graphical models - Page 206

Many to Many with LINQ-To-Sql and ASP.NET MVC

- by Jonathan Stowell

Hi All, I will restrict this to the three tables I am trying to work with Problem, Communications, and ProbComms. The scenario is that a Student may have many Problems concurrently which may affect their studies. Lecturers may have future communications with a student after an initial problem is logged, however as a Student may have multiple Problems the Lecturer may decide that the discussion they had is related to more than one Problem. Here is a screenshot of the LINQ-To-Sql representation of my DB: LINQ-To-Sql Screenshot At the moment in my StudentController I have a StudentFormViewModel Class: // //ViewModel Class public class StudentFormViewModel { IProbCommRepository probCommRepository; // Properties public Student Student { get; private set; } public IEnumerable<ProbComm> ProbComm { get; private set; } // // Dependency Injection enabled constructors public StudentFormViewModel(Student student, IEnumerable<ProbComm> probComm) : this(new ProbCommRepository()) { this.Student = student; this.ProbComm = probComm; } public StudentFormViewModel(IProbCommRepository pRepository) { probCommRepository = pRepository; } } When I go to the Students Detail Page this runs: public ActionResult Details(string id) { StudentFormViewModel viewdata = new StudentFormViewModel(studentRepository.GetStudent(id), probCommRepository.FindAllProblemComms(id)); if (viewdata == null) return View("NotFound"); else return View(viewdata); } The GetStudent works fine and returns an instance of the student to output on the page, below the student I output all problems logged against them, but underneath these problems I want to show the communications related to the Problem. The LINQ I am using for ProbComms is This is located in the Model class ProbCommRepository, and accessed via a IProbCommRepository interface: public IQueryable<ProbComm> FindAllProblemComms(string studentEmail) { return (from p in db.ProbComms where p.Problem.StudentEmail.Equals(studentEmail) orderby p.Problem.ProblemDateTime select p); } However for example if I have this data in the ProbComms table: ProblemID CommunicationID 1 1 1 2 The query returns two rows so I assume I somehow have to groupby Problem or ProblemID but I am not too sure how to do this with the way I have built things as the return type has to be ProbComm for the query as thats what Model class its located in. When it comes to the view the Details.aspx calls two partial views each passing the relevant view data through, StudentDetails works fine page: <%@ Page Title="" Language="C#" MasterPageFile="~/Views/Shared/Site.Master" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage<MitigatingCircumstances.Controllers.StudentFormViewModel>" %> <% Html.RenderPartial("StudentDetails", this.ViewData.Model.Student); %> <% Html.RenderPartial("StudentProblems", this.ViewData.Model.ProbComm); %> StudentProblems uses a foreach loop to loop through records in the Model and I am trying another foreach loop to output the communication details: <%@ Control Language="C#" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewUserControl<IEnumerable<MitigatingCircumstances.Models.ProbComm>>" %> <script type="text/javascript" language="javascript"> $(document).ready(function() { $("DIV.ContainerPanel > DIV.collapsePanelHeader > DIV.ArrowExpand").toggle( function() { $(this).parent().next("div.Content").show("slow"); $(this).attr("class", "ArrowClose"); }, function() { $(this).parent().next("div.Content").hide("slow"); $(this).attr("class", "ArrowExpand"); }); }); </script> <div class="studentProblems"> <% var i = 0; foreach (var item in Model) { %> <div id="ContainerPanel<%= i = i + 1 %>" class="ContainerPanel"> <div id="header<%= i = i + 1 %>" class="collapsePanelHeader"> <div id="dvHeaderText<%= i = i + 1 %>" class="HeaderContent"><%= Html.Encode(String.Format("{0:dd/MM/yyyy}", item.Problem.ProblemDateTime))%></div> <div id="dvArrow<%= i = i + 1 %>" class="ArrowExpand"></div> </div> <div id="dvContent<%= i = i + 1 %>" class="Content" style="display: none"> <p> Type: <%= Html.Encode(item.Problem.CommunicationType.TypeName) %> </p> <p> Problem Outline: <%= Html.Encode(item.Problem.ProblemOutline)%> </p> <p> Mitigating Circumstance Form: <%= Html.Encode(item.Problem.MCF)%> </p> <p> Mitigating Circumstance Level: <%= Html.Encode(item.Problem.MitigatingCircumstanceLevel.MCLevel)%> </p> <p> Absent From: <%= Html.Encode(String.Format("{0:g}", item.Problem.AbsentFrom))%> </p> <p> Absent Until: <%= Html.Encode(String.Format("{0:g}", item.Problem.AbsentUntil))%> </p> <p> Requested Follow Up: <%= Html.Encode(String.Format("{0:g}", item.Problem.RequestedFollowUp))%> </p> <p>Problem Communications</p> <% foreach (var comm in Model) { %> <p> <% if (item.Problem.ProblemID == comm.ProblemID) { %> <%= Html.Encode(comm.ProblemCommunication.CommunicationOutline)%> <% } %> </p> <% } %> </div> </div> <br /> <% } %> </div> The issue is that using the example data before the Model has two records for the same problem as there are two communications for that problem, therefore duplicating the output. Any help with this would be gratefully appreciated. Thanks, Jon

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NetLogo 4.1 - implementation of a motorway ( Problem creating collision of cars )

- by user206019

Hi there, I am trying to create a simulation of motorway and the behaviour of the drivers in NetLogo. I have some questions that I m struggling to solve. Here is my code: globals [ selected-car ;; the currently selected car average-speed ;; average speed of all the cars look-ahead ] turtles-own [ speed ;; the current speed of the car speed-limit ;; the maximum speed of the car (different for all cars) lane ;; the current lane of the car target-lane ;; the desired lane of the car change? ;; true if the car wants to change lanes patience ;; the driver's current patience max-patience ;; the driver's maximum patience ] to setup ca import-drawing "my_road3.png" set-default-shape turtles "car" crt number_of_cars [ setup-cars ] end to setup-cars set color blue set size .9 set lane (random 3) set target-lane (lane + 1) setxy round random-xcor (lane + 1) set heading 90 set speed 0.1 + random 9.9 set speed-limit (((random 11) / 10) + 1) set change? false set max-patience ((random 50) + 10) set patience (max-patience - (random 10)) ;; make sure no two cars are on the same patch loop [ ifelse any? other turtles-here [ fd 1 ] [ stop ] ;if count turtles-here > 1 ; fd 0.1 ;if ; ;ifelse (any? turtles-on neighbors) or (count turtles-here > 1) ;[ ; ifelse (count turtles-here = 1) ; [ if any? turtles-on neighbors ; [ ; if distance min-one-of turtles-on neighbors [distance myself] > 0.9 ; [stop] ; ] ; ] ; [ fd 0.1 ] ;] ;[ stop ] ] end to go drive end to drive ;; first determine average speed of the cars set average-speed ((sum [speed] of turtles) / number_of_cars) ;set-current-plot "Car Speeds" ;set-current-plot-pen "average" ;plot average-speed ;set-current-plot-pen "max" ;plot (max [speed] of turtles) ;set-current-plot-pen "min" ;plot (abs (min [speed] of turtles) ) ;set-current-plot-pen "selected-car" ;plot ([speed] of selected-car) ask turtles [ ifelse (any? turtles-at 1 0) [ set speed ([speed] of (one-of (turtles-at 1 0))) decelerate ] [ ifelse (look-ahead = 2) [ ifelse (any? turtles-at 2 0) [ set speed ([speed] of (one-of turtles-at 2 0)) decelerate ] [ accelerate if count turtles-at 0 1 = 0 and ycor < 2.5 [lt 90 fd 1 rt 90] ] ] [accelerate if count turtles-at 0 1 = 0 and ycor < 2.5 [lt 90 fd 1 rt 90] ] ] if (speed < 0.01) [ set speed 0.01 ] if (speed > speed-limit) [ set speed speed-limit ] ifelse (change? = false) [ signal ] [ change-lanes ] ;; Control for making sure no one crashes. ifelse (any? turtles-at 1 0) and (xcor != min-pxcor - .5) [ set speed [speed] of (one-of turtles-at 1 0) ] [ ifelse ((any? turtles-at 2 0) and (speed > 1.0)) [ set speed ([speed] of (one-of turtles-at 2 0)) fd 1 ] [jump speed] ] ] tick end ;; increase speed of cars to accelerate ;; turtle procedure set speed (speed + (speed-up / 1000)) end ;; reduce speed of cars to decelerate ;; turtle procedure set speed (speed - (slow-down / 1000)) end to signal ifelse (any? turtles-at 1 0) [ if ([speed] of (one-of (turtles-at 1 0))) < (speed) [ set change? true ] ] [ set change? false ] end ;; undergoes search algorithms to change-lanes ;; turtle procedure show ycor ifelse (patience <= 0) [ ifelse (max-patience <= 1) [ set max-patience (random 10) + 1 ] [ set max-patience (max-patience - (random 5)) ] set patience max-patience ifelse (target-lane = 0) [ set target-lane 1 set lane 0 ] [ set target-lane 0 set lane 1 ] ] [ set patience (patience - 1) ] ifelse (target-lane = lane) [ ifelse (target-lane = 0) [ set target-lane 1 set change? false ] [ set target-lane 0 set change? false ] ] [ ifelse (target-lane = 1) [ ifelse (pycor = 2) [ set lane 1 set change? false ] [ ifelse (not any? turtles-at 0 1) [ set ycor (ycor + 1) ] [ ifelse (not any? turtles-at 1 0) [ set xcor (xcor + 1) ] [ decelerate if (speed <= 0) [ set speed 0.1 ] ] ] ] ] [ ifelse (pycor = -2) [ set lane 0 set change? false ] [ ifelse (not any? turtles-at 0 -1) [ set ycor (ycor - 1) ] [ ifelse (not any? turtles-at 1 0) [ set xcor (xcor + 1) ] [ decelerate if (speed <= 0) [ set speed 0.1 ] ] ] ] ] ] end I know its a bit messy because I am using code from other models from the library. I want to know how to create the collision of the cars. I can't think of any idea. As you notice my agent has almost the same size as the patch (I set it to 0.9 so that you can distinguish the space between 2 cars when they are set next to each other and I round the coordinates so that they are set to the centre of the patch). In my accelerate procedure I set my agent to turn left, move 1, turn right in a loop. I want to know if there's a command that lets me make the agent jump from one lane to the other (to the patch next to it on its left) without making it turn and move. And last, if you notice the code i created the car checks the patch that is next to it on the lane on its left and the patch in front of it and the back of it. So if the 3 patches on its left are empty then it can change lane. The fuzzy part is that when i run the setup and I press Go sometimes (not always) the car goes out of the 3 basic lanes. To understand this I have 7 lanes. The middle one which I don't use which is lane 0. Then there are 3 lanes on top of lane 0 and 3 below it. So the code I am using refers to the upper 3 lanes where I set the cars but for some reason some of the cars change lane and go to lane -3 then -2 and so forth. If someone can give me a tip I would really appreciate it. Thank you in advance. Tip: if you want to try this code in netlogo keep in mind that on interface tab I have 2 buttons one setup and one go as well as 3 sliders with names: number_of_cars , speed-up , slow-down.

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Am I just not understanding TDD unit testing (Asp.Net MVC project)?

- by KallDrexx

I am trying to figure out how to correctly and efficiently unit test my Asp.net MVC project. When I started on this project I bought the Pro ASP.Net MVC, and with that book I learned about TDD and unit testing. After seeing the examples, and the fact that I work as a software engineer in QA in my current company, I was amazed at how awesome TDD seemed to be. So I started working on my project and went gun-ho writing unit tests for my database layer, business layer, and controllers. Everything got a unit test prior to implementation. At first I thought it was awesome, but then things started to go downhill. Here are the issues I started encountering: I ended up writing application code in order to make it possible for unit tests to be performed. I don't mean this in a good way as in my code was broken and I had to fix it so the unit test pass. I mean that abstracting out the database to a mock database is impossible due to the use of linq for data retrieval (using the generic repository pattern). The reason is that with linq-sql or linq-entities you can do joins just by doing: var objs = select p from _container.Projects select p.Objects; However, if you mock the database layer out, in order to have that linq pass the unit test you must change the linq to be var objs = select p from _container.Projects join o in _container.Objects on o.ProjectId equals p.Id select o; Not only does this mean you are changing your application logic just so you can unit test it, but you are making your code less efficient for the sole purpose of testability, and getting rid of a lot of advantages using an ORM has in the first place. Furthermore, since a lot of the IDs for my models are database generated, I proved to have to write additional code to handle the non-database tests since IDs were never generated and I had to still handle those cases for the unit tests to pass, yet they would never occur in real scenarios. Thus I ended up throwing out my database unit testing. Writing unit tests for controllers was easy as long as I was returning views. However, the major part of my application (and the one that would benefit most from unit testing) is a complicated ajax web application. For various reasons I decided to change the app from returning views to returning JSON with the data I needed. After this occurred my unit tests became extremely painful to write, as I have not found any good way to write unit tests for non-trivial json. After pounding my head and wasting a ton of time trying to find a good way to unit test the JSON, I gave up and deleted all of my controller unit tests (all controller actions are focused on this part of the app so far). So finally I was left with testing the Service layer (BLL). Right now I am using EF4, however I had this issue with linq-sql as well. I chose to do the EF4 model-first approach because to me, it makes sense to do it that way (define my business objects and let the framework figure out how to translate it into the sql backend). This was fine at the beginning but now it is becoming cumbersome due to relationships. For example say I have Project, User, and Object entities. One Object must be associated to a project, and a project must be associated to a user. This is not only a database specific rule, these are my business rules as well. However, say I want to do a unit test that I am able to save an object (for a simple example). I now have to do the following code just to make sure the save worked: User usr = new User { Name = "Me" }; _userService.SaveUser(usr); Project prj = new Project { Name = "Test Project", Owner = usr }; _projectService.SaveProject(prj); Object obj = new Object { Name = "Test Object" }; _objectService.SaveObject(obj); // Perform verifications There are many issues with having to do all this just to perform one unit test. There are several issues with this. For starters, if I add a new dependency, such as all projects must belong to a category, I must go into EVERY single unit test that references a project, add code to save the category then add code to add the category to the project. This can be a HUGE effort down the road for a very simple business logic change, and yet almost none of the unit tests I will be modifying for this requirement are actually meant to test that feature/requirement. If I then add verifications to my SaveProject method, so that projects cannot be saved unless they have a name with at least 5 characters, I then have to go through every Object and Project unit test to make sure that the new requirement doesn't make any unrelated unit tests fail. If there is an issue in the UserService.SaveUser() method it will cause all project, and object unit tests to fail and it the cause won't be immediately noticeable without having to dig through the exceptions. Thus I have removed all service layer unit tests from my project. I could go on and on, but so far I have not seen any way for unit testing to actually help me and not get in my way. I can see specific cases where I can, and probably will, implement unit tests, such as making sure my data verification methods work correctly, but those cases are few and far between. Some of my issues can probably be mitigated but not without adding extra layers to my application, and thus making more points of failure just so I can unit test. Thus I have no unit tests left in my code. Luckily I heavily use source control so I can get them back if I need but I just don't see the point. Everywhere on the internet I see people talking about how great TDD unit tests are, and I'm not just talking about the fanatical people. The few people who dismiss TDD/Unit tests give bad arguments claiming they are more efficient debugging by hand through the IDE, or that their coding skills are amazing that they don't need it. I recognize that both of those arguments are utter bullocks, especially for a project that needs to be maintainable by multiple developers, but any valid rebuttals to TDD seem to be few and far between. So the point of this post is to ask, am I just not understanding how to use TDD and automatic unit tests?

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CakePHP 3-level-deep model associatons

