magnet links - Page 334

jqGrid concatinating/building html tag incorrectly

- by Energetic Pixels

Please excuse to length of post. But I needed to explain what I am seeing. I have a onSelectRow option that is supposed to build stacked html <li> tags (such as <li>...</li> <li>...</li> <li>...</li> ) up to the number of static xml elements that I am looking at. But my script is concatinating all the image src links together instead of building the whole listobject tag. Everything else in my jqGrid script works with exception of repeated elements inside my xml. onSelectRow: function() { var gsr = $('#searchResults').jqGrid('getGridParam', 'selrow'); if (gsr) { var data = $('#searchResults').jqGrid('getRowData', gsr); $('#thumbs ul').html('<li><a class='thumb' href='' + data.piclocation + '' title='' + data.pictitle + ''><img src='" + data.picthumb + "' alt='" + data.pictitle + "' /></a><div class='caption'><div class='image-title'>" + data.pictitle + "</div></div></li>"); };" my xml file is something like this: <photo> <pic> <asset>weaponLib/stillMedia/slides/A106.jpg</asset> <thumb>weaponLib/stillMedia/thumbs/A106.jpg</thumb> <caption>Side view of DODIC A106</caption> <title>Side view of 22 caliber long rifle ball cartridge</title> </pic> <pic> <asset>weaponLib/stillMedia/slides/A106_A.jpg</asset> <thumb>weaponLib/stillMedia/thumbs/A106_A.jpg</thumb> <caption>Side view of DODIC A106</caption> <title>Side view of 22 caliber long rifle ball cartridge</title> </pic> <pic> <asset>weaponLib/stillMedia/slides/A106_B.jpg</asset> <thumb>weaponLib/stillMedia/thumbs/A106_B.jpg</thumb> <caption>Side view of DODIC A106</caption> <title>Side view of 22 caliber long rifle ball cartridge</title> </pic> <pic> <asset>weaponLib/stillMedia/slides/A106_C.jpg</asset> <thumb>weaponLib/stillMedia/thumbs/A106_C.jpg</thumb> <caption>Side view of DODIC A106</caption> <title>Side view of 22 caliber long rifle ball cartridge</title> </pic> <pic> <asset>weaponLib/stillMedia/slides/A106_D.jpg</asset> <thumb>weaponLib/stillMedia/thumbs/A106_D.jpg</thumb> <caption>Side view of DODIC A106</caption> <title>Side view of 22 caliber long rifle ball cartridge</title> </pic> My script works fine when it only sees one sequence, but when it sees more than one it puts all html inside the tags together then for the caption and title does the same for them. It generates only one <li></li> tag set instead of 5 in the example above like I want. The <li> tags are being used by a slideshow (with thumbnails) utility. Inside firebug, I can see the object that it is built for me: <a title="Side view of 22 caliber long rifle ball cartridgeSide view of 22 caliber long rifle ball cartridgeSide view of 22 caliber long rifle ball cartridgeSide view of 22 caliber long rifle ball cartridgeSide view of 22 caliber long rifle ball cartridge" href="weaponLib/stillMedia/slides/A106.jpgweaponLib/stillMedia/slides/A106_A.jpgweaponLib/stillMedia/slides/A106_B.jpgweaponLib/stillMedia/slides/A106_C.jpgweaponLib/stillMedia/slides/A106_D.jpg" class="thumb"><img alt="Side view of 22 caliber long rifle ball cartridgeSide view of 22 caliber long rifle ball cartridgeSide view of 22 caliber long rifle ball cartridgeSide view of 22 caliber long rifle ball cartridgeSide view of 22 caliber long rifle ball cartridge" src="weaponLib/stillMedia/thumbs/A106.jpgweaponLib/stillMedia/thumbs/A106_A.jpgweaponLib/stillMedia/thumbs/A106_B.jpgweaponLib/stillMedia/thumbs/A106_C.jpgweaponLib/stillMedia/thumbs/A106_D.jpg"></a> Within jqGrid, the cell is holding: <td title="weaponLib/stillMedia/slides/A106.jpgweaponLib/stillMedia/slides/A106_A.jpgweaponLib/stillMedia/slides/A106_B.jpgweaponLib/stillMedia/slides/A106_C.jpgweaponLib/stillMedia/slides/A106_D.jpg" style="text-align: center; display: none;" role="gridcell">weaponLib/stillMedia/slides/A106.jpgweaponLib/stillMedia/slides/A106_A.jpgweaponLib/stillMedia/slides/A106_B.jpgweaponLib/stillMedia/slides/A106_C.jpgweaponLib/stillMedia/slides/A106_D.jpg</td> I know that jqGrid is building it wrong. I am double-stumped as to direction to fix it. Any suggestions would be greatly greatly appreciated. tony

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Help required in adding new methods, properties into existing classes dynamically

- by Bepenfriends

Hi All, I am not sure whether it is possible to achieve this kind of implementation in Dot Net. Below are the information Currently we are on an application which is done in COM+, ASP, XSL, XML technologies. It is a multi tier architecture application in which COM+ acts as the BAL. The execution steps for any CRUD operation will be defined using a seperate UI which uses XML to store the information. BAL reads the XML and understands the execution steps which are defined and executes corresponding methods in DLL. Much like EDM we have our custom model (using XML) which determines which property of object is searchable, retrievable etc. Based on this information BAL constructs queries and calls procedures to get the data. In the current application both BAL and DAL are heavily customizable without doing any code change. the results will be transmitted to presentation layer in XML format which constructs the UI based on the data recieved. Now I am creating a migration project which deals with employee information. It is also going to follow the N Tier architecture in which the presentation layer communicates with BAL which connects to DAL to return the Data. Here is the problem, In our existing version we are handling every information as XML in its native form (no converstion of object etc), but in the migration project, Team is really interested in utilizing the OOP model of development where every information which is sent from BAL need to be converted to objects of its respective types (example employeeCollection, Address Collection etc). If we have the static number of data returned from BAL we can have a class which contains those nodes as properties and we can access the same. But in our case the data returned from our BAL need to be customized. How can we handle the customization in presentation layer which is converting the result to an Object. Below is an example of the XML returned <employees> <employee> <firstName>Employee 1 First Name</firstName> <lastName>Employee 1 Last Name</lastName> <addresses> <address> <addressType>1</addressType> <StreetName>Street name1</StreetName> <RegionName>Region name</RegionName> <address> <address> <addressType>2</addressType> <StreetName>Street name2</StreetName> <RegionName>Region name</RegionName> <address> <address> <addressType>3</addressType> <StreetName>Street name3</StreetName> <RegionName>Region name</RegionName> <address> <addresses> </employee> <employee> <firstName>Employee 2 First Name</firstName> <lastName>Employee 2 Last Name</lastName> <addresses> <address> <addressType>1</addressType> <StreetName>Street name1</StreetName> <RegionName>Region name</RegionName> <address> <address> <addressType>2</addressType> <StreetName>Street name2</StreetName> <RegionName>Region name</RegionName> <address> <addresses> </employee> </employees> If these are the only columns then i can write a class which is like public class Address{ public int AddressType {get;set;}; public string StreetName {get;set;}; public string RegionName {get;set;}; } public class Employee{ public string FirstName {get; set;} public string LastName {get; set;} public string AddressCollection {get; set;} } public class EmployeeCollection : List<Employee>{ public bool Add (Employee Data){ .... } } public class AddressCollection : List<Address>{ public bool Add (Address Data){ .... } } This class will be provided to customers and consultants as DLLs. We will not provide the source code for the same. Now when the consultants or customers does customization(example adding country to address and adding passport information object with employee object) they must be able to access those properties in these classes, but without source code they will not be able to do those modifications.which makes the application useless. Is there is any way to acomplish this in DotNet. I thought of using Anonymous classes but, the problem with Anonymous classes are we can not have methods in it. I am not sure how can i fit the collection objects (which will be inturn an anonymous class) Not sure about datagrid / user control binding etc. I also thought of using CODEDom to create classes runtime but not sure about the meory, performance issues. also the classes must be created only once and must use the same till there is another change. Kindly help me out in this problem. Any kind of help meterial/ cryptic code/ links will be helpful.

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How can I use the FOR attribute of a LABEL tag without the ID attribute on the INPUT tag

- by Shawn

Is there a solution to the problem illustrated in the code below? Start by opening the code in a browser to get straight to the point and not have to look through all that code before knowing what you're looking for. <html> <head> <title>Input ID creates problems</title> <style type="text/css"> #prologue, #summary { margin: 5em; } </style> </head> <body> <h1>Input ID creates a bug</h1> <p id="prologue"> In this example, I make a list of checkboxes representing things which could appear in a book. If you want some in your book, you check them: </p> <form> <ul> <li> <input type="checkbox" id="prologue" /> <label for="prologue">prologue</label> </li> <li> <input type="checkbox" id="chapter" /> <label for="chapter">chapter</label> </li> <li> <input type="checkbox" id="summary" /> <label for="summary">summary</label> </li> <li> <input type="checkbox" id="etc" /> <label for="etc">etc</label> <label> </li> </ul> </form> <p id="summary"> For each checkbox, I want to assign an ID so that clicking a label checks the corresponding checkbox. The problems occur when other elements in the page already use those IDs. In this case, a CSS declaration was made to add margins to the two paragraphs which IDs are "prologue" and "summary", but because of the IDs given to the checkboxes, the checkboxes named "prologue" and "summary" are also affected by this declaration. The following links simply call a javascript function which writes out the element whose id is <a href="javascript:alert(document.getElementById('prologue'));">prologue</a> and <a href="javascript:alert(document.getElementById('summary'));">summary</a>, respectively. In the first case (prologue), the script writes out [object HTMLParagraphElement], because the first element found with id "prologue" is a paragraph. But in the second case (summary), the script writes out [object HTMLInputElement] because the first element found with id "summary" is an input. In the case of another script, the consequences of this mix up could have been much more dramatic. Now try clicking on the label prologue in the list above. It does not check the checkbox as clicking on any other label. This is because it finds the paragraph whose ID is also "prologue" and tries to check that instead. By the way, if there were another checkbox whose id was "prologue", then clicking on the label would check the one which appears first in the code. </p> <p> An easy fix for this would be to chose other IDs for the checkboxes, but this doesn't apply if these IDs are given dynamically, by a php script for example. Another easy fix for this would be to write labels like this: <pre> <label><input type="checkbox" />prologue</label> </pre> and not need to give an ID to the checkboxes. But this only works if the label and checkbox are next to each other. </p> <p> Well, that's the problem. I guess the ideal solution would be to link a label to a checkboxe using another mechanism (not using ID). I think the perfect way to do this would be to match a label to the input element whose NAME (not ID) is the same as the label's FOR attribute. What do you think? </p> </body> </html>

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WPF Some styles not applied on DataTemplate controls

- by Martin

Hi, I am trying to learn something about WPF and I am quite amazed by its flexibility. However, I have hit a problem with Styles and DataTemplates, which is little bit confusing. I have defined below test page to play around a bit with styles etc and found that the Styles defined in <Page.Resources> for Border and TextBlock are not applied in the DataTemplate, but Style for ProgressBar defined in exactly the same way is applied. Source code (I just use Kaxaml and XamlPadX to view the result) <Page xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"> <Page.Resources> <Style TargetType="{x:Type Border}"> <Setter Property="Background" Value="SkyBlue"/> <Setter Property="BorderBrush" Value="Black"/> <Setter Property="BorderThickness" Value="2"/> <Setter Property="CornerRadius" Value="5"/> </Style> <Style TargetType="{x:Type TextBlock}"> <Setter Property="FontWeight" Value="Bold"/> </Style> <Style TargetType="{x:Type ProgressBar}"> <Setter Property="Height" Value="10"/> <Setter Property="Width" Value="100"/> <Setter Property="Foreground" Value="Red"/> </Style> <XmlDataProvider x:Key="TestData" XPath="/TestData"> <x:XData> <TestData xmlns=""> <TestElement> <Name>Item 1</Name> <Value>25</Value> </TestElement> <TestElement> <Name>Item 2</Name> <Value>50</Value> </TestElement> </TestData> </x:XData> </XmlDataProvider> <HierarchicalDataTemplate DataType="TestElement"> <Border Height="45" Width="120" Margin="5,5"> <StackPanel Orientation="Vertical" Margin="5,5" VerticalAlignment="Center" HorizontalAlignment="Center"> <TextBlock HorizontalAlignment="Center" Text="{Binding XPath=Name}"/> <ProgressBar Value="{Binding XPath=Value}"/> </StackPanel> </Border> </HierarchicalDataTemplate> </Page.Resources> <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal" HorizontalAlignment="Center" VerticalAlignment="Center"> <StackPanel Orientation="Vertical" VerticalAlignment="Center"> <Border Height="45" Width="120" Margin="5,5"> <StackPanel Orientation="Vertical" VerticalAlignment="Center" HorizontalAlignment="Center"> <TextBlock HorizontalAlignment="Center" Text="Item 1"/> <ProgressBar Value="25"/> </StackPanel> </Border> <Border Height="45" Width="120" Margin="5,5"> <StackPanel Orientation="Vertical" VerticalAlignment="Center" HorizontalAlignment="Center"> <TextBlock HorizontalAlignment="Center" Text="Item 2"/> <ProgressBar Value="50"/> </StackPanel> </Border> </StackPanel> <ListBox Margin="10,10" Width="140" ItemsSource="{Binding Source={StaticResource TestData}, XPath=TestElement}"/> </StackPanel> </Page> I suspect it has something to do with default styles etc, but more puzzling is why some Styles are applied and some not. I cannot find an easy explanation for above anywhere and thus would like to ask if someone would be kind enough to explain this behaviour in lamens' terms with possible links to technical description, i.e. to MSDN or so. Thanks in advance for you support!

