement'GOSELECT 'This is the third statement';GO Once you return the event data from the ring buffer and parse the XML (see my earlier post on reading event data) you should see something like this: event_name sql_text sql_statement_completed SELECT ‘This is the second statement’ You can see that only the second statement from the test was actually collected. (Feel free to try this yourself. Check out what happens if you remove the WHERE statement from your session. Go ahead, I’ll wait.) Percentage Sampling OK, so that wasn’t particularly interesting, but you can probably see that this could be interesting, for example, lets say I need a 25% sample of the statements executed on my server for some type of QA analysis, that might be more interesting than just the second statement. All comparisons of predicates are handled using an object called a predicate comparator; the simple comparisons such as equals, greater than, etc. are mapped to the common mathematical symbols you know and love (eg. = and >), but to do the less common comparisons you will need to use the predicate comparators directly. You would probably look to the MOD operation to do this type sampling; we would too, but we don’t call it MOD, we call it divides_by_uint64. This comparator evaluates whether one number is divisible by another with no remainder. The general syntax for using a predicate comparator is pred_comp(field, value), field is always first and value is always second. So lets take a look at how the session changes to answer our new question of 25% sampling: CREATE EVENT SESSION counter_test_25 ON SERVERADD EVENT sqlserver.sql_statement_completed    (ACTION (sqlserver.sql_text)    WHERE package0.divides_by_uint64(package0.counter,4))ADD TARGET package0.ring_bufferWITH (MAX_DISPATCH_LATENCY = 1 SECONDS)GO Here I’ve replaced the simple equivalency check with the divides_by_uint64 comparator to check if the counter is evenly divisible by 4, which gives us back every fourth record. I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to test this session. Why order matters I indicated at the start of this post that order matters when it comes to the counter predicate – it does. Like most other predicate systems, Extended Events evaluates the predicate statement from left to right; as soon as the predicate statement is proven false we abandon evaluation of the remainder of the statement. The counter predicate source is only incremented when it is evaluated so whether or not the counter is incremented will depend on where it is in the predicate statement and whether a previous criteria made the predicate false or not. Here is a generic example: Pred1: (WHERE statement_1 AND package0.counter = 2)Pred2: (WHERE package0.counter = 2 AND statement_1) Let’s say I cause a number of events as follows and examine what happens to the counter predicate source. Iteration Statement Pred1 Counter Pred2 Counter A Not statement_1 0 1 B statement_1 1 2 C Not statement_1 1 3 D statement_1 2 4 As you can see, in the case of Pred1, statement_1 is evaluated first, when it fails (A & C) predicate evaluation is stopped and the counter is not incremented. With Pred2 the counter is evaluated first, so it is incremented on every iteration of the event and the remaining parts of the predicate are then evaluated. In this example, Pred1 would return an event for D while Pred2 would return an event for B. But wait, there is an interesting side-effect here; consider Pred2 if I had run my statements in the following order: Not statement_1 Not statement_1 statement_1 statement_1 In this case I would never get an event back from the system because the point at which counter=2, the rest of the predicate evaluates as false so the event is not returned. If you’re using the counter target for sampling and you’re not getting the expected events, or any events, check the order of the predicate criteria. As a general rule I’d suggest that the counter criteria should be the last element of your predicate statement since that will assure that your sampling rate will apply to the set of event records defined by the rest of your predicate. Aside: I’m interested in hearing about uses for putting the counter predicate criteria earlier in the predicate statement. If you have one, post it in a comment to share with the class. - Mike Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• How to use Azure storage for uploading and displaying pictures.

  - by Magnus Karlsson

  Basic set up of Azure storage for local development and production. This is a somewhat completion of the following guide from http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/net/how-to-guides/blob-storage/ that also involves a practical example that I believe is commonly used, i.e. upload and present an image from a user.   First we set up for local storage and then we configure for them to work on a web role. Steps: 1. Configure connection string locally. 2. Configure model, controllers and razor views.   1. Setup connectionsstring 1.1 Right click your web role and choose “Properties”. 1.2 Click Settings. 1.3 Add setting. 1.4 Name your setting. This will be the name of the connectionstring. 1.5 Click the ellipsis to the right. (the ellipsis appear when you mark the area. 1.6 The following window appears- Select “Windows Azure storage emulator” and click ok.   Now we have a connection string to use. To be able to use it we need to make sure we have windows azure tools for storage. 2.1 Click Tools –> Library Package manager –> Manage Nuget packages for solution. 2.2 This is what it looks like after it has been added.   Now on to what the code should look like. 3.1 First we need a view which collects images to upload. Here Index.cshtml. 1: @model List<string> 2:  3: @{ 4: ViewBag.Title = "Index"; 5: } 6:  7: <h2>Index</h2> 8: <form action="@Url.Action("Upload")" method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data"> 9:  10: <label for="file">Filename:</label> 11: <input type="file" name="file" id="file1" /> 12: <br /> 13: <label for="file">Filename:</label> 14: <input type="file" name="file" id="file2" /> 15: <br /> 16: <label for="file">Filename:</label> 17: <input type="file" name="file" id="file3" /> 18: <br /> 19: <label for="file">Filename:</label> 20: <input type="file" name="file" id="file4" /> 21: <br /> 22: <input type="submit" value="Submit" /> 23: 24: </form> 25:  26: @foreach (var item in Model) { 27:  28: <img src="@item" alt="Alternate text"/> 29: } 3.2 We need a controller to receive the post. Notice the “containername” string I send to the blobhandler. I use this as a folder for the pictures for each user. If this is not a requirement you could just call it container or anything with small characters directly when creating the container. 1: public ActionResult Upload(IEnumerable<HttpPostedFileBase> file) 2: { 3: BlobHandler bh = new BlobHandler("containername"); 4: bh.Upload(file); 5: var blobUris=bh.GetBlobs(); 6: 7: return RedirectToAction("Index",blobUris); 8: } 3.3 The handler model. I’ll let the comments speak for themselves. 1: public class BlobHandler 2: { 3: // Retrieve storage account from connection string. 4: CloudStorageAccount storageAccount = CloudStorageAccount.Parse( 5: CloudConfigurationManager.GetSetting("StorageConnectionString")); 6: 7: private string imageDirecoryUrl; 8: 9: /// <summary> 10: /// Receives the users Id for where the pictures are and creates 11: /// a blob storage with that name if it does not exist. 12: /// </summary> 13: /// <param name="imageDirecoryUrl"></param> 14: public BlobHandler(string imageDirecoryUrl) 15: { 16: this.imageDirecoryUrl = imageDirecoryUrl; 17: // Create the blob client. 18: CloudBlobClient blobClient = storageAccount.CreateCloudBlobClient(); 19: 20: // Retrieve a reference to a container. 21: CloudBlobContainer container = blobClient.GetContainerReference(imageDirecoryUrl); 22: 23: // Create the container if it doesn't already exist. 24: container.CreateIfNotExists(); 25: 26: //Make available to everyone 27: container.SetPermissions( 28: new BlobContainerPermissions 29: { 30: PublicAccess = BlobContainerPublicAccessType.Blob 31: }); 32: } 33: 34: public void Upload(IEnumerable<HttpPostedFileBase> file) 35: { 36: // Create the blob client. 37: CloudBlobClient blobClient = storageAccount.CreateCloudBlobClient(); 38: 39: // Retrieve a reference to a container. 40: CloudBlobContainer container = blobClient.GetContainerReference(imageDirecoryUrl); 41: 42: if (file != null) 43: { 44: foreach (var f in file) 45: { 46: if (f != null) 47: { 48: CloudBlockBlob blockBlob = container.GetBlockBlobReference(f.FileName); 49: blockBlob.UploadFromStream(f.InputStream); 50: } 51: } 52: } 53: } 54: 55: public List<string> GetBlobs() 56: { 57: // Create the blob client. 58: CloudBlobClient blobClient = storageAccount.CreateCloudBlobClient(); 59: 60: // Retrieve reference to a previously created container. 61: CloudBlobContainer container = blobClient.GetContainerReference(imageDirecoryUrl); 62: 63: List<string> blobs = new List<string>(); 64: 65: // Loop over blobs within the container and output the URI to each of them 66: foreach (var blobItem in container.ListBlobs()) 67: blobs.Add(blobItem.Uri.ToString()); 68: 69: return blobs; 70: } 71: } 3.4 So, when the files have been uploaded we will get them to present them to out user in the index page. Pretty straight forward. In this example we only present the image by sending the Uri’s to the view. A better way would be to save them up in a view model containing URI, metadata, alternate text, and other relevant information but for this example this is all we need.   4. Now press F5 in your solution to try it out. You can see the storage emulator UI here:     4.1 If you get any exceptions or errors I suggest to first check if the service Is running correctly. I had problem with this and they seemed related to the installation and a reboot fixed my problems.     5. Set up for Cloud storage. To do this we need to add configuration for cloud just as we did for local in step one. 5.1 We need our keys to do this. Go to the windows Azure menagement portal, select storage icon to the right and click “Manage keys”. (Image from a different blog post though).   5.2 Do as in step 1.but replace step 1.6 with: 1.6 Choose “Manually entered credentials”. Enter your account name. 1.7 Paste your Account Key from step 5.1. and click ok.   5.3. Save, publish and run! Please feel free to ask any questions using the comments form at the bottom of this page. I will get back to you to help you solve any questions. Our consultancy agency also provides services in the Nordic regions if you would like any further support.