- by user357452

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What's New in ASP.NET 4

- by Navaneeth

The .NET Framework version 4 includes enhancements for ASP.NET 4 in targeted areas. Visual Studio 2010 and Microsoft Visual Web Developer Express also include enhancements and new features for improved Web development. This document provides an overview of many of the new features that are included in the upcoming release. This topic contains the following sections: ASP.NET Core Services ASP.NET Web Forms ASP.NET MVC Dynamic Data ASP.NET Chart Control Visual Web Developer Enhancements Web Application Deployment with Visual Studio 2010 Enhancements to ASP.NET Multi-Targeting ASP.NET Core Services ASP.NET 4 introduces many features that improve core ASP.NET services such as output caching and session state storage. Extensible Output Caching Since the time that ASP.NET 1.0 was released, output caching has enabled developers to store the generated output of pages, controls, and HTTP responses in memory. On subsequent Web requests, ASP.NET can serve content more quickly by retrieving the generated output from memory instead of regenerating the output from scratch. However, this approach has a limitation — generated content always has to be stored in memory. On servers that experience heavy traffic, the memory requirements for output caching can compete with memory requirements for other parts of a Web application. ASP.NET 4 adds extensibility to output caching that enables you to configure one or more custom output-cache providers. Output-cache providers can use any storage mechanism to persist HTML content. These storage options can include local or remote disks, cloud storage, and distributed cache engines. Output-cache provider extensibility in ASP.NET 4 lets you design more aggressive and more intelligent output-caching strategies for Web sites. For example, you can create an output-cache provider that caches the "Top 10" pages of a site in memory, while caching pages that get lower traffic on disk. Alternatively, you can cache every vary-by combination for a rendered page, but use a distributed cache so that the memory consumption is offloaded from front-end Web servers. You create a custom output-cache provider as a class that derives from the OutputCacheProvider type. You can then configure the provider in the Web.config file by using the new providers subsection of the outputCache element For more information and for examples that show how to configure the output cache, see outputCache Element for caching (ASP.NET Settings Schema). For more information about the classes that support caching, see the documentation for the OutputCache and OutputCacheProvider classes. By default, in ASP.NET 4, all HTTP responses, rendered pages, and controls use the in-memory output cache. The defaultProvider attribute for ASP.NET is AspNetInternalProvider. You can change the default output-cache provider used for a Web application by specifying a different provider name for defaultProvider attribute. In addition, you can select different output-cache providers for individual control and for individual requests and programmatically specify which provider to use. For more information, see the HttpApplication.GetOutputCacheProviderName(HttpContext) method. The easiest way to choose a different output-cache provider for different Web user controls is to do so declaratively by using the new providerName attribute in a page or control directive, as shown in the following example: <%@ OutputCache Duration="60" VaryByParam="None" providerName="DiskCache" %> Preloading Web Applications Some Web applications must load large amounts of data or must perform expensive initialization processing before serving the first request. In earlier versions of ASP.NET, for these situations you had to devise custom approaches to "wake up" an ASP.NET application and then run initialization code during the Application_Load method in the Global.asax file. To address this scenario, a new application preload manager (autostart feature) is available when ASP.NET 4 runs on IIS 7.5 on Windows Server 2008 R2. The preload feature provides a controlled approach for starting up an application pool, initializing an ASP.NET application, and then accepting HTTP requests. It lets you perform expensive application initialization prior to processing the first HTTP request. For example, you can use the application preload manager to initialize an application and then signal a load-balancer that the application was initialized and ready to accept HTTP traffic. To use the application preload manager, an IIS administrator sets an application pool in IIS 7.5 to be automatically started by using the following configuration in the applicationHost.config file: <applicationPools> <add name="MyApplicationPool" startMode="AlwaysRunning" /> </applicationPools> Because a single application pool can contain multiple applications, you specify individual applications to be automatically started by using the following configuration in the applicationHost.config file: <sites> <site name="MySite" id="1"> <application path="/" serviceAutoStartEnabled="true" serviceAutoStartProvider="PrewarmMyCache" >  </application> </site> </sites>  <serviceAutoStartProviders> <add name="PrewarmMyCache" type="MyNamespace.CustomInitialization, MyLibrary" /> </serviceAutoStartProviders> When an IIS 7.5 server is cold-started or when an individual application pool is recycled, IIS 7.5 uses the information in the applicationHost.config file to determine which Web applications have to be automatically started. For each application that is marked for preload, IIS7.5 sends a request to ASP.NET 4 to start the application in a state during which the application temporarily does not accept HTTP requests. When it is in this state, ASP.NET instantiates the type defined by the serviceAutoStartProvider attribute (as shown in the previous example) and calls into its public entry point. You create a managed preload type that has the required entry point by implementing the IProcessHostPreloadClient interface, as shown in the following example: public class CustomInitialization : System.Web.Hosting.IProcessHostPreloadClient { public void Preload(string[] parameters) { // Perform initialization. } } After your initialization code runs in the Preload method and after the method returns, the ASP.NET application is ready to process requests. Permanently Redirecting a Page Content in Web applications is often moved over the lifetime of the application. This can lead to links to be out of date, such as the links that are returned by search engines. In ASP.NET, developers have traditionally handled requests to old URLs by using the Redirect method to forward a request to the new URL. However, the Redirect method issues an HTTP 302 (Found) response (which is used for a temporary redirect). This results in an extra HTTP round trip. ASP.NET 4 adds a RedirectPermanent helper method that makes it easy to issue HTTP 301 (Moved Permanently) responses, as in the following example: RedirectPermanent("/newpath/foroldcontent.aspx"); Search engines and other user agents that recognize permanent redirects will store the new URL that is associated with the content, which eliminates the unnecessary round trip made by the browser for temporary redirects. Session State Compression By default, ASP.NET provides two options for storing session state across a Web farm. The first option is a session state provider that invokes an out-of-process session state server. The second option is a session state provider that stores data in a Microsoft SQL Server database. Because both options store state information outside a Web application's worker process, session state has to be serialized before it is sent to remote storage. If a large amount of data is saved in session state, the size of the serialized data can become very large. ASP.NET 4 introduces a new compression option for both kinds of out-of-process session state providers. By using this option, applications that have spare CPU cycles on Web servers can achieve substantial reductions in the size of serialized session state data. You can set this option using the new compressionEnabled attribute of the sessionState element in the configuration file. When the compressionEnabled configuration option is set to true, ASP.NET compresses (and decompresses) serialized session state by using the .NET Framework GZipStreamclass. The following example shows how to set this attribute. <sessionState mode="SqlServer" sqlConnectionString="data source=dbserver;Initial Catalog=aspnetstate" allowCustomSqlDatabase="true" compressionEnabled="true" /> ASP.NET Web Forms Web Forms has been a core feature in ASP.NET since the release of ASP.NET 1.0. Many enhancements have been in this area for ASP.NET 4, such as the following: The ability to set meta tags. More control over view state. Support for recently introduced browsers and devices. Easier ways to work with browser capabilities. Support for using ASP.NET routing with Web Forms. More control over generated IDs. The ability to persist selected rows in data controls. More control over rendered HTML in the FormView and ListView controls. Filtering support for data source controls. Enhanced support for Web standards and accessibility Setting Meta Tags with the Page.MetaKeywords and Page.MetaDescription Properties Two properties have been added to the Page class: MetaKeywords and MetaDescription. These two properties represent corresponding meta tags in the HTML rendered for a page, as shown in the following example: <head id="Head1" runat="server"> <title>Untitled Page</title> <meta name="keywords" content="keyword1, keyword2' /> <meta name="description" content="Description of my page" /> </head> These two properties work like the Title property does, and they can be set in the @ Page directive. For more information, see Page.MetaKeywords and Page.MetaDescription. Enabling View State for Individual Controls A new property has been added to the Control class: ViewStateMode. You can use this property to disable view state for all controls on a page except those for which you explicitly enable view state. View state data is included in a page's HTML and increases the amount of time it takes to send a page to the client and post it back. Storing more view state than is necessary can cause significant decrease in performance. In earlier versions of ASP.NET, you could reduce the impact of view state on a page's performance by disabling view state for specific controls. But sometimes it is easier to enable view state for a few controls that need it instead of disabling it for many that do not need it. For more information, see Control.ViewStateMode. Support for Recently Introduced Browsers and Devices ASP.NET includes a feature that is named browser capabilities that lets you determine the capabilities of the browser that a user is using. Browser capabilities are represented by the HttpBrowserCapabilities object which is stored in the HttpRequest.Browser property. Information about a particular browser's capabilities is defined by a browser definition file. In ASP.NET 4, these browser definition files have been updated to contain information about recently introduced browsers and devices such as Google Chrome, Research in Motion BlackBerry smart phones, and Apple iPhone. Existing browser definition files have also been updated. For more information, see How to: Upgrade an ASP.NET Web Application to ASP.NET 4 and ASP.NET Web Server Controls and Browser Capabilities. The browser definition files that are included with ASP.NET 4 are shown in the following list: •blackberry.browser •chrome.browser •Default.browser •firefox.browser •gateway.browser •generic.browser •ie.browser •iemobile.browser •iphone.browser •opera.browser •safari.browser A New Way to Define Browser Capabilities ASP.NET 4 includes a new feature referred to as browser capabilities providers. As the name suggests, this lets you build a provider that in turn lets you write custom code to determine browser capabilities. In ASP.NET version 3.5 Service Pack 1, you define browser capabilities in an XML file. This file resides in a machine-level folder or an application-level folder. Most developers do not need to customize these files, but for those who do, the provider approach can be easier than dealing with complex XML syntax. The provider approach makes it possible to simplify the process by implementing a common browser definition syntax, or a database that contains up-to-date browser definitions, or even a Web service for such a database. For more information about the new browser capabilities provider, see the What's New for ASP.NET 4 White Paper. Routing in ASP.NET 4 ASP.NET 4 adds built-in support for routing with Web Forms. Routing is a feature that was introduced with ASP.NET 3.5 SP1 and lets you configure an application to use URLs that are meaningful to users and to search engines because they do not have to specify physical file names. This can make your site more user-friendly and your site content more discoverable by search engines. For example, the URL for a page that displays product categories in your application might look like the following example: http://website/products.aspx?categoryid=12 By using routing, you can use the following URL to render the same information: http://website/products/software The second URL lets the user know what to expect and can result in significantly improved rankings in search engine results. the new features include the following: The PageRouteHandler class is a simple HTTP handler that you use when you define routes. You no longer have to write a custom route handler. The HttpRequest.RequestContext and Page.RouteData properties make it easier to access information that is passed in URL parameters. The RouteUrl expression provides a simple way to create a routed URL in markup. The RouteValue expression provides a simple way to extract URL parameter values in markup. The RouteParameter class makes it easier to pass URL parameter values to a query for a data source control (similar to FormParameter). You no longer have to change the Web.config file to enable routing. For more information about routing, see the following topics: ASP.NET Routing Walkthrough: Using ASP.NET Routing in a Web Forms Application How to: Define Routes for Web Forms Applications How to: Construct URLs from Routes How to: Access URL Parameters in a Routed Page Setting Client IDs The new ClientIDMode property makes it easier to write client script that references HTML elements rendered for server controls. Increasing use of Microsoft Ajax makes the need to do this more common. For example, you may have a data control that renders a long list of products with prices and you want to use client script to make a Web service call and update individual prices in the list as they change without refreshing the entire page. Typically you get a reference to an HTML element in client script by using the document.GetElementById method. You pass to this method the value of the id attribute of the HTML element you want to reference. In the case of elements that are rendered for ASP.NET server controls earlier versions of ASP.NET could make this difficult or impossible. You were not always able to predict what id values ASP.NET would generate, or ASP.NET could generate very long id values. The problem was especially difficult for data controls that would generate multiple rows for a single instance of the control in your markup. ASP.NET 4 adds two new algorithms for generating id attributes. These algorithms can generate id attributes that are easier to work with in client script because they are more predictable and that are easier to work with because they are simpler. For more information about how to use the new algorithms, see the following topics: ASP.NET Web Server Control Identification Walkthrough: Making Data-Bound Controls Easier to Access from JavaScript Walkthrough: Making Controls Located in Web User Controls Easier to Access from JavaScript How to: Access Controls from JavaScript by ID Persisting Row Selection in Data Controls The GridView and ListView controls enable users to select a row. In previous versions of ASP.NET, row selection was based on the row index on the page. For example, if you select the third item on page 1 and then move to page 2, the third item on page 2 is selected. In most cases, is more desirable not to select any rows on page 2. ASP.NET 4 supports Persisted Selection, a new feature that was initially supported only in Dynamic Data projects in the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1. When this feature is enabled, the selected item is based on the row data key. This means that if you select the third row on page 1 and move to page 2, nothing is selected on page 2. When you move back to page 1, the third row is still selected. This is a much more natural behavior than the behavior in earlier versions of ASP.NET. Persisted selection is now supported for the GridView and ListView controls in all projects. You can enable this feature in the GridView control, for example, by setting the EnablePersistedSelection property, as shown in the following example: <asp:GridView id="GridView2" runat="server" PersistedSelection="true"> </asp:GridView> FormView Control Enhancements The FormView control is enhanced to make it easier to style the content of the control with CSS. In previous versions of ASP.NET, the FormView control rendered it contents using an item template. This made styling more difficult in the markup because unexpected table row and table cell tags were rendered by the control. The FormView control supports RenderOuterTable, a property in ASP.NET 4. When this property is set to false, as show in the following example, the table tags are not rendered. This makes it easier to apply CSS style to the contents of the control. <asp:FormView ID="FormView1" runat="server" RenderTable="false"> For more information, see FormView Web Server Control Overview. ListView Control Enhancements The ListView control, which was introduced in ASP.NET 3.5, has all the functionality of the GridView control while giving you complete control over the output. This control has been made easier to use in ASP.NET 4. The earlier version of the control required that you specify a layout template that contained a server control with a known ID. The following markup shows a typical example of how to use the ListView control in ASP.NET 3.5. <asp:ListView ID="ListView1" runat="server"> <LayoutTemplate> <asp:PlaceHolder ID="ItemPlaceHolder" runat="server"></asp:PlaceHolder> </LayoutTemplate> <ItemTemplate> <% Eval("LastName")%> </ItemTemplate> </asp:ListView> In ASP.NET 4, the ListView control does not require a layout template. The markup shown in the previous example can be replaced with the following markup: <asp:ListView ID="ListView1" runat="server"> <ItemTemplate> <% Eval("LastName")%> </ItemTemplate> </asp:ListView> For more information, see ListView Web Server Control Overview. Filtering Data with the QueryExtender Control A very common task for developers who create data-driven Web pages is to filter data. This traditionally has been performed by building Where clauses in data source controls. This approach can be complicated, and in some cases the Where syntax does not let you take advantage of the full functionality of the underlying database. To make filtering easier, a new QueryExtender control has been added in ASP.NET 4. This control can be added to EntityDataSource or LinqDataSource controls in order to filter the data returned by these controls. Because the QueryExtender control relies on LINQ, but you do not to need to know how to write LINQ queries to use the query extender. The QueryExtender control supports a variety of filter options. The following lists QueryExtender filter options. Term Definition SearchExpression Searches a field or fields for string values and compares them to a specified string value. RangeExpression Searches a field or fields for values in a range specified by a pair of values. PropertyExpression Compares a specified value to a property value in a field. If the expression evaluates to true, the data that is being examined is returned. OrderByExpression Sorts data by a specified column and sort direction. CustomExpression Calls a function that defines custom filter in the page. For more information, see QueryExtenderQueryExtender Web Server Control Overview. Enhanced Support for Web Standards and Accessibility Earlier versions of ASP.NET controls sometimes render markup that does not conform to HTML, XHTML, or accessibility standards. ASP.NET 4 eliminates most of these exceptions. For details about how the HTML that is rendered by each control meets accessibility standards, see ASP.NET Controls and Accessibility. CSS for Controls that Can be Disabled In ASP.NET 3.5, when a control is disabled (see WebControl.Enabled), a disabled attribute is added to the rendered HTML element. For example, the following markup creates a Label control that is disabled: <asp:Label id="Label1" runat="server" Text="Test" Enabled="false" /> In ASP.NET 3.5, the previous control settings generate the following HTML: <span id="Label1" disabled="disabled">Test</span> In HTML 4.01, the disabled attribute is not considered valid on span elements. It is valid only on input elements because it specifies that they cannot be accessed. On display-only elements such as span elements, browsers typically support rendering for a disabled appearance, but a Web page that relies on this non-standard behavior is not robust according to accessibility standards. For display-only elements, you should use CSS to indicate a disabled visual appearance. Therefore, by default ASP.NET 4 generates the following HTML for the control settings shown previously: <span id="Label1" class="aspNetDisabled">Test</span> You can change the value of the class attribute that is rendered by default when a control is disabled by setting the DisabledCssClass property. CSS for Validation Controls In ASP.NET 3.5, validation controls render a default color of red as an inline style. For example, the following markup creates a RequiredFieldValidator control: <asp:RequiredFieldValidator ID="RequiredFieldValidator1" runat="server" ErrorMessage="Required Field" ControlToValidate="RadioButtonList1" /> ASP.NET 3.5 renders the following HTML for the validator control: <span id="RequiredFieldValidator1" style="color:Red;visibility:hidden;">RequiredFieldValidator</span> By default, ASP.NET 4 does not render an inline style to set the color to red. An inline style is used only to hide or show the validator, as shown in the following example: <span id="RequiredFieldValidator1" style"visibility:hidden;">RequiredFieldValidator</span> Therefore, ASP.NET 4 does not automatically show error messages in red. For information about how to use CSS to specify a visual style for a validation control, see Validating User Input in ASP.NET Web Pages. CSS for the Hidden Fields Div Element ASP.NET uses hidden fields to store state information such as view state and control state. These hidden fields are contained by a div element. In ASP.NET 3.5, this div element does not have a class attribute or an id attribute. Therefore, CSS rules that affect all div elements could unintentionally cause this div to be visible. To avoid this problem, ASP.NET 4 renders the div element for hidden fields with a CSS class that you can use to differentiate the hidden fields div from others. The new classvalue is shown in the following example: <div class="aspNetHidden"> CSS for the Table, Image, and ImageButton Controls By default, in ASP.NET 3.5, some controls set the border attribute of rendered HTML to zero (0). The following example shows HTML that is generated by the Table control in ASP.NET 3.5: <table id="Table2" border="0"> The Image control and the ImageButton control also do this. Because this is not necessary and provides visual formatting information that should be provided by using CSS, the attribute is not generated in ASP.NET 4. CSS for the UpdatePanel and UpdateProgress Controls In ASP.NET 3.5, the UpdatePanel and UpdateProgress controls do not support expando attributes. This makes it impossible to set a CSS class on the HTMLelements that they render. In ASP.NET 4 these controls have been changed to accept expando attributes, as shown in the following example: <asp:UpdatePanel runat="server" class="myStyle"> </asp:UpdatePanel> The following HTML is rendered for this markup: <div id="ctl00_MainContent_UpdatePanel1" class="expandoclass"> </div> Eliminating Unnecessary Outer Tables In ASP.NET 3.5, the HTML that is rendered for the following controls is wrapped in a table element whose purpose is to apply inline styles to the entire control: FormView Login PasswordRecovery ChangePassword If you use templates to customize the appearance of these controls, you can specify CSS styles in the markup that you provide in the templates. In that case, no extra outer table is required. In ASP.NET 4, you can prevent the table from being rendered by setting the new RenderOuterTable property to false. Layout Templates for Wizard Controls In ASP.NET 3.5, the Wizard and CreateUserWizard controls generate an HTML table element that is used for visual formatting. In ASP.NET 4 you can use a LayoutTemplate element to specify the layout. If you do this, the HTML table element is not generated. In the template, you create placeholder controls to indicate where items should be dynamically inserted into the control. (This is similar to how the template model for the ListView control works.) For more information, see the Wizard.LayoutTemplate property. New HTML Formatting Options for the CheckBoxList and RadioButtonList Controls ASP.NET 3.5 uses HTML table elements to format the output for the CheckBoxList and RadioButtonList controls. To provide an alternative that does not use tables for visual formatting, ASP.NET 4 adds two new options to the RepeatLayout enumeration: UnorderedList. This option causes the HTML output to be formatted by using ul and li elements instead of a table. OrderedList. This option causes the HTML output to be formatted by using ol and li elements instead of a table. For examples of HTML that is rendered for the new options, see the RepeatLayout enumeration. Header and Footer Elements for the Table Control In ASP.NET 3.5, the Table control can be configured to render thead and tfoot elements by setting the TableSection property of the TableHeaderRow class and the TableFooterRow class. In ASP.NET 4 these properties are set to the appropriate values by default. CSS and ARIA Support for the Menu Control In ASP.NET 3.5, the Menu control uses HTML table elements for visual formatting, and in some configurations it is not keyboard-accessible. ASP.NET 4 addresses these problems and improves accessibility in the following ways: The generated HTML is structured as an unordered list (ul and li elements). CSS is used for visual formatting. The menu behaves in accordance with ARIA standards for keyboard access. You can use arrow keys to navigate menu items. (For information about ARIA, see Accessibility in Visual Studio and ASP.NET.) ARIA role and property attributes are added to the generated HTML. (Attributes are added by using JavaScript instead of included in the HTML, to avoid generating HTML that would cause markup validation errors.) Styles for the Menu control are rendered in a style block at the top of the page, instead of inline with the rendered HTML elements. If you want to use a separate CSS file so that you can modify the menu styles, you can set the Menu control's new IncludeStyleBlock property to false, in which case the style block is not generated. Valid XHTML for the HtmlForm Control In ASP.NET 3.5, the HtmlForm control (which is created implicitly by the <form runat="server"> tag) renders an HTML form element that has both name and id attributes. The name attribute is deprecated in XHTML 1.1. Therefore, this control does not render the name attribute in ASP.NET 4. Maintaining Backward Compatibility in Control Rendering An existing ASP.NET Web site might have code in it that assumes that controls are rendering HTML the way they do in ASP.NET 3.5. To avoid causing backward compatibility problems when you upgrade the site to ASP.NET 4, you can have ASP.NET continue to generate HTML the way it does in ASP.NET 3.5 after you upgrade the site. To do so, you can set the controlRenderingCompatibilityVersion attribute of the pages element to "3.5" in the Web.config file of an ASP.NET 4 Web site, as shown in the following example: <system.web> <pages controlRenderingCompatibilityVersion="3.5"/> </system.web> If this setting is omitted, the default value is the same as the version of ASP.NET that the Web site targets. (For information about multi-targeting in ASP.NET, see .NET Framework Multi-Targeting for ASP.NET Web Projects.) ASP.NET MVC ASP.NET MVC helps Web developers build compelling standards-based Web sites that are easy to maintain because it decreases the dependency among application layers by using the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern. MVC provides complete control over the page markup. It also improves testability by inherently supporting Test Driven Development (TDD). Web sites created using ASP.NET MVC have a modular architecture. This allows members of a team to work independently on the various modules and can be used to improve collaboration. For example, developers can work on the model and controller layers (data and logic), while the designer work on the view (presentation). For tutorials, walkthroughs, conceptual content, code samples, and a complete API reference, see ASP.NET MVC 2. Dynamic Data Dynamic Data was introduced in the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 release in mid-2008. This feature provides many enhancements for creating data-driven applications, such as the following: A RAD experience for quickly building a data-driven Web site. Automatic validation that is based on constraints defined in the data model. The ability to easily change the markup that is generated for fields in the GridView and DetailsView controls by using field templates that are part of your Dynamic Data project. For ASP.NET 4, Dynamic Data has been enhanced to give developers even more power for quickly building data-driven Web sites. For more information, see ASP.NET Dynamic Data Content Map. Enabling Dynamic Data for Individual Data-Bound Controls in Existing Web Applications You can use Dynamic Data features in existing ASP.NET Web applications that do not use scaffolding by enabling Dynamic Data for individual data-bound controls. Dynamic Data provides the presentation and data layer support for rendering these controls. When you enable Dynamic Data for data-bound controls, you get the following benefits: Setting default values for data fields. Dynamic Data enables you to provide default values at run time for fields in a data control. Interacting with the database without creating and registering a data model. Automatically validating the data that is entered by the user without writing any code. For more information, see Walkthrough: Enabling Dynamic Data in ASP.NET Data-Bound Controls. New Field Templates for URLs and E-mail Addresses ASP.NET 4 introduces two new built-in field templates, EmailAddress.ascx and Url.ascx. These templates are used for fields that are marked as EmailAddress or Url using the DataTypeAttribute attribute. For EmailAddress objects, the field is displayed as a hyperlink that is created by using the mailto: protocol. When users click the link, it opens the user's e-mail client and creates a skeleton message. Objects typed as Url are displayed as ordinary hyperlinks. The following example shows how to mark fields. [DataType(DataType.EmailAddress)] public object HomeEmail { get; set; } [DataType(DataType.Url)] public object Website { get; set; } Creating Links with the DynamicHyperLink Control Dynamic Data uses the new routing feature that was added in the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 to control the URLs that users see when they access the Web site. The new DynamicHyperLink control makes it easy to build links to pages in a Dynamic Data site. For information, see How to: Create Table Action Links in Dynamic Data Support for Inheritance in the Data Model Both the ADO.NET Entity Framework and LINQ to SQL support inheritance in their data models. An example of this might be a database that has an InsurancePolicy table. It might also contain CarPolicy and HousePolicy tables that have the same fields as InsurancePolicy and then add more fields. Dynamic Data has been modified to understand inherited objects in the data model and to support scaffolding for the inherited tables. For more information, see Walkthrough: Mapping Table-per-Hierarchy Inheritance in Dynamic Data. Support for Many-to-Many Relationships (Entity Framework Only) The Entity Framework has rich support for many-to-many relationships between tables, which is implemented by exposing the relationship as a collection on an Entity object. New field templates (ManyToMany.ascx and ManyToMany_Edit.ascx) have been added to provide support for displaying and editing data that is involved in many-to-many relationships. For more information, see Working with Many-to-Many Data Relationships in Dynamic Data. New Attributes to Control Display and Support Enumerations The DisplayAttribute has been added to give you additional control over how fields are displayed. The DisplayNameAttribute attribute in earlier versions of Dynamic Data enabled you to change the name that is used as a caption for a field. The new DisplayAttribute class lets you specify more options for displaying a field, such as the order in which a field is displayed and whether a field will be used as a filter. The attribute also provides independent control of the name that is used for the labels in a GridView control, the name that is used in a DetailsView control, the help text for the field, and the watermark used for the field (if the field accepts text input). The EnumDataTypeAttribute class has been added to let you map fields to enumerations. When you apply this attribute to a field, you specify an enumeration type. Dynamic Data uses the new Enumeration.ascx field template to create UI for displaying and editing enumeration values. The template maps the values from the database to the names in the enumeration. Enhanced Support for Filters Dynamic Data 1.0 had built-in filters for Boolean columns and foreign-key columns. The filters did not let you specify the order in which they were displayed. The new DisplayAttribute attribute addresses this by giving you control over whether a column appears as a filter and in what order it will be displayed. An additional enhancement is that filtering support has been rewritten to use the new QueryExtender feature of Web Forms. This lets you create filters without requiring knowledge of the data source control that the filters will be used with. Along with these extensions, filters have also been turned into template controls, which lets you add new ones. Finally, the DisplayAttribute class mentioned earlier allows the default filter to be overridden, in the same way that UIHint allows the default field template for a column to be overridden. For more information, see Walkthrough: Filtering Rows in Tables That Have a Parent-Child Relationship and QueryableFilterRepeater. ASP.NET Chart Control The ASP.NET chart server control enables you to create ASP.NET pages applications that have simple, intuitive charts for complex statistical or financial analysis. The chart control supports the following features: Data series, chart areas, axes, legends, labels, titles, and more. Data binding. Data manipulation, such as copying, splitting, merging, alignment, grouping, sorting, searching, and filtering. Statistical formulas and financial formulas. Advanced chart appearance, such as 3-D, anti-aliasing, lighting, and perspective. Events and customizations. Interactivity and Microsoft Ajax. Support for the Ajax Content Delivery Network (CDN), which provides an optimized way for you to add Microsoft Ajax Library and jQuery scripts to your Web applications. For more information, see Chart Web Server Control Overview. Visual Web Developer Enhancements The following sections provide information about enhancements and new features in Visual Studio 2010 and Visual Web Developer Express. The Web page designer in Visual Studio 2010 has been enhanced for better CSS compatibility, includes additional support for HTML and ASP.NET markup snippets, and features a redesigned version of IntelliSense for JScript. Improved CSS Compatibility The Visual Web Developer designer in Visual Studio 2010 has been updated to improve CSS 2.1 standards compliance. The designer better preserves HTML source code and is more robust than in previous versions of Visual Studio. HTML and JScript Snippets In the HTML editor, IntelliSense auto-completes tag names. The IntelliSense Snippets feature auto-completes whole tags and more. In Visual Studio 2010, IntelliSense snippets are supported for JScript, alongside C# and Visual Basic, which were supported in earlier versions of Visual Studio. Visual Studio 2010 includes over 200 snippets that help you auto-complete common ASP.NET and HTML tags, including required attributes (such as runat="server") and common attributes specific to a tag (such as ID, DataSourceID, ControlToValidate, and Text). You can download additional snippets, or you can write your own snippets that encapsulate the blocks of markup that you or your team use for common tasks. For more information on HTML snippets, see Walkthrough: Using HTML Snippets. JScript IntelliSense Enhancements In Visual 2010, JScript IntelliSense has been redesigned to provide an even richer editing experience. IntelliSense now recognizes objects that have been dynamically generated by methods such as registerNamespace and by similar techniques used by other JavaScript frameworks. Performance has been improved to analyze large libraries of script and to display IntelliSense with little or no processing delay. Compatibility has been significantly increased to support almost all third-party libraries and to support diverse coding styles. Documentation comments are now parsed as you type and are immediately leveraged by IntelliSense. Web Application Deployment with Visual Studio 2010 For Web application projects, Visual Studio now provides tools that work with the IIS Web Deployment Tool (Web Deploy) to automate many processes that had to be done manually in earlier versions of ASP.NET. For example, the following tasks can now be automated: Creating an IIS application on the destination computer and configuring IIS settings. Copying files to the destination computer. Changing Web.config settings that must be different in the destination environment. Propagating changes to data or data structures in SQL Server databases that are used by the Web application. For more information about Web application deployment, see ASP.NET Deployment Content Map. Enhancements to ASP.NET Multi-Targeting ASP.NET 4 adds new features to the multi-targeting feature to make it easier to work with projects that target earlier versions of the .NET Framework. Multi-targeting was introduced in ASP.NET 3.5 to enable you to use the latest version of Visual Studio without having to upgrade existing Web sites or Web services to the latest version of the .NET Framework. In Visual Studio 2008, when you work with a project targeted for an earlier version of the .NET Framework, most features of the development environment adapt to the targeted version. However, IntelliSense displays language features that are available in the current version, and property windows display properties available in the current version. In Visual Studio 2010, only language features and properties available in the targeted version of the .NET Framework are shown. For more information about multi-targeting, see the following topics: .NET Framework Multi-Targeting for ASP.NET Web Projects ASP.NET Side-by-Side Execution Overview How to: Host Web Applications That Use Different Versions of the .NET Framework on the Same Server How to: Deploy Web Site Projects Targeted for Earlier Versions of the .NET Framework

