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  • How Can I Safely Destroy Sensitive Data CDs/DVDs?

    - by Jason Fitzpatrick
    You have a pile of DVDs with sensitive information on them and you need to safely and effectively dispose of them so no data recovery is possible. What’s the most safe and efficient way to get the job done? Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites. The Question SuperUser reader HaLaBi wants to know how he can safely destroy CDs and DVDs with personal data on them: I have old CDs/DVDs which have some backups, these backups have some work and personal files. I always had problems when I needed to physically destroy them to make sure no one will reuse them. Breaking them is dangerous, pieces could fly fast and may cause harm. Scratching them badly is what I always do but it takes long time and I managed to read some of the data in the scratched CDs/DVDs. What’s the way to physically destroy a CD/DVD safely? How should he approach the problem? The Answer SuperUser contributor Journeyman Geek offers a practical solution coupled with a slightly mad-scientist solution: The proper way is to get yourself a shredder that also handles cds – look online for cd shredders. This is the right option if you end up doing this routinely. I don’t do this very often – For small scale destruction I favour a pair of tin snips – they have enough force to cut through a cd, yet are blunt enough to cause small cracks along the sheer line. Kitchen shears with one serrated side work well too. You want to damage the data layer along with shearing along the plastic, and these work magnificently. Do it in a bag, cause this generates sparkly bits. There’s also the fun, and probably dangerous way – find yourself an old microwave, and microwave them. I would suggest doing this in a well ventilated area of course, and not using your mother’s good microwave. There’s a lot of videos of this on YouTube – such as this (who’s done this in a kitchen… and using his mom’s microwave). This results in a very much destroyed cd in every respect. If I was an evil hacker mastermind, this is what I’d do. The other options are better for the rest of us. Another contributor, Keltari, notes that the only safe (and DoD approved) way to dispose of data is total destruction: The answer by Journeyman Geek is good enough for almost everything. But oddly, that common phrase “Good enough for government work” does not apply – depending on which part of the government. It is technically possible to recover data from shredded/broken/etc CDs and DVDs. If you have a microscope handy, put the disc in it and you can see the pits. The disc can be reassembled and the data can be reconstructed — minus the data that was physically destroyed. So why not just pulverize the disc into dust? Or burn it to a crisp? While technically, that would completely eliminate the data, it leaves no record of the disc having existed. And in some places, like DoD and other secure facilities, the data needs to be destroyed, but the disc needs to exist. If there is a security audit, the disc can be pulled to show it has been destroyed. So how can a disc exist, yet be destroyed? Well, the most common method is grinding the disc down to destroy the data, yet keep the label surface of the disc intact. Basically, it’s no different than using sandpaper on the writable side, till the data is gone. Have something to add to the explanation? Sound off in the the comments. Want to read more answers from other tech-savvy Stack Exchange users? Check out the full discussion thread here.     

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  • Agile Testing Days 2012 – My First Conference!

    - by Chris George
    I’d like to give you a bit of background first… so please bear with me! In 1996, whilst studying for my final year of my degree, I applied for a job as a C++ Developer at a small software house in Hertfordshire  After bodging up the technical part of the interview I didn’t get the job, but was offered a position as a QA Engineer instead. The role sounded intriguing and the pay was pretty good so in the absence of anything else I took it. Here began my career in the world of software testing! Back then, testing/QA was often an afterthought, something that was bolted on to the development process and very much a second class citizen. Test automation was rare, and tools were basic or non-existent! The internet was just starting to take off, and whilst there might have been testing communities and resources, we were certainly not exposed to any of them. After 8 years I moved to another small company, and again didn’t find myself exposed to any of the changes that were happening in the industry. It wasn’t until I joined Red Gate in 2008 that my view of testing and software development as a whole started to expand. But it took a further 4 years for my view of testing to be totally blown open, and so the story really begins… In May 2012 I was fortunate to land the role of Head of Test Engineering. Soon after, I received an email with details for the “Agile Testi However, in my new role, I decided that it was time to bite the bullet and at least go to one conference. Perhaps I could get some new ideas to supplement and support some of the ideas I already had.ng Days” conference in Potsdam, Germany. I looked over the suggested programme and some of the talks peeked my interest. For numerous reasons I’d shied away from attending conferences in the past, one of the main ones being that I didn’t see much benefit in attending loads of talks when I could just read about stuff like that on the internet. So, on the 18th November 2012, myself and three other Red Gaters boarded a plane at Heathrow bound for Potsdam, Germany to attend Agile Testing Days 2012. Tutorial Day – “Software Testing Reloaded” We chose to do the tutorials on the 19th, I chose the one titled “Software Testing Reloaded – So you wanna actually DO something? We’ve got just the workshop for you. Now with even less powerpoint!”. With such a concise and serious title I just had to see what it was about! I nervously entered the room to be greeted by tables, chairs etc all over the place, not set out and frankly in one hell of a mess! There were a few people in there playing a game with dice. Okaaaay… this is going to be a long day! Actually the dice game was an exercise in deduction and simplification… I found it very interesting and is certainly something I’ll be using at work as a training exercise! (I won’t explain the game here cause I don’t want to let the cat out of the bag…) The tutorial consisted of several games, exploring different aspects of testing. They were all practical yet required a fair amount of thin king. Matt Heusser and Pete Walen were running the tutorial, and presented it in a very relaxed and light-hearted manner. It was really my first experience of working in small teams with testers from very different backgrounds, and it was really enjoyable. Matt & Pete were very approachable and offered advice where required whilst still making you work for the answers! One of the tasks was to devise several strategies for testing some electronic dice. The premise was that a Vegas casino wanted to use the dice to appeal to the twenty-somethings interested in tech, but needed assurance that they were as reliable and random as traditional dice. This was a very interesting and challenging exercise that forced us to challenge various assumptions, determine/clarify requirements but most of all it was frustrating because the dice made a very very irritating beeping noise. Multiple that by at least 12 dice and I was dreaming about them all that night!! Some of the main takeaways that were brilliantly demonstrated through the games were not to make assumptions, challenge requirements, and have fun testing! The tutorial lasted the whole day, but to be honest the day went very quickly! My introduction into the conference experience started very well indeed, and I would talk to both Matt and Pete several times during the 4 days. Days 1,2 & 3 will be coming soon…  

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  • Myths about Coding Craftsmanship part 2

    - by tom
    Myth 3: The source of all bad code is inept developers and stupid people When you review code is this what you assume?  Shame on you.  You are probably making assumptions in your code if you are assuming so much already.  Bad code can be the result of any number of causes including but not limited to using dated techniques (like boxing when generics are available), not following standards (“look how he does the spacing between arguments!” or “did he really just name that variable ‘bln_Hello_Cats’?”), being redundant, using properties, methods, or objects in a novel way (like switching on button.Text between “Hello World” and “Hello World “ //clever use of space character… sigh), not following the SOLID principals, hacking around assumptions made in earlier iterations / hacking in features that should be worked into the overall design.  The first two issues, while annoying are pretty easy to spot and can be fixed so easily.  If your coding team is made up of experienced professionals who are passionate about staying current then these shouldn’t be happening.  If you work with a variety of skills, backgrounds, and experience then there will be some of this stuff going on.  If you have an opportunity to mentor such a developer who is receptive to constructive criticism don’t be a jerk; help them and the codebase will improve.  A little patience can improve the codebase, your work environment, and even your perspective. The novelty and redundancy I have encountered has often been the use of creativity when language knowledge was perceived as unavailable or too time consuming.  When developers learn on the job you get a lot of this.  Rather than going to MSDN developers will use what they know.  Depending on the constraints of their assignment hacking together what they know may seem quite practical.  This was not stupid though I often wonder how much time is actually “saved” by hacking.  These issues are often harder to untangle if we ever do.  They can also grow out of control as we write hack after hack to make it work and get back to some development that is satisfying. Hacking upon an existing hack is what I call “feeding the monster”.  Code monsters are anti-patterns and hacks gone wild.  The reason code monsters continue to get bigger is that they keep growing in scope, touching more and more of the application.  This is not the result of dumb developers. It is probably the result of avoiding design, not taking the time to understand the problems or anticipate or communicate the vision of the product.  If our developers don’t understand the purpose of a feature or product how do we expect potential customers to do so? Forethought and organization are often what is missing from bad code.  Developers who do not use the SOLID principals should be encouraged to learn these principals and be given guidance on how to apply them.  The time “saved” by giving hackers room to hack will be made up for and then some. Not as technical debt but as shoddy work that if not replaced will be struggled with again and again.  Bad code is not the result of dumb developers (usually) it is the result of trying to do too much without the proper resources and neglecting the right thing that needs doing with the first thoughtless thing that comes into our heads. Object oriented code is all about relationships between objects.  Coders who believe their coworkers are all fools tend to write objects that are difficult to work with, not eager to explain themselves, and perform erratically and irrationally.  If you constantly find you are surrounded by idiots you may want to ask yourself if you are being unreasonable, if you are being closed minded, of if you have chosen the right profession.  Opening your mind up to the idea that you probably work with rational, well-intentioned people will probably make you a better coder and it might even make you less grumpy.  If you are surrounded by jerks who do not engage in the exchange of ideas who do not care about their customers or the durability of the code you are building together then I suggest you find a new place to work.  Myth 4: Customers don’t care about “beautiful” code Craftsmanship is customer focused because it means that the job was done right, the product will withstand the abuse, modifications, and scrutiny of our customers.  Users can appreciate a predictable timeline for a release, a product delivered on time and on budget, a feature set that does not interfere with the task(s) it is supporting, quick turnarounds on exception messages, self healing issues, and less issues.  These are all hindered by skimping on craftsmanship.  When we write data access and when we write reusable code.   What do you think?  Does bad code come primarily from low IQ individuals?  Do customers care about beautiful code?

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  • Oracle NoSQL Database Exceeds 1 Million Mixed YCSB Ops/Sec

    - by Charles Lamb
    We ran a set of YCSB performance tests on Oracle NoSQL Database using SSD cards and Intel Xeon E5-2690 CPUs with the goal of achieving 1M mixed ops/sec on a 95% read / 5% update workload. We used the standard YCSB parameters: 13 byte keys and 1KB data size (1,102 bytes after serialization). The maximum database size was 2 billion records, or approximately 2 TB of data. We sized the shards to ensure that this was not an "in-memory" test (i.e. the data portion of the B-Trees did not fit into memory). All updates were durable and used the "simple majority" replica ack policy, effectively 'committing to the network'. All read operations used the Consistency.NONE_REQUIRED parameter allowing reads to be performed on any replica. In the past we have achieved 100K ops/sec using SSD cards on a single shard cluster (replication factor 3) so for this test we used 10 shards on 15 Storage Nodes with each SN carrying 2 Rep Nodes and each RN assigned to its own SSD card. After correcting a scaling problem in YCSB, we blew past the 1M ops/sec mark with 8 shards and proceeded to hit 1.2M ops/sec with 10 shards.  Hardware Configuration We used 15 servers, each configured with two 335 GB SSD cards. We did not have homogeneous CPUs across all 15 servers available to us so 12 of the 15 were Xeon E5-2690, 2.9 GHz, 2 sockets, 32 threads, 193 GB RAM, and the other 3 were Xeon E5-2680, 2.7 GHz, 2 sockets, 32 threads, 193 GB RAM.  There might have been some upside in having all 15 machines configured with the faster CPU, but since CPU was not the limiting factor we don't believe the improvement would be significant. The client machines were Xeon X5670, 2.93 GHz, 2 sockets, 24 threads, 96 GB RAM. Although the clients had 96 GB of RAM, neither the NoSQL Database or YCSB clients require anywhere near that amount of memory and the test could have just easily been run with much less. Networking was all 10GigE. YCSB Scaling Problem We made three modifications to the YCSB benchmark. The first was to allow the test to accommodate more than 2 billion records (effectively int's vs long's). To keep the key size constant, we changed the code to use base 32 for the user ids. The second change involved to the way we run the YCSB client in order to make the test itself horizontally scalable.The basic problem has to do with the way the YCSB test creates its Zipfian distribution of keys which is intended to model "real" loads by generating clusters of key collisions. Unfortunately, the percentage of collisions on the most contentious keys remains the same even as the number of keys in the database increases. As we scale up the load, the number of collisions on those keys increases as well, eventually exceeding the capacity of the single server used for a given key.This is not a workload that is realistic or amenable to horizontal scaling. YCSB does provide alternate key distribution algorithms so this is not a shortcoming of YCSB in general. We decided that a better model would be for the key collisions to be limited to a given YCSB client process. That way, as additional YCSB client processes (i.e. additional load) are added, they each maintain the same number of collisions they encounter themselves, but do not increase the number of collisions on a single key in the entire store. We added client processes proportionally to the number of records in the database (and therefore the number of shards). This change to the use of YCSB better models a use case where new groups of users are likely to access either just their own entries, or entries within their own subgroups, rather than all users showing the same interest in a single global collection of keys. If an application finds every user having the same likelihood of wanting to modify a single global key, that application has no real hope of getting horizontal scaling. Finally, we used read/modify/write (also known as "Compare And Set") style updates during the mixed phase. This uses versioned operations to make sure that no updates are lost. This mode of operation provides better application behavior than the way we have typically run YCSB in the past, and is only practical at scale because we eliminated the shared key collision hotspots.It is also a more realistic testing scenario. To reiterate, all updates used a simple majority replica ack policy making them durable. Scalability Results In the table below, the "KVS Size" column is the number of records with the number of shards and the replication factor. Hence, the first row indicates 400m total records in the NoSQL Database (KV Store), 2 shards, and a replication factor of 3. The "Clients" column indicates the number of YCSB client processes. "Threads" is the number of threads per process with the total number of threads. Hence, 90 threads per YCSB process for a total of 360 threads. The client processes were distributed across 10 client machines. Shards KVS Size Clients Mixed (records) Threads OverallThroughput(ops/sec) Read Latencyav/95%/99%(ms) Write Latencyav/95%/99%(ms) 2 400m(2x3) 4 90(360) 302,152 0.76/1/3 3.08/8/35 4 800m(4x3) 8 90(720) 558,569 0.79/1/4 3.82/16/45 8 1600m(8x3) 16 90(1440) 1,028,868 0.85/2/5 4.29/21/51 10 2000m(10x3) 20 90(1800) 1,244,550 0.88/2/6 4.47/23/53

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  • ADF Reusable Artefacts

    - by Arda Eralp
    Primary reusable ADF Business Component: Entity Objects (EOs) View Objects (VOs) Application Modules (AMs) Framework Extensions Classes Primary reusable ADF Controller: Bounded Task Flows (BTFs) Task Flow Templates Primary reusable ADF Faces: Page Templates Skins Declarative Components Utility Classes Certain components will often be used more than once. Whether the reuse happens within the same application, or across different applications, it is often advantageous to package these reusable components into a library that can be shared between different developers, across different teams, and even across departments within an organization. In the world of Java object-oriented programming, reusing classes and objects is just standard procedure. With the introduction of the model-view-controller (MVC) architecture, applications can be further modularized into separate model, view, and controller layers. By separating the data (model and business services layers) from the presentation (view and controller layers), you ensure that changes to any one layer do not affect the integrity of the other layers. You can change business logic without having to change the UI, or redesign the web pages or front end without having to recode domain logic. Oracle ADF and JDeveloper support the MVC design pattern. When you create an application in JDeveloper, you can choose many application templates that automatically set up data model and user interface projects. Because the different MVC layers are decoupled from each other, development can proceed on different projects in parallel and with a certain amount of independence. ADF Library further extends this modularity of design by providing a convenient and practical way to create, deploy, and reuse high-level components. When you first design your application, you design it with component reusability in mind. If you created components that can be reused, you can package them into JAR files and add them to a reusable component repository. If you need a component, you may look into the repository for those components and then add them into your project or application. For example, you can create an application module for a domain and package it to be used as the data model project in several different applications. Or, if your application will be consuming components, you may be able to load a page template component from a repository of ADF Library JARs to create common look and feel pages. Then you can put your page flow together by stringing together several task flow components pulled from the library. An ADF Library JAR contains ADF components and does not, and cannot, contain other JARs. It should not be confused with the JDeveloper library, Java EE library, or Oracle WebLogic shared library. Reusable Component Description Data Control Any data control can be packaged into an ADF Library JAR. Some of the data controls supported by Oracle ADF include application modules, Enterprise JavaBeans, web services, URL services, JavaBeans, and placeholder data controls. Application Module When you are using ADF Business Components and you generate an application module, an associated application module data control is also generated. When you package an application module data control, you also package up the ADF Business Components associated with that application module. The relevant entity objects, view objects, and associations will be a part of the ADF Library JAR and available for reuse. Business Components Business components are the entity objects, view objects, and associations used in the ADF Business Components data model project. You can package business components by themselves or together with an application module. Task Flows & Task Flow Templates Task flows can be packaged into an ADF Library JAR for reuse. If you drop a bounded task flow that uses page fragments, JDeveloper adds a region to the page and binds it to the dropped task flow. ADF bounded task flows built using pages can be dropped onto pages. The drop will create a link to call the bounded task flow. A task flow call activity and control flow will automatically be added to the task flow, with the view activity referencing the page. If there is more than one existing task flow with a view activity referencing the page, it will prompt you to select the one to automatically add a task flow call activity and control flow. If an ADF task flow template was created in the same project as the task flow, the ADF task flow template will be included in the ADF Library JAR and will be reusable. Page Templates You can package a page template and its artifacts into an ADF Library JAR. If the template uses image files and they are included in a directory within your project, these files will also be available for the template during reuse. Declarative Components You can create declarative components and package them for reuse. The tag libraries associated with the component will be included and loaded into the consuming project. You can also package up projects that have several different reusable components if you expect that more than one component will be consumed. For example, you can create a project that has both an application module and a bounded task flow. When this ADF Library JAR file is consumed, the application will have both the application module and the task flow available for use. You can package multiple components into one JAR file, or you can package a single component into a JAR file. Oracle ADF and JDeveloper give you the option and flexibility to create reusable components that best suit you and your organization. You create a reusable component by using JDeveloper to package and deploy the project that contains the components into a ADF Library JAR file. You use the components by adding that JAR to the consuming project. At design time, the JAR is added to the consuming project's class path and so is available for reuse. At runtime, the reused component runs from the JAR file by reference.

