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  • What's the best way to write a maintainable web scraping app?

    - by Benj
    I wrote a perl script a while ago which logged into my online banking and emailed me my balance and a mini-statement every day. I found it very useful for keeping track of my finances. The only problem is that I wrote it just using perl and curl and it was quite complicated and hard to maintain. After a few instances of my bank changing their webpage I got fed up of debugging it to keep it up to date. So what's the best way of writing such a program in such a way that it's easy to maintain? I'd like to write a nice well engineered version in either Perl or Java which will be easy to update when the bank inevitably fiddle with their web site.

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  • How do we name test methods where we are checking for more than one condition?

    - by Sandbox
    I follow the technique specified in Roy Osherove's The Art Of Unit Testing book while naming test methods - MethodName_Scenario_Expectation. It suits perfectly well for my 'unit' tests. But,for tests that I write in 'controller' or 'coordinator' class, there isn't necessarily a method which I want to test. For these tests, I generate multiple conditions which make up one scenario and then I verify the expectation. For example, I may set some properties on different instances, generate an event and then verify that my expectation from controller/coordinator is being met. Now, my controller handles events using a private event handler. Here my scenario is that, I set some properties, say 3 condition1,condition2 and condition3 Also, my scenario includes an event is raised I don't have a method name as my event handler is private. How do I name such a test method?

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  • Should Factories Persist Entities?

    - by mxmissile
    Should factories persist entities they build? Or is that the job of the caller? Pseudo Example Incoming: public class OrderFactory { public Order Build() { var order = new Order(); .... return order; } } public class OrderController : Controller { public OrderController(IRepository repository) { this.repository = repository; } public ActionResult MyAction() { var order = factory.Build(); repository.Insert(order); ... } } or public class OrderFactory { public OrderFactory(IRepository repository) { this.repository = repository; } public Order Build() { var order = new Order(); ... repository.Insert(order); return order; } } public class OrderController : Controller { public ActionResult MyAction() { var order = factory.Build(); ... } } Is there a recommended practice here?

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  • How to cope with developing against a poor 3rd party API/application?

    - by wsanville
    I'm a web developer, and my organization has recently started to use a proprietary ASP.NET CMS for our web sites. I was excited to get started using the CMS, thinking it would bring a lot of value to our end users and be fun to work with, since my skills are a good match for the types of projects we're using it for. That was about a year ago. Since then, we've ran into all kinds of issues, from blatant bugs in the product, to nasty edge cases in the APIs, to extremely poor documentation for developers. On about a weekly basis, we are forced to pursue workarounds and rewrite some of the out of the box functionality, and even find some of the basic features unusable. In many cases, since this is a closed source application (and obfuscated of course), there's nothing we can do as developers to solve these issues. So my question is, how does one attempt to develop a good application in such a scenario? The application mostly works when using the the exact out of the box behavior, or using one of the company's starter sites. However, my attempts to use the underlying APIs to implement slightly different, yet reasonable behavior has proved to be extremely time consuming (not to mention just as buggy), given the lack of good information about the APIs. I've given this a lot of thought, and my conflicting viewpoints are the following: Strongly advise against any customization to the CMS, as development time will rise exponentially, or even have an extremely high chance of failing. While this is accurate, I do not want to give the impression that I am not willing to code my own solutions to problems and take the initiative to implement something difficult or complex. I don't want to be perceived as someone who is not motivated, lazy, or not knowledgeable to do anything complex, because this is simply not the case. I love coding my own solutions, trying new/difficult things, I just dislike the vendor app we're using. Continue on the path I'm on now, which is hacking my way past all issues I encounter and try my best to deliver an application that meets the needs and specs exactly. My goals are to make it as seamless and easy to use as possible to the end user, even when integrating the CMS with our other applications internally. The problem I'm finding with this approach is it is very time consuming. I open support cases with the vendor on a regular basis to solve issues and to gain knowledge of their APIs, but this is extremely time consuming, and in some cases it leads to dead ends. I post on the vendors forums on a regular basis but have become frustrated as most of my posts get 0 replies. So, what would you, a reasonable developer, do in this case? How can I make the best of the situation? And just for fun, here are some of the code smells and anti-patterns I've dealt with using the product (aside from their own code blatantly failing): Use of StringBuilder to concatenate a giant string that is hard coded and does not change. They use it to concatenate their Javascript and write it out into the body tags of their pages. Methods that accept object or Microsoft.VisualBasic.Collection as the parameters. In the case of the VB Collection, the data is not a list of any kind, it's used instead of making a class. Methods that return a Hashtable of VB Collections Method names of the form MethodName_v45, MethodName_v20, etc... Multiple classes with the same name in different namespaces with different functionality/behavior. Intellisense that reads "Note: this parameter is non functional" Complete lack of coding standards, API is filled with magic numbers and magic strings. Properties with a getter of type object that accepts totally different things, like enum or strings, and throw exceptions at runtime when you pass in something not supported. And much, much, more...