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• SQL SERVER – Create a Very First Report with the Report Wizard

  - by Pinal Dave

  This example is from the Beginning SSRS by Kathi Kellenberger. Supporting files are available with a free download from the www.Joes2Pros.com web site. What is the report Wizard? In today’s world automation is all around you. Henry Ford began building his Model T automobiles on a moving assembly line a century ago and changed the world. The moving assembly line allowed Ford to build identical cars quickly and cheaply. Henry Ford said in his autobiography “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black.” Today you can buy a car straight from the factory with your choice of several colors and with many options like back up cameras, built-in navigation systems and heated leather seats. The assembly lines now use robots to perform some tasks along with human workers. When you order your new car, if you want something special, not offered by the manufacturer, you will have to find a way to add it later. In computer software, we also have “assembly lines” called wizards. A wizard will ask you a series of questions, often branching to specific questions based on earlier answers, until you get to the end of the wizard. These wizards are used for many things, from something simple like setting up a rule in Outlook to performing administrative tasks on a server. Often, a wizard will get you part of the way to the end result, enough to get much of the tedious work out of the way. Once you get the product from the wizard, if the wizard is not capable of doing something you need, you can tweak the results. Create a Report with the Report Wizard Let’s get started with your first report!  Launch SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) from the Start menu under SQL Server 2012. Once SSDT is running, click New Project to launch the New Project dialog box. On the left side of the screen expand Business Intelligence and select Reporting Services. Configure the properties as shown in . Be sure to select Report Server Project Wizard as the type of report and to save the project in the C:\Joes2Pros\SSRSCompanionFiles\Chapter3\Project folder. Click OK and wait for the Report Wizard to launch. Click Next on the Welcome screen.  On the Select the Data Source screen, make sure that New data source is selected. Type JProCo as the data source name. Make sure that Microsoft SQL Server is selected in the Type dropdown. Click Edit to configure the connection string on the Connection Properties dialog box. If your SQL Server database server is installed on your local computer, type in localhost for the Server name and select the JProCo database from the Select or enter a database name dropdown. Click OK to dismiss the Connection Properties dialog box. Check Make this a shared data source and click Next. On the Design the Query screen, you can use the query builder to build a query if you wish. Since this post is not meant to teach you T-SQL queries, you will copy all queries from files that have been provided for you. In the C:\Joes2Pros\SSRSCompanionFiles\Chapter3\Resources folder open the sales by employee.sql file. Copy and paste the code from the file into the Query string Text Box. Click Next. On the Select the Report Type screen, choose Tabular and click Next. On the Design the Table screen, you have to figure out the groupings of the report. How do you do this? Well, you often need to know a bit about the data and report requirements. I often draw the report out on paper first to help me determine the groups. In the case of this report, I could group the data several ways. Do I want to see the data grouped by Year and Month? Do I want to see the data grouped by Employee or Category? The only thing I know for sure about this ahead of time is that the TotalSales goes in the Details section. Let’s assume that the CIO asked to see the data grouped first by Year and Month, then by Category. Let’s move the fields to the right-hand side. This is done by selecting Page > Group or Details >, as shown in, and click Next. On the Choose the Table Layout screen, select Stepped and check Include subtotals and Enable drilldown, as shown in. On the Choose the Style screen, choose any color scheme you wish (unlike the Model T) and click Next. I chose the default, Slate. On the Choose the Deployment Location screen, change the Deployment folder to Chapter 3 and click Next. At the Completing the Wizard screen, name your report Employee Sales and click Finish. After clicking Finish, the report and a shared data source will appear in the Solution Explorer and the report will also be visible in Design view. Click the Preview tab at the top. This report expects the user to supply a year which the report will then use as a filter. Type in a year between 2006 and 2013 and click View Report. Click the plus sign next to the Sales Year to expand the report to see the months, then expand again to see the categories and finally the details. You now have the assembly line report completed, and you probably already have some ideas on how to improve the report. Tomorrow’s Post Tomorrow’s blog post will show how to create your own data sources and data sets in SSRS. If you want to learn SSRS in easy to simple words – I strongly recommend you to get Beginning SSRS book from Joes 2 Pros. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL Tagged: Reporting Services, SSRS

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• Thoughts on Build 2013

  - by D'Arcy Lussier

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/dlussier/archive/2013/06/30/153294.aspxAnd so another Build conference has come to an end. Below are my thoughts/perspectives on various aspects of the event. I’ll do a separate blog post on my thoughts of the Build message for developers. The Good Moscone center was a great venue for Build! Easy to get around, easy to get to, and well maintained, it was a very comfortable conference venue. Yeah, the free swag was nice. Build has built up an expectation that attendees will always get something; it’ll be interesting to see how Microsoft maintains this expectation over the next few Build events. I still maintain that free swag should never be the main reason one attends an event, and for me this was definitely just an added bonus. I’m planning on trying to use the Surface as a dedicated 2nd device at work for meetings, I’ll share my experiences over the next few months. The hackathon event was a great idea, although personally I couldn’t justify spending the money on a conference registration just to spend the entire conference coding. Still, the apps that were created were really great and there was a lot of passion and excitement around the hackathon. I wonder if they couldn’t have had the hackathon on the Monday/Tuesday for those that wanted to participate so they didn’t miss any of the actual conference over Wed/Thurs. San Francisco was a great city to host Build. Getting from hotels to the conference center was very easy (well especially for me, I was only 3 blocks away) and the city itself felt very safe. However, if I never have to fly into SFO again I’ll be alright with that! Delays going into and out of SFO and both apparently were due to the airport itself. The Bad Build is one of those oddities on the conference landscape where people will pay to commit to attending an event without knowing anything about the sessions. We got our list of conference sessions when we registered on Tuesday, not before. And even then, we only got titles and not descriptions (those were eventually made available via the conference’s mobile application). I get it…they’re going to make announcements and they don’t want to give anything away through the session titles. But honestly, there wasn’t anything in the session titles that I would have considered a surprise. Breakfasts were brutal. High-carb pastries, donuts, and muffins with fruit and hard boiled eggs does not a conference breakfast make. I can’t believe that the difference between a continental breakfast per person and a hot breakfast buffet would have been a huge impact to a conference fee that was already around $2000. The vendor area was anemic. I don’t know why Microsoft forces the vendors into cookie-cutter booth areas (this year they were all made of plywood material). WPC, TechEd – booth areas there allow the vendors to be creative with their displays. Not so much for Build. Really odd was the lack of Microsoft’s own representation around Bing. In the day 1 keynote Microsoft made a big deal about Bing as an API. Yet there was nobody in the vendor area set up to provide more information or have discussions with about the Bing API. The Ugly Our name badges were NFC enabled. The purpose of this, beyond the vendors being able to scan your info, wasn’t really made clear. An attendee I talked to showed how you could get a reader app on your phone so you can scan other members cards and collect their contact info – which is a kewl idea; business cards are so 1990’s. But I was *shocked* at the amount of information that was on our name badges! Here’s what’s displayed on our name badge: - Name - Company - Twitter Handle I’m ok with that. But here’s what actually gets read: - Name - Company - Address Used for Registration - Phone Number Used for Registration So sharing that info with another attendee, they get way more of my info than just how to find me on Twitter! Microsoft, you need to fix this for the future. If vendors want to collect information on attendees, they should be able to collect an ID from the badge, then get a report with corresponding records afterwards. My personal information should not be so readily available, and without my knowledge! Final Verdict Maybe its my older age, maybe its where I’m at in life with family, maybe its where I’m at in my career, but when I consider whether a conference experience was valuable I get to the core reason I attend: opportunities to learn, opportunities to network, opportunities to engage with Microsoft. Opportunities to Learn:  Sessions I attended were generally OK, with some really stand out ones on Day 2. I would love to see Microsoft adopt the Dojo format for a portion of their sessions. Hands On Labs are dull, lecture style sessions are great for information sharing. But a guided hands-on coding session (Read: Dojo) provides the best of both worlds. Being that all content is publically available online to everyone (Build attendee or not), the value of attending the conference sessions is decreased. The value though is in the discussions that take part in person afterwards, which leads to… Opportunities to Network: I enjoyed getting together with old friends and connecting with Twitter friends in person for the first time. I also had an opportunity to meet total strangers. So from a networking perspective, Build was fantastic! I still think it would have been great to have an area for ad-hoc discussions – where speakers could announce they’d be available for more questions after their sessions, or attendees who wanted to discuss more in depth on a topic with other attendees could arrange space. Some people have no problems being outgoing and making these things happen, but others are not and a structured model is more attractive. Opportunities to Engage with Microsoft: Hit and miss on this one. Outside of the vendor area, unless you cornered or reached out to a speaker, there wasn’t any defined way to connect with blue badges. And as I mentioned above, Microsoft didn’t have full representation in the vendor area (no Bing). All in all, Build was a fun party where I was informed about some new stuff and got some free swag. Was it worth the time away from home and the hit to my PD budget? I’d say Somewhat. Build is a great informational conference, but I wouldn’t call it a learning conference. Considering that TechEd seems to be moving to more of an IT Pro focus, independent developer conferences seem to be the best value for those looking to learn and not just be informed. With the rapid development cycle Microsoft is embracing, we’re already seeing Build happening twice within a 12 month period. If that continues, the value of attending Build in person starts to diminish – especially with so much content available online. If Microsoft wants Build to be a must-attend event in the future, they need to start incorporating aspects of Tech Ed, past PDCs, and other conferences so those that want to leave with more than free swag have something to attract them.