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  • The design of a generic data synchronizer, or, an [object] that does [actions] with the aid of [helpers]

    - by acheong87
    I'd like to create a generic data-source "synchronizer," where data-source "types" may include MySQL databases, Google Spreadsheets documents, CSV files, among others. I've been trying to figure out how to structure this in terms of classes and interfaces, keeping in mind (what I've read about) composition vs. inheritance and is-a vs. has-a, but each route I go down seems to violate some principle. For simplicity, assume that all data-sources have a header-row-plus-data-rows format. For example, assume that the first rows of Google Spreadsheets documents and CSV files will have column headers, a.k.a. "fields" (to parallel database fields). Also, eventually, I would like to implement this in PHP, but avoiding language-specific discussion would probably be more productive. Here's an overview of what I've tried. Part 1/4: ISyncable class CMySQL implements ISyncable GetFields() // sql query, pdo statement, whatever AddFields() RemFields() ... _dbh class CGoogleSpreadsheets implements ISyncable GetFields() // zend gdata api AddFields() RemFields() ... _spreadsheetKey _worksheetId class CCsvFile implements ISyncable GetFields() // read from buffer AddFields() RemFields() ... _buffer interface ISyncable GetFields() AddFields($field1, $field2, ...) RemFields($field1, $field2, ...) ... CanAddFields() // maybe the spreadsheet is locked for write, or CanRemFields() // maybe no permission to alter a database table ... AddRow() ModRow() RemRow() ... Open() Close() ... First Question: Does it make sense to use an interface, as above? Part 2/4: CSyncer Next, the thing that does the syncing. class CSyncer __construct(ISyncable $A, ISyncable $B) Push() // sync A to B Pull() // sync B to A Sync() // Push() and Pull() only differ in direction; factor. // Sync()'s job is to make sure that the fields on each side // match, to add fields where appropriate and possible, to // account for different column-orderings, etc., and of // course, to add and remove rows as necessary to sync. ... _A _B Second Question: Does it make sense to define such a class, or am I treading dangerously close to the "Kingdom of Nouns"? Part 3/4: CTranslator? ITranslator? Now, here's where I actually get lost, assuming the above is passable. Sometimes, two ISyncables speak different "dialects." For example, believe it or not, Google Spreadsheets (accessed through the Google Data API "list feed") returns column headers lower-cased and stripped of all spaces and symbols! That is, sys_TIMESTAMP is systimestamp, as far as my code can tell. (Yes, I am aware that the "cell feed" does not strip the name so; however cell-by-cell manipulation is too slow for what I'm doing.) One can imagine other hypothetical examples. Perhaps even the data itself can be in different "dialects." But let's take it as given for now, and not argue this if possible. Third Question: How would you implement "translation"? Note: Taking all this as an exercise, I'm more interested in the "idealized" design, rather than the practical one. (God knows that shipped sailed when I began this project.) Part 4/4: Further Thought Here's my train of thought to demonstrate I've thunk, albeit unfruitfully: First, I thought, primitively, "I'll just modify CMySQL::GetFields() to lower-case and strip field names so they're compatible with Google Spreadsheets." But of course, then my class should really be called, CMySQLForGoogleSpreadsheets, and that can't be right. So, the thing which translates must exist outside of an ISyncable implementor. And surely it can't be right to make each translation a method in CSyncer. If it exists outside of both ISyncable and CSyncer, then what is it? (Is it even an "it"?) Is it an abstract class, i.e. abstract CTranslator? Is it an interface, since a translator only does, not has, i.e. interface ITranslator? Does it even require instantiation? e.g. If it's an ITranslator, then should its translation methods be static? (I learned what "late static binding" meant, today.) And, dear God, whatever it is, how should a CSyncer use it? Does it "have" it? Is it, "it"? Who am I? ...am I, "I"? I've attempted to break up the question into sub-questions, but essentially my question is singular: How does one implement an object A that conceptually "links" (has) two objects b1 and b2 that share a common interface B, where certain pairs of b1 and b2 require a helper, e.g. a translator, to be handled by A? Something tells me that I've overcomplicated this design, or violated a principle much higher up. Thank you all very much for your time and any advice you can provide.

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  • What are some concise and comprehensive introductory guide to unit testing for a self-taught programmer [closed]

    - by Superbest
    I don't have much formal training in programming and I have learned most things by looking up solutions on the internet to practical problems I have. There are some areas which I think would be valuable to learn, but which ended up both being difficult to learn and easy to avoid learning for a self-taught programmer. Unit testing is one of them. Specifically, I am interested in tests in and for C#/.NET applications using Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools in Visual Studio 2010 and/or 2012, but I really want a good introduction to the principles so language and IDE shouldn't matter much. At this time I'm interested in relatively trivial tests for small or medium sized programs (development time of weeks or months and mostly just myself developing). I don't necessarily intend to do test-driven development (I am aware that some say unit testing alone is supposed to be for developing features in TDD, and not an assurance that there are no bugs in the software, but unit testing is often the only kind of testing for which I have resources). I have found this tutorial which I feel gave me a decent idea of what unit tests and TDD looks like, but in trying to apply these ideas to my own projects, I often get confused by questions I can't answer and don't know how to answer, such as: What parts of my application and what sorts of things aren't necessarily worth testing? How fine grained should my tests be? Should they test every method and property separately, or work with a larger scope? What is a good naming convention for test methods? (since apparently the name of the method is the only way I will be able to tell from a glance at the test results table what works in my program and what doesn't) Is it bad to have many asserts in one test method? Since apparently VS2012 reports only that "an Assert.IsTrue failed within method MyTestMethod", and if MyTestMethod has 10 Assert.IsTrue statements, it will be irritating to figure out why a test is failing. If a lot of the functionality deals with writing and reading data to/from the disk in a not-exactly trivial fashion, how do I test that? If I provide a bunch of files as input by placing them in the program's directory, do I have to copy those files to the test project's bin/Debug folder now? If my program works with a large body of data and execution takes minutes or more, should my tests have it do the whole use all of the real data, a subset of it, or simulated data? If latter, how do I decide on the subset or how to simulate? Closely related to the previous point, if a class is such that its main operation happens in a state that is arrived to by the program after some involved operations (say, a class makes calculations on data derived from a few thousands of lines of code analyzing some raw data) how do I test just that class without inevitably ending up testing that class and all the other code that brings it to that state along with it? In general, what kind of approach should I use for test initialization? (hopefully that is the correct term, I mean preparing classes for testing by filling them in with appropriate data) How do I deal with private members? Do I just suck it up and assume that "not public = shouldn't be tested"? I have seen people suggest using private accessors and reflection, but these feel like clumsy and unsuited for regular use. Are these even good ideas? Is there anything like design patterns concerning testing specifically? I guess the main themes in what I'd like to learn more about are, (1) what are the overarching principles that should be followed (or at least considered) in every testing effort and (2) what are popular rules of thumb for writing tests. For example, at one point I recall hearing from someone that if a method is longer than 200 lines, it should be refactored - not a universally correct rule, but it has been quite helpful since I'd otherwise happily put hundreds of lines in single methods and then wonder why my code is so hard to read. Similarly I've found ReSharpers suggestions on member naming style and other things to be quite helpful in keeping my codebases sane. I see many resources both online and in print that talk about testing in the context of large applications (years of work, 10s of people or more). However, because I've never worked on such large projects, this context is very unfamiliar to me and makes the material difficult to follow and relate to my real world problems. Speaking of software development in general, advice given with the assumptions of large projects isn't always straightforward to apply to my own, smaller endeavors. Summary So my question is: What are some resources to learn about unit testing, for a hobbyist, self-taught programmer without much formal training? Ideally, I'm looking for a short and simple "bible of unit testing" which I can commit to memory, and then apply systematically by repeatedly asking myself "is this test following the bible of testing closely enough?" and then amending discrepancies if it doesn't.

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  • SOA Suite 11g Native Format Builder Complex Format Example

    - by bob.webster
    This rather long posting details the steps required to process a grouping of fixed length records using Format Builder.   If it’s 10 pm and you’re feeling beat you might want to leave this until tomorrow.  But if it’s 10 pm and you need to get a Format Builder Complex template done, read on… The goal is to process individual orders from a file using the 11g File Adapter and Format Builder Sample Data =========== 001Square Widget            0245.98 102Triagular Widget         1120.00 403Circular Widget           0099.45 ORD8898302/01/2011 301Hexagon Widget         1150.98 ORD6735502/01/2011 The records are fixed length records representing a number of logical Order records. Each order record consists of a number of item records starting with a 3 digit number, followed by a single Summary Record which starts with the constant ORD. How can this file be processed so that the first poll returns the first order? 001Square Widget            0245.98 102Triagular Widget         1120.00 403Circular Widget           0099.45 ORD8898302/01/2011 And the second poll returns the second order? 301Hexagon Widget           1150.98 ORD6735502/01/2011 Note: if you need more than one order per poll, that’s also possible, see the “Multiple Messages” field in the “File Adapter Step 6 of 9” snapshot further down.   To follow along with this example you will need - Studio Edition Version 11.1.1.4.0    with the   - SOA Extension for JDeveloper 11.1.1.4.0 installed Both can be downloaded from here:  http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/soasuite/downloads/index.html You will not need a running WebLogic Server domain to complete the steps and Format Builder tests in this article.     Start with a SOA Composite containing a File Adapter The Format Builder is part of the File Adapter so start by creating a new SOA Project and Composite. Here is a quick summary for those not familiar with these steps - Start JDeveloper - From the Main Menu choose File->New - In the New Gallery window that opens Expand the “General” category and Select the Applications node.   Then choose SOA Application from the Items section on the right.  Finally press the OK button. - In Step 1 of the “Create SOA Application wizard” that appears enter an Application Name and an Directory of your     choice,   then press the Next button. - In Step 2 of the “Create SOA Application wizard”, press the Next button leaving all entries as defaulted. - In Step 3 of the “Create SOA Application wizard”, Enter a composite name of your choice and Press the Finish   Button These steps result in a new Application and SOA Project. The SOA Project contains a composite.xml file which is opened and shown below. For our example we have not defined a Mediator or a BPEL process to minimize the steps, but one or the other would eventually be needed to use the File Adapter we are about to create. Drag and drop the File Adapter icon from the Component Pallette onto either the LEFT side of the diagram under “Exposed Services” or the right side under “External References”.  (See the Green Circle in the image below).  Placing the adapter on the left side would indicate the file being processed is inbound to the composite, if the adapter is placed on the right side then the data is outbound to a file.     Note that the same Format Builder definition can be used in both directions.  For example we could use the format with a File Adapter on the left side of the composite to parse fixed data into XML, modify the data in our Composite or BPEL process and then use the same Format Builder definition with a File adapter on the right side of the composite to write the data back out in the same fixed data format When the File Adapter is dropped on the Composite the File Adapter Wizard Appears. Skip Past the first page, Step 1 of 9 by pressing the Next button. In Step 2 enter a service name of your choice as shown below, then press Next   When the Native Format Builder appears, skip the welcome page by pressing next. Also press the Next button to accept the settings on Step 3 of 9 On Step 4, select Read File and press the Next button as shown below.   On Step 5 enter a directory that will contain a file with the input data, then  Press the Next button as shown below. In step 6, enter *.txt or another file format to select input files from the input directory mentioned in step 5. ALSO check the “Files contain Multiple Messages” checkbox and set the “Publish Messages in Batches of” field to 1.  The value can be set higher to increase the number of logical order group records returned on each poll of the file adapter.  In other words, it determines the number of Orders that will be sent to each instance of a Mediator or Composite processing using the File Adapter.   Skip Step 7 by pressing the Next button In Step 8 press the Gear Icon on the right side to load the Native Format Builder.       Native Format Builder  appears Before diving into the format, here is an overview of the process. Approach - Bottom up Assuming an Order is a grouping of item records and a summary record…. - Define a separate  Complex Type for each Record Type found in the group.    (One for itemRecord and one for summaryRecord) - Define a Complex Type to contain the Group of Record types defined above   (LogicalOrderRecord) - Define a top level element to represent an order.  (order)   The order element will be of type LogicalOrderRecord   Defining the Format In Step 1 select   “Create new”  and  “Complex Type” and “Next”   In Step two browse to and select a file containing the test data shown at the start of this article. A link is provided at the end of this article to download a file containing the test data. Press the Next button     In Step 3 Complex types must be define for each type of input record. Select the Root-Element and Click on the Add Complex Type icon This creates a new empty complex type definition shown below. The fastest way to create the definition is to highlight the first line of the Sample File data and drag the line onto the  <new_complex_type> Format Builder introspects the data and provides a grid to define additional fields. Change the “Complex Type Name” to  “itemRecord” Then click on the ruler to indicate the position of fixed columns.  Drag the red triangle icons to the exact columns if necessary. Double click on an existing red triangle to remove an unwanted entry. In the case below fields are define in columns 0-3, 4-28, 29-eol When the field definitions are correct, press the “Generate Fields” button. Field entries named C1, C2 and C3 will be created as shown below. Click on the field names and rename them from C1->itemNum, C2->itemDesc and C3->itemCost  When all the fields are correctly defined press OK to save the complex type.        Next, the process is repeated to define a Complex Type for the SummaryRecord. Select the Root-Element in the schema tree and press the new complex type icon Then highlight and drag the Summary Record from the sample data onto the <new_complex_type>   Change the complex type name to “summaryRecord” Mark the fixed fields for Order Number and Order Date. Press the Generate Fields button and rename C1 and C2 to itemNum and orderDate respectively.   The last complex type to be defined is a type to hold the group of items and the summary record. Select the Root-Element in the schema tree and click the new complex type icon Select the “<new_complex_type>” entry and click the pencil icon   On the Complex Type Details page change the name and type of each input field. Change line 1 to be named item and set the Type  to “itemRecord” Change line 2 to be named summary and set the Type to “summaryRecord” We also need to indicate that itemRecords repeat in the input file. Click the pencil icon at the right side of the item line. On the Edit Details page change the “Max Occurs” entry from 1 to UNBOUNDED. We also need to indicate how to identify an itemRecord.  Since each item record has “.” in column 32 we can use this fact to differentiate an item record from a summary record. Change the “Look Ahead” field to value 32 and enter a period in the “Look For” field Press the OK button to save entry.     Finally, its time to create a top level element to represent an order. Select the “Root-Element” in the schema tree and press the New element icon Click on the <new_element> and press the pencil icon.   Set the Element Name to “order” and change the Data Type to “logicalOrderRecord” Press the OK button to save the element definition.   The final definition should match the screenshot below. Press the Next Button to view the definition source.     Press the Test Button to test the definition   Press the Green Triangle Icon to run the test.   And we are presented with an unwelcome error. The error states that the processor ran out of data while working through the definition. The processor was unable to differentiate between itemRecords and summaryRecords and therefore treated the entire file as a list of itemRecords.  At end of file, the “summary” portion of the logicalOrderRecord remained unprocessed but mandatory.   This root cause of this error is the loss of our “lookAhead” definition used to identify itemRecords. This appears to be a bug in the  Native Format Builder 11.1.1.4.0 Luckily, a simple workaround exists. Press the Cancel button and return to the “Step 4 of 4” Window. Manually add    nxsd:lookAhead="32" nxsd:lookFor="."   attributes after the maxOccurs attribute of the item element. as shown in the highlighted text below.   When the lookAhead and lookFor attributes have been added Press the Test button and on the Test page press the Green Triangle. The test is now successful, the first order in the file is returned by the File Adapter.     Below is a complete listing of the Result XML from the right column of the screen above   Try running it The downloaded input test file and completed schema file can be used for testing without following all the Native Format Builder steps in this example. Use the following link to download a file containing the sample data. Download Sample Input Data This is the best approach rather than cutting and pasting the input data at the top of the article.  Since the data is fixed length it’s very important to watch out for trailing spaces in the data and to ensure an eol character at the end of every line. The download file is correctly formatted. The final schema definition can be downloaded at the following link Download Completed Schema Definition   - Save the inputData.txt file to a known location like the xsd folder in your project. - Save the inputData_6.xsd file to the xsd folder in your project. - At step 1 in the Native Format Builder wizard  (as shown above) check the “Edit existing” radio button,    then browse and select the inputData_6.xsd file - At step 2 of the Format Builder configuration Wizard (as shown above) supply the path and filename for    the inputData.txt file. - You can then proceed to the test page and run a test. - Remember the wizard bug will drop the lookAhead and lookFor attributes,  you will need to manually add   nxsd:lookAhead="32" nxsd:lookFor="."    after the maxOccurs attribute of the item element in the   LogicalOrderRecord Complex Type.  (as shown above)   Good Luck with your Format Project

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  • Inheritance Mapping Strategies with Entity Framework Code First CTP5: Part 3 – Table per Concrete Type (TPC) and Choosing Strategy Guidelines

