Search Results

Search found 13794 results on 552 pages for 'variable scope'.

Page 190/552 | < Previous Page | 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197  | Next Page >

• Finding cause of memory leaks in large PHP stacks

  - by Mike B

  I have CLI script that runs over several thousand iterations between runs and it appears to have a memory leak. I'm using a tweaked version of Zend Framework with Smarty for view templating and each iteration uses several MB worth of code. The first run immediately uses nearly 8MB of memory (which is fine) but every following run adds about 80kb. My main loop looks like this (very simplified) $users = UsersModel::getUsers(); foreach($users as $user) { $obj = new doSomethingAwesome(); $obj->run($user); $obj = null; unset($obj); } The point is that everything in scope should be unset and the memory freed. My understanding is that PHP runs through its garbage collection process at it's own desire but it does so at the end of functions/methods/scripts. So something must be leaking memory inside doSomethingAwesome() but as I said it is a huge stack of code. Ideally, I would love to find some sort of tool that displayed all my variables no matter the scope at some point during execution. Some sort of symbol-table viewer for php. Does anything like that or any other tools that could help nail down memory leaks in php exist?

  Read the article

• WPF : Command routing for Keyboard shortcuts.

  - by Sprotty

  Basically I want to create a keyboard shortcut which is valid within the scope of a window, and not just enabled when focus is within the control that binds it. in more detail.... I have a window which has 3 controls a toolbar textbox Custom Control The toolbar has a button bound to the Command CustomCommands.CmdA and linked to 'Ctrl-T'. My Custom Control can process CmdA. When I run the app and click on my custom control CmdA is enabled and works fine. Also Ctrl-T cause the command to fire. However when I select the text box, my custom command CmdA becomes disabled. I can rectify this by setting the command target for CmdA's button. Now when I select the textBox, CmdA is still enabled. But the Keyboard shortcut Ctrl-T does nothing. Is there any easy way to change the scope of keyboard shortcuts? Or do I need to catch the keypress somewhere lower down, and work out which Command it relates to and route it myself (if so is there a framework within which to do this?) Many Thanks Simon

  Read the article

• JRuby app throws exception in Spring

  - by mat3001

  I am trying to run a JRuby app in Spring. I use Eclipse to run it. But it doesn't compile. Does anybody know what's going on here? Exception in thread "Launcher:/oflaDemo" [INFO] [Launcher:/oflaDemo] org.springframework.beans.factory.support.DefaultListableBeanFactory - Destroying singletons in org.springframework.beans.factory.support.DefaultListableBeanFactory@4a009ab0: defining beans [placeholderConfig,web.context,web.scope,web.handler,demoService.service]; parent: org.springframework.beans.factory.support.DefaultListableBeanFactory@f5d8d75 [INFO] [Launcher:/installer] org.red5.server.service.Installer - Installer service created org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanCreationException: Error creating bean with name 'web.scope' defined in ServletContext resource [/WEB-INF/red5-web.xml]: Initialization of bean failed; nested exception is org.springframework.beans.TypeMismatchException: Failed to convert property value of type [org.springframework.scripting.jruby.JRubyScriptFactory] to required type [org.red5.server.api.IScopeHandler] for property 'handler'; nested exception is java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Cannot convert value of type [org.springframework.scripting.jruby.JRubyScriptFactory] to required type [org.red5.server.api.IScopeHandler] for property 'handler': no matching editors or conversion strategy found at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.doCreateBean(AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.java:480) at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory$1.run(AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.java:409) at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method) I don't have a lot of experience with Spring, so I would really appreciate hits. If you're familiar with red5 - yes it's the oflademo app supplied by red5.

  Read the article

• Make Errors: Missing Includes in C++ Script?

  - by Abs

  Hello all, I just got help in how to compile this script a few mintues ago on SO but I have managed to get errors. I am only a beginner in C++ and have no idea what the below erros means or how to fix it. This is the script in question. I have read the comments from some users suggesting they changed the #include parts but it seems to be exactly what the script has, see this comment. [root@localhost wkthumb]# qmake-qt4 && make g++ -c -pipe -O2 -g -pipe -Wall -Wp,-D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -fstack-protector --param=ssp-buffer-size=4 -m32 -march=i386 -mtune=generic -fasynchronous-unwind-tables -Wall -W -D_REENTRANT -DQT_NO_DEBUG -DQT_GUI_LIB -DQT_CORE_LIB -I/usr/lib/qt4/mkspecs/linux-g++ -I. -I/usr/include/QtCore -I/usr/include/QtGui -I/usr/include -I. -I. -I. -o main.o main.cpp main.cpp:5:20: error: QWebView: No such file or directory main.cpp:6:21: error: QWebFrame: No such file or directory main.cpp:8: error: expected constructor, destructor, or type conversion before ‘*’ token main.cpp:11: error: ‘QWebView’ has not been declared main.cpp: In function ‘void loadFinished(bool)’: main.cpp:18: error: ‘view’ was not declared in this scope main.cpp:18: error: ‘QWebSettings’ has not been declared main.cpp:19: error: ‘QWebSettings’ has not been declared main.cpp:20: error: ‘QWebSettings’ has not been declared main.cpp: In function ‘int main(int, char**)’: main.cpp:42: error: ‘view’ was not declared in this scope main.cpp:42: error: expected type-specifier before ‘QWebView’ main.cpp:42: error: expected `;' before ‘QWebView’ make: *** [main.o] Error 1 I have the web kit on my Fedora Core 10 machine: qt-4.5.3-9.fc10.i386 qt-devel-4.5.3-9.fc10.i386 Thanks all for any help

  Read the article

• Unit Testing the Use of TransactionScope

  - by Randolpho

  The preamble: I have designed a strongly interfaced and fully mockable data layer class that expects the business layer to create a TransactionScope when multiple calls should be included in a single transaction. The problem: I would like to unit test that my business layer makes use of a TransactionScope object when I expect it to. Unfortunately, the standard pattern for using TransactionScope is a follows: using(var scope = new TransactionScope()) { // transactional methods datalayer.InsertFoo(); datalayer.InsertBar(); scope.Complete(); } While this is a really great pattern in terms of usability for the programmer, testing that it's done seems... unpossible to me. I cannot detect that a transient object has been instantiated, let alone mock it to determine that a method was called on it. Yet my goal for coverage implies that I must. The Question: How can I go about building unit tests that ensure TransactionScope is used appropriately according to the standard pattern? Final Thoughts: I've considered a solution that would certainly provide the coverage I need, but have rejected it as overly complex and not conforming to the standard TransactionScope pattern. It involves adding a CreateTransactionScope method on my data layer object that returns an instance of TransactionScope. But because TransactionScope contains constructor logic and non-virtual methods and is therefore difficult if not impossible to mock, CreateTransactionScope would return an instance of DataLayerTransactionScope which would be a mockable facade into TransactionScope. While this might do the job it's complex and I would prefer to use the standard pattern. Is there a better way?

