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  • get local groups and not the primary groups for a domain user

    - by user175084
    i have a code to get the groups a user belongs to. try { DirectoryEntry adRoot = new DirectoryEntry(string.Format("WinNT://{0}", Environment.UserDomainName)); DirectoryEntry user = adRoot.Children.Find(completeUserName, "User"); object obGroups = user.Invoke("Groups"); foreach (object ob in (IEnumerable)obGroups) { // Create object for each group. DirectoryEntry obGpEntry = new DirectoryEntry(ob); listOfMyWindowsGroups.Add(obGpEntry.Name); } return true; } catch (Exception ex) { new GUIUtility().LogMessageToFile("Error in getting User MachineGroups = " + ex); return false; } the above code works fine when i have to find the groups of a local user but for a domain user it returns a value "Domain User" which is kind of wierd as it is a part of 2 local groups. Please can some1 help in solving this mystery. thanks Research I did some finding and got that i am being returned the primary group of the domain user called "Domain User" group but what i actually want is the groups of the local machines the domain user is a part of... i cannot get that.. any suggestions another code using LDAP string domain = Environment.UserDomainName; DirectoryEntry DE = new DirectoryEntry("LDAP://" + domain, null, null, AuthenticationTypes.Secure); DirectorySearcher search = new DirectorySearcher(); search.SearchRoot = DE; search.Filter = "(SAMAccountName=" + completeUserName + ")"; //Searches active directory for the login name search.PropertiesToLoad.Add("displayName"); // Once found, get a list of Groups try { SearchResult result = search.FindOne(); // Grab the records and assign them to result if (result != null) { DirectoryEntry theUser = result.GetDirectoryEntry(); theUser.RefreshCache(new string[] { "tokenGroups" }); foreach (byte[] resultBytes in theUser.Properties["tokenGroups"]) { System.Security.Principal.SecurityIdentifier mySID = new System.Security.Principal.SecurityIdentifier(resultBytes, 0); DirectorySearcher sidSearcher = new DirectorySearcher(); sidSearcher.SearchRoot = DE; sidSearcher.Filter = "(objectSid=" + mySID.Value + ")"; sidSearcher.PropertiesToLoad.Add("distinguishedName"); SearchResult sidResult = sidSearcher.FindOne(); if (sidResult != null) { listOfMyWindowsGroups.Add((string)sidResult.Properties["distinguishedName"][0]); } } } else { new GUIUtility().LogMessageToFile("no user found"); } return true; } catch (Exception ex) { new GUIUtility().LogMessageToFile("Error obtaining group names: " + ex.Message + " Please contact your administrator."); // If an error occurs report it to the user. return false; } this works too but i get the same result "Domain Users" . Please can some1 tell me how to get the local machine groups...????

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  • jquery selector problem with script tags

    - by Tauren
    I'm attempting to select all <script type="text/html"> tags in a page. I use <script> tags to store HTML templates, similar to how John Resig does it. For some reason, the following jquery selector doesn't seem to be selecting anything: $("script[type*=html]").each(function() { alert("Found script "+this.id); }); This markup is in the BODY of the HTML document: <body> <script id="filter-search" type="text/html"> <dt>Search</dt> <dd><input type="text"/></dd> </script> </body> I've also tried putting it into the HEAD of the HTML document, and it is still not found. No alert is ever shown. If I instead change my code to this: $("script[type*=javascript]").each(function() { alert("Found script "+this.id); }); Then it finds only the scripts in the HEAD that have a src to an external file. Scripts in the actual page are not found. For instance, with the following in HEAD: <head> <script type="text/javascript" src="jquery.js" id="jquery"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="jquery-ui.js" id="ui"></script> <script type="text/javascript" id="custom"> $(document).ready( function() { $("script[type*=javascript]").each(function() { alert("Found script "+this.id); }); $("script[type*=html]").each(function() { alert("Found TEMPLATE script "+this.id); }); }); </script> <script id="filter-test" type="text/html"> <dt>Test</dt> </script> </head> <body> <script id="filter-search" type="text/html"> <dt>Search</dt> <dd><input type="text"/></dd> </script> </body> I get the following alerts: Found script jquery Found script ui The custom and filter-test scripts in the HEAD are not selected, nor is the filter-search script in the body tag. Is this the expected behavior? Why does this not work? I can work around it, but it is annoying that it doesn't work.

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  • Most efficient method to query a Young Tableau

    - by Matthieu M.
    A Young Tableau is a 2D matrix A of dimensions M*N such that: i,j in [0,M)x[0,N): for each p in (i,M), A[i,j] <= A[p,j] for each q in (j,N), A[i,j] <= A[i,q] That is, it's sorted row-wise and column-wise. Since it may contain less than M*N numbers, the bottom-right values might be represented either as missing or using (in algorithm theory) infinity to denote their absence. Now the (elementary) question: how to check if a given number is contained in the Young Tableau ? Well, it's trivial to produce an algorithm in O(M*N) time of course, but what's interesting is that it is very easy to provide an algorithm in O(M+N) time: Bottom-Left search: Let x be the number we look for, initialize i,j as M-1, 0 (bottom left corner) If x == A[i,j], return true If x < A[i,j], then if i is 0, return false else decrement i and go to 2. Else, if j is N-1, return false else increment j This algorithm does not make more than M+N moves. The correctness is left as an exercise. It is possible though to obtain a better asymptotic runtime. Pivot Search: Let x be the number we look for, initialize i,j as floor(M/2), floor(N/2) If x == A[i,j], return true If x < A[i,j], search (recursively) in A[0:i-1, 0:j-1], A[i:M-1, 0:j-1] and A[0:i-1, j:N-1] Else search (recursively) in A[i+1:M-1, 0:j], A[i+1:M-1, j+1:N-1] and A[0:i, j+1:N-1] This algorithm proceed by discarding one of the 4 quadrants at each iteration and running recursively on the 3 left (divide and conquer), the master theorem yields a complexity of O((N+M)**(log 3 / log 4)) which is better asymptotically. However, this is only a big-O estimation... So, here are the questions: Do you know (or can think of) an algorithm with a better asymptotical runtime ? Like introsort prove, sometimes it's worth switching algorithms depending on the input size or input topology... do you think it would be possible here ? For 2., I am notably thinking that for small size inputs, the bottom-left search should be faster because of its O(1) space requirement / lower constant term.

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  • Model Fit of Binary GLM with more than 1 or 2 predictors

    - by Salmo salar
    I am trying to predict a binary GLM with multiple predictors. I can do it fine with one predictor variable however struggle when I use multiple Sample data: structure(list(attempt = structure(c(1L, 2L, 1L, 2L, 1L, 1L, 1L, 2L, 1L, 2L, 1L, 1L, 1L, 2L, 1L, 2L, 1L, 2L, 1L, 1L, 1L, 1L, 2L, 1L, 2L, 1L, 1L, 2L, 1L, 1L, 1L, 1L, 1L, 2L, 1L, 2L, 1L, 1L, 1L, 2L, 1L, 1L, 2L, 1L, 1L, 2L, 1L, 2L, 1L, 1L, 2L, 1L, 2L), .Label = c("1", "2"), class = "factor"), searchtime = c(137, 90, 164, 32, 39, 30, 197, 308, 172, 48, 867, 117, 63, 1345, 38, 122, 226, 397, 0, 106, 259, 220, 170, 102, 46, 327, 8, 10, 23, 108, 315, 318, 70, 646, 69, 97, 117, 45, 31, 64, 125, 17, 240, 63, 549, 1651, 233, 406, 334, 168, 127, 47, 881), mean.search.flow = c(15.97766667, 14.226, 17.15724762, 14.7465, 39.579, 23.355, 110.2926923, 71.95709524, 72.73666667, 32.37466667, 50.34905172, 27.98471429, 49.244, 109.1759778, 77.71733333, 37.446875, 101.23875, 67.78534615, 21.359, 36.54257143, 34.13961111, 64.35253333, 80.98554545, 61.50857143, 48.983, 63.81072727, 26.105, 46.783, 23.0605, 33.61557143, 46.31042857, 62.37061905, 12.565, 42.31983721, 15.3982, 14.49625, 23.77425, 25.626, 74.62485714, 170.1547778, 50.67125, 48.098, 66.83644444, 76.564875, 80.63189189, 136.0573243, 136.3484, 86.68688889, 34.82169565, 70.00415385, 64.67233333, 81.72766667, 57.74522034), Pass = structure(c(1L, 2L, 1L, 2L, 2L, 2L, 1L, 1L, 1L, 2L, 2L, 2L, 1L, 2L, 1L, 2L, 1L, 2L, 2L, 2L, 2L, 1L, 1L, 1L, 2L, 2L, 1L, 2L, 2L, 2L, 2L, 2L, 1L, 2L, 1L, 1L, 2L, 1L, 1L, 1L, 2L, 1L, 2L, 2L, 1L, 2L, 1L, 2L, 2L, 1L, 2L, 1L, 2L), .Label = c("0", "1"), class = "factor")), .Names = c("attempt", "searchtime", "mean.search.flow", "Pass"), class = "data.frame", row.names = c(1L, 2L, 3L, 4L, 5L, 6L, 7L, 8L, 12L, 13L, 14L, 15L, 16L, 17L, 18L, 19L, 20L, 21L, 22L, 23L, 24L, 25L, 26L, 28L, 29L, 30L, 31L, 32L, 33L, 34L, 35L, 36L, 37L, 38L, 39L, 40L, 50L, 51L, 53L, 54L, 60L, 61L, 62L, 63L, 64L, 65L, 66L, 67L, 68L, 69L, 70L, 71L, 72L)) First model with single predictor M2 <- glm(Pass ~ searchtime, data = DF3, family = binomial) summary(M2) drop1(M2, test = "Chi") Plot works fine P1 <- predict(M2, newdata = MyData, type = "link", se = TRUE) plot(x=MyData$searchtime, exp(P1$fit) / (1+exp(P1$fit)), type = "l", ylim = c(0,1), xlab = "search time", ylab = "pobability of passage") lines(MyData$searchtime, exp(P1$fit+1.96*P1$se.fit)/ (1 + exp(P1$fit + 1.96 * P1$se.fit)), lty = 2) lines(MyData$searchtime, exp(P1$fit-1.96*P1$se.fit)/ (1 + exp(P1$fit - 1.96 * P1$se.fit)), lty = 2) points(DF3$searchtime, DF3$Search.and.pass) Second model M2a <- glm(Pass ~ searchtime + mean.search.flow+ attempt, data = DF3, family = binomial) summary(M2a) drop1(M2a, test = "Chi") How do I plot this with "dummy" data? I have tried along the lines of Model.matrix and expand.grid, as you would do with glmer, but fail straight away due to the two categorical variables along with factor(attempt)

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  • Realtime Twitter Replies?

    - by ejunker
    I have created Twitter bots for many geographic locations. I want to allow users to @-reply to the Twitter bot with commands and then have the bot respond with the results. I would like to have the bot reply to the user as quickly as possible (realtime). Apparently, Twitter used to have an XMPP/Jabber interface that would provide this type of realtime feed of replies but it was shut down. As I see it my options are to use one of the following: REST API This would involve polling every X minutes for each bot. The problem with this is that it is not realtime and each Twitter account would have to be polled. Search API The search API does allow specifying a "-to" parameter in the search and replies to all bots could be aggregated in a search such as "-to bot1 OR -to bot2...". Though if you have hundreds of bots then the search string would get very long and probably exceed the maximum length of a GET request. Streaming API The streaming API looks very promising as it provides realtime results. The API allows you to specify a follow and track parameters. follow is not useful as the bot does not know who will be sending it commands. track allows you to specify keywords to track. This could possibly work by creating a daemon process that connects to the Streaming API and tracks all references to the bot's names. Once again since there are lots of bots to track the length and complexity of the query may be an issue. Another idea would be to track a special hashtag such as #botcommand and then a user could send a command using this syntax @bot1 weather #botcommand. Then by using the Streaming API to track all references to #botcommand would give you a realtime stream of all the commands. Further parsing could then be done to determine which bot to send the command to. Third-party service Are there any third-party companies that have access to the Twitter firehouse and offer realtime data? I haven't investigated these, but here are a few that I have found: Gnip Tweet.IM excla.im TwitterSpy - seems to use polling, not realtime I'm leaning towards using the Streaming API. Is there a better way to get near realtime @-replies for many (hundreds) of Twitter accounts?