    - by mortezam
    This is the third (and last) post in a series that explains different approaches to map an inheritance hierarchy with EF Code First. I've described these strategies in previous posts: Part 1 – Table per Hierarchy (TPH) Part 2 – Table per Type (TPT)In today’s blog post I am going to discuss Table per Concrete Type (TPC) which completes the inheritance mapping strategies supported by EF Code First. At the end of this post I will provide some guidelines to choose an inheritance strategy mainly based on what we've learned in this series. TPC and Entity Framework in the Past Table per Concrete type is somehow the simplest approach suggested, yet using TPC with EF is one of those concepts that has not been covered very well so far and I've seen in some resources that it was even discouraged. The reason for that is just because Entity Data Model Designer in VS2010 doesn't support TPC (even though the EF runtime does). That basically means if you are following EF's Database-First or Model-First approaches then configuring TPC requires manually writing XML in the EDMX file which is not considered to be a fun practice. Well, no more. You'll see that with Code First, creating TPC is perfectly possible with fluent API just like other strategies and you don't need to avoid TPC due to the lack of designer support as you would probably do in other EF approaches. Table per Concrete Type (TPC)In Table per Concrete type (aka Table per Concrete class) we use exactly one table for each (nonabstract) class. All properties of a class, including inherited properties, can be mapped to columns of this table, as shown in the following figure: As you can see, the SQL schema is not aware of the inheritance; effectively, we’ve mapped two unrelated tables to a more expressive class structure. If the base class was concrete, then an additional table would be needed to hold instances of that class. I have to emphasize that there is no relationship between the database tables, except for the fact that they share some similar columns. TPC Implementation in Code First Just like the TPT implementation, we need to specify a separate table for each of the subclasses. We also need to tell Code First that we want all of the inherited properties to be mapped as part of this table. In CTP5, there is a new helper method on EntityMappingConfiguration class called MapInheritedProperties that exactly does this for us. Here is the complete object model as well as the fluent API to create a TPC mapping: public abstract class BillingDetail {     public int BillingDetailId { get; set; }     public string Owner { get; set; }     public string Number { get; set; } }          public class BankAccount : BillingDetail {     public string BankName { get; set; }     public string Swift { get; set; } }          public class CreditCard : BillingDetail {     public int CardType { get; set; }     public string ExpiryMonth { get; set; }     public string ExpiryYear { get; set; } }      public class InheritanceMappingContext : DbContext {     public DbSet<BillingDetail> BillingDetails { get; set; }              protected override void OnModelCreating(ModelBuilder modelBuilder)     {         modelBuilder.Entity<BankAccount>().Map(m =>         {             m.MapInheritedProperties();             m.ToTable("BankAccounts");         });         modelBuilder.Entity<CreditCard>().Map(m =>         {             m.MapInheritedProperties();             m.ToTable("CreditCards");         });                 } } The Importance of EntityMappingConfiguration ClassAs a side note, it worth mentioning that EntityMappingConfiguration class turns out to be a key type for inheritance mapping in Code First. Here is an snapshot of this class: namespace System.Data.Entity.ModelConfiguration.Configuration.Mapping {     public class EntityMappingConfiguration<TEntityType> where TEntityType : class     {         public ValueConditionConfiguration Requires(string discriminator);         public void ToTable(string tableName);         public void MapInheritedProperties();     } } As you have seen so far, we used its Requires method to customize TPH. We also used its ToTable method to create a TPT and now we are using its MapInheritedProperties along with ToTable method to create our TPC mapping. TPC Configuration is Not Done Yet!We are not quite done with our TPC configuration and there is more into this story even though the fluent API we saw perfectly created a TPC mapping for us in the database. To see why, let's start working with our object model. For example, the following code creates two new objects of BankAccount and CreditCard types and tries to add them to the database: using (var context = new InheritanceMappingContext()) {     BankAccount bankAccount = new BankAccount();     CreditCard creditCard = new CreditCard() { CardType = 1 };                      context.BillingDetails.Add(bankAccount);     context.BillingDetails.Add(creditCard);     context.SaveChanges(); } Running this code throws an InvalidOperationException with this message: The changes to the database were committed successfully, but an error occurred while updating the object context. The ObjectContext might be in an inconsistent state. Inner exception message: AcceptChanges cannot continue because the object's key values conflict with another object in the ObjectStateManager. Make sure that the key values are unique before calling AcceptChanges. The reason we got this exception is because DbContext.SaveChanges() internally invokes SaveChanges method of its internal ObjectContext. ObjectContext's SaveChanges method on its turn by default calls AcceptAllChanges after it has performed the database modifications. AcceptAllChanges method merely iterates over all entries in ObjectStateManager and invokes AcceptChanges on each of them. Since the entities are in Added state, AcceptChanges method replaces their temporary EntityKey with a regular EntityKey based on the primary key values (i.e. BillingDetailId) that come back from the database and that's where the problem occurs since both the entities have been assigned the same value for their primary key by the database (i.e. on both BillingDetailId = 1) and the problem is that ObjectStateManager cannot track objects of the same type (i.e. BillingDetail) with the same EntityKey value hence it throws. If you take a closer look at the TPC's SQL schema above, you'll see why the database generated the same values for the primary keys: the BillingDetailId column in both BankAccounts and CreditCards table has been marked as identity. How to Solve The Identity Problem in TPC As you saw, using SQL Server’s int identity columns doesn't work very well together with TPC since there will be duplicate entity keys when inserting in subclasses tables with all having the same identity seed. Therefore, to solve this, either a spread seed (where each table has its own initial seed value) will be needed, or a mechanism other than SQL Server’s int identity should be used. Some other RDBMSes have other mechanisms allowing a sequence (identity) to be shared by multiple tables, and something similar can be achieved with GUID keys in SQL Server. While using GUID keys, or int identity keys with different starting seeds will solve the problem but yet another solution would be to completely switch off identity on the primary key property. As a result, we need to take the responsibility of providing unique keys when inserting records to the database. We will go with this solution since it works regardless of which database engine is used. Switching Off Identity in Code First We can switch off identity simply by placing DatabaseGenerated attribute on the primary key property and pass DatabaseGenerationOption.None to its constructor. DatabaseGenerated attribute is a new data annotation which has been added to System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations namespace in CTP5: public abstract class BillingDetail {     [DatabaseGenerated(DatabaseGenerationOption.None)]     public int BillingDetailId { get; set; }     public string Owner { get; set; }     public string Number { get; set; } } As always, we can achieve the same result by using fluent API, if you prefer that: modelBuilder.Entity<BillingDetail>()             .Property(p => p.BillingDetailId)             .HasDatabaseGenerationOption(DatabaseGenerationOption.None); Working With The Object Model Our TPC mapping is ready and we can try adding new records to the database. But, like I said, now we need to take care of providing unique keys when creating new objects: using (var context = new InheritanceMappingContext()) {     BankAccount bankAccount = new BankAccount()      {          BillingDetailId = 1                          };     CreditCard creditCard = new CreditCard()      {          BillingDetailId = 2,         CardType = 1     };                      context.BillingDetails.Add(bankAccount);     context.BillingDetails.Add(creditCard);     context.SaveChanges(); } Polymorphic Associations with TPC is Problematic The main problem with this approach is that it doesn’t support Polymorphic Associations very well. After all, in the database, associations are represented as foreign key relationships and in TPC, the subclasses are all mapped to different tables so a polymorphic association to their base class (abstract BillingDetail in our example) cannot be represented as a simple foreign key relationship. For example, consider the the domain model we introduced here where User has a polymorphic association with BillingDetail. This would be problematic in our TPC Schema, because if User has a many-to-one relationship with BillingDetail, the Users table would need a single foreign key column, which would have to refer both concrete subclass tables. This isn’t possible with regular foreign key constraints. Schema Evolution with TPC is Complex A further conceptual problem with this mapping strategy is that several different columns, of different tables, share exactly the same semantics. This makes schema evolution more complex. For example, a change to a base class property results in changes to multiple columns. It also makes it much more difficult to implement database integrity constraints that apply to all subclasses. Generated SQLLet's examine SQL output for polymorphic queries in TPC mapping. For example, consider this polymorphic query for all BillingDetails and the resulting SQL statements that being executed in the database: var query = from b in context.BillingDetails select b; Just like the SQL query generated by TPT mapping, the CASE statements that you see in the beginning of the query is merely to ensure columns that are irrelevant for a particular row have NULL values in the returning flattened table. (e.g. BankName for a row that represents a CreditCard type). TPC's SQL Queries are Union Based As you can see in the above screenshot, the first SELECT uses a FROM-clause subquery (which is selected with a red rectangle) to retrieve all instances of BillingDetails from all concrete class tables. The tables are combined with a UNION operator, and a literal (in this case, 0 and 1) is inserted into the intermediate result; (look at the lines highlighted in yellow.) EF reads this to instantiate the correct class given the data from a particular row. A union requires that the queries that are combined, project over the same columns; hence, EF has to pad and fill up nonexistent columns with NULL. This query will really perform well since here we can let the database optimizer find the best execution plan to combine rows from several tables. There is also no Joins involved so it has a better performance than the SQL queries generated by TPT where a Join is required between the base and subclasses tables. Choosing Strategy GuidelinesBefore we get into this discussion, I want to emphasize that there is no one single "best strategy fits all scenarios" exists. As you saw, each of the approaches have their own advantages and drawbacks. Here are some rules of thumb to identify the best strategy in a particular scenario: If you don’t require polymorphic associations or queries, lean toward TPC—in other words, if you never or rarely query for BillingDetails and you have no class that has an association to BillingDetail base class. I recommend TPC (only) for the top level of your class hierarchy, where polymorphism isn’t usually required, and when modification of the base class in the future is unlikely. If you do require polymorphic associations or queries, and subclasses declare relatively few properties (particularly if the main difference between subclasses is in their behavior), lean toward TPH. Your goal is to minimize the number of nullable columns and to convince yourself (and your DBA) that a denormalized schema won’t create problems in the long run. If you do require polymorphic associations or queries, and subclasses declare many properties (subclasses differ mainly by the data they hold), lean toward TPT. Or, depending on the width and depth of your inheritance hierarchy and the possible cost of joins versus unions, use TPC. By default, choose TPH only for simple problems. For more complex cases (or when you’re overruled by a data modeler insisting on the importance of nullability constraints and normalization), you should consider the TPT strategy. But at that point, ask yourself whether it may not be better to remodel inheritance as delegation in the object model (delegation is a way of making composition as powerful for reuse as inheritance). Complex inheritance is often best avoided for all sorts of reasons unrelated to persistence or ORM. EF acts as a buffer between the domain and relational models, but that doesn’t mean you can ignore persistence concerns when designing your classes. SummaryIn this series, we focused on one of the main structural aspect of the object/relational paradigm mismatch which is inheritance and discussed how EF solve this problem as an ORM solution. We learned about the three well-known inheritance mapping strategies and their implementations in EF Code First. Hopefully it gives you a better insight about the mapping of inheritance hierarchies as well as choosing the best strategy for your particular scenario. Happy New Year and Happy Code-Firsting! References ADO.NET team blog Java Persistence with Hibernate book a { color: #5A99FF; } a:visited { color: #5A99FF; } .title { padding-bottom: 5px; font-family: Segoe UI; font-size: 11pt; font-weight: bold; padding-top: 15px; } .code, .typeName { font-family: consolas; } .typeName { color: #2b91af; } .padTop5 { padding-top: 5px; } .padTop10 { padding-top: 10px; } .exception { background-color: #f0f0f0; font-style: italic; padding-bottom: 5px; padding-left: 5px; padding-top: 5px; padding-right: 5px; }

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  • Load and Web Performance Testing using Visual Studio Ultimate 2010-Part 3

    - by Tarun Arora
    Welcome back once again, in Part 1 of Load and Web Performance Testing using Visual Studio 2010 I talked about why Performance Testing the application is important, the test tools available in Visual Studio Ultimate 2010 and various test rig topologies, in Part 2 of Load and Web Performance Testing using Visual Studio 2010 I discussed the details of web performance & load tests as well as why it’s important to follow a goal based pattern while performance testing your application. In part 3 I’ll be discussing Test Result Analysis, Test Result Drill through, Test Report Generation, Test Run Comparison, Asp.net Profiler and some closing thoughts. Test Results – I see some creepy worms! In Part 2 we put together a web performance test and a load test, lets run the test to see load test to see how the Web site responds to the load simulation. While the load test is running you will be able to see close to real time analysis in the Load Test Analyser window. You can use the Load Test Analyser to conduct load test analysis in three ways: Monitor a running load test - A condensed set of the performance counter data is maintained in memory. To prevent the results memory requirements from growing unbounded, up to 200 samples for each performance counter are maintained. This includes 100 evenly spaced samples that span the current elapsed time of the run and the most recent 100 samples.         After the load test run is completed - The test controller spools all collected performance counter data to a database while the test is running. Additional data, such as timing details and error details, is loaded into the database when the test completes. The performance data for a completed test is loaded from the database and analysed by the Load Test Analyser. Below you can see a screen shot of the summary view, this provides key results in a format that is compact and easy to read. You can also print the load test summary, this is generated after the test has completed or been stopped.         Analyse the load test results of a previously run load test – We’ll see this in the section where i discuss comparison between two test runs. The performance counters can be plotted on the graphs. You also have the option to highlight a selected part of the test and view details, drill down to the user activity chart where you can hover over to see more details of the test run.   Generate Report => Test Run Comparisons The level of reports you can generate using the Load Test Analyser is astonishing. You have the option to create excel reports and conduct side by side analysis of two test results or to track trend analysis. The tools also allows you to export the graph data either to MS Excel or to a CSV file. You can view the ASP.NET profiler report to conduct further analysis as well. View Data and Diagnostic Attachments opens the Choose Diagnostic Data Adapter Attachment dialog box to select an adapter to analyse the result type. For example, you can select an IntelliTrace adapter, click OK and open the IntelliTrace summary for the test agent that was used in the load test.   Compare results This creates a set of reports that compares the data from two load test results using tables and bar charts. I have taken these screen shots from the MSDN documentation, I would highly recommend exploring the wealth of knowledge available on MSDN. Leaving Thoughts While load testing the application with an excessive load for a longer duration of time, i managed to bring the IIS to its knees by piling up a huge queue of requests waiting to be processed. This clearly means that the IIS had run out of threads as all the threads were busy processing existing request, one easy way of fixing this is by increasing the default number of allocated threads, but this might escalate the problem. The better suggestion is to try and drill down to the actual root cause of the problem. When ever the garbage collection runs it stops processing any pages so all requests that come in during that period are queued up, but realistically the garbage collection completes in fraction of a a second. To understand this better lets look at the .net heap, it is divided into large heap and small heap, anything greater than 85kB in size will be allocated to the Large object heap, the Large object heap is non compacting and remember large objects are expensive to move around, so if you are allocating something in the large object heap, make sure that you really need it! The small object heap on the other hand is divided into generations, so all objects that are supposed to be short-lived are suppose to live in Gen-0 and the long living objects eventually move to Gen-2 as garbage collection goes through.  As you can see in the picture below all < 85 KB size objects are first assigned to Gen-0, when Gen-0 fills up and a new object comes in and finds Gen-0 full, the garbage collection process is started, the process checks for all the dead objects and assigns them as the valid candidate for deletion to free up memory and promotes all the remaining objects in Gen-0 to Gen-1. So in the future when ever you clean up Gen-1 you have to clean up Gen-0 as well. When you fill up Gen – 0 again, all of Gen – 1 dead objects are drenched and rest are moved to Gen-2 and Gen-0 objects are moved to Gen-1 to free up Gen-0, but by this time your Garbage collection process has started to take much more time than it usually takes. Now as I mentioned earlier when garbage collection is being run all page requests that come in during that period are queued up. Does this explain why possibly page requests are getting queued up, apart from this it could also be the case that you are waiting for a long running database process to complete.      Lets explore the heap a bit more… What is really a case of crisis is when the objects are living long enough to make it to Gen-2 and then dying, this is definitely a high cost operation. But sometimes you need objects in memory, for example when you cache data you hold on to the objects because you need to use them right across the user session, which is acceptable. But if you wanted to see what extreme caching can do to your server then write a simple application that chucks in a lot of data in cache, run a load test over it for about 10-15 minutes, forcing a lot of data in memory causing the heap to run out of memory. If you get to such a state where you start running out of memory the IIS as a mode of recovery restarts the worker process. It is great way to free up all your memory in the heap but this would clear the cache. The problem with this is if the customer had 10 items in their shopping basket and that data was stored in the application cache, the user basket will now be empty forcing them either to get frustrated and go to a competitor website or if the customer is really patient, give it another try! How can you address this, well two ways of addressing this; 1. Workaround – A x86 bit processor only allows a maximum of 4GB of RAM, this means the machine effectively has around 3.4 GB of RAM available, the OS needs about 1.5 GB of RAM to run efficiently, the IIS and .net framework also need their share of memory, leaving you a heap of around 800 MB to play with. Because Team builds by default build your application in ‘Compile as any mode’ it means the application is build such that it will run in x86 bit mode if run on a x86 bit processor and run in a x64 bit mode if run on a x64 but processor. The problem with this is not all applications are really x64 bit compatible specially if you are using com objects or external libraries. So, as a quick win if you compiled your application in x86 bit mode by changing the compile as any selection to compile as x86 in the team build, you will be able to run your application on a x64 bit machine in x86 bit mode (WOW – By running Windows on Windows) and what that means is, you could use 8GB+ worth of RAM, if you take away everything else your application will roughly get a heap size of at least 4 GB to play with, which is immense. If you need a heap size of more than 4 GB you have either build a software for NASA or there is something fundamentally wrong in your application. 2. Solution – Now that you have put a workaround in place the IIS will not restart the worker process that regularly, which means you can take a breather and start working to get to the root cause of this memory leak. But this begs a question “How do I Identify possible memory leaks in my application?” Well i won’t say that there is one single tool that can tell you where the memory leak is, but trust me, ‘Performance Profiling’ is a great start point, it definitely gets you started in the right direction, let’s have a look at how. Performance Wizard - Start the Performance Wizard and select Instrumentation, this lets you measure function call counts and timings. Before running the performance session right click the performance session settings and chose properties from the context menu to bring up the Performance session properties page and as shown in the screen shot below, check the check boxes in the group ‘.NET memory profiling collection’ namely ‘Collect .NET object allocation information’ and ‘Also collect the .NET Object lifetime information’.    Now if you fire off the profiling session on your pages you will notice that the results allows you to view ‘Object Lifetime’ which shows you the number of objects that made it to Gen-0, Gen-1, Gen-2, Large heap, etc. Another great feature about the profile is that if your application has > 5% cases where objects die right after making to the Gen-2 storage a threshold alert is generated to alert you. Since you have the option to also view the most expensive methods and by capturing the IntelliTrace data you can drill in to narrow down to the line of code that is the root cause of the problem. Well now that we have seen how crucial memory management is and how easy Visual Studio Ultimate 2010 makes it for us to identify and reproduce the problem with the best of breed tools in the product. Caching One of the main ways to improve performance is Caching. Which basically means you tell the web server that instead of going to the database for each request you keep the data in the webserver and when the user asks for it you serve it from the webserver itself. BUT that can have consequences! Let’s look at some code, trust me caching code is not very intuitive, I define a cache key for almost all searches made through the common search page and cache the results. The approach works fine, first time i get the data from the database and second time data is served from the cache, significant performance improvement, EXCEPT when two users try to do the same operation and run into each other. But it is easy to handle this by adding the lock as you can see in the snippet below. So, as long as a user comes in and finds that the cache is empty, the user locks and starts to get the cache no more concurrency issues. But lets say you are processing 10 requests per second, by the time i have locked the operation to get the results from the database, 9 other users came in and found that the cache key is null so after i have come out and populated the cache they will still go in to get the results again. The application will still be faster because the next set of 10 users and so on would continue to get data from the cache. BUT if we added another null check after locking to build the cache and before actual call to the db then the 9 users who follow me would not make the extra trip to the database at all and that would really increase the performance, but didn’t i say that the code won’t be very intuitive, may be you should leave a comment you don’t want another developer to come in and think what a fresher why is he checking for the cache key null twice !!! The downside of caching is, you are storing the data outside of the database and the data could be wrong because the updates applied to the database would make the data cached at the web server out of sync. So, how do you invalidate the cache? Well if you only had one way of updating the data lets say only one entry point to the data update you can write some logic to say that every time new data is entered set the cache object to null. But this approach will not work as soon as you have several ways of feeding data to the system or your system is scaled out across a farm of web servers. The perfect solution to this is Micro Caching which means you cache the query for a set time duration and invalidate the cache after that set duration. The advantage is every time the user queries for that data with in the time span for which you have cached the results there are no calls made to the database and the data is served right from the server which makes the response immensely quick. Now figuring out the appropriate time span for which you micro cache the query results really depends on the application. Lets say your website gets 10 requests per second, if you retain the cache results for even 1 minute you will have immense performance gains. You would reduce 90% hits to the database for searching. Ever wondered why when you go to e-bookers.com or xpedia.com or yatra.com to book a flight and you click on the book button because the fare seems too exciting and you get an error message telling you that the fare is not valid any more. Yes, exactly => That is a cache failure! These travel sites or price compare engines are not going to hit the database every time you hit the compare button instead the results will be served from the cache, because the query results are micro cached, its a perfect trade-off, by micro caching the results the site gains 100% performance benefits but every once in a while annoys a customer because the fare has expired. But the trade off works in the favour of these sites as they are still able to process up to 30+ page requests per second which means cater to the site traffic by may be losing 1 customer every once in a while to a competitor who is also using a similar caching technique what are the odds that the user will not come back to their site sooner or later? Recap   Resources Below are some Key resource you might like to review. I would highly recommend the documentation, walkthroughs and videos available on MSDN. You can always make use of Fiddler to debug Web Performance Tests. Some community test extensions and plug ins available on Codeplex might also be of interest to you. The Road Ahead Thank you for taking the time out and reading this blog post, you may also want to read Part I and Part II if you haven’t so far. If you enjoyed the post, remember to subscribe to http://feeds.feedburner.com/TarunArora. Questions/Feedback/Suggestions, etc please leave a comment. Next ‘Load Testing in the cloud’, I’ll be working on exploring the possibilities of running Test controller/Agents in the Cloud. See you on the other side! Thank You!   Share this post : CodeProject