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New features of C# 4.0

This article covers New features of C# 4.0. Article has been divided into below sections. Introduction. Dynamic Lookup. Named and Optional Arguments. Features for COM interop. Variance. Relationship with Visual Basic. Resources. Other interested readings… 22 New Features of Visual Studio 2008 for .NET Professionals 50 New Features of SQL Server 2008 IIS 7.0 New features Introduction It is now close to a year since Microsoft Visual C# 3.0 shipped as part of Visual Studio 2008. In the VS Managed Languages team we are hard at work on creating the next version of the language (with the unsurprising working title of C# 4.0), and this document is a first public description of the planned language features as we currently see them. Please be advised that all this is in early stages of production and is subject to change. Part of the reason for sharing our plans in public so early is precisely to get the kind of feedback that will cause us to improve the final product before it rolls out. Simultaneously with the publication of this whitepaper, a first public CTP (community technology preview) of Visual Studio 2010 is going out as a Virtual PC image for everyone to try. Please use it to play and experiment with the features, and let us know of any thoughts you have. We ask for your understanding and patience working with very early bits, where especially new or newly implemented features do not have the quality or stability of a final product. The aim of the CTP is not to give you a productive work environment but to give you the best possible impression of what we are working on for the next release. The CTP contains a number of walkthroughs, some of which highlight the new language features of C# 4.0. Those are excellent for getting a hands-on guided tour through the details of some common scenarios for the features. You may consider this whitepaper a companion document to these walkthroughs, complementing them with a focus on the overall language features and how they work, as opposed to the specifics of the concrete scenarios. C# 4.0 The major theme for C# 4.0 is dynamic programming. Increasingly, objects are “dynamic” in the sense that their structure and behavior is not captured by a static type, or at least not one that the compiler knows about when compiling your program. Some examples include a. objects from dynamic programming languages, such as Python or Ruby b. COM objects accessed through IDispatch c. ordinary .NET types accessed through reflection d. objects with changing structure, such as HTML DOM objects While C# remains a statically typed language, we aim to vastly improve the interaction with such objects. A secondary theme is co-evolution with Visual Basic. Going forward we will aim to maintain the individual character of each language, but at the same time important new features should be introduced in both languages at the same time. They should be differentiated more by style and feel than by feature set. The new features in C# 4.0 fall into four groups: Dynamic lookup Dynamic lookup allows you to write method, operator and indexer calls, property and field accesses, and even object invocations which bypass the C# static type checking and instead gets resolved at runtime. Named and optional parameters Parameters in C# can now be specified as optional by providing a default value for them in a member declaration. When the member is invoked, optional arguments can be omitted. Furthermore, any argument can be passed by parameter name instead of position. COM specific interop features Dynamic lookup as well as named and optional parameters both help making programming against COM less painful than today. On top of that, however, we are adding a number of other small features that further improve the interop experience. Variance It used to be that an IEnumerable<string> wasn’t an IEnumerable<object>. Now it is – C# embraces type safe “co-and contravariance” and common BCL types are updated to take advantage of that. Dynamic Lookup Dynamic lookup allows you a unified approach to invoking things dynamically. With dynamic lookup, when you have an object in your hand you do not need to worry about whether it comes from COM, IronPython, the HTML DOM or reflection; you just apply operations to it and leave it to the runtime to figure out what exactly those operations mean for that particular object. This affords you enormous flexibility, and can greatly simplify your code, but it does come with a significant drawback: Static typing is not maintained for these operations. A dynamic object is assumed at compile time to support any operation, and only at runtime will you get an error if it wasn’t so. Oftentimes this will be no loss, because the object wouldn’t have a static type anyway, in other cases it is a tradeoff between brevity and safety. In order to facilitate this tradeoff, it is a design goal of C# to allow you to opt in or opt out of dynamic behavior on every single call. The dynamic type C# 4.0 introduces a new static type called dynamic. When you have an object of type dynamic you can “do things to it” that are resolved only at runtime: dynamic d = GetDynamicObject(…); d.M(7); The C# compiler allows you to call a method with any name and any arguments on d because it is of type dynamic. At runtime the actual object that d refers to will be examined to determine what it means to “call M with an int” on it. The type dynamic can be thought of as a special version of the type object, which signals that the object can be used dynamically. It is easy to opt in or out of dynamic behavior: any object can be implicitly converted to dynamic, “suspending belief” until runtime. Conversely, there is an “assignment conversion” from dynamic to any other type, which allows implicit conversion in assignment-like constructs: dynamic d = 7; // implicit conversion int i = d; // assignment conversion Dynamic operations Not only method calls, but also field and property accesses, indexer and operator calls and even delegate invocations can be dispatched dynamically: dynamic d = GetDynamicObject(…); d.M(7); // calling methods d.f = d.P; // getting and settings fields and properties d[“one”] = d[“two”]; // getting and setting thorugh indexers int i = d + 3; // calling operators string s = d(5,7); // invoking as a delegate The role of the C# compiler here is simply to package up the necessary information about “what is being done to d”, so that the runtime can pick it up and determine what the exact meaning of it is given an actual object d. Think of it as deferring part of the compiler’s job to runtime. The result of any dynamic operation is itself of type dynamic. Runtime lookup At runtime a dynamic operation is dispatched according to the nature of its target object d: COM objects If d is a COM object, the operation is dispatched dynamically through COM IDispatch. This allows calling to COM types that don’t have a Primary Interop Assembly (PIA), and relying on COM features that don’t have a counterpart in C#, such as indexed properties and default properties. Dynamic objects If d implements the interface IDynamicObject d itself is asked to perform the operation. Thus by implementing IDynamicObject a type can completely redefine the meaning of dynamic operations. This is used intensively by dynamic languages such as IronPython and IronRuby to implement their own dynamic object models. It will also be used by APIs, e.g. by the HTML DOM to allow direct access to the object’s properties using property syntax. Plain objects Otherwise d is a standard .NET object, and the operation will be dispatched using reflection on its type and a C# “runtime binder” which implements C#’s lookup and overload resolution semantics at runtime. This is essentially a part of the C# compiler running as a runtime component to “finish the work” on dynamic operations that was deferred by the static compiler. Example Assume the following code: dynamic d1 = new Foo(); dynamic d2 = new Bar(); string s; d1.M(s, d2, 3, null); Because the receiver of the call to M is dynamic, the C# compiler does not try to resolve the meaning of the call. Instead it stashes away information for the runtime about the call. This information (often referred to as the “payload”) is essentially equivalent to: “Perform an instance method call of M with the following arguments: 1. a string 2. a dynamic 3. a literal int 3 4. a literal object null” At runtime, assume that the actual type Foo of d1 is not a COM type and does not implement IDynamicObject. In this case the C# runtime binder picks up to finish the overload resolution job based on runtime type information, proceeding as follows: 1. Reflection is used to obtain the actual runtime types of the two objects, d1 and d2, that did not have a static type (or rather had the static type dynamic). The result is Foo for d1 and Bar for d2. 2. Method lookup and overload resolution is performed on the type Foo with the call M(string,Bar,3,null) using ordinary C# semantics. 3. If the method is found it is invoked; otherwise a runtime exception is thrown. Overload resolution with dynamic arguments Even if the receiver of a method call is of a static type, overload resolution can still happen at runtime. This can happen if one or more of the arguments have the type dynamic: Foo foo = new Foo(); dynamic d = new Bar(); var result = foo.M(d); The C# runtime binder will choose between the statically known overloads of M on Foo, based on the runtime type of d, namely Bar. The result is again of type dynamic. The Dynamic Language Runtime An important component in the underlying implementation of dynamic lookup is the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR), which is a new API in .NET 4.0. The DLR provides most of the infrastructure behind not only C# dynamic lookup but also the implementation of several dynamic programming languages on .NET, such as IronPython and IronRuby. Through this common infrastructure a high degree of interoperability is ensured, but just as importantly the DLR provides excellent caching mechanisms which serve to greatly enhance the efficiency of runtime dispatch. To the user of dynamic lookup in C#, the DLR is invisible except for the improved efficiency. However, if you want to implement your own dynamically dispatched objects, the IDynamicObject interface allows you to interoperate with the DLR and plug in your own behavior. This is a rather advanced task, which requires you to understand a good deal more about the inner workings of the DLR. For API writers, however, it can definitely be worth the trouble in order to vastly improve the usability of e.g. a library representing an inherently dynamic domain. Open issues There are a few limitations and things that might work differently than you would expect. · The DLR allows objects to be created from objects that represent classes. However, the current implementation of C# doesn’t have syntax to support this. · Dynamic lookup will not be able to find extension methods. Whether extension methods apply or not depends on the static context of the call (i.e. which using clauses occur), and this context information is not currently kept as part of the payload. · Anonymous functions (i.e. lambda expressions) cannot appear as arguments to a dynamic method call. The compiler cannot bind (i.e. “understand”) an anonymous function without knowing what type it is converted to. One consequence of these limitations is that you cannot easily use LINQ queries over dynamic objects: dynamic collection = …; var result = collection.Select(e => e + 5); If the Select method is an extension method, dynamic lookup will not find it. Even if it is an instance method, the above does not compile, because a lambda expression cannot be passed as an argument to a dynamic operation. There are no plans to address these limitations in C# 4.0. Named and Optional Arguments Named and optional parameters are really two distinct features, but are often useful together. Optional parameters allow you to omit arguments to member invocations, whereas named arguments is a way to provide an argument using the name of the corresponding parameter instead of relying on its position in the parameter list. Some APIs, most notably COM interfaces such as the Office automation APIs, are written specifically with named and optional parameters in mind. Up until now it has been very painful to call into these APIs from C#, with sometimes as many as thirty arguments having to be explicitly passed, most of which have reasonable default values and could be omitted. Even in APIs for .NET however you sometimes find yourself compelled to write many overloads of a method with different combinations of parameters, in order to provide maximum usability to the callers. Optional parameters are a useful alternative for these situations. Optional parameters A parameter is declared optional simply by providing a default value for it: public void M(int x, int y = 5, int z = 7); Here y and z are optional parameters and can be omitted in calls: M(1, 2, 3); // ordinary call of M M(1, 2); // omitting z – equivalent to M(1, 2, 7) M(1); // omitting both y and z – equivalent to M(1, 5, 7) Named and optional arguments C# 4.0 does not permit you to omit arguments between commas as in M(1,,3). This could lead to highly unreadable comma-counting code. Instead any argument can be passed by name. Thus if you want to omit only y from a call of M you can write: M(1, z: 3); // passing z by name or M(x: 1, z: 3); // passing both x and z by name or even M(z: 3, x: 1); // reversing the order of arguments All forms are equivalent, except that arguments are always evaluated in the order they appear, so in the last example the 3 is evaluated before the 1. Optional and named arguments can be used not only with methods but also with indexers and constructors. Overload resolution Named and optional arguments affect overload resolution, but the changes are relatively simple: A signature is applicable if all its parameters are either optional or have exactly one corresponding argument (by name or position) in the call which is convertible to the parameter type. Betterness rules on conversions are only applied for arguments that are explicitly given – omitted optional arguments are ignored for betterness purposes. If two signatures are equally good, one that does not omit optional parameters is preferred. M(string s, int i = 1); M(object o); M(int i, string s = “Hello”); M(int i); M(5); Given these overloads, we can see the working of the rules above. M(string,int) is not applicable because 5 doesn’t convert to string. M(int,string) is applicable because its second parameter is optional, and so, obviously are M(object) and M(int). M(int,string) and M(int) are both better than M(object) because the conversion from 5 to int is better than the conversion from 5 to object. Finally M(int) is better than M(int,string) because no optional arguments are omitted. Thus the method that gets called is M(int). Features for COM interop Dynamic lookup as well as named and optional parameters greatly improve the experience of interoperating with COM APIs such as the Office Automation APIs. In order to remove even more of the speed bumps, a couple of small COM-specific features are also added to C# 4.0. Dynamic import Many COM methods accept and return variant types, which are represented in the PIAs as object. In the vast majority of cases, a programmer calling these methods already knows the static type of a returned object from context, but explicitly has to perform a cast on the returned value to make use of that knowledge. These casts are so common that they constitute a major nuisance. In order to facilitate a smoother experience, you can now choose to import these COM APIs in such a way that variants are instead represented using the type dynamic. In other words, from your point of view, COM signatures now have occurrences of dynamic instead of object in them. This means that you can easily access members directly off a returned object, or you can assign it to a strongly typed local variable without having to cast. To illustrate, you can now say excel.Cells[1, 1].Value = "Hello"; instead of ((Excel.Range)excel.Cells[1, 1]).Value2 = "Hello"; and Excel.Range range = excel.Cells[1, 1]; instead of Excel.Range range = (Excel.Range)excel.Cells[1, 1]; Compiling without PIAs Primary Interop Assemblies are large .NET assemblies generated from COM interfaces to facilitate strongly typed interoperability. They provide great support at design time, where your experience of the interop is as good as if the types where really defined in .NET. However, at runtime these large assemblies can easily bloat your program, and also cause versioning issues because they are distributed independently of your application. The no-PIA feature allows you to continue to use PIAs at design time without having them around at runtime. Instead, the C# compiler will bake the small part of the PIA that a program actually uses directly into its assembly. At runtime the PIA does not have to be loaded. Omitting ref Because of a different programming model, many COM APIs contain a lot of reference parameters. Contrary to refs in C#, these are typically not meant to mutate a passed-in argument for the subsequent benefit of the caller, but are simply another way of passing value parameters. It therefore seems unreasonable that a C# programmer should have to create temporary variables for all such ref parameters and pass these by reference. Instead, specifically for COM methods, the C# compiler will allow you to pass arguments by value to such a method, and will automatically generate temporary variables to hold the passed-in values, subsequently discarding these when the call returns. In this way the caller sees value semantics, and will not experience any side effects, but the called method still gets a reference. Open issues A few COM interface features still are not surfaced in C#. Most notably these include indexed properties and default properties. As mentioned above these will be respected if you access COM dynamically, but statically typed C# code will still not recognize them. There are currently no plans to address these remaining speed bumps in C# 4.0. Variance An aspect of generics that often comes across as surprising is that the following is illegal: IList<string> strings = new List<string>(); IList<object> objects = strings; The second assignment is disallowed because strings does not have the same element type as objects. There is a perfectly good reason for this. If it were allowed you could write: objects[0] = 5; string s = strings[0]; Allowing an int to be inserted into a list of strings and subsequently extracted as a string. This would be a breach of type safety. However, there are certain interfaces where the above cannot occur, notably where there is no way to insert an object into the collection. Such an interface is IEnumerable<T>. If instead you say: IEnumerable<object> objects = strings; There is no way we can put the wrong kind of thing into strings through objects, because objects doesn’t have a method that takes an element in. Variance is about allowing assignments such as this in cases where it is safe. The result is that a lot of situations that were previously surprising now just work. Covariance In .NET 4.0 the IEnumerable<T> interface will be declared in the following way: public interface IEnumerable<out T> : IEnumerable { IEnumerator<T> GetEnumerator(); } public interface IEnumerator<out T> : IEnumerator { bool MoveNext(); T Current { get; } } The “out” in these declarations signifies that the T can only occur in output position in the interface – the compiler will complain otherwise. In return for this restriction, the interface becomes “covariant” in T, which means that an IEnumerable<A> is considered an IEnumerable<B> if A has a reference conversion to B. As a result, any sequence of strings is also e.g. a sequence of objects. This is useful e.g. in many LINQ methods. Using the declarations above: var result = strings.Union(objects); // succeeds with an IEnumerable<object> This would previously have been disallowed, and you would have had to to some cumbersome wrapping to get the two sequences to have the same element type. Contravariance Type parameters can also have an “in” modifier, restricting them to occur only in input positions. An example is IComparer<T>: public interface IComparer<in T> { public int Compare(T left, T right); } The somewhat baffling result is that an IComparer<object> can in fact be considered an IComparer<string>! It makes sense when you think about it: If a comparer can compare any two objects, it can certainly also compare two strings. This property is referred to as contravariance. A generic type can have both in and out modifiers on its type parameters, as is the case with the Func<…> delegate types: public delegate TResult Func<in TArg, out TResult>(TArg arg); Obviously the argument only ever comes in, and the result only ever comes out. Therefore a Func<object,string> can in fact be used as a Func<string,object>. Limitations Variant type parameters can only be declared on interfaces and delegate types, due to a restriction in the CLR. Variance only applies when there is a reference conversion between the type arguments. For instance, an IEnumerable<int> is not an IEnumerable<object> because the conversion from int to object is a boxing conversion, not a reference conversion. Also please note that the CTP does not contain the new versions of the .NET types mentioned above. In order to experiment with variance you have to declare your own variant interfaces and delegate types. COM Example Here is a larger Office automation example that shows many of the new C# features in action. using System; using System.Diagnostics; using System.Linq; using Excel = Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel; using Word = Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word; class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { var excel = new Excel.Application(); excel.Visible = true; excel.Workbooks.Add(); // optional arguments omitted excel.Cells[1, 1].Value = "Process Name"; // no casts; Value dynamically excel.Cells[1, 2].Value = "Memory Usage"; // accessed var processes = Process.GetProcesses() .OrderByDescending(p => p.WorkingSet) .Take(10); int i = 2; foreach (var p in processes) { excel.Cells[i, 1].Value = p.ProcessName; // no casts excel.Cells[i, 2].Value = p.WorkingSet; // no casts i++; } Excel.Range range = excel.Cells[1, 1]; // no casts Excel.Chart chart = excel.ActiveWorkbook.Charts. Add(After: excel.ActiveSheet); // named and optional arguments chart.ChartWizard( Source: range.CurrentRegion, Title: "Memory Usage in " + Environment.MachineName); //named+optional chart.ChartStyle = 45; chart.CopyPicture(Excel.XlPictureAppearance.xlScreen, Excel.XlCopyPictureFormat.xlBitmap, Excel.XlPictureAppearance.xlScreen); var word = new Word.Application(); word.Visible = true; word.Documents.Add(); // optional arguments word.Selection.Paste(); } } The code is much more terse and readable than the C# 3.0 counterpart. Note especially how the Value property is accessed dynamically. This is actually an indexed property, i.e. a property that takes an argument; something which C# does not understand. However the argument is optional. Since the access is dynamic, it goes through the runtime COM binder which knows to substitute the default value and call the indexed property. Thus, dynamic COM allows you to avoid accesses to the puzzling Value2 property of Excel ranges. Relationship with Visual Basic A number of the features introduced to C# 4.0 already exist or will be introduced in some form or other in Visual Basic: · Late binding in VB is similar in many ways to dynamic lookup in C#, and can be expected to make more use of the DLR in the future, leading to further parity with C#. · Named and optional arguments have been part of Visual Basic for a long time, and the C# version of the feature is explicitly engineered with maximal VB interoperability in mind. · NoPIA and variance are both being introduced to VB and C# at the same time. VB in turn is adding a number of features that have hitherto been a mainstay of C#. As a result future versions of C# and VB will have much better feature parity, for the benefit of everyone. Resources All available resources concerning C# 4.0 can be accessed through the C# Dev Center. Specifically, this white paper and other resources can be found at the Code Gallery site. Enjoy! span.fullpost {display:none;}

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Table sorting & pagination with jQuery and Razor in ASP.NET MVC

- by hajan

Introduction jQuery enjoys living inside pages which are built on top of ASP.NET MVC Framework. The ASP.NET MVC is a place where things are organized very well and it is quite hard to make them dirty, especially because the pattern enforces you on purity (you can still make it dirty if you want so ;) ). We all know how easy is to build a HTML table with a header row, footer row and table rows showing some data. With ASP.NET MVC we can do this pretty easy, but, the result will be pure HTML table which only shows data, but does not includes sorting, pagination or some other advanced features that we were used to have in the ASP.NET WebForms GridView. Ok, there is the WebGrid MVC Helper, but what if we want to make something from pure table in our own clean style? In one of my recent projects, I’ve been using the jQuery tablesorter and tablesorter.pager plugins that go along. You don’t need to know jQuery to make this work… You need to know little CSS to create nice design for your table, but of course you can use mine from the demo… So, what you will see in this blog is how to attach this plugin to your pure html table and a div for pagination and make your table with advanced sorting and pagination features. Demo Project Resources The resources I’m using for this demo project are shown in the following solution explorer window print screen: Content/images – folder that contains all the up/down arrow images, pagination buttons etc. You can freely replace them with your own, but keep the names the same if you don’t want to change anything in the CSS we will built later. Content/Site.css – The main css theme, where we will add the theme for our table too Controllers/HomeController.cs – The controller I’m using for this project Models/Person.cs – For this demo, I’m using Person.cs class Scripts – jquery-1.4.4.min.js, jquery.tablesorter.js, jquery.tablesorter.pager.js – required script to make the magic happens Views/Home/Index.cshtml – Index view (razor view engine) the other items are not important for the demo. ASP.NET MVC 1. Model In this demo I use only one Person class which defines Person entity with several properties. You can use your own model, maybe one which will access data from database or any other resource. Person.cs public class Person { public string Name { get; set; } public string Surname { get; set; } public string Email { get; set; } public int? Phone { get; set; } public DateTime? DateAdded { get; set; } public int? Age { get; set; } public Person(string name, string surname, string email, int? phone, DateTime? dateadded, int? age) { Name = name; Surname = surname; Email = email; Phone = phone; DateAdded = dateadded; Age = age; } } 2. View In our example, we have only one Index.chtml page where Razor View engine is used. Razor view engine is my favorite for ASP.NET MVC because it’s very intuitive, fluid and keeps your code clean. 3. Controller Since this is simple example with one page, we use one HomeController.cs where we have two methods, one of ActionResult type (Index) and another GetPeople() used to create and return list of people. HomeController.cs public class HomeController : Controller { // // GET: /Home/ public ActionResult Index() { ViewBag.People = GetPeople(); return View(); } public List<Person> GetPeople() { List<Person> listPeople = new List<Person>(); listPeople.Add(new Person("Hajan", "Selmani", "[email protected]", 070070070,DateTime.Now, 25)); listPeople.Add(new Person("Straight", "Dean", "[email protected]", 123456789, DateTime.Now.AddDays(-5), 35)); listPeople.Add(new Person("Karsen", "Livia", "[email protected]", 46874651, DateTime.Now.AddDays(-2), 31)); listPeople.Add(new Person("Ringer", "Anne", "[email protected]", null, DateTime.Now, null)); listPeople.Add(new Person("O'Leary", "Michael", "[email protected]", 32424344, DateTime.Now, 44)); listPeople.Add(new Person("Gringlesby", "Anne", "[email protected]", null, DateTime.Now.AddDays(-9), 18)); listPeople.Add(new Person("Locksley", "Stearns", "[email protected]", 2135345, DateTime.Now, null)); listPeople.Add(new Person("DeFrance", "Michel", "[email protected]", 235325352, DateTime.Now.AddDays(-18), null)); listPeople.Add(new Person("White", "Johnson", null, null, DateTime.Now.AddDays(-22), 55)); listPeople.Add(new Person("Panteley", "Sylvia", null, 23233223, DateTime.Now.AddDays(-1), 32)); listPeople.Add(new Person("Blotchet-Halls", "Reginald", null, 323243423, DateTime.Now, 26)); listPeople.Add(new Person("Merr", "South", "[email protected]", 3232442, DateTime.Now.AddDays(-5), 85)); listPeople.Add(new Person("MacFeather", "Stearns", "[email protected]", null, DateTime.Now, null)); return listPeople; } } TABLE CSS/HTML DESIGN Now, lets start with the implementation. First of all, lets create the table structure and the main CSS. 1. HTML Structure @{ Layout = null; } <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <title>ASP.NET & jQuery</title>  </head> <body> <div> <table class="tablesorter"> <thead> <tr> <th> value </th> </tr> </thead> <tbody> <tr> <td>value</td> </tr> </tbody> <tfoot> <tr> <th> value </th> </tr> </tfoot> </table> <div id="pager"> </div> </div> </body> </html> So, this is the main structure you need to create for each of your tables where you want to apply the functionality we will create. Of course the scripts are referenced once ;). As you see, our table has class tablesorter and also we have a div with id pager. In the next steps we will use both these to create the needed functionalities. The complete Index.cshtml coded to get the data from controller and display in the page is: <body> <div> <table class="tablesorter"> <thead> <tr> <th>Name</th> <th>Surname</th> <th>Email</th> <th>Phone</th> <th>Date Added</th> </tr> </thead> <tbody> @{ foreach (var p in ViewBag.People) { <tr> <td>@p.Name</td> <td>@p.Surname</td> <td>@p.Email</td> <td>@p.Phone</td> <td>@p.DateAdded</td> </tr> } } </tbody> <tfoot> <tr> <th>Name</th> <th>Surname</th> <th>Email</th> <th>Phone</th> <th>Date Added</th> </tr> </tfoot> </table> <div id="pager" style="position: none;"> <form> <img src="@Url.Content("~/Content/images/first.png")" class="first" /> <img src="@Url.Content("~/Content/images/prev.png")" class="prev" /> <input type="text" class="pagedisplay" /> <img src="@Url.Content("~/Content/images/next.png")" class="next" /> <img src="@Url.Content("~/Content/images/last.png")" class="last" /> <select class="pagesize"> <option selected="selected" value="5">5</option> <option value="10">10</option> <option value="20">20</option> <option value="30">30</option> <option value="40">40</option> </select> </form> </div> </div> </body> So, mainly the structure is the same. I have added @Razor code to create table with data retrieved from the ViewBag.People which has been filled with data in the home controller. 2. CSS Design The CSS code I’ve created is: /* DEMO TABLE */ body { font-size: 75%; font-family: Verdana, Tahoma, Arial, "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Sans-Serif; color: #232323; background-color: #fff; } table { border-spacing:0; border:1px solid gray;} table.tablesorter thead tr .header { background-image: url(images/bg.png); background-repeat: no-repeat; background-position: center right; cursor: pointer; } table.tablesorter tbody td { color: #3D3D3D; padding: 4px; background-color: #FFF; vertical-align: top; } table.tablesorter tbody tr.odd td { background-color:#F0F0F6; } table.tablesorter thead tr .headerSortUp { background-image: url(images/asc.png); } table.tablesorter thead tr .headerSortDown { background-image: url(images/desc.png); } table th { width:150px; border:1px outset gray; background-color:#3C78B5; color:White; cursor:pointer; } table thead th:hover { background-color:Yellow; color:Black;} table td { width:150px; border:1px solid gray;} PAGINATION AND SORTING Now, when everything is ready and we have the data, lets make pagination and sorting functionalities 1. jQuery Scripts referencing <link href="@Url.Content("~/Content/Site.css")" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> <script src="@Url.Content("~/Scripts/jquery-1.4.4.min.js")" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="@Url.Content("~/Scripts/jquery.tablesorter.js")" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="@Url.Content("~/Scripts/jquery.tablesorter.pager.js")" type="text/javascript"></script> 2. jQuery Sorting and Pagination script <script type="text/javascript"> $(function () { $("table.tablesorter").tablesorter({ widthFixed: true, sortList: [[0, 0]] }) .tablesorterPager({ container: $("#pager"), size: $(".pagesize option:selected").val() }); }); </script> So, with only two lines of code, I’m using both tablesorter and tablesorterPager plugins, giving some options to both these. Options added: tablesorter - widthFixed: true – gives fixed width of the columns tablesorter - sortList[[0,0]] – An array of instructions for per-column sorting and direction in the format: [[columnIndex, sortDirection], ... ] where columnIndex is a zero-based index for your columns left-to-right and sortDirection is 0 for Ascending and 1 for Descending. A valid argument that sorts ascending first by column 1 and then column 2 looks like: [[0,0],[1,0]] (source: http://tablesorter.com/docs/) tablesorterPager – container: $(“#pager”) – tells the pager container, the div with id pager in our case. tablesorterPager – size: the default size of each page, where I get the default value selected, so if you put selected to any other of the options in your select list, you will have this number of rows as default per page for the table too. END RESULTS 1. Table once the page is loaded (default results per page is 5 and is automatically sorted by 1st column as sortList is specified) 2. Sorted by Phone Descending 3. Changed pagination to 10 items per page 4. Sorted by Phone and Name (use SHIFT to sort on multiple columns) 5. Sorted by Date Added 6. Page 3, 5 items per page ADDITIONAL ENHANCEMENTS We can do additional enhancements to the table. We can make search for each column. I will cover this in one of my next blogs. Stay tuned. DEMO PROJECT You can download demo project source code from HERE.CONCLUSION Once you finish with the demo, run your page and open the source code. You will be amazed of the purity of your code.Working with pagination in client side can be very useful. One of the benefits is performance, but if you have thousands of rows in your tables, you will get opposite result when talking about performance. Hence, sometimes it is nice idea to make pagination on back-end. So, the compromise between both approaches would be best to combine both of them. I use at most up to 500 rows on client-side and once the user reach the last page, we can trigger ajax postback which can get the next 500 rows using server-side pagination of the same data. I would like to recommend the following blog post http://weblogs.asp.net/gunnarpeipman/archive/2010/09/14/returning-paged-results-from-repositories-using-pagedresult-lt-t-gt.aspx, which will help you understand how to return page results from repository. I hope this was helpful post for you. Wait for my next posts ;). Please do let me know your feedback. Best Regards, Hajan

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Why should you choose Oracle WebLogic 12c instead of JBoss EAP 6?