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  • Win7: Right place to install a program that may be 'shared' with other computers

    - by robsoft
    We have an app that currently installs itself into 'program files\our app', and it puts the internal data files into the common Application Data folder. This means the program is available to any user on that particular PC. Now we want to make a multi-user version of this program, multiple PCs accessing the program at the same time across the network. In the bad old days, under XP, we'd just have the user who installed the app 'share' the app directory and off we'd go. In principle, is this still the 'right' way to do it under Vista/Windows 7? We'd like to do this 'properly' and be as compliant as possible! Is there a recommended 'Microsoft' approach for doing this, or is it largely down to whatever we can get away with and subsequently support (hah!). I've tried researching this on the MS websites but not found anything too helpful at all - it'd be really useful to have a 'if you're trying to install this kind of thing, put it here' type guide for developers!

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  • must have tools for better quality code

    - by leon
    I just started my real development career and I want to know what set of tools/strategy that the community is using to write better quality code. To start, I use astyle to format my code doxygen to document my code gcc -Wall -Wextra -pedantic and clang -Wall -Wextra -pedantic to check all warnings What tools/strategy do you use to write better code? This question is open to all language and all platform.

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  • CSS selectors : should I minimise my use of the class attribute in the HTML or optimise the speed

    - by Laurent Bourgault-Roy
    As I was working on a small website, I decided to use the PageSpeed extension to check if their was some improvement I could do to make the site load faster. However I was quite surprise when it told me that my use of CSS selector was "inefficient". I was always told that you should keep the usage of the class attribute in the HTML to a minimum, but if I understand correctly what PageSpeed tell me, it's much more efficient for the browser to match directly against a class name. It make sense to me, but it also mean that I need to put more CSS classes in my HTML. It also make my .css file a little harder to read. I usually tend to mark my CSS like this : #mainContent p.productDescription em.priceTag { ... } Which make it easy to read : I know this will affect the main content and that it affect something in a paragraph tag (so I wont start to put all sort of layout code in it) that describe a product and its something that need emphasis. However it seem I should rewrite it as .priceTag { ... } Which remove all context information about the style. And if I want to use differently formatted price tag (for example, one in a list on the sidebar and one in a paragraph), I need to use something like that .paragraphPriceTag { ... } .listPriceTag { ... } Which really annoy me since I seem to duplicate the semantic of the HTML in my classes. And that mean I can't put common style in an unqualified .priceTag { ... } and thus I need to replicate the style in both CSS rule, making it harder to make change. (Altough for that I could use multiple class selector, but IE6 dont support them) I believe making code harder to read for the sake of speed has never been really considered a very good practice . Except where it is critical, of course. This is why people use PHP/Ruby/C# etc. instead of C/assembly to code their site. It's easier to write and debug. So I was wondering if I should stick with few CSS classes and complex selector or if I should go the optimisation route and remove my fancy CSS selectors for the sake of speed? Does PageSpeed make over the top recommandation? On most modern computer, will it even make a difference?

