overkill - Page 26 - Developer IT

elffile: ELF Specific File Identification Utility

- by user9154181

Solaris 11 has a new standard user level command, /usr/bin/elffile. elffile is a variant of the file utility that is focused exclusively on linker related files: ELF objects, archives, and runtime linker configuration files. All other files are simply identified as "non-ELF". The primary advantage of elffile over the existing file utility is in the area of archives — elffile examines the archive members and can produce a summary of the contents, or per-member details. The impetus to add elffile to Solaris came from the effort to extend the format of Solaris archives so that they could grow beyond their previous 32-bit file limits. That work introduced a new archive symbol table format. Now that there was more than one possible format, I thought it would be useful if the file utility could identify which format a given archive is using, leading me to extend the file utility: % cc -c ~/hello.c % ar r foo.a hello.o % file foo.a foo.a: current ar archive, 32-bit symbol table % ar r -S foo.a hello.o % file foo.a foo.a: current ar archive, 64-bit symbol table In turn, this caused me to think about all the things that I would like the file utility to be able to tell me about an archive. In particular, I'd like to be able to know what's inside without having to unpack it. The end result of that train of thought was elffile. Much of the discussion in this article is adapted from the PSARC case I filed for elffile in December 2010: PSARC 2010/432 elffile Why file Is No Good For Archives And Yet Should Not Be Fixed The standard /usr/bin/file utility is not very useful when applied to archives. When identifying an archive, a user typically wants to know 2 things: Is this an archive? Presupposing that the archive contains objects, which is by far the most common use for archives, what platform are the objects for? Are they for sparc or x86? 32 or 64-bit? Some confusing combination from varying platforms? The file utility provides a quick answer to question (1), as it identifies all archives as "current ar archive". It does nothing to answer the more interesting question (2). To answer that question, requires a multi-step process: Extract all archive members Use the file utility on the extracted files, examine the output for each file in turn, and compare the results to generate a suitable summary description. Remove the extracted files It should be easier and more efficient to answer such an obvious question. It would be reasonable to extend the file utility to examine archive contents in place and produce a description. However, there are several reasons why I decided not to do so: The correct design for this feature within the file utility would have file examine each archive member in turn, applying its full abilities to each member. This would be elegant, but also represents a rather dramatic redesign and re-implementation of file. Archives nearly always contain nothing but ELF objects for a single platform, so such generality in the file utility would be of little practical benefit. It is best to avoid adding new options to standard utilities for which other implementations of interest exist. In the case of the file utility, one concern is that we might add an option which later appears in the GNU version of file with a different and incompatible meaning. Indeed, there have been discussions about replacing the Solaris file with the GNU version in the past. This may or may not be desirable, and may or may not ever happen. Either way, I don't want to preclude it. Examining archive members is an O(n) operation, and can be relatively slow with large archives. The file utility is supposed to be a very fast operation. I decided that extending file in this way is overkill, and that an investment in the file utility for better archive support would not be worth the cost. A solution that is more narrowly focused on ELF and other linker related files is really all that we need. The necessary code for doing this already exists within libelf. All that is missing is a small user-level wrapper to make that functionality available at the command line. In that vein, I considered adding an option for this to the elfdump utility. I examined elfdump carefully, and even wrote a prototype implementation. The added code is small and simple, but the conceptual fit with the rest of elfdump is poor. The result complicates elfdump syntax and documentation, definite signs that this functionality does not belong there. And so, I added this functionality as a new user level command. The elffile Command The syntax for this new command is elffile [-s basic | detail | summary] filename... Please see the elffile(1) manpage for additional details. To demonstrate how output from elffile looks, I will use the following files: FileDescription configA runtime linker configuration file produced with crle dwarf.oAn ELF object /etc/passwdA text file mixed.aArchive containing a mixture of ELF and non-ELF members mixed_elf.aArchive containing ELF objects for different machines not_elf.aArchive containing no ELF objects same_elf.aArchive containing a collection of ELF objects for the same machine. This is the most common type of archive. The file utility identifies these files as follows: % file config dwarf.o /etc/passwd mixed.a mixed_elf.a not_elf.a same_elf.a config: Runtime Linking Configuration 64-bit MSB SPARCV9 dwarf.o: ELF 64-bit LSB relocatable AMD64 Version 1 /etc/passwd: ascii text mixed.a: current ar archive, 32-bit symbol table mixed_elf.a: current ar archive, 32-bit symbol table not_elf.a: current ar archive same_elf.a: current ar archive, 32-bit symbol table By default, elffile uses its "summary" output style. This output differs from the output from the file utility in 2 significant ways: Files that are not an ELF object, archive, or runtime linker configuration file are identified as "non-ELF", whereas the file utility attempts further identification for such files. When applied to an archive, the elffile output includes a description of the archive's contents, without requiring member extraction or other additional steps. Applying elffile to the above files: % elffile config dwarf.o /etc/passwd mixed.a mixed_elf.a not_elf.a same_elf.a config: Runtime Linking Configuration 64-bit MSB SPARCV9 dwarf.o: ELF 64-bit LSB relocatable AMD64 Version 1 /etc/passwd: non-ELF mixed.a: current ar archive, 32-bit symbol table, mixed ELF and non-ELF content mixed_elf.a: current ar archive, 32-bit symbol table, mixed ELF content not_elf.a: current ar archive, non-ELF content same_elf.a: current ar archive, 32-bit symbol table, ELF 64-bit LSB relocatable AMD64 Version 1 The output for same_elf.a is of particular interest: The vast majority of archives contain only ELF objects for a single platform, and in this case, the default output from elffile answers both of the questions about archives posed at the beginning of this discussion, in a single efficient step. This makes elffile considerably more useful than file, within the realm of linker-related files. elffile can produce output in two other styles, "basic", and "detail". The basic style produces output that is the same as that from 'file', for linker-related files. The detail style produces per-member identification of archive contents. This can be useful when the archive contents are not homogeneous ELF object, and more information is desired than the summary output provides: % elffile -s detail mixed.a mixed.a: current ar archive, 32-bit symbol table mixed.a(dwarf.o): ELF 32-bit LSB relocatable 80386 Version 1 mixed.a(main.c): non-ELF content mixed.a(main.o): ELF 64-bit LSB relocatable AMD64 Version 1 [SSE]

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SharePoint logging to a list

- by Norgean

I recently worked in an environment with several servers. Locating the correct SharePoint log file for error messages, or development trace calls, is cumbersome. And once the solution hit the cloud, it got even worse, as we had no access to the log files at all. Obviously we are not the only ones with this problem, and the current trend seems to be to log to a list. This had become an off-hour project, so rather than do the sensible thing and find a ready-made solution, I decided to do it the hard way. So! Fire up Visual Studio, create yet another empty SharePoint solution, and start to think of some requirements. Easy on/offI want to be able to turn list-logging on and off.Easy loggingFor me, this means being able to use string.Format.Easy filteringLet's have the possibility to add some filtering columns; category and severity, where severity can be "verbose", "warning" or "error". Easy on/off Well, that's easy. Create a new web feature. Add an event receiver, and create the list on activation of the feature. Tear the list down on de-activation. I chose not to create a new content type; I did not feel that it would give me anything extra. I based the list on the generic list - I think a better choice would have been the announcement type. Approximately: public void CreateLog(SPWeb web) { var list = web.Lists.TryGetList(LogListName); if (list == null) { var listGuid = web.Lists.Add(LogListName, "Logging for the masses", SPListTemplateType.GenericList); list = web.Lists[listGuid]; list.Title = LogListTitle; list.Update(); list.Fields.Add(Category, SPFieldType.Text, false); var stringColl = new StringCollection(); stringColl.AddRange(new[]{Error, Information, Verbose}); list.Fields.Add(Severity, SPFieldType.Choice, true, false, stringColl); ModifyDefaultView(list); } }Should be self explanatory, but: only create the list if it does not already exist (d'oh). Best practice: create it with a Url-friendly name, and, if necessary, give it a better title. ...because otherwise you'll have to look for a list with a name like "Simple_x0020_Log". I've added a couple of fields; a field for category, and a 'severity'. Both to make it easier to find relevant log messages. Notice that I don't have to call list.Update() after adding the fields - this would cause a nasty error (something along the lines of "List locked by another user"). The function for deleting the log is exactly as onerous as you'd expect: public void DeleteLog(SPWeb web) { var list = web.Lists.TryGetList(LogListTitle); if (list != null) { list.Delete(); } } So! "All" that remains is to log. Also known as adding items to a list. Lots of different methods with different signatures end up calling the same function. For example, LogVerbose(web, message) calls LogVerbose(web, null, message) which again calls another method which calls: private static void Log(SPWeb web, string category, string severity, string textformat, params object[] texts) { if (web != null) { var list = web.Lists.TryGetList(LogListTitle); if (list != null) { var item = list.AddItem(); // NOTE! NOT list.Items.Add… just don't, mkay? var text = string.Format(textformat, texts); if (text.Length > 255) // because the title field only holds so many chars. Sigh. text = text.Substring(0, 254); item[SPBuiltInFieldId.Title] = text; item[Degree] = severity; item[Category] = category; item.Update(); } } // omitted: Also log to SharePoint log. } By adding a params parameter I can call it as if I was doing a Console.WriteLine: LogVerbose(web, "demo", "{0} {1}{2}", "hello", "world", '!'); Ok, that was a silly example, a better one might be: LogError(web, LogCategory, "Exception caught when updating {0}. exception: {1}", listItem.Title, ex); For performance reasons I use list.AddItem rather than list.Items.Add. For completeness' sake, let us include the "ModifyDefaultView" function that I deliberately skipped earlier. private void ModifyDefaultView(SPList list) { // Add fields to default view var defaultView = list.DefaultView; var exists = defaultView.ViewFields.Cast<string>().Any(field => String.CompareOrdinal(field, Severity) == 0); if (!exists) { var field = list.Fields.GetFieldByInternalName(Severity); if (field != null) defaultView.ViewFields.Add(field); field = list.Fields.GetFieldByInternalName(Category); if (field != null) defaultView.ViewFields.Add(field); defaultView.Update(); var sortDoc = new XmlDocument(); sortDoc.LoadXml(string.Format("<Query>{0}</Query>", defaultView.Query)); var orderBy = (XmlElement) sortDoc.SelectSingleNode("//OrderBy"); if (orderBy != null && sortDoc.DocumentElement != null) sortDoc.DocumentElement.RemoveChild(orderBy); orderBy = sortDoc.CreateElement("OrderBy"); sortDoc.DocumentElement.AppendChild(orderBy); field = list.Fields[SPBuiltInFieldId.Modified]; var fieldRef = sortDoc.CreateElement("FieldRef"); fieldRef.SetAttribute("Name", field.InternalName); fieldRef.SetAttribute("Ascending", "FALSE"); orderBy.AppendChild(fieldRef); fieldRef = sortDoc.CreateElement("FieldRef"); field = list.Fields[SPBuiltInFieldId.ID]; fieldRef.SetAttribute("Name", field.InternalName); fieldRef.SetAttribute("Ascending", "FALSE"); orderBy.AppendChild(fieldRef); defaultView.Query = sortDoc.DocumentElement.InnerXml; //defaultView.Query = "<OrderBy><FieldRef Name='Modified' Ascending='FALSE' /><FieldRef Name='ID' Ascending='FALSE' /></OrderBy>"; defaultView.Update(); } } First two lines are easy - see if the default view includes the "Severity" column. If it does - quit; our job here is done.Adding "severity" and "Category" to the view is not exactly rocket science. But then? Then we build the sort order query. Through XML. The lines are numerous, but boring. All to achieve the CAML query which is commented out. The major benefit of using the dom to build XML, is that you may get compile time errors for spelling mistakes. I say 'may', because although the compiler will not let you forget to close a tag, it will cheerfully let you spell "Name" as "Naem". Whichever you prefer, at the end of the day the view will sort by modified date and ID, both descending. I added the ID as there may be several items with the same time stamp. So! Simple logging to a list, with sensible a view, and with normal functionality for creating your own filterings. I should probably have added some more views in code, ready filtered for "only errors", "errors and warnings" etc. And it would be nice to block verbose logging completely, but I'm not happy with the alternatives. (yetanotherfeature or an admin page seem like overkill - perhaps just removing it as one of the choices, and not log if it isn't there?) Before you comment - yes, try-catches have been removed for clarity. There is nothing worse than having a logging function that breaks your site!

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Mapping UrlEncoded POST Values in ASP.NET Web API

- by Rick Strahl

If there's one thing that's a bit unexpected in ASP.NET Web API, it's the limited support for mapping url encoded POST data values to simple parameters of ApiController methods. When I first looked at this I thought I was doing something wrong, because it seems mighty odd that you can bind query string values to parameters by name, but can't bind POST values to parameters in the same way. To demonstrate here's a simple example. If you have a Web API method like this:[HttpGet] public HttpResponseMessage Authenticate(string username, string password) { …} and then hit with a URL like this: http://localhost:88/samples/authenticate?Username=ricks&Password=sekrit it works just fine. The query string values are mapped to the username and password parameters of our API method. But if you now change the method to work with [HttpPost] instead like this:[HttpPost] public HttpResponseMessage Authenticate(string username, string password) { …} and hit it with a POST HTTP Request like this: POST http://localhost:88/samples/authenticate HTTP/1.1 Host: localhost:88 Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8 Content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded Content-Length: 30 Username=ricks&Password=sekrit you'll find that while the request works, it doesn't actually receive the two string parameters. The username and password parameters are null and so the method is definitely going to fail. When I mentioned this over Twitter a few days ago I got a lot of responses back of why I'd want to do this in the first place - after all HTML Form submissions are the domain of MVC and not WebAPI which is a valid point. However, the more common use case is using POST Variables with AJAX calls. The following is quite common for passing simple values:$.post(url,{ Username: "Rick", Password: "sekrit" },function(result) {…}); but alas that doesn't work. How ASP.NET Web API handles Content Bodies Web API supports parsing content data in a variety of ways, but it does not deal with multiple posted content values. In effect you can only post a single content value to a Web API Action method. That one parameter can be very complex and you can bind it in a variety of ways, but ultimately you're tied to a single POST content value in your parameter definition. While it's possible to support multiple parameters on a POST/PUT operation, only one parameter can be mapped to the actual content - the rest have to be mapped to route values or the query string. Web API treats the whole request body as one big chunk of data that is sent to a Media Type Formatter that's responsible for de-serializing the content into whatever value the method requires. The restriction comes from async nature of Web API where the request data is read only once inside of the formatter that retrieves and deserializes it. Because it's read once, checking for content (like individual POST variables) first is not possible. However, Web API does provide a couple of ways to access the form POST data: Model Binding - object property mapping to bind POST values FormDataCollection - collection of POST keys/values ModelBinding POST Values - Binding POST data to Object Properties The recommended way to handle POST values in Web API is to use Model Binding, which maps individual urlencoded POST values to properties of a model object provided as the parameter. Model binding requires a single object as input to be bound to the POST data, with each POST key that matches a property name (including nested properties like Address.Street) being mapped and updated including automatic type conversion of simple types. This is a very nice feature - and a familiar one from MVC - that makes it very easy to have model objects mapped directly from inbound data. The obvious drawback with Model Binding is that you need a model for it to work: You have to provide a strongly typed object that can receive the data and this object has to map the inbound data. To rewrite the example above to use ModelBinding I have to create a class maps the properties that I need as parameters:public class LoginData { public string Username { get; set; } public string Password { get; set; } } and then accept the data like this in the API method:[HttpPost] public HttpResponseMessage Authenticate(LoginData login) { string username = login.Username; string password = login.Password; … } This works fine mapping the POST values to the properties of the login object. As a side benefit of this method definition, the method now also allows posting of JSON or XML to the same endpoint. If I change my request to send JSON like this: POST http://localhost:88/samples/authenticate HTTP/1.1 Host: localhost:88 Accept: application/jsonContent-type: application/json Content-Length: 40 {"Username":"ricks","Password":"sekrit"} it works as well and transparently, courtesy of the nice Content Negotiation features of Web API. There's nothing wrong with using Model binding and in fact it's a common practice to use (view) model object for inputs coming back from the client and mapping them into these models. But it can be kind of a hassle if you have AJAX applications with a ton of backend hits, especially if many methods are very atomic and focused and don't effectively require a model or view. Not always do you have to pass structured data, but sometimes there are just a couple of simple response values that need to be sent back. If all you need is to pass a couple operational parameters, creating a view model object just for parameter purposes seems like overkill. Maybe you can use the query string instead (if that makes sense), but if you can't then you can often end up with a plethora of 'message objects' that serve no further purpose than to make Model Binding work. Note that you can accept multiple parameters with ModelBinding so the following would still work:[HttpPost] public HttpResponseMessage Authenticate(LoginData login, string loginDomain) but only the object will be bound to POST data. As long as loginDomain comes from the querystring or route data this will work. Collecting POST values with FormDataCollection Another more dynamic approach to handle POST values is to collect POST data into a FormDataCollection. FormDataCollection is a very basic key/value collection (like FormCollection in MVC and Request.Form in ASP.NET in general) and then read the values out individually by querying each. [HttpPost] public HttpResponseMessage Authenticate(FormDataCollection form) { var username = form.Get("Username"); var password = form.Get("Password"); …} The downside to this approach is that it's not strongly typed, you have to handle type conversions on non-string parameters, and it gets a bit more complicated to test such as setup as you have to seed a FormDataCollection with data. On the other hand it's flexible and easy to use and especially with string parameters is easy to deal with. It's also dynamic, so if the client sends you a variety of combinations of values on which you make operating decisions, this is much easier to work with than a strongly typed object that would have to account for all possible values up front. The downside is that the code looks old school and isn't as self-documenting as a parameter list or object parameter would be. Nevertheless it's totally functionality and a viable choice for collecting POST values. What about [FromBody]? Web API also has a [FromBody] attribute that can be assigned to parameters. If you have multiple parameters on a Web API method signature you can use [FromBody] to specify which one will be parsed from the POST content. Unfortunately it's not terribly useful as it only returns content in raw format and requires a totally non-standard format ("=content") to specify your content. For more info in how FromBody works and several related issues to how POST data is mapped, you can check out Mike Stalls post: How WebAPI does Parameter Binding Not really sure where the Web API team thought [FromBody] would really be a good fit other than a down and dirty way to send a full string buffer. Extending Web API to make multiple POST Vars work? Don't think so Clearly there's no native support for multiple POST variables being mapped to parameters, which is a bit of a bummer. I know in my own work on one project my customer actually found this to be a real sticking point in their AJAX backend work, and we ended up not using Web API and using MVC JSON features instead. That's kind of sad because Web API is supposed to be the proper solution for AJAX backends. With all of ASP.NET Web API's extensibility you'd think there would be some way to build this functionality on our own, but after spending a bit of time digging and asking some of the experts from the team and Web API community I didn't hear anything that even suggests that this is possible. From what I could find I'd say it's not possible primarily because Web API's Routing engine does not account for the POST variable mapping. This means [HttpPost] methods with url encoded POST buffers are not mapped to the parameters of the endpoint, and so the routes would never even trigger a request that could be intercepted. Once the routing doesn't work there's not much that can be done. If somebody has an idea how this could be accomplished I would love to hear about it. Do we really need multi-value POST mapping? I think that that POST value mapping is a feature that one would expect of any API tool to have. If you look at common APIs out there like Flicker and Google Maps etc. they all work with POST data. POST data is very prominent much more so than JSON inputs and so supporting as many options that enable would seem to be crucial. All that aside, Web API does provide very nice features with Model Binding that allows you to capture many POST variables easily enough, and logistically this will let you build whatever you need with POST data of all shapes as long as you map objects. But having to have an object for every operation that receives a data input is going to take its toll in heavy AJAX applications, with a lot of types created that do nothing more than act as parameter containers. I also think that POST variable mapping is an expected behavior and Web APIs non-support will likely result in many, many questions like this one: How do I bind a simple POST value in ASP.NET WebAPI RC? with no clear answer to this question. I hope for V.next of WebAPI Microsoft will consider this a feature that's worth adding. Related Articles Passing multiple POST parameters to Web API Controller Methods Mike Stall's post: How Web API does Parameter Binding Where does ASP.NET Web API Fit?© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in Web Api Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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Passing multiple simple POST Values to ASP.NET Web API