- by Ricardo Ferreira

In this post, I will cover some technical differences between Oracle WebLogic 12c and JBoss EAP 6, which was released a couple days ago from Red Hat. This article claims to help you in the evaluation of key points that you should consider when choosing for an Java EE application server. In the following sections, I will present to you some important aspects that most customers ask us when they are seriously evaluating for an middleware infrastructure, specially if you are considering JBoss for some reason. I would suggest that you keep the following question in mind while you are reading the points: "Why should I choose JBoss instead of WebLogic?" 1) Multi Datacenter Deployment and Clustering - D/R ("Disaster & Recovery") architecture support is embedded on the WebLogic Server 12c product. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no direct D/R support included, Red Hat relies on third-part tools with higher prices. When you consider a middleware solution to host your business critical application, you should worry with every architectural aspect that are related with the solution. Fail-over support is one little aspect of a truly reliable solution. If you do not worry about D/R, your solution will not be reliable. Having said that, with Red Hat and JBoss EAP 6, you have this extra cost that will increase considerably the total cost of ownership of the solution. As we commonly hear from analysts, open-source are not so cheaper when you start seeing the big picture. - WebLogic Server 12c supports advanced LAN clustering, detection of death servers and have a common alert framework. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has limited LAN clustering support with no server death detection. They do not generate any alerts when servers goes down (only if you buy JBoss ON which is a separated technology, but until now does not support JBoss EAP 6) and manual intervention are required when servers goes down. In most cases, admin people must rely on "kill -9", "tail -f someFile.log" and "ps ax | grep java" commands to manage failures and clustering anomalies. - WebLogic Server 12c supports the concept of Node Manager, which is a separated process that runs on the physical | virtual servers that allows extend the administration of the cluster to WebLogic managed servers that are often distributed across multiple machines and geographic locations. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no equivalent technology. Whole server instances must be managed individually. - WebLogic Server 12c Node Manager supports Coherence to boost performance when managing servers. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no similar technology. There is no way to coordinate JBoss and infiniband instances provided by JBoss using high throughput and low latency protocols like InfiniBand. The Node Manager feature also allows another very important feature that JBoss EAP lacks: secure the administration. When using WebLogic Node Manager, all the administration tasks are sent to the managed servers in a secure tunel protected by a certificate, which means that the transport layer that separates the WebLogic administration console from the managed servers are secured by SSL. - WebLogic Server 12c are now integrated with OTD ("Oracle Traffic Director") which is a web server technology derived from the former Sun iPlanet Web Server. This software complements the web server support offered by OHS ("Oracle HTTP Server"). Using OTD, WebLogic instances are load-balanced by a high powerful software that knows how to handle SDP ("Socket Direct Protocol") over InfiniBand, which boost performance when used with engineered systems technologies like Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand only offers support to Apache Web Server with custom modules created to deal with JBoss clusters, but only across standard TCP/IP networks. 2) Application and Runtime Diagnostics - WebLogic Server 12c have diagnostics capabilities embedded on the server called WLDF ("WebLogic Diagnostic Framework") so there is no need to rely on third-part tools. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no diagnostics capabilities. Their only diagnostics tool is the log generated by the application server. Admin people are encouraged to analyse thousands of log lines to find out what is going on. - WebLogic Server 12c complement WLDF with JRockit MC ("Mission Control"), which provides to administrators and developers a complete insight about the JVM performance, behavior and possible bottlenecks. WebLogic Server 12c also have an classloader analysis tool embedded, and even a log analyzer tool that enables administrators and developers to view logs of multiple servers at the same time. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand relies on third-part tools to do something similar. Again, only log searching are offered to find out whats going on. - WebLogic Server 12c offers end-to-end traceability and monitoring available through Oracle EM ("Enterprise Manager"), including monitoring of business transactions that flows through web servers, ESBs, application servers and database servers, all of this with high deep JVM analysis and diagnostics. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand, even using JBoss ON ("Operations Network"), which is a separated technology, does not support those features. Red Hat relies on third-part tools to provide direct Oracle database traceability across JVMs. One of those tools are Oracle EM for non-Oracle middleware that manage JBoss, Tomcat, Websphere and IIS transparently. - WebLogic Server 12c with their JRockit support offers a tool called JRockit Flight Recorder, which can give developers a complete visibility of a certain period of application production monitoring with zero extra overhead. This automatic recording allows you to deep analyse threads latency, memory leaks, thread contention, resource utilization, stack overflow damages and GC ("Garbage Collection") cycles, to observe in real time stop-the-world phenomenons, generational, reference count and parallel collects and mutator threads analysis. JBoss EAP 6 don't even dream to support something similar, even because they don't have their own JVM. 3) Application Server Administration - WebLogic Server 12c offers a complete administration console complemented with scripting and macro-like recording capabilities. A single WebLogic console can managed up to hundreds of WebLogic servers belonging to the same domain. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has a limited console and provides a XML centric administration. JBoss, after ten years, started the development of a rudimentary centralized administration that still leave a lot of administration tasks aside, so admin people and developers must touch scripts and XML configuration files for most advanced and even simple administration tasks. This lead applications to error prone and risky deployments. Even using JBoss ON, JBoss EAP are not able to offer decent administration features for admin people which must be high skilled in JBoss internal architecture and its managing capabilities. - Oracle EM is available to manage multiple domains, databases, application servers, operating systems and virtualization, with a complete end-to-end visibility. JBoss ON does not provide management capabilities across the complete architecture, only basic monitoring. Even deployment must be done aside JBoss ON which does no integrate well with others softwares than JBoss. Until now, JBoss ON does not supports JBoss EAP 6, so even their minimal support for JBoss are not available for JBoss EAP 6 leaving customers uncovered and subject to high skilled JBoss admin people. - WebLogic Server 12c has the same administration model whatever is the topology selected by the customer. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand differentiates between two operational models: standalone-mode and domain-mode, that are not consistent with each other. Depending on the mode used, the administration skill is different. - WebLogic Server 12c has no point-of-failures processes, and it does not need to define any specialized server. Domain model in WebLogic is available for years (at least ten years or more) and is production proven. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand needs special processes to garantee JBoss integrity, the PC ("Process-Controller") and the HC ("Host-Controller"). Different from WebLogic, the domain model in JBoss is quite new (one year at tops) of maturity, and need to mature considerably until start doing things like WebLogic domain model does. - WebLogic Server 12c supports parallel deployment model which enables some artifacts being deployed at the same time. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand does not have any similar feature. Every deployment are done atomically in the containers. This means that if you have a huge EAR (an EAR of 120 MB of size for instance) and deploy onto JBoss EAP 6, this EAR will take some minutes in order to starting accept thread requests. The same EAR deployed onto WebLogic Server 12c will reduce the deployment time at least in 2X compared to JBoss. 4) Support and Upgrades - WebLogic Server 12c has patch management available. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no patch management available, each JBoss EAP instance should be patched manually. To achieve such feature, you need to buy a separated technology called JBoss ON ("Operations Network") that manage this type of stuff. But until now, JBoss ON does not support JBoss EAP 6 so, in practice, JBoss EAP 6 does not have this feature. - WebLogic Server 12c supports previuous WebLogic domains without any reconfiguration since its kernel is robust and mature since its creation in 1995. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has a proven lack of supportability between JBoss AS 4, 5, 6 and 7. Different kernels and messaging engines were implemented in JBoss stack in the last five years reveling their incapacity to create a well architected and proven middleware technology. - WebLogic Server 12c has patch prescription based on customer configuration. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no such capability. People need to create ticket supports and have their installations revised by Red Hat support guys to gain some patch prescription from them. - Oracle WebLogic Server independent of the version has 8 years of support of new patches and has lifetime release of existing patches beyond that. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand provides patches for a specific application server version up to 5 years after the release date. JBoss EAP 4 and previous versions had only 4 years. A good question that Red Hat will argue to answer is: "what happens when you find issues after year 5"? 5) RAC ("Real Application Clusters") Support - WebLogic Server 12c ships with a specific JDBC driver to leverage Oracle RAC clustering capabilities (Fast-Application-Notification, Transaction Affinity, Fast-Connection-Failover, etc). Oracle JDBC thin driver are also available. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand ships only the standard Oracle JDBC thin driver. Load balancing with Oracle RAC are not supported. Manual intervention in case of planned or unplanned RAC downtime are necessary. In JBoss EAP 6, situation does not reestablish automatically after downtime. - WebLogic Server 12c has a feature called Active GridLink for Oracle RAC which provides up to 3X performance on OLTP applications. This seamless integration between WebLogic and Oracle database enable more value added to critical business applications leveraging their investments in Oracle database technology and Oracle middleware. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no performance gains at all, even when admin people implement some kind of connection-pooling tuning. - WebLogic Server 12c also supports transaction and web session affinity to the Oracle RAC, which provides aditional gains of performance. This is particularly interesting if you are creating a reliable solution that are distributed not only in an LAN cluster, but into a different data center. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no such support. 6) Standards and Technology Support - WebLogic Server 12c is fully Java EE 6 compatible and production ready since december of 2011. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand became fully compatible with Java EE 6 only in the community version after three months, and production ready only in a few days considering that this article was written in June of 2012. Red Hat says that they are the masters of innovation and technology proliferation, but compared with Oracle and even other proprietary vendors like IBM, they historically speaking are lazy to deliver the most newest technologies and standards adherence. - Oracle is the steward of Java, driving innovation into the platform from commercial and open-source vendors. Red Hat on the other hand does not have its own JVM and relies on third-part JVMs to complete their application server offer. 95% of Red Hat customers are using Oracle HotSpot as JVM, which means that without Oracle involvement, their support are limited exclusively to the application server layer and we all know that most problems are happens in the JVM layer. - WebLogic Server 12c supports natively JDK 7, which empower developers to explore the maximum of the Java platform productivity when writing code. This feature differentiate WebLogic from others application servers (except GlassFish that are also managed by Oracle) because the usage of JDK 7 introduce such remarkable productivity features like the "try-with-resources" enhancement, catching multiple exceptions with one try block, Strings in the switch statements, JVM improvements in terms of JDBC, I/O, networking, security, concurrency and of course, the most important feature of Java 7: native support for multiple non-Java languages. More features regarding JDK 7 can be found here. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand does not support JDK 7 officially, they comment in their community version that "Java SE 7 can be used with JBoss 7" which does not gives you any guarantees of enterprise support for JDK 7. - Oracle WebLogic Server 12c supports integration with Spring framework allowing Spring applications to use WebLogic special transaction manager, exposing bean interfaces to WebLogic MBeans to take advantage of all WebLogic monitoring and administration advantages. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no special integration with Spring. In fact, Red Hat offers a suspicious package called "JBoss Web Platform" that in theory supports Spring, but in practice this package does not offers any special integration. It is just a facility for Red Hat customers to have support from both JBoss and Spring technology using the same customer support. 7) Lightweight Development - Oracle WebLogic Server 12c and Oracle GlassFish are completely integrated and can share applications without any modifications. Starting with the 12c version, WebLogic now understands natively GlassFish deployment descriptors and specific configurations in order to offer you a truly and reliable migration path from a community Java EE application server to a enterprise middleware product like WebLogic. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no support to natively reuse an existing (or still in development) application from JBoss AS community server. Users of JBoss suffer of critical issues during deployment time that includes: changing the libraries and dependencies of the application, patching the DTD or XSD deployment descriptors, refactoring of the application layers due classloading issues and anomalies, rebuilding of persistence, business and web layers due issues with "usage of the certified version of an certain dependency" or "frameworks that Red Hat potentially does not recommend" etc. If you have the culture or enterprise IT directive of developing Java EE applications using community middleware to in a certain future, transition to enterprise (supported by a vendor) middleware, Oracle WebLogic plus Oracle GlassFish offers you a more sustainable solution. - WebLogic Server 12c has a very light ZIP distribution (less than 165 MB). JBoss EAP 6 ZIP size is around 130 MB, together with JBoss ON you have more 100 MB resulting in a higher download footprint. This is particularly interesting if you plan to use automated setup of application server instances (for example, to rapidly setup a development or staging environment) using Maven or Hudson. - WebLogic Server 12c has a complete integration with Maven allowing developers to setup WebLogic domains with few commands. Tasks like downloading WebLogic, installation, domain creation, data sources deployment are completely integrated. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has a limited offer integration with those tools. - WebLogic Server 12c has a startup mode called WLX that turns-off EJB, JMS and JCA containers leaving enabled only the web container with Java EE 6 web profile. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no such feature, you need to disable manually the containers that you do not want to use. - WebLogic Server 12c supports fastswap, which enables you to change classes without redeployment. This is particularly interesting if you are developing patches for the application that is already deployed and you do not want to redeploy the entire application. This is the same behavior that most application servers offers to JSP pages, but with WebLogic Server 12c, you have the same feature for Java classes in general. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no such support. Even JBoss EAP 5 does not support this until now. 8) JMS and Messaging - WebLogic Server 12c has a proven and high scalable JMS implementation since its initial release in 1995. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has a still immature technology called HornetQ, which was introduced in JBoss EAP 5 replacing everything that was implemented in the previous versions. Red Hat loves to introduce new technologies across JBoss versions, playing around with customers and their investments. And when they are asked about why they have changed the implementation and caused such a mess, their answer is always: "the previous implementation was inadequate and not aligned with the community strategy so we are creating a new a improved one". This Red Hat practice leads to uncomfortable investments that in a near future (sometimes less than a year) will be affected in someway. - WebLogic Server 12c has troubleshooting and monitoring features included on the WebLogic console and WLDF. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no direct monitoring on the console, activity is reflected only on the logs, no debug logs available in case of JMS issues. - WebLogic Server 12c has extremely good performance and scalability. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has a JMS storage mechanism relying on Oracle database or MySQL. This means that if an issue in production happens and Red Hat affirms that an performance issue is happening due to database problems, they will not support you on the performance issue. They will orient you to call Oracle instead. - WebLogic Server 12c supports messaging enterprise features like SAF ("Store and Forward"), Distributed Queues/Topics and Foreign JMS providers support that leverage JMS implementations without compromise developer code making things completely transparent. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand do not even dream to support such features. 9) Caching and Grid - Coherence, which is the leading and most mature data grid technology from Oracle, is available since early 2000 and was integrated with WebLogic in 2009. Coherence and WebLogic clusters can be both managed from WebLogic administrative console. Even Node Manager supports Coherence. JBoss on the other hand discontinued JBoss Cache, which was their caching implementation just like they did with the messaging implementation (JBossMQ) which was a issue for long term customers. JBoss EAP 6 ships InfiniSpan version 1.0 which is immature and lack a proven record of successful cases and reliability. - WebLogic Server 12c has a feature called ActiveCache which uses Coherence to, without any code changes, replicate HTTP sessions from both WebLogic and other application servers like JBoss, Tomcat, Websphere, GlassFish and even Microsoft IIS. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand does have such support and even when they do in the future, they probably will support only their own application server. - Coherence can be used to manage both L1 and L2 cache levels, providing support to Oracle TopLink and others JPA compliant implementations, even Hibernate. JBoss EAP 6 and Infinispan on the other hand supports only Hibernate. And most important of all: Infinispan does not have any successful case of L1 or L2 caching level support using Hibernate, which lead us to reflect about its viability. 10) Performance - WebLogic Server 12c is certified with Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud and can run unchanged applications at this engineered system. This approach can benefit customers from Exalogic optimization's of both kernel and JVM layers to boost performance in terms of 10X for web, OLTP, JMS and grid applications. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no investment on engineered systems: customers do not have the choice to deploy on a Java ultra fast system if their project becomes relevant and performance issues are detected. - WebLogic Server 12c maintains a performance gain across each new release: starting on WebLogic 5.1, the overall performance gain has been close to 4X, which close to a 20% gain release by release. JBoss on the other hand does not provide SPECJAppServer or SPECJEnterprise performance benchmarks. Their so called "performance gains" remains hidden in their customer environments, which lead us to think if it is true or not since we will never get access to those environments. - WebLogic Server 12c has industry performance benchmarks with submissions across platforms and configurations leading SPECJ. Oracle WebLogic leads SPECJAppServer performance in multiple categories, fitting all customer topologies like: dual-node, single-node, multi-node and multi-node with RAC. JBoss... again, does not provide any SPECJAppServer performance benchmarks. - WebLogic Server 12c has a feature called work manager which allows your application to embrace new performance levels based on critical resource utilization of the CPUs usage. Work managers prioritizes work and allocates threads based on an execution model that takes into account administrator-defined parameters and actual run-time performance and throughput. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no compared feature and probably they never will. Not supporting such feature like work managers, JBoss EAP 6 forces admin people and specially developers to uncover performance gains in a intrusive way, rewriting the code and doing performance refactorings. 11) Professional Services Support - WebLogic Server 12c and any other technology sold by Oracle give customers the possibility of hire OCS ("Oracle Consulting Services") to manage critical scenarios, deployment assistance of new applications, high skilled consultancy of architecture, best practices and people allocation together with customer teams. All OCS services are available without any restrictions, having the customer bought software from Oracle or just starting their implementation before any acquisition. JBoss EAP 6 or Red Hat to be more specifically, only offers professional services if you buy subscriptions from them. If you are developing a new critical application for your business and need the help of Red Hat for a serious issue or architecture decision, they will probably say: "OK... I can help you but after you buy subscriptions from me". Red Hat also does not allows their professional services consultants to manage environments that uses community based software. They will probably force you to first buy a subscription, download their "enterprise" version and them, optionally hire their consultants. - Oracle provides you our university to educate your team into our technologies, including of course specialized trainings of WebLogic application server. At any time and location, you can hire Oracle to train your team so you get trustful knowledge according to your specific needs. Certifications for the products are also available if your technical people desire to differentiate themselves as professionals. Red Hat on the other hand have a limited pool of resources to train your team in their technologies. Basically they are selling training and certification for RHEL ("Red Hat Enterprise Linux") but if you demand more specialized training in JBoss middleware, they will probably connect you to some "certified" partner localized training since they are apparently discontinuing their education center, at least here in Brazil. They were not able to reproduce their success with RHEL education to their middleware division since they need first sell the subscriptions to after gives you specialized training. And again, they only offer you specialized training based on their enterprise version (EAP in the case of JBoss) which means that the courses will be a quite outdated. There are reports of developers that took official training's from Red Hat at this year (2012) and in a certain JBoss advanced course, Red Hat supposedly covered JBossMQ as the messaging subsystem, and even the printed material provided was based on JBossMQ since the training was created for JBoss EAP 4.3. 12) Encouraging Transparency without Ulterior Motives - WebLogic Server 12c like any other software from Oracle can be downloaded any time from anywhere, you should only possess an OTN ("Oracle Technology Network") credential and you can download any enterprise software how many times you want. And is not some kind of "trial" version. It is the official binaries that will be running for ever in your data center. Oracle does not encourages the usage of "specific versions" of our software. The binaries you buy from Oracle are the same binaries anyone in the world could download and use for testing and personal education. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand are not available for download unless you buy a subscription and get access to the Red Hat enterprise repositories. If you need to test, learn or just start creating your application using Red Hat's middleware software, you should download it from the community website. You are not allowed to download the enterprise version that, according to Red Hat are more secure, reliable and robust. But no one of us want to start the development of a software with an unsecured, unreliable and not scalable middleware right? So what you do? You are "invited" by Red Hat to buy subscriptions from them to get access to the "cool" version of the software. - WebLogic Server 12c prices are publicly available in the Oracle website. If you want to know right now how much WebLogic will cost to your organization, just click here and get access to our price list. In the case of WebLogic, check out the "US Oracle Technology Commercial Price List". Oracle also encourages you to get in touch with a sales representative to discuss discounts that would make possible the investment into our technology. But you are not required to do this, only if you are interested in buying our technology or maybe you want to discuss some discount scenarios. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand does not have its cost publicly available in Red Hat's website or in any other media, at least is not so easy to get such information. The only link you will possibly find in their website is a "Contact a Sales Representative" link. This is not a very good relationship between an customer and an vendor. This is not an example of transparency, mainly when the software are sold as open. In this situations, customers expects to see the software prices publicly available, so they can have the chance to decide, based on the existing features of the software, if the cost is fair or not. Conclusion Oracle WebLogic is the most mature, secure, reliable and scalable Java EE application server of the market, and have a proven record of success around the globe to prove it's majority. Don't lose the chance to discover today how WebLogic could fit your needs and sustain your global IT middleware strategy, no matter if your strategy are completely based on the Cloud or not.

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Scripting with the Sun ZFS Storage 7000 Appliance