  Read the article

• Logging in "Java Library Code" libs for Android applications

  - by K. Claszen

  I follow the advice to implement Android device (not application!) independent library code for my Android Apps in a seperate "Java Library Code" project. This makes testing easier for me as I can use the standard maven project layout, Spring test support and Continuous Build systems the way I am used to. I do not want to mix this inside my Android App project although this might be possible. I now wonder how to implement logging in this library. As this library will be used on the Android device I would like to go with android.util.Log. I added the followind dependency to my project to get the missing Android packages/classes and dependencies: <dependency> <groupId>com.google.android</groupId> <artifactId>android</artifactId> <version>2.2.1</version> <scope>provided</scope> </dependency> But this library just contains stub method (similar to the android.jar inside the android-sdk), thus using android.util.Log results in java.lang.RuntimeException: Stub! when running my unit tests. How do I implement logging which works on the Android device but does not fail outside (I do not expect it to work, but it must not fail)? Thanks for any advice Klaus For now I am going with the workaround to catch the exception outside android but hope there is a better solution. try { Log.d("me", "hello"); } catch (RuntimeException re) { // ignore failure outside android }

  Read the article

• Sharepoint Active directory forms authentication

  - by Sushant

  Hi, I am devloping a sharepoint website in Forms authentication mode. I am trying to authenticate myself/ my company users against company's active directory. The ldap path I received from my technical team is LDAP://infinmumcfac.inf.com OU=Infotech,DC=inf,DC=com I got this piece of code from microsoft site. <membership defaultProvider="LdapMembershipProvider"> <providers> <add name="LdapMembership" type="Microsoft.Office.Server.Security.LDAPMembershipProvider, Microsoft.Office.Server, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71E9BCE111E9429C" server="DC" port="389" useSSL="false" userDNAttribute="distinguishedName" userNameAttribute="sAMAccountName" userContainer="CN=Users,DC=userName,DC=local" userObjectClass="person" userFilter="(|(ObjectCategory=group)(ObjectClass=person))" scope="Subtree" otherRequiredUserAttributes="sn,givenname,cn" /> </providers> </membership> The site asked me to change the Server and Usercontainer attribute. I have modified the code to <membership defaultProvider="LdapMembershipProvider"> <providers> <add name="LdapMembership" type="Microsoft.Office.Server.Security.LDAPMembershipProvider, Microsoft.Office.Server, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71E9BCE111E9429C" server=” infinmumcfac.inf.com” port="389" useSSL="false" userDNAttribute="distinguishedName" userNameAttribute="sAMAccountName" userContainer=" OU=Infotech,DC=inf,DC=com " userObjectClass="person" userFilter="(|(ObjectCategory=group)(ObjectClass=person))" scope="Subtree" otherRequiredUserAttributes="sn,givenname,cn" /> </providers> </membership> I placed this code in web.config file of central administration site and my sharepoint website . I am still facing login issues. Any help or insight would be highly grateful.Thanking in anticipation.

  Read the article

• Alter a function as a parameter before evaluating it in R?

  - by Shane

  Is there any way, given a function passed as a parameter, to alter its input parameter string before evaluating it? Here's pseudo-code for what I'm hoping to achieve: test.func <- function(a, b) { # here I want to alter the b expression before evaluating it: b(..., val1=a) } Given the function call passed to b, I want to add in a as another parameter without needing to always specify ... in the b call. So the output from this test.func call should be: test.func(a="a", b=paste(1, 2)) "1" "2" "a" Edit: Another way I could see doing something like this would be if I could assign the additional parameter within the scope of the parent function (again, as pseudo-code); in this case a would be within the scope of t1 and hence t2, but not globally assigned: t2 <- function(...) { paste(a=a, ...) } t1 <- function(a, b) { local( { a <<- a; b } ) } t1(a="a", b=t2(1, 2)) This is somewhat akin to currying in that I'm nesting the parameter within the function itself. Edit 2: Just to add one more comment to this: I realize that one related approach could be to use "prototype-based programming" such that things would be inherited (which could be achieved with the proto package). But I was hoping for a easier way to simply alter the input parameters before evaluating in R.

  Read the article

• Angular JS pagination after data loaded

  - by Federico Bucchi

  do you have any example of Angular JS elements pagination loaded from I file? I found this example: http://jsfiddle.net/SAWsA/11/ Now, instead of having this: $scope.items = [ {"id":"1","name":"name 1","description":"description 1","field3":"field3 1","field4":"field4 1","field5 ":"field5 1"}, {"id":"2","name":"name 2","description":"description 1","field3":"field3 2","field4":"field4 2","field5 ":"field5 2"}, {"id":"3","name":"name 3","description":"description 1","field3":"field3 3","field4":"field4 3","field5 ":"field5 3"}, {"id":"4","name":"name 4","description":"description 1","field3":"field3 4","field4":"field4 4","field5 ":"field5 4"}, {"id":"5","name":"name 5","description":"description 1","field3":"field3 5","field4":"field4 5","field5 ":"field5 5"}, {"id":"6","name":"name 6","description":"description 1","field3":"field3 6","field4":"field4 6","field5 ":"field5 6"}, {"id":"7","name":"name 7","description":"description 1","field3":"field3 7","field4":"field4 7","field5 ":"field5 7"}, {"id":"8","name":"name 8","description":"description 1","field3":"field3 8","field4":"field4 8","field5 ":"field5 8"}, {"id":"9","name":"name 9","description":"description 1","field3":"field3 9","field4":"field4 9","field5 ":"field5 9"}, {"id":"10","name":"name 10","description":"description 1","field3":"field3 10","field4":"field4 10","field5 ":"field5 10"}, {"id":"11","name":"name 11","description":"description 1","field3":"field3 11","field4":"field4 11","field5 ":"field5 11"}, {"id":"12","name":"name 12","description":"description 1","field3":"field3 12","field4":"field4 12","field5 ":"field5 12"}, {"id":"13","name":"name 13","description":"description 1","field3":"field3 13","field4":"field4 13","field5 ":"field5 13"}, {"id":"14","name":"name 14","description":"description 1","field3":"field3 14","field4":"field4 14","field5 ":"field5 14"}, {"id":"15","name":"name 15","description":"description 1","field3":"field3 15","field4":"field4 15","field5 ":"field5 15"}, {"id":"16","name":"name 16","description":"description 1","field3":"field3 16","field4":"field4 16","field5 ":"field5 16"}, {"id":"17","name":"name 17","description":"description 1","field3":"field3 17","field4":"field4 17","field5 ":"field5 17"}, {"id":"18","name":"name 18","description":"description 1","field3":"field3 18","field4":"field4 18","field5 ":"field5 18"}, {"id":"19","name":"name 19","description":"description 1","field3":"field3 19","field4":"field4 19","field5 ":"field5 19"}, {"id":"20","name":"name 20","description":"description 1","field3":"field3 20","field4":"field4 20","field5 ":"field5 20"} ]; I have to use something generated by: $http.get('/json/mocks/apps/applications.json') .then(function (result) { $scope.items = result.data.applications; }); How would you create the pagination waiting for the data loaded from $http.get?

  Read the article

• How to use Transaction in Entity FrameWork?