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  • How to modify my Response.Document XSD for getting author name form Sharepoint

    - by Rohan Patil
    Hi, This is my XSD currently <?xml version="1.0" encoding="Windows-1252"?> <xsd:schema xmlns:tns="urn:Microsoft.Search.Response.Document" attributeFormDefault="unqualified" elementFormDefault="qualified" targetNamespace="urn:Microsoft.Search.Response.Document" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"> <xsd:import namespace="urn:Microsoft.Search.Response.Document.Document" schemaLocation="Microsoft.Search.Response.Document.Document.xsd" /> <xsd:annotation> <xsd:documentation> </xsd:documentation> <xsd:documentation> Defines a Query Respnose from a Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Query Service. </xsd:documentation> </xsd:annotation> <!-- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - --> <!-- Root Element: Document --> <!-- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - --> <xsd:element name="Document"> <xsd:complexType> <xsd:sequence> <xsd:element name="Title" type="xsd:string" minOccurs="0" /> <xsd:element name="Action"> <xsd:complexType> <xsd:sequence> <xsd:element name="LinkUrl"> <xsd:complexType> <xsd:simpleContent> <xsd:extension base="xsd:string"> <xsd:attribute name="size" type="xsd:unsignedByte" use="optional" /> <xsd:attribute name="fileExt" type="xsd:string" use="required" /> </xsd:extension> </xsd:simpleContent> </xsd:complexType> </xsd:element> </xsd:sequence> </xsd:complexType> </xsd:element> <xsd:element name="Description" type="xsd:string" minOccurs="0" /> <xsd:element name="Date" type="xsd:dateTime" minOccurs="0" /> <xsd:element xmlns:q1="urn:Microsoft.Search.Response.Document.Document" ref="q1:Properties" minOccurs="0" /> </xsd:sequence> <xsd:attribute name="relevance" type="xsd:unsignedByte" use="optional" /> </xsd:complexType> </xsd:element> </xsd:schema> I want to able to get the author name.. Please help..

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  • Using FindAll on a List<List<T>> type

    - by Ken Foster
    Assuming public class MyClass { public int ID {get; set; } public string Name {get; set; } } and List<MyClass> classList = //populate with MyClass instances of various IDs I can do List<MyClass> result = classList.FindAll(class => class.ID == 123); and that will give me a list of just classes with ID = 123. Works great, looks elegant. Now, if I had List<List<MyClass>> listOfClassLists = //populate with Lists of MyClass instances How do I get a filtered list where the lists themselves are filtered. I tried List<List<MyClass>> result = listOfClassLists.FindAll (list => list.FindAll(class => class.ID == 123).Count > 0); it looks elegant, but doesn't work. It only includes Lists of classes where at least one class has an ID of 123, but it includes ALL MyClass instances in that list, not just the ones that match. I ended up having to do List<List<MyClass>> result = Results(listOfClassLists, 123); private List<List<MyClass>> Results(List<List<MyClass>> myListOfLists, int id) { List<List<MyClass>> results = new List<List<MyClass>>(); foreach (List<MyClass> myClassList in myListOfLists) { List<MyClass> subList = myClassList.FindAll(myClass => myClass.ID == id); if (subList.Count > 0) results.Add(subList); } return results; } which gets the job done, but isn't that elegant. Just looking for better ways to do a FindAll on a List of Lists. Ken

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  • Php INNER JOING jqGrid help

    - by yanike
    I'm trying to get INNER JOIN to work with JQGRID, but I can't get it working. I want the code to get the first_name and last_name from members using the "efrom" from messages that matches the "id" from members. $col = array(); $col["title"] = "From"; $col["name"] = "messages.efrom"; $col["width"] = "70"; $col["hidden"] = false; $col["editable"] = false; $col["sortable"] = true; $col["search"] = true; $cols[] = $col; $col = array(); $col["title"] = "First Name"; $col["name"] = "members.first_name"; $col["width"] = "80"; $col["hidden"] = false; $col["editable"] = false; $col["sortable"] = true; $col["search"] = true; $cols[] = $col; $col = array(); $col["title"] = "Last Name"; $col["name"] = "members.last_name"; $col["width"] = "80"; $col["hidden"] = false; $col["editable"] = false; $col["sortable"] = true; $col["search"] = true; $cols[] = $col; $col = array(); $col["title"] = "Subject"; $col["name"] = "messages.esubject"; $col["width"] = "300"; $col["hidden"] = false; $col["editable"] = false; $col["sortable"] = true; $col["search"] = true; $cols[] = $col; $col = array(); $col["title"] = "Date"; $col["name"] = "messages.edatetime"; $col["width"] = "150"; $col["hidden"] = false; $col["editable"] = false; $col["sortable"] = true; $col["search"] = true; $cols[] = $col; $g = new jqgrid(); $grid["sortname"] = 'messages.edatetime'; $g->select_command = "SELECT messages.efrom, messages.esubject, messages.edatetime, members.first_name, members.last_name FROM messages INNER JOIN members ON messages.efrom = members.id";

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  • How to match multiple substrings in jQuery combobox autocomplete

    - by John R
    I found more than a couple examples of this with a plain jquery autocomplete but not in a way that will work with the autocomplete included in the combobox code from the demo because the structure of the code is structured so differently. I want to match every item that has all of the search tokens anywhere in any word. I don't need to match the start of any word, any part of it is fine. I don't care if the search strings are highlighted in the autocomplete list if that makes things too complicated. Desired search/result combos: (please excuse the spacing) "fi th" "fi rst second th ird" "rs on" "fi rs t sec on d third" "ec rd" "first s ec ond thi rd" but not limited to any max/min length or number of tokens. EDIT I figured part of it out using the code structure from the other autocorrect I had working. source: function( requestObj, responseFunc ) { var matchArry = $("select > option").map(function(){return this.innerHTML;}).get(); var srchTerms = $.trim(requestObj.term).split(/\s+/); // For each search term, remove non-matches $.each (srchTerms, function (J, term) { var regX = new RegExp (term, "i"); matchArry = $.map (matchArry, function (item) { if( regX.test(item) ){ return{ label: item, value: item, option: HTMLOptionElement } ? item :null; } } ); }); // Return the match results responseFunc (matchArry); }, and select: function( event, ui ) { ui.item.option.selected = true; self._trigger( "selected", event, { item: ui.item.option }); $("destination").val(ui.item.value); // I added this line }, but I can't get both multiple words AND being able to click to select working at the same time. If I remove the } ? item :null; on the return in the map function I can click to select an item. If I leave it I can type multiple words, but I can't click any of the items... Is that the problem or the option: this? I've tried replacing it with HTMLOptionElement and null and I'm stuck. I am able to set the value of another field with ui.item.value within the select label but that doesn't put the value in the search box or close the dropdown menu. Fiddle of current code: http://jsfiddle.net/eY3hM/

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  • Click on notification starts activity twice

    - by Karussell
    I'm creating a notification from a service with the following code: NotificationManager notificationManager = (NotificationManager) ctx .getSystemService(Context.NOTIFICATION_SERVICE); CharSequence tickerText = "bla ..."; long when = System.currentTimeMillis(); Notification notification = new Notification(R.drawable.icon, tickerText, when); Intent notificationIntent = new Intent(ctx, SearchActivity.class). putExtra(SearchActivity.INTENT_SOURCE, MyNotificationService.class.getSimpleName()); PendingIntent contentIntent = PendingIntent.getActivity(ctx, 0, notificationIntent, 0); notification.setLatestEventInfo(ctx, ctx.getString(R.string.app_name), tickerText, contentIntent); notification.flags |= Notification.FLAG_AUTO_CANCEL; notificationManager.notify(1, notification); The logs clearly says that the the method startActivity is called twice times: 04-02 23:48:06.923: INFO/ActivityManager(2466): Starting activity: Intent { act=android.intent.action.SEARCH cmp=com.xy/.SearchActivity bnds=[0,520][480,616] (has extras) } 04-02 23:48:06.923: WARN/ActivityManager(2466): startActivity called from non-Activity context; forcing Intent.FLAG_ACTIVITY_NEW_TASK for: Intent { act=android.intent.action.SEARCH cmp=com.xy/.SearchActivity bnds=[0,520][480,616] (has extras) } 04-02 23:48:06.958: INFO/ActivityManager(2466): Starting activity: Intent { act=android.intent.action.SEARCH cmp=com.xy/.SearchActivity bnds=[0,0][480,96] (has extras) } 04-02 23:48:06.958: WARN/ActivityManager(2466): startActivity called from non-Activity context; forcing Intent.FLAG_ACTIVITY_NEW_TASK for: Intent { act=android.intent.action.SEARCH cmp=com.xy/.SearchActivity bnds=[0,0][480,96] (has extras) } 04-02 23:48:07.087: INFO/notification(5028): onStartCmd: received start id 2: Intent { cmp=com.xy/.NotificationService } 04-02 23:48:07.310: INFO/notification(5028): onStartCmd: received start id 3: Intent { cmp=com.xy/.NotificationService } 04-02 23:48:07.392: INFO/ActivityManager(2466): Displayed activity com.xy/.SearchActivity: 462 ms (total 462 ms) 04-02 23:48:07.392: INFO/ActivityManager(2466): Displayed activity com.xy/.SearchActivity: 318 ms (total 318 ms) Why are they started twice? There are two identical questions on stackoverflow: here and here. But they do not explain what the initial issue could be and they do not work for me. E.g. changing to launchMode singleTop is not appropriated for me and it should work without changing launchMode according to the official docs (see Invoking the search dialog). Nevertheless I also tried to add the following flags to notificationIntent Intent.FLAG_ACTIVITY_CLEAR_TOP | PendingIntent.FLAG_UPDATE_CURRENT but the problem remains the same.

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  • How do I query delegation properties of an active directory user account?