- by Geoff Ongley

The Sun ZFS Storage 7000 appliance has a user friendly and easy to understand graphical web based interface we call the "BUI" or "Browser User Interface".This interface is very useful for many tasks, but in some cases a script (or workflow) may be more appropriate, such as:Repetitive tasksTasks which work on (or obtain information about) a large number of shares or usersTasks which are triggered by an alert threshold (workflows)Tasks where you want a only very basic input, but a consistent output (workflows)The appliance scripting language is based on ECMAscript 3 (close to javascript). I'm not going to cover ECMAscript 3 in great depth (I'm far from an expert here), but I would like to show you some neat things you can do with the appliance, to get you started based on what I have found from my own playing around.I'm making the assumption you have some sort of programming background, and understand variables, arrays, functions to some extent - but of course if something is not clear, please let me know so I can fix it up or clarify it.Variable Declarations and ArraysVariablesECMAScript is a dynamically and weakly typed language. If you don't know what that means, google is your friend - but at a high level it means we can just declare variables with no specific type and on the fly.For example, I can declare a variable and use it straight away in the middle of my code, for example:projects=list();Which makes projects an array of values that are returned from the list(); function (which is usable in most contexts). With this kind of variable, I can do things like:projects.length (this property on array tells you how many objects are in it, good for for loops etc). Alternatively, I could say:projects=3;and now projects is just a simple number.Should we declare variables like this so loosely? In my opinion, the answer is no - I feel it is a better practice to declare variables you are going to use, before you use them - and given them an initial value. You can do so as follows:var myVariable=0;To demonstrate the ability to just randomly assign and change the type of variables, you can create a simple script at the cli as follows (bold for input):fishy10:> script("." to run)> run("cd /");("." to run)> run ("shares");("." to run)> var projects;("." to run)> projects=list();("." to run)> printf("Number of projects is: %d\n",projects.length);("." to run)> projects=152;("." to run)> printf("Value of the projects variable as an integer is now: %d\n",projects);("." to run)> .Number of projects is: 7Value of the projects variable as an integer is now: 152You can also confirm this behaviour by checking the typeof variable we are dealing with:fishy10:> script("." to run)> run("cd /");("." to run)> run ("shares");("." to run)> var projects;("." to run)> projects=list();("." to run)> printf("var projects is of type %s\n",typeof(projects));("." to run)> projects=152;("." to run)> printf("var projects is of type %s\n",typeof(projects));("." to run)> .var projects is of type objectvar projects is of type numberArraysSo you likely noticed that we have already touched on arrays, as the list(); (in the shares context) stored an array into the 'projects' variable.But what if you want to declare your own array? Easy! This is very similar to Java and other languages, we just instantiate a brand new "Array" object using the keyword new:var myArray = new Array();will create an array called "myArray".A quick example:fishy10:> script("." to run)> testArray = new Array();("." to run)> testArray[0]="This";("." to run)> testArray[1]="is";("." to run)> testArray[2]="just";("." to run)> testArray[3]="a";("." to run)> testArray[4]="test";("." to run)> for (i=0; i < testArray.length; i++)("." to run)> {("." to run)> printf("Array element %d is %s\n",i,testArray[i]);("." to run)> }("." to run)> .Array element 0 is ThisArray element 1 is isArray element 2 is justArray element 3 is aArray element 4 is testWorking With LoopsFor LoopFor loops are very similar to those you will see in C, java and several other languages. One of the key differences here is, as you were made aware earlier, we can be a bit more sloppy with our variable declarations.The general way you would likely use a for loop is as follows:for (variable; test-case; modifier for variable){}For example, you may wish to declare a variable i as 0; and a MAX_ITERATIONS variable to determine how many times this loop should repeat:var i=0;var MAX_ITERATIONS=10;And then, use this variable to be tested against some case existing (has i reached MAX_ITERATIONS? - if not, increment i using i++);for (i=0; i < MAX_ITERATIONS; i++){ // some work to do}So lets run something like this on the appliance:fishy10:> script("." to run)> var i=0;("." to run)> var MAX_ITERATIONS=10;("." to run)> for (i=0; i < MAX_ITERATIONS; i++)("." to run)> {("." to run)> printf("The number is %d\n",i);("." to run)> }("." to run)> .The number is 0The number is 1The number is 2The number is 3The number is 4The number is 5The number is 6The number is 7The number is 8The number is 9While LoopWhile loops again are very similar to other languages, we loop "while" a condition is met. For example:fishy10:> script("." to run)> var isTen=false;("." to run)> var counter=0;("." to run)> while(isTen==false)("." to run)> {("." to run)> if (counter==10) ("." to run)> { ("." to run)> isTen=true; ("." to run)> } ("." to run)> printf("Counter is %d\n",counter);("." to run)> counter++; ("." to run)> }("." to run)> printf("Loop has ended and Counter is %d\n",counter);("." to run)> .Counter is 0Counter is 1Counter is 2Counter is 3Counter is 4Counter is 5Counter is 6Counter is 7Counter is 8Counter is 9Counter is 10Loop has ended and Counter is 11So what do we notice here? Something has actually gone wrong - counter will technically be 11 once the loop completes... Why is this?Well, if we have a loop like this, where the 'while' condition that will end the loop may be set based on some other condition(s) existing (such as the counter has reached 10) - we must ensure that we terminate this iteration of the loop when the condition is met - otherwise the rest of the code will be followed which may not be desirable. In other words, like in other languages, we will only ever check the loop condition once we are ready to perform the next iteration, so any other code after we set "isTen" to be true, will still be executed as we can see it was above.We can avoid this by adding a break into our loop once we know we have set the condition - this will stop the rest of the logic being processed in this iteration (and as such, counter will not be incremented). So lets try that again:fishy10:> script("." to run)> var isTen=false;("." to run)> var counter=0;("." to run)> while(isTen==false)("." to run)> {("." to run)> if (counter==10) ("." to run)> { ("." to run)> isTen=true; ("." to run)> break;("." to run)> } ("." to run)> printf("Counter is %d\n",counter);("." to run)> counter++; ("." to run)> }("." to run)> printf("Loop has ended and Counter is %d\n", counter);("." to run)> .Counter is 0Counter is 1Counter is 2Counter is 3Counter is 4Counter is 5Counter is 6Counter is 7Counter is 8Counter is 9Loop has ended and Counter is 10Much better!Methods to Obtain and Manipulate DataGet MethodThe get method allows you to get simple properties from an object, for example a quota from a user. The syntax is fairly simple:var myVariable=get('property');An example of where you may wish to use this, is when you are getting a bunch of information about a user (such as quota information when in a shares context):var users=list();for(k=0; k < users.length; k++){ user=users[k]; run('select ' + user); var username=get('name'); var usage=get('usage'); var quota=get('quota');...Which you can then use to your advantage - to print or manipulate infomation (you could change a user's information with a set method, based on the information returned from the get method). The set method is explained next.Set MethodThe set method can be used in a simple manner, similar to get. The syntax for set is:set('property','value'); // where value is a string, if it was a number, you don't need quotesFor example, we could set the quota on a share as follows (first observing the initial value):fishy10:shares default/test-geoff> script("." to run)> var currentQuota=get('quota');("." to run)> printf("Current Quota is: %s\n",currentQuota);("." to run)> set('quota','30G');("." to run)> run('commit');("." to run)> currentQuota=get('quota');("." to run)> printf("Current Quota is: %s\n",currentQuota);("." to run)> .Current Quota is: 0Current Quota is: 32212254720This shows us using both the get and set methods as can be used in scripts, of course when only setting an individual share, the above is overkill - it would be much easier to set it manually at the cli using 'set quota=3G' and then 'commit'.List MethodThe list method can be very powerful, especially in more complex scripts which iterate over large amounts of data and manipulate it if so desired. The general way you will use list is as follows:var myVar=list();Which will make "myVar" an array, containing all the objects in the relevant context (this could be a list of users, shares, projects, etc). You can then gather or manipulate data very easily.We could list all the shares and mountpoints in a given project for example:fishy10:shares another-project> script("." to run)> var shares=list();("." to run)> for (i=0; i < shares.length; i++)("." to run)> {("." to run)> run('select ' + shares[i]);("." to run)> var mountpoint=get('mountpoint');("." to run)> printf("Share %s discovered, has mountpoint %s\n",shares[i],mountpoint);("." to run)> run('done');("." to run)> }("." to run)> .Share and-another discovered, has mountpoint /export/another-project/and-anotherShare another-share discovered, has mountpoint /export/another-project/another-shareShare bob discovered, has mountpoint /export/another-projectShare more-shares-for-all discovered, has mountpoint /export/another-project/more-shares-for-allShare yep discovered, has mountpoint /export/another-project/yepWriting More Complex and Re-Usable CodeFunctionsThe best way to be able to write more complex code is to use functions to split up repeatable or reusable sections of your code. This also makes your more complex code easier to read and understand for other programmers.We write functions as follows:function functionName(variable1,variable2,...,variableN){}For example, we could have a function that takes a project name as input, and lists shares for that project (assuming we're already in the 'project' context - context is important!):function getShares(proj){ run('select ' + proj); shares=list(); printf("Project: %s\n", proj); for(j=0; j < shares.length; j++) { printf("Discovered share: %s\n",shares[i]); } run('done'); // exit selected project}Commenting your CodeLike any other language, a large part of making it readable and understandable is to comment it. You can use the same comment style as in C and Java amongst other languages.In other words, sngle line comments use://at the beginning of the comment.Multi line comments use:/*at the beginning, and:*/ at the end.For example, here we will use both:fishy10:> script("." to run)> // This is a test comment("." to run)> printf("doing some work...\n");("." to run)> /* This is a multi-line("." to run)> comment which I will span across("." to run)> three lines in total */("." to run)> printf("doing some more work...\n");("." to run)> .doing some work...doing some more work...Your comments do not have to be on their own, they can begin (particularly with single line comments this is handy) at the end of a statement, for examplevar projects=list(); // The variable projects is an array containing all projects on the system.Try and Catch StatementsYou may be used to using try and catch statements in other languages, and they can (and should) be utilised in your code to catch expected or unexpected error conditions, that you do NOT wish to stop your code from executing (if you do not catch these errors, your script will exit!):try{ // do some work}catch(err) // Catch any error that could occur{ // do something here under the error condition}For example, you may wish to only execute some code if a context can be reached. If you can't perform certain actions under certain circumstances, that may be perfectly acceptable.For example if you want to test a condition that only makes sense when looking at a SMB/NFS share, but does not make sense when you hit an iscsi or FC LUN, you don't want to stop all processing of other shares you may not have covered yet.For example we may wish to obtain quota information on all shares for all users on a share (but this makes no sense for a LUN):function getShareQuota(shar) // Get quota for each user of this share{ run('select ' + shar); printf(" SHARE: %s\n", shar); try { run('users'); printf(" %20s %11s %11s %3s\n","Username","Usage(G)","Quota(G)","Quota(%)"); printf(" %20s %11s %11s %4s\n","--------","--------","--------","----"); users=list(); for(k=0; k < users.length; k++) { user=users[k]; getUserQuota(user); } run('done'); // exit user context } catch(err) { printf(" SKIPPING %s - This is NOT a NFS or CIFs share, not looking for users\n", shar); } run('done'); // done with this share}Running Scripts Remotely over SSHAs you have likely noticed, writing and running scripts for all but the simplest jobs directly on the appliance is not going to be a lot of fun.There's a couple of choices on what you can do here:Create scripts on a remote system and run them over sshCreate scripts, wrapping them in workflow code, so they are stored on the appliance and can be triggered under certain circumstances (like a threshold being reached)We'll cover the first one here, and then cover workflows later on (as these are for the most part just scripts with some wrapper information around them).Creating a SSH Public/Private SSH Key PairLog on to your handy Solaris box (You wouldn't be using any other OS, right? :P) and use ssh-keygen to create a pair of ssh keys. I'm storing this separate to my normal key:[geoff@lightning ~] ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 1024Generating public/private rsa key pair.Enter file in which to save the key (/export/home/geoff/.ssh/id_rsa): /export/home/geoff/.ssh/nas_key_rsaEnter passphrase (empty for no passphrase): Enter same passphrase again: Your identification has been saved in /export/home/geoff/.ssh/nas_key_rsa.Your public key has been saved in /export/home/geoff/.ssh/nas_key_rsa.pub.The key fingerprint is:7f:3d:53:f0:2a:5e:8b:2d:94:2a:55:77:66:5c:9b:14 geoff@lightningInstalling the Public Key on the ApplianceOn your Solaris host, observe the public key:[geoff@lightning ~] cat .ssh/nas_key_rsa.pub ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAABIwAAAIEAvYfK3RIaAYmMHBOvyhKM41NaSmcgUMC3igPN5gUKJQvSnYmjuWG6CBr1CkF5UcDji7v19jG3qAD5lAMFn+L0CxgRr8TNaAU+hA4/tpAGkjm+dKYSyJgEdMIURweyyfUFXoerweR8AWW5xlovGKEWZTAfvJX9Zqvh8oMQ5UJLUUc= geoff@lightningNow, copy and paste everything after "ssh-rsa" and before "user@hostname" - in this case, geoff@lightning. That is, this bit:AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAABIwAAAIEAvYfK3RIaAYmMHBOvyhKM41NaSmcgUMC3igPN5gUKJQvSnYmjuWG6CBr1CkF5UcDji7v19jG3qAD5lAMFn+L0CxgRr8TNaAU+hA4/tpAGkjm+dKYSyJgEdMIURweyyfUFXoerweR8AWW5xlovGKEWZTAfvJX9Zqvh8oMQ5UJLUUc=Logon to your appliance and get into the preferences -> keys area for this user (root):[geoff@lightning ~] ssh [email protected]: Last login: Mon Dec 6 17:13:28 2010 from 192.168.0.2fishy10:> configuration usersfishy10:configuration users> select rootfishy10:configuration users root> preferences fishy10:configuration users root preferences> keysOR do it all in one hit:fishy10:> configuration users select root preferences keysNow, we create a new public key that will be accepted for this user and set the type to RSA:fishy10:configuration users root preferences keys> createfishy10:configuration users root preferences key (uncommitted)> set type=RSASet the key itself using the string copied previously (between ssh-rsa and user@host), and set the key ensuring you put double quotes around it (eg. set key="<key>"):fishy10:configuration users root preferences key (uncommitted)> set key="AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAABIwAAAIEAvYfK3RIaAYmMHBOvyhKM41NaSmcgUMC3igPN5gUKJQvSnYmjuWG6CBr1CkF5UcDji7v19jG3qAD5lAMFn+L0CxgRr8TNaAU+hA4/tpAGkjm+dKYSyJgEdMIURweyyfUFXoerweR8AWW5xlovGKEWZTAfvJX9Zqvh8oMQ5UJLUUc="Now set the comment for this key (do not use spaces):fishy10:configuration users root preferences key (uncommitted)> set comment="LightningRSAKey" Commit the new key:fishy10:configuration users root preferences key (uncommitted)> commitVerify the key is there:fishy10:configuration users root preferences keys> lsKeys:NAME MODIFIED TYPE COMMENT key-000 2010-10-25 20:56:42 RSA cycloneRSAKey key-001 2010-12-6 17:44:53 RSA LightningRSAKey As you can see, we now have my new key, and a previous key I have created on this appliance.Running your Script over SSH from a Remote SystemHere I have created a basic test script, and saved it as test.ecma3:[geoff@lightning ~] cat test.ecma3 script// This is a test script, By Geoff Ongley 2010.printf("Testing script remotely over ssh\n");.Now, we can run this script remotely with our keyless login:[geoff@lightning ~] ssh -i .ssh/nas_key_rsa root@fishy10 < test.ecma3Pseudo-terminal will not be allocated because stdin is not a terminal.Testing script remotely over sshPutting it Together - An Example Completed Quota Gathering ScriptSo now we have a lot of the basics to creating a script, let us do something useful, like, find out how much every user is using, on every share on the system (you will recognise some of the code from my previous examples): script/************************************** Quick and Dirty Quota Check script ** Written By Geoff Ongley ** 25 October 2010 **************************************/function getUserQuota(usr){ run('select ' + usr); var username=get('name'); var usage=get('usage'); var quota=get('quota'); var usage_g=usage / 1073741824; // convert bytes to gigabytes var quota_g=quota / 1073741824; // as above var quota_percent=0 if (quota > 0) { quota_percent=(usage / quota)*(100/1); } printf(" %20s %8.2f %8.2f %d%%\n",username,usage_g,quota_g,quota_percent); run('done'); // done with this selected user}function getShareQuota(shar){ //printf("DEBUG: selecting share %s\n", shar); run('select ' + shar); printf(" SHARE: %s\n", shar); try { run('users'); printf(" %20s %11s %11s %3s\n","Username","Usage(G)","Quota(G)","Quota(%)"); printf(" %20s %11s %11s %4s\n","--------","--------","--------","--------"); users=list(); for(k=0; k < users.length; k++) { user=users[k]; getUserQuota(user); } run('done'); // exit user context } catch(err) { printf(" SKIPPING %s - This is NOT a NFS or CIFs share, not looking for users\n", shar); } run('done'); // done with this share}function getShares(proj){ //printf("DEBUG: selecting project %s\n",proj); run('select ' + proj); shares=list(); printf("Project: %s\n", proj); for(j=0; j < shares.length; j++) { share=shares[j]; getShareQuota(share); } run('done'); // exit selected project}function getProjects(){ run('cd /'); run('shares'); projects=list(); for (i=0; i < projects.length; i++) { var project=projects[i]; getShares(project); } run('done'); // exit context for all projects}getProjects();.Which can be run as follows, and will print information like this:[geoff@lightning ~/FISHWORKS_SCRIPTS] ssh -i ~/.ssh/nas_key_rsa root@fishy10 < get_quota_utilisation.ecma3Pseudo-terminal will not be allocated because stdin is not a terminal.Project: another-project SHARE: and-another Username Usage(G) Quota(G) Quota(%) -------- -------- -------- -------- nobody 0.00 0.00 0% geoffro 0.05 0.00 0% Billy 0.10 0.00 0% root 0.00 0.00 0% testing-user 0.05 0.00 0% SHARE: another-share Username Usage(G) Quota(G) Quota(%) -------- -------- -------- -------- root 0.00 0.00 0% nobody 0.00 0.00 0% geoffro 0.05 0.49 9% testing-user 0.05 0.02 249% Billy 0.10 0.29 33% SHARE: bob Username Usage(G) Quota(G) Quota(%) -------- -------- -------- -------- nobody 0.00 0.00 0% root 0.00 0.00 0% SHARE: more-shares-for-all Username Usage(G) Quota(G) Quota(%) -------- -------- -------- -------- Billy 0.10 0.00 0% testing-user 0.05 0.00 0% nobody 0.00 0.00 0% root 0.00 0.00 0% geoffro 0.05 0.00 0% SHARE: yep Username Usage(G) Quota(G) Quota(%) -------- -------- -------- -------- root 0.00 0.00 0% nobody 0.00 0.00 0% Billy 0.10 0.01 999% testing-user 0.05 0.49 9% geoffro 0.05 0.00 0%Project: default SHARE: Test-LUN SKIPPING Test-LUN - This is NOT a NFS or CIFs share, not looking for users SHARE: test-geoff Username Usage(G) Quota(G) Quota(%) -------- -------- -------- -------- geoffro 0.05 0.00 0% root 3.18 10.00 31% uucp 0.00 0.00 0% nobody 0.59 0.49 119%^CKilled by signal 2.Creating a WorkflowWorkflows are scripts that we store on the appliance, and can have the script execute either on request (even from the BUI), or on an event such as a threshold being met.Workflow BasicsA workflow allows you to create a simple process that can be executed either via the BUI interface interactively, or by an alert being raised (for some threshold being reached, for example).The basics parameters you will have to set for your "workflow object" (notice you're creating a variable, that embodies ECMAScript) are as follows (parameters is optional):name: A name for this workflowdescription: A Description for the workflowparameters: A set of input parameters (useful when you need user input to execute the workflow)execute: The code, the script itself to execute, which will be function (parameters)With parameters, you can specify things like this (slightly modified sample taken from the System Administration Guide): ...parameters: variableParam1: { label: 'Name of Share', type: 'String' }, variableParam2 { label: 'Share Size', type: 'size' },execute: ....}; Note the commas separating the sections of name, parameters, execute, and so on. This is important!Also - there is plenty of properties you can set on the parameters for your workflow, these are described in the Sun ZFS Storage System Administration Guide.Creating a Basic Workflow from a Basic ScriptTo make a basic script into a basic workflow, you need to wrap the following around your script to create a 'workflow' object:var workflow = {name: 'Get User Quotas',description: 'Displays Quota Utilisation for each user on each share',execute: function() {// (basic script goes here, minus the "script" at the beginning, and "." at the end)}};However, it appears (at least in my experience to date) that the workflow object may only be happy with one function in the execute parameter - either that or I'm doing something wrong. As far as I can tell, after execute: you should only have a basic one function context like so:execute: function(){}To deal with this, and to give an example similar to our script earlier, I have created another simple quota check, to show the same basic functionality, but in a workflow format:var workflow = {name: 'Get User Quotas',description: 'Displays Quota Utilisation for each user on each share',execute: function () { run('cd /'); run('shares'); projects=list(); for (i=0; i < projects.length; i++) { run('select ' + projects[i]); shares=list('filesystem'); printf("Project: %s\n", projects[i]); for(j=0; j < shares.length; j++) { run('select ' +shares[j]); try { run('users'); printf(" SHARE: %s\n", shares[j]); printf(" %20s %11s %11s %3s\n","Username","Usage(G)","Quota(G)","Quota(%)"); printf(" %20s %11s %11s %4s\n","--------","--------","--------","-------"); users=list(); for(k=0; k < users.length; k++) { run('select ' + users[k]); username=get('name'); usage=get('usage'); quota=get('quota'); usage_g=usage / 1073741824; // convert bytes to gigabytes quota_g=quota / 1073741824; // as above quota_percent=0 if (quota > 0) { quota_percent=(usage / quota)*(100/1); } printf(" %20s %8.2f %8.2f %d%%\n",username,usage_g,quota_g,quota_percent); run('done'); } run('done'); // exit user context } catch(err) { // printf(" %s is a LUN, Not looking for users\n", shares[j]); } run('done'); // exit selected share context } run('done'); // exit project context } }};SummaryThe Sun ZFS Storage 7000 Appliance offers lots of different and interesting features to Sun/Oracle customers, including the world renowned Analytics. Hopefully the above will help you to think of new creative things you could be doing by taking advantage of one of the other neat features, the internal scripting engine!Some references are below to help you continue learning more, I'll update this post as I do the same! Enjoy...More information on ECMAScript 3A complete reference to ECMAScript 3 which will help you learn more of the details you may be interested in, can be found here:http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST-ARCH/ECMA-262,%203rd%20edition,%20December%201999.pdfMore Information on Administering the Sun ZFS Storage 7000The Sun ZFS Storage 7000 System Administration guide can be a useful reference point, and can be found here:http://wikis.sun.com/download/attachments/186238602/2010_Q3_2_ADMIN.pdf

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256 Windows Azure Worker Roles, Windows Kinect and a 90's Text-Based Ray-Tracer

- by Alan Smith

For a couple of years I have been demoing a simple render farm hosted in Windows Azure using worker roles and the Azure Storage service. At the start of the presentation I deploy an Azure application that uses 16 worker roles to render a 1,500 frame 3D ray-traced animation. At the end of the presentation, when the animation was complete, I would play the animation delete the Azure deployment. The standing joke with the audience was that it was that it was a “$2 demo”, as the compute charges for running the 16 instances for an hour was $1.92, factor in the bandwidth charges and it’s a couple of dollars. The point of the demo is that it highlights one of the great benefits of cloud computing, you pay for what you use, and if you need massive compute power for a short period of time using Windows Azure can work out very cost effective. The “$2 demo” was great for presenting at user groups and conferences in that it could be deployed to Azure, used to render an animation, and then removed in a one hour session. I have always had the idea of doing something a bit more impressive with the demo, and scaling it from a “$2 demo” to a “$30 demo”. The challenge was to create a visually appealing animation in high definition format and keep the demo time down to one hour. This article will take a run through how I achieved this. Ray Tracing Ray tracing, a technique for generating high quality photorealistic images, gained popularity in the 90’s with companies like Pixar creating feature length computer animations, and also the emergence of shareware text-based ray tracers that could run on a home PC. In order to render a ray traced image, the ray of light that would pass from the view point must be tracked until it intersects with an object. At the intersection, the color, reflectiveness, transparency, and refractive index of the object are used to calculate if the ray will be reflected or refracted. Each pixel may require thousands of calculations to determine what color it will be in the rendered image. Pin-Board Toys Having very little artistic talent and a basic understanding of maths I decided to focus on an animation that could be modeled fairly easily and would look visually impressive. I’ve always liked the pin-board desktop toys that become popular in the 80’s and when I was working as a 3D animator back in the 90’s I always had the idea of creating a 3D ray-traced animation of a pin-board, but never found the energy to do it. Even if I had a go at it, the render time to produce an animation that would look respectable on a 486 would have been measured in months. PolyRay Back in 1995 I landed my first real job, after spending three years being a beach-ski-climbing-paragliding-bum, and was employed to create 3D ray-traced animations for a CD-ROM that school kids would use to learn physics. I had got into the strange and wonderful world of text-based ray tracing, and was using a shareware ray-tracer called PolyRay. PolyRay takes a text file describing a scene as input and, after a few hours processing on a 486, produced a high quality ray-traced image. The following is an example of a basic PolyRay scene file. background Midnight_Blue static define matte surface { ambient 0.1 diffuse 0.7 } define matte_white texture { matte { color white } } define matte_black texture { matte { color dark_slate_gray } } define position_cylindrical 3 define lookup_sawtooth 1 define light_wood <0.6, 0.24, 0.1> define median_wood <0.3, 0.12, 0.03> define dark_wood <0.05, 0.01, 0.005> define wooden texture { noise surface { ambient 0.2 diffuse 0.7 specular white, 0.5 microfacet Reitz 10 position_fn position_cylindrical position_scale 1 lookup_fn lookup_sawtooth octaves 1 turbulence 1 color_map( [0.0, 0.2, light_wood, light_wood] [0.2, 0.3, light_wood, median_wood] [0.3, 0.4, median_wood, light_wood] [0.4, 0.7, light_wood, light_wood] [0.7, 0.8, light_wood, median_wood] [0.8, 0.9, median_wood, light_wood] [0.9, 1.0, light_wood, dark_wood]) } } define glass texture { surface { ambient 0 diffuse 0 specular 0.2 reflection white, 0.1 transmission white, 1, 1.5 }} define shiny surface { ambient 0.1 diffuse 0.6 specular white, 0.6 microfacet Phong 7 } define steely_blue texture { shiny { color black } } define chrome texture { surface { color white ambient 0.0 diffuse 0.2 specular 0.4 microfacet Phong 10 reflection 0.8 } } viewpoint { from <4.000, -1.000, 1.000> at <0.000, 0.000, 0.000> up <0, 1, 0> angle 60 resolution 640, 480 aspect 1.6 image_format 0 } light <-10, 30, 20> light <-10, 30, -20> object { disc <0, -2, 0>, <0, 1, 0>, 30 wooden } object { sphere <0.000, 0.000, 0.000>, 1.00 chrome } object { cylinder <0.000, 0.000, 0.000>, <0.000, 0.000, -4.000>, 0.50 chrome } After setting up the background and defining colors and textures, the viewpoint is specified. The “camera” is located at a point in 3D space, and it looks towards another point. The angle, image resolution, and aspect ratio are specified. Two lights are present in the image at defined coordinates. The three objects in the image are a wooden disc to represent a table top, and a sphere and cylinder that intersect to form a pin that will be used for the pin board toy in the final animation. When the image is rendered, the following image is produced. The pins are modeled with a chrome surface, so they reflect the environment around them. Note that the scale of the pin shaft is not correct, this will be fixed later. Modeling the Pin Board The frame of the pin-board is made up of three boxes, and six cylinders, the front box is modeled using a clear, slightly reflective solid, with the same refractive index of glass. The other shapes are modeled as metal. object { box <-5.5, -1.5, 1>, <5.5, 5.5, 1.2> glass } object { box <-5.5, -1.5, -0.04>, <5.5, 5.5, -0.09> steely_blue } object { box <-5.5, -1.5, -0.52>, <5.5, 5.5, -0.59> steely_blue } object { cylinder <-5.2, -1.2, 1.4>, <-5.2, -1.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <5.2, -1.2, 1.4>, <5.2, -1.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <-5.2, 5.2, 1.4>, <-5.2, 5.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <5.2, 5.2, 1.4>, <5.2, 5.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <0, -1.2, 1.4>, <0, -1.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <0, 5.2, 1.4>, <0, 5.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } In order to create the matrix of pins that make up the pin board I used a basic console application with a few nested loops to create two intersecting matrixes of pins, which models the layout used in the pin boards. The resulting image is shown below. The pin board contains 11,481 pins, with the scene file containing 23,709 lines of code. For the complete animation 2,000 scene files will be created, which is over 47 million lines of code. Each pin in the pin-board will slide out a specific distance when an object is pressed into the back of the board. This is easily modeled by setting the Z coordinate of the pin to a specific value. In order to set all of the pins in the pin-board to the correct position, a bitmap image can be used. The position of the pin can be set based on the color of the pixel at the appropriate position in the image. When the Windows Azure logo is used to set the Z coordinate of the pins, the following image is generated. The challenge now was to make a cool animation. The Azure Logo is fine, but it is static. Using a normal video to animate the pins would not work; the colors in the video would not be the same as the depth of the objects from the camera. In order to simulate the pin board accurately a series of frames from a depth camera could be used. Windows Kinect The Kenect controllers for the X-Box 360 and Windows feature a depth camera. The Kinect SDK for Windows provides a programming interface for Kenect, providing easy access for .NET developers to the Kinect sensors. The Kinect Explorer provided with the Kinect SDK is a great starting point for exploring Kinect from a developers perspective. Both the X-Box 360 Kinect and the Windows Kinect will work with the Kinect SDK, the Windows Kinect is required for commercial applications, but the X-Box Kinect can be used for hobby projects. The Windows Kinect has the advantage of providing a mode to allow depth capture with objects closer to the camera, which makes for a more accurate depth image for setting the pin positions. Creating a Depth Field Animation The depth field animation used to set the positions of the pin in the pin board was created using a modified version of the Kinect Explorer sample application. In order to simulate the pin board accurately, a small section of the depth range from the depth sensor will be used. Any part of the object in front of the depth range will result in a white pixel; anything behind the depth range will be black. Within the depth range the pixels in the image will be set to RGB values from 0,0,0 to 255,255,255. A screen shot of the modified Kinect Explorer application is shown below. The Kinect Explorer sample application was modified to include slider controls that are used to set the depth range that forms the image from the depth stream. This allows the fine tuning of the depth image that is required for simulating the position of the pins in the pin board. The Kinect Explorer was also modified to record a series of images from the depth camera and save them as a sequence JPEG files that will be used to animate the pins in the animation the Start and Stop buttons are used to start and stop the image recording. En example of one of the depth images is shown below. Once a series of 2,000 depth images has been captured, the task of creating the animation can begin. Rendering a Test Frame In order to test the creation of frames and get an approximation of the time required to render each frame a test frame was rendered on-premise using PolyRay. The output of the rendering process is shown below. The test frame contained 23,629 primitive shapes, most of which are the spheres and cylinders that are used for the 11,800 or so pins in the pin board. The 1280x720 image contains 921,600 pixels, but as anti-aliasing was used the number of rays that were calculated was 4,235,777, with 3,478,754,073 object boundaries checked. The test frame of the pin board with the depth field image applied is shown below. The tracing time for the test frame was 4 minutes 27 seconds, which means rendering the2,000 frames in the animation would take over 148 hours, or a little over 6 days. Although this is much faster that an old 486, waiting almost a week to see the results of an animation would make it challenging for animators to create, view, and refine their animations. It would be much better if the animation could be rendered in less than one hour. Windows Azure Worker Roles The cost of creating an on-premise render farm to render animations increases in proportion to the number of servers. The table below shows the cost of servers for creating a render farm, assuming a cost of $500 per server. Number of Servers Cost 1 $500 16 $8,000 256 $128,000 As well as the cost of the servers, there would be additional costs for networking, racks etc. Hosting an environment of 256 servers on-premise would require a server room with cooling, and some pretty hefty power cabling. The Windows Azure compute services provide worker roles, which are ideal for performing processor intensive compute tasks. With the scalability available in Windows Azure a job that takes 256 hours to complete could be perfumed using different numbers of worker roles. The time and cost of using 1, 16 or 256 worker roles is shown below. Number of Worker Roles Render Time Cost 1 256 hours $30.72 16 16 hours $30.72 256 1 hour $30.72 Using worker roles in Windows Azure provides the same cost for the 256 hour job, irrespective of the number of worker roles used. Provided the compute task can be broken down into many small units, and the worker role compute power can be used effectively, it makes sense to scale the application so that the task is completed quickly, making the results available in a timely fashion. The task of rendering 2,000 frames in an animation is one that can easily be broken down into 2,000 individual pieces, which can be performed by a number of worker roles. Creating a Render Farm in Windows Azure The architecture of the render farm is shown in the following diagram. The render farm is a hybrid application with the following components: · On-Premise o Windows Kinect – Used combined with the Kinect Explorer to create a stream of depth images. o Animation Creator – This application uses the depth images from the Kinect sensor to create scene description files for PolyRay. These files are then uploaded to the jobs blob container, and job messages added to the jobs queue. o Process Monitor – This application queries the role instance lifecycle table and displays statistics about the render farm environment and render process. o Image Downloader – This application polls the image queue and downloads the rendered animation files once they are complete. · Windows Azure o Azure Storage – Queues and blobs are used for the scene description files and completed frames. A table is used to store the statistics about the rendering environment. The architecture of each worker role is shown below. The worker role is configured to use local storage, which provides file storage on the worker role instance that can be use by the applications to render the image and transform the format of the image. The service definition for the worker role with the local storage configuration highlighted is shown below. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceDefinition name="CloudRay" > <WorkerRole name="CloudRayWorkerRole" vmsize="Small"> <Imports> </Imports> <ConfigurationSettings> <Setting name="DataConnectionString" /> </ConfigurationSettings> <LocalResources> <LocalStorage name="RayFolder" cleanOnRoleRecycle="true" /> </LocalResources> </WorkerRole> </ServiceDefinition> The two executable programs, PolyRay.exe and DTA.exe are included in the Azure project, with Copy Always set as the property. PolyRay will take the scene description file and render it to a Truevision TGA file. As the TGA format has not seen much use since the mid 90’s it is converted to a JPG image using Dave's Targa Animator, another shareware application from the 90’s. Each worker roll will use the following process to render the animation frames. 1. The worker process polls the job queue, if a job is available the scene description file is downloaded from blob storage to local storage. 2. PolyRay.exe is started in a process with the appropriate command line arguments to render the image as a TGA file. 3. DTA.exe is started in a process with the appropriate command line arguments convert the TGA file to a JPG file. 4. The JPG file is uploaded from local storage to the images blob container. 5. A message is placed on the images queue to indicate a new image is available for download. 6. The job message is deleted from the job queue. 7. The role instance lifecycle table is updated with statistics on the number of frames rendered by the worker role instance, and the CPU time used. The code for this is shown below. public override void Run() { // Set environment variables string polyRayPath = Path.Combine(Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("RoleRoot"), PolyRayLocation); string dtaPath = Path.Combine(Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("RoleRoot"), DTALocation); LocalResource rayStorage = RoleEnvironment.GetLocalResource("RayFolder"); string localStorageRootPath = rayStorage.RootPath; JobQueue jobQueue = new JobQueue("renderjobs"); JobQueue downloadQueue = new JobQueue("renderimagedownloadjobs"); CloudRayBlob sceneBlob = new CloudRayBlob("scenes"); CloudRayBlob imageBlob = new CloudRayBlob("images"); RoleLifecycleDataSource roleLifecycleDataSource = new RoleLifecycleDataSource(); Frames = 0; while (true) { // Get the render job from the queue CloudQueueMessage jobMsg = jobQueue.Get(); if (jobMsg != null) { // Get the file details string sceneFile = jobMsg.AsString; string tgaFile = sceneFile.Replace(".pi", ".tga"); string jpgFile = sceneFile.Replace(".pi", ".jpg"); string sceneFilePath = Path.Combine(localStorageRootPath, sceneFile); string tgaFilePath = Path.Combine(localStorageRootPath, tgaFile); string jpgFilePath = Path.Combine(localStorageRootPath, jpgFile); // Copy the scene file to local storage sceneBlob.DownloadFile(sceneFilePath); // Run the ray tracer. string polyrayArguments = string.Format("\"{0}\" -o \"{1}\" -a 2", sceneFilePath, tgaFilePath); Process polyRayProcess = new Process(); polyRayProcess.StartInfo.FileName = Path.Combine(Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("RoleRoot"), polyRayPath); polyRayProcess.StartInfo.Arguments = polyrayArguments; polyRayProcess.Start(); polyRayProcess.WaitForExit(); // Convert the image string dtaArguments = string.Format(" {0} /FJ /P{1}", tgaFilePath, Path.GetDirectoryName (jpgFilePath)); Process dtaProcess = new Process(); dtaProcess.StartInfo.FileName = Path.Combine(Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("RoleRoot"), dtaPath); dtaProcess.StartInfo.Arguments = dtaArguments; dtaProcess.Start(); dtaProcess.WaitForExit(); // Upload the image to blob storage imageBlob.UploadFile(jpgFilePath); // Add a download job. downloadQueue.Add(jpgFile); // Delete the render job message jobQueue.Delete(jobMsg); Frames++; } else { Thread.Sleep(1000); } // Log the worker role activity. roleLifecycleDataSource.Alive ("CloudRayWorker", RoleLifecycleDataSource.RoleLifecycleId, Frames); } } Monitoring Worker Role Instance Lifecycle In order to get more accurate statistics about the lifecycle of the worker role instances used to render the animation data was tracked in an Azure storage table. The following class was used to track the worker role lifecycles in Azure storage. public class RoleLifecycle : TableServiceEntity { public string ServerName { get; set; } public string Status { get; set; } public DateTime StartTime { get; set; } public DateTime EndTime { get; set; } public long SecondsRunning { get; set; } public DateTime LastActiveTime { get; set; } public int Frames { get; set; } public string Comment { get; set; } public RoleLifecycle() { } public RoleLifecycle(string roleName) { PartitionKey = roleName; RowKey = Utils.GetAscendingRowKey(); Status = "Started"; StartTime = DateTime.UtcNow; LastActiveTime = StartTime; EndTime = StartTime; SecondsRunning = 0; Frames = 0; } } A new instance of this class is created and added to the storage table when the role starts. It is then updated each time the worker renders a frame to record the total number of frames rendered and the total processing time. These statistics are used be the monitoring application to determine the effectiveness of use of resources in the render farm. Rendering the Animation The Azure solution was deployed to Windows Azure with the service configuration set to 16 worker role instances. This allows for the application to be tested in the cloud environment, and the performance of the application determined. When I demo the application at conferences and user groups I often start with 16 instances, and then scale up the application to the full 256 instances. The configuration to run 16 instances is shown below. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceConfiguration serviceName="CloudRay" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceConfiguration" osFamily="1" osVersion="*"> <Role name="CloudRayWorkerRole"> <Instances count="16" /> <ConfigurationSettings> <Setting name="DataConnectionString" value="DefaultEndpointsProtocol=https;AccountName=cloudraydata;AccountKey=..." /> </ConfigurationSettings> </Role> </ServiceConfiguration> About six minutes after deploying the application the first worker roles become active and start to render the first frames of the animation. The CloudRay Monitor application displays an icon for each worker role instance, with a number indicating the number of frames that the worker role has rendered. The statistics on the left show the number of active worker roles and statistics about the render process. The render time is the time since the first worker role became active; the CPU time is the total amount of processing time used by all worker role instances to render the frames. Five minutes after the first worker role became active the last of the 16 worker roles activated. By this time the first seven worker roles had each rendered one frame of the animation. With 16 worker roles u and running it can be seen that one hour and 45 minutes CPU time has been used to render 32 frames with a render time of just under 10 minutes. At this rate it would take over 10 hours to render the 2,000 frames of the full animation. In order to complete the animation in under an hour more processing power will be required. Scaling the render farm from 16 instances to 256 instances is easy using the new management portal. The slider is set to 256 instances, and the configuration saved. We do not need to re-deploy the application, and the 16 instances that are up and running will not be affected. Alternatively, the configuration file for the Azure service could be modified to specify 256 instances. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceConfiguration serviceName="CloudRay" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceConfiguration" osFamily="1" osVersion="*"> <Role name="CloudRayWorkerRole"> <Instances count="256" /> <ConfigurationSettings> <Setting name="DataConnectionString" value="DefaultEndpointsProtocol=https;AccountName=cloudraydata;AccountKey=..." /> </ConfigurationSettings> </Role> </ServiceConfiguration> Six minutes after the new configuration has been applied 75 new worker roles have activated and are processing their first frames. Five minutes later the full configuration of 256 worker roles is up and running. We can see that the average rate of frame rendering has increased from 3 to 12 frames per minute, and that over 17 hours of CPU time has been utilized in 23 minutes. In this test the time to provision 140 worker roles was about 11 minutes, which works out at about one every five seconds. We are now half way through the rendering, with 1,000 frames complete. This has utilized just under three days of CPU time in a little over 35 minutes. The animation is now complete, with 2,000 frames rendered in a little over 52 minutes. The CPU time used by the 256 worker roles is 6 days, 7 hours and 22 minutes with an average frame rate of 38 frames per minute. The rendering of the last 1,000 frames took 16 minutes 27 seconds, which works out at a rendering rate of 60 frames per minute. The frame counts in the server instances indicate that the use of a queue to distribute the workload has been very effective in distributing the load across the 256 worker role instances. The first 16 instances that were deployed first have rendered between 11 and 13 frames each, whilst the 240 instances that were added when the application was scaled have rendered between 6 and 9 frames each. Completed Animation I’ve uploaded the completed animation to YouTube, a low resolution preview is shown below. Pin Board Animation Created using Windows Kinect and 256 Windows Azure Worker Roles The animation can be viewed in 1280x720 resolution at the following link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5jy6bvSxWc Effective Use of Resources According to the CloudRay monitor statistics the animation took 6 days, 7 hours and 22 minutes CPU to render, this works out at 152 hours of compute time, rounded up to the nearest hour. As the usage for the worker role instances are billed for the full hour, it may have been possible to render the animation using fewer than 256 worker roles. When deciding the optimal usage of resources, the time required to provision and start the worker roles must also be considered. In the demo I started with 16 worker roles, and then scaled the application to 256 worker roles. It would have been more optimal to start the application with maybe 200 worker roles, and utilized the full hour that I was being billed for. This would, however, have prevented showing the ease of scalability of the application. The new management portal displays the CPU usage across the worker roles in the deployment. The average CPU usage across all instances is 93.27%, with over 99% used when all the instances are up and running. This shows that the worker role resources are being used very effectively. Grid Computing Scenarios Although I am using this scenario for a hobby project, there are many scenarios where a large amount of compute power is required for a short period of time. Windows Azure provides a great platform for developing these types of grid computing applications, and can work out very cost effective. · Windows Azure can provide massive compute power, on demand, in a matter of minutes. · The use of queues to manage the load balancing of jobs between role instances is a simple and effective solution. · Using a cloud-computing platform like Windows Azure allows proof-of-concept scenarios to be tested and evaluated on a very low budget. · No charges for inbound data transfer makes the uploading of large data sets to Windows Azure Storage services cost effective. (Transaction charges still apply.) Tips for using Windows Azure for Grid Computing Scenarios I found the implementation of a render farm using Windows Azure a fairly simple scenario to implement. I was impressed by ease of scalability that Azure provides, and by the short time that the application took to scale from 16 to 256 worker role instances. In this case it was around 13 minutes, in other tests it took between 10 and 20 minutes. The following tips may be useful when implementing a grid computing project in Windows Azure. · Using an Azure Storage queue to load-balance the units of work across multiple worker roles is simple and very effective. The design I have used in this scenario could easily scale to many thousands of worker role instances. · Windows Azure accounts are typically limited to 20 cores. If you need to use more than this, a call to support and a credit card check will be required. · Be aware of how the billing model works. You will be charged for worker role instances for the full clock our in which the instance is deployed. Schedule the workload to start just after the clock hour has started. · Monitor the utilization of the resources you are provisioning, ensure that you are not paying for worker roles that are idle. · If you are deploying third party applications to worker roles, you may well run into licensing issues. Purchasing software licenses on a per-processor basis when using hundreds of processors for a short time period would not be cost effective. · Third party software may also require installation onto the worker roles, which can be accomplished using start-up tasks. Bear in mind that adding a startup task and possible re-boot will add to the time required for the worker role instance to start and activate. An alternative may be to use a prepared VM and use VM roles. · Consider using the Windows Azure Autoscaling Application Block (WASABi) to autoscale the worker roles in your application. When using a large number of worker roles, the utilization must be carefully monitored, if the scaling algorithms are not optimal it could get very expensive!