  - by programmerist

  How to use Transaction in Entity FrameWork? i read some links on Stackoverflow : http://stackoverflow.com/questions/815586/entity-framework-using-transactions-or-savechangesfalse-and-acceptallchanges BUT; i have 3 table so i have 3 entities: CREATE TABLE Personel (PersonelID integer PRIMARY KEY identity not null, Ad varchar(30), Soyad varchar(30), Meslek varchar(100), DogumTarihi datetime, DogumYeri nvarchar(100), PirimToplami float); Go create TABLE Prim (PrimID integer PRIMARY KEY identity not null, PersonelID integer Foreign KEY references Personel(PersonelID), SatisTutari int, Prim float, SatisTarihi Datetime); Go CREATE TABLE Finans (ID integer PRIMARY KEY identity not null, Tutar float); Personel, Prim,Finans my tables. if you look Prim table you can see Prim value float value if i write a textbox not float value my transaction must run. using (TestEntities testCtx = new TestEntities()) { using (TransactionScope scope = new TransactionScope()) { // do someyihng... testCtx.Personel.SaveChanges(); // do someyihng... testCtx.Prim.SaveChanges(); // do someyihng... testCtx.Finans.SaveChanges(); scope .Complete(); success = true; } } How can i do that?

  Read the article

• Updating Pointer using signals and slots

  - by Umesha MS

  Hi, I am very new to the QT; please help me to solve the problem. I am using thread to perform intensive operation in back ground. Meanwhile I want to update the UI, so I am using SIGNALS and SLOTS. To update UI I emit a signal and update UI. Let us consider bellow sample code, struct sample { QString name; QString address; }; void Update(sample *); void sampleFunction() { sample a; a.name = "Sachin Tendulkar"; a.address = "India" emit Update(&a); } In the above code we are creating a local object and passing the address of local object. In the QT document, it says that when we emit a signal it will be placed in the queue and late it will be delivered to the windows. Since my object is in local scope it will be delete once it goes out of the scope. Please tell me a way to send a pointer in a signal.

  Read the article

• JQuery UI Sortable

  - by RussP

  Can someone please help me with this one: When using UISortables where - and how do I put "serialize" into the JQuery function? I have 4 columns class '.columm' and each wit a unique id - col1,col2,col3 & col4. I can get the drag & drop bit to work I now need to put the "final" positions into a serialized array. Here is my code: $(".column").sortable({ revert: true, scroll: true, appendTo: 'body', connectWith: '.column', delay:200, stop: function() { $(".column").each(function(){ var test = $(this).attr('id'); alert(test); // //var myArray = $(this).sortable("serialize"); }) }, revertDuration:50000, scope:'scope', opacity: 0.80, }); You will see alert test. I have done this to see if I can get the col id's into an alert and I can, but where do i put .sortable( "serialize" , [options] ) and how do I do that for the 4 columns to create 1 single serialized array? having done that how/where do you set the order when you next load the page? (OK yes, I do intent to "store" the serialized array) Help please - thanks

  Read the article

• password-check directive in angularjs

  - by mpm

  I'm writing a password verify directive : Directives.directive("passwordVerify",function(){ return { require:"ngModel", link: function(scope,element,attrs,ctrl){ ctrl.$parsers.unshift(function(viewValue){ var origin = scope.$eval(attrs["passwordVerify"]); if(origin!==viewValue){ ctrl.$setValidity("passwordVerify",false); return undefined; }else{ ctrl.$setValidity("passwordVerify",true); return viewValue; } }); } }; }); html : <input data-ng-model='user.password' type="password" name='password' placeholder='password' required> <input data-ng-model='user.password_verify' type="password" name='confirm_password' placeholder='confirm password' required data-password-verify="user.password"> Given 2 password fields in a form, if both password values are equal then the field affected by the directive is valid. The issue is that it works one way (i.e. when I type a password in the password-verify field). However, when the original password field is updated, the password-verify doesn't become valid. Any idea how I could have a "two way binding verify?"

  Read the article

• What wrapper class in C++ should I use for automated resource management?

  - by Vilx-

  I'm a C++ amateur. I'm writing some Win32 API code and there are handles and weirdly compositely allocated objects aplenty. So I was wondering - is there some wrapper class that would make resource management easier? For example, when I want to load some data I open a file with CreateFile() and get a HANDLE. When I'm done with it, I should call CloseHandle() on it. But for any reasonably complex loading function there will be dozens of possible exit points, not to mention exceptions. So it would be great if I could wrap the handle in some kind of wrapper class which would automatically call CloseHandle() once execution left the scope. Even better - it could do some reference counting so I can pass it around in and out of other functions, and it would release the resource only when the last reference left scope. The concept is simple - but is there something like that in the standard library? I'm using Visual Studio 2008, by the way, and I don't want to attach a 3rd party framework like Boost or something.

  Read the article

• Why does reusing arrays increase performance so significantly in c#?

  - by Willem

  In my code, I perform a large number of tasks, each requiring a large array of memory to temporarily store data. I have about 500 tasks. At the beginning of each task, I allocate memory for an array : double[] tempDoubleArray = new double[M]; M is a large number depending on the precise task, typically around 2000000. Now, I do some complex calculations to fill the array, and in the end I use the array to determine the result of this task. After that, the tempDoubleArray goes out of scope. Profiling reveals that the calls to construct the arrays are time consuming. So, I decide to try and reuse the array, by making it static and reusing it. It requires some additional juggling to figure out the minimum size of the array, requiring an extra pass through all tasks, but it works. Now, the program is much faster (from 80 sec to 22 sec for execution of all tasks). double[] tempDoubleArray = staticDoubleArray; However, I'm a bit in the dark of why precisely this works so well. Id say that in the original code, when the tempDoubleArray goes out of scope, it can be collected, so allocating a new array should not be that hard right? I ask this because understanding why it works might help me figuring out other ways to achieve the same effect, and because I would like to know in what cases allocation gives performance issues.

  Read the article

• static member specialization of templated child class and templated base class

  - by b3nj1

  I'm trying to have a templated class (here C) that inherits from another templated class (here A) and perform static member specialization (of int var here), but I cant get the right syntax to do so (if it's possible #include <iostream> template<typename derived> class A { public: static int var; }; //This one works fine class B :public A<B> { public: B() { std::cout << var << std::endl; } }; template<> int A<B>::var = 9; //This one doesn't works template<typename type> class C :public A<C<type> > { public: C() { std::cout << var << std::endl; } }; //template<> template<typename type> int A<C<type> >::a = 10; int main() { B b; C<int> c; return 0; } I put an example that works with a non templated class (here B) and i can get the static member specialization of var, but for C that just doesn't work. Here is what gcc tells me : test.cpp: In constructor ‘C<type>::C()’: test.cpp:29:26: error: ‘var’ was not declared in this scope test.cpp: At global scope: test.cpp:34:18: error: template definition of non-template ‘int A<C<type> >::a’ I'm using gcc version 4.6.3, thanks for any help

  Read the article

• [C++] Trouble declaring and recognizing global functions

  - by Sarah

  I've created some mathematical functions that will be used in main() and by member functions in multiple host classes. I was thinking it would be easiest to make these math functions global in scope, but I'm not sure how to do this. I've currently put all the functions in a file called Rdraws.cpp, with the prototypes in Rdraws.h. Even with all the #includes and externs, I'm getting a "symbol not found" error at the first function call in main(). Here's what I have: // Rdraws.cpp #include <cstdlib> using namespace std; #include <cmath> #include "Rdraws.h" #include "rng.h" extern RNG rgen // this is the PRNG used in the simulation; global scope void rmultinom( double p_trans[], int numTrials, int numTrans, int numEachTrans[] ) { // function 1 def } void rmultinom( const double p_trans[], const int numTrials, int numTrans, int numEachTrans[]) { // function 2 def } int rbinom( int nTrials, double pLeaving ) { // function 3 def } // Rdraws.h #ifndef RDRAWS #define RDRAWS void rmultinom( double[], int, int, int[] ); void rmultinom( const double[], const int, int, int[] ); int rbinom( int, double ); #endif // main.cpp ... #include "Rdraws.h" ... extern void rmultinom(double p_trans[], int numTrials, int numTrans, int numEachTrans[]); extern void rmultinom(const double p_trans[], const int numTrials, int numTrans, int numEachTrans[]); extern int rbinom( int n, double p ); ... int main() { ... } I'm pretty new to programming. If there's a dramatically smarter way to do this, I'd love to know.