    - by Mark J Miller
    I am writing a utility to audit the configuration of a WCF service. In order to properly pass credentials from the client, thru the WCF service back to the SQL back end the domain account used to run the service must be configured in Active Directory with the setting "Trust this user for delegation" (Properties - "Delegation" tab). Using C#, how do I access the settings on this tab in Active Directory. I've spent the last 5 hours trying to track this down on the web and can't seem to find it. Here's what I've done so far: using (Domain domain = Domain.GetCurrentDomain()) { Console.WriteLine(domain.Name); // get domain "dev" from MSSQLSERVER service account DirectoryEntry ouDn = new DirectoryEntry("LDAP://CN=Users,dc=dev,dc=mydomain,dc=lcl"); DirectorySearcher search = new DirectorySearcher(ouDn); // get sAMAccountName "dev.services" from MSSQLSERVER service account search.Filter = "(sAMAccountName=dev.services)"; search.PropertiesToLoad.Add("displayName"); search.PropertiesToLoad.Add("userAccountControl"); SearchResult result = search.FindOne(); if (result != null) { Console.WriteLine(result.Properties["displayName"][0]); DirectoryEntry entry = result.GetDirectoryEntry(); int userAccountControlFlags = (int)entry.Properties["userAccountControl"].Value; if ((userAccountControlFlags & (int)UserAccountControl.TRUSTED_FOR_DELEGATION) == (int)UserAccountControl.TRUSTED_FOR_DELEGATION) Console.WriteLine("TRUSTED_FOR_DELEGATION"); else if ((userAccountControlFlags & (int)UserAccountControl.TRUSTED_TO_AUTH_FOR_DELEGATION) == (int)UserAccountControl.TRUSTED_TO_AUTH_FOR_DELEGATION) Console.WriteLine("TRUSTED_TO_AUTH_FOR_DELEGATION"); else if ((userAccountControlFlags & (int)UserAccountControl.NOT_DELEGATED) == (int)UserAccountControl.NOT_DELEGATED) Console.WriteLine("NOT_DELEGATED"); foreach (PropertyValueCollection pvc in entry.Properties) { Console.WriteLine(pvc.PropertyName); for (int i = 0; i < pvc.Count; i++) { Console.WriteLine("\t{0}", pvc[i]); } } } } The "userAccountControl" does not seem to be the correct property. I think it is tied to the "Account Options" section on the "Account" tab, which is not what we're looking for but this is the closest I've gotten so far. The justification for all this is: We do not have permission to setup the service in QA or in Production, so along with our written instructions (which are notoriously only followed in partial) I am creating a tool that will audit the setup (WCF and SQL) to determine if the setup is correct. This will allow the person deploying the service to run this utility and verify everything is setup correctly - saving us hours of headaches and reducing downtime during deployment.

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  • Javascript terminates after trying to select data from an object passed to a function

    - by Silmaril89
    Here is my javascript: $(document).ready(function(){ var queries = getUrlVars(); $.get("mail3.php", { listid: queries["listid"], mindex: queries["mindex"] }, showData, 'html'); }); function showData(data) { var response = $(data).find("#mailing").html(); if (response == null) { $("#results").html("<h3>Server didn't respond, try again.</h3>"); } else if (response.length) { var old = $("#results").html(); old = old + "<br /><h3>" + response + "</h3>"; $("#results").html(old); var words = response.split(' '); words[2] = words[2] * 1; words[4] = words[4] * 1; if (words[2] < words[4]) { var queries = getUrlVars(); $.get("mail3.php", { listid: queries["listid"], mindex: words[2] }, function(data){showData(data);}, 'html'); } else { var done = $(data).find("#done").html(); old = old + "<br />" + done; $("#results").html(old); } } else { $("#results").html("<h3>Server responded with an empty reply, try again.</h3>"); } } function getUrlVars() { var vars = [], hash; var hashes = window.location.href.slice(window.location.href.indexOf('?') + 1).split('&'); for (var i = 0; i < hashes.length; i++) { hash = hashes[i].split('='); vars.push(hash[0]); vars[hash[0]] = hash[1]; } return vars; } After the first line in showData: var response = $(data).find("#mailing").html(); the javascript stops. If I put an alert before it, the alert pops up, after it, it doesn't pop up. There must be something wrong with using $(data), but why? Any ideas would be appreciated.

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  • How to perform gui operation in doInBackground method?

    - by jM2.me
    My application reads a user selected file which contains addresses and then displays on mapview when done geocoding. To avoid hanging app the importing and geocoding is done in AsyncTask. public class LoadOverlayAsync extends AsyncTask<Uri, Integer, StopsOverlay> { Context context; MapView mapView; Drawable drawable; public LoadOverlayAsync(Context con, MapView mv, Drawable dw) { context = con; mapView = mv; drawable = dw; } protected StopsOverlay doInBackground(Uri... uris) { StringBuilder text = new StringBuilder(); StopsOverlay stopsOverlay = new StopsOverlay(drawable, context); Geocoder geo = new Geocoder(context, Locale.US); try { File file = new File(new URI(uris[0].toString())); BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(file)); String line; while ((line = br.readLine()) != null) { StopOverlay stopOverlay = null; String[] tempLine = line.split("~"); List<Address> results = geo.getFromLocationName(tempLine[4] + " " + tempLine[5] + " " + tempLine[7] + " " + tempLine[8], 10); if (results.size() > 0) { Toast progressToast = Toast.makeText(context, "More than one yo", 1000); progressToast.show(); } else if (results.size() == 1) { Address addr = results.get(0); GeoPoint mPoint = new GeoPoint((int)(addr.getLatitude() * 1E6), (int)(addr.getLongitude() * 1E6)); stopOverlay = new StopOverlay(mPoint, tempLine); } if (stopOverlay != null) { stopsOverlay.addOverlay(stopOverlay); } //List<Address> results = geo.getFromLocationName(locationName, maxResults) } } catch (URISyntaxException e) { showErrorToast(e.toString()); //e.printStackTrace(); } catch (FileNotFoundException e) { showErrorToast(e.toString()); //e.printStackTrace(); } catch (IOException e) { showErrorToast(e.toString()); //e.printStackTrace(); } return stopsOverlay; } protected void onProgressUpdate(Integer... progress) { Toast progressToast = Toast.makeText(context, "Loaded " + progress.toString(), 1000); progressToast.show(); } protected void onPostExecute(StopsOverlay so) { //mapView.getOverlays().add(so); Toast progressToast = Toast.makeText(context, "Done geocoding", 1000); progressToast.show(); } protected void showErrorToast(String msg) { Toast Newtoast = Toast.makeText(context, msg, 10000); Newtoast.show(); } } But if geocode fails, I want a dialog popup to let user edit the address. That would require calling on gui method while in doInBackground. What would be a good workaround this?

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  • problem with struts actions and redirections

    - by Casey
    I am trying to update a simple web app that was built with struts2, jsp and standard servlets. I am trying to redirect a url to a specific action but can't seem to get it to work right. For example, the url that is correct is: http://localhost:8080/theapp/lookup/search.action Here is my web.xml: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?> <!DOCTYPE web-app PUBLIC "-//Sun Microsystems, Inc.//DTD Web Application 2.3//EN" "http://java.sun.com/dtd/web-app_2_3.dtd"><web-app> <display-name>theapp</display-name> <filter> <filter-name>struts2</filter-name> <filter-class> org.apache.struts2.dispatcher.FilterDispatcher </filter-class> </filter> <filter-mapping> <filter-name>struts2</filter-name> <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern> </filter-mapping> <listener> <listener-class> org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener </listener-class> </listener> And here is my struts.xml: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?> <!DOCTYPE struts PUBLIC "-//Apache Software Foundation//DTD Struts Configuration 2.0//EN" "http://struts.apache.org/dtds/struts-2.0.dtd"> <default-action-ref name="search" /> <action name="search" method="search" class="com.theapp.SearchAction" > <result>index.jsp</result> <result name="input" >index.jsp</result> <result name="error" type="redirect">site_locator_mobile/error.action</result> </action> The problem here is that if I don't specify the correct url as above, I just get the index.jsp file, but without any properties in index.jsp being processed because the information is contained in the servlet. What I would like to is if someone just entered: http://localhost:8080/theapp/lookup/ than they would be taken to: http://localhost:8080/theapp/lookup/search.action Thanks

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  • php database image show problem

    - by Termedi
    here is the code <?php session_start(); if(!isset($_SESSION['user_name'])) { header('Location: login.php'); } $conn = mysql_connect("localhost", "root", "") or die("Can no connect to Database Server"); ?> <html> <head> </head> <body> <center> <div id="ser"> <form action="" method="post"> <label for="file">Card No:</label> <input type="text" name="card_no" id="card_no" class="fil" onKeyUp="CardNoLength()" onKeyDown="CardNoLength()" onKeyPress="CardNoLength()"/> <input type="submit" name="search" value="Search" class="btn" onClick="return CardNoLengthMIN()"/> </form> </div> </center> <br/><hr style="border: 1px solid #606060 ;" /> <center><a href="index.php">Home</a></center> <br/> <center> <?php if(isset($_POST['card_no'])) { if($conn) { if(mysql_select_db("img_mgmt", $conn)) { $sql = "select * from temp_images where card_no='".trim($_POST['card_no'])."'"; $result = mysql_query($sql); $image = mysql_fetch_array($result); if(isset($image['card_no'])) { //echo "<img src=\"".$image['file_path']."\" alt=\"".$image['card_no']."\" width=\"250\" height=\"280\"/>"; header("Content-type: image/jpeg"); echo $image['img_content']; } else { echo "<p style=\"color:red;\">Sorry, Your search came with no results ! <br/> Try with different card number"; } } else { echo "Database selection error: ".mysql_error(); } } else { echo "Could not connect: ".mysql_error(); } } ?> </center> </body> </html> But it after executing the script it shows: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at C:\xampp\htdocs\img\search.php:61) in C:\xampp\htdocs\img\search.php on line 77

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  • How to handle very frequent updates to a Lucene index

    - by fsm
    I am trying to prototype an indexing/search application which uses very volatile indexing data sources (forums, social networks etc), here are some of the performance requirements, Very fast turn-around time (by this I mean that any new data (such as a new message on a forum) should be available in the search results very soon (less than a minute)) I need to discard old documents on a fairly regular basis to ensure that the search results are not dated. Last but not least, the search application needs to be responsive. (latency on the order of 100 milliseconds, and should support at least 10 qps) All of the requirements I have currently can be met w/o using Lucene (and that would let me satisfy all 1,2 and 3), but I am anticipating other requirements in the future (like search relevance etc) which Lucene makes easier to implement. However, since Lucene is designed for use cases far more complex than the one I'm currently working on, I'm having a hard time satisfying my performance requirements. Here are some questions, a. I read that the optimize() method in the IndexWriter class is expensive, and should not be used by applications that do frequent updates, what are the alternatives? b. In order to do incremental updates, I need to keep committing new data, and also keep refreshing the index reader to make sure it has the new data available. These are going to affect 1 and 3 above. Should I try duplicate indices? What are some common approaches to solving this problem? c. I know that Lucene provides a delete method, which lets you delete all documents that match a certain query, in my case, I need to delete all documents which are older than a certain age, now one option is to add a date field to every document and use that to delete documents later. Is it possible to do range queries on document ids (I can create my own id field since I think that the one created by lucene keeps changing) to delete documents? Is it any faster than comparing dates represented as strings? I know these are very open questions, so I am not looking for a detailed answer, I will try to treat all of your answers as suggestions and use them to inform my design. Thanks! Please let me know if you need any other information.

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  • Criticise/Recommendations for my code

    - by aLk
    Before i go any further it would be nice to know if there is any major design flaws in my program so far. Is there anything worth changing before i continue? Model package model; import java.sql.*; import java.util.*; public class MovieDatabase { @SuppressWarnings({ "rawtypes", "unchecked" }) public List queryMovies() throws SQLException { Connection connection = null; java.sql.Statement statement = null; ResultSet rs = null; List results = new ArrayList(); try { DriverManager.registerDriver(new com.mysql.jdbc.Driver()); connection = DriverManager.getConnection("jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/test", "root", "password"); statement = connection.createStatement(); String query = "SELECT * FROM movie"; rs = statement.executeQuery(query); while(rs.next()) { MovieBean bean = new MovieBean(); bean.setMovieId(rs.getInt(1)); bean.setTitle(rs.getString(2)); bean.setYear(rs.getInt(3)); bean.setRating(rs.getInt(4)); results.add(bean); } } catch(SQLException e) { } return results; } } Servlet public class Service extends HttpServlet { @SuppressWarnings("rawtypes") protected void doGet(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) throws ServletException, IOException { response.setContentType("text/html"); PrintWriter out = response.getWriter(); out.println("Movies!"); MovieDatabase movies = new MovieDatabase(); try { List results = movies.queryMovies(); Iterator it = results.iterator(); while(it.hasNext()) { MovieBean movie = new MovieBean(); movie = (MovieBean)it.next(); out.println(movie.getYear()); } } catch(SQLException e) { } } } Bean package model; @SuppressWarnings("serial") public class MovieBean implements java.io.Serializable { protected int movieid; protected int rating; protected int year; protected String title; public MovieBean() { } public void setMovieId(int movieidVal) { movieid = movieidVal; } public void setRating(int ratingVal) { rating = ratingVal; } public void setYear(int yearVal) { year = yearVal; } public void setTitle(String titleVal) { title = titleVal; } public int getMovieId() { return movieid; } public int getRating() { return rating; } public int getYear() { return year; } public String getTitle() { return title; } }

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  • Is throwing an exception a healthy way to exit?