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modalpopupextender.Show() wont fire

- by Peter Lea

I'm pretty new to developing for the web so bare with me. I have a company page with multiple locations and emails etc at each of these addresses. The idea is to have a single modalpopup to edit each type of data (one for email, one for urls, one for addresses etc). I link the modalpopupextender to a hiddenbutton and then call an edit function from various places where I can populate some hiddenfields and textboxes in the panel before showing it. The code executes but it just wont show the damn popup, I just see a flash and can't figure out if its my panel, my css or something I don't understand about ajax and postbacks etc. Things i've tried after reading various threads: Disable smart navigation in web.config Move ToolKitScriptManager up to master page and use proxy in content set hiddenbutton to use style="display:none" tried links etc instead of hidden button Heres my code CSS .modalBackground { position: absolute; z-index: 100; top: 0px; left: 0px; background-color: #000; filter: alpha(opacity=60); -moz-opacity: 0.6; opacity: 0.6; } .modalPopup { background-color: #FFD; border-width: 3px; border-style: solid; border-color: gray; padding: 3px;} Asp/html <ajaxToolkit:ModalPopupExtender runat="server" ID="mpe_email" BackgroundCssClass="modalBackground" PopupControlID="modal_email" CancelControlID="btn_cancel_email" TargetControlID="fake_btn_email" /> <asp:Button ID="fake_btn_email" runat="server" Text="email" style="display:none;" /> <asp:panel id="modal_email" runat="server" class="modalPopup" Width="500px" Height="500px"> <asp:HiddenField ID="hf_modal_email_location_id" runat="server" Value="" /> <asp:HiddenField ID="hf_modal_email_contact_id" runat="server" Value="" /> <asp:HiddenField ID="hf_modal_email_comms_id" runat="server" Value="" /> <table width="100%"> <tr> <td> <asp:Label ID="lbl_mpe_email_title" runat="server" Text="Edit Email Address" /> </td> </tr> <tr> <td> <table width="100%"> <tr> <td width="40px"><img src="../images/email.png" height="30px" width="30px"/></td> <td> <table width="100px"> <tr> <td><span>Quick Ref: <asp:TextBox ID="txb_mpe_email_qref" runat="server" Text="" /></span></td> </tr> <tr> <td><span>Email Address: <asp:TextBox ID="txb_mpe_email_address_full" runat="server" Text="" /></span></td> </tr> </table> </td> </tr> </table> </td> </tr> <tr> <td width="40px" align="left"><asp:Button ID="btn_cancel_email" runat="server" Text="Cancel"/></td> <td align="right"><asp:Button ID="btn_save_email" runat="server" Text="Save" OnCommand="save_modal_email" /></td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2" align="right"><asp:Label ID="lbl_mpe_email_err" runat="server" Text="" /></td> </tr> </table> c# public void oloc_ocon_email_edit(object sender, RepeaterCommandEventArgs e) { switch (e.CommandName) { case "edit": hf_modal_email_location_id.Value = ((HiddenField)e.Item.FindControl("hf_oloc_ocon_emails_location_id")).Value; hf_modal_email_contact_id.Value = ((HiddenField)e.Item.FindControl("hf_oloc_ocon_emails_contact_id")).Value; hf_modal_email_comms_id.Value = ((HiddenField)e.Item.FindControl("hf_oloc_ocon_emails_comms_id")).Value; lbl_mpe_email_title.Text = "Edit Email Address"; txb_mpe_email_qref.Text = ((HiddenField)e.Item.FindControl("hf_oloc_ocon_emails_qref")).Value; txb_mpe_email_address_full.Text = ((HiddenField)e.Item.FindControl("hf_oloc_ocon_emails_email_full")).Value; lbl_mpe_email_err.Text = ""; mpe_email.Show(); break; case "new": hf_modal_email_location_id.Value = ((HiddenField)e.Item.FindControl("hf_oloc_ocon_emails_location_id_p")).Value; hf_modal_email_contact_id.Value = ((HiddenField)e.Item.FindControl("hf_oloc_ocon_emails_contact_id_p")).Value; hf_modal_email_comms_id.Value = "0"; lbl_mpe_email_title.Text = "New Email Address"; txb_mpe_email_qref.Text = ""; txb_mpe_email_address_full.Text = ""; lbl_mpe_email_err.Text = ""; mpe_email.Show(); break; } } Stuff makes so much more sense in a desktop environment, I hope someone can point me in the right direction. Thanks

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Jquery mobile page structure

- by Die 20

I built a jquery mobile site a while back and I have recently been expanding on it and noticing performance issues. I believe it is because I constructed the site using a multi-page set up where a single php file houses the following pages: **ALL_PAGES.PHP** <html> <head> /* external css and js files */ </head> <body> <div date-role="page" id="main"> <div class="page_link"> page 1 </div> <div class="page_link"> page 2 </div> <div class="page_link"> page 3 </div> </div> <div date-role="page" id="page 1"> <div class="page_link"> main </div> <div class="page_link"> page 2 </div> <div class="page_link"> page 3 </div> </div> <div date-role="page" id="page 2"> <div class="page_link"> main </div> <div class="page_link"> page 1 </div> <div class="page_link"> page 3 </div> </div> <div date-role="page" id="page 3"> <div class="page_link"> main </div> <div class="page_link"> page 1 </div> <div class="page_link"> page 2 </div> </div> </body> </html> **end ALL_PAGES.PHP ** I want to break away from this multi-page setup on one php file, and move to a setup where each page is a separate php file. To accomplish this I took the html from each page and moved it to its own php page. Then I added href links in replace of the mobile.change() functions I used for the "page_link" classes. **MAIN.PHP** <html> <head> external css and js files </head> <body> <div date-role="page" id="page 1"> <a href="/main.php"> main </a> <a href="/page_2.php"> page 2 </a> <a href="/page_3.php"> page 3 </a> </div> </body> </html> **end MAIN.PHP** **PAGE_1.PHP** <div date-role="page" id="page 1"> <a href="/main.php"> main </a> <a href="/page_2.php"> page 2 </a> <a href="/page_3.php"> page 3 </a> </div> **end PAGE_1.PHP** **PAGE_2.PHP** <div date-role="page" id="page 2"> <a href="/main.php"> main </a> <a href="/page_1.php"> page 1 </a> <a href="/page_3.php"> page 3 </a> </div> **end PAGE_2.PHP** **PAGE_3.PHP** <div date-role="page" id="page 3"> <a href="/main.php"> main </a> <a href="/page_1.php"> page 1 </a> <a href="/page_2.php"> page 2 </a> </div> **end PAGE_3.PHP** The site works fine except when the user hits the refresh button in the browser. When that happens each page loses access to any external css and js files located on the main page. I am fairly new to JQM so any advice would be helpful.

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Understanding the passing of data/life of a script in web development/CodeIgniter

- by Pete Jodo

I hope I worded the title accurately enough but I typically use Java and don't have much experience in Web Development/PHP/CodeIgniter. I have a difficult time understanding the life cycle of a script as I found out trying to implement a certain feature to a website I am developing (as a means of learning how to). I'll first describe the feature I tried implementing and then the problem I ran into that made me question my fundamental understanding of how scripts work since I'm used to typical OOP. Ok so here goes... I have a webpage that has 2 basic tasks a user can do, create and delete an entry. What I attempted to implement was a way to time a user how long it takes them to complete a certain task. The way I did this was have a homepage where there would be a list of tasks a user to choose from (in this case 2, create and delete). A user would click a task which would link to the 'true' homepage where the user then would be expected to complete the task. My script looks like this: <?php class Site extends CI_Controller { var $task1; var $tasks = array( "task1" => NULL, "date1" => 0, "date2" => 0, "diff" => 0); function __construct() { parent::__construct(); include 'timetask.php'; $this->task1 = new TimeTask("create"); } function index() { $this->tasks['task1'] = $this->task1->getTask(); $this->tasks['diff'] = $this->task1->getTimeDiff(); if($this->tasks['diff'] == NULL) { $this->tasks['diff'] = 0; } $this->load->view('usability_test', $this->tasks); } function origIndex() { $this->task1->setDate1(new DateTime()); $this->tasks['date1'] = $this->task1->getDate1()->getTimestamp(); $data = array(); if($q = $this->site_model->get_records()) { $data['records'] = $q; } $this->load->view('options_view', $data); } function create() { $this->task1->setDate2(new DateTime()); $this->tasks['date2'] = $this->task1->getDate2()->getTimestamp(); $data = array( 'author' => $this->input->post('author'), 'title' => $this->input->post('title'), 'contents' => $this->input->post('contents') ); $this->site_model->add_record($data); $this->index(); } I only included create to keep it short. Then I also have the TimeTask class, that actually another StackOverflow so kindly helped me with: <?php class TimeTask { private $task; /** * @var DateTime */ private $date1, $date2; function __construct($currTask) { $this->task = $currTask; } public function getTimeDiff() { $hasDiff = $this->date1 && $this->date2; if ($hasDiff) { return $this->date2->getTimestamp() - $this->date1->getTimestamp(); } else { return NULL; } } public function __toString() { return (string) $this->getTimeDiff(); } /** * @return \DateTime */ public function getDate1() { return $this->date1; } /** * @param \DateTime $date1 */ public function setDate1(DateTime $date1) { $this->date1 = $date1; } /** * @return \DateTime */ public function getDate2() { return $this->date2; } /** * @param \DateTime $date2 */ public function setDate2(DateTime $date2) { $this->date2 = $date2; } /** * @return get current task */ public function getTask() { return $this->task; } } ?> I don't think posting the views is necessary for the question but here is atleast how the links are made. ...and... id", $row-title); ? Now there's no error in the code but it doesn't do what I expect of it and the reason I assume why is because that each time a function of the script is called via a new page it is NOT the same instance of the script called previously so any previously created objects are no longer there. This confuses me and leaves me quite unsure of how to implement this gracefully. Some ways I would guess of how to do this is by passing the necessary data through the URL or have data saved in a database and retrieve it later to compare the times. What would be a recommended way to do, not just this, but anything that needs previously created data? Also, am I correct to think that a script is only 'alive' for one webpage at a time? Thanks!

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ruby on rails has_many through relationship

- by BennyB

Hi i'm having a little trouble with a has_many through relationship for my app and was hoping to find some help. So i've got Users & Lectures. Lectures are created by one user but then other users can then "join" the Lectures that have been created. Users have their own profile feed of the Lectures they have created & also have a feed of Lectures friends have created. This question however is not about creating a lecture but rather "Joining" a lecture that has been created already. I've created a "lecturerelationships" model & controller to handle this relationship between Lectures & the Users who have Joined (which i call "actives"). Users also then MUST "Exit" the Lecture (either by clicking "Exit" or navigating to one of the header navigation links). I'm grateful if anyone can work through some of this with me... I've got: Users.rb model Lectures.rb model Users_controller Lectures_controller then the following model lecturerelationship.rb class lecturerelationship < ActiveRecord::Base attr_accessible :active_id, :joinedlecture_id belongs_to :active, :class_name => "User" belongs_to :joinedlecture, :class_name => "Lecture" validates :active_id, :presence => true validates :joinedlecture_id, :presence => true end lecturerelationships_controller.rb class LecturerelationshipsController < ApplicationController before_filter :signed_in_user def create @lecture = Lecture.find(params[:lecturerelationship][:joinedlecture_id]) current_user.join!(@lecture) redirect_to @lecture end def destroy @lecture = Lecturerelationship.find(params[:id]).joinedlecture current_user.exit!(@user) redirect_to @user end end Lectures that have been created (by friends) show up on a users feed in the following file _activity_item.html.erb <li id="<%= activity_item.id %>"> <%= link_to gravatar_for(activity_item.user, :size => 200), activity_item.user %><br clear="all"> <%= render :partial => 'shared/join', :locals => {:activity_item => activity_item} %> <span class="title"><%= link_to activity_item.title, lecture_url(activity_item) %></span><br clear="all"> <span class="user"> Joined by <%= link_to activity_item.user.name, activity_item.user %> </span><br clear="all"> <span class="timestamp"> <%= time_ago_in_words(activity_item.created_at) %> ago. </span> <% if current_user?(activity_item.user) %> <%= link_to "delete", activity_item, :method => :delete, :confirm => "Are you sure?", :title => activity_item.content %> <% end %> </li> Then you see I link to the the 'shared/join' partial above which can be seen in the file below _join.html.erb <%= form_for(current_user.lecturerelationships.build(:joinedlecture_id => activity_item.id)) do |f| %> <div> <%= f.hidden_field :joinedlecture_id %> </div> <%= f.submit "Join", :class => "btn btn-large btn-info" %> <% end %> Some more files that might be needed: config/routes.rb SampleApp::Application.routes.draw do resources :users do member do get :following, :followers, :joined_lectures end end resources :sessions, :only => [:new, :create, :destroy] resources :lectures, :only => [:create, :destroy, :show] resources :relationships, :only => [:create, :destroy] #for users following each other resources :lecturerelationships, :only => [:create, :destroy] #users joining existing lectures So what happens is the lecture comes in my activity_feed with a Join button option at the bottom...which should create a lecturerelationship of an "active" & "joinedlecture" (which obviously are supposed to be coming from the user & lecture classes. But the error i get when i click the join button is as follows: ActiveRecord::StatementInvalid in LecturerelationshipsController#create SQLite3::ConstraintException: constraint failed: INSERT INTO "lecturerelationships" ("active_id", "created_at", "joinedlecture_id", "updated_at") VALUES (?, ?, ?, ?) Also i've included my user model (seems the error is referring to it) user.rb class User < ActiveRecord::Base attr_accessible :email, :name, :password, :password_confirmation has_secure_password has_many :lectures, :dependent => :destroy has_many :lecturerelationships, :foreign_key => "active_id", :dependent => :destroy has_many :joined_lectures, :through => :lecturerelationships, :source => :joinedlecture before_save { |user| user.email = email.downcase } before_save :create_remember_token validates :name, :presence => true, :length => { :maximum => 50 } VALID_EMAIL_REGEX = /\A[\w+\-.]+@[a-z\d\-.]+\.[a-z]+\z/i validates :email, :presence => true, :format => { :with => VALID_EMAIL_REGEX }, :uniqueness => { :case_sensitive => false } validates :password, :presence => true, :length => { :minimum => 6 } validates :password_confirmation, :presence => true def activity # This feed is for "My Activity" - basically lectures i've started Lecture.where("user_id = ?", id) end def friendactivity Lecture.from_users_followed_by(self) end # lECTURE TO USER (JOINING) RELATIONSHIPS def joined?(selected_lecture) lecturerelationships.find_by_joinedlecture_id(selected_lecture.id) end def join!(selected_lecture) lecturerelationships.create!(:joinedlecture_id => selected_lecture.id) end def exit!(selected_lecture) lecturerelationships.find_by_joinedlecture_id(selected_lecture.id).destroy end end Thanks for any and all help - i'll be on here for a while so as mentioned i'd GREATLY appreciate someone who may have the time to work through my issues with me...

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javax.servlet.ServletException: WriteText method cannot write null text