  Read the article

• Identifying memory leaks in C++

  - by Dororo

  I've got the following bit of code, which I've narrowed down to be causing a memory leak (that is, in Task Manager, the Private Working Set of memory increases with the same repeated input string). I understand the concepts of heaps and stacks for memory, as well as the general rules for avoiding memory leaks, but something somewhere is still going wrong: while(!quit){ char* thebuffer = new char[210]; //checked the function, it isn't creating the leak int size = FuncToObtainInputTextFromApp(thebuffer); //stored in thebuffer string bufferstring = thebuffer; int startlog = bufferstring.find("$"); int endlog = bufferstring.find("&"); string str_text=""; str_text = bufferstring.substr(startlog,endlog-startlog+1); String^ str_text_m = gcnew String(str_text_m.c_str()); //some work done delete str_text_m; delete [] thebuffer; } The only thing I can think of is it might be the creation of 'string str_text' since it never goes out of scope since it just reloops in the while? If so, how would I resolve that? Defining it outside the while loop wouldn't solve it since it'd also remain in scope then too. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

  Read the article

• Syntax errors on Heroku, but not on local server (postgresql related?)

  - by Phil_Ken_Sebben

  I'm trying to deploy my first app on Heroku (rails 3). It works fine on my local server, but when I pushed it to Heroku and ran it, it crashes, giving a number of syntax errors. These are related to a collection of scopes I use like the one below: scope :scored, lambda { |score = nil| score.nil? ? {} : where('products.votes_count >= ?', score) } it produces errors of this form: "syntax error, unexpected '=', expecting '|' " "syntax error, unexpected '}', expecting kEND" Why is this syntax making Heroku choke and how can I correct it? Thanks! EDIT: I was using sqlite on my local machine and Heroku does not support that. Trying to make sure the db is properly configured for PG. I believe I have done that by specifying in the gemfile that sqlite only be used in development. Yet I still get these syntax errors, that interrupt even the db:migrate. EDIT: So now it seems more likely that my scope syntax doesn't work in postgreSQL. Does anyone know how to convert this properly?

  Read the article

• Reporting Services Sum of Inner Group in Outer Group

  - by Spoonybard

  I have a report in Reporting Services 2008 using ASP.net 3.5 and SQL Server 2008. The report has 2 groupings and a detail row. This is the current format: Outer Group Inner Group Detail Row The Detail Row represents an item on a receipt and a receipt can have multiple items. Each receipt was paid with a certain payment method. So the Outer Group is grouped by payment type, the Inner Group is grouped by the receipt's ID, and the Detail Row is each item for the given receipt. My raw data result set has two important columns: The Amount Received and the Amount Applied. The Amount Received is how much money in total was collected for all the items on the receipt. The Amount Applied is how much money each item got from the total Amount Received. Sample Result Set: ReceiptID Item ItemID AmountReceived AmountApplied Payment Method ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 1 Book 1 $200.00 $40.00 Cash 1 CD 2 $200.00 $20.00 Cash 1 Software 3 $200.00 $100.00 Cash 1 Backpack 4 $200.00 $40.00 Cash The Inner Group displays the AmountReceived correctly as $200. However, the Outer Group displays the AmountReceived as $800, because I believe that it is going off each detail row which in this case is a count of 4 items. What I want is to see in the Outer Group that the Amount Received is $200. I tried restricting the scope in my SUM function to be the Inner Group, but I get the error "The scope parameter must be set to a string constant that is equal to either the name of a containing group, the name of a containing data region, or the name of a dataset." Does anyone have any suggestions on how to solve this issue? Thanks.

  Read the article

• Android thread handler NullPointerException

  - by Realn0whereman

  So this null pointer is confusing me. I believe it is a scope issue. My main activity looks like this: public class App extends Activity { ProgressDialog progressDialog; ProgressThread progressThread; Then inside of the oncreate I do this: ProgressDialog progressDialog = new ProgressDialog(this); progressDialog.setProgressStyle(ProgressDialog.STYLE_SPINNER); progressDialog.setMessage("Fetching Images..."); ProgressThread progressThread = new ProgressThread(handler,mImageIds,mImages); progressThread.start(); progressDialog.show(); THEN inside progressThread which is a separate class I do mHandler.sendMessage(mHandler.obtainMessage()); Now up until this point i believe it behaves as it should. I have my handler hanging out in class scope right underneath my oncreate final Handler handler = new Handler() { public void handleMessage(Message msg){ progressDialog.hide(); progressThread.interrupt(); } }; The program thinks that progressDialog and progressThread are declared, but are null. Why would they be null if I instantiate in my oncreate.

  Read the article

• Issue in alternate Row color using each() method of JQuery

  - by user1323981

  I have a table as under <table > <tr> <th scope="col">EmpId</th><th scope="col">EmpName</th> </tr> <tr> <td>1</td><td>ABC</td> </tr> <tr> <td>2</td><td>DEF</td> </tr> </table> I want to set the alternate row color of only the "td" elements of the table and not "th" by using only each() function. I have tried with <style type="text/css"> tr.even { background-color: green; } tr.odd { background-color: yellow; } </style> $(document).ready(function () { $('table > tbody').each(function () { $('tr:odd', this).addClass('odd').removeClass('even'); $('tr:even', this).addClass('even').removeClass('odd'); }); }); Though this works but it accepts also "th" element. How to avoid that? Please help Thanks