    - by ramaseshan
    I have a setup that looks like this. class Checker { // member data Results m_results; // see below public: bool Check(); private: bool Check1(); bool Check2(); // .. so on }; Checker is a class that performs lengthy check computations for engineering analysis. Each type of check has a resultant double that the checker stores. (see below) bool Checker::Check() { // initilisations etc. Check1(); Check2(); // ... so on } A typical Check function would look like this: bool Checker::Check1() { double result; // lots of code m_results.SetCheck1Result(result); } And the results class looks something like this: class Results { double m_check1Result; double m_check2Result; // ... public: void SetCheck1Result(double d); double GetOverallResult() { return max(m_check1Result, m_check2Result, ...); } }; Note: all code is oversimplified. The Checker and Result classes were initially written to perform all checks and return an overall double result. There is now a new requirement where I only need to know if any of the results exceeds 1. If it does, subsequent checks need not be carried out(it's an optimisation). To achieve this, I could either: Modify every CheckN function to keep check for result and return. The parent Check function would keep checking m_results. OR In the Results::SetCheckNResults(), throw an exception if the value exceeds 1 and catch it at the end of Checker::Check(). The first is tedious, error prone and sub-optimal because every CheckN function further branches out into sub-checks etc. The second is non-intrusive and quick. One disadvantage is I can think of is that the Checker code may not necessarily be exception-safe(although there is no other exception being thrown anywhere else). Is there anything else that's obvious that I'm overlooking? What about the cost of throwing exceptions and stack unwinding? Is there a better 3rd option?

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  • Exception from Response.Redirect?

    - by allencoded
    I keep getting an error: A first chance exception of type 'System.Threading.ThreadAbortException' occurred in mscorlib.dll An exception of type 'System.Threading.ThreadAbortException' occurred in mscorlib.dll but was not handled in user code The thread '' (0x27ee4) has exited with code 0 (0x0). I was told it was related to this: protected void Button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { Response.Redirect("Results.aspx?Keywords=" + searchString.Text); } I figured it may help to include my complete code. The code above is the only C# code on my first asp page. That code relates to this code on this page. It is also the only C# code I have on my second page. I am simply just trying to pass a keyword from a search form to this block of code: if (Request.QueryString["Keywords"] != null){ string keywords = Request.QueryString["Keywords"]; string myAppID = "HIDDEN"; var xml = XDocument.Load("http://svcs.ebay.com/services/search/FindingService/v1?OPERATION-NAME=findItemsByKeywords&SERVICE-VERSION=1.0.0&SECURITY-APPNAME=" + myAppID + "&RESPONSE-DATA-FORMAT=XML&REST-PAYLOAD&keywords=" + keywords + "&paginationInput.entriesPerPage=5"); XNamespace ns = "http://www.ebay.com/marketplace/search/v1/services"; var titles = from item in xml.Root.Descendants(ns + "title") select new{ title = xml.Descendants(ns + "title").Select (x => x.Value), }; foreach (var item in titles){ Label1.Text += item; } } This block of code calls the keyword value and uses it in an api to perform a search. The code of the xml(api) formats like this: <findItemsByKeywordsResponse xmlns="http://www.ebay.com/marketplace/search/v1/services"> <searchReslut count="5"> <item> <title></title> </item> <item> <title></title> </item> <item> <title></title> </item> Why am I getting this error how do you fix it?

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  • Why the only hidden field that is being filled from GET action is not being passed in model?

    - by user1807954
    Sorry for the long title, I didn't know how to make it any shorter. My code: My model: public class CarFilter { public String carMake { get; set; } public String carModel { get; set; } public String carEdition { get; set; } . . . public String SortBy { get; set; } } public class CarSearch : CarFilter { public List<Car> Car { get; set; } } My controller: public ActionResult SearchResult(CarSearch search) { var cars = from d in db.Cars select d; if (Request.HttpMethod == "POST") { search.SortBy = "Price"; } search.Car = new List<Car>(); search.Car.AddRange(cars); var temp = new List<CarSearch>(); temp.Add(search); return View(temp); } My Index view (where user filters results): @model IEnumerable<Cars.Models.CarSearch> @using (Html.BeginForm("SearchResult", "Home", FormMethod.Post)){..forms and other stuff..} My SearchResult view (where user sees the results of filtration): @model IEnumerable<Cars.Models.CarSearch> @using (Html.BeginForm("SearchResult", "Home", FormMethod.Get)) { @Html.Hidden("carMake") @Html.Hidden("carModel") @Html.Hidden("carEdition") . . . @Html.Hidden("SortBy", temp.SortBy) <input name="SortBy" class="buttons" type="submit" value="Make"/> My goal What I'm trying to do is when user clicked on sort by Make it will have to GET back all the variables in hidden field back to the SearchResult action in order to sort the result (same filtered results). Result Is: <input id="SortBy" name="SortBy" type="hidden" value=""/>. The value is null and it's not being passed but all the other hidden fields such as carMake and etc have value. But when I use foreach it works perfect. Question Why is this like this? the SortBy is in the same model class as other fields in the view. The only difference is that SortBy is not being filled in the Index view with other fields, instead it's being filled in controller action. What is the explanation for this? Am I missing any C# definition or something such as dynamic objects or something?

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  • Indexing on only part of a field in MongoDB

    - by Rob Hoare
    Is there a way to create an index on only part of a field in MongoDB, for example on the first 10 characters? I couldn't find it documented (or asked about on here). The MySQL equivalent would be CREATE INDEX part_of_name ON customer (name(10));. Reason: I have a collection with a single field that varies in length from a few characters up to over 1000 characters, average 50 characters. As there are a hundred million or so documents it's going to be hard to fit the full index in memory (testing with 8% of the data the index is already 400MB, according to stats). Indexing just the first part of the field would reduce the index size by about 75%. In most cases the search term is quite short, it's not a full-text search. A work-around would be to add a second field of 10 (lowercased) characters for each item, index that, then add logic to filter the results if the search term is over ten characters (and that extra field is probably needed anyway for case-insensitive searches, unless anybody has a better way). Seems like an ugly way to do it though. [added later] I tried adding the second field, containing the first 12 characters from the main field, lowercased. It wasn't a big success. Previously, the average object size was 50 bytes, but I forgot that includes the _id and other overheads, so my main field length (there was only one) averaged nearer to 30 bytes than 50. Then, the second field index contains the _id and other overheads. Net result (for my 8% sample) is the index on the main field is 415MB and on the 12 byte field is 330MB - only a 20% saving in space, not worthwhile. I could duplicate the entire field (to work around the case insensitive search problem) but realistically it looks like I should reconsider whether MongoDB is the right tool for the job (or just buy more memory and use twice as much disk space). [added even later] This is a typical document, with the source field, and the short lowercased field: { "_id" : ObjectId("505d0e89f56588f20f000041"), "q" : "Continental Airlines", "f" : "continental " } Indexes: db.test.ensureIndex({q:1}); db.test.ensureIndex({f:1}); The 'f" index, working on a shorter field, is 80% of the size of the "q" index. I didn't mean to imply I included the _id in the index, just that it needs to use that somewhere to show where the index will point to, so it's an overhead that probably helps explain why a shorter key makes so little difference. Access to the index will be essentially random, no part of it is more likely to be accessed than any other. Total index size for the full file will likely be 5GB, so it's not extreme for that one index. Adding some other fields for other search cases, and their associated indexes, and copies of data for lower case, does start to add up, which I why I started looking into a more concise index.

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  • Select Elements in nested Divs using JQuery

    - by PIKP
    I have the following html markup inside a Div named item and I want to select all the elements (inside nested divs) and clear the values. As shown in following given Jquery I have managed to access elements in each Div by using.children().each(). But the the problem is .children().each()goes one level down at a time from the parent div, so I have repeated the same code block with multiple .children() to access the elements inside nested Divs, can anyone suggest me a method to do this without repeating the code for N number of nested divs . html markup <div class="item"> <input type="hidden" value="1234" name="testVal"> <div class="form-group" id="c1"> <div class="controls "> <input type="text" value="Results" name="s1" maxlength="255" id="id2"> </div> </div> <div class="form-group" id="id4"> <input type="text" value="Results" name="s12" maxlength="255" id="id225"> <div class="form-group" id="id41"> <input type="text" value="Results" name="s12" maxlength="255" id="5"> <div class="form-group" id="id42"> <input type="text" value="Results" name="s12" maxlength="255" id="5"> <div class="form-group" id="id43"> <input type="text" value="Results" name="s12" maxlength="255" id="id224"> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> My Qjuery script var row = $(".item:first").clone(false).get(0); $(row).children().each(function () { updateElementIndex(this, prefix, formCount); if ($(this).attr('type') == 'text') { $(this).val(''); } if ($(this).attr('type') == 'hidden' && ($(this).attr('name') != 'csrfmiddlewaretoken')) { $(this).val(''); } if ($(this).attr('type') == 'file') { $(this).val(''); } if ($(this).attr('type') == 'checkbox') { $(this).attr('checked', false); } $(this).remove('a'); }); // Relabel or rename all the relevant bits $(row).children().children().each(function () { updateElementIndex(this, prefix, formCount) if ($(this).attr('type') == 'text') { $(this).val(''); } if ($(this).attr('type') == 'hidden' && ($(this).attr('name') != 'csrfmiddlewaretoken')) { $(this).val(''); } if ($(this).attr('type') == 'file') { $(this).val(''); } if ($(this).attr('type') == 'checkbox') { $(this).attr('checked', false); } $(this).remove('a'); });

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  • Node.js Adventure - Host Node.js on Windows Azure Worker Role