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  • Why is using a common-lookup table to restrict the status of entity wrong?

    - by FreshCode
    According to Five Simple Database Design Errors You Should Avoid by Anith Sen, using a common-lookup table to store the possible statuses for an entity is a common mistake. Why is this wrong? I disagree that it's wrong, citing the example of jobs at a repair service with many possible statuses that generally have a natural flow, eg.: Booked In Assigned to Technician Diagnosing problem Waiting for Client Confirmation Repaired & Ready for Pickup Repaired & Couriered Irreparable & Ready for Pickup Quote Rejected Arguably, some of these statuses can be normalised to tables like Couriered Items, Completed Jobs and Quotes (with Pending/Accepted/Rejected statuses), but that feels like unnecessary schema complication. Another common example would be order statuses that restrict the status of an order, eg: Pending Completed Shipped Cancelled Refunded The status titles and descriptions are in one place for editing and are easy to scaffold as a drop-down with a foreign key for dynamic data applications. This has worked well for me in the past. If the business rules dictate the creation of a new order status, I can just add it to OrderStatus table, without rebuilding my code.

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  • C# Async call garbage collection

    - by Troy
    Hello. I am working on a Silverlight/WCF application and of course have numerous async calls throughout the Silverlight program. I was wondering on how is the best way to handle the creation of the client classes and subscribing. Specifically, if I subscribe to an event in a method, after it returns does it fall out of scope? internal MyClass { public void OnMyButtonClicked() { var wcfClient = new WcfClient(); wcfClient.SomeMethodFinished += OnMethodCompleted; wcfClient.SomeMethodAsync(); } private void OnMethodCompleted(object sender, EventArgs args) { //Do something with the result //After this method does the subscription to the event //fall out of scope for garbage collection? } } Will I run into problems if I call the function again and create another subscription? Thanks in advance to anyone who responds.

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  • Truth tables in code? How to structure state machine?

    - by HanClinto
    I have a (somewhat) large truth table / state machine that I need to implement in my code (embedded C). I anticipate the behavior specification of this state machine to change in the future, and so I'd like to keep this easily modifiable in the future. My truth table has 4 inputs and 4 outputs. I have it all in an Excel spreadsheet, and if I could just paste that into my code with a little formatting, that would be ideal. I was thinking I would like to access my truth table like so: u8 newState[] = decisionTable[input1][input2][input3][input4]; And then I could access the output values with: setOutputPin( LINE_0, newState[0] ); setOutputPin( LINE_1, newState[1] ); setOutputPin( LINE_2, newState[2] ); setOutputPin( LINE_3, newState[3] ); But in order to get that, it looks like I would have to do a fairly confusing table like so: static u8 decisionTable[][][][][] = {{{{ 0, 0, 0, 0 }, { 0, 0, 0, 0 }}, {{ 0, 0, 0, 0 }, { 0, 0, 0, 0 }}}, {{{ 0, 0, 1, 1 }, { 0, 1, 1, 1 }}, {{ 0, 1, 0, 1 }, { 1, 1, 1, 1 }}}}, {{{{ 0, 1, 0, 1 }, { 1, 1, 1, 1 }}, {{ 0, 1, 0, 1 }, { 1, 1, 1, 1 }}}, {{{ 0, 1, 1, 1 }, { 0, 1, 1, 1 }}, {{ 0, 1, 0, 1 }, { 1, 1, 1, 1 }}}}; Those nested brackets can be somewhat confusing -- does anyone have a better idea for how I can keep a pretty looking table in my code? Thanks! Edit based on HUAGHAGUAH's answer: Using an amalgamation of everyone's input (thanks -- I wish I could "accept" 3 or 4 of these answers), I think I'm going to try it as a two dimensional array. I'll index into my array using a small bit-shifting macro: #define SM_INPUTS( in0, in1, in2, in3 ) ((in0 << 0) | (in1 << 1) | (in2 << 2) | (in3 << 3)) And that will let my truth table array look like this: static u8 decisionTable[][] = { { 0, 0, 0, 0 }, { 0, 0, 0, 0 }, { 0, 0, 0, 0 }, { 0, 0, 0, 0 }, { 0, 0, 1, 1 }, { 0, 1, 1, 1 }, { 0, 1, 0, 1 }, { 1, 1, 1, 1 }, { 0, 1, 0, 1 }, { 1, 1, 1, 1 }, { 0, 1, 0, 1 }, { 1, 1, 1, 1 }, { 0, 1, 1, 1 }, { 0, 1, 1, 1 }, { 0, 1, 0, 1 }, { 1, 1, 1, 1 }}; And I can then access my truth table like so: decisionTable[ SM_INPUTS( line1, line2, line3, line4 ) ] I'll give that a shot and see how it works out. I'll also be replacing the 0's and 1's with more helpful #defines that express what each state means, along with /**/ comments that explain the inputs for each line of outputs. Thanks for the help, everyone!