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  • ASP.NET MVC 3 Hosting :: How to Deploy Web Apps Using ASP.NET MVC 3, Razor and EF Code First - Part I

    - by mbridge
    First, you can download the source code from http://efmvc.codeplex.com. The following frameworks will be used for this step by step tutorial. public class Category {     public int CategoryId { get; set; }     [Required(ErrorMessage = "Name Required")]     [StringLength(25, ErrorMessage = "Must be less than 25 characters")]     public string Name { get; set;}     public string Description { get; set; }     public virtual ICollection<Expense> Expenses { get; set; } } Expense Class public class Expense {             public int ExpenseId { get; set; }            public string  Transaction { get; set; }     public DateTime Date { get; set; }     public double Amount { get; set; }     public int CategoryId { get; set; }     public virtual Category Category { get; set; } }    Define Domain Model Let’s create domain model for our simple web application Category Class We have two domain entities - Category and Expense. A single category contains a list of expense transactions and every expense transaction should have a Category. In this post, we will be focusing on CRUD operations for the entity Category and will be working on the Expense entity with a View Model object in the later post. And the source code for this application will be refactored over time. The above entities are very simple POCO (Plain Old CLR Object) classes and the entity Category is decorated with validation attributes in the System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations namespace. Now we want to use these entities for defining model objects for the Entity Framework 4. Using the Code First approach of Entity Framework, we can first define the entities by simply writing POCO classes without any coupling with any API or database library. This approach lets you focus on domain model which will enable Domain-Driven Development for applications. EF code first support is currently enabled with a separate API that is runs on top of the Entity Framework 4. EF Code First is reached CTP 5 when I am writing this article. Creating Context Class for Entity Framework We have created our domain model and let’s create a class in order to working with Entity Framework Code First. For this, you have to download EF Code First CTP 5 and add reference to the assembly EntitFramework.dll. You can also use NuGet to download add reference to EEF Code First. public class MyFinanceContext : DbContext {     public MyFinanceContext() : base("MyFinance") { }     public DbSet<Category> Categories { get; set; }     public DbSet<Expense> Expenses { get; set; }         }   The above class MyFinanceContext is derived from DbContext that can connect your model classes to a database. The MyFinanceContext class is mapping our Category and Expense class into database tables Categories and Expenses using DbSet<TEntity> where TEntity is any POCO class. When we are running the application at first time, it will automatically create the database. EF code-first look for a connection string in web.config or app.config that has the same name as the dbcontext class. If it is not find any connection string with the convention, it will automatically create database in local SQL Express database by default and the name of the database will be same name as the dbcontext class. You can also define the name of database in constructor of the the dbcontext class. Unlike NHibernate, we don’t have to use any XML based mapping files or Fluent interface for mapping between our model and database. The model classes of Code First are working on the basis of conventions and we can also use a fluent API to refine our model. The convention for primary key is ‘Id’ or ‘<class name>Id’.  If primary key properties are detected with type ‘int’, ‘long’ or ‘short’, they will automatically registered as identity columns in the database by default. Primary key detection is not case sensitive. We can define our model classes with validation attributes in the System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations namespace and it automatically enforces validation rules when a model object is updated or saved. Generic Repository for EF Code First We have created model classes and dbcontext class. Now we have to create generic repository pattern for data persistence with EF code first. If you don’t know about the repository pattern, checkout Martin Fowler’s article on Repository Let’s create a generic repository to working with DbContext and DbSet generics. public interface IRepository<T> where T : class     {         void Add(T entity);         void Delete(T entity);         T GetById(long Id);         IEnumerable<T> All();     } RepositoryBasse – Generic Repository class protected MyFinanceContext Database {     get { return database ?? (database = DatabaseFactory.Get()); } } public virtual void Add(T entity) {     dbset.Add(entity);            }        public virtual void Delete(T entity) {     dbset.Remove(entity); }   public virtual T GetById(long id) {     return dbset.Find(id); }   public virtual IEnumerable<T> All() {     return dbset.ToList(); } } DatabaseFactory class public class DatabaseFactory : Disposable, IDatabaseFactory {     private MyFinanceContext database;     public MyFinanceContext Get()     {         return database ?? (database = new MyFinanceContext());     }     protected override void DisposeCore()     {         if (database != null)             database.Dispose();     } } Unit of Work If you are new to Unit of Work pattern, checkout Fowler’s article on Unit of Work . According to Martin Fowler, the Unit of Work pattern "maintains a list of objects affected by a business transaction and coordinates the writing out of changes and the resolution of concurrency problems." Let’s create a class for handling Unit of Work public interface IUnitOfWork {     void Commit(); } UniOfWork class public class UnitOfWork : IUnitOfWork {     private readonly IDatabaseFactory databaseFactory;     private MyFinanceContext dataContext;       public UnitOfWork(IDatabaseFactory databaseFactory)     {         this.databaseFactory = databaseFactory;     }       protected MyFinanceContext DataContext     {         get { return dataContext ?? (dataContext = databaseFactory.Get()); }     }       public void Commit()     {         DataContext.Commit();     } } The Commit method of the UnitOfWork will call the commit method of MyFinanceContext class and it will execute the SaveChanges method of DbContext class.   Repository class for Category In this post, we will be focusing on the persistence against Category entity and will working on other entities in later post. Let’s create a repository for handling CRUD operations for Category using derive from a generic Repository RepositoryBase<T>. public class CategoryRepository: RepositoryBase<Category>, ICategoryRepository     {     public CategoryRepository(IDatabaseFactory databaseFactory)         : base(databaseFactory)         {         }                } public interface ICategoryRepository : IRepository<Category> { } If we need additional methods than generic repository for the Category, we can define in the CategoryRepository. Dependency Injection using Unity 2.0 If you are new to Inversion of Control/ Dependency Injection or Unity, please have a look on my articles at http://weblogs.asp.net/shijuvarghese/archive/tags/IoC/default.aspx. I want to create a custom lifetime manager for Unity to store container in the current HttpContext. public class HttpContextLifetimeManager<T> : LifetimeManager, IDisposable {     public override object GetValue()     {         return HttpContext.Current.Items[typeof(T).AssemblyQualifiedName];     }     public override void RemoveValue()     {         HttpContext.Current.Items.Remove(typeof(T).AssemblyQualifiedName);     }     public override void SetValue(object newValue)     {         HttpContext.Current.Items[typeof(T).AssemblyQualifiedName] = newValue;     }     public void Dispose()     {         RemoveValue();     } } Let’s create controller factory for Unity in the ASP.NET MVC 3 application.                 404, String.Format(                     "The controller for path '{0}' could not be found" +     "or it does not implement IController.",                 reqContext.HttpContext.Request.Path));       if (!typeof(IController).IsAssignableFrom(controllerType))         throw new ArgumentException(                 string.Format(                     "Type requested is not a controller: {0}",                     controllerType.Name),                     "controllerType");     try     {         controller= container.Resolve(controllerType) as IController;     }     catch (Exception ex)     {         throw new InvalidOperationException(String.Format(                                 "Error resolving controller {0}",                                 controllerType.Name), ex);     }     return controller; }   } Configure contract and concrete types in Unity Let’s configure our contract and concrete types in Unity for resolving our dependencies. private void ConfigureUnity() {     //Create UnityContainer               IUnityContainer container = new UnityContainer()                 .RegisterType<IDatabaseFactory, DatabaseFactory>(new HttpContextLifetimeManager<IDatabaseFactory>())     .RegisterType<IUnitOfWork, UnitOfWork>(new HttpContextLifetimeManager<IUnitOfWork>())     .RegisterType<ICategoryRepository, CategoryRepository>(new HttpContextLifetimeManager<ICategoryRepository>());                 //Set container for Controller Factory                ControllerBuilder.Current.SetControllerFactory(             new UnityControllerFactory(container)); } In the above ConfigureUnity method, we are registering our types onto Unity container with custom lifetime manager HttpContextLifetimeManager. Let’s call ConfigureUnity method in the Global.asax.cs for set controller factory for Unity and configuring the types with Unity. protected void Application_Start() {     AreaRegistration.RegisterAllAreas();     RegisterGlobalFilters(GlobalFilters.Filters);     RegisterRoutes(RouteTable.Routes);     ConfigureUnity(); } Developing web application using ASP.NET MVC 3 We have created our domain model for our web application and also have created repositories and configured dependencies with Unity container. Now we have to create controller classes and views for doing CRUD operations against the Category entity. Let’s create controller class for Category Category Controller public class CategoryController : Controller {     private readonly ICategoryRepository categoryRepository;     private readonly IUnitOfWork unitOfWork;           public CategoryController(ICategoryRepository categoryRepository, IUnitOfWork unitOfWork)     {         this.categoryRepository = categoryRepository;         this.unitOfWork = unitOfWork;     }       public ActionResult Index()     {         var categories = categoryRepository.All();         return View(categories);     }     [HttpGet]     public ActionResult Edit(int id)     {         var category = categoryRepository.GetById(id);         return View(category);     }       [HttpPost]     public ActionResult Edit(int id, FormCollection collection)     {         var category = categoryRepository.GetById(id);         if (TryUpdateModel(category))         {             unitOfWork.Commit();             return RedirectToAction("Index");         }         else return View(category);                 }       [HttpGet]     public ActionResult Create()     {         var category = new Category();         return View(category);     }           [HttpPost]     public ActionResult Create(Category category)     {         if (!ModelState.IsValid)         {             return View("Create", category);         }                     categoryRepository.Add(category);         unitOfWork.Commit();         return RedirectToAction("Index");     }       [HttpPost]     public ActionResult Delete(int  id)     {         var category = categoryRepository.GetById(id);         categoryRepository.Delete(category);         unitOfWork.Commit();         var categories = categoryRepository.All();         return PartialView("CategoryList", categories);       }        } Creating Views in Razor Now we are going to create views in Razor for our ASP.NET MVC 3 application.  Let’s create a partial view CategoryList.cshtml for listing category information and providing link for Edit and Delete operations. CategoryList.cshtml @using MyFinance.Helpers; @using MyFinance.Domain; @model IEnumerable<Category>      <table>         <tr>         <th>Actions</th>         <th>Name</th>          <th>Description</th>         </tr>     @foreach (var item in Model) {             <tr>             <td>                 @Html.ActionLink("Edit", "Edit",new { id = item.CategoryId })                 @Ajax.ActionLink("Delete", "Delete", new { id = item.CategoryId }, new AjaxOptions { Confirm = "Delete Expense?", HttpMethod = "Post", UpdateTargetId = "divCategoryList" })                           </td>             <td>                 @item.Name             </td>             <td>                 @item.Description             </td>         </tr>         }       </table>     <p>         @Html.ActionLink("Create New", "Create")     </p> The delete link is providing Ajax functionality using the Ajax.ActionLink. This will call an Ajax request for Delete action method in the CategoryCotroller class. In the Delete action method, it will return Partial View CategoryList after deleting the record. We are using CategoryList view for the Ajax functionality and also for Index view using for displaying list of category information. Let’s create Index view using partial view CategoryList  Index.chtml @model IEnumerable<MyFinance.Domain.Category> @{     ViewBag.Title = "Index"; }    <h2>Category List</h2>    <script src="@Url.Content("~/Scripts/jquery.unobtrusive-ajax.min.js")" type="text/javascript"></script>    <div id="divCategoryList">               @Html.Partial("CategoryList", Model) </div> We can call the partial views using Html.Partial helper method. Now we are going to create View pages for insert and update functionality for the Category. Both view pages are sharing common user interface for entering the category information. So I want to create an EditorTemplate for the Category information. We have to create the EditorTemplate with the same name of entity object so that we can refer it on view pages using @Html.EditorFor(model => model) . So let’s create template with name Category. Category.cshtml @model MyFinance.Domain.Category <div class="editor-label"> @Html.LabelFor(model => model.Name) </div> <div class="editor-field"> @Html.EditorFor(model => model.Name) @Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.Name) </div> <div class="editor-label"> @Html.LabelFor(model => model.Description) </div> <div class="editor-field"> @Html.EditorFor(model => model.Description) @Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.Description) </div> Let’s create view page for insert Category information @model MyFinance.Domain.Category   @{     ViewBag.Title = "Save"; }   <h2>Create</h2>   <script src="@Url.Content("~/Scripts/jquery.validate.min.js")" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="@Url.Content("~/Scripts/jquery.validate.unobtrusive.min.js")" type="text/javascript"></script>   @using (Html.BeginForm()) {     @Html.ValidationSummary(true)     <fieldset>         <legend>Category</legend>                @Html.EditorFor(model => model)               <p>             <input type="submit" value="Create" />         </p>     </fieldset> }   <div>     @Html.ActionLink("Back to List", "Index") </div> ViewStart file In Razor views, we can add a file named _viewstart.cshtml in the views directory  and this will be shared among the all views with in the Views directory. The below code in the _viewstart.cshtml, sets the Layout page for every Views in the Views folder.     @{     Layout = "~/Views/Shared/_Layout.cshtml"; } Tomorrow, we will cotinue the second part of this article. :)