    - by Shaun
    In my previous post I demonstrated about how to develop and deploy a Node.js application on Windows Azure Web Site (a.k.a. WAWS). WAWS is a new feature in Windows Azure platform. Since it’s low-cost, and it provides IIS and IISNode components so that we can host our Node.js application though Git, FTP and WebMatrix without any configuration and component installation. But sometimes we need to use the Windows Azure Cloud Service (a.k.a. WACS) and host our Node.js on worker role. Below are some benefits of using worker role. - WAWS leverages IIS and IISNode to host Node.js application, which runs in x86 WOW mode. It reduces the performance comparing with x64 in some cases. - WACS worker role does not need IIS, hence there’s no restriction of IIS, such as 8000 concurrent requests limitation. - WACS provides more flexibility and controls to the developers. For example, we can RDP to the virtual machines of our worker role instances. - WACS provides the service configuration features which can be changed when the role is running. - WACS provides more scaling capability than WAWS. In WAWS we can have at most 3 reserved instances per web site while in WACS we can have up to 20 instances in a subscription. - Since when using WACS worker role we starts the node by ourselves in a process, we can control the input, output and error stream. We can also control the version of Node.js.   Run Node.js in Worker Role Node.js can be started by just having its execution file. This means in Windows Azure, we can have a worker role with the “node.exe” and the Node.js source files, then start it in Run method of the worker role entry class. Let’s create a new windows azure project in Visual Studio and add a new worker role. Since we need our worker role execute the “node.exe” with our application code we need to add the “node.exe” into our project. Right click on the worker role project and add an existing item. By default the Node.js will be installed in the “Program Files\nodejs” folder so we can navigate there and add the “node.exe”. Then we need to create the entry code of Node.js. In WAWS the entry file must be named “server.js”, which is because it’s hosted by IIS and IISNode and IISNode only accept “server.js”. But here as we control everything we can choose any files as the entry code. For example, I created a new JavaScript file named “index.js” in project root. Since we created a C# Windows Azure project we cannot create a JavaScript file from the context menu “Add new item”. We have to create a text file, and then rename it to JavaScript extension. After we added these two files we should set their “Copy to Output Directory” property to “Copy Always”, or “Copy if Newer”. Otherwise they will not be involved in the package when deployed. Let’s paste a very simple Node.js code in the “index.js” as below. As you can see I created a web server listening at port 12345. 1: var http = require("http"); 2: var port = 12345; 3:  4: http.createServer(function (req, res) { 5: res.writeHead(200, { "Content-Type": "text/plain" }); 6: res.end("Hello World\n"); 7: }).listen(port); 8:  9: console.log("Server running at port %d", port); Then we need to start “node.exe” with this file when our worker role was started. This can be done in its Run method. I found the Node.js and entry JavaScript file name, and then create a new process to run it. Our worker role will wait for the process to be exited. If everything is OK once our web server was opened the process will be there listening for incoming requests, and should not be terminated. The code in worker role would be like this. 1: public override void Run() 2: { 3: // This is a sample worker implementation. Replace with your logic. 4: Trace.WriteLine("NodejsHost entry point called", "Information"); 5:  6: // retrieve the node.exe and entry node.js source code file name. 7: var node = Environment.ExpandEnvironmentVariables(@"%RoleRoot%\approot\node.exe"); 8: var js = "index.js"; 9:  10: // prepare the process starting of node.exe 11: var info = new ProcessStartInfo(node, js) 12: { 13: CreateNoWindow = false, 14: ErrorDialog = true, 15: WindowStyle = ProcessWindowStyle.Normal, 16: UseShellExecute = false, 17: WorkingDirectory = Environment.ExpandEnvironmentVariables(@"%RoleRoot%\approot") 18: }; 19: Trace.WriteLine(string.Format("{0} {1}", node, js), "Information"); 20:  21: // start the node.exe with entry code and wait for exit 22: var process = Process.Start(info); 23: process.WaitForExit(); 24: } Then we can run it locally. In the computer emulator UI the worker role started and it executed the Node.js, then Node.js windows appeared. Open the browser to verify the website hosted by our worker role. Next let’s deploy it to azure. But we need some additional steps. First, we need to create an input endpoint. By default there’s no endpoint defined in a worker role. So we will open the role property window in Visual Studio, create a new input TCP endpoint to the port we want our website to use. In this case I will use 80. Even though we created a web server we should add a TCP endpoint of the worker role, since Node.js always listen on TCP instead of HTTP. And then changed the “index.js”, let our web server listen on 80. 1: var http = require("http"); 2: var port = 80; 3:  4: http.createServer(function (req, res) { 5: res.writeHead(200, { "Content-Type": "text/plain" }); 6: res.end("Hello World\n"); 7: }).listen(port); 8:  9: console.log("Server running at port %d", port); Then publish it to Windows Azure. And then in browser we can see our Node.js website was running on WACS worker role. We may encounter an error if we tried to run our Node.js website on 80 port at local emulator. This is because the compute emulator registered 80 and map the 80 endpoint to 81. But our Node.js cannot detect this operation. So when it tried to listen on 80 it will failed since 80 have been used.   Use NPM Modules When we are using WAWS to host Node.js, we can simply install modules we need, and then just publish or upload all files to WAWS. But if we are using WACS worker role, we have to do some extra steps to make the modules work. Assuming that we plan to use “express” in our application. Firstly of all we should download and install this module through NPM command. But after the install finished, they are just in the disk but not included in the worker role project. If we deploy the worker role right now the module will not be packaged and uploaded to azure. Hence we need to add them to the project. On solution explorer window click the “Show all files” button, select the “node_modules” folder and in the context menu select “Include In Project”. But that not enough. We also need to make all files in this module to “Copy always” or “Copy if newer”, so that they can be uploaded to azure with the “node.exe” and “index.js”. This is painful step since there might be many files in a module. So I created a small tool which can update a C# project file, make its all items as “Copy always”. The code is very simple. 1: static void Main(string[] args) 2: { 3: if (args.Length < 1) 4: { 5: Console.WriteLine("Usage: copyallalways [project file]"); 6: return; 7: } 8:  9: var proj = args[0]; 10: File.Copy(proj, string.Format("{0}.bak", proj)); 11:  12: var xml = new XmlDocument(); 13: xml.Load(proj); 14: var nsManager = new XmlNamespaceManager(xml.NameTable); 15: nsManager.AddNamespace("pf", "http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003"); 16:  17: // add the output setting to copy always 18: var contentNodes = xml.SelectNodes("//pf:Project/pf:ItemGroup/pf:Content", nsManager); 19: UpdateNodes(contentNodes, xml, nsManager); 20: var noneNodes = xml.SelectNodes("//pf:Project/pf:ItemGroup/pf:None", nsManager); 21: UpdateNodes(noneNodes, xml, nsManager); 22: xml.Save(proj); 23:  24: // remove the namespace attributes 25: var content = xml.InnerXml.Replace("<CopyToOutputDirectory xmlns=\"\">", "<CopyToOutputDirectory>"); 26: xml.LoadXml(content); 27: xml.Save(proj); 28: } 29:  30: static void UpdateNodes(XmlNodeList nodes, XmlDocument xml, XmlNamespaceManager nsManager) 31: { 32: foreach (XmlNode node in nodes) 33: { 34: var copyToOutputDirectoryNode = node.SelectSingleNode("pf:CopyToOutputDirectory", nsManager); 35: if (copyToOutputDirectoryNode == null) 36: { 37: var n = xml.CreateNode(XmlNodeType.Element, "CopyToOutputDirectory", null); 38: n.InnerText = "Always"; 39: node.AppendChild(n); 40: } 41: else 42: { 43: if (string.Compare(copyToOutputDirectoryNode.InnerText, "Always", true) != 0) 44: { 45: copyToOutputDirectoryNode.InnerText = "Always"; 46: } 47: } 48: } 49: } Please be careful when use this tool. I created only for demo so do not use it directly in a production environment. Unload the worker role project, execute this tool with the worker role project file name as the command line argument, it will set all items as “Copy always”. Then reload this worker role project. Now let’s change the “index.js” to use express. 1: var express = require("express"); 2: var app = express(); 3:  4: var port = 80; 5:  6: app.configure(function () { 7: }); 8:  9: app.get("/", function (req, res) { 10: res.send("Hello Node.js!"); 11: }); 12:  13: app.get("/User/:id", function (req, res) { 14: var id = req.params.id; 15: res.json({ 16: "id": id, 17: "name": "user " + id, 18: "company": "IGT" 19: }); 20: }); 21:  22: app.listen(port); Finally let’s publish it and have a look in browser.   Use Windows Azure SQL Database We can use Windows Azure SQL Database (a.k.a. WACD) from Node.js as well on worker role hosting. Since we can control the version of Node.js, here we can use x64 version of “node-sqlserver” now. This is better than if we host Node.js on WAWS since it only support x86. Just install the “node-sqlserver” module from NPM, copy the “sqlserver.node” from “Build\Release” folder to “Lib” folder. Include them in worker role project and run my tool to make them to “Copy always”. Finally update the “index.js” to use WASD. 1: var express = require("express"); 2: var sql = require("node-sqlserver"); 3:  4: var connectionString = "Driver={SQL Server Native Client 10.0};Server=tcp:{SERVER NAME}.database.windows.net,1433;Database={DATABASE NAME};Uid={LOGIN}@{SERVER NAME};Pwd={PASSWORD};Encrypt=yes;Connection Timeout=30;"; 5: var port = 80; 6:  7: var app = express(); 8:  9: app.configure(function () { 10: app.use(express.bodyParser()); 11: }); 12:  13: app.get("/", function (req, res) { 14: sql.open(connectionString, function (err, conn) { 15: if (err) { 16: console.log(err); 17: res.send(500, "Cannot open connection."); 18: } 19: else { 20: conn.queryRaw("SELECT * FROM [Resource]", function (err, results) { 21: if (err) { 22: console.log(err); 23: res.send(500, "Cannot retrieve records."); 24: } 25: else { 26: res.json(results); 27: } 28: }); 29: } 30: }); 31: }); 32:  33: app.get("/text/:key/:culture", function (req, res) { 34: sql.open(connectionString, function (err, conn) { 35: if (err) { 36: console.log(err); 37: res.send(500, "Cannot open connection."); 38: } 39: else { 40: var key = req.params.key; 41: var culture = req.params.culture; 42: var command = "SELECT * FROM [Resource] WHERE [Key] = '" + key + "' AND [Culture] = '" + culture + "'"; 43: conn.queryRaw(command, function (err, results) { 44: if (err) { 45: console.log(err); 46: res.send(500, "Cannot retrieve records."); 47: } 48: else { 49: res.json(results); 50: } 51: }); 52: } 53: }); 54: }); 55:  56: app.get("/sproc/:key/:culture", function (req, res) { 57: sql.open(connectionString, function (err, conn) { 58: if (err) { 59: console.log(err); 60: res.send(500, "Cannot open connection."); 61: } 62: else { 63: var key = req.params.key; 64: var culture = req.params.culture; 65: var command = "EXEC GetItem '" + key + "', '" + culture + "'"; 66: conn.queryRaw(command, function (err, results) { 67: if (err) { 68: console.log(err); 69: res.send(500, "Cannot retrieve records."); 70: } 71: else { 72: res.json(results); 73: } 74: }); 75: } 76: }); 77: }); 78:  79: app.post("/new", function (req, res) { 80: var key = req.body.key; 81: var culture = req.body.culture; 82: var val = req.body.val; 83:  84: sql.open(connectionString, function (err, conn) { 85: if (err) { 86: console.log(err); 87: res.send(500, "Cannot open connection."); 88: } 89: else { 90: var command = "INSERT INTO [Resource] VALUES ('" + key + "', '" + culture + "', N'" + val + "')"; 91: conn.queryRaw(command, function (err, results) { 92: if (err) { 93: console.log(err); 94: res.send(500, "Cannot retrieve records."); 95: } 96: else { 97: res.send(200, "Inserted Successful"); 98: } 99: }); 100: } 101: }); 102: }); 103:  104: app.listen(port); Publish to azure and now we can see our Node.js is working with WASD through x64 version “node-sqlserver”.   Summary In this post I demonstrated how to host our Node.js in Windows Azure Cloud Service worker role. By using worker role we can control the version of Node.js, as well as the entry code. And it’s possible to do some pre jobs before the Node.js application started. It also removed the IIS and IISNode limitation. I personally recommended to use worker role as our Node.js hosting. But there are some problem if you use the approach I mentioned here. The first one is, we need to set all JavaScript files and module files as “Copy always” or “Copy if newer” manually. The second one is, in this way we cannot retrieve the cloud service configuration information. For example, we defined the endpoint in worker role property but we also specified the listening port in Node.js hardcoded. It should be changed that our Node.js can retrieve the endpoint. But I can tell you it won’t be working here. In the next post I will describe another way to execute the “node.exe” and Node.js application, so that we can get the cloud service configuration in Node.js. I will also demonstrate how to use Windows Azure Storage from Node.js by using the Windows Azure Node.js SDK.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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  • The broken Promise of the Mobile Web