- by Learner

I have created a Web application using JSF+Icefaces+Richfaces+Primefaces.It is working great while I run it from eclipse as a project but When I created its WAR file and deployed in GlassFish Server then while rendering a page it is throwing this exception javax.servlet.ServletException: WriteText method cannot write null text I searched but didn't get any good solution.A quick help is highly appreciated Edit:1 I think this would be the relevant part for this <li class="page_item" id="liMasterSearch">  <h:commandLink value="Search" action="#{masterRenderBean.showSimpleSearch}"></h:commandLink> </li> <li class="page_item" id="liAdvanceSearch"> <h:commandLink value="Advance Search" action="#{masterRenderBean.showADVS}"></h:commandLink> </li> Here you can see two links (1) Search and (2) Advance Search when I click on Search , It shows search page (By rendering-Actually I have included all pages in masterpage and render them on commandlink functions) <h:panelGroup rendered="#{not masterRenderBean.simpleSearch}"> <ui:include src="../../WebPages/SearchPages/MasterSearch.xhtml"></ui:include> </h:panelGroup> But When I click on Advance Search link (on which this part should render) <h:panelGroup rendered="#{not masterRenderBean.advs}"> <ui:include src="../../WebPages/SearchPages/PersonalAdvanceSearch.xhtml"/> </h:panelGroup> The browser show the above exception. NOTE: Keep in mind that this problem is occurring in deploying.It is not coming in actual application when I run it from eclipse from code EDIT:2 I found in server logs that this exception is coming due to acefaces and this portion of code <ace:autoCompleteEntry id="txtplaceofbirth" rows="10" autocomplete="false" minChars="2" width="150" value="#{inputPersonal.selectedplcofBirth}" filterMatchMode="none" valueChangeListener="#{inputPersonal.valueChangeEventCity}"> <f:selectItems value="#{inputPersonal.cities}"/> </ace:autoCompleteEntry></h:outputFormat> is messing up.Any idea Why this is hapening? Edit #3: Here is the full tack trace of exception [#|2012-11-19T09:55:48.026+0500|SEVERE|glassfish3.1.2|javax.enterprise.system.std.com.sun.enterprise.server.logging|_ThreadID=53;_ThreadName=Thread-2;|java.lang.NullPointerException: WriteText method cannot write null text at org.icefaces.impl.context.DOMResponseWriter.writeText(DOMResponseWriter.java:314) at org.icefaces.impl.context.DOMResponseWriter.writeText(DOMResponseWriter.java:340) at com.sun.faces.renderkit.html_basic.OutputMessageRenderer.encodeEnd(OutputMessageRenderer.java:163) at javax.faces.component.UIComponentBase.encodeEnd(UIComponentBase.java:875) at javax.faces.component.UIComponent.encodeAll(UIComponent.java:1764) at javax.faces.render.Renderer.encodeChildren(Renderer.java:168) at org.icefaces.impl.renderkit.RendererWrapper.encodeChildren(RendererWrapper.java:49) at javax.faces.component.UIComponentBase.encodeChildren(UIComponentBase.java:845) at com.sun.faces.renderkit.html_basic.HtmlBasicRenderer.encodeRecursive(HtmlBasicRenderer.java:304) at com.sun.faces.renderkit.html_basic.GroupRenderer.encodeChildren(GroupRenderer.java:105) at javax.faces.component.UIComponentBase.encodeChildren(UIComponentBase.java:845) at javax.faces.component.UIComponent.encodeAll(UIComponent.java:1757) at javax.faces.render.Renderer.encodeChildren(Renderer.java:168) at org.icefaces.impl.renderkit.RendererWrapper.encodeChildren(RendererWrapper.java:49) at javax.faces.component.UIComponentBase.encodeChildren(UIComponentBase.java:845) at javax.faces.component.UIComponent.encodeAll(UIComponent.java:1757) at javax.faces.component.UIComponent.encodeAll(UIComponent.java:1760) at org.icefaces.impl.context.DOMPartialViewContext.processPartial(DOMPartialViewContext.java:142) at javax.faces.component.UIViewRoot.encodeChildren(UIViewRoot.java:981) at javax.faces.component.UIComponent.encodeAll(UIComponent.java:1757) at com.sun.faces.application.view.FaceletViewHandlingStrategy.renderView(FaceletViewHandlingStrategy.java:391) at com.sun.faces.application.view.MultiViewHandler.renderView(MultiViewHandler.java:131) at javax.faces.application.ViewHandlerWrapper.renderView(ViewHandlerWrapper.java:288) at com.sun.faces.lifecycle.RenderResponsePhase.execute(RenderResponsePhase.java:121) at com.sun.faces.lifecycle.Phase.doPhase(Phase.java:101) at com.sun.faces.lifecycle.LifecycleImpl.render(LifecycleImpl.java:139) at javax.faces.webapp.FacesServlet.service(FacesServlet.java:594) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardWrapper.service(StandardWrapper.java:1542) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardWrapperValve.invoke(StandardWrapperValve.java:281) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContextValve.invoke(StandardContextValve.java:175) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardPipeline.doInvoke(StandardPipeline.java:655) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardPipeline.invoke(StandardPipeline.java:595) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHostValve.invoke(StandardHostValve.java:161) at org.apache.catalina.connector.CoyoteAdapter.doService(CoyoteAdapter.java:331) at org.apache.catalina.connector.CoyoteAdapter.service(CoyoteAdapter.java:231) at com.sun.enterprise.v3.services.impl.ContainerMapper$AdapterCallable.call(ContainerMapper.java:317) at com.sun.enterprise.v3.services.impl.ContainerMapper.service(ContainerMapper.java:195) at com.sun.grizzly.http.ProcessorTask.invokeAdapter(ProcessorTask.java:849) at com.sun.grizzly.http.ProcessorTask.doProcess(ProcessorTask.java:746) at com.sun.grizzly.http.ProcessorTask.process(ProcessorTask.java:1045) at com.sun.grizzly.http.DefaultProtocolFilter.execute(DefaultProtocolFilter.java:228) at com.sun.grizzly.DefaultProtocolChain.executeProtocolFilter(DefaultProtocolChain.java:137) at com.sun.grizzly.DefaultProtocolChain.execute(DefaultProtocolChain.java:104) at com.sun.grizzly.DefaultProtocolChain.execute(DefaultProtocolChain.java:90) at com.sun.grizzly.http.HttpProtocolChain.execute(HttpProtocolChain.java:79) at com.sun.grizzly.ProtocolChainContextTask.doCall(ProtocolChainContextTask.java:54) at com.sun.grizzly.SelectionKeyContextTask.call(SelectionKeyContextTask.java:59) at com.sun.grizzly.ContextTask.run(ContextTask.java:71) at com.sun.grizzly.util.AbstractThreadPool$Worker.doWork(AbstractThreadPool.java:532) at com.sun.grizzly.util.AbstractThreadPool$Worker.run(AbstractThreadPool.java:513) at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:722) |#]

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Can this PHP function be improved?

- by jasondavis

Below is some code I am working on for a navigation menu, if you are on a certain page, it will add a "current" css class to the proper tab. I am curious if there is a better way to do this in PHP because it really seems like a lot of code to do such a simple task? My pages will also have a jquery library already loaded, would it be better to set the tab with jquery instead of PHP? Any tips appreciated <?PHP active_header('page identifier goes here'); //ie; 'home' or 'users.online' function active_header($page_name) { // arrays for header menu selector $header_home = array('home' => true); $header_users = array( 'users.online' => true, 'users.online.male' => true, 'users.online.female' => true, 'users.online.friends' => true, 'users.location' => true, 'users.featured' => true, 'users.new' => true, 'users.browse' => true, 'users.search' => true, 'users.staff' => true ); $header_forum = array('forum' => true); $header_more = array( 'widgets' => true, 'news' => true, 'promote' => true, 'development' => true, 'bookmarks' => true, 'about' => true ); $header_money = array( 'account.money' => true, 'account.store' => true, 'account.lottery' => true, 'users.top.money' => true ); $header_account = array('account' => true); $header_mail = array( 'mail.inbox' => true, 'mail.sentbox' => true, 'mail.trash' => true, 'bulletins.post' => true, 'bulletins.my' => true, 'bulletins' => true ); // set variables if there array value exist if (isset($header_home[$page_name])){ $current_home = 'current'; }else if (isset($header_users[$page_name])){ $current_users = 'current'; }else if (isset($header_forum[$page_name])){ $current_forum = 'current'; }else if (isset($header_more[$page_name])){ $current_more = 'current'; }else if (isset($header_money[$page_name])){ $current_money = 'current'; }else if (isset($header_account[$page_name])){ $current_account = 'current'; }else if (isset($header_mail[$page_name])){ $current_mail = 'current'; } // show the links echo '<li class="' . (isset($current_home) ? $current_home : '') . '"><a href=""><em>Home</em></a></li>'; echo '<li class="' . (isset($current_users) ? $current_users : '') . '"><a href=""><em>Users</em></a></li>'; echo '<li class="' . (isset($current_forum) ? $current_forum : '') . '"><a href=""><em>Forum</em></a></li>'; echo '<li class="' . (isset($current_more) ? $current_more : '') . '"><a href=""><em>More</em></a></li>'; echo '<li class="' . (isset($current_money) ? $current_money : '') . '"><a href=""><em>Money</em></a></li>'; echo '<li class="' . (isset($current_account) ? $current_account : '') . '"><a href=""><em>Account</em></a></li>'; echo '<li class="' . (isset($current_mail) ? $current_mail : '') . '"><a href=""><em>Mail</em></a></li>'; } ?>

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Navbar Dropdown in Bootstrap 3

- by user2333842

I recently started learning and using Bootstrap 3. I figured I would start with something simple- a header and a dropdown bar. I used the code from the Bootstrap website. I started out with the basic Bootstrap template, then added the bootstrap navbar. This is my code so far. <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <title>WEBSITE NAME</title> <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">  <link href="css/bootstrap.min.css" rel="stylesheet" media="screen">   </head> <body> <h1>WEBSITE NAME</h1> <nav class="navbar navbar-default" role="navigation">  <div class="navbar-header"> <button type="button" class="navbar-toggle" data-toggle="collapse" data-target=".navbar-ex1-collapse"> <span class="sr-only">Toggle navigation</span> <span class="icon-bar"></span> <span class="icon-bar"></span> <span class="icon-bar"></span> </button> </div>  <div class="collapse navbar-collapse navbar-ex1-collapse"> <ul class="nav navbar-nav"> <li class="active"><a href="#">Home</a></li> <li><a href="#">Tutorials</a></li> <li><a href="#">Software</a></li> <li class="dropdown"> <a href="#" class="dropdown-toggle" data-toggle="dropdown">Dropdown <b class="caret"></b></a> <ul class="dropdown-menu"> <li><a href="#">Action</a></li> <li><a href="#">Another action</a></li> <li><a href="#">Something else here</a></li> <li><a href="#">Separated link</a></li> <li><a href="#">One more separated link</a></li> </ul> </li> </ul> <form class="navbar-form navbar-left" role="search"> <div class="form-group"> <input type="text" class="form-control" placeholder="Search"> </div> <button type="submit" class="btn btn-default">Submit</button> </form> <ul class="nav navbar-nav navbar-right"> <li><a href="https://twitter.com/"><span class="glyphicon glyphicon-comment"></span> Twitter</a></li> <li><a href="https://youtube.com/"><span class="glyphicon glyphicon-facetime-video"></span> YouTube</a></li> </ul> </li> </ul> </div> </nav>  <script src="//code.jquery.com/jquery.js"></script>  <script src="js/bootstrap.min.js"></script> </body> </html> The dropdown menu is absolutely not working at all- hovering or clicking it. What do I need to do?

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Does this language feature already exist?

- by Pindatjuh

I'm currently developing a new language for programming in a continuous environment (compare it to electrical engineering), and I've got some ideas on a certain language construction. Let me explain the feature by explanation and then by definition: x = a U b; Where x is a variable and a and b are other variables (or static values). This works like a union between a and b; no duplicates and no specific order. with(x) { // regular 'with' usage; using the global interpretation of "x" x = 5; // will replace the original definition of "x = a U b;" } with(x = a) { // this code block is executed when the "x" variable // has the "a" variable assigned. All references in // this code-block to "x" are references to "a". So saying: x = 5; // would only change the variable "a". If the variable "a" // later on changes, x still equals to 5, in this fashion: // 'x = a U b U 5;' // '[currentscope] = 5;' // thus, 'a = 5;' } with(x = b) { // same but with "b" } with(x != a) { // here the "x" variable refers to any variable // but "a"; thus saying x = 5; // is equal to the rewriting of // 'x = a U b U 5;' // 'b = 5;' (since it was the scope of this block) } with(x = (a U b)) { // guaranteed that "x" is 'a U b'; interacting with "x" // will interact with both "a" and "b". x = 5; // makes both "a" and "b" equal to 5; also the "x" variable // is updated to contain: // 'x = a U b U 5;' // '[currentscope] = 5;' // 'a U b = 5;' // and thus: 'a = 5; b = 5;'. } // etc. In the above, all code-blocks are executed, but the "scope" changes in each block how x is interpreted. In the first block, x is guaranteed to be a: thus interacting with x inside that block will interact on a. The second and the third code-block are only equal in this situation (because not a: then there only remains b). The last block guarantees that x is at least a or b. Further more; U is not the "bitwise or operator", but I've called it the "and/or"-operator. Its definition is: "U" = "and" U "or" (On my blog, http://cplang.wordpress.com/2009/12/19/binop-and-or/, there is more (mathematical) background information on this operator. It's loosely based on sets. Using different syntax, changed it in this question.) Update: more examples. print = "Hello world!" U "How are you?"; // this will print // both values, but the // order doesn't matter. // 'userkey' is a variable containing a key. with(userkey = "a") { print = userkey; // will only print "a". } with(userkey = ("shift" U "a")) { // pressed both "shift" and the "a" key. print = userkey; // will "print" shift and "a", even // if the user also pressed "ctrl": // the interpretation of "userkey" is changed, // such that it only contains the matched cases. } with((userkey = "shift") U (userkey = "a")) { // same as if-statement above this one, showing the distributivity. } x = 5 U 6 U 7; y = x + x; // will be: // y = (5 U 6 U 7) + (5 U 6 U 7) // = 10 U 11 U 12 U 13 U 14 somewantedkey = "ctrl" U "alt" U "space" with(userkey = somewantedkey) { // must match all elements of "somewantedkey" // (distributed the Boolean equals operated) // thus only executed when all the defined keys are pressed } with(somewantedkey = userkey) { // matches only one of the provided "somewantedkey" // thus when only "space" is pressed, this block is executed. } Update2: more examples and some more context. with(x = (a U b)) { // this } // can be written as with((x = a) U (x = b)) { // this: changing the variable like x = 5; // will be rewritten as: // a = 5 and b = 5 } Some background information: I'm building a language which is "time-independent", like Java is "platform-independant". Everything stated in the language is "as is", and is continuously actively executed. This means; the programmer does not know in which order (unless explicitly stated using constructions) elements are, nor when statements are executed. The language is completely separated from the "time"-concept, i.e. it's continuously executed: with(a < 5) { a++; } // this is a loop-structure; // how and when it's executed isn't known however. with(a) { // everytime the "a" variable changes, this code-block is executed. b = 4; with(b < 3) { // runs only three times. } with(b > 0) { b = b - 1; // runs four times } } Update 3: After pondering on the type of this language feature; it closely resemblances Netbeans Platform's Lookup, where each "with"-statement a synchronized agent is, working on it's specific "filter" of objects. Instead of type-based, this is variable-based (fundamentally quite the same; just a different way of identifiying objects). I greatly thank all of you for providing me with very insightful information and links/hints to great topics I can research. Thanks. I do not know if this construction already exists, so that's my question: does this language feature already exist?

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How to model a relationship that NHibernate (or Hibernate) doesn’t easily support

- by MylesRip

I have a situation in which the ideal relationship, I believe, would involve Value Object Inheritance. This is unfortunately not supported in NHibernate so any solution I come up with will be less than perfect. Let’s say that: “Item” entities have a “Location” that can be in one of multiple different formats. These formats are completely different with no overlapping fields. We will deal with each Location in the format that is provided in the data with no attempt to convert from one format to another. Each Item has exactly one Location. “SpecialItem” is a subtype of Item, however, that is unique in that it has exactly two Locations. “Group” entities aggregate Items. “LocationGroup” is as subtype of Group. LocationGroup also has a single Location that can be in any of the formats as described above. Although I’m interested in Items by Group, I’m also interested in being able to find all items with the same Location, regardless of which group they are in. I apologize for the number of stipulations listed above, but I’m afraid that simplifying it any further wouldn’t really reflect the difficulties of the situation. Here is how the above could be diagrammed: Mapping Dilemma Diagram: (http://www.freeimagehosting.net/uploads/592ad48b1a.jpg) (I tried placing the diagram inline, but Stack Overflow won't allow that until I have accumulated more points. I understand the reasoning behind it, but it is a bit inconvenient for now.) Hmmm... Apparently I can't have multiple links either. :-( Analyzing the above, I make the following observations: I treat Locations polymorphically, referring to the supertype rather than the subtype. Logically, Locations should be “Value Objects” rather than entities since it is meaningless to differentiate between two Location objects that have all the same values. Thus equality between Locations should be based on field comparisons, not identifiers. Also, value objects should be immutable and shared references should not be allowed. Using NHibernate (or Hibernate) one would typically map value objects using the “component” keyword which would cause the fields of the class to be mapped directly into the database table that represents the containing class. Put another way, there would not be a separate “Locations” table in the database (and Locations would therefore have no identifiers). NHibernate (or Hibernate) do not currently support inheritance for value objects. My choices as I see them are: Ignore the fact that Locations should be value objects and map them as entities. This would take care of the inheritance mapping issues since NHibernate supports entity inheritance. The downside is that I then have to deal with aliasing issues. (Meaning that if multiple objects share a reference to the same Location, then changing values for one object’s Location would cause the location to change for other objects that share the reference the same Location record.) I want to avoid this if possible. Another downside is that entities are typically compared by their IDs. This would mean that two Location objects would be considered not equal even if the values of all their fields are the same. This would be invalid and unacceptable from the business perspective. Flatten Locations into a single class so that there are no longer inheritance relationships for Locations. This would allow Locations to be treated as value objects which could easily be handled by using “component” mapping in NHibernate. The downside in this case would be that the domain model becomes weaker, more fragile and less maintainable. Do some “creative” mapping in the hbm files in order to force Location fields to be mapped into the containing entities’ tables without using the “component” keyword. This approach is described by Colin Jack here. My situation is more complicated than the one he describes due to the fact that SpecialItem has a second Location and the fact that a different entity, LocatedGroup, also has Locations. I could probably get it to work, but the mappings would be non-intuitive and therefore hard to understand and maintain by other developers in the future. Also, I suspect that these tricky mappings would likely not be possible using Fluent NHibernate so I would use the advantages of using that tool, at least in that situation. Surely others out there have run into similar situations. I’m hoping someone who has “been there, done that” can share some wisdom. :-) So here’s the question… Which approach should be preferred in this situation? Why?