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  • When are global variables acceptable?

    - by dsimcha
    Everyone here seems to hate global variables, but I see at least one very reasonable use for them: They are great for holding program parameters that are determined at program initialization and not modified afterwords. Do you agree that this is an exception to the "globals are evil" rule? Is there any other exception that you can think of, besides in quick and dirty throwaway code where basically anything goes? If not, why are globals so fundamentally evil that you do not believe that there are any exceptons?

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  • Most common software development mistakes

    - by hgulyan
    Inspired by Dealing with personal failure, I remembered my own failed software development experience. Finally I agreed to rewrite existing application. It took me less than a week to rewrite existing app and more up to 2 months to write from zero my own. That 2 months were really hard and interesting. It was my first big software development process. I researched almost everything concerning to my application. Read Code Complete. Even some articles on how to create user interface. Some psychology stuff. Typography, Colors. DAL, DB Structure, SOA, Patterns, UML, Load testing etc. I hope, that after a month or 2 I would get opportunity to continue working on my failed project, but before that, I would like to ask: What are common mistakes in software development? What you shouldn't do in any case?

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  • Where do you extend classes in your rails application?

    - by ro
    Just about to extend the Array class with the following extension: class Array def shuffle! size.downto(1) { |n| push delete_at(rand(n)) } self end end However, I was wondering where a good place to keep these sort of extensions. I was thinking environment.rb or putting in its own file in the initializers directory.

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  • SQL Server error handling: exceptions and the database-client contract

    - by gbn
    We’re a team of SQL Servers database developers. Our clients are a mixed bag of C#/ASP.NET, C# and Java web services, Java/Unix services and some Excel. Our client developers only use stored procedures that we provide and we expect that (where sensible, of course) they treat them like web service methods. Some our client developers don’t like SQL exceptions. They understand them in their languages but they don’t appreciate that the SQL is limited in how we can communicate issues. I don’t just mean SQL errors, such as trying to insert “bob” into a int column. I also mean exceptions such as telling them that a reference value is wrong, or that data has already changed, or they can’t do this because his aggregate is not zero. They’d don’t really have any concrete alternatives: they’ve mentioned that we should output parameters, but we assume an exception means “processing stopped/rolled back. How do folks here handle the database-client contract? Either generally or where there is separation between the DB and client code monkeys. Edits: we use SQL Server 2005 TRY/CATCH exclusively we log all errors after the rollback to an exception table already we're concerned that some of our clients won't check output paramaters and assume everything is OK. We need errors flagged up for support to look at. everything is an exception... the clients are expected to do some message parsing to separate information vs errors. To separate our exceptions from DB engine and calling errors, they should use the error number (ours are all 50,000 of course)

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  • What lessons can you learn from software maintanence?