- by Rick Strahl

A few weeks backs I posted a blog post about what does and doesn't work with ASP.NET Web API when it comes to POSTing data to a Web API controller. One of the features that doesn't work out of the box - somewhat unexpectedly - is the ability to map POST form variables to simple parameters of a Web API method. For example imagine you have this form and you want to post this data to a Web API end point like this via AJAX: <form> Name: <input type="name" name="name" value="Rick" /> Value: <input type="value" name="value" value="12" /> Entered: <input type="entered" name="entered" value="12/01/2011" /> <input type="button" id="btnSend" value="Send" /> </form> <script type="text/javascript"> $("#btnSend").click( function() { $.post("samples/PostMultipleSimpleValues?action=kazam", $("form").serialize(), function (result) { alert(result); }); }); </script> or you might do this more explicitly by creating a simple client map and specifying the POST values directly by hand:$.post("samples/PostMultipleSimpleValues?action=kazam", { name: "Rick", value: 1, entered: "12/01/2012" }, $("form").serialize(), function (result) { alert(result); }); On the wire this generates a simple POST request with Url Encoded values in the content:POST /AspNetWebApi/samples/PostMultipleSimpleValues?action=kazam HTTP/1.1 Host: localhost User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; WOW64; rv:15.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/15.0.1 Accept: application/json Connection: keep-alive Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=UTF-8 X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest Referer: http://localhost/AspNetWebApi/FormPostTest.html Content-Length: 41 Pragma: no-cache Cache-Control: no-cachename=Rick&value=12&entered=12%2F10%2F2011 Seems simple enough, right? We are basically posting 3 form variables and 1 query string value to the server. Unfortunately Web API can't handle request out of the box. If I create a method like this:[HttpPost] public string PostMultipleSimpleValues(string name, int value, DateTime entered, string action = null) { return string.Format("Name: {0}, Value: {1}, Date: {2}, Action: {3}", name, value, entered, action); }You'll find that you get an HTTP 404 error and { "Message": "No HTTP resource was found that matches the request URI…"} Yes, it's possible to pass multiple POST parameters of course, but Web API expects you to use Model Binding for this - mapping the post parameters to a strongly typed .NET object, not to single parameters. Alternately you can also accept a FormDataCollection parameter on your API method to get a name value collection of all POSTed values. If you're using JSON only, using the dynamic JObject/JValue objects might also work. ModelBinding is fine in many use cases, but can quickly become overkill if you only need to pass a couple of simple parameters to many methods. Especially in applications with many, many AJAX callbacks the 'parameter mapping type' per method signature can lead to serious class pollution in a project very quickly. Simple POST variables are also commonly used in AJAX applications to pass data to the server, even in many complex public APIs. So this is not an uncommon use case, and - maybe more so a behavior that I would have expected Web API to support natively. The question "Why aren't my POST parameters mapping to Web API method parameters" is already a frequent one… So this is something that I think is fairly important, but unfortunately missing in the base Web API installation. Creating a Custom Parameter Binder Luckily Web API is greatly extensible and there's a way to create a custom Parameter Binding to provide this functionality! Although this solution took me a long while to find and then only with the help of some folks Microsoft (thanks Hong Mei!!!), it's not difficult to hook up in your own projects. It requires one small class and a GlobalConfiguration hookup. Web API parameter bindings allow you to intercept processing of individual parameters - they deal with mapping parameters to the signature as well as converting the parameters to the actual values that are returned. Here's the implementation of the SimplePostVariableParameterBinding class:public class SimplePostVariableParameterBinding : HttpParameterBinding { private const string MultipleBodyParameters = "MultipleBodyParameters"; public SimplePostVariableParameterBinding(HttpParameterDescriptor descriptor) : base(descriptor) { } /// <summary> /// Check for simple binding parameters in POST data. Bind POST /// data as well as query string data /// </summary> public override Task ExecuteBindingAsync(ModelMetadataProvider metadataProvider, HttpActionContext actionContext, CancellationToken cancellationToken) { // Body can only be read once, so read and cache it NameValueCollection col = TryReadBody(actionContext.Request); string stringValue = null; if (col != null) stringValue = col[Descriptor.ParameterName]; // try reading query string if we have no POST/PUT match if (stringValue == null) { var query = actionContext.Request.GetQueryNameValuePairs(); if (query != null) { var matches = query.Where(kv => kv.Key.ToLower() == Descriptor.ParameterName.ToLower()); if (matches.Count() > 0) stringValue = matches.First().Value; } } object value = StringToType(stringValue); // Set the binding result here SetValue(actionContext, value); // now, we can return a completed task with no result TaskCompletionSource<AsyncVoid> tcs = new TaskCompletionSource<AsyncVoid>(); tcs.SetResult(default(AsyncVoid)); return tcs.Task; } private object StringToType(string stringValue) { object value = null; if (stringValue == null) value = null; else if (Descriptor.ParameterType == typeof(string)) value = stringValue; else if (Descriptor.ParameterType == typeof(int)) value = int.Parse(stringValue, CultureInfo.CurrentCulture); else if (Descriptor.ParameterType == typeof(Int32)) value = Int32.Parse(stringValue, CultureInfo.CurrentCulture); else if (Descriptor.ParameterType == typeof(Int64)) value = Int64.Parse(stringValue, CultureInfo.CurrentCulture); else if (Descriptor.ParameterType == typeof(decimal)) value = decimal.Parse(stringValue, CultureInfo.CurrentCulture); else if (Descriptor.ParameterType == typeof(double)) value = double.Parse(stringValue, CultureInfo.CurrentCulture); else if (Descriptor.ParameterType == typeof(DateTime)) value = DateTime.Parse(stringValue, CultureInfo.CurrentCulture); else if (Descriptor.ParameterType == typeof(bool)) { value = false; if (stringValue == "true" || stringValue == "on" || stringValue == "1") value = true; } else value = stringValue; return value; } /// <summary> /// Read and cache the request body /// </summary> /// <param name="request"></param> /// <returns></returns> private NameValueCollection TryReadBody(HttpRequestMessage request) { object result = null; // try to read out of cache first if (!request.Properties.TryGetValue(MultipleBodyParameters, out result)) { // parsing the string like firstname=Hongmei&lastname=Ge result = request.Content.ReadAsFormDataAsync().Result; request.Properties.Add(MultipleBodyParameters, result); } return result as NameValueCollection; } private struct AsyncVoid { } } The ExecuteBindingAsync method is fired for each parameter that is mapped and sent for conversion. This custom binding is fired only if the incoming parameter is a simple type (that gets defined later when I hook up the binding), so this binding never fires on complex types or if the first type is not a simple type. For the first parameter of a request the Binding first reads the request body into a NameValueCollection and caches that in the request.Properties collection. The request body can only be read once, so the first parameter request reads it and then caches it. Subsequent parameters then use the cached POST value collection. Once the form collection is available the value of the parameter is read, and the value is translated into the target type requested by the Descriptor. SetValue writes out the value to be mapped. Once you have the ParameterBinding in place, the binding has to be assigned. This is done along with all other Web API configuration tasks at application startup in global.asax's Application_Start:GlobalConfiguration.Configuration.ParameterBindingRules .Insert(0, (HttpParameterDescriptor descriptor) => { var supportedMethods = descriptor.ActionDescriptor.SupportedHttpMethods; // Only apply this binder on POST and PUT operations if (supportedMethods.Contains(HttpMethod.Post) || supportedMethods.Contains(HttpMethod.Put)) { var supportedTypes = new Type[] { typeof(string), typeof(int), typeof(decimal), typeof(double), typeof(bool), typeof(DateTime) }; if (supportedTypes.Where(typ => typ == descriptor.ParameterType).Count() > 0) return new SimplePostVariableParameterBinding(descriptor); } // let the default bindings do their work return null; }); The ParameterBindingRules.Insert method takes a delegate that checks which type of requests it should handle. The logic here checks whether the request is POST or PUT and whether the parameter type is a simple type that is supported. Web API calls this delegate once for each method signature it tries to map and the delegate returns null to indicate it's not handling this parameter, or it returns a new parameter binding instance - in this case the SimplePostVariableParameterBinding. Once the parameter binding and this hook up code is in place, you can now pass simple POST values to methods with simple parameters. The examples I showed above should now work in addition to the standard bindings. Summary Clearly this is not easy to discover. I spent quite a bit of time digging through the Web API source trying to figure this out on my own without much luck. It took Hong Mei at Micrsoft to provide a base example as I asked around so I can't take credit for this solution :-). But once you know where to look, Web API is brilliantly extensible to make it relatively easy to customize the parameter behavior. I'm very stoked that this got resolved - in the last two months I've had two customers with projects that decided not to use Web API in AJAX heavy SPA applications because this POST variable mapping wasn't available. This might actually change their mind to still switch back and take advantage of the many great features in Web API. I too frequently use plain POST variables for communicating with server AJAX handlers and while I could have worked around this (with untyped JObject or the Form collection mostly), having proper POST to parameter mapping makes things much easier. I said this in my last post on POST data and say it again here: I think POST to method parameter mapping should have been shipped in the box with Web API, because without knowing about this limitation the expectation is that simple POST variables map to parameters just like query string values do. I hope Microsoft considers including this type of functionality natively in the next version of Web API natively or at least as a built-in HttpParameterBinding that can be just added. This is especially true, since this binding doesn't affect existing bindings. Resources SimplePostVariableParameterBinding Source on GitHub Global.asax hookup source Mapping URL Encoded Post Values in ASP.NET Web API© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in Web Api AJAX Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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Software Engineering Practices – Different Projects should have different maturity levels

- by Dylan Smith

I’ve had a lot of discussions at the office lately about the drastically different sets of software engineering practices used on our various projects, if what we are doing is appropriate, and what factors should you be considering when determining what practices are most appropriate in a given context. I wanted to write up my thoughts in a little more detail on this subject, so here we go: If you compare any two software projects (specifically comparing their codebases) you’ll often see very different levels of maturity in the software engineering practices employed. By software engineering practices, I’m specifically referring to the quality of the code and the amount of technical debt present in the project. Things such as Test Driven Development, Domain Driven Design, Behavior Driven Development, proper adherence to the SOLID principles, etc. are all practices that you would expect at the mature end of the spectrum. At the other end of the spectrum would be the quick-and-dirty solutions that are done using something like an Access Database, Excel Spreadsheet, or maybe some quick “drag-and-drop coding”. For this blog post I’m going to refer to this as the Software Engineering Maturity Spectrum (SEMS). I believe there is a time and a place for projects at every part of that SEMS. The risks and costs associated with under-engineering solutions have been written about a million times over so I won’t bother going into them again here, but there are also (unnecessary) costs with over-engineering a solution. Sometimes putting multiple layers, and IoC containers, and abstracting out the persistence, etc is complete overkill if a one-time use Access database could solve the problem perfectly well. A lot of software developers I talk to seem to automatically jump to the very right-hand side of this SEMS in everything they do. A common rationalization I hear is that it may seem like a small trivial application today, but these things always grow and stick around for many years, then you’re stuck maintaining a big ball of mud. I think this is a cop-out. Sure you can’t always anticipate how an application will be used or grow over its lifetime (can you ever??), but that doesn’t mean you can’t manage it and evolve the underlying software architecture as necessary (even if that means having to toss the code out and re-write it at some point…maybe even multiple times). My thoughts are that we should be making a conscious decision around the start of each project approximately where on the SEMS we want the project to exist. I believe this decision should be based on 3 factors: 1. Importance - How important to the business is this application? What is the impact if the application were to suddenly stop working? 2. Complexity - How complex is the application functionality? 3. Life-Expectancy - How long is this application expected to be in use? Is this a one-time use application, does it fill a short-term need, or is it more strategic and is expected to be in-use for many years to come? Of course this isn’t an exact science. You can’t say that Project X should be at the 73% mark on the SEMS and expect that to be helpful. My point is not that you need to precisely figure out what point on the SEMS the project should be at then translate that into some prescriptive set of practices and techniques you should be using. Rather my point is that we need to be aware that there is a spectrum, and that not everything is going to be (or should be) at the edges of that spectrum, indeed a large number of projects should probably fall somewhere within the middle; and different projects should adopt a different level of software engineering practices and maturity levels based on the needs of that project. To give an example of this way of thinking from my day job: Every couple of years my company plans and hosts a large event where ~400 of our customers all fly in to one location for a multi-day event with various activities. We have some staff whose job it is to organize the logistics of this event, which includes tracking which flights everybody is booked on, arranging for transportation to/from airports, arranging for hotel rooms, name tags, etc The last time we arranged this event all these various pieces of data were tracked in separate spreadsheets and reconciliation and cross-referencing of all the data was literally done by hand using printed copies of the spreadsheets and several people sitting around a table going down each list row by row. Obviously there is some room for improvement in how we are using software to manage the event’s logistics. The next time this event occurs we plan to provide the event planning staff with a more intelligent tool (either an Excel spreadsheet or probably an Access database) that can track all the information in one location and make sure that the various pieces of data are properly linked together (so for example if a person cancels you only need to delete them from one place, and not a dozen separate lists). This solution would fall at or near the very left end of the SEMS meaning that we will just quickly create something with very little attention paid to using mature software engineering practices. If we examine this project against the 3 criteria I listed above for determining it’s place within the SEMS we can see why: Importance – If this application were to stop working the business doesn’t grind to a halt, revenue doesn’t stop, and in fact our customers wouldn’t even notice since it isn’t a customer facing application. The impact would simply be more work for our event planning staff as they revert back to the previous way of doing things (assuming we don’t have any data loss). Complexity – The use cases for this project are pretty straightforward. It simply needs to manage several lists of data, and link them together appropriately. Precisely the task that access (and/or Excel) can do with minimal custom development required. Life-Expectancy – For this specific project we’re only planning to create something to be used for the one event (we only hold these events every 2 years). If it works well this may change (see below). Let’s assume we hack something out quickly and it works great when we plan the next event. We may decide that we want to make some tweaks to the tool and adopt it for planning all future events of this nature. In that case we should examine where the current application is on the SEMS, and make a conscious decision whether something needs to be done to move it further to the right based on the new objectives and goals for this application. This may mean scrapping the access database and re-writing it as an actual web or windows application. In this case, the life-expectancy changed, but let’s assume the importance and complexity didn’t change all that much. We can still probably get away with not adopting a lot of the so-called “best practices”. For example, we can probably still use some of the RAD tooling available and might have an Autonomous View style design that connects directly to the database and binds to typed datasets (we might even choose to simply leave it as an access database and continue using it; this is a decision that needs to be made on a case-by-case basis). At Anvil Digital we have aspirations to become a primarily product-based company. So let’s say we use this tool to plan a handful of events internally, and everybody loves it. Maybe a couple years down the road we decide we want to package the tool up and sell it as a product to some of our customers. In this case the project objectives/goals change quite drastically. Now the tool becomes a source of revenue, and the impact of it suddenly stopping working is significantly less acceptable. Also as we hold focus groups, and gather feedback from customers and potential customers there’s a pretty good chance the feature-set and complexity will have to grow considerably from when we were using it only internally for planning a small handful of events for one company. In this fictional scenario I would expect the target on the SEMS to jump to the far right. Depending on how we implemented the previous release we may be able to refactor and evolve the existing codebase to introduce a more layered architecture, a robust set of automated tests, introduce a proper ORM and IoC container, etc. More likely in this example the jump along the SEMS would be so large we’d probably end up scrapping the current code and re-writing. Although, if it was a slow phased roll-out to only a handful of customers, where we collected feedback, made some tweaks, and then rolled out to a couple more customers, we may be able to slowly refactor and evolve the code over time rather than tossing it out and starting from scratch. The key point I’m trying to get across is not that you should be throwing out your code and starting from scratch all the time. But rather that you should be aware of when and how the context and objectives around a project changes and periodically re-assess where the project currently falls on the SEMS and whether that needs to be adjusted based on changing needs. Note: There is also the idea of “spectrum decay”. Since our industry is rapidly evolving, what we currently accept as mature software engineering practices (the right end of the SEMS) probably won’t be the same 3 years from now. If you have a project that you were to assess at somewhere around the 80% mark on the SEMS today, but don’t touch the code for 3 years and come back and re-assess its position, it will almost certainly have changed since the right end of the SEMS will have moved farther out (maybe the project is now only around 60% due to decay). Developer Skills Another important aspect to this whole discussion is around the skill sets of your architects and lead developers. When talking about the progression of a developers skills from junior->intermediate->senior->… they generally start by only being able to write code that belongs on the left side of the SEMS and as they gain more knowledge and skill they become capable of working at a higher and higher level along the SEMS. We all realize that the learning never stops, but eventually you’ll get to the point where you can comfortably develop at the right-end of the SEMS (the exact practices and techniques that translates to is constantly changing, but that’s not the point here). A critical skill that I’d love to see more evidence of in our industry is the most senior guys not only being able to work at the right-end of the SEMS, but more importantly be able to consciously work at any point along the SEMS as project needs dictate. An even more valuable skill would be if you could make the conscious decision to move a projects code further right on the SEMS (based on changing needs) and do so in an incremental manner without having to start from scratch. An exercise that I’m planning to go through with all of our projects here at Anvil in the near future is to map out where I believe each project currently falls within this SEMS, where I believe the project *should* be on the SEMS based on the business needs, and for those that don’t match up (i.e. most of them) come up with a plan to improve the situation.

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NHibernate which cache to use for WinForms application

- by chiccodoro

I have a C# WinForms application with a database backend (oracle) and use NHibernate for O/R mapping. I would like to reduce communication to the database as much as possible since the network in here is quite slow, so I read about second level caching. I found this quite good introduction, which lists the following available cache implementations. I'm wondering which implementation I should use for my application. The caching should be simple, it should not significantly slow down the first occurrence of a query, and it should not take much memory to load the implementing assemblies. (With NHibernate and Castle, the application already takes up to 80 MB of RAM!) Velocity: uses Microsoft Velocity which is a highly scalable in-memory application cache for all kinds of data. Prevalence: uses Bamboo.Prevalence as the cache provider. Bamboo.Prevalence is a .NET implementation of the object prevalence concept brought to life by Klaus Wuestefeld in Prevayler. Bamboo.Prevalence provides transparent object persistence to deterministic systems targeting the CLR. It offers persistent caching for smart client applications. SysCache: Uses System.Web.Caching.Cache as the cache provider. This means that you can rely on ASP.NET caching feature to understand how it works. SysCache2: Similar to NHibernate.Caches.SysCache, uses ASP.NET cache. This provider also supports SQL dependency-based expiration, meaning that it is possible to configure certain cache regions to automatically expire when the relevant data in the database changes. MemCache: uses memcached; memcached is a high-performance, distributed memory object caching system, generic in nature, but intended for use in speeding up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load. Basically a distributed hash table. SharedCache: high-performance, distributed and replicated memory object caching system. See here and here for more info My considerations so far were: Velocity seems quite heavyweight and overkill (the files totally take 467 KB of disk space, haven't measured the RAM it takes so far because I didn't manage to make it run, see below) Prevalence, at least in my first attempt, slowed down my query from ~0.5 secs to ~5 secs, and caching didn't work (see below) SysCache seems to be for ASP.NET, not for winforms. MemCache and SharedCache seem to be for distributed scenarios. Which one would you suggest me to use? There would also be a built-in implementation, which of course is very lightweight, but the referenced article tells me that I "(...) should never use this cache provider for production code but only for testing." Besides the question which fits best into my situation I also faced problems with applying them: Velocity complained that "dcacheClient" tag not specified in the application configuration file. Specify valid tag in configuration file," although I created an app.config file for the assembly and pasted the example from this article. Prevalence, as mentioned above, heavily slowed down my first query, and the next time the exact same query was executed, another select was sent to the database. Maybe I should "externalize" this topic into another post. I will do that if someone tells me it is absolutely unusual that a query is slowed down so much and he needs further details to help me.