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• A star algorithm implementation problems

  - by bryan226

  I’m having some trouble implementing the A* algorithm in a 2D tile based game. The problem is basically that the algorithm gets stuck when something gets in its direct way (e.g. walls) Note that it only allows Horizontal and Vertical movement. Here's a picture as it works fine across the map without something in its direct way: (Green tile = destination, Blue = In closed list, Green = in open list) This is what happens if I try to walk 'around' a wall: I calculate costs with the F = G + H formula: G = 1 Cost per Step H = 10 Cost per Step //Count how many tiles are between current-tile & destination-tile The functions: short c_astar::GuessH(short Startx,short Starty,short Destinationx,short Destinationy) { hgeVector Start, Destination; Start.x = Startx; Start.y = Starty; Destination.x = Destinationx; Destination.y = Destinationy; short a = 0; short b = 0; if(Start.x > Destination.x) a = Start.x - Destination.x; else a = Destination.x - Start.x; if(Start.y > Destination.y) b = Start.y - Destination.y; else b = Destination.y - Start.y; return (a+b)*10; } short c_astar::GuessG(short Startx,short Starty,short Currentx,short Currenty) { hgeVector Start, Destination; Start.x = Startx; Start.y = Starty; Destination.x = Currentx; Destination.y = Currenty; short a = 0; short b = 0; if(Start.x > Destination.x) a = Start.x - Destination.x; else a = Destination.x - Start.x; if(Start.y > Destination.y) b = Start.y - Destination.y; else b = Destination.y - Start.y; return (a+b); } At the end of the loop I check which tile is the cheapest to go according to its F value: Then some quick checks are done for each tile (UP,DOWN,LEFT,RIGHT): //...CX are holding the F value of the TILE specified // Info: C0 = Center (Current) // C1 = UP // C2 = DOWN // C3 = LEFT // C4 = RIGHT //Quick checks if(((C1 < C2) && (C1 < C3) && (C1 < C4))) { Current.y -= 1; bSimilar = false; if(DEBUG) hge->System_Log("C1 < ALL"); } //.. same for C2,C3 & C4 If there are multiple tiles with the same F value: It’s actually a switch for DOWNLEFT,UPRIGHT.. etc. Here’s one of it: case UPRIGHT: { //UP Temporary = Current; Temporary.y -= 1; bTileStatus[0] = IsTileWalkable(Temporary.x,Temporary.y); if(bTileStatus[0]) { //Proceed normal we are OK & walkable Tilex.Tile = map.at(Temporary.y).at(Temporary.x); //Search in lists if(SearchInClosedList(Tilex.Tile.ID,C0)) bFoundInClosedList[0] = true; if(SearchInOpenList(Tilex.Tile.ID,C0)) bFoundInOpenList[0] = true; //RIGHT Temporary = Current; Temporary.x += 1; bTileStatus[1] = IsTileWalkable(Temporary.x,Temporary.y); if(bTileStatus[1]) { //Proceed normal we are OK & walkable Tilex.Tile = map.at(Temporary.y).at(Temporary.x); //Search in lists if(SearchInClosedList(Tilex.Tile.ID,C0)) bFoundInClosedList[1] = true; if(SearchInOpenList(Tilex.Tile.ID,C0)) bFoundInOpenList[1] = true; //************************************************* // Purpose: ClosedList behavior //************************************************* if(bFoundInClosedList[0] && !bFoundInClosedList[1]) { //UP found in ClosedList. Go RIGHT return RIGHT; } if(!bFoundInClosedList[0] && bFoundInClosedList[1]) { //RIGHT found in ClosedList. Go UP return UP; } if(bFoundInClosedList[0] && bFoundInClosedList[1]) { //Both found in ClosedList. Random value switch(hge->Random_Int(8,9)) { case 8: return UP; break; case 9: return RIGHT; break; } } //************************************************* // Purpose: OpenList behavior //************************************************* if(bFoundInOpenList[0] && !bFoundInOpenList[1]) { //UP found in OpenList. Go RIGHT return RIGHT; } if(!bFoundInOpenList[0] && bFoundInOpenList[1]) { //RIGHT found in OpenList. Go UP return UP; } if(bFoundInOpenList[0] && bFoundInOpenList[1]) { //Both found in OpenList. Random value switch(hge->Random_Int(8,9)) { case 8: return UP; break; case 9: return RIGHT; break; } } } else if(!bTileStatus[1]) { //RIGHT is not walkable OR out of range //Choose UP return UP; } } else if(!bTileStatus[0]) { //UP is not walkable OR out of range //Fast check RIGHT Temporary = Current; Temporary.x += 1; bTileStatus[1] = IsTileWalkable(Temporary.x,Temporary.y); if(bTileStatus[1]) { return RIGHT; } else return FAILED; //Failed, no valid path found! } } break; A log for the second picture: (Cut down to ten passes, because it’s just repeating itself) ----------------------------------------------------- PASS: 1 | C1: 211 | C2: 191 | C3: 211 | C4: 191 DOWN + RIGHT SIMILAR Going DOWN ----------------------------------------------------- PASS: 2 | C1: 200 | C2: 182 | C3: 202 | C4: 182 DOWN + RIGHT SIMILAR Going DOWN ----------------------------------------------------- PASS: 3 | C1: 191 | C2: 193 | C3: 193 | C4: 173 C4 < ALL Tile(12.000000,6.000000) not walkable. MAX_F_VALUE set. ----------------------------------------------------- PASS: 4 | C1: 182 | C2: 184 | C3: 182 | C4: 999 UP + LEFT SIMILAR Going UP Tile(12.000000,5.000000) not walkable. MAX_F_VALUE set. ----------------------------------------------------- PASS: 5 | C1: 191 | C2: 173 | C3: 191 | C4: 999 C2 < ALL Tile(12.000000,6.000000) not walkable. MAX_F_VALUE set. ----------------------------------------------------- PASS: 6 | C1: 182 | C2: 184 | C3: 182 | C4: 999 UP + LEFT SIMILAR Going UP Tile(12.000000,5.000000) not walkable. MAX_F_VALUE set. ----------------------------------------------------- PASS: 7 | C1: 191 | C2: 173 | C3: 191 | C4: 999 C2 < ALL Tile(12.000000,6.000000) not walkable. MAX_F_VALUE set. ----------------------------------------------------- PASS: 8 | C1: 182 | C2: 184 | C3: 182 | C4: 999 UP + LEFT SIMILAR Going LEFT ----------------------------------------------------- PASS: 9 | C1: 191 | C2: 193 | C3: 193 | C4: 173 C4 < ALL Tile(12.000000,6.000000) not walkable. MAX_F_VALUE set. ----------------------------------------------------- PASS: 10 | C1: 182 | C2: 184 | C3: 182 | C4: 999 UP + LEFT SIMILAR Going LEFT ----------------------------------------------------- Its always going after the cheapest F value, which seems to be wrong. If someone could point me to the right direction I'd be thankful. Regards, bryan226

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• Not attending the LUGM mini-meetup - 05. Oct 2013

  Not attending a meeting of the LUGM can be fun, too. It's getting a bit of a habit that Ish is organising small gatherings, aka mini-meetups, of the Linux User Group Mauritius/Meta (LUGM) almost every Saturday. There they mainly discuss and talk about various elements of using Linux as ones main operating systems and the possibilities you are going to have. On top of course, some tips & tricks about mastering the command line and initial steps in scripting or even writing HTML. In general, sounds like a good portion of fun and great spirit of community. Unfortunately, I'm usually quite busy with private and family matters during the weekend and so I already signalised that I wouldn't be around. Well, at least not physically... But this Saturday a couple of things worked out faster than expected and so I was hanging out on my machine. I made virtual contact with one of Pawan's messages over on Facebook... And somehow that kicked off some kind of an online game fun on basic configuration of Apache HTTPd 2.2.x, PHP 5.x and how to improve the overall performance of a newly installed blog based on WordPress. Default configuration files Nitin's website finally came alive and despite the dark theme and the hidden Apple 'fanboy' advertisement I was more interested in the technical situation. As with any new installation there is usually quite some adjustment to be done. And Nitin's page was no exception. Unfortunately, out of the box installations of Apache httpd and PHP are too verbose and expose too much information under the hood. You might think that this isn't really a problem at all, well, think about it again after completely reading this article. First, I checked the HTTP response headers - using either Chrome Developer Tools or Firefox Web Developer extension - of Nitin's page and based on that I advised him to lower the noise levels a little bit. It's not really necessary that detailed information about web server software and scripting language has to be published in every response made. Quite a number of script kiddies and exploits actually check for version specifics prior to an attack. So, removing at least version details hardens the system a little bit. In particular, I'm talking about these response values: Server X-Powered-By How to achieve that? By tweaking the configuration files... Namely, we are going to look into the following ones: apache2.conf httpd.conf .htaccess php.ini The above list contains some additional files, I'm talking about in the next paragraphs. Anyway, those are the ones involved. Tweaking Apache Open your favourite text editor and start to modify the apache2.conf. Eventually, you might like to have a quick peak at the file to see whether it is necessary to adjust it or not. Following is a handy combination of commands to get an overview of your active directives: # sudo grep -v '#' /etc/apache2/apache2.conf | grep -v '^$' | less There you keep an eye on those two Apache directives: ServerSignature Off ServerTokens Prod If that's not the case, change them as highlighted above. In order to activate your modifications you have to restart Apache httpd server. On Debian and Ubuntu you might use apache2ctl for that, on other distributions you might have to use service or run the init-scripts again: # sudo apache2ctl configtestSyntax OK# sudo apache2ctl restart Refresh your website and check the HTTP response header. Tweaking PHP5 (a little bit) Next, check your php.ini file with the following statement: # sudo grep -v ';' /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini | grep -v '^$' | less And check the value of expose_php = Off Again, if it's not as highlighted, change it... Some more Apache love Okay, back to Apache it might also be interesting to improve the situation about browser caching and removing more obsolete information. When you run your website against the usual performance checks like Google Page Speed and Yahoo YSlow you might see those check points with bad grades on a standard, default configuration. Well, this can be done easily. Configure entity tags (ETags) ETags are only interesting when you run your websites on a farm of multiple web servers. Removing this data for your static resources is very simple in Apache. As we are going to deal with the HTTP response header information you have to ensure that Apache is capable to manipulate them. First, check your enabled modules: # sudo ls -al /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/ | grep headers And in case that the 'headers' module is not listed, you have to enable it from the available ones: # sudo a2enmod headers Second, check your httpd.conf file (in case it exists): # sudo grep -v '#' /etc/apache2/httpd.conf | grep -v '^$' | less In newer (better said fresh) installations you might have to create a new configuration file below your conf.d folder with your favourite text editor like so: # sudo nano /etc/apache2/conf.d/headers.conf Then, in order to tweak your HTTP responses either check for those lines or add them: Header unset ETagFileETag None In case that your file doesn't exist or those lines are missing, feel free to create/add them. Afterwards, check your Apache configuration syntax and restart your running instances as already shown above: # sudo apache2ctl configtestSyntax OK# sudo apache2ctl restart Add Expires headers To improve the loading performance of your website, you should take some care into the proper configuration of how to leverage the browser's ability to cache certain resources and files. This is done by adding an Expires: value to the HTTP response header. Generally speaking it is advised that you specify a near-future, read: 1 week or a little bit more, for your static content like JavaScript files or Cascading Style Sheets. One solution to adjust this is to put some instructions into the .htaccess file in the root folder of your web site. Of course, this could also be placed into a more generic location of your Apache installation but honestly, I'd like to keep this at the web site level. Following some adjustments I'm currently using on this blog site: # Turn on Expires and set default to 0ExpiresActive OnExpiresDefault A0 # Set up caching on media files for 1 year (forever?)<FilesMatch "\.(flv|ico|pdf|avi|mov|ppt|doc|mp3|wmv|wav)$">ExpiresDefault A29030400Header append Cache-Control "public"</FilesMatch> # Set up caching on media files for 1 week<FilesMatch "\.(js|css)$">ExpiresDefault A604800Header append Cache-Control "public"</FilesMatch> # Set up caching on media files for 31 days<FilesMatch "\.(gif|jpg|jpeg|png|swf)$">ExpiresDefault A2678400Header append Cache-Control "public"</FilesMatch> As we are editing the .htaccess files, it is not necessary to restart Apache. In case that your web site doesn't load anymore or you're experiencing an error while trying to restart your httpd, check that the 'expires' module is actually an enabled module: # ls -al /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/ | grep expires# sudo a2enmod expires Of course, the instructions above a re not feature complete but I hope that they might provide a better default configuration for your LAMP stack. Resume of the day Within a couple of hours, and while being occupied with an eLearning course on SQL Server 2012, I had some good fun in helping and assisting other LUGM members while they were some kilometers away at Bagatelle. According to other blog articles it seems that Nitin had quite some moments of desperation. Just for the records: At no time it was my intention to either kick his butt or pull a leg on him. Simply, providing some input based on the lessons I've learned over the last couple of years configuring Apache HTTPd and PHP. Check out the other blogs, too: LUGM mini-meetup... Epic! Superb Saturday Linux Meetup And last but not least, the man himself: The end of a new beginning Cheers, and happy community'ing! Updates Due to our weekly Code & Coffee sessions in the MSCC community, I had a chance to talk to Nitin directly and he showed me the problems directly on his machine. This led to update this article hence the paragraphs on enabling the modules 'headers' and 'expires'.