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Microsoft and jQuery

- by Rick Strahl

The jQuery JavaScript library has been steadily getting more popular and with recent developments from Microsoft, jQuery is also getting ever more exposure on the ASP.NET platform including now directly from Microsoft. jQuery is a light weight, open source DOM manipulation library for JavaScript that has changed how many developers think about JavaScript. You can download it and find more information on jQuery on www.jquery.com. For me jQuery has had a huge impact on how I develop Web applications and was probably the main reason I went from dreading to do JavaScript development to actually looking forward to implementing client side JavaScript functionality. It has also had a profound impact on my JavaScript skill level for me by seeing how the library accomplishes things (and often reviewing the terse but excellent source code). jQuery made an uncomfortable development platform (JavaScript + DOM) a joy to work on. Although jQuery is by no means the only JavaScript library out there, its ease of use, small size, huge community of plug-ins and pure usefulness has made it easily the most popular JavaScript library available today. As a long time jQuery user, I’ve been excited to see the developments from Microsoft that are bringing jQuery to more ASP.NET developers and providing more integration with jQuery for ASP.NET’s core features rather than relying on the ASP.NET AJAX library. Microsoft and jQuery – making Friends jQuery is an open source project but in the last couple of years Microsoft has really thrown its weight behind supporting this open source library as a supported component on the Microsoft platform. When I say supported I literally mean supported: Microsoft now offers actual tech support for jQuery as part of their Product Support Services (PSS) as jQuery integration has become part of several of the ASP.NET toolkits and ships in several of the default Web project templates in Visual Studio 2010. The ASP.NET MVC 3 framework (still in Beta) also uses jQuery for a variety of client side support features including client side validation and we can look forward toward more integration of client side functionality via jQuery in both MVC and WebForms in the future. In other words jQuery is becoming an optional but included component of the ASP.NET platform. PSS support means that support staff will answer jQuery related support questions as part of any support incidents related to ASP.NET which provides some piece of mind to some corporate development shops that require end to end support from Microsoft. In addition to including jQuery and supporting it, Microsoft has also been getting involved in providing development resources for extending jQuery’s functionality via plug-ins. Microsoft’s last version of the Microsoft Ajax Library – which is the successor to the native ASP.NET AJAX Library – included some really cool functionality for client templates, databinding and localization. As it turns out Microsoft has rebuilt most of that functionality using jQuery as the base API and provided jQuery plug-ins of these components. Very recently these three plug-ins were submitted and have been approved for inclusion in the official jQuery plug-in repository and been taken over by the jQuery team for further improvements and maintenance. Even more surprising: The jQuery-templates component has actually been approved for inclusion in the next major update of the jQuery core in jQuery V1.5, which means it will become a native feature that doesn’t require additional script files to be loaded. Imagine this – an open source contribution from Microsoft that has been accepted into a major open source project for a core feature improvement. Microsoft has come a long way indeed! What the Microsoft Involvement with jQuery means to you For Microsoft jQuery support is a strategic decision that affects their direction in client side development, but nothing stopped you from using jQuery in your applications prior to Microsoft’s official backing and in fact a large chunk of developers did so readily prior to Microsoft’s announcement. Official support from Microsoft brings a few benefits to developers however. jQuery support in Visual Studio 2010 means built-in support for jQuery IntelliSense, automatically added jQuery scripts in many projects types and a common base for client side functionality that actually uses what most developers are already using. If you have already been using jQuery and were worried about straying from the Microsoft line and their internal Microsoft Ajax Library – worry no more. With official support and the change in direction towards jQuery Microsoft is now following along what most in the ASP.NET community had already been doing by using jQuery, which is likely the reason for Microsoft’s shift in direction in the first place. ASP.NET AJAX and the Microsoft AJAX Library weren’t bad technology – there was tons of useful functionality buried in these libraries. However, these libraries never got off the ground, mainly because early incarnations were squarely aimed at control/component developers rather than application developers. For all the functionality that these controls provided for control developers they lacked in useful and easily usable application developer functionality that was easily accessible in day to day client side development. The result was that even though Microsoft shipped support for these tools in the box (in .NET 3.5 and 4.0), other than for the internal support in ASP.NET for things like the UpdatePanel and the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit as well as some third party vendors, the Microsoft client libraries were largely ignored by the developer community opening the door for other client side solutions. Microsoft seems to be acknowledging developer choice in this case: Many more developers were going down the jQuery path rather than using the Microsoft built libraries and there seems to be little sense in continuing development of a technology that largely goes unused by the majority of developers. Kudos for Microsoft for recognizing this and gracefully changing directions. Note that even though there will be no further development in the Microsoft client libraries they will continue to be supported so if you’re using them in your applications there’s no reason to start running for the exit in a panic and start re-writing everything with jQuery. Although that might be a reasonable choice in some cases, jQuery and the Microsoft libraries work well side by side so that you can leave existing solutions untouched even as you enhance them with jQuery. The Microsoft jQuery Plug-ins – Solid Core Features One of the most interesting developments in Microsoft’s embracing of jQuery is that Microsoft has started contributing to jQuery via standard mechanism set for jQuery developers: By submitting plug-ins. Microsoft took some of the nicest new features of the unpublished Microsoft Ajax Client Library and re-wrote these components for jQuery and then submitted them as plug-ins to the jQuery plug-in repository. Accepted plug-ins get taken over by the jQuery team and that’s exactly what happened with the three plug-ins submitted by Microsoft with the templating plug-in even getting slated to be published as part of the jQuery core in the next major release (1.5). The following plug-ins are provided by Microsoft: jQuery Templates – a client side template rendering engine jQuery Data Link – a client side databinder that can synchronize changes without code jQuery Globalization – provides formatting and conversion features for dates and numbers The first two are ports of functionality that was slated for the Microsoft Ajax Library while functionality for the globalization library provides functionality that was already found in the original ASP.NET AJAX library. To me all three plug-ins address a pressing need in client side applications and provide functionality I’ve previously used in other incarnations, but with more complete implementations. Let’s take a close look at these plug-ins. jQuery Templates http://api.jquery.com/category/plugins/templates/ Client side templating is a key component for building rich JavaScript applications in the browser. Templating on the client lets you avoid from manually creating markup by creating DOM nodes and injecting them individually into the document via code. Rather you can create markup templates – similar to the way you create classic ASP server markup – and merge data into these templates to render HTML which you can then inject into the document or replace existing content with. Output from templates are rendered as a jQuery matched set and can then be easily inserted into the document as needed. Templating is key to minimize client side code and reduce repeated code for rendering logic. Instead a single template can be used in many places for updating and adding content to existing pages. Further if you build pure AJAX interfaces that rely entirely on client rendering of the initial page content, templates allow you to a use a single markup template to handle all rendering of each specific HTML section/element. I’ve used a number of different client rendering template engines with jQuery in the past including jTemplates (a PHP style templating engine) and a modified version of John Resig’s MicroTemplating engine which I built into my own set of libraries because it’s such a commonly used feature in my client side applications. jQuery templates adds a much richer templating model that allows for sub-templates and access to the data items. Like John Resig’s original Micro Template engine, the core basics of the templating engine create JavaScript code which means that templates can include JavaScript code. To give you a basic idea of how templates work imagine I have an application that downloads a set of stock quotes based on a symbol list then displays them in the document. To do this you can create an ‘item’ template that describes how each of the quotes is renderd as a template inside of the document: <script id="stockTemplate" type="text/x-jquery-tmpl"> <div id="divStockQuote" class="errordisplay" style="width: 500px;"> <div class="label">Company:</div><div><b>${Company}(${Symbol})</b></div> <div class="label">Last Price:</div><div>${LastPrice}</div> <div class="label">Net Change:</div><div> {{if NetChange > 0}} <b style="color:green" >${NetChange}</b> {{else}} <b style="color:red" >${NetChange}</b> {{/if}} </div> <div class="label">Last Update:</div><div>${LastQuoteTimeString}</div> </div> </script> The ‘template’ is little more than HTML with some markup expressions inside of it that define the template language. Notice the embedded ${} expressions which reference data from the quote objects returned from an AJAX call on the server. You can embed any JavaScript or value expression in these template expressions. There are also a number of structural commands like {{if}} and {{each}} that provide for rudimentary logic inside of your templates as well as commands ({{tmpl}} and {{wrap}}) for nesting templates. You can find more about the full set of markup expressions available in the documentation. To load up this data you can use code like the following: <script type="text/javascript"> //var Proxy = new ServiceProxy("../PageMethods/PageMethodsService.asmx/"); $(document).ready(function () { $("#btnGetQuotes").click(GetQuotes); }); function GetQuotes() { var symbols = $("#txtSymbols").val().split(","); $.ajax({ url: "../PageMethods/PageMethodsService.asmx/GetStockQuotes", data: JSON.stringify({ symbols: symbols }), // parameter map type: "POST", // data has to be POSTed contentType: "application/json", timeout: 10000, dataType: "json", success: function (result) { var quotes = result.d; var jEl = $("#stockTemplate").tmpl(quotes); $("#quoteDisplay").empty().append(jEl); }, error: function (xhr, status) { alert(status + "\r\n" + xhr.responseText); } }); }; </script> In this case an ASMX AJAX service is called to retrieve the stock quotes. The service returns an array of quote objects. The result is returned as an object with the .d property (in Microsoft service style) that returns the actual array of quotes. The template is applied with: var jEl = $("#stockTemplate").tmpl(quotes); which selects the template script tag and uses the .tmpl() function to apply the data to it. The result is a jQuery matched set of elements that can then be appended to the quote display element in the page. The template is merged against an array in this example. When the result is an array the template is automatically applied to each each array item. If you pass a single data item – like say a stock quote – the template works exactly the same way but is applied only once. Templates also have access to a $data item which provides the current data item and information about the tempalte that is currently executing. This makes it possible to keep context within the context of the template itself and also to pass context from a parent template to a child template which is very powerful. Templates can be evaluated by using the template selector and calling the .tmpl() function on the jQuery matched set as shown above or you can use the static $.tmpl() function to provide a template as a string. This allows you to dynamically create templates in code or – more likely – to load templates from the server via AJAX calls. In short there are options The above shows off some of the basics, but there’s much for functionality available in the template engine. Check the documentation link for more information and links to additional examples. The plug-in download also comes with a number of examples that demonstrate functionality. jQuery templates will become a native component in jQuery Core 1.5, so it’s definitely worthwhile checking out the engine today and get familiar with this interface. As much as I’m stoked about templating becoming part of the jQuery core because it’s such an integral part of many applications, there are also a couple shortcomings in the current incarnation: Lack of Error Handling Currently if you embed an expression that is invalid it’s simply not rendered. There’s no error rendered into the template nor do the various template functions throw errors which leaves finding of bugs as a runtime exercise. I would like some mechanism – optional if possible – to be able to get error info of what is failing in a template when it’s rendered. No String Output Templates are always rendered into a jQuery matched set and there’s no way that I can see to directly render to a string. String output can be useful for debugging as well as opening up templating for creating non-HTML string output. Limited JavaScript Access Unlike John Resig’s original MicroTemplating Engine which was entirely based on JavaScript code generation these templates are limited to a few structured commands that can ‘execute’. There’s no code execution inside of script code which means you’re limited to calling expressions available in global objects or the data item passed in. This may or may not be a big deal depending on the complexity of your template logic. Error handling has been discussed quite a bit and it’s likely there will be some solution to that particualar issue by the time jQuery templates ship. The others are relatively minor issues but something to think about anyway. jQuery Data Link http://api.jquery.com/category/plugins/data-link/ jQuery Data Link provides the ability to do two-way data binding between input controls and an underlying object’s properties. The typical scenario is linking a textbox to a property of an object and have the object updated when the text in the textbox is changed and have the textbox change when the value in the object or the entire object changes. The plug-in also supports converter functions that can be applied to provide the conversion logic from string to some other value typically necessary for mapping things like textbox string input to say a number property and potentially applying additional formatting and calculations. In theory this sounds great, however in reality this plug-in has some serious usability issues. Using the plug-in you can do things like the following to bind data: person = { firstName: "rick", lastName: "strahl"}; $(document).ready( function() { // provide for two-way linking of inputs $("form").link(person); // bind to non-input elements explicitly $("#objFirst").link(person, { firstName: { name: "objFirst", convertBack: function (value, source, target) { $(target).text(value); } } }); $("#objLast").link(person, { lastName: { name: "objLast", convertBack: function (value, source, target) { $(target).text(value); } } }); }); This code hooks up two-way linking between a couple of textboxes on the page and the person object. The first line in the .ready() handler provides mapping of object to form field with the same field names as properties on the object. Note that .link() does NOT bind items into the textboxes when you call .link() – changes are mapped only when values change and you move out of the field. Strike one. The two following commands allow manual binding of values to specific DOM elements which is effectively a one-way bind. You specify the object and a then an explicit mapping where name is an ID in the document. The converter is required to explicitly assign the value to the element. Strike two. You can also detect changes to the underlying object and cause updates to the input elements bound. Unfortunately the syntax to do this is not very natural as you have to rely on the jQuery data object. To update an object’s properties and get change notification looks like this: function updateFirstName() { $(person).data("firstName", person.firstName + " (code updated)"); } This works fine in causing any linked fields to be updated. In the bindings above both the firstName input field and objFirst DOM element gets updated. But the syntax requires you to use a jQuery .data() call for each property change to ensure that the changes are tracked properly. Really? Sure you’re binding through multiple layers of abstraction now but how is that better than just manually assigning values? The code savings (if any) are going to be minimal. As much as I would like to have a WPF/Silverlight/Observable-like binding mechanism in client script, this plug-in doesn’t help much towards that goal in its current incarnation. While you can bind values, the ‘binder’ is too limited to be really useful. If initial values can’t be assigned from the mappings you’re going to end up duplicating work loading the data using some other mechanism. There’s no easy way to re-bind data with a different object altogether since updates trigger only through the .data members. Finally, any non-input elements have to be bound via code that’s fairly verbose and frankly may be more voluminous than what you might write by hand for manual binding and unbinding. Two way binding can be very useful but it has to be easy and most importantly natural. If it’s more work to hook up a binding than writing a couple of lines to do binding/unbinding this sort of thing helps very little in most scenarios. In talking to some of the developers the feature set for Data Link is not complete and they are still soliciting input for features and functionality. If you have ideas on how you want this feature to be more useful get involved and post your recommendations. As it stands, it looks to me like this component needs a lot of love to become useful. For this component to really provide value, bindings need to be able to be refreshed easily and work at the object level, not just the property level. It seems to me we would be much better served by a model binder object that can perform these binding/unbinding tasks in bulk rather than a tool where each link has to be mapped first. I also find the choice of creating a jQuery plug-in questionable – it seems a standalone object – albeit one that relies on the jQuery library – would provide a more intuitive interface than the current forcing of options onto a plug-in style interface. Out of the three Microsoft created components this is by far the least useful and least polished implementation at this point. jQuery Globalization http://github.com/jquery/jquery-global Globalization in JavaScript applications often gets short shrift and part of the reason for this is that natively in JavaScript there’s little support for formatting and parsing of numbers and dates. There are a number of JavaScript libraries out there that provide some support for globalization, but most are limited to a particular portion of globalization. As .NET developers we’re fairly spoiled by the richness of APIs provided in the framework and when dealing with client development one really notices the lack of these features. While you may not necessarily need to localize your application the globalization plug-in also helps with some basic tasks for non-localized applications: Dealing with formatting and parsing of dates and time values. Dates in particular are problematic in JavaScript as there are no formatters whatsoever except the .toString() method which outputs a verbose and next to useless long string. With the globalization plug-in you get a good chunk of the formatting and parsing functionality that the .NET framework provides on the server. You can write code like the following for example to format numbers and dates: var date = new Date(); var output = $.format(date, "MMM. dd, yy") + "\r\n" + $.format(date, "d") + "\r\n" + // 10/25/2010 $.format(1222.32213, "N2") + "\r\n" + $.format(1222.33, "c") + "\r\n"; alert(output); This becomes even more useful if you combine it with templates which can also include any JavaScript expressions. Assuming the globalization plug-in is loaded you can create template expressions that use the $.format function. Here’s the template I used earlier for the stock quote again with a couple of formats applied: <script id="stockTemplate" type="text/x-jquery-tmpl"> <div id="divStockQuote" class="errordisplay" style="width: 500px;"> <div class="label">Company:</div><div><b>${Company}(${Symbol})</b></div> <div class="label">Last Price:</div> <div>${$.format(LastPrice,"N2")}</div> <div class="label">Net Change:</div><div> {{if NetChange > 0}} <b style="color:green" >${NetChange}</b> {{else}} <b style="color:red" >${NetChange}</b> {{/if}} </div> <div class="label">Last Update:</div> <div>${$.format(LastQuoteTime,"MMM dd, yyyy")}</div> </div> </script> There are also parsing methods that can parse dates and numbers from strings into numbers easily: alert($.parseDate("25.10.2010")); alert($.parseInt("12.222")); // de-DE uses . for thousands separators As you can see culture specific options are taken into account when parsing. The globalization plugin provides rich support for a variety of locales: Get a list of all available cultures Query cultures for culture items (like currency symbol, separators etc.) Localized string names for all calendar related items (days of week, months) Generated off of .NET’s supported locales In short you get much of the same functionality that you already might be using in .NET on the server side. The plugin includes a huge number of locales and an Globalization.all.min.js file that contains the text defaults for each of these locales as well as small locale specific script files that define each of the locale specific settings. It’s highly recommended that you NOT use the huge globalization file that includes all locales, but rather add script references to only those languages you explicitly care about. Overall this plug-in is a welcome helper. Even if you use it with a single locale (like en-US) and do no other localization, you’ll gain solid support for number and date formatting which is a vital feature of many applications. Changes for Microsoft It’s good to see Microsoft coming out of its shell and away from the ‘not-built-here’ mentality that has been so pervasive in the past. It’s especially good to see it applied to jQuery – a technology that has stood in drastic contrast to Microsoft’s own internal efforts in terms of design, usage model and… popularity. It’s great to see that Microsoft is paying attention to what customers prefer to use and supporting the customer sentiment – even if it meant drastically changing course of policy and moving into a more open and sharing environment in the process. The additional jQuery support that has been introduced in the last two years certainly has made lives easier for many developers on the ASP.NET platform. It’s also nice to see Microsoft submitting proposals through the standard jQuery process of plug-ins and getting accepted for various very useful projects. Certainly the jQuery Templates plug-in is going to be very useful to many especially since it will be baked into the jQuery core in jQuery 1.5. I hope we see more of this type of involvement from Microsoft in the future. Kudos!© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in jQuery ASP.NET