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Button click does not start Service in Android App Widget

- by Feanor

I'm having trouble starting a Service to update an AppWidget that I'm creating as an exercise. I'm trying to get the latitude and longitude of spoofed location data from DDMS to display in the widget. The widget uses a service to update the TextView, which may be slightly overkill, but I wanted to follow the template that seems to be common in AppWidgets that do more work (like the Forecast widget or the Wiktionary widget). Right now, I'm not getting any error messages or strange behavior; nothing at all happens when the button is pressed. I'm a bit mystified as to what might be wrong. Could anyone out there point me in the right direction? Additionally, if my logic for location is faulty, I'd love recommendations on that too. I've looked at several blogs, the Google examples, and the documentation, but I feel a little fuzzy on how it works. Here is the current state of the widget: public class Widget extends AppWidgetProvider { static final String TAG = "Widget"; /** * {@inheritDoc} */ public void onUpdate(Context context, AppWidgetManager appWidgetManager, int[] appWidgetIds) { // Create an intent to launch the service Intent serviceIntent = new Intent(context, UpdateService.class); // PendingIntent is required for the onClickPendingIntent that actually // starts the service from a button click PendingIntent pendingServiceIntent = PendingIntent.getService(context, 0, serviceIntent, 0); // Get the layout for the App Widget and attach a click listener to the // button RemoteViews views = new RemoteViews(context.getPackageName(), R.layout.main); views.setOnClickPendingIntent(R.id.address_button, pendingServiceIntent); super.onUpdate(context, appWidgetManager, appWidgetIds); } // To prevent any ANR timeouts, we perform the update in a service; // really should have its own thread too public static class UpdateService extends Service { static final String TAG = "UpdateService"; private LocationManager locationManager; private Location currentLocation; private double latitude; private double longitude; public void onStart(Intent intent, int startId) { // Get a LocationManager from the system services locationManager = (LocationManager) getSystemService(Context.LOCATION_SERVICE); // Register for updates from spoofed GPS locationManager.requestLocationUpdates("gps", 30000L, 0.0f, new LocationListener() { @Override public void onLocationChanged(Location location) { currentLocation = location; } @Override public void onProviderDisabled(String provider) {} @Override public void onProviderEnabled(String provider) {} @Override public void onStatusChanged(String provider, int status, Bundle extras) {} }); // Get the last known location from GPS currentLocation = locationManager.getLastKnownLocation("gps"); // Build the widget update RemoteViews updateViews = buildUpdate(this); // Push update for this widget to the home screen ComponentName thisWidget = new ComponentName(this, Widget.class); // AppWidgetManager updates AppWidget state; gets information about // installed AppWidget providers and other AppWidget related state AppWidgetManager manager = AppWidgetManager.getInstance(this); // Updates the views based on the RemoteView returned from the // buildUpdate method (stored in updateViews) manager.updateAppWidget(thisWidget, updateViews); } public RemoteViews buildUpdate(Context context) { latitude = currentLocation.getLatitude(); longitude = currentLocation.getLongitude(); RemoteViews updateViews = new RemoteViews(context.getPackageName(), R.layout.main); updateViews.setTextViewText(R.id.latitude_text, "" + latitude); updateViews.setTextViewText(R.id.longitude_text, "" + longitude); return updateViews; } @Override public IBinder onBind(Intent intent) { // We don't need to bind to this service return null; } } }

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Rails HABTM accepts_nested_attributes_for mapping table

- by Rabbott

Currently I have a habtm relationship between a datastream (stream), and a chart. I want to be able to use the 'typical' jquery "add new stream" method to add a new entry into a mapping table that holds the chart_id, and stream_id.. But I think that most examples out there are made to handle a one to many relationship.. The functionality provided here by Ryan Bates is what I'm looking for, But I dont want to use checkboxes, I want to use a select (drop down) to add new items to the mapping table. I need THIS and THIS combined chart.rb class Chart < ActiveRecord::Base has_and_belongs_to_many :streams, :readonly => false, :join_table => 'charts_streams' accepts_nested_attributes_for :streams, :reject_if => lambda { |a| a.values.all?(&:blank?) }, :allow_destroy => true stream.rb class Stream < ActiveRecord::Base has_and_belongs_to_many :charts, :readonly => false, :join_table => 'charts_streams' application.js /* * Method used to add new child form partials */ $('form a.add_child').click(function() { var assoc = $(this).attr('data-association'); var content = $('#' + assoc + '_fields_template').html(); var regexp = new RegExp('new_' + assoc, 'g'); var new_id = new Date().getTime(); var newElements = jQuery(content.replace(regexp, new_id)).hide(); $(this).parent().before(newElements).prev().slideFadeToggle(); return false; }); /* * Method used to remove child form partials */ $('form a.remove_child').live('click', function() { if(confirm('Are you sure?')) { var hidden_field = $(this).prev('input[type=hidden]')[0]; if(hidden_field) { hidden_field.value = '1'; } $(this).parents('.fields').slideFadeToggle(); } return false; }); _form.html.erb <div id="streams"> <h4>Streams</h4> <% form.fields_for :streams do |stream_form| %> <%= render :partial => "stream", :locals => {:f => stream_form} %> <% end %> </div> <p><%= add_child_link 'Add a stream', :streams %></p> <%= new_child_fields_template(form, :streams) %> _stream.html.erb <div class="fields"> <p> <%= f.label :stream_id %><br /> <%= select_tag "chart[stream_ids][]", options_for_select(@streams.map {|s| [s.label, s.id]}, f.object.id) %> </p> <p><%= remove_child_link 'Remove stream', f %></p> </div> This may be overkill and what I am looking to do could be much easier.. Basically when I create a chart I want to be able to add as many streams to it as I want, using the javascript for adding a new entry, and removing an old one... Thanks for the help! This is 'working' but gives me a ActiveRecord::ReadOnlyRecord error when it hits the chart.update_attributes method.. am I adding the the :readonly = false in the wrong spot? Or am I just doing it completely wrong?

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Get information about AutocompleteTextView from resulting AutoCompleteTextView$DropDownListView

- by Stev_k

I'm using 3 AutocompleteTextViews to suggest entries from a database. I subclassed AutocompleteTextView to handle setting the default text to null when clicked and setting back to the default instructions if moved away and nothing is entered. I was using a SimpleCursorAdapter to bind to the view, but I discovered that there was no way I could get the id of the AutocompleteTextView from an OnItemClickListener, which I needed to put additional information from the selected row in a variable depending on which AutocompleteTextView it was from. All I could access was the AutoCompleteTextView$DropDownListView, which is an undocumented inner class that appears to offer no real functionality. Neither was there a way to go up the view hierarchy to get the original AutocompleteTextView. So I subclassed SimpleCursorAdapter and added an int to the constructor to identify which AutocompleteTextView the adapter was from, and I was able to access this from the view passed into OnItemClick(). So, although my solution works fine, I wonder if it is possible to get the id of an AutocompleteTextView from its DropDownListView? I am also using another database query which gets the id from the OnItemClick and then looks up the data for that item, because I couldn't find a way of converting more than one column to a string. Should I be using CursorAdapter for this, to save initiating another query? Oh, and another thing, do I need a database cursor initially (all_cursor) when all I'm doing is filtering on it to get a new cursor? Seems like overkill. Activity .... dbse.openDataBase(); Cursor all_Cursor = dbse.autocomplete_query(); startManagingCursor(all_Cursor); String[] from_all = new String[]{DbAdapter.KEY_NAME}; int[] to_all = new int[] {android.R.id.text1}; from_adapt = new AutocompleteAdapter(FROM_DBADAPTER, this,android.R.layout.simple_dropdown_item_1line, all_Cursor, from_all, to_all); from_adapt.setStringConversionColumn(1); from_adapt.setFilterQueryProvider(this); to_adapt = new AutocompleteAdapter(TO_DBADAPTER, this,android.R.layout.simple_dropdown_item_1line, all_Cursor, from_all, to_all); to_adapt.setStringConversionColumn(1); to_adapt.setFilterQueryProvider(this); from_auto_complete = (Autocomplete) findViewById(R.id.entry_from); from_auto_complete.setAdapter(from_adapt); from_auto_complete.setOnItemClickListener(this); to_auto_complete = (Autocomplete) findViewById(R.id.entry_to); to_auto_complete.setAdapter(to_adapt); to_auto_complete.setOnItemClickListener(this); public void onItemClick (AdapterView<?> parent, View view, int position, long id) { Cursor selected_row_cursor = dbse.data_from_id(id); selected_row_cursor.moveToFirst(); String lat = selected_row_cursor.getString(1); String lon = selected_row_cursor.getString(2); int source = ((AutocompleteAdapter) parent.getAdapter()).getSource(); Autocomplete class: public class Autocomplete extends AutoCompleteTextView implements OnTouchListener,OnFocusChangeListener{ String textcontent; Context mycontext = null; int viewid = this.getId(); public Autocomplete(Context context, AttributeSet attrs) { super(context, attrs); textcontent = this.getText().toString(); mycontext = context; this.setOnFocusChangeListener(this); this.setOnTouchListener(this); } public boolean onTouch(View v, MotionEvent event) { if (textcontent.equals(mycontext.getString(R.string.from_textbox)) | textcontent.equals(mycontext.getString(R.string.to_textbox)) | textcontent.equals(mycontext.getString(R.string.via_textbox))) { this.setText(""); } return false; } public void onFocusChange(View v, boolean hasFocus) { if (hasFocus == false) { int a = this.getText().length(); if (a == 0){ if (viewid == R.id.entry_from) {this.setText(R.string.from_textbox);} if (viewid == R.id.entry_to) {this.setText(R.string.to_textbox);} if (viewid == R.id.entry_via) {this.setText(R.string.via_textbox);} } } } } Adapter: public class AutocompleteAdapter extends SimpleCursorAdapter { int source; public AutocompleteAdapter(int query_source, Context context, int layout, Cursor c, String[] from, int[] to) { super(context, layout, c, from, to); source = query_source; } public int getSource() { return source; } } sorry that's a lot of code! Thanks for your help. Stephen

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Keyboard for programming

- by exhuma

This may seem a bit a tangential topic. It's not directly related to actual code, but is important for our line of work nevertheless. Over the years, I've switched keyboards a few times. All of them had slightly different key layouts. And I'm not talking about the language/locale layout, but the physical layout! Why not the locale layout? Well, quite frankly, that's easy to change via software. I personally have a German keyboard but have it set to the UK layout. Why? It's quite hard to find different layouts in the shops where I live. Even ordering is not always easy in the shops. So that leaves me with Internet shops. But I prefer to "test" my keyboards before buying. The most notable changes are: Mangled "Home Key Block" I've seen this first on a Logitech keyboard, but it may have originated elsewhere. Shape of the "Enter" key I've seen three different cases so far: Two lines high, wider at the top Two lines high, wider at the bottom One line high Shape of the Backspace button I've seen two types so far: One "character" wide Two "characters" wide OS Keys For Macs, you have the Option and Command buttons, for Windows you have the Windows and Context Menu buttons. Cherry even produced a Linux keyboard once (unfortunately I cannot find many details except news results). I assume a dedicated Linux keyboard would sport a Compose key and had the SysRq always labelled as well (note that some standard layouts do this already). Obviously... .. all these differences entail that some keys have to be moved around the board a lot. Which means, if you are used to one and have to work on another one, you happen to hit the wrong keys quite often. As it happens, this is much more annoying for programmers as it is for people who write texts. Mainly because the keys which are moved around are special character keys, often used in programming. Often these hardware layouts depend also indirectly on where you buy the keyboards. Honestly, I haven't seen a keyboard with a one-line "Enter" key in Germany, nor Luxembourg. I may just have missed it but that's how it looks to me at least. A survey I've seen some attempts at surveys in the style "which keyboard is best for programming". But they all - in my opinion - are not using comparable sets. So I was wondering if it was possible to concoct a survey taking the above criteria into account. But ignoring key dimensions that one would be a bit overkill I guess ;) From what I can see there are the following types of physical layout: Backspace: 2-characters wide Enter: 2-Lines, wider top Backspace: 2-characters wide Enter: 1-Line Backspace: 1-character wide Enter: 2-Lines, wider bottom Then there are the other possible permutations (home-key block, os-keys), which in total makes for quite a large list of categories. Now, I wonder... Would anyone be interested in such a survey? I personally would. Because I am looking for the perfect fit for me. If yes, then I could really use the help of anyone here to propose some models to include in the survey. Once I have some models for each category (I'd say at least 3 per category) I could go ahead and write up a survey, put it on-line and let the it collect data for a while. What do you think?

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Rendering a Long Document on iPad

- by benjismith

I'm implementing a document viewer with highlighting/annotation capabilities for a custom document format on iPad. The documents are kind of long (100 to 200 pages, if printed on paper) and I've had a hard time finding the right approach. Here are the requirments: 1) Basic rich-text styling: control of left/right margins. Control of font name, size, foreground/background color, and line spacing. Bold, italics, underline, etc. 2) Selection and highlighting of arbitrary text regions (not limited to paragraph boundaries, like in Safari/UIWebView). 3) Customization of the Cut/Copy/Paste popup (what is that thing called anyhow? UIActionBar?) This is one of the essential requirements of the app. My first implementation was based on UIWebView. I just rendered the document as HTML with CSS for text styling. But I couldn't get the kind of text selection behavior I wanted (across paragraph boundaries) and the UIActionBar can't be customized from within UIWebView. So I started working on a javascript approach, faking the device text-selection behavior using JQuery to trap touch events and dynamically modifying the DOM to change the background color of selected regions of text. I built a fake UIActionBar control as a hidden DIV, positioning it and unhiding it whenever there was an active selection region. Not too shabby. The main problem is that it's SLOOOOOOOW. Scrolling through the document is nice and quick, but dynamically changing the DOM is not very snappy. Plus, I couldn't figure out how to recreate the magnifier loupe, so my fake text-selection GUI doesn't look quite the same as the native implementation. Also, I haven't yet implemented the communication bridge between the javascript layer and the objective-c layer (where the rest of the app lives), but it was shaping up to be a huge hassle. So I've been looking at CoreText, but there are precious few examples on the web. I spent a little time with this simple little demo: http://github.com/jonasschnelli/I7CoreTextExample/ It shows how to use CoreText to draw an NSAttributedText string into a UIView. But it has its own problems: It doesn't implement text-selection behavior, and it doesn't present a UIActionBar, so I don't have any idea how to make that happen. And, more importantly, it tries to draw the entire document all at once, with significant performance degradations for long documents. My documents can have thousands of paragraphs, and less than 1% of the document is ever on screen at a time. On the plus side, these documents already contain precise formatting information. I know the exact page-position of every line of text, so I don't need a layout engine. Does anyone know how to implement this sort of view using CoreText? I understand that a full-fledged implementation is overkill for a question like this, but I'm looking for a good CoreText example with a few basic requirements: 1) Precise layout & formatting control (using the formatting metrics and text styles I've already calculated). 2) Arbitrary selection of text. 3) Customization of the UIActionBar. 4) Efficient recycling of resources for off-screen objects. I'd be happy to implement my own recycling when text elements scroll off-screen, but wouldn't that require re-implementing UIScrollView? I'm brand-new to iPhone development, and still getting used to Objective-C, but I've been working in other languages (Java, C#, flex/actionscript, etc) for more than ten years, so I feel confident in my ability to get the work done, if only I had a better feel for the iPhone SDK and the common coding patterns for stuff like this. Is it just me, or does the SDK documentation really suck? Anyhow, thanks for your help!

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Accessing a vector<vector<int>> as a flat array

- by user1762276

For this array: vector<vector<int> > v; v.push_back(vector<int>(0)); v.back().push_back(1); v.back().push_back(2); v.back().push_back(3); v.back().push_back(4); I can output {1, 2, 3, 4} easily enough: cout << v[0][0] << endl; cout << v[0][1] << endl; cout << v[0][2] << endl; cout << v[0][3] << endl; To access it as a flat array I can do this: int* z = (int*)&v[0].front(); cout << z[0] << endl; cout << z[1] << endl; cout << z[2] << endl; cout << z[3] << endl; Now, how do I access the multidimensional vector as a flat multidimensional array? I cannot use the same format as accessing a single-dimensional vector: // This does not work (outputs garbage) int** n = (int**)&v.front(); cout << n[0][0] << endl; cout << n[0][1] << endl; cout << n[0][2] << endl; cout << n[0][3] << endl; The workaround I've found is to do this: int** n = new int* [v.size()]; for (size_t i = 0; i < v.size(); i++) { n[i] = &v.at(i).front(); } cout << n[0][0] << endl; cout << n[0][1] << endl; cout << n[0][2] << endl; cout << n[0][3] << endl; Is there a way to access the entire multidimensional vector like a flat c-style array without having to dynamically allocate each dimension above the data before accessing it? Speed is not critical in the implementation and clarity for maintenance is paramount. A multidimensional vector is just fine for storing the data. However, I want to also expose the data as a flat c-style array in the SDK so that it can be easily accessible by other languages. This means that exposing the vectors as an STL object is a no go. The solution I came up with works fine for my needs as I only evaluate the array once at the very end of processing to "flatten" it. However, is there a better way to go about this? Or am I already doing it the best way I possibly can without re-implementing my own data structure (overkill since my flatten code is only a few lines). Thank you for your advice, friends!

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extensible database design: automatic ALTER TABLE or serialize() field BLOB ?