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• Goodbye my beloved Nexus One, hello Windows Phone 7

  - by George Clingerman

  Last night my wife’s Nexus One finally bit the dust. You may not know but I’ve been nursing her Nexus One one along for quite a while after her screen shattered. I was able to replace it on my own (go me!) but little quirks have been popping up and the phone was quickly deteriorating. Lately it’s been the power button. Wifey would often have to press the power button several times to get her phone to turn on and last night it just wouldn’t wake up again. I took it apart and tried my best to see if I could somehow make it live once again but no luck this time. It was finally ready to retire. We looked at first for a replacement phone for her but she wasn’t really seeing anything she liked. So I decided to make the ultimate sacrifice and offer up my much loved Nexus One and I would then get a new Windows Phone 7 device. I love T-Mobile for my service so my choices were immediately limited to basically just a single phone. The HTC HD7. I read reviews and they were all over the board from people loving to people hating the phone but I decided, hey, why not, let’s take this plunge. And I did. I’ve only had the phone for about two days now so below is my list of first reaction pros/cons. These are basically things I’ve missed or things I’ve noticed that I really like about my new Windows Phone. Cons: * No Google Talk – I used this a LOT on my Nexus. I’ve found an application called “Flory” but it’s just an ok substitute, not the same as the full featured GTalk I had on my Nexus. * Seesmic is limited– I loved the way Seesmic worked on my Nexus. It was my mobile twitter client of choice. Everything about it worked really well. On Windows Phone 7 it’s just ok. I don’t get notification of new tweets, it’s several clicks to even see a new tweet. It’s definitely got some more development before it has the same features as it did on my Nexus. * Buttons don’t give great feedback – I’d read this on the reviews about the HTC HD7 and I’m finding it true myself. Pressing the buttons on the side of the phone and the power button on the top is finicky and I have to be looking at my phone to make sure I actually got them to press. * Web browsing is slow – I’m not sure what’s up with this, I’m connected to my wireless network at my house but it’s noticeably slower on my WP7 device than my Nexus. I even switched back to verify and it’s definitely true. Retrieving tweets, hitting up the XNA forums and just general web activities are all much slower on my WP7. I can’t think of any reason this would be true but it almost seems like it’s not using my wireless for everything.   Pros: * It’s pretty – the phone is really gorgeous. I loved the form of my Nexus One by the HTC HD7 is just as pretty, maybe even prettier! It’s got a nice large, bright screen. It feels good in my hand. And it even has a little kickstand to set the phone up for movie watching. Definitely a gorgeous phone. * LIVE integration – I lost a lot of nice integration with Google services but I gained a lot of integration with LIVE services that I also use. Now I can see when I get new GMail messages AND Hotmail messages. And having the Xbox LIVE integration is admittedly cool as well. * Tile notification rock – The Windows Phone 7 commercials are TRYING to get this message out but they’re doing a really poor job of this. Tile notifications really do save you from your phone. I have a whole little mini-informational dashboard at a glance. I unlock my phone and at a glace I can see new IMs, new mail messages, software updates etc. All just letting me know in the tiles I have arranged. That’s pretty cool. * The interface works really well – I feel super hip and cool swiping and sliding things around on my Windows Phone 7. Everything works that way and it’s great and fast and really good looking. I’m all about me feeling cool. * I’m gaming more – I had gotten a few games on my Nexus One but there really weren’t a lot of good developers flocking to the service. Just browsing through the Windows Phone 7 marketplace I’m already seeing a ton of games I want to try and buy. And I sat down and bet Pixel Man 0 just yesterday on my phone. I’m already gaming more than I did on my Nexus One. * Netflix integration is fantastic - It works just like it does on my Xbox 360 and I love having this feature on my phone. * It’s basically a Zune – I’ve been taking my Zune to work and listening to music off of that while I code. I no longer need to take it with me, now I just sync songs onto my phone and it’s my new Zune. I freaking love that. One less device to carry around.   All in all my cons have really little to do with the phone (just the buttons and the web browsing) and more to do with the applications needing to catch up a bit to what I’m used to. And the Pros are things that ARE phone specific so I’m seeing that as a good sign that I’m going to be very happy with my Windows Phone 7. So Wifey is happy having her Nexus One again, I’m happy with my new Windows Phone 7. Life is good. Now I just need to make a game to pay for it….

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• WIF, ADFS 2 and WCF&ndash;Part 2: The Service

  - by Your DisplayName here!

  OK – so let’s first start with a simple WCF service and connect that to ADFS 2 for authentication. The service itself simply echoes back the user’s claims – just so we can make sure it actually works and to see how the ADFS 2 issuance rules emit claims for the service: [ServiceContract(Namespace = "urn:leastprivilege:samples")] public interface IService {     [OperationContract]     List<ViewClaim> GetClaims(); } public class Service : IService {     public List<ViewClaim> GetClaims()     {         var id = Thread.CurrentPrincipal.Identity as IClaimsIdentity;         return (from c in id.Claims                 select new ViewClaim                 {                     ClaimType = c.ClaimType,                     Value = c.Value,                     Issuer = c.Issuer,                     OriginalIssuer = c.OriginalIssuer                 }).ToList();     } } The ViewClaim data contract is simply a DTO that holds the claim information. Next is the WCF configuration – let’s have a look step by step. First I mapped all my http based services to the federation binding. This is achieved by using .NET 4.0’s protocol mapping feature (this can be also done the 3.x way – but in that scenario all services will be federated): <protocolMapping>   <add scheme="http" binding="ws2007FederationHttpBinding" /> </protocolMapping> Next, I provide a standard configuration for the federation binding: <bindings>   <ws2007FederationHttpBinding>     <binding>       <security mode="TransportWithMessageCredential">         <message establishSecurityContext="false">           <issuerMetadata address="https://server/adfs/services/trust/mex" />         </message>       </security>     </binding>   </ws2007FederationHttpBinding> </bindings> This binding points to our ADFS 2 installation metadata endpoint. This is all that is needed for svcutil (aka “Add Service Reference”) to generate the required client configuration. I also chose mixed mode security (SSL + basic message credential) for best performance. This binding also disables session – you can control that via the establishSecurityContext setting on the binding. This has its pros and cons. Something for a separate blog post, I guess. Next, the behavior section adds support for metadata and WIF: <behaviors>   <serviceBehaviors>     <behavior>       <serviceMetadata httpsGetEnabled="true" />       <federatedServiceHostConfiguration />     </behavior>   </serviceBehaviors> </behaviors> The next step is to add the WIF specific configuration (in <microsoft.identityModel />). First we need to specify the key material that we will use to decrypt the incoming tokens. This is optional for web applications but for web services you need to protect the proof key – so this is mandatory (at least for symmetric proof keys, which is the default): <serviceCertificate>   <certificateReference storeLocation="LocalMachine"                         storeName="My"                         x509FindType="FindBySubjectDistinguishedName"                         findValue="CN=Service" /> </serviceCertificate> You also have to specify which incoming tokens you trust. This is accomplished by registering the thumbprint of the signing keys you want to accept. You get this information from the signing certificate configured in ADFS 2: <issuerNameRegistry type="...ConfigurationBasedIssuerNameRegistry">   <trustedIssuers>     <add thumbprint="d1 … db"           name="ADFS" />   </trustedIssuers> </issuerNameRegistry> The last step (promised) is to add the allowed audience URIs to the configuration – WCF clients use (by default – and we’ll come back to this) the endpoint address of the service: <audienceUris>   <add value="https://machine/soapadfs/service.svc" /> </audienceUris> OK – that’s it – now we have a basic WCF service that uses ADFS 2 for authentication. The next step will be to set-up ADFS to issue tokens for this service. Afterwards we can explore various options on how to use this service from a client. Stay tuned… (if you want to have a look at the full source code or peek at the upcoming parts – you can download the complete solution here)