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Using FiddlerCore to capture HTTP Requests with .NET

- by Rick Strahl

Over the last few weeks I’ve been working on my Web load testing utility West Wind WebSurge. One of the key components of a load testing tool is the ability to capture URLs effectively so that you can play them back later under load. One of the options in WebSurge for capturing URLs is to use its built-in capture tool which acts as an HTTP proxy to capture any HTTP and HTTPS traffic from most Windows HTTP clients, including Web Browsers as well as standalone Windows applications and services. To make this happen, I used Eric Lawrence’s awesome FiddlerCore library, which provides most of the functionality of his desktop Fiddler application, all rolled into an easy to use library that you can plug into your own applications. FiddlerCore makes it almost too easy to capture HTTP content! For WebSurge I needed to capture all HTTP traffic in order to capture the full HTTP request – URL, headers and any content posted by the client. The result of what I ended up creating is this semi-generic capture form: In this post I’m going to demonstrate how easy it is to use FiddlerCore to build this HTTP Capture Form. If you want to jump right in here are the links to get Telerik’s Fiddler Core and the code for the demo provided here. FiddlerCore Download FiddlerCore on NuGet Show me the Code (WebSurge Integration code from GitHub) Download the WinForms Sample Form West Wind Web Surge (example implementation in live app) Note that FiddlerCore is bound by a license for commercial usage – see license.txt in the FiddlerCore distribution for details. Integrating FiddlerCore FiddlerCore is a library that simply plugs into your application. You can download it from the Telerik site and manually add the assemblies to your project, or you can simply install the NuGet package via: PM> Install-Package FiddlerCore The library consists of the FiddlerCore.dll as well as a couple of support libraries (CertMaker.dll and BCMakeCert.dll) that are used for installing SSL certificates. I’ll have more on SSL captures and certificate installation later in this post. But first let’s see how easy it is to use FiddlerCore to capture HTTP content by looking at how to build the above capture form. Capturing HTTP Content Once the library is installed it’s super easy to hook up Fiddler functionality. Fiddler includes a number of static class methods on the FiddlerApplication object that can be called to hook up callback events as well as actual start monitoring HTTP URLs. In the following code directly lifted from WebSurge, I configure a few filter options on Form level object, from the user inputs shown on the form by assigning it to a capture options object. In the live application these settings are persisted configuration values, but in the demo they are one time values initialized and set on the form. Once these options are set, I hook up the AfterSessionComplete event to capture every URL that passes through the proxy after the request is completed and start up the Proxy service:void Start() { if (tbIgnoreResources.Checked) CaptureConfiguration.IgnoreResources = true; else CaptureConfiguration.IgnoreResources = false; string strProcId = txtProcessId.Text; if (strProcId.Contains('-')) strProcId = strProcId.Substring(strProcId.IndexOf('-') + 1).Trim(); strProcId = strProcId.Trim(); int procId = 0; if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(strProcId)) { if (!int.TryParse(strProcId, out procId)) procId = 0; } CaptureConfiguration.ProcessId = procId; CaptureConfiguration.CaptureDomain = txtCaptureDomain.Text; FiddlerApplication.AfterSessionComplete += FiddlerApplication_AfterSessionComplete; FiddlerApplication.Startup(8888, true, true, true); } The key lines for FiddlerCore are just the last two lines of code that include the event hookup code as well as the Startup() method call. Here I only hook up to the AfterSessionComplete event but there are a number of other events that hook various stages of the HTTP request cycle you can also hook into. Other events include BeforeRequest, BeforeResponse, RequestHeadersAvailable, ResponseHeadersAvailable and so on. In my case I want to capture the request data and I actually have several options to capture this data. AfterSessionComplete is the last event that fires in the request sequence and it’s the most common choice to capture all request and response data. I could have used several other events, but AfterSessionComplete is one place where you can look both at the request and response data, so this will be the most common place to hook into if you’re capturing content. The implementation of AfterSessionComplete is responsible for capturing all HTTP request headers and it looks something like this:private void FiddlerApplication_AfterSessionComplete(Session sess) { // Ignore HTTPS connect requests if (sess.RequestMethod == "CONNECT") return; if (CaptureConfiguration.ProcessId > 0) { if (sess.LocalProcessID != 0 && sess.LocalProcessID != CaptureConfiguration.ProcessId) return; } if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(CaptureConfiguration.CaptureDomain)) { if (sess.hostname.ToLower() != CaptureConfiguration.CaptureDomain.Trim().ToLower()) return; } if (CaptureConfiguration.IgnoreResources) { string url = sess.fullUrl.ToLower(); var extensions = CaptureConfiguration.ExtensionFilterExclusions; foreach (var ext in extensions) { if (url.Contains(ext)) return; } var filters = CaptureConfiguration.UrlFilterExclusions; foreach (var urlFilter in filters) { if (url.Contains(urlFilter)) return; } } if (sess == null || sess.oRequest == null || sess.oRequest.headers == null) return; string headers = sess.oRequest.headers.ToString(); var reqBody = sess.GetRequestBodyAsString(); // if you wanted to capture the response //string respHeaders = session.oResponse.headers.ToString(); //var respBody = session.GetResponseBodyAsString(); // replace the HTTP line to inject full URL string firstLine = sess.RequestMethod + " " + sess.fullUrl + " " + sess.oRequest.headers.HTTPVersion; int at = headers.IndexOf("\r\n"); if (at < 0) return; headers = firstLine + "\r\n" + headers.Substring(at + 1); string output = headers + "\r\n" + (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(reqBody) ? reqBody + "\r\n" : string.Empty) + Separator + "\r\n\r\n"; BeginInvoke(new Action<string>((text) => { txtCapture.AppendText(text); UpdateButtonStatus(); }), output); } The code starts by filtering out some requests based on the CaptureOptions I set before the capture is started. These options/filters are applied when requests actually come in. This is very useful to help narrow down the requests that are captured for playback based on options the user picked. I find it useful to limit requests to a certain domain for captures, as well as filtering out some request types like static resources – images, css, scripts etc. This is of course optional, but I think it’s a common scenario and WebSurge makes good use of this feature. AfterSessionComplete like other FiddlerCore events, provides a Session object parameter which contains all the request and response details. There are oRequest and oResponse objects to hold their respective data. In my case I’m interested in the raw request headers and body only, as you can see in the commented code you can also retrieve the response headers and body. Here the code captures the request headers and body and simply appends the output to the textbox on the screen. Note that the Fiddler events are asynchronous, so in order to display the content in the UI they have to be marshaled back the UI thread with BeginInvoke, which here simply takes the generated headers and appends it to the existing textbox test on the form. As each request is processed, the headers are captured and appended to the bottom of the textbox resulting in a Session HTTP capture in the format that Web Surge internally supports, which is basically raw request headers with a customized 1st HTTP Header line that includes the full URL rather than a server relative URL. When the capture is done the user can either copy the raw HTTP session to the clipboard, or directly save it to file. This raw capture format is the same format WebSurge and also Fiddler use to import/export request data. While this code is application specific, it demonstrates the kind of logic that you can easily apply to the request capture process, which is one of the reasonsof why FiddlerCore is so powerful. You get to choose what content you want to look up as part of your own application logic and you can then decide how to capture or use that data as part of your application. The actual captured data in this case is only a string. The user can edit the data by hand or in the the case of WebSurge, save it to disk and automatically open the captured session as a new load test. Stopping the FiddlerCore Proxy Finally to stop capturing requests you simply disconnect the event handler and call the FiddlerApplication.ShutDown() method:void Stop() { FiddlerApplication.AfterSessionComplete -= FiddlerApplication_AfterSessionComplete; if (FiddlerApplication.IsStarted()) FiddlerApplication.Shutdown(); } As you can see, adding HTTP capture functionality to an application is very straight forward. FiddlerCore offers tons of features I’m not even touching on here – I suspect basic captures are the most common scenario, but a lot of different things can be done with FiddlerCore’s simple API interface. Sky’s the limit! The source code for this sample capture form (WinForms) is provided as part of this article. Adding Fiddler Certificates with FiddlerCore One of the sticking points in West Wind WebSurge has been that if you wanted to capture HTTPS/SSL traffic, you needed to have the full version of Fiddler and have HTTPS decryption enabled. Essentially you had to use Fiddler to configure HTTPS decryption and the associated installation of the Fiddler local client certificate that is used for local decryption of incoming SSL traffic. While this works just fine, requiring to have Fiddler installed and then using a separate application to configure the SSL functionality isn’t ideal. Fortunately FiddlerCore actually includes the tools to register the Fiddler Certificate directly using FiddlerCore. Why does Fiddler need a Certificate in the first Place? Fiddler and FiddlerCore are essentially HTTP proxies which means they inject themselves into the HTTP conversation by re-routing HTTP traffic to a special HTTP port (8888 by default for Fiddler) and then forward the HTTP data to the original client. Fiddler injects itself as the system proxy in using the WinInet Windows settings which are the same settings that Internet Explorer uses and that are configured in the Windows and Internet Explorer Internet Settings dialog. Most HTTP clients running on Windows pick up and apply these system level Proxy settings before establishing new HTTP connections and that’s why most clients automatically work once Fiddler – or FiddlerCore/WebSurge are running. For plain HTTP requests this just works – Fiddler intercepts the HTTP requests on the proxy port and then forwards them to the original port (80 for HTTP and 443 for SSL typically but it could be any port). For SSL however, this is not quite as simple – Fiddler can easily act as an HTTPS/SSL client to capture inbound requests from the server, but when it forwards the request to the client it has to also act as an SSL server and provide a certificate that the client trusts. This won’t be the original certificate from the remote site, but rather a custom local certificate that effectively simulates an SSL connection between the proxy and the client. If there is no custom certificate configured for Fiddler the SSL request fails with a certificate validation error. The key for this to work is that a custom certificate has to be installed that the HTTPS client trusts on the local machine. For a much more detailed description of the process you can check out Eric Lawrence’s blog post on Certificates. If you’re using the desktop version of Fiddler you can install a local certificate into the Windows certificate store. Fiddler proper does this from the Options menu: This operation does several things: It installs the Fiddler Root Certificate It sets trust to this Root Certificate A new client certificate is generated for each HTTPS site monitored Certificate Installation with FiddlerCore You can also provide this same functionality using FiddlerCore which includes a CertMaker class. Using CertMaker is straight forward to use and it provides an easy way to create some simple helpers that can install and uninstall a Fiddler Root certificate:public static bool InstallCertificate() { if (!CertMaker.rootCertExists()) { if (!CertMaker.createRootCert()) return false; if (!CertMaker.trustRootCert()) return false; } return true; } public static bool UninstallCertificate() { if (CertMaker.rootCertExists()) { if (!CertMaker.removeFiddlerGeneratedCerts(true)) return false; } return true; } InstallCertificate() works by first checking whether the root certificate is already installed and if it isn’t goes ahead and creates a new one. The process of creating the certificate is a two step process – first the actual certificate is created and then it’s moved into the certificate store to become trusted. I’m not sure why you’d ever split these operations up since a cert created without trust isn’t going to be of much value, but there are two distinct steps. When you trigger the trustRootCert() method, a message box will pop up on the desktop that lets you know that you’re about to trust a local private certificate. This is a security feature to ensure that you really want to trust the Fiddler root since you are essentially installing a man in the middle certificate. It’s quite safe to use this generated root certificate, because it’s been specifically generated for your machine and thus is not usable from external sources, the only way to use this certificate in a trusted way is from the local machine. IOW, unless somebody has physical access to your machine, there’s no useful way to hijack this certificate and use it for nefarious purposes (see Eric’s post for more details). Once the Root certificate has been installed, FiddlerCore/Fiddler create new certificates for each site that is connected to with HTTPS. You can end up with quite a few temporary certificates in your certificate store. To uninstall you can either use Fiddler and simply uncheck the Decrypt HTTPS traffic option followed by the remove Fiddler certificates button, or you can use FiddlerCore’s CertMaker.removeFiddlerGeneratedCerts() which removes the root cert and any of the intermediary certificates Fiddler created. Keep in mind that when you uninstall you uninstall the certificate for both FiddlerCore and Fiddler, so use UninstallCertificate() with care and realize that you might affect the Fiddler application’s operation by doing so as well. When to check for an installed Certificate Note that the check to see if the root certificate exists is pretty fast, while the actual process of installing the certificate is a relatively slow operation that even on a fast machine takes a few seconds. Further the trust operation pops up a message box so you probably don’t want to install the certificate repeatedly. Since the check for the root certificate is fast, you can easily put a call to InstallCertificate() in any capture startup code – in which case the certificate installation only triggers when a certificate is in fact not installed. Personally I like to make certificate installation explicit – just like Fiddler does, so in WebSurge I use a small drop down option on the menu to install or uninstall the SSL certificate: This code calls the InstallCertificate and UnInstallCertificate functions respectively – the experience with this is similar to what you get in Fiddler with the extra dialog box popping up to prompt confirmation for installation of the root certificate. Once the cert is installed you can then capture SSL requests. There’s a gotcha however… Gotcha: FiddlerCore Certificates don’t stick by Default When I originally tried to use the Fiddler certificate installation I ran into an odd problem. I was able to install the certificate and immediately after installation was able to capture HTTPS requests. Then I would exit the application and come back in and try the same HTTPS capture again and it would fail due to a missing certificate. CertMaker.rootCertExists() would return false after every restart and if re-installed the certificate a new certificate would get added to the certificate store resulting in a bunch of duplicated root certificates with different keys. What the heck? CertMaker and BcMakeCert create non-sticky CertificatesI turns out that FiddlerCore by default uses different components from what the full version of Fiddler uses. Fiddler uses a Windows utility called MakeCert.exe to create the Fiddler Root certificate. FiddlerCore however installs the CertMaker.dll and BCMakeCert.dll assemblies, which use a different crypto library (Bouncy Castle) for certificate creation than MakeCert.exe which uses the Windows Crypto API. The assemblies provide support for non-windows operation for Fiddler under Mono, as well as support for some non-Windows certificate platforms like iOS and Android for decryption. The bottom line is that the FiddlerCore provided bouncy castle assemblies are not sticky by default as the certificates created with them are not cached as they are in Fiddler proper. To get certificates to ‘stick’ you have to explicitly cache the certificates in Fiddler’s internal preferences. A cache aware version of InstallCertificate looks something like this:public static bool InstallCertificate() { if (!CertMaker.rootCertExists()) { if (!CertMaker.createRootCert()) return false; if (!CertMaker.trustRootCert()) return false; App.Configuration.UrlCapture.Cert = FiddlerApplication.Prefs.GetStringPref("fiddler.certmaker.bc.cert", null); App.Configuration.UrlCapture.Key = FiddlerApplication.Prefs.GetStringPref("fiddler.certmaker.bc.key", null); } return true; } public static bool UninstallCertificate() { if (CertMaker.rootCertExists()) { if (!CertMaker.removeFiddlerGeneratedCerts(true)) return false; } App.Configuration.UrlCapture.Cert = null; App.Configuration.UrlCapture.Key = null; return true; } In this code I store the Fiddler cert and private key in an application configuration settings that’s stored with the application settings (App.Configuration.UrlCapture object). These settings automatically persist when WebSurge is shut down. The values are read out of Fiddler’s internal preferences store which is set after a new certificate has been created. Likewise I clear out the configuration settings when the certificate is uninstalled. In order for these setting to be used you have to also load the configuration settings into the Fiddler preferences *before* a call to rootCertExists() is made. I do this in the capture form’s constructor:public FiddlerCapture(StressTestForm form) { InitializeComponent(); CaptureConfiguration = App.Configuration.UrlCapture; MainForm = form; if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(App.Configuration.UrlCapture.Cert)) { FiddlerApplication.Prefs.SetStringPref("fiddler.certmaker.bc.key", App.Configuration.UrlCapture.Key); FiddlerApplication.Prefs.SetStringPref("fiddler.certmaker.bc.cert", App.Configuration.UrlCapture.Cert); }} This is kind of a drag to do and not documented anywhere that I could find, so hopefully this will save you some grief if you want to work with the stock certificate logic that installs with FiddlerCore. MakeCert provides sticky Certificates and the same functionality as Fiddler But there’s actually an easier way. If you want to skip the above Fiddler preference configuration code in your application you can choose to distribute MakeCert.exe instead of certmaker.dll and bcmakecert.dll. When you use MakeCert.exe, the certificates settings are stored in Windows so they are available without any custom configuration inside of your application. It’s easier to integrate and as long as you run on Windows and you don’t need to support iOS or Android devices is simply easier to deal with. To integrate into your project, you can remove the reference to CertMaker.dll (and the BcMakeCert.dll assembly) from your project. Instead copy MakeCert.exe into your output folder. To make sure MakeCert.exe gets pushed out, include MakeCert.exe in your project and set the Build Action to None, and Copy to Output Directory to Copy if newer. Note that the CertMaker.dll reference in the project has been removed and on disk the files for Certmaker.dll, as well as the BCMakeCert.dll files on disk. Keep in mind that these DLLs are resources of the FiddlerCore NuGet package, so updating the package may end up pushing those files back into your project. Once MakeCert.exe is distributed FiddlerCore checks for it first before using the assemblies so as long as MakeCert.exe exists it’ll be used for certificate creation (at least on Windows). Summary FiddlerCore is a pretty sweet tool, and it’s absolutely awesome that we get to plug in most of the functionality of Fiddler right into our own applications. A few years back I tried to build this sort of functionality myself for an app and ended up giving up because it’s a big job to get HTTP right – especially if you need to support SSL. FiddlerCore now provides that functionality as a turnkey solution that can be plugged into your own apps easily. The only downside is FiddlerCore’s documentation for more advanced features like certificate installation which is pretty sketchy. While for the most part FiddlerCore’s feature set is easy to work with without any documentation, advanced features are often not intuitive to gleam by just using Intellisense or the FiddlerCore help file reference (which is not terribly useful). While Eric Lawrence is very responsive on his forum and on Twitter, there simply isn’t much useful documentation on Fiddler/FiddlerCore available online. If you run into trouble the forum is probably the first place to look and then ask a question if you can’t find the answer. The best documentation you can find is Eric’s Fiddler Book which covers a ton of functionality of Fiddler and FiddlerCore. The book is a great reference to Fiddler’s feature set as well as providing great insights into the HTTP protocol. The second half of the book that gets into the innards of HTTP is an excellent read for anybody who wants to know more about some of the more arcane aspects and special behaviors of HTTP – it’s well worth the read. While the book has tons of information in a very readable format, it’s unfortunately not a great reference as it’s hard to find things in the book and because it’s not available online you can’t electronically search for the great content in it. But it’s hard to complain about any of this given the obvious effort and love that’s gone into this awesome product for all of these years. A mighty big thanks to Eric Lawrence for having created this useful tool that so many of us use all the time, and also to Telerik for picking up Fiddler/FiddlerCore and providing Eric the resources to support and improve this wonderful tool full time and keeping it free for all. Kudos! Resources FiddlerCore Download FiddlerCore NuGet Fiddler Capture Sample Form Fiddler Capture Form in West Wind WebSurge (GitHub) Eric Lawrence’s Fiddler Book© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2014Posted in .NET HTTP 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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Tools and Utilities for the .NET Developer