  Read the article

• URL Rewrite – Multiple domains under one site. Part II

  - by OWScott

  I believe I have it … I’ve been meaning to put together the ultimate outgoing rule for hosting multiple domains under one site.  I finally sat down this week and setup a few test cases, and created one rule to rule them all.  In Part I of this two part series, I covered the incoming rule necessary to host a site in a subfolder of a website, while making it appear as if it’s in the root of the site.  Part II won’t work without applying Part I first, so if you haven’t read it, I encourage you to read it now. However, the incoming rule by itself doesn’t address everything.  Here’s the problem … Let’s say that we host www.site2.com in a subfolder called site2, off of masterdomain.com.  This is the same example I used in Part I.   Using an incoming rewrite rule, we are able to make a request to www.site2.com even though the site is really in the /site2 folder.  The gotcha comes with any type of path that ASP.NET generates (I’m sure other scripting technologies could do the same too).  ASP.NET thinks that the path to the root of the site is /site2, but the URL is /.  See the issue?  If ASP.NET generates a path or a redirect for us, it will always add /site2 to the URL.  That results in a path that looks something like www.site2.com/site2.  In Part I, I mentioned that you should add a condition where “{PATH_INFO} ‘does not match’ /site2”.  That allows www.site2.com/site2 and www.site2.com to both function the same.  This allows the site to always work, but if you want to hide /site2 in the URL, you need to take it one step further. One way to address this is in your code.  Ultimately this is the best bet.  Ruslan Yakushev has a great article on a few considerations that you can address in code.  I recommend giving that serious consideration.  Additionally, if you have upgraded to ASP.NET 3.5 SP1 or greater, it takes care of some of the references automatically for you. However, what if you inherit an existing application?  Or you can’t easily go through your existing site and make the code changes?  If this applies to you, read on. That’s where URL Rewrite 2.0 comes in.  With URL Rewrite 2.0, you can create an outgoing rule that will remove the /site2 before the page is sent back to the user.  This means that you can take an existing application, host it in a subfolder of your site, and ensure that the URL never reveals that it’s in a subfolder. Performance Considerations Performance overhead is something to be mindful of.  These outbound rules aren’t simply changing the server variables.  The first rule I’ll cover below needs to parse the HTML body and pull out the path (i.e. /site2) on the way through.  This will add overhead, possibly significant if you have large pages and a busy site.  In other words, your mileage may vary and you may need to test to see the impact that these rules have.  Don’t worry too much though.  For many sites, the performance impact is negligible. So, how do we do it? Creating the Outgoing Rule There are really two things to keep in mind.  First, ASP.NET applications frequently generate a URL that adds the /site2 back into the URL.  In addition to URLs, they can be in form elements, img elements and the like.  The goal is to find all of those situations and rewrite it on the way out.  Let’s call this the ‘URL problem’. Second, and similarly, ASP.NET can send a LOCATION redirect that causes a redirect back to another page.  Again, ASP.NET isn’t aware of the different URL and it will add the /site2 to the redirect.  Form Authentication is a good example on when this occurs.  Try to password protect a site running from a subfolder using forms auth and you’ll quickly find that the URL becomes www.site2.com/site2 again.  Let’s term this the ‘redirect problem’. Solving the URL Problem – Outgoing Rule #1 Let’s create a rule that removes the /site2 from any URL.  We want to remove it from relative URLs like /site2/something, or absolute URLs like http://www.site2.com/site2/something.  Most URLs that ASP.NET creates will be relative URLs, but I figure that there may be some applications that piece together a full URL, so we might as well expect that situation. Let’s get started.  First, create a new outbound rule.  You can create the rule within the /site2 folder which will reduce the performance impact of the rule.  Just a reminder that incoming rules for this situation won’t work in a subfolder … but outgoing rules will. Give it a name that makes sense to you, for example “Outgoing – URL paths”. Precondition.  If you place the rule in the subfolder, it will only run for that site and folder, so there isn’t need for a precondition.  Run it for all requests.  If you place it in the root of the site, you may want to create a precondition for HTTP_HOST = ^(www\.)?site2\.com$. For the Match section, there are a few things to consider.  For performance reasons, it’s best to match the least amount of elements that you need to accomplish the task.  For my test cases, I just needed to rewrite the <a /> tag, but you may need to rewrite any number of HTML elements.  Note that as long as you have the exclude /site2 rule in your incoming rule as I described in Part I, some elements that don’t show their URL—like your images—will work without removing the /site2 from them.  That reduces the processing needed for this rule. Leave the “matching scope” at “Response” and choose the elements that you want to change. Set the pattern to “^(?:site2|(.*//[_a-zA-Z0-9-\.]*)?/site2)(.*)”.  Make sure to replace ‘site2’ with your subfolder name in both places.  Yes, I realize this is a pretty messy looking rule, but it handles a few situations.  This rule will handle the following situations correctly: Original Rewritten using {R:1}{R:2} http://www.site2.com/site2/default.aspx http://www.site2.com/default.aspx http://www.site2.com/folder1/site2/default.aspx Won’t rewrite since it’s a sub-sub folder /site2/default.aspx /default.aspx site2/default.aspx /default.aspx /folder1/site2/default.aspx Won’t rewrite since it’s a sub-sub folder. For the conditions section, you can leave that be. Finally, for the rule, set the Action Type to “Rewrite” and set the Value to “{R:1}{R:2}”.  The {R:1} and {R:2} are back references to the sections within parentheses.  In other words, in http://domain.com/site2/something, {R:1} will be http://domain.com and {R:2} will be /something. If you view your rule from your web.config file (or applicationHost.config if it’s a global rule), it should look like this: <rule name="Outgoing - URL paths" enabled="true"> <match filterByTags="A" pattern="^(?:site2|(.*//[_a-zA-Z0-9-\.]*)?/site2)(.*)" /> <action type="Rewrite" value="{R:1}{R:2}" /> </rule> Solving the Redirect Problem Outgoing Rule #2 The second issue that we can run into is with a client-side redirect.  This is triggered by a LOCATION response header that is sent to the client.  Forms authentication is a common example.  To reproduce this, password protect your subfolder and watch how it redirects and adds the subfolder path back in. Notice in my test case the extra paths: http://site2.com/site2/login.aspx?ReturnUrl=%2fsite2%2fdefault.aspx I want to remove /site2 from both the URL and the ReturnUrl querystring value.  For semi-readability, let’s do this in 2 separate rules, one for the URL and one for the querystring. Create a second rule.  As with the previous rule, it can be created in the /site2 subfolder.  In the URL Rewrite wizard, select Outbound rules –> “Blank Rule”. Fill in the following information: Name response_location URL Precondition Don’t set Match: Matching Scope Server Variable Match: Variable Name RESPONSE_LOCATION Match: Pattern ^(?:site2|(.*//[_a-zA-Z0-9-\.]*)?/site2)(.*) Conditions Don’t set Action Type Rewrite Action Properties {R:1}{R:2} It should end up like so: <rule name="response_location URL"> <match serverVariable="RESPONSE_LOCATION" pattern="^(?:site2|(.*//[_a-zA-Z0-9-\.]*)?/site2)(.*)" /> <action type="Rewrite" value="{R:1}{R:2}" /> </rule> Outgoing Rule #3 Outgoing Rule #2 only takes care of the URL path, and not the querystring path.  Let’s create one final rule to take care of the path in the querystring to ensure that ReturnUrl=%2fsite2%2fdefault.aspx gets rewritten to ReturnUrl=%2fdefault.aspx. The %2f is the HTML encoding for forward slash (/). Create a rule like the previous one, but with the following settings: Name response_location querystring Precondition Don’t set Match: Matching Scope Server Variable Match: Variable Name RESPONSE_LOCATION Match: Pattern (.*)%2fsite2(.*) Conditions Don’t set Action Type Rewrite Action Properties {R:1}{R:2} The config should look like this: <rule name="response_location querystring"> <match serverVariable="RESPONSE_LOCATION" pattern="(.*)%2fsite2(.*)" /> <action type="Rewrite" value="{R:1}{R:2}" /> </rule> It’s possible to squeeze the last two rules into one, but it gets kind of confusing so I felt that it’s better to show it as two separate rules. Summary With the rules covered in these two parts, we’re able to have a site in a subfolder and make it appear as if it’s in the root of the site.  Not only that, we can overcome automatic redirecting that is caused by ASP.NET, other scripting technologies, and especially existing applications. Following is an example of the incoming and outgoing rules necessary for a site called www.site2.com hosted in a subfolder called /site2.  Remember that the outgoing rules can be placed in the /site2 folder instead of the in the root of the site. <rewrite> <rules> <rule name="site2.com in a subfolder" enabled="true" stopProcessing="true"> <match url=".*" /> <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll" trackAllCaptures="false"> <add input="{HTTP_HOST}" pattern="^(www\.)?site2\.com$" /> <add input="{PATH_INFO}" pattern="^/site2($|/)" negate="true" /> </conditions> <action type="Rewrite" url="/site2/{R:0}" /> </rule> </rules> <outboundRules> <rule name="Outgoing - URL paths" enabled="true"> <match filterByTags="A" pattern="^(?:site2|(.*//[_a-zA-Z0-9-\.]*)?/site2)(.*)" /> <action type="Rewrite" value="{R:1}{R:2}" /> </rule> <rule name="response_location URL"> <match serverVariable="RESPONSE_LOCATION" pattern="^(?:site2|(.*//[_a-zA-Z0-9-\.]*)?/site2)(.*)" /> <action type="Rewrite" value="{R:1}{R:2}" /> </rule> <rule name="response_location querystring"> <match serverVariable="RESPONSE_LOCATION" pattern="(.*)%2fsite2(.*)" /> <action type="Rewrite" value="{R:1}{R:2}" /> </rule> </outboundRules> </rewrite> If you run into any situations that aren’t caught by these rules, please let me know so I can update this to be as complete as possible. Happy URL Rewriting!