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• Super constructor must be a first statement in Java constructor [closed]

  - by Val

  I know the answer: "we need rules to prevent shooting into your own foot". Ok, I make millions of programming mistakes every day. To be prevented, we need one simple rule: prohibit all JLS and do not use Java. If we explain everything by "not shooting your foot", this is reasonable. But there is not much reason is such reason. When I programmed in Delphy, I always wanted the compiler to check me if I read uninitializable. I have discovered myself that is is stupid to read uncertain variable because it leads unpredictable result and is errorenous obviously. By just looking at the code I could see if there is an error. I wished if compiler could do this job. It is also a reliable signal of programming error if function does not return any value. But I never wanted it do enforce me the super constructor first. Why? You say that constructors just initialize fields. Super fields are derived; extra fields are introduced. From the goal point of view, it does not matter in which order you initialize the variables. I have studied parallel architectures and can say that all the fields can even be assigned in parallel... What? Do you want to use the unitialized fields? Stupid people always want to take away our freedoms and break the JLS rules the God gives to us! Please, policeman, take away that person! Where do I say so? I'm just saying only about initializing/assigning, not using the fields. Java compiler already defends me from the mistake of accessing notinitialized. Some cases sneak but this example shows how this stupid rule does not save us from the read-accessing incompletely initialized in construction: public class BadSuper { String field; public String toString() { return "field = " + field; } public BadSuper(String val) { field = val; // yea, superfirst does not protect from accessing // inconstructed subclass fields. Subclass constr // must be called before super()! System.err.println(this); } } public class BadPost extends BadSuper { Object o; public BadPost(Object o) { super("str"); this. o = o; } public String toString() { // superconstructor will boom here, because o is not initialized! return super.toString() + ", obj = " + o.toString(); } public static void main(String[] args) { new BadSuper("test 1"); new BadPost(new Object()); } } It shows that actually, subfields have to be inilialized before the supreclass! Meantime, java requirement "saves" us from writing specializing the class by specializing what the super constructor argument is, public class MyKryo extends Kryo { class MyClassResolver extends DefaultClassResolver { public Registration register(Registration registration) { System.out.println(MyKryo.this.getDepth()); return super.register(registration); } } MyKryo() { // cannot instantiate MyClassResolver in super super(new MyClassResolver(), new MapReferenceResolver()); } } Try to make it compilable. It is always pain. Especially, when you cannot assign the argument later. Initialization order is not important for initialization in general. I could understand that you should not use super methods before initializing super. But, the requirement for super to be the first statement is different. It only saves you from the code that does useful things simply. I do not see how this adds safety. Actually, safety is degraded because we need to use ugly workarounds. Doing post-initialization, outside the constructors also degrades safety (otherwise, why do we need constructors?) and defeats the java final safety reenforcer. To conclude Reading not initialized is a bug. Initialization order is not important from the computer science point of view. Doing initalization or computations in different order is not a bug. Reenforcing read-access to not initialized is good but compilers fail to detect all such bugs Making super the first does not solve the problem as it "Prevents" shooting into right things but not into the foot It requires to invent workarounds, where, because of complexity of analysis, it is easier to shoot into the foot doing post-initialization outside the constructors degrades safety (otherwise, why do we need constructors?) and that degrade safety by defeating final access modifier When there was java forum alive, java bigots attecked me for these thoughts. Particularly, they dislaked that fields can be initialized in parallel, saying that natural development ensures correctness. When I replied that you could use an advanced engineering to create a human right away, without "developing" any ape first, and it still be an ape, they stopped to listen me. Cos modern technology cannot afford it. Ok, Take something simpler. How do you produce a Renault? Should you construct an Automobile first? No, you start by producing a Renault and, once completed, you'll see that this is an automobile. So, the requirement to produce fields in "natural order" is unnatural. In case of alarmclock or armchair, which are still chair and clock, you may need first develop the base (clock and chair) and then add extra. So, I can have examples where superfields must be initialized first and, oppositely, when they need to be initialized later. The order does not exist in advance. So, the compiler cannot be aware of the proper order. Only programmer/constructor knows is. Compiler should not take more responsibility and enforce the wrong order onto programmer. Saying that I cannot initialize some fields because I did not ininialized the others is like "you cannot initialize the thing because it is not initialized". This is a kind of argument we have. So, to conclude once more, the feature that "protects" me from doing things in simple and right way in order to enforce something that does not add noticeably to the bug elimination at that is a strongly negative thing and it pisses me off, altogether with the all the arguments to support it I've seen so far. It is "a conceptual question about software development" Should there be the requirement to call super() first or not. I do not know. If you do or have an idea, you have place to answer. I think that I have provided enough arguments against this feature. Lets appreciate the ones who benefit form it. Let it just be something more than simple abstract and stupid "write your own language" or "protection" kind of argument. Why do we need it in the language that I am going to develop?

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• I Clobbered a Leopard with a Window Last Night

  - by D'Arcy Lussier

  I’ve had my 15” Mac Book Pro for a little over a year now, and its hands-down the best laptop I’ve ever owned…hardware wise. And I tried, I really really tried, to like OSX. I even bought Parallels so I could run Windows 7 and all my development tools while still trying to live in an OSX world. But in the end, I missed Windows too much. There were just too many shortcomings with OSX that kept me from being productive. For one thing, Office for Mac is *not* Office for Windows. The applications are written by different teams, and Excel on the Mac is just different enough to be painful. The VM experience was adequate, but my MBP would heat up like crazy when running it and the experience trying to get Windows apps to interact with an OSX file system was awkward. And I found I was in the VM more than I thought I’d be. iMovie is not as easy to use for doing simple movie editing as Windows Movie Maker. There’s no free blog editing software for OSX that’s on par with Windows Live Writer. And really, all I was using OSX for was Twitter (which I can use a Windows client for) and web browsing (also something Windows can provide obviously). So I had to ask myself – why am I forcing myself to use an operating system I don’t like, on a laptop that can support Windows 7? And so I paved my MBP and am happily running Windows 7 on it…and its fantastic! All the good stuff with the hardware is still there with the goodness of Win 7. Happy happy. I did run into some snags doing this though, and that’s really what this blog post is about – things to be aware of if you want to install Win 7 directly on your MBP metal. First, Ensure You Have Your Original Mac Install Disk This was a warning my buddy Dylan, who’s been running Win 7 on his MBP for a while now, gave me early on. The reason you need that original disk is that the hardware drivers you need are all located there. Apparently you can’t easily download them, so make sure you have them ahead of time. Second, Forget BootCamp The only reason you need BootCamp is if you still want the option to boot into OSX. If you don’t, then you don’t need BootCamp. In fact, you don’t even need BootCamp to install Win 7. What you *will* need though is a DVD with Win 7 burnt on it. Apple doesn’t support bootable USB drives. Well, actually they do for Mac Book Airs which don’t come with optical drives…but to get it working you’ll need to edit a system file of BootCamp so your make of MBP is included in an XML document, and even then you *still* are using BootCamp meaning you’ll be making an OSX partition. So don’t worry about BootCamp, just burn a Windows 7 disc, put it into the DVD drive, and restart your MBP. Third, Know The Secret Commands So after putting in the Windows 7 DVD and restarting your MBP, you’ll want to hold down the ‘C’ key during boot up. This tells the MBP that it should boot from the DVD drive instead of the hard drive. Interestingly, it appears you don’t have to do this if its the Mac OSX install disc (more on that in a second), but regardless – hold down C and Windows will start the install process. Next up is the partition process. You’ll notice that there’s a partition called ETI or something like that. This has to do with the drive format that Apple uses and how they partition their system drives. What I did – I blew it away! At first I didn’t, but I was told I couldn’t install Windows on the remaining space due to the different drive format. Blowing away the ETI partition (and all other partitions) allowed me to continue the Windows install. *REMEMBER –  No warranty is provided or implied, just telling you what I did and how I got it to work. Ok, so now Windows is installed and I’m rebooting. Everything looks good, but I need drivers! So I put in the OSX install DVD and run the BootCamp assistant which installs all the Windows drivers I need. Fantastic! Oh, I need to restart – no problem. OH NO, PROBLEM! I left the OSX install DVD in the drive and now the MBP wants to boot from the drive and install OSX! I’m not holding down the C key, what the heck?! Ok, well there must be a way to eject this disk…hmm…no physical button on the side…the eject button doesn’t seem to work on the keyboard…no little pin hole to insert something to force the disc out…well what the…?! It turns out, if you want to eject a disc at boot up, you need (and I kid you not) to plug a mouse into the laptop and hold down the right-click button while its booting. This ejected the disc for me. Seriously. Finally, Things You Should Be Aware Of Once you have Windows up and running there’s a few things you need to be aware of, mainly new keyboard shortcuts. For instance, on the Mac keyboard there is no Home, End, PageUp or PageDown. There’s also no obvious way to do something like select large amounts of text (like you would by holding Shift-Home at the end of a line of text for instance). So here’s some shortcuts you need to know: Home – fn + left arrow End – fn + right arrow Select a line of text as you would with the Home key – Shift + fn + left arrow Select a line of text as you would with the End key – Shift + fn + right arrow Page Up – fn + up arrow Page Down – fn + down arrow Also, you’ll notice that the awesome Mac track pad doesn’t respond to taps as clicks. No fear, this is just a setting that needs to be altered in the BootCamp control panel (that controls the Mac Hardware-specific settings within Windows, you can access it easily from the system tray icon) One other thing, battery life seems a bit lower than with OSX, but then again I’m also doing more than Twitter or web browsing on this thing now. Conclusion My laptop runs awesome now that I have Windows 7 on there. It’s obviously up to individual taste, but for me I just didn’t see benefits to living in an OSX world when everything I needed lived in Windows. And also, I finally am back to an operating system that doesn’t require me to eject a USB drive before physically removing it! It’s 2012 folks, how has this not been fixed?! D

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• How To: Using SimpleMembserhipProvider with MySql Connector/Net.