    - by Vasil Remeniuk
    Hello everyone, In the perfect world, all the software developers would work with the cutting edge technologies, creating systems from the scratch. In the real life, almost all of us have to maintain software from time to time (unlucky ones do it on a regular basis). Personally I first 2 years of my career was fixing bugs in the company that no longer exists (it has been taken up by Oracle). And probably the biggest lesson I've learned that time - despite of the pressure, always try to get as much information about the domain as possible (even if it's irrelevant to fixing a specific bug or adding a feature) - abstract domain knowledge doesn't lose value as fast as knowledge about trendy frameworks or methodologies. What lessons have you learned from maintenance?

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  • anti-if campaign

    - by Andrew Siemer
    I recently ran against a very interesting site that expresses a very interesting idea - the anti-if campaign. You can see this here at www.antiifcampaign.com. I have to agree that complex nested IF statements are an absolute pain in the rear. I am currently on a project that up until very recently had some crazy nested IFs that scrolled to the right for quite a ways. We cured our issues in two ways - we used Windows Workflow Foundation to address routing (or workflow) concerns. And we are in the process of implementing all of our business rules utilizing ILOG Rules for .NET (recently purchased by IBM!!). This for the most part has cured our nested IF pains...but I find myself wondering how many people cure their pains in the manner that the good folks at the AntiIfCampaign suggest (see an example here) by creating numerous amounts of abstract classes to represent a given scenario that was originally covered by the nested IF. I wonder if another way to address the removal of this complexity might also be in using an IoC container such as StructureMap to move in and out of different bits of functionality. Either way... Question: Given a scenario where I have a nested complex IF or SWITCH statement that is used to evaluate a given type of thing (say evaluating an Enum) to determine how I want to handle the processing of that thing by enum type - what are some ways to do the same form of processing without using the IF or SWITCH hierarchical structure? public enum WidgetTypes { Type1, Type2, Type3, Type4 } ... WidgetTypes _myType = WidgetTypes.Type1; ... switch(_myType) { case WidgetTypes.Type1: //do something break; case WidgetTypes.Type2: //do something break; //etc... }

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  • K/APL style programming in C++?

    - by anon
    I'm writing code in C++, but I really like K/APL's array-oriented style. Does anyone know of a good set of operator overloading tricks / macros / ... to allow some K/APL -style programming in C++? Thanks!

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  • Send through Email, or store in database?

    - by user156814
    I have wondered when it is best to send an email, and when its best to store data in a database/log file. Everytime a user wants to contact me or inform me of soething, I suppose an email is best.. but is an email always preferred over other ways, and in what cases. Possible reasons for being contacted I can think of are questions, suggestions, feedback, reporting abuse, advertising, etc... I assume email, "why add unnecessary things to the DB?", but I figure data in DB would be a lot easier to manage. Whats the better/best way to be informed of things like this.. What is the best way for you (webmaster) to be informed of something by users? through email, or some other way

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  • Reading ResultSet from multiple threads

    - by superdario
    Hello, In the database, I have a definition table that is read from the application once upon starting. This definition table rarely changes, so it makes sense to read it once and restart the application every time it changes. However, after the table is read (put into a ResultSet), it will be read by multiple handlers running in their own threads. How do you suggest to accomplish this? My idea was to populate a CachedRowSet, and then create a copy of this set (through the createCopy() method) for each handler every time a new request comes. Do you think this is wise? Does this offer a good performance? Thanks.

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  • Is it good practice to put private API in the .m files and public API in .h files in Cocoa?

    - by Paperflyer
    Many of my classes in my current project have several properties and methods that are only ever called from within the class itself. Also, they might mess with the working of the class depending on the current state of the class. Currently, all these interfaces are defined in the main interface declaration in the .h files. Is it considered good practice to put the “private” methods and properties at the top of the .m files? This won't ever affect anything since I am very likely the only person ever to look at this source code, but of course it would be interesting to know for future projects.