  Read the article

• Metro, Authentication, and the ASP.NET Web API

  - by Stephen.Walther

  Imagine that you want to create a Metro style app written with JavaScript and you want to communicate with a remote web service. For example, you are creating a movie app which retrieves a list of movies from a movies service. In this situation, how do you authenticate your Metro app and the Metro user so not just anyone can call the movies service? How can you identify the user making the request so you can return user specific data from the service? The Windows Live SDK supports a feature named Single Sign-On. When a user logs into a Windows 8 machine using their Live ID, you can authenticate the user’s identity automatically. Even better, when the Metro app performs a call to a remote web service, you can pass an authentication token to the remote service and prevent unauthorized access to the service. The documentation for Single Sign-On is located here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/live/hh826544.aspx In this blog entry, I describe the steps that you need to follow to use Single Sign-On with a (very) simple movie app. We build a Metro app which communicates with a web service created using the ASP.NET Web API. Creating the Visual Studio Solution Let’s start by creating a Visual Studio solution which contains two projects: a Windows Metro style Blank App project and an ASP.NET MVC 4 Web Application project. Name the Metro app MovieApp and the ASP.NET MVC application MovieApp.Services. When you create the ASP.NET MVC application, select the Web API template: After you create the two projects, your Visual Studio Solution Explorer window should look like this: Configuring the Live SDK You need to get your hands on the Live SDK and register your Metro app. You can download the latest version of the SDK (version 5.2) from the following address: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=29938 After you download the Live SDK, you need to visit the following website to register your Metro app: https://manage.dev.live.com/build Don’t let the title of the website — Windows Push Notifications & Live Connect – confuse you, this is the right place. Follow the instructions at the website to register your Metro app. Don’t forget to follow the instructions in Step 3 for updating the information in your Metro app’s manifest. After you register, your client secret is displayed. Record this client secret because you will need it later (we use it with the web service): You need to configure one more thing. You must enter your Redirect Domain by visiting the following website: https://manage.dev.live.com/Applications/Index Click on your application name, click Edit Settings, click the API Settings tab, and enter a value for the Redirect Domain field. You can enter any domain that you please just as long as the domain has not already been taken: For the Redirect Domain, I entered http://superexpertmovieapp.com. Create the Metro MovieApp Next, we need to create the MovieApp. The MovieApp will: 1. Use Single Sign-On to log the current user into Live 2. Call the MoviesService web service 3. Display the results in a ListView control Because we use the Live SDK in the MovieApp, we need to add a reference to it. Right-click your References folder in the Solution Explorer window and add the reference: Here’s the HTML page for the Metro App: <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <meta charset="utf-8" /> <title>MovieApp</title> <!-- WinJS references --> <link href="//Microsoft.WinJS.1.0.RC/css/ui-dark.css" rel="stylesheet" /> <script src="//Microsoft.WinJS.1.0.RC/js/base.js"></script> <script src="//Microsoft.WinJS.1.0.RC/js/ui.js"></script> <!-- Live SDK --> <script type="text/javascript" src="/LiveSDKHTML/js/wl.js"></script> <!-- WebServices references --> <link href="/css/default.css" rel="stylesheet" /> <script src="/js/default.js"></script> </head> <body> <div id="tmplMovie" data-win-control="WinJS.Binding.Template"> <div class="movieItem"> <span data-win-bind="innerText:title"></span> <br /><span data-win-bind="innerText:director"></span> </div> </div> <div id="lvMovies" data-win-control="WinJS.UI.ListView" data-win-options="{ itemTemplate: select('#tmplMovie') }"> </div> </body> </html> The HTML page above contains a Template and ListView control. These controls are used to display the movies when the movies are returned from the movies service. Notice that the page includes a reference to the Live script that we registered earlier: <!-- Live SDK --> <script type="text/javascript" src="/LiveSDKHTML/js/wl.js"></script> The JavaScript code looks like this: (function () { "use strict"; var REDIRECT_DOMAIN = "http://superexpertmovieapp.com"; var WEBSERVICE_URL = "http://localhost:49743/api/movies"; function init() { WinJS.UI.processAll().done(function () { // Get element and control references var lvMovies = document.getElementById("lvMovies").winControl; // Login to Windows Live var scopes = ["wl.signin"]; WL.init({ scope: scopes, redirect_uri: REDIRECT_DOMAIN }); WL.login().then( function(response) { // Get the authentication token var authenticationToken = response.session.authentication_token; // Call the web service var options = { url: WEBSERVICE_URL, headers: { authenticationToken: authenticationToken } }; WinJS.xhr(options).done( function (xhr) { var movies = JSON.parse(xhr.response); var listMovies = new WinJS.Binding.List(movies); lvMovies.itemDataSource = listMovies.dataSource; }, function (xhr) { console.log(xhr.statusText); } ); }, function(response) { throw WinJS.ErrorFromName("Failed to login!"); } ); }); } document.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", init); })(); There are two constants which you need to set to get the code above to work: REDIRECT_DOMAIN and WEBSERVICE_URL. The REDIRECT_DOMAIN is the domain that you entered when registering your app with Live. The WEBSERVICE_URL is the path to your web service. You can get the correct value for WEBSERVICE_URL by opening the Project Properties for the MovieApp.Services project, clicking the Web tab, and getting the correct URL. The port number is randomly generated. In my code, I used the URL  “http://localhost:49743/api/movies”. Assuming that the user is logged into Windows 8 with a Live account, when the user runs the MovieApp, the user is logged into Live automatically. The user is logged in with the following code: // Login to Windows Live var scopes = ["wl.signin"]; WL.init({ scope: scopes, redirect_uri: REDIRECT_DOMAIN }); WL.login().then(function(response) { // Do something }); The scopes setting determines what the user has permission to do. For example, access the user’s SkyDrive or access the user’s calendar or contacts. The available scopes are listed here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/live/hh243646.aspx In our case, we only need the wl.signin scope which enables Single Sign-On. After the user signs in, you can retrieve the user’s Live authentication token. The authentication token is passed to the movies service to authenticate the user. Creating the Movies Service The Movies Service is implemented as an API controller in an ASP.NET MVC 4 Web API project. Here’s what the MoviesController looks like: using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Net; using System.Net.Http; using System.Web.Http; using JWTSample; using MovieApp.Services.Models; namespace MovieApp.Services.Controllers { public class MoviesController : ApiController { const string CLIENT_SECRET = "NtxjF2wu7JeY1unvVN-lb0hoeWOMUFoR"; // GET api/values public HttpResponseMessage Get() { // Authenticate // Get authenticationToken var authenticationToken = Request.Headers.GetValues("authenticationToken").FirstOrDefault(); if (authenticationToken == null) { return new HttpResponseMessage(HttpStatusCode.Unauthorized); } // Validate token var d = new Dictionary<int, string>(); d.Add(0, CLIENT_SECRET); try { var myJWT = new JsonWebToken(authenticationToken, d); } catch { return new HttpResponseMessage(HttpStatusCode.Unauthorized); } // Return results return Request.CreateResponse( HttpStatusCode.OK, new List<Movie> { new Movie {Title="Star Wars", Director="Lucas"}, new Movie {Title="King Kong", Director="Jackson"}, new Movie {Title="Memento", Director="Nolan"} } ); } } } Because the Metro app performs an HTTP GET request, the MovieController Get() action is invoked. This action returns a set of three movies when, and only when, the authentication token is validated. The Movie class looks like this: using Newtonsoft.Json; namespace MovieApp.Services.Models { public class Movie { [JsonProperty(PropertyName="title")] public string Title { get; set; } [JsonProperty(PropertyName="director")] public string Director { get; set; } } } Notice that the Movie class uses the JsonProperty attribute to change Title to title and Director to director to make JavaScript developers happy. The Get() method validates the authentication token before returning the movies to the Metro app. To get authentication to work, you need to provide the client secret which you created at the Live management site. If you forgot to write down the secret, you can get it again here: https://manage.dev.live.com/Applications/Index The client secret is assigned to a constant at the top of the MoviesController class. The MoviesController class uses a helper class named JsonWebToken to validate the authentication token. This class was created by the Windows Live team. You can get the source code for the JsonWebToken class from the following GitHub repository: https://github.com/liveservices/LiveSDK/blob/master/Samples/Asp.net/AuthenticationTokenSample/JsonWebToken.cs You need to add an additional reference to your MVC project to use the JsonWebToken class: System.Runtime.Serialization. You can use the JsonWebToken class to get a unique and validated user ID like this: var user = myJWT.Claims.UserId; If you need to store user specific information then you can use the UserId property to uniquely identify the user making the web service call. Running the MovieApp When you first run the Metro MovieApp, you get a screen which asks whether the app should have permission to use Single Sign-On. This screen never appears again after you give permission once. Actually, when I first ran the app, I get the following error: According to the error, the app is blocked because “We detected some suspicious activity with your Online Id account. To help protect you, we’ve temporarily blocked your account.” This appears to be a bug in the current preview release of the Live SDK and there is more information about this bug here: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/messengerconnect/thread/866c495f-2127-429d-ab07-842ef84f16ae/ If you click continue, and continue running the app, the error message does not appear again.  Summary The goal of this blog entry was to describe how you can validate Metro apps and Metro users when performing a call to a remote web service. First, I explained how you can create a Metro app which takes advantage of Single Sign-On to authenticate the current user against Live automatically. You learned how to register your Metro app with Live and how to include an authentication token in an Ajax call. Next, I explained how you can validate the authentication token – retrieved from the request header – in a web service. I discussed how you can use the JsonWebToken class to validate the authentication token and retrieve the unique user ID.