  - by Francisco Tirado

  Now on Connector/Net 6.9 the users will have the ability to use SimpleMembership Provider on MVC4 templates. The configuration is very simple and also have compatibility with OAuth, in this post we'll explain step by step how to configure it in a MVC 4 Web Application. Requirements  The requirements to use SimpleMembership with Connector/Net are: Install Connector/Net 6.9, or download the No Install version. Net Framework 4.0 or greater. MVC 4  Visual Studio 2012 or newer version Creating and configuring a new project In this example we'll use VS2012 to create the project basis on the Internet Aplication template and using Entity Framework to manage the User model. Open VS 2012 and create a new project, we'll create a new MVC 4 Web Application and configure the project to use Net Framework 4.5. Type a name for the project and then click “Ok”. In the next dialog we'll choose the “Internet Application” template and use Razor as engine without creating a test project. Click “Ok” to continue. Now we have a new project with the templates necessaries to run a Web Application with the default values. We'll use the current files to continue working. If you have installed Connector/Net you can skip this step, if you don't have installed but you're planning to do it, please install it and continue with the next step. If you're using the No Install version of Connector/Net we'll need to add the references to our project, the assemblies needed are: MySql.Data, MySql.Data.Entities and MySql.Web. Be sure that the assemblies chosen match the Net Framework version used in our project and the MySql.Data.Entities is compatible with EF5 (EF5 is the default added by the project). Now open the “web.config” file, and under the <connectionStrings> node add a connection string that points to a MySql instance. We'll use the following connection configuration: <add name="MyConnection" connectionString="server=localhost;UserId=root;password=pass;database=MySqlSimpleMembership;" providerName="MySql.Data.MySqlClient"/> Under the node <system.web> we'll add the following configuration: <membership defaultProvider="MySqlSimpleMembershipProvider"><providers><clear/><add name="MySqlSimpleMembershipProvider" type="MySql.Web.Security.MySqlSimpleMembershipProvider,MySql.Web,Version=6.9.3.0,Culture=neutral,PublicKeyToken=c5687fc88969c44d" applicationName="MySqlSimpleMembershipTest" description="MySQLdefaultapplication" connectionStringName="MyConnection"  userTableName="UserProfile" userIdColumn="UserId" userNameColumn="UserName" autoGenerateTables="True"/></providers></membership> In the previous configuration the mandatory properties are: connectionStringName, userTableName, userIdColumn, userNameColumn and autoGenerateTables. If the other properties are not provided a default value is set to it but if the mandatory properties are not set a ProviderException will be thrown. The valid properties for the MySqlSimpleMembership are the same used for MySqlMembership plus the mandatory fields. UserTableName: Name of the table where will be stored the user, this table is independent from the schema generated by the provider and can be edited later by the user. UserId: name of the column that will store the id for the records in the userTableName. UserName : name of the column that will store the name/user for the records in the userTableName. The connectionStringName property must match a connection string defined in web.config file. Once the configuration is done in web.config, we need to be sure that our database context for the Users Table point to the right connection string. In our case we just need to update the class UsersContext in the file AcountModel.cs in the Models folder. The file also contains the UserProfile class which match the configuration for our UserTable. Other class that needs to be updated is the SimpleMembershipInitializer in the file InitializeSimpleMembershipAttribute.cs in the Filters folder. In that class we'll see a call to the method “WebSecurity.InitializeDatabaseConnection”, in that call is where we need to update the parameters to match our configuration. If the database that you configure in your connection string doesn't exists, you need to create it empty. Now we're ready to run our web application, press F5 or the Run button in the tool bar. You'll see the following screen: If you go to your database used by the application you'll see some tables created, now we are using SimpleMembership. Now create a user, click on “Register” at the top-right in the web page. Type your user name and password, then click on “Register”. You'll be redirected to the home page and you'll see the name of your user at the top-right page. If you take a look on the tables just created in your database you will find the data about the user you just register. In our case the tables that contains the information are UserProfile and Webpages_Membership.  Configuring OAuth Other option to access your website will be using OAuth, so you can validate an user using an external account like Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc. In this post we'll enable the authentication for Google account in our application. Go to the class AuthConfig.cs in the folder App_Start. In the method “RegisterAuth” uncomment the last line where is the call to the method “OauthWebSecurity.RegisterGoogleClient”. Run the application. Once the application is running click on “Login”. You will see at the right side the option to login using a Google account, click on “Google”.  You will be asked for Google credentials. If your login is successful you'll see a message asking for your approval to give permission to your site to access your information. Click on “Accept”. Now a page to register your user will be shown, click on “Register”. Now your new user is logged in in your application. You can take a look of the user information created in the tables  UserProfile and Webpages_OauthMembership. If you want to use another external option to authenticate users you must enable the client in the same class where we enable the Google authentication, but for others providers is mandatory to register your Application in their site. Once you have register your application they will give you a token/key and the id for your application, that information you're going to use it to register the client. Thanks for reading.

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• OS8- AK8- The bad news...

  - by Steve Tunstall

  Ok I told you I would give you the bad news of AK8 to go along with all the cool new stuff, so here it is. It's not that bad, really, just things you need to be aware of. First, the 2013.1 code is being called OS8, AK8 and 2013.1 by different people. I mean different people INSIDE Oracle!! It was supposed to be easy, but it never is. So for the rest of this blog entry, I'm calling it AK8. AK8 is not compatible with the 7x10 series. Ever. The 7x10 series is not supported with AK8, and if you try to upgrade one, it will fail at the healthcheck. All 7x20 series, all of them regardless of age, are supported with AK8. Drive trays. Let's talk about drive trays and SAS cards. The older drive trays for the 7x20 series were called the "Riverwalk 2" or "DS2" trays. They were technically the "J4410" series JBODs that Sun used to sell a la carte before we stopped selling JBODs. Don't get me started on that, it still makes me mad. We used these for many years, and you can still buy them right now until December 15th, 2013, when they will no longer be sold. The DS2 tray only came as a 4u, 24 drive shelf. It held 3.5" drives, and you had a choice of 2TB, 3TB, 300GB or 600GB drives. The SAS HBA in the 7x20 series was called a "Thebe" card, with a part # of 7105394. The 7420, for example, came standard with two of these "Thebe" cards for connecting to the disk trays. Two Thebe cards could handle up to 12 trays, so one would add two more cards to go to 24 trays, or have up to six Thebe cards to handle 36 trays. This card was for external SAS only. It did not connect to the internal OS drives or the Readzillas, both of which used the internal SCSI controller of the server. These Riverwalk 2 trays ARE supported with AK8. You can upgrade your older 7420 or 7320, no problem, as-is. The much older Riverwalk 1 trays or J4400 trays are NOT supported by AK8. However, they were only used by the 7x10 series, and we already said that the 7x10 series was not supported. Here's where it gets tricky. Since last January, we have been selling the new style disk trays. We call them the "DE2-24P" and the "DE2-24C" trays. The "C" tray is for capacity drives, which are 3.5" 3TB or 4TB drives. The "P" trays are for performance drives, which are 2.5" 300GB and 900GB drives. These trays are NOT Riverwalk 2 trays, even though the "C" series may kind of look like it. Different manufacturer and different firmware. They are not new. Like I said, we've been selling them with the 7x20 series since last January. They are the only disk trays we will be selling going forward. Of course, AK8 supports them. So what's the problem? The problem is going to be for people who have to mix drive trays. Remember, your older 7x20 series has Thebe SAS2 HBAs. These have 2 SAS ports per card.  The new ZS3-2 and ZS3-4 systems, however, have the new "Thebe2" SAS2 HBAs. These Thebe2 cards have 4 ports per card. This is very cool, as we can now do more SAS channels with less cards. Instead of needing 4 SAS cards to grow to 24 trays like we did with the old Thebe cards, I can now do 24 trays with only 2 Thebe2 cards. This means more IO slots for fun things like Infiniband and 10G. So far, so good, right? These Thebe2 cards work with any disk tray. You can even mix older DS2 trays with the newer DE2 trays in the same system, as long as you have Thebe2 cards. Ah, there's your problem. You don't have Thebe2 cards in your old 7420, do you? Well, I told you the bad news wasn't that bad, right? We can take out your Thebe cards and replace them with Thebe2. You can then plug your older DS2 trays right back in, and also now get newer DE2 trays going forward. However, it's important that the trays are on different SAS channels. You can mix them in the same system, but not on the same channel. Ask your local SC if you need help with the new cable layout. By the way, the new ZS3-2 and ZS3-4 systems also include a new IO card called "Erie" cards. These are for INTERNAL SAS to the OS drives and the Readzillas. So those are now SAS2 instead of SATA like the older models. Yes, the Erie card uses an IO slot, but that's OK, because the Thebe2 cards allow us to use less SAS HBAs to grow the system, right? That's it. Not too much bad news and really not that bad. AK8 does not support the 7x10 series, and you may need new Thebe2 cards in your older systems if you want to add on newer DE2 trays. I think we can all agree that there are worse things out there. Like our Congress.   Next up.... More good news and cool AK8 tricks. Such as virtual NICS. 