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Data Modeling: Logical Modeling Exercise

- by swisscheese

In trying to learn the art of data storage I have been trying to take in as much solid information as possible. PerformanceDBA posted some really helpful tutorials/examples in the following posts among others: is my data normalized? and Relational table naming convention. I already asked a subset question of this model here. So to make sure I understood the concepts he presented and I have seen elsewhere I wanted to take things a step or two further and see if I am grasping the concepts. Hence the purpose of this post, which hopefully others can also learn from. Everything I present is conceptual to me and for learning rather than applying it in some production system. It would be cool to get some input from PerformanceDBA also since I used his models to get started, but I appreciate all input given from anyone. As I am new to databases and especially modeling I will be the first to admit that I may not always ask the right questions, explain my thoughts clearly, or use the right verbage due to lack of expertise on the subject. So please keep that in mind and feel free to steer me in the right direction if I head off track. If there is enough interest in this I would like to take this from the logical to physical phases to show the evolution of the process and share it here on Stack. I will keep this thread for the Logical Diagram though and start new one for the additional steps. For my understanding I will be building a MySQL DB in the end to run some tests and see if what I came up with actually works. Here is the list of things that I want to capture in this conceptual model. Edit for V1.2 The purpose of this is to list Bands, their members, and the Events that they will be appearing at, as well as offer music and other merchandise for sale Members will be able to match up with friends Members can write reviews on the Bands, their music, and their events. There can only be one review per member on a given item, although they can edit their reviews and history will be maintained. BandMembers will have the chance to write a single Comment on Reviews about the Band they are associated with. Collectively as a Band only one Comment is allowed per Review. Members can then rate all Reviews and Comments but only once per given instance Members can select their favorite Bands, music, Merchandise, and Events Bands, Songs, and Events will be categorized into the type of Genre that they are and then further subcategorized into a SubGenre if necessary. It is ok for a Band or Event to fall into more then one Genre/SubGenre combination. Event date, time, and location will be posted for a given band and members can show that they will be attending the Event. An Event can be comprised of more than one Band, and multiple Events can take place at a single location on the same day Every party will be tied to at least one address and address history shall be maintained. Each party could also be tied to more then one address at a time (i.e. billing, shipping, physical) There will be stored profiles for Bands, BandMembers, and general members. So there it is, maybe a bit involved but could be a great learning tool for many hopefully as the process evolves and input is given by the community. Any input? EDIT v1.1 In response to PerformanceDBA U.3) That means no merchandise other than Band merchandise in the database. Correct ? That was my original thought but you got me thinking. Maybe the site would want to sell its own merchandise or even other merchandise from the bands. Not sure a mod to make for that. Would it require an entire rework of the Catalog section or just the identifying relationship that exists with the Band? Attempted a mod to sell both complete albums or song. Either way they would both be in electronic format only available for download. That is why I listed an Album as being comprised of Songs rather then 2 separate entities. U.5) I understand what you bring up about the circular relation with Favorite. I would like to get to this “It is either one Entity with some form of differentiation (FavoriteType) which identifies its treatment” but how to is not clear to me. What am I missing here? u.6) “Business Rules This is probably the only area you are weak in.” Thanks for the honest response. I will readdress these but I hope to clear up some confusion in my head first with the responses I have posted back to you. Q.1) Yes I would like to have Accepted, Rejected, and Blocked. I am not sure what you are referring to as to how this would change the logical model? Q.2) A person does not have to be a User. They can exist only as a BandMember. Is that what you are asking? Minor Issue Zero, One, or More…Oops I admit I forgot to give this attention when building the model. I am submitting this version as is and will address in a future version. I need to read up more on Constraint Checking to make sure I am understanding things. M.4) Depends if you envision OrderPurchase in the future. Can you expand as to what you mean here? EDIT V1.2 In response to PerformanceDBA input... Lessons learned. I was mixing the concept of Identifying / Non-Identifying and Cardinality (i.e. Genre / SubGenre), and doing so inconsistently to make things worse. Associative Tables are not required in Logical Diagrams as their many-to-many relationships can be depicted and then expanded in the Physical Model. I was overlooking the Cardinality in a lot of the relationships The importance of reading through relationships using effective Verb Phrases to reassure I am modeling what I want to accomplish. U.2) In the concept of this model it is only required to track a Venue as a location for an Event. No further data needs to be collected. With that being said Events will take place on a given EventDate and will be hosted at a Venue. Venues will host multiple events and possibly multiple events on a given date. In my new model my thinking was that EventDate is already tied to Event . Therefore, Venue will not need a relationship with EventDate. The 5th and 6th bullets you have listed under U.2) leave me questioning my thinking though. Am I missing something here? U.3) Is it time to move the link between Item and Band up to Item and Party instead? With the current design I don't see a possibility to sell merchandise not tied to the band as you have brought up. U.5) I left as per your input rather than making it a discrete Supertype/Subtype Relationship as I don’t see a benefit of having that type of roll up. Additional Revisions AR.1) After going through the exercise for FavoriteItem, I feel that Item to Review requires a many-to-many relationship so that is indicated. Necessary? Ok here we go for v1.3 I took a few days on this version, going back and forth with my design. Once the logical process is complete, as I want to see if I am on the right track, I will go through in depth what I had learned and the troubles I faced as a beginner going through this process. The big point for this version was it took throwing in some Keys to help see what I was missing in the past. Going through the process of doing a matrix proved to be of great help also. Regardless of anything, if it wasn't for the input given by PerformanceDBA I would still be a lost soul wondering in the dark. Who knows my current design might reaffirm that I still am, but I have learned a lot so I am know I at least have a flashlight in my hand. At this point in time I admit that I am still confused about identifying and non-identifying relationships. In my model I had to use non-identifying relationships with non nulls just to join the relationships I wanted to model. In reading a lot on the subject there seems to be a lot of disagreement and indecisiveness on the subject so I did what I thought represented the right things in my model. When to force (identifying) and when to be free (non-identifying)? Anyone have inputs? EDIT V1.4 Ok took the V1.3 inputs and cleaned things up for this V1.4 Currently working on a V1.5 to include attributes.

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Rspec2, Rails3, Authlogic: Can't run specs

- by Sam

When I do rspec spec in my rails project, I get No examples were matched. Perhaps {:if=>#<Proc:0x0000010126e998@/Users/samliu/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p0@rails3/gems/rspec-core-2.3.1/lib/rspec/core/configuration.rb:50 (lambda)>, :unless=>#<Proc:0x0000010126e970@/Users/samliu/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p0@rails3/gems/rspec-core-2.3.1/lib/rspec/core/configuration.rb:51 (lambda)>} is excluding everything? Finished in 0.00004 seconds 0 examples, 0 failures Now, this seems like maybe if I wrote a spec it would work, but as soon as I write a spec (and I do include spec_helper) /Users/samliu/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p0@rails3/gems/rspec-core-2.3.1/lib/rspec/core/backward_compatibility.rb:20:in `const_missing': uninitialized constant Authlogic (NameError) from /{myapp}/app/models/user_session.rb:1:in `<top (required)>' from /Users/samliu/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p0@rails3/gems/railties-3.0.3/lib/rails/engine.rb:138:in `block (2 levels) in eager_load!' from /Users/samliu/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p0@rails3/gems/railties-3.0.3/lib/rails/engine.rb:137:in `each' from /Users/samliu/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p0@rails3/gems/railties-3.0.3/lib/rails/engine.rb:137:in `block in eager_load!' from /Users/samliu/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p0@rails3/gems/railties-3.0.3/lib/rails/engine.rb:135:in `each' from /Users/samliu/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p0@rails3/gems/railties-3.0.3/lib/rails/engine.rb:135:in `eager_load!' from /Users/samliu/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p0@rails3/gems/railties-3.0.3/lib/rails/application.rb:108:in `eager_load!' from /Users/samliu/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p0@rails3/gems/railties-3.0.3/lib/rails/application/finisher.rb:41:in `block in <module:Finisher>' from /Users/samliu/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p0@rails3/gems/railties-3.0.3/lib/rails/initializable.rb:25:in `instance_exec' from /Users/samliu/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p0@rails3/gems/railties-3.0.3/lib/rails/initializable.rb:25:in `run' from /Users/samliu/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p0@rails3/gems/railties-3.0.3/lib/rails/initializable.rb:50:in `block in run_initializers' from /Users/samliu/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p0@rails3/gems/railties-3.0.3/lib/rails/initializable.rb:49:in `each' from /Users/samliu/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p0@rails3/gems/railties-3.0.3/lib/rails/initializable.rb:49:in `run_initializers' from /Users/samliu/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p0@rails3/gems/railties-3.0.3/lib/rails/application.rb:134:in `initialize!' from /Users/samliu/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p0@rails3/gems/railties-3.0.3/lib/rails/application.rb:77:in `method_missing' from /{myapp}/config/environment.rb:5:in `<top (required)>' from <internal:lib/rubygems/custom_require>:29:in `require' from <internal:lib/rubygems/custom_require>:29:in `require' from /{myapp}/spec/spec_helper.rb:3:in `<top (required)>' from <internal:lib/rubygems/custom_require>:29:in `require' from <internal:lib/rubygems/custom_require>:29:in `require' from /{myapp}/spec/controllers/pages_controller_spec.rb:1:in `<top (required)>' from /Users/samliu/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p0@rails3/gems/rspec-core-2.3.1/lib/rspec/core/configuration.rb:388:in `load' from /Users/samliu/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p0@rails3/gems/rspec-core-2.3.1/lib/rspec/core/configuration.rb:388:in `block in load_spec_files' from /Users/samliu/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p0@rails3/gems/rspec-core-2.3.1/lib/rspec/core/configuration.rb:388:in `map' from /Users/samliu/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p0@rails3/gems/rspec-core-2.3.1/lib/rspec/core/configuration.rb:388:in `load_spec_files' from /Users/samliu/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p0@rails3/gems/rspec-core-2.3.1/lib/rspec/core/command_line.rb:18:in `run' from /Users/samliu/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p0@rails3/gems/rspec-core-2.3.1/lib/rspec/core/runner.rb:55:in `run_in_process' from /Users/samliu/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p0@rails3/gems/rspec-core-2.3.1/lib/rspec/core/runner.rb:46:in `run' from /Users/samliu/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p0@rails3/gems/rspec-core-2.3.1/lib/rspec/core/runner.rb:10:in `block in autorun' The important line here seems to be /core/backward_compatibility.rb:20:in `const_missing': uninitialized constant Authlogic (NameError) Now if this were rails 2.3.8, I'd simply put config.gem "authlogic" into the environment.rb, in the initialization code block. However, the rails 3 environment.rb looks way different (there is no config code block, so putting it in arbitrarily causes an error where config is not defined). So my questions are 1) Do I actually have to put the gem config anywhere? I looked at https://github.com/trevmex/authlogic_rails3_example/ and it seems he didn't put it anywhere. 2) Does anyone know what I'm doing wrong in terms of rspec? My gem list is *** LOCAL GEMS *** abstract (1.0.0) actionmailer (3.0.3, 3.0.1, 3.0.0, 3.0.0.rc2, 2.3.4) actionpack (3.0.3, 3.0.1, 3.0.0, 3.0.0.rc2, 2.3.4) activemodel (3.0.3, 3.0.1, 3.0.0, 3.0.0.rc2) activerecord (3.0.3, 3.0.1, 3.0.0, 3.0.0.rc2, 2.3.4) activeresource (3.0.3, 3.0.1, 3.0.0, 3.0.0.rc2, 2.3.4) activesupport (3.0.3, 3.0.1, 3.0.0, 3.0.0.rc2, 2.3.4) arel (2.0.6, 1.0.1) asdf (0.5.0) authlogic (2.1.6, 2.1.3) autotest (4.4.6, 4.4.1) autotest-fsevent (0.2.4) autotest-growl (0.2.9) autotest-rails (4.1.0) autotest-rails-pure (4.1.2) bluecloth (2.0.9) builder (2.1.2) bundler (1.0.7, 1.0.2) cgi_multipart_eof_fix (2.5.0) commonwatir (1.6.2) couchrest (0.33) cri (1.0.1) cucumber (0.4.4, 0.4.3, 0.3.11) daemons (1.1.0, 1.0.10) dependencies (0.0.7) diff-lcs (1.1.2) erubis (2.6.6) fastercsv (1.5.0) fastthread (1.0.7) firewatir (1.6.2) flay (1.4.0) flog (2.2.0) funfx (0.2.2) gem_plugin (0.2.3) gemsonrails (0.7.2) giraffesoft-resource_controller (0.6.5) haml (2.2.14) hoe (2.3.3) i18n (0.4.1) jscruggs-metric_fu (1.1.5) json_pure (1.1.9) kramdown (0.12.0) mail (2.2.13, 2.2.6.1) memcache-client (1.8.5) mime-types (1.16) mojombo-chronic (0.3.0) mongrel (1.1.5) monk (0.0.7) nanoc (3.1.5) nanoc3 (3.1.5) nokogiri (1.4.3.1, 1.4.0) open4 (0.9.6) polyglot (0.3.1, 0.2.9) rack (1.2.1, 1.0.1) rack-mount (0.6.13) rack-test (0.5.6) rails (3.0.0, 2.3.4) rails3-generators (0.17.0, 0.14.0) railties (3.0.3, 3.0.1, 3.0.0, 3.0.0.rc2) rake (0.8.7) relevance-rcov (0.9.2.1) rest-client (1.0.3) rspec (2.3.0, 2.0.0.rc, 1.2.9) rspec-core (2.3.1, 2.0.0.rc) rspec-expectations (2.3.0, 2.0.0.rc) rspec-mocks (2.3.0, 2.0.0.rc) rspec-rails (2.3.1, 2.0.0.rc, 1.2.9) ruby_parser (2.0.4) rubyforge (2.0.3) rubygems-update (1.3.6, 1.3.5) rvm (1.0.13) s4t-utils (1.0.4) safariwatir (0.3.7) sexp_processor (3.0.3) spork (0.7.3) sqlite3-ruby (1.3.1, 1.2.5) sys-uname (0.8.5) term-ansicolor (1.0.4) text-format (1.0.0) text-hyphen (1.0.0) thor (0.14.6, 0.14.3, 0.12.0) treetop (1.4.8, 1.4.2) tzinfo (0.3.23) user-choices (1.1.6) vlad (2.0.0) vlad-git (2.1.0) webrat (0.7.1, 0.6.0, 0.5.3) xml-simple (1.0.12) ZenTest (4.4.2) I am using ruby 1.9.2 and rails 3.0.3 installed using RVM on OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard. I just want to be able to run my specs like I used to. As a separate issue, autotest yields an error about an include for autotest/growl but I installed autotest-growl. Maybe this is a gem issue? I tried doing the same things and get the same error when it comes to using my ubuntu 10.04 server machine though. Gemfile source 'http://rubygems.org' gem 'rails', '3.0.3' # Bundle edge Rails instead: # gem 'rails', :git => 'git://github.com/rails/rails.git' gem 'sqlite3-ruby', :require => 'sqlite3' group :couch do gem 'couchrest' end group :user_auth do gem 'authlogic' gem "rails3-generators" gem 'facebooker' end group :markup do gem 'haml' gem 'sass' end group :testing do gem 'rspec-rails' gem 'rspec' gem 'webrat' gem 'cucumber' gem 'capybara' gem 'factory_girl' gem 'shoulda' gem 'autotest' end group :server do gem 'unicorn' end # Use unicorn as the web server # gem 'unicorn' # Deploy with Capistrano # gem 'capistrano' # To use debugger # gem 'ruby-debug' # Bundle the extra gems: # gem 'bj' # gem 'nokogiri' # gem 'sqlite3-ruby', :require => 'sqlite3' # gem 'aws-s3', :require => 'aws/s3' # Bundle gems for the local environment. Make sure to # put test-only gems in this group so their generators # and rake tasks are available in development mode: # group :development, :test do # gem 'webrat' # end Gemfile.lock GEM remote: http://rubygems.org/ specs: ZenTest (4.4.2) abstract (1.0.0) actionmailer (3.0.3) actionpack (= 3.0.3) mail (~> 2.2.9) actionpack (3.0.3) activemodel (= 3.0.3) activesupport (= 3.0.3) builder (~> 2.1.2) erubis (~> 2.6.6) i18n (~> 0.4) rack (~> 1.2.1) rack-mount (~> 0.6.13) rack-test (~> 0.5.6) tzinfo (~> 0.3.23) activemodel (3.0.3) activesupport (= 3.0.3) builder (~> 2.1.2) i18n (~> 0.4) activerecord (3.0.3) activemodel (= 3.0.3) activesupport (= 3.0.3) arel (~> 2.0.2) tzinfo (~> 0.3.23) activeresource (3.0.3) activemodel (= 3.0.3) activesupport (= 3.0.3) activesupport (3.0.3) arel (2.0.6) authlogic (2.1.6) activesupport autotest (4.4.6) ZenTest (>= 4.4.1) builder (2.1.2) capybara (0.4.0) celerity (>= 0.7.9) culerity (>= 0.2.4) mime-types (>= 1.16) nokogiri (>= 1.3.3) rack (>= 1.0.0) rack-test (>= 0.5.4) selenium-webdriver (>= 0.0.27) xpath (~> 0.1.2) celerity (0.8.6) childprocess (0.1.6) ffi (~> 0.6.3) couchrest (1.0.1) json (>= 1.4.6) mime-types (>= 1.15) rest-client (>= 1.5.1) cucumber (0.10.0) builder (>= 2.1.2) diff-lcs (~> 1.1.2) gherkin (~> 2.3.2) json (~> 1.4.6) term-ansicolor (~> 1.0.5) culerity (0.2.13) diff-lcs (1.1.2) erubis (2.6.6) abstract (>= 1.0.0) facebooker (1.0.75) json_pure (>= 1.0.0) factory_girl (1.3.2) ffi (0.6.3) rake (>= 0.8.7) gherkin (2.3.2) json (~> 1.4.6) term-ansicolor (~> 1.0.5) haml (3.0.25) i18n (0.5.0) json (1.4.6) json_pure (1.4.6) kgio (2.0.0) mail (2.2.13) activesupport (>= 2.3.6) i18n (>= 0.4.0) mime-types (~> 1.16) treetop (~> 1.4.8) mime-types (1.16) nokogiri (1.4.4) polyglot (0.3.1) rack (1.2.1) rack-mount (0.6.13) rack (>= 1.0.0) rack-test (0.5.6) rack (>= 1.0) rails (3.0.3) actionmailer (= 3.0.3) actionpack (= 3.0.3) activerecord (= 3.0.3) activeresource (= 3.0.3) activesupport (= 3.0.3) bundler (~> 1.0) railties (= 3.0.3) rails3-generators (0.17.0) railties (>= 3.0.0) railties (3.0.3) actionpack (= 3.0.3) activesupport (= 3.0.3) rake (>= 0.8.7) thor (~> 0.14.4) rake (0.8.7) rest-client (1.6.1) mime-types (>= 1.16) rspec (2.3.0) rspec-core (~> 2.3.0) rspec-expectations (~> 2.3.0) rspec-mocks (~> 2.3.0) rspec-core (2.3.1) rspec-expectations (2.3.0) diff-lcs (~> 1.1.2) rspec-mocks (2.3.0) rspec-rails (2.3.1) actionpack (~> 3.0) activesupport (~> 3.0) railties (~> 3.0) rspec (~> 2.3.0) rubyzip (0.9.4) sass (3.1.0.alpha.206) selenium-webdriver (0.1.2) childprocess (~> 0.1.5) ffi (~> 0.6.3) json_pure rubyzip shoulda (2.11.3) sqlite3-ruby (1.3.2) term-ansicolor (1.0.5) thor (0.14.6) treetop (1.4.9) polyglot (>= 0.3.1) tzinfo (0.3.23) unicorn (3.1.0) kgio (~> 2.0.0) rack webrat (0.7.2) nokogiri (>= 1.2.0) rack (>= 1.0) rack-test (>= 0.5.3) xpath (0.1.2) nokogiri (~> 1.3) PLATFORMS ruby DEPENDENCIES authlogic autotest capybara couchrest cucumber facebooker factory_girl haml rails (= 3.0.3) rails3-generators rspec rspec-rails sass shoulda sqlite3-ruby unicorn webrat