- by mario

I want an adaptable database scheme. But still use a simple table data gateway in my application, where I just pass an $data[] array for storing. The basic columns are settled in the initial table scheme. There will however arise a couple of meta fields later (ca 10-20). I want some flexibility there and not adapt the database manually each time, or -worse- change the application logic just because of new fields. So now there are two options which seem workable yet not overkill. But I'm not sure about the scalability or database drawbacks. (1) Automatic ALTER TABLE. Whenever the $data array is to be saved, the keys are compared against the current database columns. New columns get defined before the $data is INSERTed into the table. Actually seems simple enough in test code: function save($data, $table="forum") { // columns if ($new_fields = array_diff(array_keys($data), known_fields($table))) { extend_schema($table, $new_fields, $data); } // save $columns = implode("`, `", array_keys($data)); $qm = str_repeat(",?", count(array_keys($data)) - 1); echo ("INSERT INTO `$table` (`$columns`) VALUES (?$qm);"); function known_fields($table) { return unserialize(@file_get_contents("db:$table")) ?: array("id"); function extend_schema($table, $new_fields, $data) { foreach ($new_fields as $field) { echo("ALTER TABLE `$table` ADD COLUMN `$field` VARCHAR;"); Since it is mostly meta information fields, adding them just as VARCHAR seems sufficient. Nobody will query by them anyway. So the database is really just used as storage here. However, while I might want to add a lot of new $data fields on the go, they will not always be populated. (2) serialize() fields into BLOB. Any new/extraneous meta fields could be opaque to the database. Simply sorting out the virtual fields from the real database columns is simple. And the meta fields can just be serialize()d into a blob/text field then: function ext_save($data, $table="forum") { $db_fields = array("id", "content", "flags", "ext"); // disjoin foreach (array_diff(array_keys($data),$db_fields) as $key) { $data["ext"][$key] = $data[$key]; unset($data[$key]); } $data["ext"] = serialize($data["ext"]); Unserializing and unpacking this 'ext' column on read queries is a minor overhead. The advantage is that there won't be any sparsely filled columns in the database, so I guess it's compacter and faster than the AUTO ALTER TABLE approach. Of course, this method prevents ever using one of the new fields in a WHERE or GROUP BY clause. But I think none of the possible meta fields (user_agent, author_ip, author_img, votes, hits, last_modified, ..) would/should ever be used there anyway. So I currently prefer the 'ext' blob approach, even if it's a one-way ticket. How are such columns called usually? (looking for examples/doc) Would you use XML serialization for (very theoretical) in-database queries? The adapting table scheme seems a "cleaner" interface, even if most columns might remain empty then. How does that impact speed? How many such sparse VARCHAR fields can MySQL/innodb stomach? But most importantly: Is there any standard implementation for this? A pseudo ORM with automatic ALTER TABLE tricks? Storing a simple column list seems workable, but something like pdo::getColumnMeta would be more robust.

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ActionScript Gradient Banding Problem

- by TheDarkIn1978

i'm having a strange issue with banding between certain colors of a gradient. to create the gradient, i'm drawing evenly spaced circle wedges from the center to the border, and filling each circle wedge from a bitmap line gradient pixel in a loop. public class ColorWheel extends Sprite { private static const DEFAULT_RADIUS:Number = 100; private static const DEFAULT_BANDING_QUALITY:int = 3600; public function ColorWheel(nRadius:Number = DEFAULT_RADIUS) { init(nRadius); } public function init(nRadius:Number = DEFAULT_RADIUS):void { var nRadians : Number; var nColor : Number; var objMatrix : Matrix = new Matrix(); var nX : Number; var nY : Number; var previousX : Number = nRadius; var previousY : Number = 0; var leftToRightColors:Array = new Array(0xFF0000, 0xFFFF00, 0x00FF00, 0x00FFFF, 0x0000FF, 0xFF00FF); leftToRightColors.push(leftToRightColors[0]); var leftToRightAlphas:Array = new Array(); var leftToRightRatios:Array = new Array(); var leftToRightPartition:Number = 255 / (leftToRightColors.length - 1); //Push arrays for (var j:int = 0; j < leftToRightColors.length; j++) { leftToRightAlphas.push(1); leftToRightRatios.push(j * leftToRightPartition); } var leftToRightColorsMatrix:Matrix = new Matrix(); leftToRightColorsMatrix.createGradientBox(DEFAULT_BANDING_QUALITY, 1); //Produce a horizontal leftToRightLine sprite var leftToRightLine:Sprite = new Sprite(); leftToRightLine.graphics.lineStyle(1, 0, 1, false, LineScaleMode.NONE, CapsStyle.NONE); leftToRightLine.graphics.lineGradientStyle(GradientType.LINEAR, leftToRightColors, leftToRightAlphas, leftToRightRatios, leftToRightColorsMatrix); leftToRightLine.graphics.moveTo(0, 0); leftToRightLine.graphics.lineTo(DEFAULT_BANDING_QUALITY, 0); //Assign bitmapData to the leftToRightLine var leftToRightLineBitmapData:BitmapData = new BitmapData(leftToRightLine.width, leftToRightLine.height); leftToRightLineBitmapData.draw(leftToRightLine); for(var i:int = 1; i < (DEFAULT_BANDING_QUALITY + 1); i++) { // Convert the degree to radians. nRadians = i * (Math.PI / (DEFAULT_BANDING_QUALITY / 2)); // OR the individual color channels together. nColor = leftToRightLineBitmapData.getPixel(i-1, 0); // Calculate the coordinate in which the line should be drawn to. nX = nRadius * Math.cos(nRadians); nY = nRadius * Math.sin(nRadians); // Create a matrix for the wedges gradient color. objMatrix.createGradientBox(nRadius * 2, nRadius * 2, nRadians, -nRadius, -nRadius); graphics.beginGradientFill(GradientType.LINEAR, [nColor, nColor], [1, 1], [127, 255], objMatrix); graphics.moveTo( 0, 0 ); graphics.lineTo( previousX, previousY ); graphics.lineTo( nX, nY ); graphics.lineTo( 0, 0 ); graphics.endFill(); previousX = nX; previousY = nY; } } } i'm creating a circle with 3600 wedges, although it doesn't look like it based on the screen shot within the orange color that is produced from gradating from red to yellow numbers. adding a orange number between red and yellow doesn't help. but if i create the circle with only 360 wedges, the gradient banding is much more obvious. 3600 is probably overkill, and doesn't really add more detail over, say, making the circle of 1440 wedges, but i don't know any other way to slightly elevate this banding issue. any ideas how i can fix this, or what i'm doing wrong? could it be caused by the circleMatrix rotation?

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How do I detect a file write error in C?

- by rich

I have an embedded environment where a user might insert or remove a USB flash drive. I would like to know if the drive has been removed, or if there is some other problem when I try to write to the drive. However, Linux just saves the information in its buffers and returns with no indicated error. The computer I'm using comes with a 2.4.26 kernel and libc 2.3.2. I'm mounting the drive this way: i = mount(MEMORY_DEV_PATH, MEMORY_MNT_PATH, "vfat", MS_SYNCHRONOUS, NULL); That works: 50:/root # mount /dev/scsi/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part1 on /mem type vfat (rw,sync) 50:/root # Later, I try to copy a file to it: int ifile, ofile; ifile = open("/tmp/tmpmidi.mid", O_RDONLY); if (ifile < 0) { perror("open in"); break; } ofile = open(current_file_name.c_str(), O_WRONLY | O_SYNC); if (ofile < 0) { perror("open out"); break; } #define BUFSZ 256 char buffer[BUFSZ]; while (1) { i = read(ifile, buffer, BUFSZ); if (i < 0) { perror("read"); break; } j = write(ofile, buffer, i); if (j < 0) { perror("write"); break; } if (i != j) { perror("Sizes wrong"); break; } if (i < BUFSZ) { printf("Copy is finished, I hope\n"); close(ifile); close(ofile); break; } } If this snippet of code is executed with a write-protected USB memory, the result is Copy is finished, I hope amid a flurry of error messages from the kernel on the console. I believe the same thing would happen if I simply removed the USB drive (without unmounting it). I have also fiddled with devfs. I figured out how to get it to automatically mount the drive, (with the REGISTER event) but it never seems to trigger the UNREGISTER when I pull out the memory. How can I determine in my program whether I have successfully created a file? Update 4 July: It was a silly oversight of me not to check the result from close(). Unfortunately, the file can be closed without error. So that didn't help. What about fsync()? That sounds like a good idea, but that didn't catch the error either. There might be some interesting information in /sys if I had such a thing. I believe that didn't get added until 2.6.?. The comment(s) about the quality of my flash drive are probably justified. It's one of the earlier ones. In fact, write protect switches seem to be extremely rare these days. I think I have to use the overkill option: Create a file, unmount & remount the drive, and check to see if the file is there. If that doesn't solve my problem, then something is really messed up! Note to myself: Make sure the file you try to create isn't already there! By the way, this does happen to be a C++ program. You can tell by the .c_str() which I had intended to edit out for simplicity.

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Using an alternate JSON Serializer in ASP.NET Web API

- by Rick Strahl

The new ASP.NET Web API that Microsoft released alongside MVC 4.0 Beta last week is a great framework for building REST and AJAX APIs. I've been working with it for quite a while now and I really like the way it works and the complete set of features it provides 'in the box'. It's about time that Microsoft gets a decent API for building generic HTTP endpoints into the framework. DataContractJsonSerializer sucks As nice as Web API's overall design is one thing still sucks: The built-in JSON Serialization uses the DataContractJsonSerializer which is just too limiting for many scenarios. The biggest issues I have with it are: No support for untyped values (object, dynamic, Anonymous Types) MS AJAX style Date Formatting Ugly serialization formats for types like Dictionaries To me the most serious issue is dealing with serialization of untyped objects. I have number of applications with AJAX front ends that dynamically reformat data from business objects to fit a specific message format that certain UI components require. The most common scenario I have there are IEnumerable query results from a database with fields from the result set rearranged to fit the sometimes unconventional formats required for the UI components (like jqGrid for example). Creating custom types to fit these messages seems like overkill and projections using Linq makes this much easier to code up. Alas DataContractJsonSerializer doesn't support it. Neither does DataContractSerializer for XML output for that matter. What this means is that you can't do stuff like this in Web API out of the box:public object GetAnonymousType() { return new { name = "Rick", company = "West Wind", entered= DateTime.Now }; } Basically anything that doesn't have an explicit type DataContractJsonSerializer will not let you return. FWIW, the same is true for XmlSerializer which also doesn't work with non-typed values for serialization. The example above is obviously contrived with a hardcoded object graph, but it's not uncommon to get dynamic values returned from queries that have anonymous types for their result projections. Apparently there's a good possibility that Microsoft will ship Json.NET as part of Web API RTM release. Scott Hanselman confirmed this as a footnote in his JSON Dates post a few days ago. I've heard several other people from Microsoft confirm that Json.NET will be included and be the default JSON serializer, but no details yet in what capacity it will show up. Let's hope it ends up as the default in the box. Meanwhile this post will show you how you can use it today with the beta and get JSON that matches what you should see in the RTM version. What about JsonValue? To be fair Web API DOES include a new JsonValue/JsonObject/JsonArray type that allow you to address some of these scenarios. JsonValue is a new type in the System.Json assembly that can be used to build up an object graph based on a dictionary. It's actually a really cool implementation of a dynamic type that allows you to create an object graph and spit it out to JSON without having to create .NET type first. JsonValue can also receive a JSON string and parse it without having to actually load it into a .NET type (which is something that's been missing in the core framework). This is really useful if you get a JSON result from an arbitrary service and you don't want to explicitly create a mapping type for the data returned. For serialization you can create an object structure on the fly and pass it back as part of an Web API action method like this:public JsonValue GetJsonValue() { dynamic json = new JsonObject(); json.name = "Rick"; json.company = "West Wind"; json.entered = DateTime.Now; dynamic address = new JsonObject(); address.street = "32 Kaiea"; address.zip = "96779"; json.address = address; dynamic phones = new JsonArray(); json.phoneNumbers = phones; dynamic phone = new JsonObject(); phone.type = "Home"; phone.number = "808 123-1233"; phones.Add(phone); phone = new JsonObject(); phone.type = "Home"; phone.number = "808 123-1233"; phones.Add(phone); //var jsonString = json.ToString(); return json; } which produces the following output (formatted here for easier reading):{ name: "rick", company: "West Wind", entered: "2012-03-08T15:33:19.673-10:00", address: { street: "32 Kaiea", zip: "96779" }, phoneNumbers: [ { type: "Home", number: "808 123-1233" }, { type: "Mobile", number: "808 123-1234" }] } If you need to build a simple JSON type on the fly these types work great. But if you have an existing type - or worse a query result/list that's already formatted JsonValue et al. become a pain to work with. As far as I can see there's no way to just throw an object instance at JsonValue and have it convert into JsonValue dictionary. It's a manual process. Using alternate Serializers in Web API So, currently the default serializer in WebAPI is DataContractJsonSeriaizer and I don't like it. You may not either, but luckily you can swap the serializer fairly easily. If you'd rather use the JavaScriptSerializer built into System.Web.Extensions or Json.NET today, it's not too difficult to create a custom MediaTypeFormatter that uses these serializers and can replace or partially replace the native serializer. Here's a MediaTypeFormatter implementation using the ASP.NET JavaScriptSerializer:using System; using System.Net.Http.Formatting; using System.Threading.Tasks; using System.Web.Script.Serialization; using System.Json; using System.IO; namespace Westwind.Web.WebApi { public class JavaScriptSerializerFormatter : MediaTypeFormatter { public JavaScriptSerializerFormatter() { SupportedMediaTypes.Add(new System.Net.Http.Headers.MediaTypeHeaderValue("application/json")); } protected override bool CanWriteType(Type type) { // don't serialize JsonValue structure use default for that if (type == typeof(JsonValue) || type == typeof(JsonObject) || type== typeof(JsonArray) ) return false; return true; } protected override bool CanReadType(Type type) { if (type == typeof(IKeyValueModel)) return false; return true; } protected override System.Threading.Tasks.Taskobject OnReadFromStreamAsync(Type type, System.IO.Stream stream, System.Net.Http.Headers.HttpContentHeaders contentHeaders, FormatterContext formatterContext) { var task = Taskobject.Factory.StartNew(() = { var ser = new JavaScriptSerializer(); string json; using (var sr = new StreamReader(stream)) { json = sr.ReadToEnd(); sr.Close(); } object val = ser.Deserialize(json,type); return val; }); return task; } protected override System.Threading.Tasks.Task OnWriteToStreamAsync(Type type, object value, System.IO.Stream stream, System.Net.Http.Headers.HttpContentHeaders contentHeaders, FormatterContext formatterContext, System.Net.TransportContext transportContext) { var task = Task.Factory.StartNew( () = { var ser = new JavaScriptSerializer(); var json = ser.Serialize(value); byte[] buf = System.Text.Encoding.Default.GetBytes(json); stream.Write(buf,0,buf.Length); stream.Flush(); }); return task; } } } Formatter implementation is pretty simple: You override 4 methods to tell which types you can handle and then handle the input or output streams to create/parse the JSON data. Note that when creating output you want to take care to still allow JsonValue/JsonObject/JsonArray types to be handled by the default serializer so those objects serialize properly - if you let either JavaScriptSerializer or JSON.NET handle them they'd try to render the dictionaries which is very undesirable. If you'd rather use Json.NET here's the JSON.NET version of the formatter:// this code requires a reference to JSON.NET in your project #if true using System; using System.Net.Http.Formatting; using System.Threading.Tasks; using System.Web.Script.Serialization; using System.Json; using Newtonsoft.Json; using System.IO; using Newtonsoft.Json.Converters; namespace Westwind.Web.WebApi { public class JsonNetFormatter : MediaTypeFormatter { public JsonNetFormatter() { SupportedMediaTypes.Add(new System.Net.Http.Headers.MediaTypeHeaderValue("application/json")); } protected override bool CanWriteType(Type type) { // don't serialize JsonValue structure use default for that if (type == typeof(JsonValue) || type == typeof(JsonObject) || type == typeof(JsonArray)) return false; return true; } protected override bool CanReadType(Type type) { if (type == typeof(IKeyValueModel)) return false; return true; } protected override System.Threading.Tasks.Taskobject OnReadFromStreamAsync(Type type, System.IO.Stream stream, System.Net.Http.Headers.HttpContentHeaders contentHeaders, FormatterContext formatterContext) { var task = Taskobject.Factory.StartNew(() = { var settings = new JsonSerializerSettings() { NullValueHandling = NullValueHandling.Ignore, }; var sr = new StreamReader(stream); var jreader = new JsonTextReader(sr); var ser = new JsonSerializer(); ser.Converters.Add(new IsoDateTimeConverter()); object val = ser.Deserialize(jreader, type); return val; }); return task; } protected override System.Threading.Tasks.Task OnWriteToStreamAsync(Type type, object value, System.IO.Stream stream, System.Net.Http.Headers.HttpContentHeaders contentHeaders, FormatterContext formatterContext, System.Net.TransportContext transportContext) { var task = Task.Factory.StartNew( () = { var settings = new JsonSerializerSettings() { NullValueHandling = NullValueHandling.Ignore, }; string json = JsonConvert.SerializeObject(value, Formatting.Indented, new JsonConverter[1] { new IsoDateTimeConverter() } ); byte[] buf = System.Text.Encoding.Default.GetBytes(json); stream.Write(buf,0,buf.Length); stream.Flush(); }); return task; } } } #endif One advantage of the Json.NET serializer is that you can specify a few options on how things are formatted and handled. You get null value handling and you can plug in the IsoDateTimeConverter which is nice to product proper ISO dates that I would expect any Json serializer to output these days. Hooking up the Formatters Once you've created the custom formatters you need to enable them for your Web API application. To do this use the GlobalConfiguration.Configuration object and add the formatter to the Formatters collection. Here's what this looks like hooked up from Application_Start in a Web project:protected void Application_Start(object sender, EventArgs e) { // Action based routing (used for RPC calls) RouteTable.Routes.MapHttpRoute( name: "StockApi", routeTemplate: "stocks/{action}/{symbol}", defaults: new { symbol = RouteParameter.Optional, controller = "StockApi" } ); // WebApi Configuration to hook up formatters and message handlers // optional RegisterApis(GlobalConfiguration.Configuration); } public static void RegisterApis(HttpConfiguration config) { // Add JavaScriptSerializer formatter instead - add at top to make default //config.Formatters.Insert(0, new JavaScriptSerializerFormatter()); // Add Json.net formatter - add at the top so it fires first! // This leaves the old one in place so JsonValue/JsonObject/JsonArray still are handled config.Formatters.Insert(0, new JsonNetFormatter()); } One thing to remember here is the GlobalConfiguration object which is Web API's static configuration instance. I think this thing is seriously misnamed given that GlobalConfiguration could stand for anything and so is hard to discover if you don't know what you're looking for. How about WebApiConfiguration or something more descriptive? Anyway, once you know what it is you can use the Formatters collection to insert your custom formatter. Note that I insert my formatter at the top of the list so it takes precedence over the default formatter. I also am not removing the old formatter because I still want JsonValue/JsonObject/JsonArray to be handled by the default serialization mechanism. Since they process in sequence and I exclude processing for these types JsonValue et al. still get properly serialized/deserialized. Summary Currently DataContractJsonSerializer in Web API is a pain, but at least we have the ability with relatively limited effort to replace the MediaTypeFormatter and plug in our own JSON serializer. This is useful for many scenarios - if you have existing client applications that used MVC JsonResult or ASP.NET AJAX results from ASMX AJAX services you can plug in the JavaScript serializer and get exactly the same serializer you used in the past so your results will be the same and don't potentially break clients. JSON serializers do vary a bit in how they serialize some of the more complex types (like Dictionaries and dates for example) and so if you're migrating it might be helpful to ensure your client code doesn't break when you switch to ASP.NET Web API. Going forward it looks like Microsoft is planning on plugging in Json.Net into Web API and make that the default. I think that's an awesome choice since Json.net has been around forever, is fast and easy to use and provides a ton of functionality as part of this great library. I just wish Microsoft would have figured this out sooner instead of now at the last minute integrating with it especially given that Json.Net has a similar set of lower level JSON objects JsonValue/JsonObject etc. which now will end up being duplicated by the native System.Json stuff. It's not like we don't already have enough confusion regarding which JSON serializer to use (JavaScriptSerializer, DataContractJsonSerializer, JsonValue/JsonObject/JsonArray and now Json.net). For years I've been using my own JSON serializer because the built in choices are both limited. However, with an official encorsement of Json.Net I'm happily moving on to use that in my applications. Let's see and hope Microsoft gets this right before ASP.NET Web API goes gold.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in Web Api AJAX ASP.NET Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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Where does ASP.NET Web API Fit?