- by mbcrump

Tweet this list! Add a link to my site to your bookmarks to quickly find this page again! Add me to twitter! This is a list of the tools/utilities that I use to do my job/hobby. I wanted this page to load fast and contain information that only you care about. If I have missed a tool that you like, feel free to contact me and I will add it to the list. Also, this list took a lot of time to complete. Please do not steal my work, if you like the page then please link back to my site. I will keep the links/information updated as new tools/utilities are created. Windows/.NET Development – This is a list of tools that any Windows/.NET developer should have in his bag. I have used at some point in my career everything listed on this page and below is the tools worth keeping. Name Description License AnkhSVN Subversion support for Visual Studio. It also works with VS2010. Free Aurora XAML Designer One of the best XAML creation tools available. Has a ton of built in templates that you can copy/paste into VS2010. COST/Trial BeyondCompare Beyond Compare 3 is the ideal tool for comparing files and folders on your Windows or Linux system. Visualize changes in your code and carefully reconcile them. COST/Trial BuildIT Automated Task Tool Its main purpose is to automate tasks, whether it is the final packaging of a product, an automated daily build, maybe sending out a mailing list, even backing-up files. Free C Sharper for VB Convert VB to C#. COST CLRProfiler Analyze and improve the behavior of your .NET app. Free CodeRush Direct competitor to ReSharper, contains similar feature. This is one of those decide for yourself. COST/Trial Disk2VHD Disk2vhd is a utility that creates VHD (Virtual Hard Disk - Microsoft's Virtual Machine disk format) versions of physical disks for use in Microsoft Virtual PC or Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs). Free Eazfuscator.NET Is a free obfuscator for .NET. The main purpose is to protect intellectual property of software. Free EQATEC Profiler Make your .NET app run faster. No source code changes are needed. Just point the profiler to your app, run the modified code, and get a visual report. COST Expression Studio 3/4 Comes with Web, Blend, Sketch Flow and more. You can create websites, produce beautiful XAML and more. COST/Trial Expresso The award-winning Expresso editor is equally suitable as a teaching tool for the beginning user of regular expressions or as a full-featured development environment for the experienced programmer or web designer with an extensive knowledge of regular expressions. Free Fiddler Fiddler is a web debugging proxy which logs all HTTP(s) traffic between your computer and the internet. Free Firebug Powerful Web development tool. If you build websites, you will need this. Free FxCop FxCop is an application that analyzes managed code assemblies (code that targets the .NET Framework common language runtime) and reports information about the assemblies, such as possible design, localization, performance, and security improvements. Free GAC Browser and Remover Easy way to remove multiple assemblies from the GAC. Assemblies registered by programs like Install Shield can also be removed. Free GAC Util The Global Assembly Cache tool allows you to view and manipulate the contents of the global assembly cache and download cache. Free HelpScribble Help Scribble is a full-featured, easy-to-use help authoring tool for creating help files from start to finish. You can create Win Help (.hlp) files, HTML Help (.chm) files, a printed manual and online documentation (on a web site) all from the same Help Scribble project. COST/Trial IETester IETester is a free Web Browser that allows you to have the rendering and JavaScript engines of IE9 preview, IE8, IE7 IE 6 and IE5.5 on Windows 7, Vista and XP, as well as the installed IE in the same process. Free iTextSharp iText# (iTextSharp) is a port of the iText open source java library for PDF generation written entirely in C# for the .NET platform. Use the iText mailing list to get support. Free Kaxaml Kaxaml is a lightweight XAML editor that gives you a "split view" so you can see both your XAML and your rendered content. Free LINQPad LinqPad lets you interactively query databases in a LINQ. Free Linquer Many programmers are familiar with SQL and will need a help in the transition to LINQ. Sometimes there are complicated queries to be written and Linqer can help by converting SQL scripts to LINQ. COST/Trial LiquidXML Liquid XML Studio 2010 is an advanced XML developers toolkit and IDE, containing all the tools needed for designing and developing XML schema and applications. COST/Trial Log4Net log4net is a tool to help the programmer output log statements to a variety of output targets. log4net is a port of the excellent log4j framework to the .NET runtime. We have kept the framework similar in spirit to the original log4j while taking advantage of new features in the .NET runtime. For more information on log4net see the features document. Free Microsoft Web Platform Installer The Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0 (Web PI) is a free tool that makes getting the latest components of the Microsoft Web Platform, including Internet Information Services (IIS), SQL Server Express, .NET Framework and Visual Web Developer easy. Free Mono Development Don't have Visual Studio - no problem! This is an open Source C# and .NET development environment for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X Free Net Mass Downloader While it’s great that Microsoft has released the .NET Reference Source Code, you can only get it one file at a time while you’re debugging. If you’d like to batch download it for reading or to populate the cache, you’d have to write a program that instantiated and called each method in the Framework Class Library. Fortunately, .NET Mass Downloader comes to the rescue! Free nMap Nmap ("Network Mapper") is a free and open source (license) utility for network exploration or security auditing. Many systems and network administrators also find it useful for tasks such as network inventory, managing service upgrade schedules, and monitoring host or service uptime. Free NoScript (Firefox add-in) The NoScript Firefox extension provides extra protection for Firefox, Flock, Seamonkey and other Mozilla-based browsers: this free, open source add-on allows JavaScript, Java and Flash and other plug-ins to be executed only by trusted web sites of your choice (e.g. your online bank), and provides the most powerful Anti-XSS protection available in a browser. Free NotePad 2 Notepad2, a fast and light-weight Notepad-like text editor with syntax highlighting. This program can be run out of the box without installation, and does not touch your system's registry. Free PageSpy PageSpy is a small add-on for Internet Explorer that allows you to select any element within a webpage, select an option in the context menu, and view detailed information about both the coding behind the page and the element you selected. Free Phrase Express PhraseExpress manages your frequently used text snippets in customizable categories for quick access. Free PowerGui PowerGui is a free community for PowerGUI, a graphical user interface and script editor for Microsoft Windows PowerShell! Free Powershell Comes with Win7, but you can automate tasks by using the .NET Framework. Great for network admins. Free Process Explorer Ever wondered which program has a particular file or directory open? Now you can find out. Process Explorer shows you information about which handles and DLLs processes have opened or loaded. Also, included in the SysInterals Suite. Free Process Monitor Process Monitor is an advanced monitoring tool for Windows that shows real-time file system, Registry and process/thread activity. Free Reflector Explore and analyze compiled .NET assemblies, viewing them in C#, Visual Basic, and IL. This is an Essential for any .NET developer. Free Regular Expression Library Stuck on a Regular Expression but you think someone has already figured it out? Chances are they have. Free Regulator Regulator makes Regular Expressions easy. This is a must have for a .NET Developer. Free RenameMaestro RenameMaestro is probably the easiest batch file renamer you'll find to instantly rename multiple files COST ReSharper The one program that I cannot live without. Supports VS2010 and offers simple refactoring, code analysis/assistance/cleanup/templates. One of the few applications that is worth the $$$. COST/Trial ScrewTurn Wiki ScrewTurn Wiki allows you to create, manage and share wikis. A wiki is a collaboratively-edited, information-centered website: the most famous is Wikipedia. Free SharpDevelop What is #develop? SharpDevelop is a free IDE for C# and VB.NET projects on Microsoft's .NET platform. Free Show Me The Template Show Me The Template is a tool for exploring the templates, be their data, control or items panel, that comes with the controls built into WPF for all 6 themes. Free SnippetCompiler Compiles code snippets without opening Visual Studio. It does not support .NET 4. Free SQL Prompt SQL Prompt is a plug-in that increases how fast you can work with SQL. It provides code-completion for SQL server, reformatting, db schema information and snippets. Awesome! COST/Trial SQLinForm SQLinForm is an automatic SQL code formatter for all major databases including ORACLE, SQL Server, DB2, UDB, Sybase, Informix, PostgreSQL, Teradata, MySQL, MS Access etc. with over 70 formatting options. COST/OnlineFree SSMS Tools SSMS Tools Pack is an add-in for Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) including SSMS Express. Free Storm STORM is a free and open source tool for testing web services. Free Telerik Code Convertor Convert code from VB to C Sharp and Vice Versa. Free TurtoiseSVN TortoiseSVN is a really easy to use Revision control / version control / source control software for Windows.Since it's not an integration for a specific IDE you can use it with whatever development tools you like. Free UltraEdit UltraEdit is the ideal text, HTML and hex editor, and an advanced PHP, Perl, Java and JavaScript editor for programmers. UltraEdit is also an XML editor including a tree-style XML parser. An industry-award winner, UltraEdit supports disk-based 64-bit file handling (standard) on 32-bit Windows platforms (Windows 2000 and later). COST/Trial Virtual Windows XP Comes with some W7 version and allows you to run WinXP along side W7. Free VirtualBox Virtualization by Sun Microsystems. You can virtualize Windows, Linux and more. Free Visual Log Parser SQL queries against a variety of log files and other system data sources. Free WinMerge WinMerge is an Open Source differencing and merging tool for Windows. WinMerge can compare both folders and files, presenting differences in a visual text format that is easy to understand and handle. Free Wireshark Wireshark is one of the best network protocol analyzer's for Unix and windows. This has been used several times to get me out of a bind. Free XML Notepad 07 Old, but still one of my favorite XML viewers. Free Productivity Tools – This is the list of tools that I use to save time or quickly navigate around Windows. Name Description License AutoHotKey Automate almost anything by sending keystrokes and mouse clicks. You can write a mouse or keyboard macro by hand or use the macro recorder. Free CLCL CLCL is clipboard caching utility. Free Ditto Ditto is an extension to the standard windows clipboard. It saves each item placed on the clipboard allowing you access to any of those items at a later time. Ditto allows you to save any type of information that can be put on the clipboard, text, images, html, custom formats, ..... Free Evernote Remember everything from notes to photos. It will synch between computers/devices. Free InfoRapid Inforapid is a search tool that will display all you search results in a html like browser. If you click on a word in that browser, it will start another search to the word you clicked on. Handy if you want to trackback something to it's true origin. The word you looked for will be highlighted in red. Clicking on the red word will open the containing file in a text based viewer. Clicking on any word in the opened document will start another search on that word. Free KatMouse The prime purpose of the KatMouse utility is to enhance the functionality of mice with a scroll wheel, offering 'universal' scrolling: moving the mouse wheel will scroll the window directly beneath the mouse cursor (not the one with the keyboard focus, which is default on Windows OSes). This is a major increase in the usefulness of the mouse wheel. Free ScreenR Instant Screencast with nothing to download. Works with Mac or PC and free. Free Start++ Start++ is an enhancement for the Start Menu in Windows Vista. It also extends the Run box and the command-line with customizable commands. For example, typing "w Windows Vista" will take you to the Windows Vista page on Wikipedia! Free Synergy Synergy lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, without special hardware. It's intended for users with multiple computers on their desk since each system uses its own monitor(s). Free Texter Texter lets you define text substitution hot strings that, when triggered, will replace hotstring with a larger piece of text. By entering your most commonly-typed snippets of text into Texter, you can save countless keystrokes in the course of the day. Free Total Commander File handling, FTP, Archive handling and much more. Even works with Win3.11. COST/Trial Available Wizmouse WizMouse is a mouse enhancement utility that makes your mouse wheel work on the window currently under the mouse pointer, instead of the currently focused window. This means you no longer have to click on a window before being able to scroll it with the mouse wheel. This is a far more comfortable and practical way to make use of the mouse wheel. Free Xmarks Bookmark sync and search between computers. Free General Utilities – This is a list for power user users or anyone that wants more out of Windows. I usually install a majority of these whenever I get a new system. Name Description License µTorrent µTorrent is a lightweight and efficient BitTorrent client for Windows or Mac with many features. I use this for downloading LEGAL media. Free Audacity Audacity® is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It is available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems. Learn more about Audacity... Also check our Wiki and Forum for more information. Free AVast Free FREE Antivirus. Free CD Burner XP Pro CDBurnerXP is a free application to burn CDs and DVDs, including Blu-Ray and HD-DVDs. It also includes the feature to burn and create ISOs, as well as a multilanguage interface. Free CDEX You can extract digital audio CDs into mp3/wav. Free Combofix Combofix is a freeware (a legitimate spyware remover created by sUBs), Combofix was designed to scan a computer for known malware, spyware (SurfSideKick, QooLogic, and Look2Me as well as any other combination of the mentioned spyware applications) and remove them. Free Cpu-Z Provides information about some of the main devices of your system. Free Cropper Cropper is a screen capture utility written in C#. It makes it fast and easy to grab parts of your screen. Use it to easily crop out sections of vector graphic files such as Fireworks without having to flatten the files or open in a new editor. Use it to easily capture parts of a web site, including text and images. It's also great for writing documentation that needs images of your application or web site. Free DropBox Drag and Drop files to sync between computers. Free DVD-Fab Converts/Copies DVDs/Blu-Ray to different formats. (like mp4, mkv, avi) COST/Trial Available FastStone Capture FastStone Capture is a powerful, lightweight, yet full-featured screen capture tool that allows you to easily capture and annotate anything on the screen including windows, objects, menus, full screen, rectangular/freehand regions and even scrolling windows/web pages. Free ffdshow FFDShow is a DirectShow decoding filter for decompressing DivX, XviD, H.264, FLV1, WMV, MPEG-1 and MPEG-2, MPEG-4 movies. Free Filezilla FileZilla Client is a fast and reliable cross-platform FTP, FTPS and SFTP client with lots of useful features and an intuitive graphical user interface. You can also download a server version. Free FireFox Web Browser, do you really need an explanation? Free FireGestures A customizable mouse gestures extension which enables you to execute various commands and user scripts with five types of gestures. Free FoxIt Reader Light weight PDF viewer. You should install this with the advanced setting or it will install a toolbar and setup some shortcuts. Free gSynchIt Synch Gmail and Outlook. Even supports Outlook 2010 32/64 bit COST/Trial Available Hulu Desktop At home or in a hotel, this has replaced my cable/satellite subscription. Free ImgBurn ImgBurn is a lightweight CD / DVD / HD DVD / Blu-ray burning application that everyone should have in their toolkit! Free Infrarecorder InfraRecorder is a free CD/DVD burning solution for Microsoft Windows. It offers a wide range of powerful features; all through an easy to use application interface and Windows Explorer integration. Free KeePass KeePass is a free open source password manager, which helps you to manage your passwords in a secure way. Free LastPass Another password management, synchronize between browsers, automatic form filling and more. Free Live Essentials One download and lots of programs including Mail, Live Writer, Movie Maker and more! Free Monitores MonitorES is a small windows utility that helps you to turnoff monitor display when you lock down your machine.Also when you lock your machine, it will pause all your running media programs & set your IM status message to "Away" / Custom message(via options) and restore it back to normal when you back. Free mRemote mRemote is a full-featured, multi-tab remote connections manager. Free Open Office OpenOffice.org 3 is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages. It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose. Free Paint.NET Simple, intuitive, and innovative user interface for