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Is there a Telecommunications Reference Architecture?

- by raul.goycoolea

@font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }@font-face { font-family: "Courier New"; }@font-face { font-family: "Wingdings"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraph, li.MsoListParagraph, div.MsoListParagraph { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }ol { margin-bottom: 0cm; }ul { margin-bottom: 0cm; } Abstract Reference architecture provides needed architectural information that can be provided in advance to an enterprise to enable consistent architectural best practices. Enterprise Reference Architecture helps business owners to actualize their strategies, vision, objectives, and principles. It evaluates the IT systems, based on Reference Architecture goals, principles, and standards. It helps to reduce IT costs by increasing functionality, availability, scalability, etc. Telecom Reference Architecture provides customers with the flexibility to view bundled service bills online with the provision of multiple services. It provides real-time, flexible billing and charging systems, to handle complex promotions, discounts, and settlements with multiple parties. This paper attempts to describe the Reference Architecture for the Telecom Enterprises. It lays the foundation for a Telecom Reference Architecture by articulating the requirements, drivers, and pitfalls for telecom service providers. It describes generic reference architecture for telecom enterprises and moves on to explain how to achieve Enterprise Reference Architecture by using SOA. Introduction A Reference Architecture provides a methodology, set of practices, template, and standards based on a set of successful solutions implemented earlier. These solutions have been generalized and structured for the depiction of both a logical and a physical architecture, based on the harvesting of a set of patterns that describe observations in a number of successful implementations. It helps as a reference for the various architectures that an enterprise can implement to solve various problems. It can be used as the starting point or the point of comparisons for various departments/business entities of a company, or for the various companies for an enterprise. It provides multiple views for multiple stakeholders. Major artifacts of the Enterprise Reference Architecture are methodologies, standards, metadata, documents, design patterns, etc. Purpose of Reference Architecture In most cases, architects spend a lot of time researching, investigating, defining, and re-arguing architectural decisions. It is like reinventing the wheel as their peers in other organizations or even the same organization have already spent a lot of time and effort defining their own architectural practices. This prevents an organization from learning from its own experiences and applying that knowledge for increased effectiveness. Reference architecture provides missing architectural information that can be provided in advance to project team members to enable consistent architectural best practices. Enterprise Reference Architecture helps an enterprise to achieve the following at the abstract level: · Reference architecture is more of a communication channel to an enterprise · Helps the business owners to accommodate to their strategies, vision, objectives, and principles. · Evaluates the IT systems based on Reference Architecture Principles · Reduces IT spending through increasing functionality, availability, scalability, etc · A Real-time Integration Model helps to reduce the latency of the data updates Is used to define a single source of Information · Provides a clear view on how to manage information and security · Defines the policy around the data ownership, product boundaries, etc. · Helps with cost optimization across project and solution portfolios by eliminating unused or duplicate investments and assets · Has a shorter implementation time and cost Once the reference architecture is in place, the set of architectural principles, standards, reference models, and best practices ensure that the aligned investments have the greatest possible likelihood of success in both the near term and the long term (TCO). Common pitfalls for Telecom Service Providers Telecom Reference Architecture serves as the first step towards maturity for a telecom service provider. During the course of our assignments/experiences with telecom players, we have come across the following observations – Some of these indicate a lack of maturity of the telecom service provider: · In markets that are growing and not so mature, it has been observed that telcos have a significant amount of in-house or home-grown applications. In some of these markets, the growth has been so rapid that IT has been unable to cope with business demands. Telcos have shown a tendency to come up with workarounds in their IT applications so as to meet business needs. · Even for core functions like provisioning or mediation, some telcos have tried to manage with home-grown applications. · Most of the applications do not have the required scalability or maintainability to sustain growth in volumes or functionality. · Applications face interoperability issues with other applications in the operator's landscape. Integrating a new application or network element requires considerable effort on the part of the other applications. · Application boundaries are not clear, and functionality that is not in the initial scope of that application gets pushed onto it. This results in the development of the multiple, small applications without proper boundaries. · Usage of Legacy OSS/BSS systems, poor Integration across Multiple COTS Products and Internal Systems. Most of the Integrations are developed on ad-hoc basis and Point-to-Point Integration. · Redundancy of the business functions in different applications • Fragmented data across the different applications and no integrated view of the strategic data • Lot of performance Issues due to the usage of the complex integration across OSS and BSS systems However, this is where the maturity of the telecom industry as a whole can be of help. The collaborative efforts of telcos to overcome some of these problems have resulted in bodies like the TM Forum. They have come up with frameworks for business processes, data, applications, and technology for telecom service providers. These could be a good starting point for telcos to clean up their enterprise landscape. Industry Trends in Telecom Reference Architecture Telecom reference architectures are evolving rapidly because telcos are facing business and IT challenges. “The reality is that there probably is no killer application, no silver bullet that the telcos can latch onto to carry them into a 21st Century.... Instead, there are probably hundreds – perhaps thousands – of niche applications.... And the only way to find which of these works for you is to try out lots of them, ramp up the ones that work, and discontinue the ones that fail.” – Martin Creaner President & CTO TM Forum. The following trends have been observed in telecom reference architecture: · Transformation of business structures to align with customer requirements · Adoption of more Internet-like technical architectures. The Web 2.0 concept is increasingly being used. · Virtualization of the traditional operations support system (OSS) · Adoption of SOA to support development of IP-based services · Adoption of frameworks like Service Delivery Platforms (SDPs) and IP Multimedia Subsystem · (IMS) to enable seamless deployment of various services over fixed and mobile networks · Replacement of in-house, customized, and stove-piped OSS/BSS with standards-based COTS products · Compliance with industry standards and frameworks like eTOM, SID, and TAM to enable seamless integration with other standards-based products Drivers of Reference Architecture The drivers of the Reference Architecture are Reference Architecture Goals, Principles, and Enterprise Vision and Telecom Transformation. The details are depicted below diagram. @font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoCaption, li.MsoCaption, div.MsoCaption { margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; font-size: 9pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: rgb(79, 129, 189); font-weight: bold; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; } Figure 1. Drivers for Reference Architecture @font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }@font-face { font-family: "Courier New"; }@font-face { font-family: "Wingdings"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraph, li.MsoListParagraph, div.MsoListParagraph { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }ol { margin-bottom: 0cm; }ul { margin-bottom: 0cm; } Today’s telecom reference architectures should seamlessly integrate traditional legacy-based applications and transition to next-generation network technologies (e.g., IP multimedia subsystems). This has resulted in new requirements for flexible, real-time billing and OSS/BSS systems and implications on the service provider’s organizational requirements and structure. Telecom reference architectures are today expected to: · Integrate voice, messaging, email and other VAS over fixed and mobile networks, back end systems · Be able to provision multiple services and service bundles • Deliver converged voice, video and data services · Leverage the existing Network Infrastructure · Provide real-time, flexible billing and charging systems to handle complex promotions, discounts, and settlements with multiple parties. · Support charging of advanced data services such as VoIP, On-Demand, Services (e.g. Video), IMS/SIP Services, Mobile Money, Content Services and IPTV. · Help in faster deployment of new services • Serve as an effective platform for collaboration between network IT and business organizations · Harness the potential of converging technology, networks, devices and content to develop multimedia services and solutions of ever-increasing sophistication on a single Internet Protocol (IP) · Ensure better service delivery and zero revenue leakage through real-time balance and credit management · Lower operating costs to drive profitability Enterprise Reference Architecture The Enterprise Reference Architecture (RA) fills the gap between the concepts and vocabulary defined by the reference model and the implementation. Reference architecture provides detailed architectural information in a common format such that solutions can be repeatedly designed and deployed in a consistent, high-quality, supportable fashion. This paper attempts to describe the Reference Architecture for the Telecom Application Usage and how to achieve the Enterprise Level Reference Architecture using SOA. • Telecom Reference Architecture • Enterprise SOA based Reference Architecture Telecom Reference Architecture Tele Management Forum’s New Generation Operations Systems and Software (NGOSS) is an architectural framework for organizing, integrating, and implementing telecom systems. NGOSS is a component-based framework consisting of the following elements: · The enhanced Telecom Operations Map (eTOM) is a business process framework. · The Shared Information Data (SID) model provides a comprehensive information framework that may be specialized for the needs of a particular organization. · The Telecom Application Map (TAM) is an application framework to depict the functional footprint of applications, relative to the horizontal processes within eTOM. · The Technology Neutral Architecture (TNA) is an integrated framework. TNA is an architecture that is sustainable through technology changes. NGOSS Architecture Standards are: · Centralized data · Loosely coupled distributed systems · Application components/re-use · A technology-neutral system framework with technology specific implementations · Interoperability to service provider data/processes · Allows more re-use of business components across multiple business scenarios · Workflow automation The traditional operator systems architecture consists of four layers, · Business Support System (BSS) layer, with focus toward customers and business partners. Manages order, subscriber, pricing, rating, and billing information. · Operations Support System (OSS) layer, built around product, service, and resource inventories. · Networks layer – consists of Network elements and 3rd Party Systems. · Integration Layer – to maximize application communication and overall solution flexibility. Reference architecture for telecom enterprises is depicted below. @font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }@font-face { font-family: "Courier New"; }@font-face { font-family: "Wingdings"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoCaption, li.MsoCaption, div.MsoCaption { margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; font-size: 9pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: rgb(79, 129, 189); font-weight: bold; }p.MsoListParagraph, li.MsoListParagraph, div.MsoListParagraph { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }ol { margin-bottom: 0cm; }ul { margin-bottom: 0cm; } Figure 2. Telecom Reference Architecture The major building blocks of any Telecom Service Provider architecture are as follows: 1. Customer Relationship Management CRM encompasses the end-to-end lifecycle of the customer: customer initiation/acquisition, sales, ordering, and service activation, customer care and support, proactive campaigns, cross sell/up sell, and retention/loyalty. CRM also includes the collection of customer information and its application to personalize, customize, and integrate delivery of service to a customer, as well as to identify opportunities for increasing the value of the customer to the enterprise. The key functionalities related to Customer Relationship Management are · Manage the end-to-end lifecycle of a customer request for products. · Create and manage customer profiles. · Manage all interactions with customers – inquiries, requests, and responses. · Provide updates to Billing and other south bound systems on customer/account related updates such as customer/ account creation, deletion, modification, request bills, final bill, duplicate bills, credit limits through Middleware. · Work with Order Management System, Product, and Service Management components within CRM. · Manage customer preferences – Involve all the touch points and channels to the customer, including contact center, retail stores, dealers, self service, and field service, as well as via any media (phone, face to face, web, mobile device, chat, email, SMS, mail, the customer's bill, etc.). · Support single interface for customer contact details, preferences, account details, offers, customer premise equipment, bill details, bill cycle details, and customer interactions. CRM applications interact with customers through customer touch points like portals, point-of-sale terminals, interactive voice response systems, etc. The requests by customers are sent via fulfillment/provisioning to billing system for ordering processing. 2. Billing and Revenue Management Billing and Revenue Management handles the collection of appropriate usage records and production of timely and accurate bills – for providing pre-bill usage information and billing to customers; for processing their payments; and for performing payment collections. In addition, it handles customer inquiries about bills, provides billing inquiry status, and is responsible for resolving billing problems to the customer's satisfaction in a timely manner. This process grouping also supports prepayment for services. The key functionalities provided by these applications are · To ensure that enterprise revenue is billed and invoices delivered appropriately to customers. · To manage customers’ billing accounts, process their payments, perform payment collections, and monitor the status of the account balance. · To ensure the timely and effective fulfillment of all customer bill inquiries and complaints. · Collect the usage records from mediation and ensure appropriate rating and discounting of all usage and pricing. · Support revenue sharing; split charging where usage is guided to an account different from the service consumer. · Support prepaid and post-paid rating. · Send notification on approach / exceeding the usage thresholds as enforced by the subscribed offer, and / or as setup by the customer. · Support prepaid, post paid, and hybrid (where some services are prepaid and the rest of the services post paid) customers and conversion from post paid to prepaid, and vice versa. · Support different billing function requirements like charge prorating, promotion, discount, adjustment, waiver, write-off, account receivable, GL Interface, late payment fee, credit control, dunning, account or service suspension, re-activation, expiry, termination, contract violation penalty, etc. · Initiate direct debit to collect payment against an invoice outstanding. · Send notification to Middleware on different events; for example, payment receipt, pre-suspension, threshold exceed, etc. Billing systems typically get usage data from mediation systems for rating and billing. They get provisioning requests from order management systems and inquiries from CRM systems. Convergent and real-time billing systems can directly get usage details from network elements. 3. Mediation Mediation systems transform/translate the Raw or Native Usage Data Records into a general format that is acceptable to billing for their rating purposes. The following lists the high-level roles and responsibilities executed by the Mediation system in the end-to-end solution. · Collect Usage Data Records from different data sources – like network elements, routers, servers – via different protocol and interfaces. · Process Usage Data Records – Mediation will process Usage Data Records as per the source format. · Validate Usage Data Records from each source. · Segregates Usage Data Records coming from each source to multiple, based on the segregation requirement of end Application. · Aggregates Usage Data Records based on the aggregation rule if any from different sources. · Consolidates multiple Usage Data Records from each source. · Delivers formatted Usage Data Records to different end application like Billing, Interconnect, Fraud Management, etc. · Generates audit trail for incoming Usage Data Records and keeps track of all the Usage Data Records at various stages of mediation process. · Checks duplicate Usage Data Records across files for a given time window. 4. Fulfillment This area is responsible for providing customers with their requested products in a timely and correct manner. It translates the customer's business or personal need into a solution that can be delivered using the specific products in the enterprise's portfolio. This process informs the customers of the status of their purchase order, and ensures completion on time, as well as ensuring a delighted customer. These processes are responsible for accepting and issuing orders. They deal with pre-order feasibility determination, credit authorization, order issuance, order status and tracking, customer update on customer order activities, and customer notification on order completion. Order management and provisioning applications fall into this category. The key functionalities provided by these applications are · Issuing new customer orders, modifying open customer orders, or canceling open customer orders; · Verifying whether specific non-standard offerings sought by customers are feasible and supportable; · Checking the credit worthiness of customers as part of the customer order process; · Testing the completed offering to ensure it is working correctly; · Updating of the Customer Inventory Database to reflect that the specific product offering has been allocated, modified, or cancelled; · Assigning and tracking customer provisioning activities; · Managing customer provisioning jeopardy conditions; and · Reporting progress on customer orders and other processes to customer. These applications typically get orders from CRM systems. They interact with network elements and billing systems for fulfillment of orders. 5. Enterprise Management This process area includes those processes that manage enterprise-wide activities and needs, or have application within the enterprise as a whole. They encompass all business management processes that · Are necessary to support the whole of the enterprise, including processes for financial management, legal management, regulatory management, process, cost, and quality management, etc.; · Are responsible for setting corporate policies, strategies, and directions, and for providing guidelines and targets for the whole of the business, including strategy development and planning for areas, such as Enterprise Architecture, that are integral to the direction and development of the business; · Occur throughout the enterprise, including processes for project management, performance assessments, cost assessments, etc. (i) Enterprise Risk Management: Enterprise Risk Management focuses on assuring that risks and threats to the enterprise value and/or reputation are identified, and appropriate controls are in place to minimize or eliminate the identified risks. The identified risks may be physical or logical/virtual. Successful risk management ensures that the enterprise can support its mission critical operations, processes, applications, and communications in the face of serious incidents such as security threats/violations and fraud attempts. Two key areas covered in Risk Management by telecom operators are: · Revenue Assurance: Revenue assurance system will be responsible for identifying revenue loss scenarios across components/systems, and will help in rectifying the problems. The following lists the high-level roles and responsibilities executed by the Revenue Assurance system in the end-to-end solution. o Identify all usage information dropped when networks are being upgraded. o Interconnect bill verification. o Identify where services are routinely provisioned but never billed. o Identify poor sales policies that are intensifying collections problems. o Find leakage where usage is sent to error bucket and never billed for. o Find leakage where field service, CRM, and network build-out are not optimized. · Fraud Management: Involves collecting data from different systems to identify abnormalities in traffic patterns, usage patterns, and subscription patterns to report suspicious activity that might suggest fraudulent usage of resources, resulting in revenue losses to the operator. The key roles and responsibilities of the system component are as follows: o Fraud management system will capture and monitor high usage (over a certain threshold) in terms of duration, value, and number of calls for each subscriber. The threshold for each subscriber is decided by the system and fixed automatically. o Fraud management will be able to detect the unauthorized access to services for certain subscribers. These subscribers may have been provided unauthorized services by employees. The component will raise the alert to the operator the very first time of such illegal calls or calls which are not billed. o The solution will be to have an alarm management system that will deliver alarms to the operator/provider whenever it detects a fraud, thus minimizing fraud by catching it the first time it occurs. o The Fraud Management system will be capable of interfacing with switches, mediation systems, and billing systems (ii) Knowledge Management This process focuses on knowledge management, technology research within the enterprise, and the evaluation of potential technology acquisitions. Key responsibilities of knowledge base management are to · Maintain knowledge base – Creation and updating of knowledge base on ongoing basis. · Search knowledge base – Search of knowledge base on keywords or category browse · Maintain metadata – Management of metadata on knowledge base to ensure effective management and search. · Run report generator. · Provide content – Add content to the knowledge base, e.g., user guides, operational manual, etc. (iii) Document Management It focuses on maintaining a repository of all electronic documents or images of paper documents relevant to the enterprise using a system. (iv) Data Management It manages data as a valuable resource for any enterprise. For telecom enterprises, the typical areas covered are Master Data Management, Data Warehousing, and Business Intelligence. It is also responsible for data governance, security, quality, and database management. Key responsibilities of Data Management are · Using ETL, extract the data from CRM, Billing, web content, ERP, campaign management, financial, network operations, asset management info, customer contact data, customer measures, benchmarks, process data, e.g., process inputs, outputs, and measures, into Enterprise Data Warehouse. · Management of data traceability with source, data related business rules/decisions, data quality, data cleansing data reconciliation, competitors data – storage for all the enterprise data (customer profiles, products, offers, revenues, etc.) · Get online update through night time replication or physical backup process at regular frequency. · Provide the data access to business intelligence and other systems for their analysis, report generation, and use. (v) Business Intelligence It uses the Enterprise Data to provide the various analysis and reports that contain prospects and analytics for customer retention, acquisition of new customers due to the offers, and SLAs. It will generate right and optimized plans – bolt-ons for the customers. The following lists the high-level roles and responsibilities executed by the Business Intelligence system at the Enterprise Level: · It will do Pattern analysis and reports problem. · It will do Data Analysis – Statistical analysis, data profiling, affinity analysis of data, customer segment wise usage patterns on offers, products, service and revenue generation against services and customer segments. · It will do Performance (business, system, and forecast) analysis, churn propensity, response time, and SLAs analysis. · It will support for online and offline analysis, and report drill down capability. · It will collect, store, and report various SLA data. · It will provide the necessary intelligence for marketing and working on campaigns, etc., with cost benefit analysis and predictions. It will advise on customer promotions with additional services based on loyalty and credit history of customer · It will Interface with Enterprise Data Management system for data to run reports and analysis tasks. It will interface with the campaign schedules, based on historical success evidence. (vi) Stakeholder and External Relations Management It manages the enterprise's relationship with stakeholders and outside entities. Stakeholders include shareholders, employee organizations, etc. Outside entities include regulators, local community, and unions. Some of the processes within this grouping are Shareholder Relations, External Affairs, Labor Relations, and Public Relations. (vii) Enterprise Resource Planning It is used to manage internal and external resources, including tangible assets, financial resources, materials, and human resources. Its purpose is to facilitate the flow of information between all business functions inside the boundaries of the enterprise and manage the connections to outside stakeholders. ERP systems consolidate all business operations into a uniform and enterprise wide system environment. The key roles and responsibilities for Enterprise System are given below: · It will handle responsibilities such as core accounting, financial, and management reporting. · It will interface with CRM for capturing customer account and details. · It will interface with billing to capture the billing revenue and other financial data. · It will be responsible for executing the dunning process. Billing will send the required feed to ERP for execution of dunning. · It will interface with the CRM and Billing through batch interfaces. Enterprise management systems are like horizontals in the enterprise and typically interact with all major telecom systems. E.g., an ERP system interacts with CRM, Fulfillment, and Billing systems for different kinds of data exchanges. 6. External Interfaces/Touch Points The typical external parties are customers, suppliers/partners, employees, shareholders, and other stakeholders. External interactions from/to a Service Provider to other parties can be achieved by a variety of mechanisms, including: · Exchange of emails or faxes · Call Centers · Web Portals · Business-to-Business (B2B) automated transactions These applications provide an Internet technology driven interface to external parties to undertake a variety of business functions directly for themselves. These can provide fully or partially automated service to external parties through various touch points. Typical characteristics of these touch points are · Pre-integrated self-service system, including stand-alone web framework or integration front end with a portal engine · Self services layer exposing atomic web services/APIs for reuse by multiple systems across the architectural environment · Portlets driven connectivity exposing data and services interoperability through a portal engine or web application These touch points mostly interact with the CRM systems for requests, inquiries, and responses. 7. Middleware The component will be primarily responsible for integrating the different systems components under a common platform. It should provide a Standards-Based Platform for building Service Oriented Architecture and Composite Applications. The following lists the high-level roles and responsibilities executed by the Middleware component in the end-to-end solution. · As an integration framework, covering to and fro interfaces · Provide a web service framework with service registry. · Support SOA framework with SOA service registry. · Each of the interfaces from / to Middleware to other components would handle data transformation, translation, and mapping of data points. · Receive data from the caller / activate and/or forward the data to the recipient system in XML format. · Use standard XML for data exchange. · Provide the response back to the service/call initiator. · Provide a tracking until the response completion. · Keep a store transitional data against each call/transaction. · Interface through Middleware to get any information that is possible and allowed from the existing systems to enterprise systems; e.g., customer profile and customer history, etc. · Provide the data in a common unified format to the SOA calls across systems, and follow the Enterprise Architecture directive. · Provide an audit trail for all transactions being handled by the component. 8. Network Elements The term Network Element means a facility or equipment used in the provision of a telecommunications service. Such terms also includes features, functions, and capabilities that are provided by means of such facility or equipment, including subscriber numbers, databases, signaling systems, and information sufficient for billing and collection or used in the transmission, routing, or other provision of a telecommunications service. Typical network elements in a GSM network are Home Location Register (HLR), Intelligent Network (IN), Mobile Switching Center (MSC), SMS Center (SMSC), and network elements for other value added services like Push-to-talk (PTT), Ring Back Tone (RBT), etc. Network elements are invoked when subscribers use their telecom devices for any kind of usage. These elements generate usage data and pass it on to downstream systems like mediation and billing system for rating and billing. They also integrate with provisioning systems for order/service fulfillment. 9. 3rd Party Applications 3rd Party systems are applications like content providers, payment gateways, point of sale terminals, and databases/applications maintained by the Government. Depending on applicability and the type of functionality provided by 3rd party applications, the integration with different telecom systems like CRM, provisioning, and billing will be done. 10. Service Delivery Platform A service delivery platform (SDP) provides the architecture for the rapid deployment, provisioning, execution, management, and billing of value added telecom services. SDPs are based on the concept of SOA and layered architecture. They support the delivery of voice, data services, and content in network and device-independent fashion. They allow application developers to aggregate network capabilities, services, and sources of content. SDPs typically contain layers for web services exposure, service application development, and network abstraction. SOA Reference Architecture SOA concept is based on the principle of developing reusable business service and building applications by composing those services, instead of building monolithic applications in silos. It’s about bridging the gap between business and IT through a set of business-aligned IT services, using a set of design principles, patterns, and techniques. In an SOA, resources are made available to participants in a value net, enterprise, line of business (typically spanning multiple applications within an enterprise or across multiple enterprises). It consists of a set of business-aligned IT services that collectively fulfill an organization’s business processes and goals. We can choreograph these services into composite applications and invoke them through standard protocols. SOA, apart from agility and reusability, enables: · The business to specify processes as orchestrations of reusable services · Technology agnostic business design, with technology hidden behind service interface · A contractual-like interaction between business and IT, based on service SLAs · Accountability and governance, better aligned to business services · Applications interconnections untangling by allowing access only through service interfaces, reducing the daunting side effects of change · Reduced pressure to replace legacy and extended lifetime for legacy applications, through encapsulation in services · A Cloud Computing paradigm, using web services technologies, that makes possible service outsourcing on an on-demand, utility-like, pay-per-usage basis The following section represents the Reference Architecture of logical view for the Telecom Solution. The new custom built application needs to align with this logical architecture in the long run to achieve EA benefits. Packaged implementation applications, such as ERP billing applications, need to expose their functions as service providers (as other applications consume) and interact with other applications as service consumers. COT applications need to expose services through wrappers such as adapters to utilize existing resources and at the same time achieve Enterprise Architecture goal and objectives. The following are the various layers for Enterprise level deployment of SOA. This diagram captures the abstract view of Enterprise SOA layers and important components of each layer. Layered architecture means decomposition of services such that most interactions occur between adjacent layers. However, there is no strict rule that top layers should not directly communicate with bottom layers. The diagram below represents the important logical pieces that would result from overall SOA transformation. @font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }@font-face { font-family: "Courier New"; }@font-face { font-family: "Wingdings"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoCaption, li.MsoCaption, div.MsoCaption { margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; font-size: 9pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: rgb(79, 129, 189); font-weight: bold; }p.MsoListParagraph, li.MsoListParagraph, div.MsoListParagraph { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }ol { margin-bottom: 0cm; }ul { margin-bottom: 0cm; } Figure 3. Enterprise SOA Reference Architecture 1. Operational System Layer: This layer consists of all packaged applications like CRM, ERP, custom built applications, COTS based applications like Billing, Revenue Management, Fulfilment, and the Enterprise databases that are essential and contribute directly or indirectly to the Enterprise OSS/BSS Transformation. ERP holds the data of Asset Lifecycle Management, Supply Chain, and Advanced Procurement and Human Capital Management, etc. CRM holds the data related to Order, Sales, and Marketing, Customer Care, Partner Relationship Management, Loyalty, etc. Content Management handles Enterprise Search and Query. Billing application consists of the following components: · Collections Management, Customer Billing Management, Invoices, Real-Time Rating, Discounting, and Applying of Charges · Enterprise databases will hold both the application and service data, whether structured or unstructured. MDM - Master data majorly consists of Customer, Order, Product, and Service Data. 2. Enterprise Component Layer: This layer consists of the Application Services and Common Services that are responsible for realizing the functionality and maintaining the QoS of the exposed services. This layer uses container-based technologies such as application servers to implement the components, workload management, high availability, and load balancing. Application Services: This Service Layer enables application, technology, and database abstraction so that the complex accessing logic is hidden from the other service layers. This is a basic service layer, which exposes application functionalities and data as reusable services. The three types of the Application access services are: · Application Access Service: This Service Layer exposes application level functionalities as a reusable service between BSS to BSS and BSS to OSS integration. This layer is enabled using disparate technology such as Web Service, Integration Servers, and Adaptors, etc. · Data Access Service: This Service Layer exposes application data services as a reusable reference data service. This is done via direct interaction with application data. and provides the federated query. · Network Access Service: This Service Layer exposes provisioning layer as a reusable service from OSS to OSS integration. This integration service emphasizes the need for high performance, stateless process flows, and distributed design. Common Services encompasses management of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data such as information services, portal services, interaction services, infrastructure services, and security services, etc. 3. Integration Layer: This consists of service infrastructure components like service bus, service gateway for partner integration, service registry, service repository, and BPEL processor. Service bus will carry the service invocation payloads/messages between consumers and providers. The other important functions expected from it are itinerary based routing, distributed caching of routing information, transformations, and all qualities of service for messaging-like reliability, scalability, and availability, etc. Service registry will hold all contracts (wsdl) of services, and it helps developers to locate or discover service during design time or runtime. • BPEL processor would be useful in orchestrating the services to compose a complex business scenario or process. • Workflow and business rules management are also required to support manual triggering of certain activities within business process. based on the rules setup and also the state machine information. Application, data, and service mediation layer typically forms the overall composite application development framework or SOA Framework. 4. Business Process Layer: These are typically the intermediate services layer and represent Shared Business Process Services. At Enterprise Level, these services are from Customer Management, Order Management, Billing, Finance, and Asset Management application domains. 5. Access Layer: This layer consists of portals for Enterprise and provides a single view of Enterprise information management and dashboard services. 6. Channel Layer: This consists of various devices; applications that form part of extended enterprise; browsers through which users access the applications. 7. Client Layer: This designates the different types of users accessing the enterprise applications. The type of user typically would be an important factor in determining the level of access to applications. 8. Vertical pieces like management, monitoring, security, and development cut across all horizontal layers Management and monitoring involves all aspects of SOA-like services, SLAs, and other QoS lifecycle processes for both applications and services surrounding SOA governance. 9. EA Governance, Reference Architecture, Roadmap, Principles, and Best Practices: EA Governance is important in terms of providing the overall direction to SOA implementation within the enterprise. This involves board-level involvement, in addition to business and IT executives. At a high level, this involves managing the SOA projects implementation, managing SOA infrastructure, and controlling the entire effort through all fine-tuned IT processes in accordance with COBIT (Control Objectives for Information Technology). Devising tools and techniques to promote reuse culture, and the SOA way of doing things needs competency centers to be established in addition to training the workforce to take up new roles that are suited to SOA journey. Conclusions Reference Architectures can serve as the basis for disparate architecture efforts throughout the organization, even if they use different tools and technologies. Reference architectures provide best practices and approaches in the independent way a vendor deals with technology and standards. Reference Architectures model the abstract architectural elements for an enterprise independent of the technologies, protocols, and products that are used to implement an SOA. Telecom enterprises today are facing significant business and technology challenges due to growing competition, a multitude of services, and convergence. Adopting architectural best practices could go a long way in meeting these challenges. The use of SOA-based architecture for communication to each of the external systems like Billing, CRM, etc., in OSS/BSS system has made the architecture very loosely coupled, with greater flexibility. Any change in the external systems would be absorbed at the Integration Layer without affecting the rest of the ecosystem. The use of a Business Process Management (BPM) tool makes the management and maintenance of the business processes easy, with better performance in terms of lead time, quality, and cost. Since the Architecture is based on standards, it will lower the cost of deploying and managing OSS/BSS applications over their lifecycles.