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  • Oracle BI Server Modeling, Part 1- Designing a Query Factory

    - by bob.ertl(at)oracle.com
      Welcome to Oracle BI Development's BI Foundation blog, focused on helping you get the most value from your Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (BI EE) platform deployments.  In my first series of posts, I plan to show developers the concepts and best practices for modeling in the Common Enterprise Information Model (CEIM), the semantic layer of Oracle BI EE.  In this segment, I will lay the groundwork for the modeling concepts.  First, I will cover the big picture of how the BI Server fits into the system, and how the CEIM controls the query processing. Oracle BI EE Query Cycle The purpose of the Oracle BI Server is to bridge the gap between the presentation services and the data sources.  There are typically a variety of data sources in a variety of technologies: relational, normalized transaction systems; relational star-schema data warehouses and marts; multidimensional analytic cubes and financial applications; flat files, Excel files, XML files, and so on. Business datasets can reside in a single type of source, or, most of the time, are spread across various types of sources. Presentation services users are generally business people who need to be able to query that set of sources without any knowledge of technologies, schemas, or how sources are organized in their company. They think of business analysis in terms of measures with specific calculations, hierarchical dimensions for breaking those measures down, and detailed reports of the business transactions themselves.  Most of them create queries without knowing it, by picking a dashboard page and some filters.  Others create their own analysis by selecting metrics and dimensional attributes, and possibly creating additional calculations. The BI Server bridges that gap from simple business terms to technical physical queries by exposing just the business focused measures and dimensional attributes that business people can use in their analyses and dashboards.   After they make their selections and start the analysis, the BI Server plans the best way to query the data sources, writes the optimized sequence of physical queries to those sources, post-processes the results, and presents them to the client as a single result set suitable for tables, pivots and charts. The CEIM is a model that controls the processing of the BI Server.  It provides the subject areas that presentation services exposes for business users to select simplified metrics and dimensional attributes for their analysis.  It models the mappings to the physical data access, the calculations and logical transformations, and the data access security rules.  The CEIM consists of metadata stored in the repository, authored by developers using the Administration Tool client.     Presentation services and other query clients create their queries in BI EE's SQL-92 language, called Logical SQL or LSQL.  The API simply uses ODBC or JDBC to pass the query to the BI Server.  Presentation services writes the LSQL query in terms of the simplified objects presented to the users.  The BI Server creates a query plan, and rewrites the LSQL into fully-detailed SQL or other languages suitable for querying the physical sources.  For example, the LSQL on the left below was rewritten into the physical SQL for an Oracle 11g database on the right. Logical SQL   Physical SQL SELECT "D0 Time"."T02 Per Name Month" saw_0, "D4 Product"."P01  Product" saw_1, "F2 Units"."2-01  Billed Qty  (Sum All)" saw_2 FROM "Sample Sales" ORDER BY saw_0, saw_1       WITH SAWITH0 AS ( select T986.Per_Name_Month as c1, T879.Prod_Dsc as c2,      sum(T835.Units) as c3, T879.Prod_Key as c4 from      Product T879 /* A05 Product */ ,      Time_Mth T986 /* A08 Time Mth */ ,      FactsRev T835 /* A11 Revenue (Billed Time Join) */ where ( T835.Prod_Key = T879.Prod_Key and T835.Bill_Mth = T986.Row_Wid) group by T879.Prod_Dsc, T879.Prod_Key, T986.Per_Name_Month ) select SAWITH0.c1 as c1, SAWITH0.c2 as c2, SAWITH0.c3 as c3 from SAWITH0 order by c1, c2   Probably everybody reading this blog can write SQL or MDX.  However, the trick in designing the CEIM is that you are modeling a query-generation factory.  Rather than hand-crafting individual queries, you model behavior and relationships, thus configuring the BI Server machinery to manufacture millions of different queries in response to random user requests.  This mass production requires a different mindset and approach than when you are designing individual SQL statements in tools such as Oracle SQL Developer, Oracle Hyperion Interactive Reporting (formerly Brio), or Oracle BI Publisher.   The Structure of the Common Enterprise Information Model (CEIM) The CEIM has a unique structure specifically for modeling the relationships and behaviors that fill the gap from logical user requests to physical data source queries and back to the result.  The model divides the functionality into three specialized layers, called Presentation, Business Model and Mapping, and Physical, as shown below. Presentation services clients can generally only see the presentation layer, and the objects in the presentation layer are normally the only ones used in the LSQL request.  When a request comes into the BI Server from presentation services or another client, the relationships and objects in the model allow the BI Server to select the appropriate data sources, create a query plan, and generate the physical queries.  That's the left to right flow in the diagram below.  When the results come back from the data source queries, the right to left relationships in the model show how to transform the results and perform any final calculations and functions that could not be pushed down to the databases.   Business Model Think of the business model as the heart of the CEIM you are designing.  This is where you define the analytic behavior seen by the users, and the superset library of metric and dimension objects available to the user community as a whole.  It also provides the baseline business-friendly names and user-readable dictionary.  For these reasons, it is often called the "logical" model--it is a virtual database schema that persists no data, but can be queried as if it is a database. The business model always has a dimensional shape (more on this in future posts), and its simple shape and terminology hides the complexity of the source data models. Besides hiding complexity and normalizing terminology, this layer adds most of the analytic value, as well.  This is where you define the rich, dimensional behavior of the metrics and complex business calculations, as well as the conformed dimensions and hierarchies.  It contributes to the ease of use for business users, since the dimensional metric definitions apply in any context of filters and drill-downs, and the conformed dimensions enable dashboard-wide filters and guided analysis links that bring context along from one page to the next.  The conformed dimensions also provide a key to hiding the complexity of many sources, including federation of different databases, behind the simple business model. Note that the expression language in this layer is LSQL, so that any expression can be rewritten into any data source's query language at run time.  This is important for federation, where a given logical object can map to several different physical objects in different databases.  It is also important to portability of the CEIM to different database brands, which is a key requirement for Oracle's BI Applications products. Your requirements process with your user community will mostly affect the business model.  This is where you will define most of the things they specifically ask for, such as metric definitions.  For this reason, many of the best-practice methodologies of our consulting partners start with the high-level definition of this layer. Physical Model The physical model connects the business model that meets your users' requirements to the reality of the data sources you have available. In the query factory analogy, think of the physical layer as the bill of materials for generating physical queries.  Every schema, table, column, join, cube, hierarchy, etc., that will appear in any physical query manufactured at run time must be modeled here at design time. Each physical data source will have its own physical model, or "database" object in the CEIM.  The shape of each physical model matches the shape of its physical source.  In other words, if the source is normalized relational, the physical model will mimic that normalized shape.  If it is a hypercube, the physical model will have a hypercube shape.  If it is a flat file, it will have a denormalized tabular shape. To aid in query optimization, the physical layer also tracks the specifics of the database brand and release.  This allows the BI Server to make the most of each physical source's distinct capabilities, writing queries in its syntax, and using its specific functions. This allows the BI Server to push processing work as deep as possible into the physical source, which minimizes data movement and takes full advantage of the database's own optimizer.  For most data sources, native APIs are used to further optimize performance and functionality. The value of having a distinct separation between the logical (business) and physical models is encapsulation of the physical characteristics.  This encapsulation is another enabler of packaged BI applications and federation.  It is also key to hiding the complex shapes and relationships in the physical sources from the end users.  Consider a routine drill-down in the business model: physically, it can require a drill-through where the first query is MDX to a multidimensional cube, followed by the drill-down query in SQL to a normalized relational database.  The only difference from the user's point of view is that the 2nd query added a more detailed dimension level column - everything else was the same. Mappings Within the Business Model and Mapping Layer, the mappings provide the binding from each logical column and join in the dimensional business model, to each of the objects that can provide its data in the physical layer.  When there is more than one option for a physical source, rules in the mappings are applied to the query context to determine which of the data sources should be hit, and how to combine their results if more than one is used.  These rules specify aggregate navigation, vertical partitioning (fragmentation), and horizontal partitioning, any of which can be federated across multiple, heterogeneous sources.  These mappings are usually the most sophisticated part of the CEIM. Presentation You might think of the presentation layer as a set of very simple relational-like views into the business model.  Over ODBC/JDBC, they present a relational catalog consisting of databases, tables and columns.  For business users, presentation services interprets these as subject areas, folders and columns, respectively.  (Note that in 10g, subject areas were called presentation catalogs in the CEIM.  In this blog, I will stick to 11g terminology.)  Generally speaking, presentation services and other clients can query only these objects (there are exceptions for certain clients such as BI Publisher and Essbase Studio). The purpose of the presentation layer is to specialize the business model for different categories of users.  Based on a user's role, they will be restricted to specific subject areas, tables and columns for security.  The breakdown of the model into multiple subject areas organizes the content for users, and subjects superfluous to a particular business role can be hidden from that set of users.  Customized names and descriptions can be used to override the business model names for a specific audience.  Variables in the object names can be used for localization. For these reasons, you are better off thinking of the tables in the presentation layer as folders than as strict relational tables.  The real semantics of tables and how they function is in the business model, and any grouping of columns can be included in any table in the presentation layer.  In 11g, an LSQL query can also span multiple presentation subject areas, as long as they map to the same business model. Other Model Objects There are some objects that apply to multiple layers.  These include security-related objects, such as application roles, users, data filters, and query limits (governors).  There are also variables you can use in parameters and expressions, and initialization blocks for loading their initial values on a static or user session basis.  Finally, there are Multi-User Development (MUD) projects for developers to check out units of work, and objects for the marketing feature used by our packaged customer relationship management (CRM) software.   The Query Factory At this point, you should have a grasp on the query factory concept.  When developing the CEIM model, you are configuring the BI Server to automatically manufacture millions of queries in response to random user requests. You do this by defining the analytic behavior in the business model, mapping that to the physical data sources, and exposing it through the presentation layer's role-based subject areas. While configuring mass production requires a different mindset than when you hand-craft individual SQL or MDX statements, it builds on the modeling and query concepts you already understand. The following posts in this series will walk through the CEIM modeling concepts and best practices in detail.  We will initially review dimensional concepts so you can understand the business model, and then present a pattern-based approach to learning the mappings from a variety of physical schema shapes and deployments to the dimensional model.  Along the way, we will also present the dimensional calculation template, and learn how to configure the many additivity patterns.

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  • Dynamic XAP loading in Task-It - Part 1

    Download Source Code NOTE 1: The source code provided is running against the RC versions of Silverlight 4 and VisualStudio 2010, so you will need to update to those bits to run it. NOTE 2: After downloading the source, be sure to set the .Web project as the StartUp Project, and Default.aspx as the Start Page In my MEF into post, MEF to the rescue in Task-It, I outlined a couple of issues I was facing and explained why I chose MEF (the Managed Extensibility Framework) to solve these issues. Other posts to check out There are a few other resources out there around dynamic XAP loading that you may want to review (by the way, Glenn Block is the main dude when it comes to MEF): Glenn Blocks 3-part series on a dynamically loaded dashboard Glenn and John Papas Silverlight TV video on dynamic xap loading These provide some great info, but didnt exactly cover the scenario I wanted to achieve in Task-Itand that is dynamically loading each of the apps pages the first time the user enters a page. The code In the code I provided for download above, I created a simple solution that shows the technique I used for dynamic XAP loading in Task-It, but without all of the other code that surrounds it. Taking all that other stuff away should make it easier to grasp. Having said that, there is still a fair amount of code involved. I am always looking for ways to make things simpler, and to achieve the desired result with as little code as possible, so if I find a better/simpler way I will blog about it, but for now this technique works for me. When I created this solution I started by creating a new Silverlight Navigation Application called DynamicXAP Loading. I then added the following line to my UriMappings in MainPage.xaml: <uriMapper:UriMapping Uri="/{assemblyName};component/{path}" MappedUri="/{assemblyName};component/{path}"/> In the section of MainPage.xaml that produces the page links in the upper right, I kept the Home link, but added a couple of new ones (page1 and page 2). These are the pages that will be dynamically (lazy) loaded: <StackPanel x:Name="LinksStackPanel" Style="{StaticResource LinksStackPanelStyle}">      <HyperlinkButton Style="{StaticResource LinkStyle}" NavigateUri="/Home" TargetName="ContentFrame" Content="home"/>      <Rectangle Style="{StaticResource DividerStyle}"/>      <HyperlinkButton Style="{StaticResource LinkStyle}" Content="page 1" Command="{Binding NavigateCommand}" CommandParameter="{Binding ModulePage1}"/>      <Rectangle Style="{StaticResource DividerStyle}"/>      <HyperlinkButton Style="{StaticResource LinkStyle}" Content="page 2" Command="{Binding NavigateCommand}" CommandParameter="{Binding ModulePage2}"/>  </StackPanel> In App.xaml.cs I added a bit of MEF code. In Application_Startup I call a method called InitializeContainer, which creates a PackageCatalog (a MEF thing), then I create a CompositionContainer and pass it to the CompositionHost.Initialize method. This is boiler-plate MEF stuff that allows you to do 'composition' and import 'packages'. You're welcome to do a bit more MEF research on what is happening here if you'd like, but for the purpose of this example you can just trust that it works. :-) private void Application_Startup(object sender, StartupEventArgs e) {     InitializeContainer();     this.RootVisual = new MainPage(); }   private static void InitializeContainer() {     var catalog = new PackageCatalog();     catalog.AddPackage(Package.Current);     var container = new CompositionContainer(catalog);     container.ComposeExportedValue(catalog);     CompositionHost.Initialize(container); } Infrastructure In the sample code you'll notice that there is a project in the solution called DynamicXAPLoading.Infrastructure. This is simply a Silverlight Class Library project that I created just to move stuff I considered application 'infrastructure' code into a separate place, rather than cluttering the main Silverlight project (DynamicXapLoading). I did this same thing in Task-It, as the amount of this type of code was starting to clutter up the Silverlight project, and it just seemed to make sense to move things like Enums, Constants and the like off to a separate place. In the DynamicXapLoading.Infrastructure project you'll see 3 classes: Enums - There is only one enum in here called ModuleEnum. We'll use these later. PageMetadata - We will use this class later to add metadata to a new dynamically loaded project. ViewModelBase - This is simply a base class for view models that we will use in this, as well as future samples. As mentioned in my MVVM post, I will be using the MVVM pattern throughout my code for reasons detailed in the post. By the way, the ViewModelExtension class in there allows me to do strongly-typed property changed notification, so rather than OnPropertyChanged("MyProperty"), I can do this.OnPropertyChanged(p => p.MyProperty). It's just a less error-prown approach, because if you don't spell "MyProperty" correctly using the first method, nothing will break, it just won't work. Adding a new page We currently have a couple of pages that are being dynamically (lazy) loaded, but now let's add a third page. 1. First, create a new Silverlight Application project: In this example I call it Page3. In the future you may prefer to use a different name, like DynamicXAPLoading.Page3, or even DynamicXAPLoading.Modules.Page3. It can be whatever you want. In my Task-It application I used the latter approach (with 'Modules' in the name). I do think of these application as 'modules', but Prism uses the same term, so some folks may not like that. Use whichever naming convention you feel is appropriate, but for now Page3 will do. When you change the name to Page3 and click OK, you will be presented with the Add New Project dialog: It is important that you leave the 'Host the Silverlight application in a new or existing Web site in the solution' checked, and the .Web project will be selected in the dropdown below. This will create the .xap file for this project under ClientBin in the .Web project, which is where we want it. 2. Uncheck the 'Add a test page that references the application' checkbox, and leave everything else as is. 3. Once the project is created, you can delete App.xaml and MainPage.xaml. 4. You will need to add references your new project to the following: DynamicXAPLoading.Infrastructure.dll (this is a Project reference) DynamicNavigation.dll (this is in the Libs directory under the DynamicXAPLoading project) System.ComponentModel.Composition.dll System.ComponentModel.Composition.Initialization.dll System.Windows.Controls.Navigation.dll If you have installed the latest RC bits you will find the last 3 dll's under the .NET tab in the Add Referenced dialog. They live in the following location, or if you are on a 64-bit machine like me, it will be Program Files (x86).       C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Silverlight\v4.0\Libraries\Client Now let's create some UI for our new project. 5. First, create a new Silverlight User Control called Page3.dyn.xaml 6. Paste the following code into the xaml: <dyn:DynamicPageShim xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"     xmlns:dyn="clr-namespace:DynamicNavigation;assembly=DynamicNavigation"     xmlns:my="clr-namespace:Page3;assembly=Page3">     <my:Page3Host /> </dyn:DynamicPageShim> This is just a 'shim', part of David Poll's technique for dynamic loading. 7. Expand the icon next to Page3.dyn.xaml and delete the code-behind file (Page3.dyn.xaml.cs). 8. Next we will create a control that will 'host' our page. Create another Silverlight User Control called Page3Host.xaml and paste in the following XAML: <dyn:DynamicPage x:Class="Page3.Page3Host"     xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"     xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"     xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008"     xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006"     xmlns:dyn="clr-namespace:DynamicNavigation;assembly=DynamicNavigation"     xmlns:Views="clr-namespace:Page3.Views"      mc:Ignorable="d"     d:DesignHeight="300" d:DesignWidth="400"     Title="Page 3">       <Views:Page3/>   </dyn:DynamicPage> 9. Now paste the following code into the code-behind for this control: using DynamicXAPLoading.Infrastructure;   namespace Page3 {     [PageMetadata(NavigateUri = "/Page3;component/Page3.dyn.xaml", Module = Enums.Page3)]     public partial class Page3Host     {         public Page3Host()         {             InitializeComponent();         }     } } Notice that we are now using that PageMetadata custom attribute class that we created in the Infrastructure project, and setting its two properties. NavigateUri - This tells it that the assembly is called Page3 (with a slash beforehand), and the page we want to load is Page3.dyn.xaml...our 'shim'. That line we added to the UriMapper in MainPage.xaml will use this information to load the page. Module - This goes back to that ModuleEnum class in our Infrastructure project. However, setting the Module to ModuleEnum.Page3 will cause a compilation error, so... 10. Go back to that Enums.cs under the Infrastructure project and add a 3rd entry for Page3: public enum ModuleEnum {     Page1,     Page2,     Page3 } 11. Now right-click on the Page3 project and add a folder called Views. 12. Right-click on the Views folder and create a new Silverlight User Control called Page3.xaml. We won't bother creating a view model for this User Control as I did in the Page 1 and Page 2 projects, just for the sake of simplicity. Feel free to add one if you'd like though, and copy the code from one of those other projects. Right now those view models aren't really doing anything anyway...though they will in my next post. :-) 13. Now let's replace the xaml for Page3.xaml with the following: <dyn:DynamicPage x:Class="Page3.Views.Page3"     xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"     xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"     xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008"     xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006"     xmlns:dyn="clr-namespace:DynamicNavigation;assembly=DynamicNavigation"     mc:Ignorable="d"     d:DesignHeight="300" d:DesignWidth="400"     Style="{StaticResource PageStyle}">       <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot">         <ScrollViewer x:Name="PageScrollViewer" Style="{StaticResource PageScrollViewerStyle}">             <StackPanel x:Name="ContentStackPanel">                 <TextBlock x:Name="HeaderText" Style="{StaticResource HeaderTextStyle}" Text="Page 3"/>                 <TextBlock x:Name="ContentText" Style="{StaticResource ContentTextStyle}" Text="Page 3 content"/>             </StackPanel>         </ScrollViewer>     </Grid>   </dyn:DynamicPage> 14. And in the code-behind remove the inheritance from UserControl, so it should look like this: namespace Page3.Views {     public partial class Page3     {         public Page3()         {             InitializeComponent();         }     } } One thing you may have noticed is that the base class for the last two User Controls we created is DynamicPage. Once again, we are using the infrastructure that David Poll created. 15. OK, a few last things. We need a link on our main page so that we can access our new page. In MainPage.xaml let's update our links to look like this: <StackPanel x:Name="LinksStackPanel" Style="{StaticResource LinksStackPanelStyle}">     <HyperlinkButton Style="{StaticResource LinkStyle}" NavigateUri="/Home" TargetName="ContentFrame" Content="home"/>     <Rectangle Style="{StaticResource DividerStyle}"/>     <HyperlinkButton Style="{StaticResource LinkStyle}" Content="page 1" Command="{Binding NavigateCommand}" CommandParameter="{Binding ModulePage1}"/>     <Rectangle Style="{StaticResource DividerStyle}"/>     <HyperlinkButton Style="{StaticResource LinkStyle}" Content="page 2" Command="{Binding NavigateCommand}" CommandParameter="{Binding ModulePage2}"/>     <Rectangle Style="{StaticResource DividerStyle}"/>     <HyperlinkButton Style="{StaticResource LinkStyle}" Content="page 3" Command="{Binding NavigateCommand}" CommandParameter="{Binding ModulePage3}"/> </StackPanel> 16. Next, we need to add the following at the bottom of MainPageViewModel in the ViewModels directory of our DynamicXAPLoading project: public ModuleEnum ModulePage3 {     get { return ModuleEnum.Page3; } } 17. And at last, we need to add a case for our new page to the switch statement in MainPageViewModel: switch (module) {     case ModuleEnum.Page1:         DownloadPackage("Page1.xap");         break;     case ModuleEnum.Page2:         DownloadPackage("Page2.xap");         break;     case ModuleEnum.Page3:         DownloadPackage("Page3.xap");         break;     default:         break; } Now fire up the application and click the page 1, page 2 and page 3 links. What you'll notice is that there is a 2-second delay the first time you hit each page. That is because I added the following line to the Navigate method in MainPageViewModel: Thread.Sleep(2000); // Simulate a 2 second initial loading delay The reason I put this in there is that I wanted to simulate a delay the first time the page loads (as the .xap is being downloaded from the server). You'll notice that after the first hit to the page though that there is no delay...that's because the .xap has already been downloaded. Feel free to comment out this 2-second delay, or remove it if you'd like. I just wanted to show how subsequent hits to the page would be quicker than the initial one. By the way, you may want to display some sort of BusyIndicator while the .xap is loading. I have that in my Task-It appplication, but for the sake of simplicity I did not include it here. In the future I'll blog about how I show and hide the BusyIndicator using events (I'm currently using the eventing framework in Prism for that, but may move to the one in the MVVM Light Toolkit some time soon). Whew, that felt like a lot of steps, but it does work quite nicely. As I mentioned earlier, I'll try to find ways to simplify the code (I'd like to get away from having things like hard-coded .xap file names) and will blog about it in the future if I find a better way. In my next post, I'll talk more about what is actually happening with the code that makes this all work.Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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  • Calculating the Size (in Bytes and MB) of a Oracle Coherence Cache