- by Rick Strahl

With the pending release of ASP.NET MVC 4 and the new ASP.NET Web API, there has been a lot of discussion of where the new Web API technology fits in the ASP.NET Web stack. There are a lot of choices to build HTTP based applications available now on the stack - we've come a long way from when WebForms and Http Handlers/Modules where the only real options. Today we have WebForms, MVC, ASP.NET Web Pages, ASP.NET AJAX, WCF REST and now Web API as well as the core ASP.NET runtime to choose to build HTTP content with. Web API definitely squarely addresses the 'API' aspect - building consumable services - rather than HTML content, but even to that end there are a lot of choices you have today. So where does Web API fit, and when doesn't it? But before we get into that discussion, let's talk about what a Web API is and why we should care. What's a Web API? HTTP 'APIs' (Microsoft's new terminology for a service I guess) are becoming increasingly more important with the rise of the many devices in use today. Most mobile devices like phones and tablets run Apps that are using data retrieved from the Web over HTTP. Desktop applications are also moving in this direction with more and more online content and synching moving into even traditional desktop applications. The pending Windows 8 release promises an app like platform for both the desktop and other devices, that also emphasizes consuming data from the Cloud. Likewise many Web browser hosted applications these days are relying on rich client functionality to create and manipulate the browser user interface, using AJAX rather than server generated HTML data to load up the user interface with data. These mobile or rich Web applications use their HTTP connection to return data rather than HTML markup in the form of JSON or XML typically. But an API can also serve other kinds of data, like images or other binary files, or even text data and HTML (although that's less common). A Web API is what feeds rich applications with data. ASP.NET Web API aims to service this particular segment of Web development by providing easy semantics to route and handle incoming requests and an easy to use platform to serve HTTP data in just about any content format you choose to create and serve from the server. But .NET already has various HTTP Platforms The .NET stack already includes a number of technologies that provide the ability to create HTTP service back ends, and it has done so since the very beginnings of the .NET platform. From raw HTTP Handlers and Modules in the core ASP.NET runtime, to high level platforms like ASP.NET MVC, Web Forms, ASP.NET AJAX and the WCF REST engine (which technically is not ASP.NET, but can integrate with it), you've always been able to handle just about any kind of HTTP request and response with ASP.NET. The beauty of the raw ASP.NET platform is that it provides you everything you need to build just about any type of HTTP application you can dream up from low level APIs/custom engines to high level HTML generation engine. ASP.NET as a core platform clearly has stood the test of time 10+ years later and all other frameworks like Web API are built on top of this ASP.NET core. However, although it's possible to create Web APIs / Services using any of the existing out of box .NET technologies, none of them have been a really nice fit for building arbitrary HTTP based APIs. Sure, you can use an HttpHandler to create just about anything, but you have to build a lot of plumbing to build something more complex like a comprehensive API that serves a variety of requests, handles multiple output formats and can easily pass data up to the server in a variety of ways. Likewise you can use ASP.NET MVC to handle routing and creating content in various formats fairly easily, but it doesn't provide a great way to automatically negotiate content types and serve various content formats directly (it's possible to do with some plumbing code of your own but not built in). Prior to Web API, Microsoft's main push for HTTP services has been WCF REST, which was always an awkward technology that had a severe personality conflict, not being clear on whether it wanted to be part of WCF or purely a separate technology. In the end it didn't do either WCF compatibility or WCF agnostic pure HTTP operation very well, which made for a very developer-unfriendly environment. Personally I didn't like any of the implementations at the time, so much so that I ended up building my own HTTP service engine (as part of the West Wind Web Toolkit), as have a few other third party tools that provided much better integration and ease of use. With the release of Web API for the first time I feel that I can finally use the tools in the box and not have to worry about creating and maintaining my own toolkit as Web API addresses just about all the features I implemented on my own and much more. ASP.NET Web API provides a better HTTP Experience ASP.NET Web API differentiates itself from the previous Microsoft in-box HTTP service solutions in that it was built from the ground up around the HTTP protocol and its messaging semantics. Unlike WCF REST or ASP.NET AJAX with ASMX, it’s a brand new platform rather than bolted on technology that is supposed to work in the context of an existing framework. The strength of the new ASP.NET Web API is that it combines the best features of the platforms that came before it, to provide a comprehensive and very usable HTTP platform. Because it's based on ASP.NET and borrows a lot of concepts from ASP.NET MVC, Web API should be immediately familiar and comfortable to most ASP.NET developers. Here are some of the features that Web API provides that I like: Strong Support for URL Routing to produce clean URLs using familiar MVC style routing semantics Content Negotiation based on Accept headers for request and response serialization Support for a host of supported output formats including JSON, XML, ATOM Strong default support for REST semantics but they are optional Easily extensible Formatter support to add new input/output types Deep support for more advanced HTTP features via HttpResponseMessage and HttpRequestMessage classes and strongly typed Enums to describe many HTTP operations Convention based design that drives you into doing the right thing for HTTP Services Very extensible, based on MVC like extensibility model of Formatters and Filters Self-hostable in non-Web applications Testable using testing concepts similar to MVC Web API is meant to handle any kind of HTTP input and produce output and status codes using the full spectrum of HTTP functionality available in a straight forward and flexible manner. Looking at the list above you can see that a lot of functionality is very similar to ASP.NET MVC, so many ASP.NET developers should feel quite comfortable with the concepts of Web API. The Routing and core infrastructure of Web API are very similar to how MVC works providing many of the benefits of MVC, but with focus on HTTP access and manipulation in Controller methods rather than HTML generation in MVC. There’s much improved support for content negotiation based on HTTP Accept headers with the framework capable of detecting automatically what content the client is sending and requesting and serving the appropriate data format in return. This seems like such a little and obvious thing, but it's really important. Today's service backends often are used by multiple clients/applications and being able to choose the right data format for what fits best for the client is very important. While previous solutions were able to accomplish this using a variety of mixed features of WCF and ASP.NET, Web API combines all this functionality into a single robust server side HTTP framework that intrinsically understands the HTTP semantics and subtly drives you in the right direction for most operations. And when you need to customize or do something that is not built in, there are lots of hooks and overrides for most behaviors, and even many low level hook points that allow you to plug in custom functionality with relatively little effort. No Brainers for Web API There are a few scenarios that are a slam dunk for Web API. If your primary focus of an application or even a part of an application is some sort of API then Web API makes great sense. HTTP ServicesIf you're building a comprehensive HTTP API that is to be consumed over the Web, Web API is a perfect fit. You can isolate the logic in Web API and build your application as a service breaking out the logic into controllers as needed. Because the primary interface is the service there's no confusion of what should go where (MVC or API). Perfect fit. Primary AJAX BackendsIf you're building rich client Web applications that are relying heavily on AJAX callbacks to serve its data, Web API is also a slam dunk. Again because much if not most of the business logic will probably end up in your Web API service logic, there's no confusion over where logic should go and there's no duplication. In Single Page Applications (SPA), typically there's very little HTML based logic served other than bringing up a shell UI and then filling the data from the server with AJAX which means the business logic required for data retrieval and data acceptance and validation too lives in the Web API. Perfect fit. Generic HTTP EndpointsAnother good fit are generic HTTP endpoints that to serve data or handle 'utility' type functionality in typical Web applications. If you need to implement an image server, or an upload handler in the past I'd implement that as an HTTP handler. With Web API you now have a well defined place where you can implement these types of generic 'services' in a location that can easily add endpoints (via Controller methods) or separated out as more full featured APIs. Granted this could be done with MVC as well, but Web API seems a clearer and more well defined place to store generic application services. This is one thing I used to do a lot of in my own libraries and Web API addresses this nicely. Great fit. Mixed HTML and AJAX Applications: Not a clear Choice For all the commonality that Web API and MVC share they are fundamentally different platforms that are independent of each other. A lot of people have asked when does it make sense to use MVC vs. Web API when you're dealing with typical Web application that creates HTML and also uses AJAX functionality for rich functionality. While it's easy to say that all 'service'/AJAX logic should go into a Web API and all HTML related generation into MVC, that can often result in a lot of code duplication. Also MVC supports JSON and XML result data fairly easily as well so there's some confusion where that 'trigger point' is of when you should switch to Web API vs. just implementing functionality as part of MVC controllers. Ultimately there's a tradeoff between isolation of functionality and duplication. A good rule of thumb I think works is that if a large chunk of the application's functionality serves data Web API is a good choice, but if you have a couple of small AJAX requests to serve data to a grid or autocomplete box it'd be overkill to separate out that logic into a separate Web API controller. Web API does add overhead to your application (it's yet another framework that sits on top of core ASP.NET) so it should be worth it .Keep in mind that MVC can generate HTML and JSON/XML and just about any other content easily and that functionality is not going away, so just because you Web API is there it doesn't mean you have to use it. Web API is not a full replacement for MVC obviously either since there's not the same level of support to feed HTML from Web API controllers (although you can host a RazorEngine easily enough if you really want to go that route) so if you're HTML is part of your API or application in general MVC is still a better choice either alone or in combination with Web API. I suspect (and hope) that in the future Web API's functionality will merge even closer with MVC so that you might even be able to mix functionality of both into single Controllers so that you don't have to make any trade offs, but at the moment that's not the case. Some Issues To think about Web API is similar to MVC but not the Same Although Web API looks a lot like MVC it's not the same and some common functionality of MVC behaves differently in Web API. For example, the way single POST variables are handled is different than MVC and doesn't lend itself particularly well to some AJAX scenarios with POST data. Code Duplication I already touched on this in the Mixed HTML and Web API section, but if you build an MVC application that also exposes a Web API it's quite likely that you end up duplicating a bunch of code and - potentially - infrastructure. You may have to create authentication logic both for an HTML application and for the Web API which might need something different altogether. More often than not though the same logic is used, and there's no easy way to share. If you implement an MVC ActionFilter and you want that same functionality in your Web API you'll end up creating the filter twice. AJAX Data or AJAX HTML On a recent post's comments, David made some really good points regarding the commonality of MVC and Web API's and its place. One comment that caught my eye was a little more generic, regarding data services vs. HTML services. David says: I see a lot of merit in the combination of Knockout.js, client side templates and view models, calling Web API for a responsive UI, but sometimes late at night that still leaves me wondering why I would no longer be using some of the nice tooling and features that have evolved in MVC ;-) You know what - I can totally relate to that. On the last Web based mobile app I worked on, we decided to serve HTML partials to the client via AJAX for many (but not all!) things, rather than sending down raw data to inject into the DOM on the client via templating or direct manipulation. While there are definitely more bytes on the wire, with this, the overhead ended up being actually fairly small if you keep the 'data' requests small and atomic. Performance was often made up by the lack of client side rendering of HTML. Server rendered HTML for AJAX templating gives so much better infrastructure support without having to screw around with 20 mismatched client libraries. Especially with MVC and partials it's pretty easy to break out your HTML logic into very small, atomic chunks, so it's actually easy to create small rendering islands that can be used via composition on the server, or via AJAX calls to small, tight partials that return HTML to the client. Although this is often frowned upon as to 'heavy', it worked really well in terms of developer effort as well as providing surprisingly good performance on devices. There's still plenty of jQuery and AJAX logic happening on the client but it's more manageable in small doses rather than trying to do the entire UI composition with JavaScript and/or 'not-quite-there-yet' template engines that are very difficult to debug. This is not an issue directly related to Web API of course, but something to think about especially for AJAX or SPA style applications. Summary Web API is a great new addition to the ASP.NET platform and it addresses a serious need for consolidation of a lot of half-baked HTTP service API technologies that came before it. Web API feels 'right', and hits the right combination of usability and flexibility at least for me and it's a good fit for true API scenarios. However, just because a new platform is available it doesn't meant that other tools or tech that came before it should be discarded or even upgraded to the new platform. There's nothing wrong with continuing to use MVC controller methods to handle API tasks if that's what your app is running now - there's very little to be gained by upgrading to Web API just because. But going forward Web API clearly is the way to go, when building HTTP data interfaces and it's good to see that Microsoft got this one right - it was sorely needed! Resources ASP.NET Web API AspConf Ask the Experts Session (first 5 minutes) © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in Web Api Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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C#/.NET Little Wonders: The Useful But Overlooked Sets

- by James Michael Hare

Once again we consider some of the lesser known classes and keywords of C#. Today we will be looking at two set implementations in the System.Collections.Generic namespace: HashSet<T> and SortedSet<T>. Even though most people think of sets as mathematical constructs, they are actually very useful classes that can be used to help make your application more performant if used appropriately. A Background From Math In mathematical terms, a set is an unordered collection of unique items. In other words, the set {2,3,5} is identical to the set {3,5,2}. In addition, the set {2, 2, 4, 1} would be invalid because it would have a duplicate item (2). In addition, you can perform set arithmetic on sets such as: Intersections: The intersection of two sets is the collection of elements common to both. Example: The intersection of {1,2,5} and {2,4,9} is the set {2}. Unions: The union of two sets is the collection of unique items present in either or both set. Example: The union of {1,2,5} and {2,4,9} is {1,2,4,5,9}. Differences: The difference of two sets is the removal of all items from the first set that are common between the sets. Example: The difference of {1,2,5} and {2,4,9} is {1,5}. Supersets: One set is a superset of a second set if it contains all elements that are in the second set. Example: The set {1,2,5} is a superset of {1,5}. Subsets: One set is a subset of a second set if all the elements of that set are contained in the first set. Example: The set {1,5} is a subset of {1,2,5}. If We’re Not Doing Math, Why Do We Care? Now, you may be thinking: why bother with the set classes in C# if you have no need for mathematical set manipulation? The answer is simple: they are extremely efficient ways to determine ownership in a collection. For example, let’s say you are designing an order system that tracks the price of a particular equity, and once it reaches a certain point will trigger an order. Now, since there’s tens of thousands of equities on the markets, you don’t want to track market data for every ticker as that would be a waste of time and processing power for symbols you don’t have orders for. Thus, we just want to subscribe to the stock symbol for an equity order only if it is a symbol we are not already subscribed to. Every time a new order comes in, we will check the list of subscriptions to see if the new order’s stock symbol is in that list. If it is, great, we already have that market data feed! If not, then and only then should we subscribe to the feed for that symbol. So far so good, we have a collection of symbols and we want to see if a symbol is present in that collection and if not, add it. This really is the essence of set processing, but for the sake of comparison, let’s say you do a list instead: 1: // class that handles are order processing service 2: public sealed class OrderProcessor 3: { 4: // contains list of all symbols we are currently subscribed to 5: private readonly List<string> _subscriptions = new List<string>(); 6: 7: ... 8: } Now whenever you are adding a new order, it would look something like: 1: public PlaceOrderResponse PlaceOrder(Order newOrder) 2: { 3: // do some validation, of course... 4: 5: // check to see if already subscribed, if not add a subscription 6: if (!_subscriptions.Contains(newOrder.Symbol)) 7: { 8: // add the symbol to the list 9: _subscriptions.Add(newOrder.Symbol); 10: 11: // do whatever magic is needed to start a subscription for the symbol 12: } 13: 14: // place the order logic! 15: } What’s wrong with this? In short: performance! Finding an item inside a List<T> is a linear - O(n) – operation, which is not a very performant way to find if an item exists in a collection. (I used to teach algorithms and data structures in my spare time at a local university, and when you began talking about big-O notation you could immediately begin to see eyes glossing over as if it was pure, useless theory that would not apply in the real world, but I did and still do believe it is something worth understanding well to make the best choices in computer science). Let’s think about this: a linear operation means that as the number of items increases, the time that it takes to perform the operation tends to increase in a linear fashion. Put crudely, this means if you double the collection size, you might expect the operation to take something like the order of twice as long. Linear operations tend to be bad for performance because they mean that to perform some operation on a collection, you must potentially “visit” every item in the collection. Consider finding an item in a List<T>: if you want to see if the list has an item, you must potentially check every item in the list before you find it or determine it’s not found. Now, we could of course sort our list and then perform a binary search on it, but sorting is typically a linear-logarithmic complexity – O(n * log n) - and could involve temporary storage. So performing a sort after each add would probably add more time. As an alternative, we could use a SortedList<TKey, TValue> which sorts the list on every Add(), but this has a similar level of complexity to move the items and also requires a key and value, and in our case the key is the value. This is why sets tend to be the best choice for this type of processing: they don’t rely on separate keys and values for ordering – so they save space – and they typically don’t care about ordering – so they tend to be extremely performant. The .NET BCL (Base Class Library) has had the HashSet<T> since .NET 3.5, but at that time it did not implement the ISet<T> interface. As of .NET 4.0, HashSet<T> implements ISet<T> and a new set, the SortedSet<T> was added that gives you a set with ordering. HashSet<T> – For Unordered Storage of Sets When used right, HashSet<T> is a beautiful collection, you can think of it as a simplified Dictionary<T,T>. That is, a Dictionary where the TKey and TValue refer to the same object. This is really an oversimplification, but logically it makes sense. I’ve actually seen people code a Dictionary<T,T> where they store the same thing in the key and the value, and that’s just inefficient because of the extra storage to hold both the key and the value. As it’s name implies, the HashSet<T> uses a hashing algorithm to find the items in the set, which means it does take up some additional space, but it has lightning fast lookups! Compare the times below between HashSet<T> and List<T>: Operation HashSet<T> List<T> Add() O(1) O(1) at end O(n) in middle Remove() O(1) O(n) Contains() O(1) O(n) Now, these times are amortized and represent the typical case. In the very worst case, the operations could be linear if they involve a resizing of the collection – but this is true for both the List and HashSet so that’s a less of an issue when comparing the two. The key thing to note is that in the general case, HashSet is constant time for adds, removes, and contains! This means that no matter how large the collection is, it takes roughly the exact same amount of time to find an item or determine if it’s not in the collection. Compare this to the List where almost any add or remove must rearrange potentially all the elements! And to find an item in the list (if unsorted) you must search every item in the List. So as you can see, if you want to create an unordered collection and have very fast lookup and manipulation, the HashSet is a great collection. And since HashSet<T> implements ICollection<T> and IEnumerable<T>, it supports nearly all the same basic operations as the List<T> and can use the System.Linq extension methods as well. All we have to do to switch from a List<T> to a HashSet<T> is change our declaration. Since List and HashSet support many of the same members, chances are we won’t need to change much else. 1: public sealed class OrderProcessor 2: { 3: private readonly HashSet<string> _subscriptions = new HashSet<string>(); 4: 5: // ... 6: 7: public PlaceOrderResponse PlaceOrder(Order newOrder) 8: { 9: // do some validation, of course... 10: 11: // check to see if already subscribed, if not add a subscription 12: if (!_subscriptions.Contains(newOrder.Symbol)) 13: { 14: // add the symbol to the list 15: _subscriptions.Add(newOrder.Symbol); 16: 17: // do whatever magic is needed to start a subscription for the symbol 18: } 19: 20: // place the order logic! 21: } 22: 23: // ... 24: } 25: Notice, we didn’t change any code other than the declaration for _subscriptions to be a HashSet<T>. Thus, we can pick up the performance improvements in this case with minimal code changes. SortedSet<T> – Ordered Storage of Sets Just like HashSet<T> is logically similar to Dictionary<T,T>, the SortedSet<T> is logically similar to the SortedDictionary<T,T>. The SortedSet can be used when you want to do set operations on a collection, but you want to maintain that collection in sorted order. Now, this is not necessarily mathematically relevant, but if your collection needs do include order, this is the set to use. So the SortedSet seems to be implemented as a binary tree (possibly a red-black tree) internally. Since binary trees are dynamic structures and non-contiguous (unlike List and SortedList) this means that inserts and deletes do not involve rearranging elements, or changing the linking of the nodes. There is some overhead in keeping the nodes in order, but it is much smaller than a contiguous storage collection like a List<T>. Let’s compare the three: Operation HashSet<T> SortedSet<T> List<T> Add() O(1) O(log n) O(1) at end O(n) in middle Remove() O(1) O(log n) O(n) Contains() O(1) O(log n) O(n) The MSDN documentation seems to indicate that operations on SortedSet are O(1), but this seems to be inconsistent with its implementation and seems to be a documentation error. There’s actually a separate MSDN document (here) on SortedSet that indicates that it is, in fact, logarithmic in complexity. Let’s put it in layman’s terms: logarithmic means you can double the collection size and typically you only add a single extra “visit” to an item in the collection. Take that in contrast to List<T>’s linear operation where if you double the size of the collection you double the “visits” to items in the collection. This is very good performance! It’s still not as performant as HashSet<T> where it always just visits one item (amortized), but for the addition of sorting this is a good thing. Consider the following table, now this is just illustrative data of the relative complexities, but it’s enough to get the point: Collection Size O(1) Visits O(log n) Visits O(n) Visits 1 1 1 1 10 1 4 10 100 1 7 100 1000 1 10 1000 Notice that the logarithmic – O(log n) – visit count goes up very slowly compare to the linear – O(n) – visit count. This is because since the list is sorted, it can do one check in the middle of the list, determine which half of the collection the data is in, and discard the other half (binary search). So, if you need your set to be sorted, you can use the SortedSet<T> just like the HashSet<T> and gain sorting for a small performance hit, but it’s still faster than a List<T>. Unique Set Operations Now, if you do want to perform more set-like operations, both implementations of ISet<T> support the following, which play back towards the mathematical set operations described before: IntersectWith() – Performs the set intersection of two sets. Modifies the current set so that it only contains elements also in the second set. UnionWith() – Performs a set union of two sets. Modifies the current set so it contains all elements present both in the current set and the second set. ExceptWith() – Performs a set difference of two sets. Modifies the current set so that it removes all elements present in the second set. IsSupersetOf() – Checks if the current set is a superset of the second set. IsSubsetOf() – Checks if the current set is a subset of the second set. For more information on the set operations themselves, see the MSDN description of ISet<T> (here). What Sets Don’t Do Don’t get me wrong, sets are not silver bullets. You don’t really want to use a set when you want separate key to value lookups, that’s what the IDictionary implementations are best for. Also sets don’t store temporal add-order. That is, if you are adding items to the end of a list all the time, your list is ordered in terms of when items were added to it. This is something the sets don’t do naturally (though you could use a SortedSet with an IComparer with a DateTime but that’s overkill) but List<T> can. Also, List<T> allows indexing which is a blazingly fast way to iterate through items in the collection. Iterating over all the items in a List<T> is generally much, much faster than iterating over a set. Summary Sets are an excellent tool for maintaining a lookup table where the item is both the key and the value. In addition, if you have need for the mathematical set operations, the C# sets support those as well. The HashSet<T> is the set of choice if you want the fastest possible lookups but don’t care about order. In contrast the SortedSet<T> will give you a sorted collection at a slight reduction in performance. Technorati Tags: C#,.Net,Little Wonders,BlackRabbitCoder,ISet,HashSet,SortedSet