editing photos. Free Picasa Picasa is free photo editing software from Google that makes your pictures look great. Free Pidgin Pidgin is an easy to use and free chat client used by millions. Connect to AIM, MSN, Yahoo, and more chat networks all at once. Free PING PING is a live Linux ISO, based on the excellent Linux From Scratch (LFS) documentation. It can be burnt on a CD and booted, or integrated into a PXE / RIS environment. Free Putty PuTTY is an SSH and telnet client, developed originally by Simon Tatham for the Windows platform. Free Revo Uninstaller Revo Uninstaller Pro helps you to uninstall software and remove unwanted programs installed on your computer easily! Even if you have problems uninstalling and cannot uninstall them from "Windows Add or Remove Programs" control panel applet.Revo Uninstaller is a much faster and more powerful alternative to "Windows Add or Remove Programs" applet! It has very powerful features to uninstall and remove programs. Free Security Essentials Microsoft Security Essentials is a new, free consumer anti-malware solution for your computer. Free SetupVirtualCloneDrive Virtual CloneDrive works and behaves just like a physical CD/DVD drive, however it exists only virtually. Point to the .ISO file and it appears in Windows Explorer as a Drive. Free Shark 007 Codec Pack Play just about any file format with this download. Also includes my W7 Media Playlist Generator. Free Snagit 9 Screen Capture on steroids. Add arrows, captions, etc to any screenshot. COST/Trial Available SysinternalsSuite Go ahead and download the entire sys internals suite. I have mentioned multiple programs in this suite already. Free TeraCopy TeraCopy is a compact program designed to copy and move files at the maximum possible speed, providing the user with a lot of features. Free for Home TrueCrypt Free open-source disk encryption software for Windows 7/Vista/XP, Mac OS X, and Linux Free TweetDeck Fully featured Twitter client. Free UltraVNC UltraVNC is a powerful, easy to use and free software that can display the screen of another computer (via internet or network) on your own screen. The program allows you to use your mouse and keyboard to control the other PC remotely. It means that you can work on a remote computer, as if you were sitting in front of it, right from your current location. Free Unlocker Unlocks locked files. Pretty simple right? Free VLC Media Player VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player and multimedia framework capable of reading most audio and video formats Free Windows 7 Media Playlist This program is special to my heart because I wrote it. It has been mentioned on podcast and various websites. It allows you to quickly create wvx video playlist for Windows Media Center. Free WinRAR WinRAR is a powerful archive manager. It can backup your data and reduce the size of email attachments, decompress RAR, ZIP and other files downloaded from Internet and create new archives in RAR and ZIP file format. COST/Trial Available Blogging – I use the following for my blog. Name Description License Insert Code for Windows Live Writer Insert Code for Windows Live Writer will format a snippet of text in a number of programming languages such as C#, HTML, MSH, JavaScript, Visual Basic and TSQL. Free LiveWriter Included in Live Essentials, but the ultimate in Windows Blogging Free PasteAsVSCode Plug-in for Windows Live Writer that pastes clipboard content as Visual Studio code. Preserves syntax highlighting, indentation and background color. Converts RTF, outputted by Visual Studio, into HTML. Free Desktop Management – The list below represent the best in Windows Desktop Management. Name Description License 7 Stacks Allows users to have "stacks" of icons in their taskbar. Free Executor Executor is a multi purpose launcher and a more advanced and customizable version of windows run. Free Fences Fences is a program that helps you organize your desktop and can hide your icons when they are not in use. Free RocketDock Rocket Dock is a smoothly animated, alpha blended application launcher. It provides a nice clean interface to drop shortcuts on for easy access and organization. With each item completely customizable there is no end to what you can add and launch from the dock. Free WindowsTab Tabbing is an essential feature of modern web browsers. Window Tabs brings the productivity of tabbed window management to all of your desktop applications. Free

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jQuery Globalization Plugin from Microsoft

- by ScottGu

Last month I blogged about how Microsoft is starting to make code contributions to jQuery, and about some of the first code contributions we were working on: jQuery Templates and Data Linking support. Today, we released a prototype of a new jQuery Globalization Plugin that enables you to add globalization support to your JavaScript applications. This plugin includes globalization information for over 350 cultures ranging from Scottish Gaelic, Frisian, Hungarian, Japanese, to Canadian English. We will be releasing this plugin to the community as open-source. You can download our prototype for the jQuery Globalization plugin from our Github repository: http://github.com/nje/jquery-glob You can also download a set of samples that demonstrate some simple use-cases with it here. Understanding Globalization The jQuery Globalization plugin enables you to easily parse and format numbers, currencies, and dates for different cultures in JavaScript. For example, you can use the Globalization plugin to display the proper currency symbol for a culture: You also can use the Globalization plugin to format dates so that the day and month appear in the right order and the day and month names are correctly translated: Notice above how the Arabic year is displayed as 1431. This is because the year has been converted to use the Arabic calendar. Some cultural differences, such as different currency or different month names, are obvious. Other cultural differences are surprising and subtle. For example, in some cultures, the grouping of numbers is done unevenly. In the "te-IN" culture (Telugu in India), groups have 3 digits and then 2 digits. The number 1000000 (one million) is written as "10,00,000". Some cultures do not group numbers at all. All of these subtle cultural differences are handled by the jQuery Globalization plugin automatically. Getting dates right can be especially tricky. Different cultures have different calendars such as the Gregorian and UmAlQura calendars. A single culture can even have multiple calendars. For example, the Japanese culture uses both the Gregorian calendar and a Japanese calendar that has eras named after Japanese emperors. The Globalization Plugin includes methods for converting dates between all of these different calendars. Using Language Tags The jQuery Globalization plugin uses the language tags defined in the RFC 4646 and RFC 5646 standards to identity cultures (see http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5646). A language tag is composed out of one or more subtags separated by hyphens. For example: Language Tag Language Name (in English) en-AU English (Australia) en-BZ English (Belize) en-CA English (Canada) Id Indonesian zh-CHS Chinese (Simplified) Legacy Zu isiZulu Notice that a single language, such as English, can have several language tags. Speakers of English in Canada format numbers, currencies, and dates using different conventions than speakers of English in Australia or the United States. You can find the language tag for a particular culture by using the Language Subtag Lookup tool located here: http://rishida.net/utils/subtags/ The jQuery Globalization plugin download includes a folder named globinfo that contains the information for each of the 350 cultures. Actually, this folder contains more than 700 files because the folder includes both minified and un-minified versions of each file. For example, the globinfo folder includes JavaScript files named jQuery.glob.en-AU.js for English Australia, jQuery.glob.id.js for Indonesia, and jQuery.glob.zh-CHS for Chinese (Simplified) Legacy. Example: Setting a Particular Culture Imagine that you have been asked to create a German website and want to format all of the dates, currencies, and numbers using German formatting conventions correctly in JavaScript on the client. The HTML for the page might look like this: Notice the span tags above. They mark the areas of the page that we want to format with the Globalization plugin. We want to format the product price, the date the product is available, and the units of the product in stock. To use the jQuery Globalization plugin, we’ll add three JavaScript files to the page: the jQuery library, the jQuery Globalization plugin, and the culture information for a particular language: In this case, I’ve statically added the jQuery.glob.de-DE.js JavaScript file that contains the culture information for German. The language tag “de-DE” is used for German as spoken in Germany. Now that I have all of the necessary scripts, I can use the Globalization plugin to format the product price, date available, and units in stock values using the following client-side JavaScript: The jQuery Globalization plugin extends the jQuery library with new methods - including new methods named preferCulture() and format(). The preferCulture() method enables you to set the default culture used by the jQuery Globalization plugin methods. Notice that the preferCulture() method accepts a language tag. The method will find the closest culture that matches the language tag. The $.format() method is used to actually format the currencies, dates, and numbers. The second parameter passed to the $.format() method is a format specifier. For example, passing “c” causes the value to be formatted as a currency. The ReadMe file at github details the meaning of all of the various format specifiers: http://github.com/nje/jquery-glob When we open the page in a browser, everything is formatted correctly according to German language conventions. A euro symbol is used for the currency symbol. The date is formatted using German day and month names. Finally, a period instead of a comma is used a number separator: You can see a running example of the above approach with the 3_GermanSite.htm file in this samples download. Example: Enabling a User to Dynamically Select a Culture In the previous example we explicitly said that we wanted to globalize in German (by referencing the jQuery.glob.de-DE.js file). Let’s now look at the first of a few examples that demonstrate how to dynamically set the globalization culture to use. Imagine that you want to display a dropdown list of all of the 350 cultures in a page. When someone selects a culture from the dropdown list, you want all of the dates in the page to be formatted using the selected culture. Here’s the HTML for the page: Notice that all of the dates are contained in a <span> tag with a data-date attribute (data-* attributes are a new feature of HTML 5 that conveniently also still work with older browsers). We’ll format the date represented by the data-date attribute when a user selects a culture from the dropdown list. In order to display dates for any possible culture, we’ll include the jQuery.glob.all.js file like this: The jQuery Globalization plugin includes a JavaScript file named jQuery.glob.all.js. This file contains globalization information for all of the more than 350 cultures supported by the Globalization plugin. At 367KB minified, this file is not small. Because of the size of this file, unless you really need to use all of these cultures at the same time, we recommend that you add the individual JavaScript files for particular cultures that you intend to support instead of the combined jQuery.glob.all.js to a page. In the next sample I’ll show how to dynamically load just the language files you need. Next, we’ll populate the dropdown list with all of the available cultures. We can use the $.cultures property to get all of the loaded cultures: Finally, we’ll write jQuery code that grabs every span element with a data-date attribute and format the date: The jQuery Globalization plugin’s parseDate() method is used to convert a string representation of a date into a JavaScript date. The plugin’s format() method is used to format the date. The “D” format specifier causes the date to be formatted using the long date format. And now the content will be globalized correctly regardless of which of the 350 languages a user visiting the page selects. You can see a running example of the above approach with the 4_SelectCulture.htm file in this samples download. Example: Loading Globalization Files Dynamically As mentioned in the previous section, you should avoid adding the jQuery.glob.all.js file to a page whenever possible because the file is so large. A better alternative is to load the globalization information that you need dynamically. For example, imagine that you have created a dropdown list that displays a list of languages: The following jQuery code executes whenever a user selects a new language from the dropdown list. The code checks whether the globalization file associated with the selected language has already been loaded. If the globalization file has not been loaded then the globalization file is loaded dynamically by taking advantage of the jQuery $.getScript() method. The globalizePage() method is called after the requested globalization file has been loaded, and contains the client-side code to perform the globalization. The advantage of this approach is that it enables you to avoid loading the entire jQuery.glob.all.js file. Instead you only need to load the files that you need and you don’t need to load the files more than once. The 5_Dynamic.htm file in this samples download demonstrates how to implement this approach. Example: Setting the User Preferred Language Automatically Many websites detect a user’s preferred language from their browser settings and automatically use it when globalizing content. A user can set a preferred language for their browser. Then, whenever the user requests a page, this language preference is included in the request in the Accept-Language header. When using Microsoft Internet Explorer, you can set your preferred language by following these steps: Select the menu option Tools, Internet Options. Select the General tab. Click the Languages button in the Appearance section. Click the Add button to add a new language to the list of languages. Move your preferred language to the top of the list. Notice that you can list multiple languages in the Language Preference dialog. All of these languages are sent in the order that you listed them in the Accept-Language header: Accept-Language: fr-FR,id-ID;q=0.7,en-US;q=0.3 Strangely, you cannot retrieve the value of the Accept-Language header from client JavaScript. Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox support a bevy of language related properties exposed by the window.navigator object, such as windows.navigator.browserLanguage and window.navigator.language, but these properties represent either the language set for the operating system or the language edition of the browser. These properties don’t enable you to retrieve the language that the user set as his or her preferred language. The only reliable way to get a user’s preferred language (the value of the Accept-Language header) is to write server code. For example, the following ASP.NET page takes advantage of the server Request.UserLanguages property to assign the user’s preferred language to a client JavaScript variable named acceptLanguage (which then allows you to access the value using client-side JavaScript): In order for this code to work, the culture information associated with the value of acceptLanguage must be included in the page. For example, if someone’s preferred culture is fr-FR (French in France) then you need to include either the jQuery.glob.fr-FR.js or the jQuery.glob.all.js JavaScript file in the page or the culture information won’t be available. The “6_AcceptLanguages.aspx” sample in this samples download demonstrates how to implement this approach. If the culture information for the user’s preferred language is not included in the page then the $.preferCulture() method will fall back to using the neutral culture (for example, using jQuery.glob.fr.js instead of jQuery.glob.fr-FR.js). If the neutral culture information is not available then the $.preferCulture() method falls back to the default culture (English). Example: Using the Globalization Plugin with the jQuery UI DatePicker One of the goals of the Globalization plugin is to make it easier to build jQuery widgets that can be used with different cultures. We wanted to make sure that the jQuery Globalization plugin could work with existing jQuery UI plugins such as the DatePicker plugin. To that end, we created a patched version of the DatePicker plugin that can take advantage of the Globalization plugin when rendering a calendar. For example, the following figure illustrates what happens when you add the jQuery Globalization and the patched jQuery UI DatePicker plugin to a page and select Indonesian as the preferred culture: Notice that the headers for the days of the week are displayed using Indonesian day name abbreviations. Furthermore, the month names are displayed in Indonesian. You can download the patched version of the jQuery UI DatePicker from our github website. Or you can use the version included in this samples download and used by the 7_DatePicker.htm sample file. Summary I’m excited about our continuing participation in the jQuery community. This Globalization plugin is the third jQuery plugin that we’ve released. We’ve really appreciated all of the great feedback and design suggestions on the jQuery templating and data-linking prototypes that we released earlier this year. We also want to thank the jQuery and jQuery UI teams for working with us to create these plugins. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. You can follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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Introducing the Earthquake Locator – A Bing Maps Silverlight Application, part 1