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strange data annotations issue in MVC 2

- by femi

Hello, I came across something strange when creating an edit form with MVC 2. i realised that my error messages come up on form sumission even when i have filled ut valid data! i am using a buddy class which i have configured correctly ( i know that cos i can see my custom errors). Here is the code from the viewmodel that generates this; <%@ Control Language="C#" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewUserControl<TG_Careers.Models.Applicant>" %> <script src="/Scripts/MicrosoftAjax.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="/Scripts/MicrosoftMvcAjax.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="/Scripts/MicrosoftMvcValidation.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <%= Html.ValidationSummary() %> <% Html.EnableClientValidation(); %> <% using (Html.BeginForm()) {%> <div class="confirm-module"> <table cellpadding="4" cellspacing="2"> <tr> <td><%= Html.LabelFor(model => model.FirstName) %> </td> <td><%= Html.EditorFor(model => model.FirstName) %></td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2"><%= Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.FirstName) %></td> </tr> <tr> <td><%= Html.LabelFor(model => model.MiddleName) %></td> <td><%= Html.EditorFor(model => model.MiddleName) %></td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2"><%= Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.MiddleName) %></td> </tr> <tr> <td><%= Html.LabelFor(model => model.LastName) %></td> <td><%= Html.EditorFor(model => model.LastName) %></td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2"><%= Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.LastName) %></td> </tr> <tr> <td><%= Html.LabelFor(model => model.Gender) %></td> <td><%= Html.EditorFor(model => model.Gender) %></td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2"><%= Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.Gender) %></td> </tr> <tr> <td><%= Html.LabelFor(model => model.MaritalStatus) %></td> <td> <%= Html.EditorFor(model => model.MaritalStatus) %></td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2"><%= Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.MaritalStatus) %></td> </tr> <tr> <td><%= Html.LabelFor(model => model.DateOfBirth) %></td> <td><%= Html.EditorFor(model => model.DateOfBirth) %></td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2"><%= Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.DateOfBirth) %></td> </tr> <tr> <td><%= Html.LabelFor(model => model.Address) %></td> <td><%= Html.EditorFor(model => model.Address) %></td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2"><%= Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.Address) %></td> </tr> <tr> <td><%= Html.LabelFor(model => model.City) %></td> <td><%= Html.EditorFor(model => model.City) %></td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2"><%= Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.City) %></td> </tr> <tr> <td><%= Html.LabelFor(model => model.State) %></td> <td><%= Html.EditorFor(model => model.State) %></td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2"><%= Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.State) %></td> </tr> <tr> <td><%= Html.LabelFor(model => model.StateOfOriginID) %></td> <td><%= Html.DropDownList("StateOfOriginID", new SelectList(ViewData["States"] as IEnumerable, "StateID", "Name", Model.StateOfOriginID))%></td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2"><%= Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.StateOfOriginID) %></td> </tr> <tr> <td><%= Html.LabelFor(model => model.CompletedNYSC) %></td> <td><%= Html.EditorFor(model => model.CompletedNYSC) %></td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2"><%= Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.CompletedNYSC) %></td> </tr> <tr> <td><%= Html.LabelFor(model => model.YearsOfExperience) %></td> <td><%= Html.EditorFor(model => model.YearsOfExperience) %></td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2"><%= Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.YearsOfExperience) %></td> </tr> <tr> <td><%= Html.LabelFor(model => model.MobilePhone) %></td> <td><%= Html.EditorFor(model => model.MobilePhone) %></td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2"><%= Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.MobilePhone) %></td> </tr> <tr> <td><%= Html.LabelFor(model => model.DayPhone) %></td> <td> <%= Html.EditorFor(model => model.DayPhone) %></td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2"><%= Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.DayPhone) %></td> </tr> <tr> <td><%= Html.LabelFor(model => model.CVFileName) %></td> <td><%= Html.EditorFor(model => model.CVFileName) %></td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2"><%= Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.CVFileName) %></td> </tr> <tr> <td><%= Html.LabelFor(model => model.CurrentPosition) %></td> <td><%= Html.EditorFor(model => model.CurrentPosition) %></td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2"><%= Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.CurrentPosition) %></td> </tr> <tr> <td><%= Html.LabelFor(model => model.EmploymentCommenced) %></td> <td><%= Html.EditorFor(model => model.EmploymentCommenced) %></td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2"><%= Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.EmploymentCommenced) %></td> </tr> <tr> <td><%= Html.LabelFor(model => model.DateofTakingupCurrentPosition) %></td> <td><%= Html.EditorFor(model => model.DateofTakingupCurrentPosition) %></td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2"><%= Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.DateofTakingupCurrentPosition) %></td> </tr> <tr> <td> </td> <td> </td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2"> </td> </tr> </table> <p> <input type="submit" value="Save Profile Details" /> </p> </div> <% } %> Any ideas on this one please? Thanks

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OpenGL 3.x Assimp trouble implementing phong shading (normals?)

- by Defcronyke

I'm having trouble getting phong shading to look right. I'm pretty sure there's something wrong with either my OpenGL calls, or the way I'm loading my normals, but I guess it could be something else since 3D graphics and Assimp are both still very new to me. When trying to load .obj/.mtl files, the problems I'm seeing are: The models seem to be lit too intensely (less phong-style and more completely washed out, too bright). Faces that are lit seem to be lit equally all over (with the exception of a specular highlight showing only when the light source position is moved to be practically right on top of the model) Because of problems 1 and 2, spheres look very wrong: picture of sphere And things with larger faces look (less-noticeably) wrong too: picture of cube I could be wrong, but to me this doesn't look like proper phong shading. Here's the code that I think might be relevant (I can post more if necessary): file: assimpRenderer.cpp #include "assimpRenderer.hpp" namespace def { assimpRenderer::assimpRenderer(std::string modelFilename, float modelScale) { initSFML(); initOpenGL(); if (assImport(modelFilename)) // if modelFile loaded successfully { initScene(); mainLoop(modelScale); shutdownScene(); } shutdownOpenGL(); shutdownSFML(); } assimpRenderer::~assimpRenderer() { } void assimpRenderer::initSFML() { windowWidth = 800; windowHeight = 600; settings.majorVersion = 3; settings.minorVersion = 3; app = NULL; shader = NULL; app = new sf::Window(sf::VideoMode(windowWidth,windowHeight,32), "OpenGL 3.x Window", sf::Style::Default, settings); app->setFramerateLimit(240); app->setActive(); return; } void assimpRenderer::shutdownSFML() { delete app; return; } void assimpRenderer::initOpenGL() { GLenum err = glewInit(); if (GLEW_OK != err) { /* Problem: glewInit failed, something is seriously wrong. */ std::cerr << "Error: " << glewGetErrorString(err) << std::endl; } // check the OpenGL context version that's currently in use int glVersion[2] = {-1, -1}; glGetIntegerv(GL_MAJOR_VERSION, &glVersion[0]); // get the OpenGL Major version glGetIntegerv(GL_MINOR_VERSION, &glVersion[1]); // get the OpenGL Minor version std::cout << "Using OpenGL Version: " << glVersion[0] << "." << glVersion[1] << std::endl; return; } void assimpRenderer::shutdownOpenGL() { return; } void assimpRenderer::initScene() { // allocate heap space for VAOs, VBOs, and IBOs vaoID = new GLuint[scene->mNumMeshes]; vboID = new GLuint[scene->mNumMeshes*2]; iboID = new GLuint[scene->mNumMeshes]; glClearColor(0.4f, 0.6f, 0.9f, 0.0f); glEnable(GL_DEPTH_TEST); glDepthFunc(GL_LEQUAL); glEnable(GL_CULL_FACE); shader = new Shader("shader.vert", "shader.frag"); projectionMatrix = glm::perspective(60.0f, (float)windowWidth / (float)windowHeight, 0.1f, 100.0f); rot = 0.0f; rotSpeed = 50.0f; faceIndex = 0; colorArrayA = NULL; colorArrayD = NULL; colorArrayS = NULL; normalArray = NULL; genVAOs(); return; } void assimpRenderer::shutdownScene() { delete [] iboID; delete [] vboID; delete [] vaoID; delete shader; } void assimpRenderer::renderScene(float modelScale) { sf::Time elapsedTime = clock.getElapsedTime(); clock.restart(); if (rot > 360.0f) rot = 0.0f; rot += rotSpeed * elapsedTime.asSeconds(); glClear(GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT | GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT | GL_STENCIL_BUFFER_BIT); viewMatrix = glm::translate(glm::mat4(1.0f), glm::vec3(0.0f, -3.0f, -10.0f)); // move back a bit modelMatrix = glm::scale(glm::mat4(1.0f), glm::vec3(modelScale)); // scale model modelMatrix = glm::rotate(modelMatrix, rot, glm::vec3(0, 1, 0)); //modelMatrix = glm::rotate(modelMatrix, 25.0f, glm::vec3(0, 1, 0)); glm::vec3 lightPosition( 0.0f, -100.0f, 0.0f ); float lightPositionArray[3]; lightPositionArray[0] = lightPosition[0]; lightPositionArray[1] = lightPosition[1]; lightPositionArray[2] = lightPosition[2]; shader->bind(); int projectionMatrixLocation = glGetUniformLocation(shader->id(), "projectionMatrix"); int viewMatrixLocation = glGetUniformLocation(shader->id(), "viewMatrix"); int modelMatrixLocation = glGetUniformLocation(shader->id(), "modelMatrix"); int ambientLocation = glGetUniformLocation(shader->id(), "ambientColor"); int diffuseLocation = glGetUniformLocation(shader->id(), "diffuseColor"); int specularLocation = glGetUniformLocation(shader->id(), "specularColor"); int lightPositionLocation = glGetUniformLocation(shader->id(), "lightPosition"); int normalMatrixLocation = glGetUniformLocation(shader->id(), "normalMatrix"); glUniformMatrix4fv(projectionMatrixLocation, 1, GL_FALSE, &projectionMatrix[0][0]); glUniformMatrix4fv(viewMatrixLocation, 1, GL_FALSE, &viewMatrix[0][0]); glUniformMatrix4fv(modelMatrixLocation, 1, GL_FALSE, &modelMatrix[0][0]); glUniform3fv(lightPositionLocation, 1, lightPositionArray); for (unsigned int i = 0; i < scene->mNumMeshes; i++) { colorArrayA = new float[3]; colorArrayD = new float[3]; colorArrayS = new float[3]; material = scene->mMaterials[scene->mNumMaterials-1]; normalArray = new float[scene->mMeshes[i]->mNumVertices * 3]; unsigned int normalIndex = 0; for (unsigned int j = 0; j < scene->mMeshes[i]->mNumVertices * 3; j+=3, normalIndex++) { normalArray[j] = scene->mMeshes[i]->mNormals[normalIndex].x; // x normalArray[j+1] = scene->mMeshes[i]->mNormals[normalIndex].y; // y normalArray[j+2] = scene->mMeshes[i]->mNormals[normalIndex].z; // z } normalIndex = 0; glUniformMatrix3fv(normalMatrixLocation, 1, GL_FALSE, normalArray); aiColor3D ambient(0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f); material->Get(AI_MATKEY_COLOR_AMBIENT, ambient); aiColor3D diffuse(0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f); material->Get(AI_MATKEY_COLOR_DIFFUSE, diffuse); aiColor3D specular(0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f); material->Get(AI_MATKEY_COLOR_SPECULAR, specular); colorArrayA[0] = ambient.r; colorArrayA[1] = ambient.g; colorArrayA[2] = ambient.b; colorArrayD[0] = diffuse.r; colorArrayD[1] = diffuse.g; colorArrayD[2] = diffuse.b; colorArrayS[0] = specular.r; colorArrayS[1] = specular.g; colorArrayS[2] = specular.b; // bind color for each mesh glUniform3fv(ambientLocation, 1, colorArrayA); glUniform3fv(diffuseLocation, 1, colorArrayD); glUniform3fv(specularLocation, 1, colorArrayS); // render all meshes glBindVertexArray(vaoID[i]); // bind our VAO glDrawElements(GL_TRIANGLES, scene->mMeshes[i]->mNumFaces*3, GL_UNSIGNED_INT, 0); glBindVertexArray(0); // unbind our VAO delete [] normalArray; delete [] colorArrayA; delete [] colorArrayD; delete [] colorArrayS; } shader->unbind(); app->display(); return; } void assimpRenderer::handleEvents() { sf::Event event; while (app->pollEvent(event)) { if (event.type == sf::Event::Closed) { app->close(); } if ((event.type == sf::Event::KeyPressed) && (event.key.code == sf::Keyboard::Escape)) { app->close(); } if (event.type == sf::Event::Resized) { glViewport(0, 0, event.size.width, event.size.height); } } return; } void assimpRenderer::mainLoop(float modelScale) { while (app->isOpen()) { renderScene(modelScale); handleEvents(); } } bool assimpRenderer::assImport(const std::string& pFile) { // read the file with some example postprocessing scene = importer.ReadFile(pFile, aiProcess_CalcTangentSpace | aiProcess_Triangulate | aiProcess_JoinIdenticalVertices | aiProcess_SortByPType); // if the import failed, report it if (!scene) { std::cerr << "Error: " << importer.GetErrorString() << std::endl; return false; } return true; } void assimpRenderer::genVAOs() { int vboIndex = 0; for (unsigned int i = 0; i < scene->mNumMeshes; i++, vboIndex+=2) { mesh = scene->mMeshes[i]; indexArray = new unsigned int[mesh->mNumFaces * sizeof(unsigned int) * 3]; // convert assimp faces format to array faceIndex = 0; for (unsigned int t = 0; t < mesh->mNumFaces; ++t) { const struct aiFace* face = &mesh->mFaces[t]; std::memcpy(&indexArray[faceIndex], face->mIndices, sizeof(float) * 3); faceIndex += 3; } // generate VAO glGenVertexArrays(1, &vaoID[i]); glBindVertexArray(vaoID[i]); // generate IBO for faces glGenBuffers(1, &iboID[i]); glBindBuffer(GL_ELEMENT_ARRAY_BUFFER, iboID[i]); glBufferData(GL_ELEMENT_ARRAY_BUFFER, sizeof(GLuint) * mesh->mNumFaces * 3, indexArray, GL_STATIC_DRAW); // generate VBO for vertices if (mesh->HasPositions()) { glGenBuffers(1, &vboID[vboIndex]); glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, vboID[vboIndex]); glBufferData(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, mesh->mNumVertices * sizeof(GLfloat) * 3, mesh->mVertices, GL_STATIC_DRAW); glEnableVertexAttribArray((GLuint)0); glVertexAttribPointer((GLuint)0, 3, GL_FLOAT, GL_FALSE, 0, 0); } // generate VBO for normals if (mesh->HasNormals()) { normalArray = new float[scene->mMeshes[i]->mNumVertices * 3]; unsigned int normalIndex = 0; for (unsigned int j = 0; j < scene->mMeshes[i]->mNumVertices * 3; j+=3, normalIndex++) { normalArray[j] = scene->mMeshes[i]->mNormals[normalIndex].x; // x normalArray[j+1] = scene->mMeshes[i]->mNormals[normalIndex].y; // y normalArray[j+2] = scene->mMeshes[i]->mNormals[normalIndex].z; // z } normalIndex = 0; glGenBuffers(1, &vboID[vboIndex+1]); glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, vboID[vboIndex+1]); glBufferData(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, mesh->mNumVertices * sizeof(GLfloat) * 3, normalArray, GL_STATIC_DRAW); glEnableVertexAttribArray((GLuint)1); glVertexAttribPointer((GLuint)1, 3, GL_FLOAT, GL_FALSE, 0, 0); delete [] normalArray; } // tex coord stuff goes here // unbind buffers glBindVertexArray(0); glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, 0); glBindBuffer(GL_ELEMENT_ARRAY_BUFFER, 0); delete [] indexArray; } vboIndex = 0; return; } } file: shader.vert #version 150 core in vec3 in_Position; in vec3 in_Normal; uniform mat4 projectionMatrix; uniform mat4 viewMatrix; uniform mat4 modelMatrix; uniform vec3 lightPosition; uniform mat3 normalMatrix; smooth out vec3 vVaryingNormal; smooth out vec3 vVaryingLightDir; void main() { // derive MVP and MV matrices mat4 modelViewProjectionMatrix = projectionMatrix * viewMatrix * modelMatrix; mat4 modelViewMatrix = viewMatrix * modelMatrix; // get surface normal in eye coordinates vVaryingNormal = normalMatrix * in_Normal; // get vertex position in eye coordinates vec4 vPosition4 = modelViewMatrix * vec4(in_Position, 1.0); vec3 vPosition3 = vPosition4.xyz / vPosition4.w; // get vector to light source vVaryingLightDir = normalize(lightPosition - vPosition3); // Set the position of the current vertex gl_Position = modelViewProjectionMatrix * vec4(in_Position, 1.0); } file: shader.frag #version 150 core out vec4 out_Color; uniform vec3 ambientColor; uniform vec3 diffuseColor; uniform vec3 specularColor; smooth in vec3 vVaryingNormal; smooth in vec3 vVaryingLightDir; void main() { // dot product gives us diffuse intensity float diff = max(0.0, dot(normalize(vVaryingNormal), normalize(vVaryingLightDir))); // multiply intensity by diffuse color, force alpha to 1.0 out_Color = vec4(diff * diffuseColor, 1.0); // add in ambient light out_Color += vec4(ambientColor, 1.0); // specular light vec3 vReflection = normalize(reflect(-normalize(vVaryingLightDir), normalize(vVaryingNormal))); float spec = max(0.0, dot(normalize(vVaryingNormal), vReflection)); if (diff != 0) { float fSpec = pow(spec, 128.0); // Set the output color of our current pixel out_Color.rgb += vec3(fSpec, fSpec, fSpec); } } I know it's a lot to look through, but I'm putting most of the code up so as not to assume where the problem is. Thanks in advance to anyone who has some time to help me pinpoint the problem(s)! I've been trying to sort it out for two days now and I'm not getting anywhere on my own.

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