    - by Ricardo Ferreira
    The concept and usage of data grids are becoming very popular in this days since this type of technology are evolving very fast with some cool lead products like Oracle Coherence. Once for a while, developers need an programmatic way to calculate the total size of a specific cache that are residing in the data grid. In this post, I will show how to accomplish this using Oracle Coherence API. This example has been tested with 3.6, 3.7 and 3.7.1 versions of Oracle Coherence. To start the development of this example, you need to create a POJO ("Plain Old Java Object") that represents a data structure that will hold user data. This data structure will also create an internal fat so I call that should increase considerably the size of each instance in the heap memory. Create a Java class named "Person" as shown in the listing below. package com.oracle.coherence.domain; import java.io.Serializable; import java.util.ArrayList; import java.util.HashMap; import java.util.List; import java.util.Random; @SuppressWarnings("serial") public class Person implements Serializable { private String firstName; private String lastName; private List<Object> fat; private String email; public Person() { generateFat(); } public Person(String firstName, String lastName, String email) { setFirstName(firstName); setLastName(lastName); setEmail(email); generateFat(); } private void generateFat() { fat = new ArrayList<Object>(); Random random = new Random(); for (int i = 0; i < random.nextInt(18000); i++) { HashMap<Long, Double> internalFat = new HashMap<Long, Double>(); for (int j = 0; j < random.nextInt(10000); j++) { internalFat.put(random.nextLong(), random.nextDouble()); } fat.add(internalFat); } } public String getFirstName() { return firstName; } public void setFirstName(String firstName) { this.firstName = firstName; } public String getLastName() { return lastName; } public void setLastName(String lastName) { this.lastName = lastName; } public String getEmail() { return email; } public void setEmail(String email) { this.email = email; } } Now let's create a Java program that will start a data grid into Coherence and will create a cache named "People", that will hold people instances with sequential integer keys. Each person created in this program will trigger the execution of a custom constructor created in the People class that instantiates an internal fat (the random amount of data generated to increase the size of the object) for each person. Create a Java class named "CreatePeopleCacheAndPopulateWithData" as shown in the listing below. package com.oracle.coherence.demo; import com.oracle.coherence.domain.Person; import com.tangosol.net.CacheFactory; import com.tangosol.net.NamedCache; public class CreatePeopleCacheAndPopulateWithData { public static void main(String[] args) { // Asks Coherence for a new cache named "People"... NamedCache people = CacheFactory.getCache("People"); // Creates three people that will be putted into the data grid. Each person // generates an internal fat that should increase its size in terms of bytes... Person pessoa1 = new Person("Ricardo", "Ferreira", "[email protected]"); Person pessoa2 = new Person("Vitor", "Ferreira", "[email protected]"); Person pessoa3 = new Person("Vivian", "Ferreira", "[email protected]"); // Insert three people at the data grid... people.put(1, pessoa1); people.put(2, pessoa2); people.put(3, pessoa3); // Waits for 5 minutes until the user runs the Java program // that calculates the total size of the people cache... try { System.out.println("---> Waiting for 5 minutes for the cache size calculation..."); Thread.sleep(300000); } catch (InterruptedException ie) { ie.printStackTrace(); } } } Finally, let's create a Java program that, using the Coherence API and JMX, will calculate the total size of each cache that the data grid is currently managing. The approach used in this example was retrieve every cache that the data grid are currently managing, but if you are interested on an specific cache, the same approach can be used, you should only filter witch cache will be looked for. Create a Java class named "CalculateTheSizeOfPeopleCache" as shown in the listing below. package com.oracle.coherence.demo; import java.text.DecimalFormat; import java.util.Map; import java.util.Set; import java.util.TreeMap; import javax.management.MBeanServer; import javax.management.MBeanServerFactory; import javax.management.ObjectName; import com.tangosol.net.CacheFactory; public class CalculateTheSizeOfPeopleCache { @SuppressWarnings({ "unchecked", "rawtypes" }) private void run() throws Exception { // Enable JMX support in this Coherence data grid session... System.setProperty("tangosol.coherence.management", "all"); // Create a sample cache just to access the data grid... CacheFactory.getCache(MBeanServerFactory.class.getName()); // Gets the JMX server from Coherence data grid... MBeanServer jmxServer = getJMXServer(); // Creates a internal data structure that would maintain // the statistics from each cache in the data grid... Map cacheList = new TreeMap(); Set jmxObjectList = jmxServer.queryNames(new ObjectName("Coherence:type=Cache,*"), null); for (Object jmxObject : jmxObjectList) { ObjectName jmxObjectName = (ObjectName) jmxObject; String cacheName = jmxObjectName.getKeyProperty("name"); if (cacheName.equals(MBeanServerFactory.class.getName())) { continue; } else { cacheList.put(cacheName, new Statistics(cacheName)); } } // Updates the internal data structure with statistic data // retrieved from caches inside the in-memory data grid... Set<String> cacheNames = cacheList.keySet(); for (String cacheName : cacheNames) { Set resultSet = jmxServer.queryNames( new ObjectName("Coherence:type=Cache,name=" + cacheName + ",*"), null); for (Object resultSetRef : resultSet) { ObjectName objectName = (ObjectName) resultSetRef; if (objectName.getKeyProperty("tier").equals("back")) { int unit = (Integer) jmxServer.getAttribute(objectName, "Units"); int size = (Integer) jmxServer.getAttribute(objectName, "Size"); Statistics statistics = (Statistics) cacheList.get(cacheName); statistics.incrementUnit(unit); statistics.incrementSize(size); cacheList.put(cacheName, statistics); } } } // Finally... print the objects from the internal data // structure that represents the statistics from caches... cacheNames = cacheList.keySet(); for (String cacheName : cacheNames) { Statistics estatisticas = (Statistics) cacheList.get(cacheName); System.out.println(estatisticas); } } public MBeanServer getJMXServer() { MBeanServer jmxServer = null; for (Object jmxServerRef : MBeanServerFactory.findMBeanServer(null)) { jmxServer = (MBeanServer) jmxServerRef; if (jmxServer.getDefaultDomain().equals(DEFAULT_DOMAIN) || DEFAULT_DOMAIN.length() == 0) { break; } jmxServer = null; } if (jmxServer == null) { jmxServer = MBeanServerFactory.createMBeanServer(DEFAULT_DOMAIN); } return jmxServer; } private class Statistics { private long unit; private long size; private String cacheName; public Statistics(String cacheName) { this.cacheName = cacheName; } public void incrementUnit(long unit) { this.unit += unit; } public void incrementSize(long size) { this.size += size; } public long getUnit() { return unit; } public long getSize() { return size; } public double getUnitInMB() { return unit / (1024.0 * 1024.0); } public double getAverageSize() { return size == 0 ? 0 : unit / size; } public String toString() { StringBuffer sb = new StringBuffer(); sb.append("\nCache Statistics of '").append(cacheName).append("':\n"); sb.append(" - Total Entries of Cache -----> " + getSize()).append("\n"); sb.append(" - Used Memory (Bytes) --------> " + getUnit()).append("\n"); sb.append(" - Used Memory (MB) -----------> " + FORMAT.format(getUnitInMB())).append("\n"); sb.append(" - Object Average Size --------> " + FORMAT.format(getAverageSize())).append("\n"); return sb.toString(); } } public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception { new CalculateTheSizeOfPeopleCache().run(); } public static final DecimalFormat FORMAT = new DecimalFormat("###.###"); public static final String DEFAULT_DOMAIN = ""; public static final String DOMAIN_NAME = "Coherence"; } I've commented the overall example so, I don't think that you should get into trouble to understand it. Basically we are dealing with JMX. The first thing to do is enable JMX support for the Coherence client (ie, an JVM that will only retrieve values from the data grid and will not integrate the cluster) application. This can be done very easily using the runtime "tangosol.coherence.management" system property. Consult the Coherence documentation for JMX to understand the possible values that could be applied. The program creates an in memory data structure that holds a custom class created called "Statistics". This class represents the information that we are interested to see, which in this case are the size in bytes and in MB of the caches. An instance of this class is created for each cache that are currently managed by the data grid. Using JMX specific methods, we retrieve the information that are relevant for calculate the total size of the caches. To test this example, you should execute first the CreatePeopleCacheAndPopulateWithData.java program and after the CreatePeopleCacheAndPopulateWithData.java program. The results in the console should be something like this: 2012-06-23 13:29:31.188/4.970 Oracle Coherence 3.6.0.4 <Info> (thread=Main Thread, member=n/a): Loaded operational configuration from "jar:file:/E:/Oracle/Middleware/oepe_11gR1PS4/workspace/calcular-tamanho-cache-coherence/lib/coherence.jar!/tangosol-coherence.xml" 2012-06-23 13:29:31.219/5.001 Oracle Coherence 3.6.0.4 <Info> (thread=Main Thread, member=n/a): Loaded operational overrides from "jar:file:/E:/Oracle/Middleware/oepe_11gR1PS4/workspace/calcular-tamanho-cache-coherence/lib/coherence.jar!/tangosol-coherence-override-dev.xml" 2012-06-23 13:29:31.219/5.001 Oracle Coherence 3.6.0.4 <D5> (thread=Main Thread, member=n/a): Optional configuration override "/tangosol-coherence-override.xml" is not specified 2012-06-23 13:29:31.266/5.048 Oracle Coherence 3.6.0.4 <D5> (thread=Main Thread, member=n/a): Optional configuration override "/custom-mbeans.xml" is not specified Oracle Coherence Version 3.6.0.4 Build 19111 Grid Edition: Development mode Copyright (c) 2000, 2010, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. 2012-06-23 13:29:33.156/6.938 Oracle Coherence GE 3.6.0.4 <Info> (thread=Main Thread, member=n/a): Loaded Reporter configuration from "jar:file:/E:/Oracle/Middleware/oepe_11gR1PS4/workspace/calcular-tamanho-cache-coherence/lib/coherence.jar!/reports/report-group.xml" 2012-06-23 13:29:33.500/7.282 Oracle Coherence GE 3.6.0.4 <Info> (thread=Main Thread, member=n/a): Loaded cache configuration from "jar:file:/E:/Oracle/Middleware/oepe_11gR1PS4/workspace/calcular-tamanho-cache-coherence/lib/coherence.jar!/coherence-cache-config.xml" 2012-06-23 13:29:35.391/9.173 Oracle Coherence GE 3.6.0.4 <D4> (thread=Main Thread, member=n/a): TCMP bound to /192.168.177.133:8090 using SystemSocketProvider 2012-06-23 13:29:37.062/10.844 Oracle Coherence GE 3.6.0.4 <Info> (thread=Cluster, member=n/a): This Member(Id=2, Timestamp=2012-06-23 13:29:36.899, Address=192.168.177.133:8090, MachineId=55685, Location=process:244, Role=Oracle, Edition=Grid Edition, Mode=Development, CpuCount=2, SocketCount=2) joined cluster "cluster:0xC4DB" with senior Member(Id=1, Timestamp=2012-06-23 13:29:14.031, Address=192.168.177.133:8088, MachineId=55685, Location=process:1128, Role=CreatePeopleCacheAndPopulateWith, Edition=Grid Edition, Mode=Development, CpuCount=2, SocketCount=2) 2012-06-23 13:29:37.172/10.954 Oracle Coherence GE 3.6.0.4 <D5> (thread=Cluster, member=n/a): Member 1 joined Service Cluster with senior member 1 2012-06-23 13:29:37.188/10.970 Oracle Coherence GE 3.6.0.4 <D5> (thread=Cluster, member=n/a): Member 1 joined Service Management with senior member 1 2012-06-23 13:29:37.188/10.970 Oracle Coherence GE 3.6.0.4 <D5> (thread=Cluster, member=n/a): Member 1 joined Service DistributedCache with senior member 1 2012-06-23 13:29:37.188/10.970 Oracle Coherence GE 3.6.0.4 <Info> (thread=Main Thread, member=n/a): Started cluster Name=cluster:0xC4DB Group{Address=224.3.6.0, Port=36000, TTL=4} MasterMemberSet ( ThisMember=Member(Id=2, Timestamp=2012-06-23 13:29:36.899, Address=192.168.177.133:8090, MachineId=55685, Location=process:244, Role=Oracle) OldestMember=Member(Id=1, Timestamp=2012-06-23 13:29:14.031, Address=192.168.177.133:8088, MachineId=55685, Location=process:1128, Role=CreatePeopleCacheAndPopulateWith) ActualMemberSet=MemberSet(Size=2, BitSetCount=2 Member(Id=1, Timestamp=2012-06-23 13:29:14.031, Address=192.168.177.133:8088, MachineId=55685, Location=process:1128, Role=CreatePeopleCacheAndPopulateWith) Member(Id=2, Timestamp=2012-06-23 13:29:36.899, Address=192.168.177.133:8090, MachineId=55685, Location=process:244, Role=Oracle) ) RecycleMillis=1200000 RecycleSet=MemberSet(Size=0, BitSetCount=0 ) ) TcpRing{Connections=[1]} IpMonitor{AddressListSize=0} 2012-06-23 13:29:37.891/11.673 Oracle Coherence GE 3.6.0.4 <D5> (thread=Invocation:Management, member=2): Service Management joined the cluster with senior service member 1 2012-06-23 13:29:39.203/12.985 Oracle Coherence GE 3.6.0.4 <D5> (thread=DistributedCache, member=2): Service DistributedCache joined the cluster with senior service member 1 2012-06-23 13:29:39.297/13.079 Oracle Coherence GE 3.6.0.4 <D4> (thread=DistributedCache, member=2): Asking member 1 for 128 primary partitions Cache Statistics of 'People': - Total Entries of Cache -----> 3 - Used Memory (Bytes) --------> 883920 - Used Memory (MB) -----------> 0.843 - Object Average Size --------> 294640 I hope that this post could save you some time when calculate the total size of Coherence cache became a requirement for your high scalable system using data grids. See you!