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  • standard debugging way for javascript/jquery

    - by ZX12R
    This is my usual way to debug javascript. Include alert(0); to break the flow and find out what is happening. sometimes when i need multiple check points i do alert('the flow is now in function 1'); alert('the flow is now in function 2'); or sometimes just alert('success'); i would like to know if there is any standard way for debugging adopted as i am finding my current method very intrusive. thanks in advance..:)

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  • How to make a jQuery plugin (the right way)?

    - by macek
    I know there are jQuery cookie plugins out there, but I wanted to write one for the sake of better learning the jQuery plugin pattern. I like the separation of "work" in small, manageable functions, but I feel like I'm passing name, value, and options arguments around too much. Is there a way this can be refactored? I'm looking for snippets of code to help illustrate examples provided with in answers. Any help is appreciated. Thanks :) example usage $.cookie('foo', 'bar', {expires:7}); $.cookie('foo'); //=> bar $.cookie('foo', null); $.cookie('foo'); //=> undefined Edit: I did a little bit of work on this. You can view the revision history to see where this has come from. It still feels like more refactoring can be done to optimize the flow a bit. Any ideas? the plugin (function($){ $.cookie = function(name, value, options) { if (typeof value == 'undefined') { return get(name); } else { options = $.extend({}, $.cookie.defaults, options || {}); return (value != null) ? set(name, value, options) : unset(name, options); } }; $.cookie.defaults = { expires: null, path: '/', domain: null, secure: false }; var set = function(name, value, options){ console.log(options); return document.cookie = options_string(name, value, options); }; var get = function(name){ var cookies = {}; $.map(document.cookie.split(';'), function(pair){ var c = $.trim(pair).split('='); cookies[c[0]] = c[1]; }); return decodeURIComponent(cookies[name]); }; var unset = function(name, options){ value = ''; options.expires = -1; set(name, value, options); }; var options_string = function(name, value, options){ var pairs = [param.name(name, value)]; $.each(options, function(k,v){ pairs.push(param[k](v)); }); return $.map(pairs, function(p){ return p === null ? null : p; }).join(';'); }; var param = { name: function(name, value){ return name + "=" + encodeURIComponent(value); }, expires: function(value){ // no expiry if(value === null){ return null; } // number of days else if(typeof value == "number"){ d = new Date(); d.setTime(d.getTime() + (value * 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000)); } // date object else if(typeof value == "object" && value instanceof "Date") { d = value; } return "expires=" + d.toUTCString(); }, path: function(value){ return "path="+value; }, domain: function(value){ return value === null ? null : "domain=" + value; }, secure: function(bool){ return bool ? "secure" : null; } }; })(jQuery);

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  • Constructor Overload Problem in C++ Inheritance

    - by metdos
    Here my code snippet: class Request { public: Request(void); ……….. } Request::Request(void) { qDebug()<<"Request: "<<"Hello World"; } class LoginRequest :public Request { public: LoginRequest(void); LoginRequest(QDomDocument); …………… } LoginRequest::LoginRequest(void) { qDebug()<<"LoginRequest: "<<"Hello World"; requestType=LOGIN; requestId=-1; } LoginRequest::LoginRequest(QDomDocument doc){ qDebug()<<"LoginRequest: "<<"Hello World with QDomDocument"; LoginRequest::LoginRequest(); xmlDoc_=doc; } When call constructor of Overrided LoginRequest LoginRequest *test=new LoginRequest(doc); I came up with this result: Request: Hello World LoginRequest: Hello World with QDomDocument Request: Hello World LoginRequest: Hello World Obviously both constructor of LoginRequest called REquest constructor. Is there any way to cape with this situation? I can construct another function that does the job I want to do and have both constructors call that function. But I wonder is there any solution?

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