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Flex ItemRenderer/Editor ComboBox Issue...Puhleezz Help

- by Mohit

Hi EveryOne Beginner in Flex ...Even worse with item renderers... Have managed to add a Combobox to a datagrid using a itemEditor... I want to change the options in a combo box depending on the value selected by the user on a previous combo.. In the combo box i want to display a certain value (Model Name ) but for quering a table i'll pass the corresponding code of the model :(... sounds simple enough ..unfortunately not able to implement it I have found this problem on this site but the solution seems an overkill for my "small" problem..was hoping if anyone could guide me towards a more simpler solution... My xml comes as <item><mstValue>CH1</mstValue><mstRemarks>CARRIER</mstRemarks></item> <item><mstValue>CH2</mstValue><mstRemarks>TRANS</mstRemarks></item> <item><mstValue>CH3</mstValue><mstRemarks>YORK</mstRemarks></item> Now i have been able to show the values in a combo .if user selects CARRIER i want to pass CH1(dont know how to do it with itemeditors)...and then fetch values corresponding to CH1 from a table (second part of the problem)...in the sample below i used this.parentDocument.modelComboChanged(this.selectedItem) to pass the selected value ...instedd i need to pass the code for it which comes from the xml...Pls help this making me go crazy.... <mx:DataGrid id="chillerGrid" dataProvider="{chillerGridDp}" editable="true" itemRollOver="{ComponentUtil.setTooltip(event,this)}" itemRollOut="ComponentUtil.resetTooltip(event)" width="70%" height="160"> <mx:columns> <mx:DataGridColumn id="test" headerText="Model" dataField="model" editorDataField="value" editable="true" backgroundColor="#f4f2bd" width="100" > <mx:itemEditor> <mx:Component> <mx:ComboBox creationComplete="{if(text=='')selectedIndex=0;if(data && data.contactType!=undefined)text=data.contactType.text();}" change="{if(text == ''){selectedIndex=0;if(data && data.contactType!=undefined)text=data.contactType.text();};this.parentDocument.modelComboChanged(this.selectedItem)}" dataProvider="{this.parentDocument.arrColl1}" text="mstRemarks" labelField="mstRemarks" editable = "false" >  </mx:ComboBox>  </mx:Component> </mx:itemEditor> </mx:DataGridColumn> <mx:DataGridColumn headerText="Make" dataField="make" editorDataField="value" editable="true" backgroundColor="#f4f2bd" width="100" > <mx:itemEditor> <mx:Component> <mx:ComboBox creationComplete="{if(text=='')selectedIndex=0;if(data && data.contactType!=undefined)text=data.contactType.text();}" change="{if(text == ''){selectedIndex=0;if(data && data.contactType!=undefined)text=data.contactType.text();} }" labelField="@label" editable = "false" > <mx:dataProvider> <mx:String></mx:String> <mx:String>Carrier</mx:String> <mx:String>York</mx:String> <mx:String>Trane</mx:String> </mx:dataProvider> </mx:ComboBox> </mx:Component> </mx:itemEditor> </mx:DataGridColumn> <mx:DataGridColumn headerText="Chillers" dataField="chillers" width="200" editable="true"> <mx:itemEditor> <mx:Component> <mx:TextInput maxChars="49" /> </mx:Component> </mx:itemEditor> </mx:DataGridColumn> </mx:columns> </mx:DataGrid>

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Dynamically register constructor methods in an AbstractFactory at compile time using C++ templates

- by Horacio

When implementing a MessageFactory class to instatiate Message objects I used something like: class MessageFactory { public: static Message *create(int type) { switch(type) { case PING_MSG: return new PingMessage(); case PONG_MSG: return new PongMessage(); .... } } This works ok but every time I add a new message I have to add a new XXX_MSG and modify the switch statement. After some research I found a way to dynamically update the MessageFactory at compile time so I can add as many messages as I want without need to modify the MessageFactory itself. This allows for cleaner and easier to maintain code as I do not need to modify three different places to add/remove message classes: #include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> #include <string.h> #include <inttypes.h> class Message { protected: inline Message() {}; public: inline virtual ~Message() { } inline int getMessageType() const { return m_type; } virtual void say() = 0; protected: uint16_t m_type; }; template<int TYPE, typename IMPL> class MessageTmpl: public Message { enum { _MESSAGE_ID = TYPE }; public: static Message* Create() { return new IMPL(); } static const uint16_t MESSAGE_ID; // for registration protected: MessageTmpl() { m_type = MESSAGE_ID; } //use parameter to instanciate template }; typedef Message* (*t_pfFactory)(); class MessageFactory· { public: static uint16_t Register(uint16_t msgid, t_pfFactory factoryMethod) { printf("Registering constructor for msg id %d\n", msgid); m_List[msgid] = factoryMethod; return msgid; } static Message *Create(uint16_t msgid) { return m_List[msgid](); } static t_pfFactory m_List[65536]; }; template <int TYPE, typename IMPL> const uint16_t MessageTmpl<TYPE, IMPL >::MESSAGE_ID = MessageFactory::Register( MessageTmpl<TYPE, IMPL >::_MESSAGE_ID, &MessageTmpl<TYPE, IMPL >::Create); class PingMessage: public MessageTmpl < 10, PingMessage > {· public: PingMessage() {} virtual void say() { printf("Ping\n"); } }; class PongMessage: public MessageTmpl < 11, PongMessage > {· public: PongMessage() {} virtual void say() { printf("Pong\n"); } }; t_pfFactory MessageFactory::m_List[65536]; int main(int argc, char **argv) { Message *msg1; Message *msg2; msg1 = MessageFactory::Create(10); msg1->say(); msg2 = MessageFactory::Create(11); msg2->say(); delete msg1; delete msg2; return 0; } The template here does the magic by registering into the MessageFactory class, all new Message classes (e.g. PingMessage and PongMessage) that subclass from MessageTmpl. This works great and simplifies code maintenance but I still have some questions about this technique: Is this a known technique/pattern? what is the name? I want to search more info about it. I want to make the array for storing new constructors MessageFactory::m_List[65536] a std::map but doing so causes the program to segfault even before reaching main(). Creating an array of 65536 elements is overkill but I have not found a way to make this a dynamic container. For all message classes that are subclasses of MessageTmpl I have to implement the constructor. If not it won't register in the MessageFactory. For example commenting the constructor of the PongMessage: class PongMessage: public MessageTmpl < 11, PongMessage > { public: //PongMessage() {} /* HERE */ virtual void say() { printf("Pong\n"); } }; would result in the PongMessage class not being registered by the MessageFactory and the program would segfault in the MessageFactory::Create(11) line. The question is why the class won't register? Having to add the empty implementation of the 100+ messages I need feels inefficient and unnecessary.

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Google and Bing Map APIs Compared

- by SGWellens

At one of the local golf courses I frequent, there is an open grass field next to the course. It is about eight acres in size and mowed regularly. It is permissible to hit golf balls there—you bring and shag our own balls. My golf colleagues and I spend hours there practicing, chatting and in general just wasting time. One of the guys brings Ginger, the amazing, incredible, wonder dog. Ginger is a Portuguese Pointer. She chases squirrels, begs for snacks and supervises us closely to make sure we don't misbehave. Anyway, I decided to make a dedicated web page to measure distances on the field in yards using online mapping services. I started with Google maps and then did the same application with Bing maps. It is a good way to become familiar with the APIs. Here are images of the final two maps: Google: Bing: To start with online mapping services, you need to visit the respective websites and get a developers key. I pared the code down to the minimum to make it easier to compare the APIs. Google maps required this CSS (or it wouldn't work): <style type="text/css"> html { height: 100%; } body { height: 100%; margin: 0; padding: 0; } Here is how the map scripts are included. Google requires the developer Key when loading the JavaScript, Bing requires it when the map object is created: Google: <script type="text/javascript" src="https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/js?key=XXXXXXX&libraries=geometry&sensor=false" > </script> Bing: <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ecn.dev.virtualearth.net/mapcontrol/mapcontrol.ashx?v=7.0"> </script> Note: I use jQuery to manipulate the DOM elements which may be overkill, but I may add more stuff to this application and I didn't want to have to add it later. Plus, I really like jQuery. Here is how the maps are created: Common Code (the same for both Google and Bing Maps): <script type="text/javascript"> var gTheMap; var gMarker1; var gMarker2; $(document).ready(DocLoaded); function DocLoaded() { // golf course coordinates var StartLat = 44.924254; var StartLng = -93.366859; // what element to display the map in var mapdiv = $("#map_div")[0]; Google: // where on earth the map should display var StartPoint = new google.maps.LatLng(StartLat, StartLng); // create the map gTheMap = new google.maps.Map(mapdiv, { center: StartPoint, zoom: 18, mapTypeId: google.maps.MapTypeId.SATELLITE }); // place two markers marker1 = PlaceMarker(new google.maps.LatLng(StartLat, StartLng + .0001)); marker2 = PlaceMarker(new google.maps.LatLng(StartLat, StartLng - .0001)); DragEnd(null); } Bing: // where on earth the map should display var StartPoint = new Microsoft.Maps.Location(StartLat, StartLng); // create the map gTheMap = new Microsoft.Maps.Map(mapdiv, { credentials: 'Asbsa_hzfHl69XF3wxBd_WbW0dLNTRUH3ZHQG9qcV5EFRLuWEaOP1hjWdZ0A0P17', center: StartPoint, zoom: 18, mapTypeId: Microsoft.Maps.MapTypeId.aerial }); // place two markers marker1 = PlaceMarker(new Microsoft.Maps.Location(StartLat, StartLng + .0001)); marker2 = PlaceMarker(new Microsoft.Maps.Location(StartLat, StartLng - .0001)); DragEnd(null); } Note: In the Bing documentation, mapTypeId: was missing from the list of options even though the sample code included it. Note: When creating the Bing map, use the developer Key for the credentials property. I immediately place two markers/pins on the map which is simpler that creating them on the fly with mouse clicks (as I first tried). The markers/pins are draggable and I capture the DragEnd event to calculate and display the distance in yards and draw a line when the user finishes dragging. Here is the code to place a marker: Google: // ---- PlaceMarker ------------------------------------ function PlaceMarker(location) { var marker = new google.maps.Marker( { position: location, map: gTheMap, draggable: true }); marker.addListener('dragend', DragEnd); return marker; } Bing: // ---- PlaceMarker ------------------------------------ function PlaceMarker(location) { var marker = new Microsoft.Maps.Pushpin(location, { draggable : true }); Microsoft.Maps.Events.addHandler(marker, 'dragend', DragEnd); gTheMap.entities.push(marker); return marker; } Here is the code than runs when the user stops dragging a marker: Google: // ---- DragEnd ------------------------------------------- var gLine = null; function DragEnd(Event) { var meters = google.maps.geometry.spherical.computeDistanceBetween(marker1.position, marker2.position); var yards = meters * 1.0936133; $("#message").text(yards.toFixed(1) + ' yards'); // draw a line connecting the points var Endpoints = [marker1.position, marker2.position]; if (gLine == null) { gLine = new google.maps.Polyline({ path: Endpoints, strokeColor: "#FFFF00", strokeOpacity: 1.0, strokeWeight: 2, map: gTheMap }); } else gLine.setPath(Endpoints); } Bing: // ---- DragEnd ------------------------------------------- var gLine = null; function DragEnd(Args) { var Distance = CalculateDistance(marker1._location, marker2._location); $("#message").text(Distance.toFixed(1) + ' yards'); // draw a line connecting the points var Endpoints = [marker1._location, marker2._location]; if (gLine == null) { gLine = new Microsoft.Maps.Polyline(Endpoints, { strokeColor: new Microsoft.Maps.Color(0xFF, 0xFF, 0xFF, 0), // aRGB strokeThickness : 2 }); gTheMap.entities.push(gLine); } else gLine.setLocations(Endpoints); } Note: I couldn't find a function to calculate the distance between points in the Bing API, so I wrote my own (CalculateDistance). If you want to see the source for it, you can pick it off the web page. Note: I was able to verify the accuracy of the measurements by using the golf hole next to the field. I put a pin/marker on the center of the green, and then by zooming in, I was able to see the 150 markers on the fairway and put the other pin/marker on one of them. Final Notes: All in all, the APIs are very similar. Both made it easy to accomplish a lot with a minimum amount of code. In one aerial view, there are leaves on the tree, in the other, the trees are bare. I don't know which service has the newer data. Here are links to working pages: Bing Map Demo Google Map Demo I hope someone finds this useful. Steve Wellens CodeProject

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Google and Bing Map APIs Compared

- by SGWellens

At one of the local golf courses I frequent, there is an open grass field next to the course. It is about eight acres in size and mowed regularly. It is permissible to hit golf balls there—you bring and shag our own balls. My golf colleagues and I spend hours there practicing, chatting and in general just wasting time. One of the guys brings Ginger, the amazing, incredible, wonder dog. Ginger is a Hungarian Vizlas (or Hungarian pointer). She chases squirrels, begs for snacks and supervises us closely to make sure we don't misbehave. Anyway, I decided to make a dedicated web page to measure distances on the field in yards using online mapping services. I started with Google maps and then did the same application with Bing maps. It is a good way to become familiar with the APIs. Here are images of the final two maps: Google: Bing: To start with online mapping services, you need to visit the respective websites and get a developers key. I pared the code down to the minimum to make it easier to compare the APIs. Google maps required this CSS (or it wouldn't work): <style type="text/css"> html { height: 100%; } body { height: 100%; margin: 0; padding: 0; } Here is how the map scripts are included. Google requires the developer Key when loading the JavaScript, Bing requires it when the map object is created: Google: <script type="text/javascript" src="https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/js?key=XXXXXXX&libraries=geometry&sensor=false" > </script> Bing: <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ecn.dev.virtualearth.net/mapcontrol/mapcontrol.ashx?v=7.0"> </script> Note: I use jQuery to manipulate the DOM elements which may be overkill, but I may add more stuff to this application and I didn't want to have to add it later. Plus, I really like jQuery. Here is how the maps are created: Common Code (the same for both Google and Bing Maps): <script type="text/javascript"> var gTheMap; var gMarker1; var gMarker2; $(document).ready(DocLoaded); function DocLoaded() { // golf course coordinates var StartLat = 44.924254; var StartLng = -93.366859; // what element to display the map in var mapdiv = $("#map_div")[0]; Google: // where on earth the map should display var StartPoint = new google.maps.LatLng(StartLat, StartLng); // create the map gTheMap = new google.maps.Map(mapdiv, { center: StartPoint, zoom: 18, mapTypeId: google.maps.MapTypeId.SATELLITE }); // place two markers marker1 = PlaceMarker(new google.maps.LatLng(StartLat, StartLng + .0001)); marker2 = PlaceMarker(new google.maps.LatLng(StartLat, StartLng - .0001)); DragEnd(null); } Bing: // where on earth the map should display var StartPoint = new Microsoft.Maps.Location(StartLat, StartLng); // create the map gTheMap = new Microsoft.Maps.Map(mapdiv, { credentials: 'XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX', center: StartPoint, zoom: 18, mapTypeId: Microsoft.Maps.MapTypeId.aerial }); // place two markers marker1 = PlaceMarker(new Microsoft.Maps.Location(StartLat, StartLng + .0001)); marker2 = PlaceMarker(new Microsoft.Maps.Location(StartLat, StartLng - .0001)); DragEnd(null); } Note: In the Bing documentation, mapTypeId: was missing from the list of options even though the sample code included it. Note: When creating the Bing map, use the developer Key for the credentials property. I immediately place two markers/pins on the map which is simpler that creating them on the fly with mouse clicks (as I first tried). The markers/pins are draggable and I capture the DragEnd event to calculate and display the distance in yards and draw a line when the user finishes dragging. Here is the code to place a marker: Google: // ---- PlaceMarker ------------------------------------ function PlaceMarker(location) { var marker = new google.maps.Marker( { position: location, map: gTheMap, draggable: true }); marker.addListener('dragend', DragEnd); return marker; } Bing: // ---- PlaceMarker ------------------------------------ function PlaceMarker(location) { var marker = new Microsoft.Maps.Pushpin(location, { draggable : true }); Microsoft.Maps.Events.addHandler(marker, 'dragend', DragEnd); gTheMap.entities.push(marker); return marker; } Here is the code than runs when the user stops dragging a marker: Google: // ---- DragEnd ------------------------------------------- var gLine = null; function DragEnd(Event) { var meters = google.maps.geometry.spherical.computeDistanceBetween(marker1.position, marker2.position); var yards = meters * 1.0936133; $("#message").text(yards.toFixed(1) + ' yards'); // draw a line connecting the points var Endpoints = [marker1.position, marker2.position]; if (gLine == null) { gLine = new google.maps.Polyline({ path: Endpoints, strokeColor: "#FFFF00", strokeOpacity: 1.0, strokeWeight: 2, map: gTheMap }); } else gLine.setPath(Endpoints); } Bing: // ---- DragEnd ------------------------------------------- var gLine = null; function DragEnd(Args) { var Distance = CalculateDistance(marker1._location, marker2._location); $("#message").text(Distance.toFixed(1) + ' yards'); // draw a line connecting the points var Endpoints = [marker1._location, marker2._location]; if (gLine == null) { gLine = new Microsoft.Maps.Polyline(Endpoints, { strokeColor: new Microsoft.Maps.Color(0xFF, 0xFF, 0xFF, 0), // aRGB strokeThickness : 2 }); gTheMap.entities.push(gLine); } else gLine.setLocations(Endpoints); } Note: I couldn't find a function to calculate the distance between points in the Bing API, so I wrote my own (CalculateDistance). If you want to see the source for it, you can pick it off the web page. Note: I was able to verify the accuracy of the measurements by using the golf hole next to the field. I put a pin/marker on the center of the green, and then by zooming in, I was able to see the 150 markers on the fairway and put the other pin/marker on one of them. Final Notes: All in all, the APIs are very similar. Both made it easy to accomplish a lot with a minimum amount of code. In one aerial view, there are leaves on the tree, in the other, the trees are bare. I don't know which service has the newer data. Here are links to working pages: Bing Map Demo Google Map Demo I hope someone finds this useful. Steve Wellens CodeProject