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• Restoring databases to a set drive and directory

  - by okeofs

   Restoring databases to a set drive and directory Introduction Often people say that necessity is the mother of invention. In this case I was faced with the dilemma of having to restore several databases, with multiple ‘ndf’ files, and having to restore them with different physical file names, drives and directories on servers other than the servers from which they originated. As most of us would do, I went to Google to see if I could find some code to achieve this task and found some interesting snippets on Pinal Dave’s website. Naturally, I had to take it further than the code snippet, HOWEVER it was a great place to start. Creating a temp table to hold database file details First off, I created a temp table which would hold the details of the individual data files within the database. Although there are a plethora of fields (within the temp table below), I utilize LogicalName only within this example. The temporary table structure may be seen below:   create table #tmp ( LogicalName nvarchar(128)  ,PhysicalName nvarchar(260)  ,Type char(1)  ,FileGroupName nvarchar(128)  ,Size numeric(20,0)  ,MaxSize numeric(20,0), Fileid tinyint, CreateLSN numeric(25,0), DropLSN numeric(25, 0), UniqueID uniqueidentifier, ReadOnlyLSN numeric(25,0), ReadWriteLSN numeric(25,0), BackupSizeInBytes bigint, SourceBlocSize int, FileGroupId int, LogGroupGUID uniqueidentifier, DifferentialBaseLSN numeric(25,0), DifferentialBaseGUID uniqueidentifier, IsReadOnly bit, IsPresent bit,  TDEThumbPrint varchar(50) )    We now declare and populate a variable(@path), setting the variable to the path to our SOURCE database backup. declare @path varchar(50) set @path = 'P:\DATA\MYDATABASE.bak'   From this point, we insert the file details of our database into the temp table. Note that we do so by utilizing a restore statement HOWEVER doing so in ‘filelistonly’ mode.   insert #tmp EXEC ('restore filelistonly from disk = ''' + @path + '''')   At this point, I depart from what I gleaned from Pinal Dave.   I now instantiate a few more local variables. The use of each variable will be evident within the cursor (which follows):   Declare @RestoreString as Varchar(max) Declare @NRestoreString as NVarchar(max) Declare @LogicalName  as varchar(75) Declare @counter as int Declare @rows as int set @counter = 1 select @rows = COUNT(*) from #tmp  -- Count the number of records in the temp                                    -- table   Declaring and populating the cursor At this point I do realize that many people are cringing about the use of a cursor. Being an Oracle professional as well, I have learnt that there is a time and place for cursors. I would remind the reader that the data that will be read into the cursor is from a local temp table and as such, any locking of the records (within the temp table) is not really an issue.   DECLARE MY_CURSOR Cursor  FOR  Select LogicalName  From #tmp   Parsing the logical names from within the cursor. A small caveat that works in our favour,  is that the first logical name (of our database) is the logical name of the primary data file (.mdf). Other files, except for the very last logical name, belong to secondary data files. The last logical name is that of our database log file.   I now open my cursor and populate the variable @RestoreString Open My_Cursor  set @RestoreString =  'RESTORE DATABASE [MYDATABASE] FROM DISK = N''P:\DATA\ MYDATABASE.bak''' + ' with  '   We now fetch the first record from the temp table.   Fetch NEXT FROM MY_Cursor INTO @LogicalName   While there are STILL records left within the cursor, we dynamically build our restore string. Note that we are using concatenation to create ‘one big restore executable string’.   Note also that the target physical file name is hardwired, as is the target directory.   While (@@FETCH_STATUS <> -1) BEGIN IF (@@FETCH_STATUS <> -2) -- As long as there are no rows missing select @RestoreString = case  when @counter = 1 then -- This is the mdf file    @RestoreString + 'move  N''' + @LogicalName + '''' + ' TO N’’X:\DATA1\'+ @LogicalName + '.mdf' + '''' + ', '   -- OK, if it passes through here we are dealing with an .ndf file -- Note that Counter must be greater than 1 and less than the number of rows.   when @counter > 1 and @counter < @rows then -- These are the ndf file(s)    @RestoreString + 'move  N''' + @LogicalName + '''' + ' TO N’’X:\DATA1\'+ @LogicalName + '.ndf' + '''' + ', '   -- OK, if it passes through here we are dealing with the log file When @LogicalName like '%log%' then    @RestoreString + 'move  N''' + @LogicalName + '''' + ' TO N’’X:\DATA1\'+ @LogicalName + '.ldf' +'''' end --Increment the counter   set @counter = @counter + 1 FETCH NEXT FROM MY_CURSOR INTO @LogicalName END   At this point we have populated the varchar(max) variable @RestoreString with a concatenation of all the necessary file names. What we now need to do is to run the sp_executesql stored procedure, to effect the restore.   First, we must place our ‘concatenated string’ into an nvarchar based variable. Obviously this will only work as long as the length of @RestoreString is less than varchar(max) / 2.   set @NRestoreString = @RestoreString EXEC sp_executesql @NRestoreString   Upon completion of this step, the database should be restored to the server. I now close and deallocate the cursor, and to be clean, I would also drop my temp table.   CLOSE MY_CURSOR DEALLOCATE MY_CURSOR GO   Conclusion Restoration of databases on different servers with different physical names and on different drives are a fact of life. Through the use of a few variables and a simple cursor, we may achieve an efficient and effective way to achieve this task.

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• Making Those PanelBoxes Behave

  - by Duncan Mills

  I have a little problem to solve earlier this week - misbehaving <af:panelBox> components... What do I mean by that? Well here's the scenario, I have a page fragment containing a set of panelBoxes arranged vertically. As it happens, they are stamped out in a loop but that does not really matter. What I want to be able to do is to provide the user with a simple UI to close and open all of the panelBoxes in concert. This could also apply to showDetailHeader and similar items with a disclosed attrubute, but in this case it's good old panelBoxes.  Ok, so the basic solution to this should be self evident. I can set up a suitable scoped managed bean that the panelBoxes all refer to for their disclosed attribute state. Then the open all / close commandButtons in the UI can simply set the state of that bean for all the panelBoxes to pick up via EL on their disclosed attribute. Sound OK? Well that works basically without a hitch, but turns out that there is a slight problem and this is where the framework is attempting to be a little too helpful. The issue is that is the user manually discloses or hides a panelBox then that will override the value that the EL is setting. So for example. I start the page with all panelBoxes collapsed, all set by the EL state I'm storing on the session I manually disclose panelBox no 1. I press the Expand All button - all works as you would hope and all the panelBoxes are now disclosed, including of course panelBox 1 which I just expanded manually. Finally I press the Collapse All button and everything collapses except that first panelBox that I manually disclosed.  The problem is that the component remembers this manual disclosure and that overrides the value provided by the expression. If I change the viewId (navigate away and back) then the panelBox will start to behave again, until of course I touch it again! Now, the more astute amoungst you would think (as I did) Ah, sound like the MDS personalizaton stuff is getting in the way and the solution should simply be to set the dontPersist attribute to disclosed | ALL. Alas this does not fix the issue.  After a little noodling on the best way to approach this I came up with a solution that works well, although if you think of an alternative way do let me know. The principle is simple. In the disclosureListener for the panelBox I take a note of the clientID of the panelBox component that has been touched by the user along with the state. This all gets stored in a Map of Booleans in ViewScope which is keyed by clientID and stores the current disclosed state in the Boolean value.  The listener looks like this (it's held in a request scope backing bean for the page): public void handlePBDisclosureEvent(DisclosureEvent disclosureEvent) { String clientId = disclosureEvent.getComponent().getClientId(FacesContext.getCurrentInstance()); boolean state = disclosureEvent.isExpanded(); pbState.addTouchedPanelBox(clientId, state); } The pbState variable referenced here is a reference to the bean which will hold the state of the panelBoxes that lives in viewScope (recall that everything is re-set when the viewid is changed so keeping this in viewScope is just fine and cleans things up automatically). The addTouchedPanelBox() method looks like this: public void addTouchedPanelBox(String clientId, boolean state) { //create the cache if needed this is just a Map<String,Boolean> if (_touchedPanelBoxState == null) { _touchedPanelBoxState = new HashMap<String, Boolean>(); } // Simply put / replace _touchedPanelBoxState.put(clientId, state); } So that's the first part, we now have a record of every panelBox that the user has touched. So what do we do when the Collapse All or Expand All buttons are pressed? Here we do some JavaScript magic. Basically for each clientID that we have stored away, we issue a client side disclosure event from JavaScript - just as if the user had gone back and changed it manually. So here's the Collapse All button action: public String CloseAllAction() { submitDiscloseOverride(pbState.getTouchedClientIds(true), false); _uiManager.closeAllBoxes(); return null; }  The _uiManager.closeAllBoxes() method is just manipulating the master-state that all of the panelBoxes are bound to using EL. The interesting bit though is the line:  submitDiscloseOverride(pbState.getTouchedClientIds(true), false); To break that down, the first part is a call to that viewScoped state holder to ask for a list of clientIDs that need to be "tweaked": public String getTouchedClientIds(boolean targetState) { StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder(); if (_touchedPanelBoxState != null && _touchedPanelBoxState.size() > 0) { for (Map.Entry<String, Boolean> entry : _touchedPanelBoxState.entrySet()) { if (entry.getValue() == targetState) { if (sb.length() > 0) { sb.append(','); } sb.append(entry.getKey()); } } } return sb.toString(); } You'll notice that this method only processes those panelBoxes that will be in the wrong state and returns those as a comma separated list. This is then processed by the submitDiscloseOverride() method: private void submitDiscloseOverride(String clientIdList, boolean targetDisclosureState) { if (clientIdList != null && clientIdList.length() > 0) { FacesContext fctx = FacesContext.getCurrentInstance(); StringBuilder script = new StringBuilder(); script.append("overrideDiscloseHandler('"); script.append(clientIdList); script.append("',"); script.append(targetDisclosureState); script.append(");"); Service.getRenderKitService(fctx, ExtendedRenderKitService.class).addScript(fctx, script.toString()); } } This method constructs a JavaScript command to call a routine called overrideDiscloseHandler() in a script attached to the page (using the standard <af:resource> tag). That method parses out the list of clientIDs and sends the correct message to each one: function overrideDiscloseHandler(clientIdList, newState) { AdfLogger.LOGGER.logMessage(AdfLogger.INFO, "Disclosure Hander newState " + newState + " Called with: " + clientIdList); //Parse out the list of clientIds var clientIdArray = clientIdList.split(','); for (var i = 0; i < clientIdArray.length; i++){ var panelBox = flipPanel = AdfPage.PAGE.findComponentByAbsoluteId(clientIdArray[i]); if (panelBox.getComponentType() == "oracle.adf.RichPanelBox"){ panelBox.broadcast(new AdfDisclosureEvent(panelBox, newState)); } }  }  So there you go. You can see how, with a few tweaks the same code could be used for other components with disclosure that might suffer from the same problem, although I'd point out that the behavior I'm working around here us usually desirable. You can download the running example (11.1.2.2) from here. 