  Read the article

• The Product Owner

  - by Robert May

  In a previous post, I outlined the rules of Scrum.  This post details one of those rules. Picking a most important part of Scrum is difficult.  All of the rules are required, but if there were one rule that is “more” required that every other rule, its having a good Product Owner.  Simply put, the Product Owner can make or break the project. Duties of the Product Owner A Product Owner has many duties and responsibilities.  I’ll talk about each of these duties in detail below. A Product Owner: Discovers and records stories for the backlog. Prioritizes stories in the Product Backlog, Release Backlog and Iteration Backlog. Determines Release dates and Iteration Dates. Develops story details and helps the team understand those details. Helps QA to develop acceptance tests. Interact with the Customer to make sure that the product is meeting the customer’s needs. Discovers and Records Stories for the Backlog When I do Scrum, I always use User Stories as the means for capturing functionality that’s required in the system.  Some people will use Use Cases, but the same rule applies.  The Product Owner has the ultimate responsibility for figuring out what functionality will be in the system.  Many different mechanisms for capturing this input can be used.  User interviews are great, but all sources should be considered, including talking with Customer Support types.  Often, they hear what users are struggling with the most and are a great source for stories that can make the application easier to use. Care should be taken when soliciting user stories from technical types such as programmers and the people that manage them.  They will almost always give stories that are very technical in nature and may not have a direct benefit for the end user.  Stories are about adding value to the company.  If the stories don’t have direct benefit to the end user, the Product Owner should question whether or not the story should be implemented.  In general, technical stories should be included as tasks in User Stories.  Technical stories are often needed, but the ultimate value to the user is in user based functionality, so technical stories should be considered nothing more than overhead in providing that user functionality. Until the iteration prior to development, stories should be nothing more than short, one line placeholders. An exercise called Story Planning can be used to brainstorm and come up with stories.  I’ll save the description of this activity for another blog post. For more information on User Stories, please read the book User Stories Applied by Mike Cohn. Prioritizes Stories in the Product Backlog, Release Backlog and Iteration Backlog Prioritization of stories is one of the most difficult tasks that a Product Owner must do.  A key concept of Scrum done right is the need to have the team working from a single set of prioritized stories.  If the team does not have a single set of prioritized stories, Scrum will likely fail at your organization.  The Product Owner is the ONLY person who has the responsibility to prioritize that list.  The Product Owner must be very diplomatic and sincerely listen to the people around him so that he can get the priorities correct. Just listening will still not yield the proper priorities.  Care must also be taken to ensure that Return on Investment is also considered.  Ultimately, determining which stories give the most value to the company for the least cost is the most important factor in determining priorities.  Product Owners should be willing to look at cold, hard numbers to determine the order for stories.  Even when many people want a feature, if that features is costly to develop, it may not have as high of a return on investment as features that are cheaper, but not as popular. The act of prioritization often causes conflict in an environment.  Customer Service thinks that feature X is the most important, because it will stop people from calling.  Operations thinks that feature Y is the most important, because it will stop servers from crashing.  Developers think that feature Z is most important because it will make writing software much easier for them.  All of these are useful goals, but the team can have only one list of items, and each item must have a priority that is different from all other stories.  The Product Owner will determine which feature gives the best return on investment and the other features will have to wait their turn, which means that someone will not have their top priority feature implemented first. A weak Product Owner will refuse to do prioritization.  I’ve heard from multiple Product Owners the following phrase, “Well, it’s all got to be done, so what does it matter what order we do it in?”  If your product owner is using this phrase, you need a new Product Owner.  Order is VERY important.  In Scrum, every release is potentially shippable.  If the wrong priority items are developed, then the value added in each release isn’t what it should be.  Additionally, the Product Owner with this mindset doesn’t understand Agile.  A product is NEVER finished, until the company has decided that it is no longer a going concern and they are no longer going to sell the product.  Therefore, prioritization isn’t an event, its something that continues every day.  The logical extension of the phrase “It’s all got to be done” is that you will never ship your product, since a product is never “done.”  Once stories have been prioritized, assigning them to the Release Backlog and the Iteration Backlog becomes relatively simple.  The top priority items are copied into the respective backlogs in order and the task is complete.  The team does have the right to shuffle things around a little in the iteration backlog.  For example, they may determine that working on story C with story A is appropriate because they’re related, even though story B is technically a higher priority than story C.  Or they may decide that story B is too big to complete in the time available after Story A has tasks created, so they’ll work on Story C since it’s smaller.  They can’t, however, go deep into the backlog to pick stories to implement.  The team and the Product Owner should work together to determine what’s best for the company. Prioritization is time consuming, but its one of the most important things a Product Owner does. Determines Release Dates and Iteration Dates Product owners are responsible for determining release dates for a product.  A common misconception that Product Owners have is that every “release” needs to correspond with an actual release to customers.  This is not the case.  In general, releases should be no more than 3 months long.  You  may decide to release the product to the customers, and many companies do release the product to customers, but it may also be an internal release. If a release date is too far away, developers will fall into the trap of not feeling a sense of urgency.  The date is far enough away that they don’t need to give the release their full attention.  Additionally, important tasks, such as performance tuning, regression testing, user documentation, and release preparation, will not happen regularly, making them much more difficult and time consuming to do.  The more frequently you do these tasks, the easier they are to accomplish. The Product Owner will be a key participant in determining whether or not a release should be sent out to the customers.  