    - by Rick Strahl
    High end mobile devices have been with us now for almost 7 years and they have utterly transformed the way we access information. Mobile phones and smartphones that have access to the Internet and host smart applications are in the hands of a large percentage of the population of the world. In many places even very remote, cell phones and even smart phones are a common sight. I’ll never forget when I was in India in 2011 I was up in the Southern Indian mountains riding an elephant out of a tiny local village, with an elephant herder in front riding atop of the elephant in front of us. He was dressed in traditional garb with the loin wrap and head cloth/turban as did quite a few of the locals in this small out of the way and not so touristy village. So we’re slowly trundling along in the forest and he’s lazily using his stick to guide the elephant and… 10 minutes in he pulls out his cell phone from his sash and starts texting. In the middle of texting a huge pig jumps out from the side of the trail and he takes a picture running across our path in the jungle! So yeah, mobile technology is very pervasive and it’s reached into even very buried and unexpected parts of this world. Apps are still King Apps currently rule the roost when it comes to mobile devices and the applications that run on them. If there’s something that you need on your mobile device your first step usually is to look for an app, not use your browser. But native app development remains a pain in the butt, with the requirement to have to support 2 or 3 completely separate platforms. There are solutions that try to bridge that gap. Xamarin is on a tear at the moment, providing their cross-device toolkit to build applications using C#. While Xamarin tools are impressive – and also *very* expensive – they only address part of the development madness that is app development. There are still specific device integration isssues, dealing with the different developer programs, security and certificate setups and all that other noise that surrounds app development. There’s also PhoneGap/Cordova which provides a hybrid solution that involves creating local HTML/CSS/JavaScript based applications, and then packaging them to run in a specialized App container that can run on most mobile device platforms using a WebView interface. This allows for using of HTML technology, but it also still requires all the set up, configuration of APIs, security keys and certification and submission and deployment process just like native applications – you actually lose many of the benefits that  Web based apps bring. The big selling point of Cordova is that you get to use HTML have the ability to build your UI once for all platforms and run across all of them – but the rest of the app process remains in place. Apps can be a big pain to create and manage especially when we are talking about specialized or vertical business applications that aren’t geared at the mainstream market and that don’t fit the ‘store’ model. If you’re building a small intra department application you don’t want to deal with multiple device platforms and certification etc. for various public or corporate app stores. That model is simply not a good fit both from the development and deployment perspective. Even for commercial, big ticket apps, HTML as a UI platform offers many advantages over native, from write-once run-anywhere, to remote maintenance, single point of management and failure to having full control over the application as opposed to have the app store overloads censor you. In a lot of ways Web based HTML/CSS/JavaScript applications have so much potential for building better solutions based on existing Web technologies for the very same reasons a lot of content years ago moved off the desktop to the Web. To me the Web as a mobile platform makes perfect sense, but the reality of today’s Mobile Web unfortunately looks a little different… Where’s the Love for the Mobile Web? Yet here we are in the middle of 2014, nearly 7 years after the first iPhone was released and brought the promise of rich interactive information at your fingertips, and yet we still don’t really have a solid mobile Web platform. I know what you’re thinking: “But we have lots of HTML/JavaScript/CSS features that allows us to build nice mobile interfaces”. I agree to a point – it’s actually quite possible to build nice looking, rich and capable Web UI today. We have media queries to deal with varied display sizes, CSS transforms for smooth animations and transitions, tons of CSS improvements in CSS 3 that facilitate rich layout, a host of APIs geared towards mobile device features and lately even a number of JavaScript framework choices that facilitate development of multi-screen apps in a consistent manner. Personally I’ve been working a lot with AngularJs and heavily modified Bootstrap themes to build mobile first UIs and that’s been working very well to provide highly usable and attractive UI for typical mobile business applications. From the pure UI perspective things actually look very good. Not just about the UI But it’s not just about the UI - it’s also about integration with the mobile device. When it comes to putting all those pieces together into what amounts to a consolidated platform to build mobile Web applications, I think we still have a ways to go… there are a lot of missing pieces to make it all work together and integrate with the device more smoothly, and more importantly to make it work uniformly across the majority of devices. I think there are a number of reasons for this. Slow Standards Adoption HTML standards implementations and ratification has been dreadfully slow, and browser vendors all seem to pick and choose different pieces of the technology they implement. The end result is that we have a capable UI platform that’s missing some of the infrastructure pieces to make it whole on mobile devices. There’s lots of potential but what is lacking that final 10% to build truly compelling mobile applications that can compete favorably with native applications. Some of it is the fragmentation of browsers and the slow evolution of the mobile specific HTML APIs. A host of mobile standards exist but many of the standards are in the early review stage and they have been there stuck for long periods of time and seem to move at a glacial pace. Browser vendors seem even slower to implement them, and for good reason – non-ratified standards mean that implementations may change and vendor implementations tend to be experimental and  likely have to be changed later. Neither Vendors or developers are not keen on changing standards. This is the typical chicken and egg scenario, but without some forward momentum from some party we end up stuck in the mud. It seems that either the standards bodies or the vendors need to carry the torch forward and that doesn’t seem to be happening quickly enough. Mobile Device Integration just isn’t good enough Current standards are not far reaching enough to address a number of the use case scenarios necessary for many mobile applications. While not every application needs to have access to all mobile device features, almost every mobile application could benefit from some integration with other parts of the mobile device platform. Integration with GPS, phone, media, messaging, notifications, linking and contacts system are benefits that are unique to mobile applications and could be widely used, but are mostly (with the exception of GPS) inaccessible for Web based applications today. Unfortunately trying to do most of this today only with a mobile Web browser is a losing battle. Aside from PhoneGap/Cordova’s app centric model with its own custom API accessing mobile device features and the token exception of the GeoLocation API, most device integration features are not widely supported by the current crop of mobile browsers. For example there’s no usable messaging API that allows access to SMS or contacts from HTML. Even obvious components like the Media Capture API are only implemented partially by mobile devices. There are alternatives and workarounds for some of these interfaces by using browser specific code, but that’s might ugly and something that I thought we were trying to leave behind with newer browser standards. But it’s not quite working out that way. It’s utterly perplexing to me that mobile standards like Media Capture and Streams, Media Gallery Access, Responsive Images, Messaging API, Contacts Manager API have only minimal or no traction at all today. Keep in mind we’ve had mobile browsers for nearly 7 years now, and yet we still have to think about how to get access to an image from the image gallery or the camera on some devices? Heck Windows Phone IE Mobile just gained the ability to upload images recently in the Windows 8.1 Update – that’s feature that HTML has had for 20 years! These are simple concepts and common problems that should have been solved a long time ago. It’s extremely frustrating to see build 90% of a mobile Web app with relative ease and then hit a brick wall for the remaining 10%, which often can be show stoppers. The remaining 10% have to do with platform integration, browser differences and working around the limitations that browsers and ‘pinned’ applications impose on HTML applications. The maddening part is that these limitations seem arbitrary as they could easily work on all mobile platforms. For example, SMS has a URL Moniker interface that sort of works on Android, works badly with iOS (only works if the address is already in the contact list) and not at all on Windows Phone. There’s no reason this shouldn’t work universally using the same interface – after all all phones have supported SMS since before the year 2000! But, it doesn’t have to be this way Change can happen very quickly. Take the GeoLocation API for example. Geolocation has taken off at the very beginning of the mobile device era and today it works well, provides the necessary security (a big concern for many mobile APIs), and is supported by just about all major mobile and even desktop browsers today. It handles security concerns via prompts to avoid unwanted access which is a model that would work for most other device APIs in a similar fashion. One time approval and occasional re-approval if code changes or caches expire. Simple and only slightly intrusive. It all works well, even though GeoLocation actually has some physical limitations, such as representing the current location when no GPS device is present. Yet this is a solved problem, where other APIs that are conceptually much simpler to implement have failed to gain any traction at all. Technically none of these APIs should be a problem to implement, but it appears that the momentum is just not there. Inadequate Web Application Linking and Activation Another important piece of the puzzle missing is the integration of HTML based Web applications. Today HTML based applications are not first class citizens on mobile operating systems. When talking about HTML based content there’s a big difference between content and applications. Content is great for search engine discovery and plain browser usage. Content is usually accessed intermittently and permanent linking is not so critical for this type of content.  