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• VNIC - New feature of AK8 - Working with VNICs

  - by Steve Tunstall

  One of the important new features of the AK8 code is the ability to use multiple IP addresses on the same physical network port. This feature is called VNICs, or Virtual NICs. This allows us to no longer "burn" a whole port in a cluster when one cluster peer owns a network port. Traditionally, we have had to leave Net0 empty on controller 2, because it was used for managing controller 1. Vise-versa for Net1 on Controller 1. Then, if you have data going over 10GigE ports, you probably only had half of your ports running at any given time, and the partner 10GigE port on the other controller just sat there, doing nothing, unless the first controller went down. What a waste. Those days are over.  I want to thank and give a big shout-out to our good partner, OnX Enterprise Solutions, for allowing me to come into their lab and play around with their 7320 to do this demo. They let me make a big mess of their lab for the day as I played around with VNICs. If you're looking for a partner who knows Oracle well and can also piece together a solution from multiple vendors to get you what you need, OnX is a good choice. If you would like to talk to your local OnX rep, you can contact Scott Gill at [email protected] and he can point you in the right direction for your area.  Here we go: Here is what your Datalinks window looks like BEFORE you upgrade to AK8. Here's what the same screen looks like after you upgrade. See the new box? So here is my current network setup. I have my 4 physical interfaces setup each with an IP address. If I ping them, no problems.  So I can ping 180, 181, 251, and 252. However, if I try to ping 240, it does not work, as the 240 address is not being used by any of these interfaces, right?Let's change that. Here, I'm going to make a new Datalink by clicking the Datalink "Plus sign" button. I will check the VNIC box and tell it to use igb2, even though another interface is already using it. Now, I will create a new Interface, and choose "v_dl2" for it's datalink. My new network screen looks like this. A few things to take note of here. First, when I click the "igb2" device, it only highlights dl2 and int2. It does not highlight v_dl2 or v_int2.I think it should, but OK, it looks like VNICs don't highlight when you click the device. Second, note how the underscore character in v_dl2 and v_int2 do not seem to show on this screen. You can see it plainly if you go in and edit them, but from here it looks like a space instead of an underscore. Just a cosmetic bug, but something to be aware of. Now, if I click the VNIC datalink "v_dl2", on the other hand, it DOES highlight the device it belongs to, as it should. Seen here: Note that it did not, however, highlight int2 with it, even though int2 is connected to igb2. That's because we clicked v_dl2, which int2 has nothing to do with. So I'm OK with that. So let's try pinging 240 now. Of course, it works great.  So I now make another VNIC, and call it v_dl3 using igb3, and v_int3 with an address of 241. I then setup three shares, using ports 251, 240, and 241.Remember that IP 251 and 240 both are using the same physical port of igb2, and IP 241 is using port igb3. Next, I copy a folder full of stuff over to all three shares at the same time. I have analytics going so I can see the traffic. My top chart is showing the logical interfaces, and the bottom chart is showing the physical ports.Sure enough, look at the igb2 and vnic1 interfaces. They equal the traffic going over the igb2 physical port on the second chart. VNIC2, on the other hand, gets igb3 all to itself. This would work the same way with 10Gig or Infiniband ports. You can now have multiple IP addresses and even completely different subnets sharing the same physical ports. You may need to make route table entries for that. This allows us to use all of the ports you paid for with no more waste.  Very, very cool.  One small "bug" I found when doing this. It's really not a bug, it was designed to do this when VNICs were not around. But now that we have NVIC capability, they should probably change this. I've alerted the engineering team about this and they're looking into it, so perhaps it will be fixed in a later code. Here it is. Remember when we made the new VNIC datalink, I specifically said to click on the "Plus Sign" button to create it? I don't always do that. I really like to use the drag-and-drop method to create my datalinks in the network screen.HOWEVER, if you were to do that for building a VNIC, it will mess you up a little. Watch this. Here, I'm dragging igb3 over to make a new datalink. igb3 is already being used by dl3, but I'm going to make this a VNIC, so who cares, right? Well, the ZFSSA does not KNOW you are going to make it a VNIC, now does it? So... it works as designed and REMOVES the igb3 device from the current dl3 datalink in the background. See how it's now missing? At the same time, the dl3 datalink choice is missing from my list of possible VNICs for me to choose from!!!! Hey!!! I wanted to pick dl3. Why isn't it on the list??? Well, it can't be on this list because dl3 no longer has a device associated with it. Bummer for you. When you click cancel, the device is still missing from dl3. The fix is easy. Just edit dl3 by clicking the pencil button, do absolutely nothing, and click "Apply". The device will magically come back. Now, make the VNIC datalink by clicking the "Plus Sign" button. Sure enough, once you check the VNIC box, dl3 is a valid choice. No problem.  That's it for now. Have fun with VNICs.

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• Accessing your web server via IPv6

  Being able to run your systems on IPv6, have automatic address assignment and the ability to resolve host names are the necessary building blocks in your IPv6 network infrastructure. Now, that everything is in place it is about time that we are going to enable another service to respond to IPv6 requests. The following article will guide through the steps on how to enable Apache2 httpd to listen and respond to incoming IPv6 requests. This is the fourth article in a series on IPv6 configuration: Configure IPv6 on your Linux system DHCPv6: Provide IPv6 information in your local network Enabling DNS for IPv6 infrastructure Accessing your web server via IPv6 Piece of advice: This is based on my findings on the internet while reading other people's helpful articles and going through a couple of man-pages on my local system. Surfing the web - IPv6 style Enabling IPv6 connections in Apache 2 is fairly simply. But first let's check whether your system has a running instance of Apache2 or not. You can check this like so: $ service apache2 status Apache2 is running (pid 2680). In case that you got a 'service unknown' you have to install Apache to proceed with the following steps: $ sudo apt-get install apache2 Out of the box, Apache binds to all your available network interfaces and listens to TCP port 80. To check this, run the following command: $ sudo netstat -lnptu | grep "apache2\W*$"tcp6       0      0 :::80                   :::*                    LISTEN      28306/apache2 In this case Apache2 is already binding to IPv6 (and implicitly to IPv4). If you only got a tcp output, then your HTTPd is not yet IPv6 enabled. Check your Listen directive, depending on your system this might be in a different location than the default in Ubuntu. $ sudo nano /etc/apache2/ports.conf # If you just change the port or add more ports here, you will likely also# have to change the VirtualHost statement in# /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default# This is also true if you have upgraded from before 2.2.9-3 (i.e. from# Debian etch). See /usr/share/doc/apache2.2-common/NEWS.Debian.gz and# README.Debian.gzNameVirtualHost *:80Listen 80<IfModule mod_ssl.c>    # If you add NameVirtualHost *:443 here, you will also have to change    # the VirtualHost statement in /etc/apache2/sites-available/default-ssl    # to <VirtualHost *:443>    # Server Name Indication for SSL named virtual hosts is currently not    # supported by MSIE on Windows XP.    Listen 443</IfModule><IfModule mod_gnutls.c>    Listen 443</IfModule> Just in case that you don't have a ports.conf file, look for it like so: $ cd /etc/apache2/$ fgrep -r -i 'listen' ./* And modify the related file instead of the ports.conf. Which most probably might be either apache2.conf or httpd.conf anyways. Okay, please bear in mind that Apache can only bind once on the same interface and port. So, eventually, you might be interested to add another port which explicitly listens to IPv6 only. In that case, you would add the following in your configuration file: Listen 80Listen [2001:db8:bad:a55::2]:8080 But this is completely optional... Anyways, just to complete all steps, you save the file, and then check the syntax like so: $ sudo apache2ctl configtestSyntax OK Ok, now let's apply the modifications to our running Apache2 instances: $ sudo service apache2 reload * Reloading web server config apache2   ...done. $ sudo netstat -lnptu | grep "apache2\W*$"                                                                                               tcp6       0      0 2001:db8:bad:a55:::8080 :::*                    LISTEN      5922/apache2    tcp6       0      0 :::80                   :::*                    LISTEN      5922/apache2 There we have two daemons running and listening to different TCP ports. Now, that the basics are in place, it's time to prepare any website to respond to incoming requests on the IPv6 address. Open up any configuration file you have below your sites-enabled folder. $ ls -al /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/... $ sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default <VirtualHost *:80 [2001:db8:bad:a55::2]:8080>        ServerAdmin [email protected]        ServerName server.ios.mu        ServerAlias server Here, we have to check and modify the VirtualHost directive and enable it to respond to the IPv6 address and port our web server is listening to. Save your changes, run the configuration test and reload Apache2 in order to apply your modifications. After successful steps you can launch your favourite browser and navigate to your IPv6 enabled web server. Accessing an IPv6 address in the browser That looks like a successful surgery to me... Note: In case that you received a timeout, check whether your client is operating on IPv6, too.

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