The determination should be made on whether or not the features contained in the release are valuable enough  and complete enough that the customers will see real value in the release.  Often, some features will take more than three months to get them to a state where they qualify for a release or need additional supporting features to be released.  The product owner has the right to make this determination. In addition to release dates, the Product Owner also will help determine iteration dates.  In general, an iteration length should be chosen and the team should follow that iteration length for an extended period of time.  If the iteration length is changed every iteration, you’re not doing Scrum.  Iteration lengths help the team and company get into a rhythm of developing quality software.  Iterations should be somewhere between 2 and 4 weeks in length.  Any shorter, and significant software will likely not be developed.  Any longer, and the team won’t feel urgency and planning will become very difficult. Iterations may not be extended during the iteration.  Companies where Scrum isn’t really followed will often use this as a strategy to complete all stories.  They don’t want to face the harsh reality of what their true performance is, and looking good is more important than seeking visibility and improving the process and team.  Companies like this typically don’t allow failure.  This is unhealthy.  Failure is part of life and unless we learn from it, we can’t improve.  I would much rather see a team push out stories to the next iteration and then have healthy discussions about why they failed rather than extend the iteration and not deal with the core problems. If iteration length varies, retrospectives become more difficult.  For example, evaluating the performance of the team’s estimation efforts becomes much more difficult if the iteration length varies.  Also, the team must have a velocity measurement.  If the iteration length varies, measuring velocity becomes impossible and upper management no longer will have the ability to evaluate the teams performance.  People external to the team will no longer have the ability to determine when key features are likely to be developed.  Variable iterations cause the entire company to fail and likely cause Scrum to fail at an organization. Develops Story Details and Helps the Team Understand Those Details A key concept in Scrum is that the stories are nothing more than a placeholder for a conversation.  Stories should be nothing more than short, one line statements about the functionality.  The team will then converse with the Product Owner about the details about that story.  The product owner needs to have a very good idea about what the details of the story are and needs to be able to help the team understand those details. Too often, we see this requirement as being translated into the need for comprehensive documentation about the story, including old fashioned requirements documentation.  The team should only develop the documentation that is required and should not develop documentation that is only created because their is a process to do so. In general, what we see that works best is the iteration before a team starts development work on a story, the Product Owner, with other appropriate business analysts, will develop the details of that story.  They’ll figure out what business rules are required, potentially make paper prototypes or other light weight mock-ups, and they seek to understand the story and what is implied.  Note that the time allowed for this task is deliberately short.  The Product Owner only has a single iteration to develop all of the stories for the next iteration. If more than one iteration is used, I’ve found that teams will end up with Big Design Up Front and traditional requirements documents.  This is a waste of time, since the team will need to then have discussions with the Product Owner to figure out what the requirements document says.  Instead of this, skip making the pretty pictures and detailing the nuances of the requirements and build only what is minimally needed by the team to do development.  If something comes up during development, you can address it at that time and figure out what you want to do.  The goal is to keep things as light weight as possible so that everyone can move as quickly as possible. Helps QA to Develop Acceptance Tests In Scrum, no story can be counted until it is accepted by QA.  Because of this, acceptance tests are very important to the team.  In general, acceptance tests need to be developed prior to the iteration or at the very beginning of the iteration so that the team can make sure that the tasks that they develop will fulfill the acceptance criteria. The Product Owner will help the team, including QA, understand what will make the story acceptable.  Note that the Product Owner needs to be careful about specifying that the feature will work “Perfectly” at the end of the iteration.  In general, features are developed a little bit at a time, so only the bit that is being developed should be considered as necessary for acceptance. A weak Product Owner will make statements like “Do it right the first time.”  Not only are these statements damaging to the team (like they would try to do it WRONG the first time . . .), they’re also ignoring the iterative nature of Scrum.  Additionally, a weak product owner will seek to add scope in the acceptance testing.  For example, they will refuse to determine acceptance at the beginning of the iteration, and then, after the team has planned and committed to the iteration, they will expand scope by defining acceptance.  This often causes the team to miss the iteration because scope that wasn’t planned on is included.  There are ways that the team can mitigate this problem.  For example, include extra “Product Owner” time to deal with the uncertainty that you know will be introduced by the Product Owner.  This will slow the perceived velocity of the team and is not ideal, since they’ll be doing more work than they get credit for. Interact with the Customer to Make Sure that the Product is Meeting the Customer’s Needs Once development is complete, what the team has worked on should be put in front of real live people to see if it meets the needs of the customer.  One of the great things about Agile is that if something doesn’t work, we can revisit it in a future iteration!  This frees up the team to make the best decision now and know that if that decision proves to be incorrect, the team can revisit it and change that decision. Features are about adding value to the customer, so if the customer doesn’t find them useful, then having the team make tweaks is valuable.  In general, most software will be 80 to 90 percent “right” after the initial round and only minor tweaks are required.  If proper coding standards are followed, these tweaks are usually minor and easy to accomplish.  Product Owners that are doing a good job will encourage real users to see and use the software, since they know that they are trying to add value to the customer. Poor product owners will think that they know the answers already, that their customers are silly and do stupid things and that they don’t need customer input.  If you have a product owner that is afraid to show the team’s work to real customers, you probably need a different product owner. Up Next, “Who Makes a Good Product Owner.” Followed by, “Messing with the Team.” Technorati Tags: Scrum,Product Owner

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197  | Next Page >