But applications have different needs. Applications need to be started up quickly and must be easily switchable to support a multi-tasking user workflow. Therefore, it’s pretty crucial that mobile Web apps are integrated into the underlying mobile OS and work with the standard task management features. Unfortunately this integration is not as smooth as it should be. It starts with actually trying to find mobile Web applications, to ‘installing’ them onto a phone in an easily accessible manner in a prominent position. The experience of discovering a Mobile Web ‘App’ and making it sticky is by no means as easy or satisfying. Today the way you’d go about this is: Open the browser Search for a Web Site in the browser with your search engine of choice Hope that you find the right site Hope that you actually find a site that works for your mobile device Click on the link and run the app in a fully chrome’d browser instance (read tiny surface area) Pin the app to the home screen (with all the limitations outline above) Hope you pointed at the right URL when you pinned Even for you and me as developers, there are a few steps in there that are painful and annoying, but think about the average user. First figuring out how to search for a specific site or URL? And then pinning the app and hopefully from the right location? You’ve probably lost more than half of your audience at that point. This experience sucks. For developers too this process is painful since app developers can’t control the shortcut creation directly. This problem often gets solved by crazy coding schemes, with annoying pop-ups that try to get people to create shortcuts via fancy animations that are both annoying and add overhead to each and every application that implements this sort of thing differently. And that’s not the end of it - getting the link onto the home screen with an application icon varies quite a bit between browsers. Apple’s non-standard meta tags are prominent and they work with iOS and Android (only more recent versions), but not on Windows Phone. Windows Phone instead requires you to create an actual screen or rather a partial screen be captured for a shortcut in the tile manager. Who had that brilliant idea I wonder? Surprisingly Chrome on recent Android versions seems to actually get it right – icons use pngs, pinning is easy and pinned applications properly behave like standalone apps and retain the browser’s active page state and content. Each of the platforms has a different way to specify icons (WP doesn’t allow you to use an icon image at all), and the most widely used interface in use today is a bunch of Apple specific meta tags that other browsers choose to support. The question is: Why is there no standard implementation for installing shortcuts across mobile platforms using an official format rather than a proprietary one? Then there’s iOS and the crazy way it treats home screen linked URLs using a crazy hybrid format that is neither as capable as a Web app running in Safari nor a WebView hosted application. Moving off the Web ‘app’ link when switching to another app actually causes the browser and preview it to ‘blank out’ the Web application in the Task View (see screenshot on the right). Then, when the ‘app’ is reactivated it ends up completely restarting the browser with the original link. This is crazy behavior that you can’t easily work around. In some situations you might be able to store the application state and restore it using LocalStorage, but for many scenarios that involve complex data sources (like say Google Maps) that’s not a possibility. The only reason for this screwed up behavior I can think of is that it is deliberate to make Web apps a pain in the butt to use and forcing users trough the App Store/PhoneGap/Cordova route. App linking and management is a very basic problem – something that we essentially have solved in every desktop browser – yet on mobile devices where it arguably matters a lot more to have easy access to web content we have to jump through hoops to have even a remotely decent linking/activation experience across browsers. Where’s the Money? It’s not surprising that device home screen integration and Mobile Web support in general is in such dismal shape – the mobile OS vendors benefit financially from App store sales and have little to gain from Web based applications that bypass the App store and the cash cow that it presents. On top of that, platform specific vendor lock-in of both end users and developers who have invested in hardware, apps and consumables is something that mobile platform vendors actually aspire to. Web based interfaces that are cross-platform are the anti-thesis of that and so again it’s no surprise that the mobile Web is on a struggling path. But – that may be changing. More and more we’re seeing operations shifting to services that are subscription based or otherwise collect money for usage, and that may drive more progress into the Web direction in the end . Nothing like the almighty dollar to drive innovation forward. Do we need a Mobile Web App Store? As much as I dislike moderated experiences in today’s massive App Stores, they do at least provide one single place to look for apps for your device. I think we could really use some sort of registry, that could provide something akin to an app store for mobile Web apps, to make it easier to actually find mobile applications. This could take the form of a specialized search engine, or maybe a more formal store/registry like structure. Something like apt-get/chocolatey for Web apps. It could be curated and provide at least some feedback and reviews that might help with the integrity of applications. Coupled to that could be a native application on each platform that would allow searching and browsing of the registry and then also handle installation in the form of providing the home screen linking, plus maybe an initial security configuration that determines what features are allowed access to for the app. I’m not holding my breath. In order for this sort of thing to take off and gain widespread appeal, a lot of coordination would be required. And in order to get enough traction it would have to come from a well known entity – a mobile Web app store from a no name source is unlikely to gain high enough usage numbers to make a difference. In a way this would eliminate some of the freedom of the Web, but of course this would also be an optional search path in addition to the standard open Web search mechanisms to find and access content today. Security Security is a big deal, and one of the perceived reasons why so many IT professionals appear to be willing to go back to the walled garden of deployed apps is that Apps are perceived as safe due to the official review and curation of the App stores. Curated stores are supposed to protect you from malware, illegal and misleading content. It doesn’t always work out that way and all the major vendors have had issues with security and the review process at some time or another. Security is critical, but I also think that Web applications in general pose less of a security threat than native applications, by nature of the sandboxed browser and JavaScript environments. Web applications run externally completely and in the HTML and JavaScript sandboxes, with only a very few controlled APIs allowing access to device specific features. And as discussed earlier – security for any device interaction can be granted the same for mobile applications through a Web browser, as they can for native applications either via explicit policies loaded from the Web, or via prompting as GeoLocation does today. Security is important, but it’s certainly solvable problem for Web applications even those that need to access device hardware. Security shouldn’t be a reason for Web apps to be an equal player in mobile applications. Apps are winning, but haven’t we been here before? So now we’re finding ourselves back in an era of installed app, rather than Web based and managed apps. Only it’s even worse today than with Desktop applications, in that the apps are going through a gatekeeper that charges a toll and censors what you can and can’t do in your apps. Frankly it’s a mystery to me why anybody would buy into this model and why it’s lasted this long when we’ve already been through this process. It’s crazy… It’s really a shame that this regression is happening. We have the technology to make mobile Web apps much more prominent, but yet we’re basically held back by what seems little more than bureaucracy, partisan bickering and self interest of the major parties involved. Back in the day of the desktop it was Internet Explorer’s 98+%  market shareholding back the Web from improvements for many years – now it’s the combined mobile OS market in control of the mobile browsers. If mobile Web apps were allowed to be treated the same as native apps with simple ways to install and run them consistently and persistently, that would go a long way to making mobile applications much more usable and seriously viable alternatives to native apps. But as it is mobile apps have a severe disadvantage in placement and operation. There are a few bright spots in all of this. Mozilla’s FireFoxOs is embracing the Web for it’s mobile OS by essentially building every app out of HTML and JavaScript based content. It supports both packaged and certified package modes (that can be put into the app store), and Open Web apps that are loaded and run completely off the Web and can also cache locally for offline operation using a manifest. Open Web apps are treated as full class citizens in FireFoxOS and run using the same mechanism as installed apps. Unfortunately FireFoxOs is getting a slow start with minimal device support and specifically targeting the low end market. We can hope that this approach will change and catch on with other vendors, but that’s also an uphill battle given the conflict of interest with platform lock in that it represents. Recent versions of Android also seem to be working reasonably well with mobile application integration onto the desktop and activation out of the box. Although it still uses the Apple meta tags to find icons and behavior settings, everything at least works as you would expect – icons to the desktop on pinning, WebView based full screen activation, and reliable application persistence as the browser/app is treated like a real application. Hopefully iOS will at some point provide this same level of rudimentary Web app support. What’s also interesting to me is that Microsoft hasn’t picked up on the obvious need for a solid Web App platform. Being a distant third in the mobile OS war, Microsoft certainly has nothing to lose and everything to gain by using fresh ideas and expanding into areas that the other major vendors are neglecting. But instead Microsoft is trying to beat the market leaders at their own game, fighting on their adversary’s terms instead of taking a new tack. Providing a kick ass mobile Web platform that takes the lead on some of the proposed mobile APIs would be something positive that Microsoft could do to improve its miserable position in the mobile device market. Where are we at with Mobile Web? It sure sounds like I’m really down on the Mobile Web, right? I’ve built a number of mobile apps in the last year and while overall result and response has been very positive to what we were able to accomplish in terms of UI, getting that final 10% that required device integration dialed was an absolute nightmare on every single one of them. Big compromises had to be made and some features were left out or had to be modified for some devices. In two cases we opted to go the Cordova route in order to get the integration we needed, along with the extra pain involved in that process. Unless you’re not integrating with device features and you don’t care deeply about a smooth integration with the mobile desktop, mobile Web development is fraught with frustration. So, yes I’m frustrated! But it’s not for lack of wanting the mobile Web to succeed. I am still a firm believer that we will eventually arrive a much more functional mobile Web platform that allows access to the most common device features in a sensible way. It wouldn't be difficult for device platform vendors to make Web based applications first class citizens on mobile devices. But unfortunately it looks like it will still be some time before this happens. So, what’s your experience building mobile Web apps? Are you finding similar issues? Just giving up on raw Web applications and building PhoneGap apps instead? Completely skipping the Web and going native? Leave a comment for discussion. Resources Rick Strahl on DotNet Rocks talking about Mobile Web© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2014Posted in HTML5  Mobile   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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  • How to find and fix performance problems in ORM powered applications