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, October 23, 2011

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, October 23, 2011Popular ReleasesView Layout Replicator for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011: View Layout Replicator (1.0.921.51): Added CodePlex and PayPal links New iconSiteMap Editor for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011: SiteMap Editor (1.0.921.340): Added CodePlex and PayPal links New iconRibbon Browser for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011: Ribbon Browser (1.0.922.41): Added CodePlex and PayPal links New iconMVCQuick: MVCQuick 0.3.1: Features??NHibernate 3.2??Repository(ORuM) ??Spring.Net 1.3.2??Container(IoC) ??Common.Logging 1.2??Logging ASP.NET Security Provider?? ??MVCQuick.Framework??MusicStoreElysium: Elysium Theme 1.1 (CTP 1): === Version history === Elysium Theme: Version 1.1 This is pre-release Community Technology Preview version. We recommended use it only for testing and studying project's possibilities. This version included: styles for: ContextMenu MenuItem (partially) bug fixes for: CommandButton: bug #598 ComboBox: bug #599 Window: bug #605 Elysium Theme: Version 1.0 This version included: classes: ThemeManager (with standart Windows Phone colors) CommandButton, RepeatCommandButton, ToggleC...DotNet.Framework.Common: DotNet.Framework.Common 4.0: ??????????,????????????XML Explorer: XML Explorer 4.0.5: Changes in 4.0.5: Added 'Copy Attribute XPath to Address Bar' feature. Added methods for decoding node text and value from Base64 encoded strings, and copying them to the clipboard. Added 'ChildNodeDefinitions' to the options, which allows for easier navigation of parent-child and ID-IDREF relationships. Discovery happens on-demand, as nodes are expanded and child nodes are added. Nodes can now have 'virtual' child nodes, defined by an xpath to select an identifier (usually relative to ...Media Companion: MC 3.419b Weekly: A couple of minor bug fixes, but the important fix in this release is to tackle the extremely long load times for users with large TV collections (issue #130). A note has been provided by developer Playos: "One final note, you will have to suffer one final long load and then it should be fixed... alternatively you can delete the TvCache.xml and rebuild your library... The fix was to include the file extension so it doesn't have to look for the video file (checking to see if a file exists is a...CODE Framework: 4.0.11021.0: This build adds a lot of our WPF components, including our MVVC and MVC components as well as a "Metro" and "Battleship" style.GridLibre para Visual FoxPro: GridLibre para Visual FoxPro v3.5: GridLibre Para Visual FoxPro: esta herramienta ayudara a los usuarios y programadores en los manejos de los datos, como Filtrar, multiseleccion y el autoformato a las columnas como la asignacion del controlsource.Self-Tracking Entity Generator for WPF and Silverlight: Self-Tracking Entity Generator v 0.9.9: Self-Tracking Entity Generator v 0.9.9 for Entity Framework 4.0Umbraco CMS: Umbraco 5.0 CMS Alpha 3: Umbraco 5 Alpha 3Umbraco 5 (aka Jupiter) will be the next version of everyone's favourite, friendly ASP.NET CMS that already powers over 100,000 websites worldwide. Try out the Alpha of v5 today! If you're new to Umbraco and would like to get a low-down on our popular and easy-to-learn approach to content management, check out our intro video. What's Alpha 3?This is our third Alpha release. It's intended for developers looking to become familiar with the codebase & architecture, or for thos...Vkontakte WP: Vkontakte: source codeWay2Sms Applications for Android, Desktop/Laptop & Java enabled phones: Way2SMS Desktop App v2.0: 1. Fixed issue with sending messages due to changes to Way2Sms site 2. Updated the character limit to 160 from 140GART - Geo Augmented Reality Toolkit: 1.0.1: About Release 1.0.1 Release 1.0.1 is a service release that addresses several issues and improves performance. As always, check the Documentation tab for instructions on how to get started. If you don't have the Windows Phone SDK yet, grab it here. Breaking Change Please note: There is a breaking change in this release. As noted below, the WorldCalculationMode property of ARItem has been replaced by a user-definable function. ARItem is now automatically wired up with a function that perform...Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.32: Fix for issue #16710 - string literals in "constant literal operations" which contain ASP.NET substitutions should not be considered "constant." Move the JS1284 error (Misplaced Function Declaration) so it only fires when in strict mode. I got a couple complaints that people didn't like that error popping up in their existing code when they could verify that the location of that function, although not strict JS, still functions as expected cross-browser.Naked Objects: Naked Objects Release 4.0.110.0: Corresponds to the packaged version 4.0.110.0 available via NuGet. Please note that the easiest way to install and run the Naked Objects Framework is via the NuGet package manager: just search the Official NuGet Package Source for 'nakedobjects'. It is only necessary to download the source code (from here) if you wish to modify or re-build the framework yourself. If you do wish to re-build the framework, consul the file HowToBuild.txt in the release. Documentation Please note that after ...myCollections: Version 1.5: New in this version : Added edit type for selected elements Added clean for selected elements Added Amazon Italia Added Amazon China Added TVDB Italia Added TVDB China Added Turkish language You can now manually add artist Added Order by Rating Improved Add by Media Improved Artist Detail Upgrade Sqlite engine View, Zoom, Grouping, Filter are now saved by category Added group by Artist Added CubeCover View BugFixingIronPython: 2.7.1 RC: This is the first release candidate of IronPython 2.7.1. Like IronPython 54498, this release requires .NET 4 or Silverlight 4. This release will replace any existing IronPython installation. If there are no showstopping issues, this will be the only release candidate for 2.7.1, so please speak up if you run into any roadblocks. The highlights of 2.7.1 are: Updated the standard library to match CPython 2.7.2. Add the ast, csv, and unicodedata modules. Fixed several bugs. IronPython To...Rawr: Rawr 4.2.6: This is the Downloadable WPF version of Rawr!For web-based version see http://elitistjerks.com/rawr.php You can find the version notes at: http://rawr.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=VersionNotes Rawr AddonWe now have a Rawr Official Addon for in-game exporting and importing of character data hosted on Curse. The Addon does not perform calculations like Rawr, it simply shows your exported Rawr data in wow tooltips and lets you export your character to Rawr (including bag and bank items) like Char...New Projects"Cupa Timisului" evaluation app: The application is used for evaluating CABRILLO log file for "Cupa Timisului" HAM contest. You can use this code as a startup for ham contest log evaluating software... It's developed in C#.Afrihost Capped Account Monitoring Gadget: The Afrihost Monitoring Gadget is a Windows gadget to monitor the usage on your Afrihost capped account. This project is independently developed and not associated with Afrihost. It has been developed by an Afrihost client and not Afrihost themselves. Custom ORM for .NET: This project represents tiny "Custom ORM" system written in .NET (3.5 as of now). It has strongly typed mapping like in FluentNH. It allows you to change underlying data access logic on the fly. It is simple enough to grag-&-drop in your project and than change as you like.diagnostic medical system: Medical diagnostic system. Simple academic project using BiztTalk Bussines Rule Engine. DotNetNuke Kitchen Sink: A sample module project for DotNetNuke with a variety of different scenarios covered.ecBlog: ecBlog is a very simple blog application. Just run and use. Technology Choice I developed the site as expected with the MVC and HTML 5. Why MVC? In fact there is no one reason. I developed with one of the many features of MVC . MVC comes with a specific architecture, it also conFastPizza: This is a project to delivery stores, restaurants, and othersGB2312 for Silverlight: This class is for support GB2312 simplified Chinese characters for Silverlight(include Windows Phone 7) Application and inherited from Encoding abstract class. It's developed in CSharp. ?????? Silverlight(?? Windows Phone 7)?????? GB2312 ???????,? Encoding ?????。?? C# ????。Ginnay Distributed Downloader: Distributed Downloader using multiple proxiesIn for Consideration - EGR101 Rocket Launch Sequencer: In for Consideration's EGR101 RLS is an executable version of the simplified launch sequence presented in class materials of "Introduction to Engineering" at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, FL. Source code is available for those interested (C# only).luminji's core lib: luminji's core lib, provide the common utility of the c#.Muki erp System: MukiERP, features. MukiERP is a free, user-friendly, web-based ERP system. MukiERP is Open Source licensed on GPL. MukiERP is in active development and is constantly improved according to its users needs. MukiERP is written in .Net C# language. MukiERP is running well on a ASP.NET and MSSQL. NameDOB: This is for sharing a specific sample with a specific group.network utility: this is a project for working with network API.PGS: (functional) Program Generator from Spreadsheets: This project allows the generation of a functional program semantically equivalent to a given spreadsheet. Using this system, you can: - solve the calculation expressed by the user using a compiled approach. - use spreadsheets as a tool for programming by example.pkrss: c++ version:pkrss.sf.net csharp version:is here. pkrss.sf.net is c++ version desktop productor written by qt 4.7.3. pkrss.codeplex is csharp version web productor.SharePoint Log Browser: The SharePoint log browser is yet another way to view the log of SharePoint.SharpChip-8: Chip-8 Emulator written in C#SQL Server Stored Procedure best practices: This SQL Server stored procedure best practice guide contains documentations of best practices and helper tools to enhance further match with the best practices. sqlsearch: Hi, Googling gives me many search tools. But all tools are not efficient or not able to search into data. So I thought why developers on codeplex and I will not find out some solution for this same. All of you are invited to contribute in this project. Thank you, Hiren V.Suffix Tree in C# and F#: SuffixTree builds a suffix tree structure. A simple client shows how to find substrings in it, and the visual client shows the actual tree. Implemented in C# and F#.Test11: it is a test projectThe Seal: The Seal is a basic Open Source 2D Fantasy Based RPG(Role Playing Game) for Windows. More info coming soon.Toolpack: Updated and improves version silverlight toolkit and wpf toolkit.Unity Azure Setting Injector: Using Unity in Windows Azure made simple. Ever considered moving to Windows Azure, but didn't know how to inject setting from your Service Configuration file? Just reference this project and you will be able to inject Azure Storage Account Connection Strings & Local Storage Paths

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  • Converting Encrypted Values

    - by Johnm
    Your database has been protecting sensitive data at rest using the cell-level encryption features of SQL Server for quite sometime. The employees in the auditing department have been inviting you to their after-work gatherings and buying you drinks. Thousands of customers implicitly include you in their prayers of thanks giving as their identities remain safe in your company's database. The cipher text resting snuggly in a column of the varbinary data type is great for security; but it can create some interesting challenges when interacting with other data types such as the XML data type. The XML data type is one that is often used as a message type for the Service Broker feature of SQL Server. It also can be an interesting data type to capture for auditing or integrating with external systems. The challenge that cipher text presents is that the need for decryption remains even after it has experienced its XML metamorphosis. Quite an interesting challenge nonetheless; but fear not. There is a solution. To simulate this scenario, we first will want to create a plain text value for us to encrypt. We will do this by creating a variable to store our plain text value: -- set plain text value DECLARE @PlainText NVARCHAR(255); SET @PlainText = 'This is plain text to encrypt'; The next step will be to create a variable that will store the cipher text that is generated from the encryption process. We will populate this variable by using a pre-defined symmetric key and certificate combination: -- encrypt plain text value DECLARE @CipherText VARBINARY(MAX); OPEN SYMMETRIC KEY SymKey     DECRYPTION BY CERTIFICATE SymCert     WITH PASSWORD='mypassword2010';     SET @CipherText = EncryptByKey                          (                            Key_GUID('SymKey'),                            @PlainText                           ); CLOSE ALL SYMMETRIC KEYS; The value of our newly generated cipher text is 0x006E12933CBFB0469F79ABCC79A583--. This will be important as we reference our cipher text later in this post. Our final step in preparing our scenario is to create a table variable to simulate the existence of a table that contains a column used to hold encrypted values. Once this table variable has been created, populate the table variable with the newly generated cipher text: -- capture value in table variable DECLARE @tbl TABLE (EncVal varbinary(MAX)); INSERT INTO @tbl (EncVal) VALUES (@CipherText); We are now ready to experience the challenge of capturing our encrypted column in an XML data type using the FOR XML clause: -- capture set in xml DECLARE @xml XML; SET @xml = (SELECT               EncVal             FROM @tbl AS MYTABLE             FOR XML AUTO, BINARY BASE64, ROOT('root')); If you add the SELECT @XML statement at the end of this portion of the code you will see the contents of the XML data in its raw format: <root>   <MYTABLE EncVal="AG4Skzy/sEafeavMeaWDBwEAAACE--" /> </root> Strangely, the value that is captured appears nothing like the value that was created through the encryption process. The result being that when this XML is converted into a readable data set the encrypted value will not be able to be decrypted, even with access to the symmetric key and certificate used to perform the decryption. An immediate thought might be to convert the varbinary data type to either a varchar or nvarchar before creating the XML data. This approach makes good sense. The code for this might look something like the following: -- capture set in xml DECLARE @xml XML; SET @xml = (SELECT              CONVERT(NVARCHAR(MAX),EncVal) AS EncVal             FROM @tbl AS MYTABLE             FOR XML AUTO, BINARY BASE64, ROOT('root')); However, this results in the following error: Msg 9420, Level 16, State 1, Line 26 XML parsing: line 1, character 37, illegal xml character A quick query that returns CONVERT(NVARCHAR(MAX),EncVal) reveals that the value that is causing the error looks like something off of a genuine Chinese menu. While this situation does present us with one of those spine-tingling, expletive-generating challenges, rest assured that this approach is on the right track. With the addition of the "style" argument to the CONVERT method, our solution is at hand. When dealing with converting varbinary data types we have three styles available to us: - The first is to not include the style parameter, or use the value of "0". As we see, this style will not work for us. - The second option is to use the value of "1" will keep our varbinary value including the "0x" prefix. In our case, the value will be 0x006E12933CBFB0469F79ABCC79A583-- - The third option is to use the value of "2" which will chop the "0x" prefix off of our varbinary value. In our case, the value will be 006E12933CBFB0469F79ABCC79A583-- Since we will want to convert this back to varbinary when reading this value from the XML data we will want the "0x" prefix, so we will want to change our code as follows: -- capture set in xml DECLARE @xml XML; SET @xml = (SELECT              CONVERT(NVARCHAR(MAX),EncVal,1) AS EncVal             FROM @tbl AS MYTABLE             FOR XML AUTO, BINARY BASE64, ROOT('root')); Once again, with the inclusion of the SELECT @XML statement at the end of this portion of the code you will see the contents of the XML data in its raw format: <root>   <MYTABLE EncVal="0x006E12933CBFB0469F79ABCC79A583--" /> </root> Nice! We are now cooking with gas. To continue our scenario, we will want to parse the XML data into a data set so that we can glean our freshly captured cipher text. Once we have our cipher text snagged we will capture it into a variable so that it can be used during decryption: -- read back xml DECLARE @hdoc INT; DECLARE @EncVal NVARCHAR(MAX); EXEC sp_xml_preparedocument @hDoc OUTPUT, @xml; SELECT @EncVal = EncVal FROM OPENXML (@hdoc, '/root/MYTABLE') WITH ([EncVal] VARBINARY(MAX) '@EncVal'); EXEC sp_xml_removedocument @hDoc; Finally, the decryption of our cipher text using the DECRYPTBYKEYAUTOCERT method and the certificate utilized to perform the encryption earlier in our exercise: SELECT     CONVERT(NVARCHAR(MAX),                     DecryptByKeyAutoCert                          (                            CERT_ID('AuditLogCert'),                            N'mypassword2010',                            @EncVal                           )                     ) EncVal; Ah yes, another hurdle presents itself! The decryption produced the value of NULL which in cryptography means that either you don't have permissions to decrypt the cipher text or something went wrong during the decryption process (ok, sometimes the value is actually NULL; but not in this case). As we see, the @EncVal variable is an nvarchar data type. The third parameter of the DECRYPTBYKEYAUTOCERT method requires a varbinary value. Therefore we will need to utilize our handy-dandy CONVERT method: SELECT     CONVERT(NVARCHAR(MAX),                     DecryptByKeyAutoCert                          (                             CERT_ID('AuditLogCert'),                             N'mypassword2010',                             CONVERT(VARBINARY(MAX),@EncVal)                           )                     ) EncVal; Oh, almost. The result remains NULL despite our conversion to the varbinary data type. This is due to the creation of an varbinary value that does not reflect the actual value of our @EncVal variable; but rather a varbinary conversion of the variable itself. In this case, something like 0x3000780030003000360045003--. Considering the "style" parameter got us past XML challenge, we will want to consider its power for this challenge as well. Knowing that the value of "1" will provide us with the actual value including the "0x", we will opt to utilize that value in this case: SELECT     CONVERT(NVARCHAR(MAX),                     DecryptByKeyAutoCert                          (                            CERT_ID('SymCert'),                            N'mypassword2010',                            CONVERT(VARBINARY(MAX),@EncVal,1)                           )                     ) EncVal; Bingo, we have success! We have discovered what happens with varbinary data when captured as XML data. We have figured out how to make this data useful post-XML-ification. Best of all we now have a choice in after-work parties now that our very happy client who depends on our XML based interface invites us for dinner in celebration. All thanks to the effective use of the style parameter.