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West Wind WebSurge - an easy way to Load Test Web Applications

- by Rick Strahl

A few months ago on a project the subject of load testing came up. We were having some serious issues with a Web application that would start spewing SQL lock errors under somewhat heavy load. These sort of errors can be tough to catch, precisely because they only occur under load and not during typical development testing. To replicate this error more reliably we needed to put a load on the application and run it for a while before these SQL errors would flare up. It’s been a while since I’d looked at load testing tools, so I spent a bit of time looking at different tools and frankly didn’t really find anything that was a good fit. A lot of tools were either a pain to use, didn’t have the basic features I needed, or are extravagantly expensive. In the end I got frustrated enough to build an initially small custom load test solution that then morphed into a more generic library, then gained a console front end and eventually turned into a full blown Web load testing tool that is now called West Wind WebSurge. I got seriously frustrated looking for tools every time I needed some quick and dirty load testing for an application. If my aim is to just put an application under heavy enough load to find a scalability problem in code, or to simply try and push an application to its limits on the hardware it’s running I shouldn’t have to have to struggle to set up tests. It should be easy enough to get going in a few minutes, so that the testing can be set up quickly so that it can be done on a regular basis without a lot of hassle. And that was the goal when I started to build out my initial custom load tester into a more widely usable tool. If you’re in a hurry and you want to check it out, you can find more information and download links here: West Wind WebSurge Product Page Walk through Video Download link (zip) Install from Chocolatey Source on GitHub For a more detailed discussion of the why’s and how’s and some background continue reading. How did I get here? When I started out on this path, I wasn’t planning on building a tool like this myself – but I got frustrated enough looking at what’s out there to think that I can do better than what’s available for the most common simple load testing scenarios. When we ran into the SQL lock problems I mentioned, I started looking around what’s available for Web load testing solutions that would work for our whole team which consisted of a few developers and a couple of IT guys both of which needed to be able to run the tests. It had been a while since I looked at tools and I figured that by now there should be some good solutions out there, but as it turns out I didn’t really find anything that fit our relatively simple needs without costing an arm and a leg… I spent the better part of a day installing and trying various load testing tools and to be frank most of them were either terrible at what they do, incredibly unfriendly to use, used some terminology I couldn’t even parse, or were extremely expensive (and I mean in the ‘sell your liver’ range of expensive). Pick your poison. There are also a number of online solutions for load testing and they actually looked more promising, but those wouldn’t work well for our scenario as the application is running inside of a private VPN with no outside access into the VPN. Most of those online solutions also ended up being very pricey as well – presumably because of the bandwidth required to test over the open Web can be enormous. When I asked around on Twitter what people were using– I got mostly… crickets. Several people mentioned Visual Studio Load Test, and most other suggestions pointed to online solutions. I did get a bunch of responses though with people asking to let them know what I found – apparently I’m not alone when it comes to finding load testing tools that are effective and easy to use. As to Visual Studio, the higher end skus of Visual Studio and the test edition include a Web load testing tool, which is quite powerful, but there are a number of issues with that: First it’s tied to Visual Studio so it’s not very portable – you need a VS install. I also find the test setup and terminology used by the VS test runner extremely confusing. Heck, it’s complicated enough that there’s even a Pluralsight course on using the Visual Studio Web test from Steve Smith. And of course you need to have one of the high end Visual Studio Skus, and those are mucho Dinero ($$$) – just for the load testing that’s rarely an option. Some of the tools are ultra extensive and let you run analysis tools on the target serves which is useful, but in most cases – just plain overkill and only distracts from what I tend to be ultimately interested in: Reproducing problems that occur at high load, and finding the upper limits and ‘what if’ scenarios as load is ramped up increasingly against a site. Yes it’s useful to have Web app instrumentation, but often that’s not what you’re interested in. I still fondly remember early days of Web testing when Microsoft had the WAST (Web Application Stress Tool) tool, which was rather simple – and also somewhat limited – but easily allowed you to create stress tests very quickly. It had some serious limitations (mainly that it didn’t work with SSL), but the idea behind it was excellent: Create tests quickly and easily and provide a decent engine to run it locally with minimal setup. You could get set up and run tests within a few minutes. Unfortunately, that tool died a quiet death as so many of Microsoft’s tools that probably were built by an intern and then abandoned, even though there was a lot of potential and it was actually fairly widely used. Eventually the tools was no longer downloadable and now it simply doesn’t work anymore on higher end hardware. West Wind Web Surge – Making Load Testing Quick and Easy So I ended up creating West Wind WebSurge out of rebellious frustration… The goal of WebSurge is to make it drop dead simple to create load tests. It’s super easy to capture sessions either using the built in capture tool (big props to Eric Lawrence, Telerik and FiddlerCore which made that piece a snap), using the full version of Fiddler and exporting sessions, or by manually or programmatically creating text files based on plain HTTP headers to create requests. I’ve been using this tool for 4 months now on a regular basis on various projects as a reality check for performance and scalability and it’s worked extremely well for finding small performance issues. I also use it regularly as a simple URL tester, as it allows me to quickly enter a URL plus headers and content and test that URL and its results along with the ability to easily save one or more of those URLs. A few weeks back I made a walk through video that goes over most of the features of WebSurge in some detail: Note that the UI has slightly changed since then, so there are some UI improvements. Most notably the test results screen has been updated recently to a different layout and to provide more information about each URL in a session at a glance. The video and the main WebSurge site has a lot of info of basic operations. For the rest of this post I’ll talk about a few deeper aspects that may be of interest while also giving a glance at how WebSurge works. Session Capturing As you would expect, WebSurge works with Sessions of Urls that are played back under load. Here’s what the main Session View looks like: You can create session entries manually by individually adding URLs to test (on the Request tab on the right) and saving them, or you can capture output from Web Browsers, Windows Desktop applications that call services, your own applications using the built in Capture tool. With this tool you can capture anything HTTP -SSL requests and content from Web pages, AJAX calls, SOAP or REST services – again anything that uses Windows or .NET HTTP APIs. Behind the scenes the capture tool uses FiddlerCore so basically anything you can capture with Fiddler you can also capture with Web Surge Session capture tool. Alternately you can actually use Fiddler as well, and then export the captured Fiddler trace to a file, which can then be imported into WebSurge. This is a nice way to let somebody capture session without having to actually install WebSurge or for your customers to provide an exact playback scenario for a given set of URLs that cause a problem perhaps. Note that not all applications work with Fiddler’s proxy unless you configure a proxy. For example, .NET Web applications that make HTTP calls usually don’t show up in Fiddler by default. For those .NET applications you can explicitly override proxy settings to capture those requests to service calls. The capture tool also has handy optional filters that allow you to filter by domain, to help block out noise that you typically don’t want to include in your requests. For example, if your pages include links to CDNs, or Google Analytics or social links you typically don’t want to include those in your load test, so by capturing just from a specific domain you are guaranteed content from only that one domain. Additionally you can provide url filters in the configuration file – filters allow to provide filter strings that if contained in a url will cause requests to be ignored. Again this is useful if you don’t filter by domain but you want to filter out things like static image, css and script files etc. Often you’re not interested in the load characteristics of these static and usually cached resources as they just add noise to tests and often skew the overall url performance results. In my testing I tend to care only about my dynamic requests. SSL Captures require Fiddler Note, that in order to capture SSL requests you’ll have to install the Fiddler’s SSL certificate. The easiest way to do this is to install Fiddler and use its SSL configuration options to get the certificate into the local certificate store. There’s a document on the Telerik site that provides the exact steps to get SSL captures to work with Fiddler and therefore with WebSurge. Session Storage A group of URLs entered or captured make up a Session. Sessions can be saved and restored easily as they use a very simple text format that simply stored on disk. The format is slightly customized HTTP header traces separated by a separator line. The headers are standard HTTP headers except that the full URL instead of just the domain relative path is stored as part of the 1st HTTP header line for easier parsing. Because it’s just text and uses the same format that Fiddler uses for exports, it’s super easy to create Sessions by hand manually or under program control writing out to a simple text file. You can see what this format looks like in the Capture window figure above – the raw captured format is also what’s stored to disk and what WebSurge parses from. The only ‘custom’ part of these headers is that 1st line contains the full URL instead of the domain relative path and Host: header. The rest of each header are just plain standard HTTP headers with each individual URL isolated by a separator line. The format used here also uses what Fiddler produces for exports, so it’s easy to exchange or view data either in Fiddler or WebSurge. Urls can also be edited interactively so you can modify the headers easily as well: Again – it’s just plain HTTP headers so anything you can do with HTTP can be added here. Use it for single URL Testing Incidentally I’ve also found this form as an excellent way to test and replay individual URLs for simple non-load testing purposes. Because you can capture a single or many URLs and store them on disk, this also provides a nice HTTP playground where you can record URLs with their headers, and fire them one at a time or as a session and see results immediately. It’s actually an easy way for REST presentations and I find the simple UI flow actually easier than using Fiddler natively. Finally you can save one or more URLs as a session for later retrieval. I’m using this more and more for simple URL checks. Overriding Cookies and Domains Speaking of HTTP headers – you can also overwrite cookies used as part of the options. One thing that happens with modern Web applications is that you have session cookies in use for authorization. These cookies tend to expire at some point which would invalidate a test. Using the Options dialog you can actually override the cookie: which replaces the cookie for all requests with the cookie value specified here. You can capture a valid cookie from a manual HTTP request in your browser and then paste into the cookie field, to replace the existing Cookie with the new one that is now valid. Likewise you can easily replace the domain so if you captured urls on west-wind.com and now you want to test on localhost you can do that easily easily as well. You could even do something like capture on store.west-wind.com and then test on localhost/store which would also work. Running Load Tests Once you’ve created a Session you can specify the length of the test in seconds, and specify the number of simultaneous threads to run each session on. Sessions run through each of the URLs in the session sequentially by default. One option in the options list above is that you can also randomize the URLs so each thread runs requests in a different order. This avoids bunching up URLs initially when tests start as all threads run the same requests simultaneously which can sometimes skew the results of the first few minutes of a test. While sessions run some progress information is displayed: By default there’s a live view of requests displayed in a Console-like window. On the bottom of the window there’s a running total summary that displays where you’re at in the test, how many requests have been processed and what the requests per second count is currently for all requests. Note that for tests that run over a thousand requests a second it’s a good idea to turn off the console display. While the console display is nice to see that something is happening and also gives you slight idea what’s happening with actual requests, once a lot of requests are processed, this UI updating actually adds a lot of CPU overhead to the application which may cause the actual load generated to be reduced. If you are running a 1000 requests a second there’s not much to see anyway as requests roll by way too fast to see individual lines anyway. If you look on the options panel, there is a NoProgressEvents option that disables the console display. Note that the summary display is still updated approximately once a second so you can always tell that the test is still running. Test Results When the test is done you get a simple Results display: On the right you get an overall summary as well as breakdown by each URL in the session. Both success and failures are highlighted so it’s easy to see what’s breaking in your load test. The report can be printed or you can also open the HTML document in your default Web Browser for printing to PDF or saving the HTML document to disk. The list on the right shows you a partial list of the URLs that were fired so you can look in detail at the request and response data. The list can be filtered by success and failure requests. Each list is partial only (at the moment) and limited to a max of 1000 items in order to render reasonably quickly. Each item in the list can be clicked to see the full request and response data: This particularly useful for errors so you can quickly see and copy what request data was used and in the case of a GET request you can also just click the link to quickly jump to the page. For non-GET requests you can find the URL in the Session list, and use the context menu to Test the URL as configured including any HTTP content data to send. You get to see the full HTTP request and response as well as a link in the Request header to go visit the actual page. Not so useful for a POST as above, but definitely useful for GET requests. Finally you can also get a few charts. The most useful one is probably the Request per Second chart which can be accessed from the Charts menu or shortcut. Here’s what it looks like: Results can also be exported to JSON, XML and HTML. Keep in mind that these files can get very large rather quickly though, so exports can end up taking a while to complete. Command Line Interface WebSurge runs with a small core load engine and this engine is plugged into the front end application I’ve shown so far. There’s also a command line interface available to run WebSurge from the Windows command prompt. Using the command line you can run tests for either an individual URL (similar to AB.exe for example) or a full Session file. By default when it runs WebSurgeCli shows progress every second showing total request count, failures and the requests per second for the entire test. A silent option can turn off this progress display and display only the results. The command line interface can be useful for build integration which allows checking for failures perhaps or hitting a specific requests per second count etc. It’s also nice to use this as quick and dirty URL test facility similar to the way you’d use Apache Bench (ab.exe). Unlike ab.exe though, WebSurgeCli supports SSL and makes it much easier to create multi-URL tests using either manual editing or the WebSurge UI. Current Status Currently West Wind WebSurge is still in Beta status. I’m still adding small new features and tweaking the UI in an attempt to make it as easy and self-explanatory as possible to run. Documentation for the UI and specialty features is also still a work in progress. I plan on open-sourcing this product, but it won’t be free. There’s a free version available that provides a limited number of threads and request URLs to run. A relatively low cost license removes the thread and request limitations. Pricing info can be found on the Web site – there’s an introductory price which is $99 at the moment which I think is reasonable compared to most other for pay solutions out there that are exorbitant by comparison… The reason code is not available yet is – well, the UI portion of the app is a bit embarrassing in its current monolithic state. The UI started as a very simple interface originally that later got a lot more complex – yeah, that never happens, right? Unless there’s a lot of interest I don’t foresee re-writing the UI entirely (which would be ideal), but in the meantime at least some cleanup is required before I dare to publish it :-). The code will likely be released with version 1.0. I’m very interested in feedback. Do you think this could be useful to you and provide value over other tools you may or may not have used before? I hope so – it already has provided a ton of value for me and the work I do that made the development worthwhile at this point. You can leave a comment below, or for more extensive discussions you can post a message on the West Wind Message Board in the WebSurge section Microsoft MVPs and Insiders get a free License If you’re a Microsoft MVP or a Microsoft Insider you can get a full license for free. Send me a link to your current, official Microsoft profile and I’ll send you a not-for resale license. Send any messages to [email protected]. Resources For more info on WebSurge and to download it to try it out, use the following links. West Wind WebSurge Home Download West Wind WebSurge Getting Started with West Wind WebSurge Video© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2014Posted in ASP.NET Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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Extending NerdDinner: Adding Geolocated Flair