    - by FransBouma
    Once in a while we get requests about how to fix performance problems with our framework. As it comes down to following the same steps and looking into the same things every single time, I decided to write a blogpost about it instead, so more people can learn from this and solve performance problems in their O/R mapper powered applications. In some parts it's focused on LLBLGen Pro but it's also usable for other O/R mapping frameworks, as the vast majority of performance problems in O/R mapper powered applications are not specific for a certain O/R mapper framework. Too often, the developer looks at the wrong part of the application, trying to fix what isn't a problem in that part, and getting frustrated that 'things are so slow with <insert your favorite framework X here>'. I'm in the O/R mapper business for a long time now (almost 10 years, full time) and as it's a small world, we O/R mapper developers know almost all tricks to pull off by now: we all know what to do to make task ABC faster and what compromises (because there are almost always compromises) to deal with if we decide to make ABC faster that way. Some O/R mapper frameworks are faster in X, others in Y, but you can be sure the difference is mainly a result of a compromise some developers are willing to deal with and others aren't. That's why the O/R mapper frameworks on the market today are different in many ways, even though they all fetch and save entities from and to a database. I'm not suggesting there's no room for improvement in today's O/R mapper frameworks, there always is, but it's not a matter of 'the slowness of the application is caused by the O/R mapper' anymore. Perhaps query generation can be optimized a bit here, row materialization can be optimized a bit there, but it's mainly coming down to milliseconds. Still worth it if you're a framework developer, but it's not much compared to the time spend inside databases and in user code: if a complete fetch takes 40ms or 50ms (from call to entity object collection), it won't make a difference for your application as that 10ms difference won't be noticed. That's why it's very important to find the real locations of the problems so developers can fix them properly and don't get frustrated because their quest to get a fast, performing application failed. Performance tuning basics and rules Finding and fixing performance problems in any application is a strict procedure with four prescribed steps: isolate, analyze, interpret and fix, in that order. It's key that you don't skip a step nor make assumptions: these steps help you find the reason of a problem which seems to be there, and how to fix it or leave it as-is. Skipping a step, or when you assume things will be bad/slow without doing analysis will lead to the path of premature optimization and won't actually solve your problems, only create new ones. The most important rule of finding and fixing performance problems in software is that you have to understand what 'performance problem' actually means. Most developers will say "when a piece of software / code is slow, you have a performance problem". But is that actually the case? If I write a Linq query which will aggregate, group and sort 5 million rows from several tables to produce a resultset of 10 rows, it might take more than a couple of milliseconds before that resultset is ready to be consumed by other logic. If I solely look at the Linq query, the code consuming the resultset of the 10 rows and then look at the time it takes to complete the whole procedure, it will appear to me to be slow: all that time taken to produce and consume 10 rows? But if you look closer, if you analyze and interpret the situation, you'll see it does a tremendous amount of work, and in that light it might even be extremely fast. With every performance problem you encounter, always do realize that what you're trying to solve is perhaps not a technical problem at all, but a perception problem. The second most important rule you have to understand is based on the old saying "Penny wise, Pound Foolish": the part which takes e.g. 5% of the total time T for a given task isn't worth optimizing if you have another part which takes a much larger part of the total time T for that same given task. Optimizing parts which are relatively insignificant for the total time taken is not going to bring you better results overall, even if you totally optimize that part away. This is the core reason why analysis of the complete set of application parts which participate in a given task is key to being successful in solving performance problems: No analysis -> no problem -> no solution. One warning up front: hunting for performance will always include making compromises. Fast software can be made maintainable, but if you want to squeeze as much performance out of your software, you will inevitably be faced with the dilemma of compromising one or more from the group {readability, maintainability, features} for the extra performance you think you'll gain. It's then up to you to decide whether it's worth it. In almost all cases it's not. The reason for this is simple: the vast majority of performance problems can be solved by implementing the proper algorithms, the ones with proven Big O-characteristics so you know the performance you'll get plus you know the algorithm will work. The time taken by the algorithm implementing code is inevitable: you already implemented the best algorithm. You might find some optimizations on the technical level but in general these are minor. Let's look at the four steps to see how they guide us through the quest to find and fix performance problems. Isolate The first thing you need to do is to isolate the areas in your application which are assumed to be slow. For example, if your application is a web application and a given page is taking several seconds or even minutes to load, it's a good candidate to check out. It's important to start with the isolate step because it allows you to focus on a single code path per area with a clear begin and end and ignore the rest. The rest of the steps are taken per identified problematic area. Keep in mind that isolation focuses on tasks in an application, not code snippets. A task is something that's started in your application by either another task or the user, or another program, and has a beginning and an end. You can see a task as a piece of functionality offered by your application.  Analyze Once you've determined the problem areas, you have to perform analysis on the code paths of each area, to see where the performance problems occur and which areas are not the problem. This is a multi-layered effort: an application which uses an O/R mapper typically consists of multiple parts: there's likely some kind of interface (web, webservice, windows etc.), a part which controls the interface and business logic, the O/R mapper part and the RDBMS, all connected with either a network or inter-process connections provided by the OS or other means. Each of these parts, including the connectivity plumbing, eat up a part of the total time it takes to complete a task, e.g. load a webpage with all orders of a given customer X. To understand which parts participate in the task / area we're investigating and how much they contribute to the total time taken to complete the task, analysis of each participating task is essential. Start with the code you wrote which starts the task, analyze the code and track the path it follows through your application. What does the code do along the way, verify whether it's correct or not. Analyze whether you have implemented the right algorithms in your code for this particular area. Remember we're looking at one area at a time, which means we're ignoring all other code paths, just the code path of the current problematic area, from begin to end and back. Don't dig in and start optimizing at the code level just yet. We're just analyzing. If your analysis reveals big architectural stupidity, it's perhaps a good idea to rethink the architecture at this point. For the rest, we're analyzing which means we collect data about what could be wrong, for each participating part of the complete application. Reviewing the code you wrote is a good tool to get deeper understanding of what is going on for a given task but ultimately it lacks precision and overview what really happens: humans aren't good code interpreters, computers are. We therefore need to utilize tools to get deeper understanding about which parts contribute how much time to the total task, triggered by which other parts and for example how many times are they called. There are two different kind of tools which are necessary: .NET profilers and O/R mapper / RDBMS profilers. .NET profiling .NET profilers (e.g. dotTrace by JetBrains or Ants by Red Gate software) show exactly which pieces of code are called, how many times they're called, and the time it took to run that piece of code, at the method level and sometimes even at the line level. The .NET profilers are essential tools for understanding whether the time taken to complete a given task / area in your application is consumed by .NET code, where exactly in your code, the path to that code, how many times that code was called by other code and thus reveals where hotspots are located: the areas where a solution can be found. Importantly, they also reveal which areas can be left alone: remember our penny wise pound foolish saying: if a profiler reveals that a group of methods are fast, or don't contribute much to the total time taken for a given task, ignore them. Even if the code in them is perhaps complex and looks like a candidate for optimization: you can work all day on that, it won't matter.  As we're focusing on a single area of the application, it's best to start profiling right before you actually activate the task/area. Most .NET profilers support this by starting the application without starting the profiling procedure just yet. You navigate to the particular part which is slow, start profiling in the profiler, in your application you perform the actions which are considered slow, and afterwards you get a snapshot in the profiler. The snapshot contains the data collected by the profiler during the slow action, so most data is produced by code in the area to investigate. This is important, because it allows you to stay focused on a single area. O/R mapper and RDBMS profiling .NET profilers give you a good insight in the .NET side of things, but not in the RDBMS side of the application. As this article is about O/R mapper powered applications, we're also looking at databases, and the software making it possible to consume the database in your application: the O/R mapper. To understand which parts of the O/R mapper and database participate how much to the total time taken for task T, we need different tools. There are two kind of tools focusing on O/R mappers and database performance profiling: O/R mapper profilers and RDBMS profilers. For O/R mapper profilers, you can look at LLBLGen Prof by hibernating rhinos or the Linq to Sql/LLBLGen Pro profiler by Huagati. Hibernating rhinos also have profilers for other O/R mappers like NHibernate (NHProf) and Entity Framework (EFProf) and work the same as LLBLGen Prof. For RDBMS profilers, you have to look whether the RDBMS vendor has a profiler. For example for SQL Server, the profiler is shipped with SQL Server, for Oracle it's build into the RDBMS, however there are also 3rd party tools. Which tool you're using isn't really important, what's important is that you get insight in which queries are executed during the task / area we're currently focused on and how long they took. Here, the O/R mapper profilers have an advantage as they collect the time it took to execute the query from the application's perspective so they also collect the time it took to transport data across the network. This is important because a query which returns a massive resultset or a resultset with large blob/clob/ntext/image fields takes more time to get transported across the network than a small resultset and a database profiler doesn't take this into account most of the time. Another tool to use in this case, which is more low level and not all O/R mappers support it (though LLBLGen Pro and NHibernate as well do) is tracing: most O/R mappers offer some form of tracing or logging system which you can use to collect the SQL generated and executed and often also other activity behind the scenes. While tracing can produce a tremendous amount of data in some cases, it also gives insight in what's going on. Interpret After we've completed the analysis step it's time to look at the data we've collected. We've done code reviews to see whether we've done anything stupid and which parts actually take place and if the proper algorithms have been implemented. We've done .NET profiling to see which parts are choke points and how much time they contribute to the total time taken to complete the task we're investigating. We've performed O/R mapper profiling and RDBMS profiling to see which queries were executed during the task, how many queries were generated and executed and how long they took to complete, including network transportation. All this data reveals two things: which parts are big contributors to the total time taken and which parts are irrelevant. Both aspects are very important. The parts which are irrelevant (i.e. don't contribute significantly to the total time taken) can be ignored from now on, we won't look at them. The parts which contribute a lot to the total time taken are important to look at. We now have to first look at the .NET profiler results, to see whether the time taken is consumed in our own code, in .NET framework code, in the O/R mapper itself or somewhere else. For example if most of the time is consumed by DbCommand.ExecuteReader, the time it took to complete the task is depending on the time the data is fetched from the database. If there was just 1 query executed, according to tracing or O/R mapper profilers / RDBMS profilers, check whether that query is optimal, uses indexes or has to deal with a lot of data. Interpret means that you follow the path from begin to end through the data collected and determine where, along the path, the most time is contributed. It also means that you have to check whether this was expected or is totally unexpected. My previous example of the 10 row resultset of a query which groups millions of rows will likely reveal that a long time is spend inside the database and almost no time is spend in the .NET code, meaning the RDBMS part contributes the most to the total time taken, the rest is compared to that time, irrelevant. Considering the vastness of the source data set, it's expected this will take some time. However, does it need tweaking? Perhaps all possible tweaks are already in place. In the interpret step you then have to decide that further action in this area is necessary or not, based on what the analysis results show: if the analysis results were unexpected and in the area where the most time is contributed to the total time taken is room for improvement, action should be taken. If not, you can only accept the situation and move on. In all cases, document your decision together with the analysis you've done. If you decide that the perceived performance problem is actually expected due to the nature of the task performed, it's essential that in the future when someone else looks at the application and starts asking questions you can answer them properly and new analysis is only necessary if situations changed. Fix After interpreting the analysis results you've concluded that some areas need adjustment. This is the fix step: you're actively correcting the performance problem with proper action targeted at the real cause. In many cases related to O/R mapper powered applications it means you'll use different features of the O/R mapper to achieve the same goal, or apply optimizations at the RDBMS level. It could also mean you apply caching inside your application (compromise memory consumption over performance) to avoid unnecessary re-querying data and re-consuming the results. After applying a change, it's key you re-do the analysis and interpretation steps: compare the results and expectations with what you had before, to see whether your actions had any effect or whether it moved the problem to a different part of the application. Don't fall into the trap to do partly analysis: do the full analysis again: .NET profiling and O/R mapper / RDBMS profiling. It might very well be that the changes you've made make one part faster but another part significantly slower, in such a way that the overall problem hasn't changed at all. Performance tuning is dealing with compromises and making choices: to use one feature over the other, to accept a higher memory footprint, to go away from the strict-OO path and execute queries directly onto the RDBMS, these are choices and compromises which will cross your path if you want to fix performance problems with respect to O/R mappers or data-access and databases in general. In most cases it's not a big issue: alternatives are often good choices too and the compromises aren't that hard to deal with. What is important is that you document why you made a choice, a compromise: which analysis data, which interpretation led you to the choice made. This is key for good maintainability in the years to come. Most common performance problems with O/R mappers Below is an incomplete list of common performance problems related to data-access / O/R mappers / RDBMS code. It will help you with fixing the hotspots you found in the interpretation step. SELECT N+1: (Lazy-loading specific). Lazy loading triggered performance bottlenecks. Consider a list of Orders bound to a grid. You have a Field mapped onto a related field in Order, Customer.CompanyName. Showing this column in the grid will make the grid fetch (indirectly) for each row the Customer row. This means you'll get for the single list not 1 query (for the orders) but 1+(the number of orders shown) queries. To solve this: use eager loading using a prefetch path to fetch the customers with the orders. SELECT N+1 is easy to spot with an O/R mapper profiler or RDBMS profiler: if you see a lot of identical queries executed at once, you have this problem. Prefetch paths using many path nodes or sorting, or limiting. Eager loading problem. Prefetch paths can help with performance, but as 1 query is fetched per node, it can be the number of data fetched in a child node is bigger than you think. Also consider that data in every node is merged on the client within the parent. This is fast, but it also can take some time if you fetch massive amounts of entities. If you keep fetches small, you can use tuning parameters like the ParameterizedPrefetchPathThreshold setting to get more optimal queries. Deep inheritance hierarchies of type Target Per Entity/Type. If you use inheritance of type Target per Entity / Type (each type in the inheritance hierarchy is mapped onto its own table/view), fetches will join subtype- and supertype tables in many cases, which can lead to a lot of performance problems if the hierarchy has many types. With this problem, keep inheritance to a minimum if possible, or switch to a hierarchy of type Target Per Hierarchy, which means all entities in the inheritance hierarchy are mapped onto the same table/view. Of course this has its own set of drawbacks, but it's a compromise you might want to take. Fetching massive amounts of data by fetching large lists of entities. LLBLGen Pro supports paging (and limiting the # of rows returned), which is often key to process through large sets of data. Use paging on the RDBMS if possible (so a query is executed which returns only the rows in the page requested). When using paging in a web application, be sure that you switch server-side paging on on the datasourcecontrol used. In this case, paging on the grid alone is not enough: this can lead to fetching a lot of data which is then loaded into the grid and paged there. Keep note that analyzing queries for paging could lead to the false assumption that paging doesn't occur, e.g. when the query contains a field of type ntext/image/clob/blob and DISTINCT can't be applied while it should have (e.g. due to a join): the datareader will do DISTINCT filtering on the client. this is a little slower but it does perform paging functionality on the data-reader so it won't fetch all rows even if the query suggests it does. Fetch massive amounts of data because blob/clob/ntext/image fields aren't excluded. LLBLGen Pro supports field exclusion for queries. You can exclude fields (also in prefetch paths) per query to avoid fetching all fields of an entity, e.g. when you don't need them for the logic consuming the resultset. Excluding fields can greatly reduce the amount of time spend on data-transport across the network. Use this optimization if you see that there's a big difference between query execution time on the RDBMS and the time reported by the .NET profiler for the ExecuteReader method call. Doing client-side aggregates/scalar calculations by consuming a lot of data. If possible, try to formulate a scalar query or group by query using the projection system or GetScalar functionality of LLBLGen Pro to do data consumption on the RDBMS server. It's far more efficient to process data on the RDBMS server than to first load it all in memory, then traverse the data in-memory to calculate a value. Using .ToList() constructs inside linq queries. It might be you use .ToList() somewhere in a Linq query which makes the query be run partially in-memory. Example: var q = from c in metaData.Customers.ToList() where c.Country=="Norway" select c; This will actually fetch all customers in-memory and do an in-memory filtering, as the linq query is defined on an IEnumerable<T>, and not on the IQueryable<T>. Linq is nice, but it can often be a bit unclear where some parts of a Linq query might run. Fetching all entities to delete into memory first. To delete a set of entities it's rather inefficient to first fetch them all into memory and then delete them one by one. It's more efficient to execute a DELETE FROM ... WHERE query on the database directly to delete the entities in one go. LLBLGen Pro supports this feature, and so do some other O/R mappers. It's not always possible to do this operation in the context of an O/R mapper however: if an O/R mapper relies on a cache, these kind of operations are likely not supported because they make it impossible to track whether an entity is actually removed from the DB and thus can be removed from the cache. Fetching all entities to update with an expression into memory first. Similar to the previous point: it is more efficient to update a set of entities directly with a single UPDATE query using an expression instead of fetching the entities into memory first and then updating the entities in a loop, and afterwards saving them. It might however be a compromise you don't want to take as it is working around the idea of having an object graph in memory which is manipulated and instead makes the code fully aware there's a RDBMS somewhere. Conclusion Performance tuning is almost always about compromises and making choices. It's also about knowing where to look and how the systems in play behave and should behave. The four steps I provided should help you stay focused on the real problem and lead you towards the solution. Knowing how to optimally use the systems participating in your own code (.NET framework, O/R mapper, RDBMS, network/services) is key for success as well as knowing what's going on inside the application you built. I hope you'll find this guide useful in tracking down performance problems and dealing with them in a useful way.  

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