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  • How to maintain encapsulation with composition in C++?

    - by iFreilicht
    I am designing a class Master that is composed from multiple other classes, A, Base, C and D. These four classes have absolutely no use outside of Master and are meant to split up its functionality into manageable and logically divided packages. They also provide extensible functionality as in the case of Base, which can be inherited from by clients. But, how do I maintain encapsulation of Master with this design? So far, I've got two approaches, which are both far from perfect: 1. Replicate all accessors: Just write accessor-methods for all accessor-methods of all classes that Master is composed of. This leads to perfect encapsulation, because no implementation detail of Master is visible, but is extremely tedious and makes the class definition monstrous, which is exactly what the composition should prevent. Also, adding functionality to one of the composees (is that even a word?) would require to re-write all those methods in Master. An additional problem is that inheritors of Base could only alter, but not add functionality. 2. Use non-assignable, non-copyable member-accessors: Having a class accessor<T> that can not be copied, moved or assigned to, but overrides the operator-> to access an underlying shared_ptr, so that calls like Master->A()->niceFunction(); are made possible. My problem with this is that it kind of breaks encapsulation as I would now be unable to change my implementation of Master to use a different class for the functionality of niceFunction(). Still, it is the closest I've gotten without using the ugly first approach. It also fixes the inheritance issue quite nicely. A small side question would be if such a class already existed in std or boost. EDIT: Wall of code I will now post the code of the header files of the classes discussed. It may be a bit hard to understand, but I'll give my best in explaining all of it. 1. GameTree.h The foundation of it all. This basically is a doubly-linked tree, holding GameObject-instances, which we'll later get to. It also has it's own custom iterator GTIterator, but I left that out for brevity. WResult is an enum with the values SUCCESS and FAILED, but it's not really important. class GameTree { public: //Static methods for the root. Only one root is allowed to exist at a time! static void ConstructRoot(seed_type seed, unsigned int depth); inline static bool rootExists(){ return static_cast<bool>(rootObject_); } inline static weak_ptr<GameTree> root(){ return rootObject_; } //delta is in ms, this is used for velocity, collision and such void tick(unsigned int delta); //Interaction with the tree inline weak_ptr<GameTree> parent() const { return parent_; } inline unsigned int numChildren() const{ return static_cast<unsigned int>(children_.size()); } weak_ptr<GameTree> getChild(unsigned int index) const; template<typename GOType> weak_ptr<GameTree> addChild(seed_type seed, unsigned int depth = 9001){ GOType object{ new GOType(seed) }; return addChildObject(unique_ptr<GameTree>(new GameTree(std::move(object), depth))); } WResult moveTo(weak_ptr<GameTree> newParent); WResult erase(); //Iterators for for( : ) loop GTIterator& begin(){ return *(beginIter_ = std::move(make_unique<GTIterator>(children_.begin()))); } GTIterator& end(){ return *(endIter_ = std::move(make_unique<GTIterator>(children_.end()))); } //unloading should be used when objects are far away WResult unloadChildren(unsigned int newDepth = 0); WResult loadChildren(unsigned int newDepth = 1); inline const RenderObject& renderObject() const{ return gameObject_->renderObject(); } //Getter for the underlying GameObject (I have not tested the template version) weak_ptr<GameObject> gameObject(){ return gameObject_; } template<typename GOType> weak_ptr<GOType> gameObject(){ return dynamic_cast<weak_ptr<GOType>>(gameObject_); } weak_ptr<PhysicsObject> physicsObject() { return gameObject_->physicsObject(); } private: GameTree(const GameTree&); //copying is only allowed internally GameTree(shared_ptr<GameObject> object, unsigned int depth = 9001); //pointer to root static shared_ptr<GameTree> rootObject_; //internal management of a child weak_ptr<GameTree> addChildObject(shared_ptr<GameTree>); WResult removeChild(unsigned int index); //private members shared_ptr<GameObject> gameObject_; shared_ptr<GTIterator> beginIter_; shared_ptr<GTIterator> endIter_; //tree stuff vector<shared_ptr<GameTree>> children_; weak_ptr<GameTree> parent_; unsigned int selfIndex_; //used for deletion, this isn't necessary void initChildren(unsigned int depth); //constructs children }; 2. GameObject.h This is a bit hard to grasp, but GameObject basically works like this: When constructing a GameObject, you construct its basic attributes and a CResult-instance, which contains a vector<unique_ptr<Construction>>. The Construction-struct contains all information that is needed to construct a GameObject, which is a seed and a function-object that is applied at construction by a factory. This enables dynamic loading and unloading of GameObjects as done by GameTree. It also means that you have to define that factory if you inherit GameObject. This inheritance is also the reason why GameTree has a template-function gameObject<GOType>. GameObject can contain a RenderObject and a PhysicsObject, which we'll later get to. Anyway, here's the code. class GameObject; typedef unsigned long seed_type; //this declaration magic means that all GameObjectFactorys inherit from GameObjectFactory<GameObject> template<typename GOType> struct GameObjectFactory; template<> struct GameObjectFactory<GameObject>{ virtual unique_ptr<GameObject> construct(seed_type seed) const = 0; }; template<typename GOType> struct GameObjectFactory : GameObjectFactory<GameObject>{ GameObjectFactory() : GameObjectFactory<GameObject>(){} unique_ptr<GameObject> construct(seed_type seed) const{ return unique_ptr<GOType>(new GOType(seed)); } }; //same as with the factories. this is important for storing them in vectors template<typename GOType> struct Construction; template<> struct Construction<GameObject>{ virtual unique_ptr<GameObject> construct() const = 0; }; template<typename GOType> struct Construction : Construction<GameObject>{ Construction(seed_type seed, function<void(GOType*)> func = [](GOType* null){}) : Construction<GameObject>(), seed_(seed), func_(func) {} unique_ptr<GameObject> construct() const{ unique_ptr<GameObject> gameObject{ GOType::factory.construct(seed_) }; func_(dynamic_cast<GOType*>(gameObject.get())); return std::move(gameObject); } seed_type seed_; function<void(GOType*)> func_; }; typedef struct CResult { CResult() : constructions{} {} CResult(CResult && o) : constructions(std::move(o.constructions)) {} CResult& operator= (CResult& other){ if (this != &other){ for (unique_ptr<Construction<GameObject>>& child : other.constructions){ constructions.push_back(std::move(child)); } } return *this; } template<typename GOType> void push_back(seed_type seed, function<void(GOType*)> func = [](GOType* null){}){ constructions.push_back(make_unique<Construction<GOType>>(seed, func)); } vector<unique_ptr<Construction<GameObject>>> constructions; } CResult; //finally, the GameObject class GameObject { public: GameObject(seed_type seed); GameObject(const GameObject&); virtual void tick(unsigned int delta); inline Matrix4f trafoMatrix(){ return physicsObject_->transformationMatrix(); } //getter inline seed_type seed() const{ return seed_; } inline CResult& properties(){ return properties_; } inline const RenderObject& renderObject() const{ return *renderObject_; } inline weak_ptr<PhysicsObject> physicsObject() { return physicsObject_; } protected: virtual CResult construct_(seed_type seed) = 0; CResult properties_; shared_ptr<RenderObject> renderObject_; shared_ptr<PhysicsObject> physicsObject_; seed_type seed_; }; 3. PhysicsObject That's a bit easier. It is responsible for position, velocity and acceleration. It will also handle collisions in the future. It contains three Transformation objects, two of which are optional. I'm not going to include the accessors on the PhysicsObject class because I tried my first approach on it and it's just pure madness (way over 30 functions). Also missing: the named constructors that construct PhysicsObjects with different behaviour. class Transformation{ Vector3f translation_; Vector3f rotation_; Vector3f scaling_; public: Transformation() : translation_{ 0, 0, 0 }, rotation_{ 0, 0, 0 }, scaling_{ 1, 1, 1 } {}; Transformation(Vector3f translation, Vector3f rotation, Vector3f scaling); inline Vector3f translation(){ return translation_; } inline void translation(float x, float y, float z){ translation(Vector3f(x, y, z)); } inline void translation(Vector3f newTranslation){ translation_ = newTranslation; } inline void translate(float x, float y, float z){ translate(Vector3f(x, y, z)); } inline void translate(Vector3f summand){ translation_ += summand; } inline Vector3f rotation(){ return rotation_; } inline void rotation(float pitch, float yaw, float roll){ rotation(Vector3f(pitch, yaw, roll)); } inline void rotation(Vector3f newRotation){ rotation_ = newRotation; } inline void rotate(float pitch, float yaw, float roll){ rotate(Vector3f(pitch, yaw, roll)); } inline void rotate(Vector3f summand){ rotation_ += summand; } inline Vector3f scaling(){ return scaling_; } inline void scaling(float x, float y, float z){ scaling(Vector3f(x, y, z)); } inline void scaling(Vector3f newScaling){ scaling_ = newScaling; } inline void scale(float x, float y, float z){ scale(Vector3f(x, y, z)); } void scale(Vector3f factor){ scaling_(0) *= factor(0); scaling_(1) *= factor(1); scaling_(2) *= factor(2); } Matrix4f matrix(){ return WMatrix::Translation(translation_) * WMatrix::Rotation(rotation_) * WMatrix::Scale(scaling_); } }; class PhysicsObject; typedef void tickFunction(PhysicsObject& self, unsigned int delta); class PhysicsObject{ PhysicsObject(const Transformation& trafo) : transformation_(trafo), transformationVelocity_(nullptr), transformationAcceleration_(nullptr), tick_(nullptr) {} PhysicsObject(PhysicsObject&& other) : transformation_(other.transformation_), transformationVelocity_(std::move(other.transformationVelocity_)), transformationAcceleration_(std::move(other.transformationAcceleration_)), tick_(other.tick_) {} Transformation transformation_; unique_ptr<Transformation> transformationVelocity_; unique_ptr<Transformation> transformationAcceleration_; tickFunction* tick_; public: void tick(unsigned int delta){ tick_ ? tick_(*this, delta) : 0; } inline Matrix4f transformationMatrix(){ return transformation_.matrix(); } } 4. RenderObject RenderObject is a base class for different types of things that could be rendered, i.e. Meshes, Light Sources or Sprites. DISCLAIMER: I did not write this code, I'm working on this project with someone else. class RenderObject { public: RenderObject(float renderDistance); virtual ~RenderObject(); float renderDistance() const { return renderDistance_; } void setRenderDistance(float rD) { renderDistance_ = rD; } protected: float renderDistance_; }; struct NullRenderObject : public RenderObject{ NullRenderObject() : RenderObject(0.f){}; }; class Light : public RenderObject{ public: Light() : RenderObject(30.f){}; }; class Mesh : public RenderObject{ public: Mesh(unsigned int seed) : RenderObject(20.f) { meshID_ = 0; textureID_ = 0; if (seed == 1) meshID_ = Model::getMeshID("EM-208_heavy"); else meshID_ = Model::getMeshID("cube"); }; unsigned int getMeshID() const { return meshID_; } unsigned int getTextureID() const { return textureID_; } private: unsigned int meshID_; unsigned int textureID_; }; I guess this shows my issue quite nicely: You see a few accessors in GameObject which return weak_ptrs to access members of members, but that is not really what I want. Also please keep in mind that this is NOT, by any means, finished or production code! It is merely a prototype and there may be inconsistencies, unnecessary public parts of classes and such.

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  • (C#) Label.Text = Struct.Value (Microsoft.VisualStudio.Debugger.Runtime.CrossThreadMessagingException)

    - by Kyle
    I have an app that I'm working on that polls usage from an ISP (Download quota). I've tried threading this via 'new Thread(ThreaProc)' but that didn't work, now trying an IAsyncResult based approach which does the same thing... I've got no idea on how to rectify, please help? The need-to-know: // Global public delegate void AsyncPollData(ref POLLDATA pData); // Class scope: private POLLDATA pData; private void UpdateUsage() { AsyncPollData PollDataProc = new AsyncPollData(frmMain.PollUsage); IAsyncResult result = PollDataProc.BeginInvoke(ref pData, new AsyncCallback(UpdateDone), PollDataProc); } public void UpdateDone(IAsyncResult ar) { AsyncPollData PollDataProc = (AsyncPollData)ar.AsyncState; PollDataProc.EndInvoke(ref pData, ar); // The Exception occurs here: lblStatus.Text = pData.LastError; } public static void PollUsage(ref POLLDATA PData) { PData.LastError = "Some string"; return; }

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  • How to do RLE (run length encoding) in C# on a byte array?

    - by CuriousCoder
    I am trying to XOR two bitmap files (their byte arrays) to produce a byte array that can be used to change image A into image B or vice versa. I am sending this over the network so I would like to do some basic compression before this happens. Is there a way to do RLE (run length encoding) in C# (using a built-in, or fast reliable 3rd party library) on a byte array for this purpose? Notes: If you are going to suggest an alternative to my approach please keep in mind that the decompression and transformation on the remote machine has to be as quick and efficient as possible.

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  • WPF: Master - detail view with two datagrids and in MVVM

    - by EV
    Hi, I'm trying to write a master - detail control that consists of a master datagrid and the detail datagrid. My scenario was following - I used the SelectedItem and bound it to a property in ModelView. The problem is - the SelectedItem in ViewModel is never used, so I can't get the information which item is selected in a master datagrid and cannot fetch the data for thos selection. The code is below: <toolkit:DataGrid ItemsSource="{Binding}" RowDetailsVisibilityMode="VisibleWhenSelected" SelectedItem="{Binding SelectedItemHandler, Mode=TwoWay}"></toolkit:DataGrid> And in ViewModel private CustomerObjects _selectedItem; public CustomerObjects SelectedItemHandler { get { return _selectedItem; } set { OnPropertyChanged("SelectedItem"); } } The code in SelectedItemHandler is never used. What could be the problem? Should I use another approach to create master - detail in MVVM?

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  • Store XML,update record in XML,retrive a specific record in XML stored on BB device

    - by user469999
    I am writing a blackberry application where i want to store the data returned by a web service in my BB device.Earlier i was going to use SQLite for storing the data in mobile but as i googled and also did programming using SQLite and found that some BB devices dont support SQLite library and fail to create the database.Then i decided to keep the data returned by webservice in a XML format on my BB device. I just want to know is there any method or way in blackberry through which i can parse the data stored in xml,update it,or directly access a particular record stored in the xml instead of traversing the whole xml n times and finding the matched record. Please guide me as i am new to storing data in BB device.Is the approach which i am thinking to store data in XML right or shall i use something else Thanks in advance Yogesh Chaudhari

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  • Using External GPS Device w/ Android via Bluetooth

    - by jeremynealbrown
    Hello, I am writing an Android 2.0 application that is going to be used in a somewhat remote location. There will be no internet connection available and it will be used outside of the U.S. I am considering the option of using an external Nokia or similar GPS device as a receiver/transmitter and connecting to it for use in my application via the bluetooth API. I am looking for opinions on whether or not this is even possible, if anyone has attempted it or if someone has a suggestion for some other external device or approach that would be more fitting. Link to possible external GPS device: http://europe.nokia.com/find-products/accessories/all-accessories/navigation/gps-modules/nokia-gps-module-ld-3w Thanks in advance...

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  • ASP.NET + jQuery UI Modal: load aspx page into modal dialog

    - by kilonet
    I need to load aspx page into jQuery UI's modal dialog window. I used following approach: load page content via ajax call into dialog's div and show it: $.get('Page.aspx', function(response){ $('#dialog').html(response); $("#dialog").dialog('open'); }); but I've got very strange error (IE8) in line 137215738 (!): 'theForm.elements.length' - is null or not an object. JS debbuger says that source code is not available for such location. I have an assumption that this error happens because of multiple 'form' tags that appears on page after ajax call I wonder, how can i fix this? Or maybe some other way of showing aspx page in modal dialog?

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  • make folder structure at device side in iphone

    - by Ekra
    Hi friends, I have a folder structure at server side. Inside the folders there are files of all format like .txt, .pdf. I get the structure in XML format. Now I want to create the same folder structure that is present in server side at my iphone documents folder with only the names of files inside it and not the content of the files. eg: folder1 1.text(it is inside folder1) folder2 2.pdf(it is inside folder2) folder3 subFolder3 (it is inside folder3) 3.txt (it is inside subFolder3) folder4 4.txt How I need to handle the overall approach. Any help would be highly appreciated. Waiting for your reply

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  • windows authentication vs sql server authentication for asp.net forms authentication site

    - by Brij
    I have a database and a site having forms authentication. It is working fine with VS2008. This time, I am using "Trusted_connection =True". But when it is opened from outside or directly from browser then I am getting error "Login failed for user 'NT AUTHORITY\ANONYMOUS LOGON'." I know this is due to permission. SQL server is based on windows authentication. What is the best approach to manage user to connect sql server? Should I enable sql server authentication? Let me know what to do so that it makes the production feel and there wouldn't be any problem during deployment. Note: Sql server is installed on domain server.

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