- by Jon Galloway

NerdDinner is a website with the audacious goal of “Organizing the world’s nerds and helping them eat in packs.” Because nerds aren’t likely to socialize with others unless a website tells them to do it. Scott Hanselman showed off a lot of the cool features we’ve added to NerdDinner lately during his popular talk at MIX10, Beyond File | New Company: From Cheesy Sample to Social Platform. Did you miss it? Go ahead and watch it, I’ll wait. One of the features we wanted to add was flair. You know about flair, right? It’s a way to let folks who like your site show it off in their own site. For example, here’s my StackOverflow flair: Great! So how could we add some of this flair stuff to NerdDinner? What do we want to show? If we’re going to encourage our users to give up a bit of their beautiful website to show off a bit of ours, we need to think about what they’ll want to show. For instance, my StackOverflow flair is all about me, not StackOverflow. So how will this apply to NerdDinner? Since NerdDinner is all about organizing local dinners, in order for the flair to be useful it needs to make sense for the person viewing the web page. If someone visits from Egypt visits my blog, they should see information about NerdDinners in Egypt. That’s geolocation – localizing site content based on where the browser’s sitting, and it makes sense for flair as well as entire websites. So we’ll set up a simple little callout that prompts them to host a dinner in their area: Hopefully our flair works and there is a dinner near your viewers, so they’ll see another view which lists upcoming dinners near them: The Geolocation Part Generally website geolocation is done by mapping the requestor’s IP address to a geographic area. It’s not an exact science, but I’ve always found it to be pretty accurate. There are (at least) three ways to handle it: You pay somebody like MaxMind for a database (with regular updates) that sits on your server, and you use their API to do lookups. I used this on a pretty big project a few years ago and it worked well. You use HTML 5 Geolocation API or Google Gears or some other browser based solution. I think those are cool (I use Google Gears a lot), but they’re both in flux right now and I don’t think either has a wide enough of an install base yet to rely on them. You might want to, but I’ve heard you do all kinds of crazy stuff, and sometimes it gets you in trouble. I don’t mean talk out of line, but we all laugh behind your back a bit. But, hey, it’s up to you. It’s your flair or whatever. There are some free webservices out there that will take an IP address and give you location information. Easy, and works for everyone. That’s what we’re doing. I looked at a few different services and settled on IPInfoDB. It’s free, has a great API, and even returns JSON, which is handy for Javascript use. The IP query is pretty simple. We hit a URL like this: http://ipinfodb.com/ip_query.php?ip=74.125.45.100&timezone=false … and we get an XML response back like this… <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <Response> <Ip>74.125.45.100</Ip> <Status>OK</Status> <CountryCode>US</CountryCode> <CountryName>United States</CountryName> <RegionCode>06</RegionCode> <RegionName>California</RegionName> <City>Mountain View</City> <ZipPostalCode>94043</ZipPostalCode> <Latitude>37.4192</Latitude> <Longitude>-122.057</Longitude> </Response> So we’ll build some data transfer classes to hold the location information, like this: public class LocationInfo { public string Country { get; set; } public string RegionName { get; set; } public string City { get; set; } public string ZipPostalCode { get; set; } public LatLong Position { get; set; } } public class LatLong { public float Lat { get; set; } public float Long { get; set; } } And now hitting the service is pretty simple: public static LocationInfo HostIpToPlaceName(string ip) { string url = "http://ipinfodb.com/ip_query.php?ip={0}&timezone=false"; url = String.Format(url, ip); var result = XDocument.Load(url); var location = (from x in result.Descendants("Response") select new LocationInfo { City = (string)x.Element("City"), RegionName = (string)x.Element("RegionName"), Country = (string)x.Element("CountryName"), ZipPostalCode = (string)x.Element("CountryName"), Position = new LatLong { Lat = (float)x.Element("Latitude"), Long = (float)x.Element("Longitude") } }).First(); return location; } Getting The User’s IP Okay, but first we need the end user’s IP, and you’d think it would be as simple as reading the value from HttpContext: HttpContext.Current.Request.UserHostAddress But you’d be wrong. Sorry. UserHostAddress just wraps HttpContext.Current.Request.ServerVariables["REMOTE_ADDR"], but that doesn’t get you the IP for users behind a proxy. That’s in another header, “HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR". So you can either hit a wrapper and then check a header, or just check two headers. I went for uniformity: string SourceIP = string.IsNullOrEmpty(Request.ServerVariables["HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR"]) ? Request.ServerVariables["REMOTE_ADDR"] : Request.ServerVariables["HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR"]; We’re almost set to wrap this up, but first let’s talk about our views. Yes, views, because we’ll have two. Selecting the View We wanted to make it easy for people to include the flair in their sites, so we looked around at how other people were doing this. The StackOverflow folks have a pretty good flair system, which allows you to include the flair in your site as either an IFRAME reference or a Javascript include. We’ll do both. We have a ServicesController to handle use of the site information outside of NerdDinner.com, so this fits in pretty well there. We’ll be displaying the same information for both HTML and Javascript flair, so we can use one Flair controller action which will return a different view depending on the requested format. Here’s our general flow for our controller action: Get the user’s IP Translate it to a location Grab the top three upcoming dinners that are near that location Select the view based on the format (defaulted to “html”) Return a FlairViewModel which contains the list of dinners and the location information public ActionResult Flair(string format = "html") { string SourceIP = string.IsNullOrEmpty( Request.ServerVariables["HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR"]) ? Request.ServerVariables["REMOTE_ADDR"] : Request.ServerVariables["HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR"]; var location = GeolocationService.HostIpToPlaceName(SourceIP); var dinners = dinnerRepository. FindByLocation(location.Position.Lat, location.Position.Long). OrderByDescending(p => p.EventDate).Take(3); // Select the view we'll return. // Using a switch because we'll add in JSON and other formats later. string view; switch (format.ToLower()) { case "javascript": view = "JavascriptFlair"; break; default: view = "Flair"; break; } return View( view, new FlairViewModel { Dinners = dinners.ToList(), LocationName = string.IsNullOrEmpty(location.City) ? "you" : String.Format("{0}, {1}", location.City, location.RegionName) } ); } Note: I’m not in love with the logic here, but it seems like overkill to extract the switch statement away when we’ll probably just have two or three views. What do you think? The HTML View The HTML version of the view is pretty simple – the only thing of any real interest here is the use of an extension method to truncate strings that are would cause the titles to wrap. public static string Truncate(this string s, int maxLength) { if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(s) || maxLength <= 0) return string.Empty; else if (s.Length > maxLength) return s.Substring(0, maxLength) + "..."; else return s; } So here’s how the HTML view ends up looking: <%@ Page Title="" Language="C#" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage<FlairViewModel>" %> <%@ Import Namespace="NerdDinner.Helpers" %> <%@ Import Namespace="NerdDinner.Models" %> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>Nerd Dinner</title> <link href="/Content/Flair.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> </head> <body> <div id="nd-wrapper"> <h2 id="nd-header">NerdDinner.com</h2> <div id="nd-outer"> <% if (Model.Dinners.Count == 0) { %> <div id="nd-bummer"> Looks like there's no Nerd Dinners near <%:Model.LocationName %> in the near future. Why not <a target="_blank" href="http://www.nerddinner.com/Dinners/Create">host one</a>?</div> <% } else { %> <h3> Dinners Near You</h3> <ul> <% foreach (var item in Model.Dinners) { %> <li> <%: Html.ActionLink(String.Format("{0} with {1} on {2}", item.Title.Truncate(20), item.HostedBy, item.EventDate.ToShortDateString()), "Details", "Dinners", new { id = item.DinnerID }, new { target = "_blank" })%></li> <% } %> </ul> <% } %> <div id="nd-footer"> More dinners and fun at <a target="_blank" href="http://nrddnr.com">http://nrddnr.com</a></div> </div> </div> </body> </html> You’d include this in a page using an IFRAME, like this: <IFRAME height=230 marginHeight=0 src="http://nerddinner.com/services/flair" frameBorder=0 width=160 marginWidth=0 scrolling=no></IFRAME> The Javascript view The Javascript flair is written so you can include it in a webpage with a simple script include, like this: <script type="text/javascript" src="http://nerddinner.com/services/flair?format=javascript"></script> The goal of this view is very similar to the HTML embed view, with a few exceptions: We’re creating a script element and adding it to the head of the document, which will then document.write out the content. Note that you have to consider if your users will actually have a <head> element in their documents, but for website flair use cases I think that’s a safe bet. Since the content is being added to the existing page rather than shown in an IFRAME, all links need to be absolute. That means we can’t use Html.ActionLink, since it generates relative routes. We need to escape everything since it’s being written out as strings. We need to set the content type to application/x-javascript. The easiest way to do that is to use the <%@ Page ContentType%> directive. <%@ Page Language="C#" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage<NerdDinner.Models.FlairViewModel>" ContentType="application/x-javascript" %> <%@ Import Namespace="NerdDinner.Helpers" %> <%@ Import Namespace="NerdDinner.Models" %> document.write('<script>var link = document.createElement(\"link\");link.href = \"http://nerddinner.com/content/Flair.css\";link.rel = \"stylesheet\";link.type = \"text/css\";var head = document.getElementsByTagName(\"head\")[0];head.appendChild(link);</script>'); document.write('<div id=\"nd-wrapper\"><h2 id=\"nd-header\">NerdDinner.com</h2><div id=\"nd-outer\">'); <% if (Model.Dinners.Count == 0) { %> document.write('<div id=\"nd-bummer\">Looks like there\'s no Nerd Dinners near <%:Model.LocationName %> in the near future. Why not <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http://www.nerddinner.com/Dinners/Create\">host one</a>?</div>'); <% } else { %> document.write('<h3> Dinners Near You</h3><ul>'); <% foreach (var item in Model.Dinners) { %> document.write('<li><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http://nrddnr.com/<%: item.DinnerID %>\"><%: item.Title.Truncate(20) %> with <%: item.HostedBy %> on <%: item.EventDate.ToShortDateString() %></a></li>'); <% } %> document.write('</ul>'); <% } %> document.write('<div id=\"nd-footer\"> More dinners and fun at <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http://nrddnr.com\">http://nrddnr.com</a></div></div></div>'); Getting IP’s for Testing There are a variety of online services that will translate a location to an IP, which were handy for testing these out. I found http://www.itouchmap.com/latlong.html to be most useful, but I’m open to suggestions if you know of something better. Next steps I think the next step here is to minimize load – you know, in case people start actually using this flair. There are two places to think about – the NerdDinner.com servers, and the services we’re using for Geolocation. I usually think about caching as a first attack on server load, but that’s less helpful here since every user will have a different IP. Instead, I’d look at taking advantage of Asynchronous Controller Actions, a cool new feature in ASP.NET MVC 2. Async Actions let you call a potentially long-running webservice without tying up a thread on the server while waiting for the response. There’s some good info on that in the MSDN documentation, and Dino Esposito wrote a great article on Asynchronous ASP.NET Pages in the April 2010 issue of MSDN Magazine. But let’s think of the children, shall we? What about ipinfodb.com? Well, they don’t have specific daily limits, but they do throttle you if you put a lot of traffic on them. From their FAQ: We do not have a specific daily limit but queries that are at a rate faster than 2 per second will be put in "queue". If you stay below 2 queries/second everything will be normal. If you go over the limit, you will still get an answer for all queries but they will be slowed down to about 1 per second. This should not affect most users but for high volume websites, you can either use our IP database on your server or we can whitelist your IP for 5$/month (simply use the donate form and leave a comment with your server IP). Good programming practices such as not querying our API for all page views (you can store the data in a cookie or a database) will also help not reaching the limit. So the first step there is to save the geolocalization information in a time-limited cookie, which will allow us to look up the local dinners immediately without having to hit the geolocation service.

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Error "Input length must be multiple of 8 when decrypting with padded cipher"

- by Ross Peoples

I am trying to move a project from C# to Java for a learning exercise. I am still very new to Java, but I have a TripleDES class in C# that encrypts strings and returns a string value of the encrypted byte array. Here is my C# code: using System; using System.IO; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Security.Cryptography; using System.Text; namespace tDocc.Classes { /// <summary> /// Triple DES encryption class /// </summary> public static class TripleDES { private static byte[] key = { 110, 32, 73, 24, 125, 66, 75, 18, 79, 150, 211, 122, 213, 14, 156, 136, 171, 218, 119, 240, 81, 142, 23, 4 }; private static byte[] iv = { 25, 117, 68, 23, 99, 78, 231, 219 }; /// <summary> /// Encrypt a string to an encrypted byte array /// </summary> /// <param name="plainText">Text to encrypt</param> /// <returns>Encrypted byte array</returns> public static byte[] Encrypt(string plainText) { UTF8Encoding utf8encoder = new UTF8Encoding(); byte[] inputInBytes = utf8encoder.GetBytes(plainText); TripleDESCryptoServiceProvider tdesProvider = new TripleDESCryptoServiceProvider(); ICryptoTransform cryptoTransform = tdesProvider.CreateEncryptor(key, iv); MemoryStream encryptedStream = new MemoryStream(); CryptoStream cryptStream = new CryptoStream(encryptedStream, cryptoTransform, CryptoStreamMode.Write); cryptStream.Write(inputInBytes, 0, inputInBytes.Length); cryptStream.FlushFinalBlock(); encryptedStream.Position = 0; byte[] result = new byte[encryptedStream.Length]; encryptedStream.Read(result, 0, (int)encryptedStream.Length); cryptStream.Close(); return result; } /// <summary> /// Decrypt a byte array to a string /// </summary> /// <param name="inputInBytes">Encrypted byte array</param> /// <returns>Decrypted string</returns> public static string Decrypt(byte[] inputInBytes) { UTF8Encoding utf8encoder = new UTF8Encoding(); TripleDESCryptoServiceProvider tdesProvider = new TripleDESCryptoServiceProvider(); ICryptoTransform cryptoTransform = tdesProvider.CreateDecryptor(key, iv); MemoryStream decryptedStream = new MemoryStream(); CryptoStream cryptStream = new CryptoStream(decryptedStream, cryptoTransform, CryptoStreamMode.Write); cryptStream.Write(inputInBytes, 0, inputInBytes.Length); cryptStream.FlushFinalBlock(); decryptedStream.Position = 0; byte[] result = new byte[decryptedStream.Length]; decryptedStream.Read(result, 0, (int)decryptedStream.Length); cryptStream.Close(); UTF8Encoding myutf = new UTF8Encoding(); return myutf.GetString(result); } /// <summary> /// Decrypt an encrypted string /// </summary> /// <param name="text">Encrypted text</param> /// <returns>Decrypted string</returns> public static string DecryptText(string text) { if (text == "") { return text; } return Decrypt(Convert.FromBase64String(text)); } /// <summary> /// Encrypt a string /// </summary> /// <param name="text">Unencrypted text</param> /// <returns>Encrypted string</returns> public static string EncryptText(string text) { if (text == "") { return text; } return Convert.ToBase64String(Encrypt(text)); } } /// <summary> /// Random number generator /// </summary> public static class RandomGenerator { /// <summary> /// Generate random number /// </summary> /// <param name="length">Number of randomizations</param> /// <returns>Random number</returns> public static int GenerateNumber(int length) { byte[] randomSeq = new byte[length]; new RNGCryptoServiceProvider().GetBytes(randomSeq); int code = Environment.TickCount; foreach (byte b in randomSeq) { code += (int)b; } return code; } } /// <summary> /// Hash generator class /// </summary> public static class Hasher { /// <summary> /// Hash type /// </summary> public enum eHashType { /// <summary> /// MD5 hash. Quick but collisions are more likely. This should not be used for anything important /// </summary> MD5 = 0, /// <summary> /// SHA1 hash. Quick and secure. This is a popular method for hashing passwords /// </summary> SHA1 = 1, /// <summary> /// SHA256 hash. Slower than SHA1, but more secure. Used for encryption keys /// </summary> SHA256 = 2, /// <summary> /// SHA348 hash. Even slower than SHA256, but offers more security /// </summary> SHA348 = 3, /// <summary> /// SHA512 hash. Slowest but most secure. Probably overkill for most applications /// </summary> SHA512 = 4, /// <summary> /// Derrived from MD5, but only returns 12 digits /// </summary> Digit12 = 5 } /// <summary> /// Hashes text using a specific hashing method /// </summary> /// <param name="text">Input text</param> /// <param name="hash">Hash method</param> /// <returns>Hashed text</returns> public static string GetHash(string text, eHashType hash) { if (text == "") { return text; } if (hash == eHashType.MD5) { MD5CryptoServiceProvider hasher = new MD5CryptoServiceProvider(); return ByteToHex(hasher.ComputeHash(Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(text))); } else if (hash == eHashType.SHA1) { SHA1Managed hasher = new SHA1Managed(); return ByteToHex(hasher.ComputeHash(Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(text))); } else if (hash == eHashType.SHA256) { SHA256Managed hasher = new SHA256Managed(); return ByteToHex(hasher.ComputeHash(Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(text))); } else if (hash == eHashType.SHA348) { SHA384Managed hasher = new SHA384Managed(); return ByteToHex(hasher.ComputeHash(Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(text))); } else if (hash == eHashType.SHA512) { SHA512Managed hasher = new SHA512Managed(); return ByteToHex(hasher.ComputeHash(Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(text))); } else if (hash == eHashType.Digit12) { MD5CryptoServiceProvider hasher = new MD5CryptoServiceProvider(); string newHash = ByteToHex(hasher.ComputeHash(Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(text))); return newHash.Substring(0, 12); } return ""; } /// <summary> /// Generates a hash based on a file's contents. Used for detecting changes to a file and testing for duplicate files /// </summary> /// <param name="info">FileInfo object for the file to be hashed</param> /// <param name="hash">Hash method</param> /// <returns>Hash string representing the contents of the file</returns> public static string GetHash(FileInfo info, eHashType hash) { FileStream hashStream = new FileStream(info.FullName, FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read); string hashString = ""; if (hash == eHashType.MD5) { MD5CryptoServiceProvider hasher = new MD5CryptoServiceProvider(); hashString = ByteToHex(hasher.ComputeHash(hashStream)); } else if (hash == eHashType.SHA1) { SHA1Managed hasher = new SHA1Managed(); hashString = ByteToHex(hasher.ComputeHash(hashStream)); } else if (hash == eHashType.SHA256) { SHA256Managed hasher = new SHA256Managed(); hashString = ByteToHex(hasher.ComputeHash(hashStream)); } else if (hash == eHashType.SHA348) { SHA384Managed hasher = new SHA384Managed(); hashString = ByteToHex(hasher.ComputeHash(hashStream)); } else if (hash == eHashType.SHA512) { SHA512Managed hasher = new SHA512Managed(); hashString = ByteToHex(hasher.ComputeHash(hashStream)); } hashStream.Close(); hashStream.Dispose(); hashStream = null; return hashString; } /// <summary> /// Converts a byte array to a hex string /// </summary> /// <param name="data">Byte array</param> /// <returns>Hex string</returns> public static string ByteToHex(byte[] data) { StringBuilder builder = new StringBuilder(); foreach (byte hashByte in data) { builder.Append(string.Format("{0:X1}", hashByte)); } return builder.ToString(); } /// <summary> /// Converts a hex string to a byte array /// </summary> /// <param name="hexString">Hex string</param> /// <returns>Byte array</returns> public static byte[] HexToByte(string hexString) { byte[] returnBytes = new byte[hexString.Length / 2]; for (int i = 0; i <= returnBytes.Length - 1; i++) { returnBytes[i] = byte.Parse(hexString.Substring(i * 2, 2), System.Globalization.NumberStyles.HexNumber); } return returnBytes; } } } And her is what I've got for Java code so far, but I'm getting the error "Input length must be multiple of 8 when decrypting with padded cipher" when I run the test on this: import java.security.InvalidAlgorithmParameterException; import java.security.InvalidKeyException; import javax.crypto.Cipher; import javax.crypto.NoSuchPaddingException; import javax.crypto.SecretKey; import javax.crypto.spec.IvParameterSpec; import javax.crypto.spec.SecretKeySpec; import com.tdocc.utils.Base64; public class TripleDES { private static byte[] keyBytes = { 110, 32, 73, 24, 125, 66, 75, 18, 79, (byte)150, (byte)211, 122, (byte)213, 14, (byte)156, (byte)136, (byte)171, (byte)218, 119, (byte)240, 81, (byte)142, 23, 4 }; private static byte[] ivBytes = { 25, 117, 68, 23, 99, 78, (byte)231, (byte)219 }; public static String encryptText(String plainText) { try { if (plainText.isEmpty()) return plainText; return Base64.decode(TripleDES.encrypt(plainText)).toString(); } catch (Exception e) { e.printStackTrace(); } return null; } public static byte[] encrypt(String plainText) throws InvalidKeyException, InvalidAlgorithmParameterException, NoSuchPaddingException { try { final SecretKey key = new SecretKeySpec(keyBytes, "DESede"); final IvParameterSpec iv = new IvParameterSpec(ivBytes); final Cipher cipher = Cipher.getInstance("DESede/CBC/PKCS5Padding"); cipher.init(Cipher.ENCRYPT_MODE, key, iv); final byte[] plainTextBytes = plainText.getBytes("utf-8"); final byte[] cipherText = cipher.doFinal(plainTextBytes); return cipherText; } catch (Exception e) { e.printStackTrace(); } return null; } public static String decryptText(String message) { try { if (message.isEmpty()) return message; else return TripleDES.decrypt(message.getBytes()); } catch (Exception e) { e.printStackTrace(); } return null; } public static String decrypt(byte[] message) { try { final SecretKey key = new SecretKeySpec(keyBytes, "DESede"); final IvParameterSpec iv = new IvParameterSpec(ivBytes); final Cipher cipher = Cipher.getInstance("DESede/CBC/PKCS5Padding"); cipher.init(Cipher.DECRYPT_MODE, key, iv); final byte[] plainText = cipher.doFinal(message); return plainText.toString(); } catch (Exception e) { e.printStackTrace(); } return null; } }

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