- by Bobby Diaz

Update: Live demo and source code now available! The recent wave of earthquakes (no pun intended) being reported in the news got me wondering about the frequency and severity of earthquakes around the world. Since I’ve been doing a lot of Silverlight development lately, I decided to scratch my curiosity with a nice little Bing Maps application that will show the location and relative strength of recent seismic activity. Here is a list of technologies this application will utilize, so be sure to have everything downloaded and installed if you plan on following along. Silverlight 3 WCF RIA Services Bing Maps Silverlight Control * Managed Extensibility Framework (optional) MVVM Light Toolkit (optional) log4net (optional) * If you are new to Bing Maps or have not signed up for a Developer Account, you will need to visit www.bingmapsportal.com to request a Bing Maps key for your application. Getting Started We start out by creating a new Silverlight Application called EarthquakeLocator and specify that we want to automatically create the Web Application Project with RIA Services enabled. I cleaned up the web app by removing the Default.aspx and EarthquakeLocatorTestPage.html. Then I renamed the EarthquakeLocatorTestPage.aspx to Default.aspx and set it as my start page. I also set the development server to use a specific port, as shown below. RIA Services Next, I created a Services folder in the EarthquakeLocator.Web project and added a new Domain Service Class called EarthquakeService.cs. This is the RIA Services Domain Service that will provide earthquake data for our client application. I am not using LINQ to SQL or Entity Framework, so I will use the <empty domain service class> option. We will be pulling data from an external Atom feed, but this example could just as easily pull data from a database or another web service. This is an important distinction to point out because each scenario I just mentioned could potentially use a different Domain Service base class (i.e. LinqToSqlDomainService<TDataContext>). Now we can start adding Query methods to our EarthquakeService that pull data from the USGS web site. Here is the complete code for our service class: using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.IO; using System.Linq; using System.ServiceModel.Syndication; using System.Web.DomainServices; using System.Web.Ria; using System.Xml; using log4net; using EarthquakeLocator.Web.Model; namespace EarthquakeLocator.Web.Services { /// <summary> /// Provides earthquake data to client applications. /// </summary> [EnableClientAccess()] public class EarthquakeService : DomainService { private static readonly ILog log = LogManager.GetLogger(typeof(EarthquakeService)); // USGS Data Feeds: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/catalogs/ private const string FeedForPreviousDay = "http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/catalogs/1day-M2.5.xml"; private const string FeedForPreviousWeek = "http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/catalogs/7day-M2.5.xml"; /// <summary> /// Gets the earthquake data for the previous week. /// </summary> /// <returns>A queryable collection of <see cref="Earthquake"/> objects.</returns> public IQueryable<Earthquake> GetEarthquakes() { var feed = GetFeed(FeedForPreviousWeek); var list = new List<Earthquake>(); if ( feed != null ) { foreach ( var entry in feed.Items ) { var quake = CreateEarthquake(entry); if ( quake != null ) { list.Add(quake); } } } return list.AsQueryable(); } /// <summary> /// Creates an <see cref="Earthquake"/> object for each entry in the Atom feed. /// </summary> /// <param name="entry">The Atom entry.</param> /// <returns></returns> private Earthquake CreateEarthquake(SyndicationItem entry) { Earthquake quake = null; string title = entry.Title.Text; string summary = entry.Summary.Text; string point = GetElementValue<String>(entry, "point"); string depth = GetElementValue<String>(entry, "elev"); string utcTime = null; string localTime = null; string depthDesc = null; double? magnitude = null; double? latitude = null; double? longitude = null; double? depthKm = null; if ( !String.IsNullOrEmpty(title) && title.StartsWith("M") ) { title = title.Substring(2, title.IndexOf(',')-3).Trim(); magnitude = TryParse(title); } if ( !String.IsNullOrEmpty(point) ) { var values = point.Split(' '); if ( values.Length == 2 ) { latitude = TryParse(values[0]); longitude = TryParse(values[1]); } } if ( !String.IsNullOrEmpty(depth) ) { depthKm = TryParse(depth); if ( depthKm != null ) { depthKm = Math.Round((-1 * depthKm.Value) / 100, 2); } } if ( !String.IsNullOrEmpty(summary) ) { summary = summary.Replace("</p>", ""); var values = summary.Split( new string[] { "<p>" }, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries); if ( values.Length == 3 ) { var times = values[1].Split( new string[] { "<br>" }, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries); if ( times.Length > 0 ) { utcTime = times[0]; } if ( times.Length > 1 ) { localTime = times[1]; } depthDesc = values[2]; depthDesc = "Depth: " + depthDesc.Substring(depthDesc.IndexOf(":") + 2); } } if ( latitude != null && longitude != null ) { quake = new Earthquake() { Id = entry.Id, Title = entry.Title.Text, Summary = entry.Summary.Text, Date = entry.LastUpdatedTime.DateTime, Url = entry.Links.Select(l => Path.Combine(l.BaseUri.OriginalString, l.Uri.OriginalString)).FirstOrDefault(), Age = entry.Categories.Where(c => c.Label == "Age") .Select(c => c.Name).FirstOrDefault(), Magnitude = magnitude.GetValueOrDefault(), Latitude = latitude.GetValueOrDefault(), Longitude = longitude.GetValueOrDefault(), DepthInKm = depthKm.GetValueOrDefault(), DepthDesc = depthDesc, UtcTime = utcTime, LocalTime = localTime }; } return quake; } private T GetElementValue<T>(SyndicationItem entry, String name) { var el = entry.ElementExtensions.Where(e => e.OuterName == name).FirstOrDefault(); T value = default(T); if ( el != null ) { value = el.GetObject<T>(); } return value; } private double? TryParse(String value) { double d; if ( Double.TryParse(value, out d) ) { return d; } return null; } /// <summary> /// Gets the feed at the specified URL. /// </summary> /// <param name="url">The URL.</param> /// <returns>A <see cref="SyndicationFeed"/> object.</returns> public static SyndicationFeed GetFeed(String url) { SyndicationFeed feed = null; try { log.Debug("Loading RSS feed: " + url); using ( var reader = XmlReader.Create(url) ) { feed = SyndicationFeed.Load(reader); } } catch ( Exception ex ) { log.Error("Error occurred while loading RSS feed: " + url, ex); } return feed; } } } The only method that will be generated in the client side proxy class, EarthquakeContext, will be the GetEarthquakes() method. The reason being that it is the only public instance method and it returns an IQueryable<Earthquake> collection that can be consumed by the client application. GetEarthquakes() calls the static GetFeed(String) method, which utilizes the built in SyndicationFeed API to load the external data feed. You will need to add a reference to the System.ServiceModel.Web library in order to take advantage of the RSS/Atom reader. The API will also allow you to create your own feeds to serve up in your applications. Model I have also created a Model folder and added a new class, Earthquake.cs. The Earthquake object will hold the various properties returned from the Atom feed. Here is a sample of the code for that class. Notice the [Key] attribute on the Id property, which is required by RIA Services to uniquely identify the entity. using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Runtime.Serialization; using System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations; namespace EarthquakeLocator.Web.Model { /// <summary> /// Represents an earthquake occurrence and related information. /// </summary> [DataContract] public class Earthquake { /// <summary> /// Gets or sets the id. /// </summary> /// <value>The id.</value> [Key] [DataMember] public string Id { get; set; } /// <summary> /// Gets or sets the title. /// </summary> /// <value>The title.</value> [DataMember] public string Title { get; set; } /// <summary> /// Gets or sets the summary. /// </summary> /// <value>The summary.</value> [DataMember] public string Summary { get; set; } // additional properties omitted } } View Model The recent trend to use the MVVM pattern for WPF and Silverlight provides a great way to separate the data and behavior logic out of the user interface layer of your client applications. I have chosen to use the MVVM Light Toolkit for the Earthquake Locator, but there are other options out there if you prefer another library. That said, I went ahead and created a ViewModel folder in the Silverlight project and added a EarthquakeViewModel class that derives from ViewModelBase. Here is the code: using System; using System.Collections.ObjectModel; using System.ComponentModel.Composition; using System.ComponentModel.Composition.Hosting; using Microsoft.Maps.MapControl; using GalaSoft.MvvmLight; using EarthquakeLocator.Web.Model; using EarthquakeLocator.Web.Services; namespace EarthquakeLocator.ViewModel { /// <summary> /// Provides data for views displaying earthquake information. /// </summary> public class EarthquakeViewModel : ViewModelBase { [Import] public EarthquakeContext Context; /// <summary> /// Initializes a new instance of the <see cref="EarthquakeViewModel"/> class. /// </summary> public EarthquakeViewModel() { var catalog = new AssemblyCatalog(GetType().Assembly); var container = new CompositionContainer(catalog); container.ComposeParts(this); Initialize(); } /// <summary> /// Initializes a new instance of the <see cref="EarthquakeViewModel"/> class. /// </summary> /// <param name="context">The context.</param> public EarthquakeViewModel(EarthquakeContext context) { Context = context; Initialize(); } private void Initialize() { MapCenter = new Location(20, -170); ZoomLevel = 2; } #region Private Methods private void OnAutoLoadDataChanged() { LoadEarthquakes(); } private void LoadEarthquakes() { var query = Context.GetEarthquakesQuery(); Context.Earthquakes.Clear(); Context.Load(query, (op) => { if ( !op.HasError ) { foreach ( var item in op.Entities ) { Earthquakes.Add(item); } } }, null); } #endregion Private Methods #region Properties private bool autoLoadData; /// <summary> /// Gets or sets a value indicating whether to auto load data. /// </summary> /// <value><c>true</c> if auto loading data; otherwise, <c>false</c>.</value> public bool AutoLoadData { get { return autoLoadData; } set { if ( autoLoadData != value ) { autoLoadData = value; RaisePropertyChanged("AutoLoadData"); OnAutoLoadDataChanged(); } } } private ObservableCollection<Earthquake> earthquakes; /// <summary> /// Gets the collection of earthquakes to display. /// </summary> /// <value>The collection of earthquakes.</value> public ObservableCollection<Earthquake> Earthquakes { get { if ( earthquakes == null ) { earthquakes = new ObservableCollection<Earthquake>(); } return earthquakes; } } private Location mapCenter; /// <summary> /// Gets or sets the map center. /// </summary> /// <value>The map center.</value> public Location MapCenter { get { return mapCenter; } set { if ( mapCenter != value ) { mapCenter = value; RaisePropertyChanged("MapCenter"); } } } private double zoomLevel; /// <summary> /// Gets or sets the zoom level. /// </summary> /// <value>The zoom level.</value> public double ZoomLevel { get { return zoomLevel; } set { if ( zoomLevel != value ) { zoomLevel = value; RaisePropertyChanged("ZoomLevel"); } } } #endregion Properties } } The EarthquakeViewModel class contains all of the properties that will be bound to by the various controls in our views. Be sure to read through the LoadEarthquakes() method, which handles calling the GetEarthquakes() method in our EarthquakeService via the EarthquakeContext proxy, and also transfers the loaded entities into the view model’s Earthquakes collection. Another thing to notice is what’s going on in the default constructor. I chose to use the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) for my composition needs, but you can use any dependency injection library or none at all. To allow the EarthquakeContext class to be discoverable by MEF, I added the following partial class so that I could supply the appropriate [Export] attribute: using System; using System.ComponentModel.Composition; namespace EarthquakeLocator.Web.Services { /// <summary> /// The client side proxy for the EarthquakeService class. /// </summary> [Export] public partial class EarthquakeContext { } } One last piece I wanted to point out before moving on to the user interface, I added a client side partial class for the Earthquake entity that contains helper properties that we will bind to later: using System; namespace EarthquakeLocator.Web.Model { /// <summary> /// Represents an earthquake occurrence and related information. /// </summary> public partial class Earthquake { /// <summary> /// Gets the location based on the current Latitude/Longitude. /// </summary> /// <value>The location.</value> public string Location { get { return String.Format("{0},{1}", Latitude, Longitude); } } /// <summary> /// Gets the size based on the Magnitude. /// </summary> /// <value>The size.</value> public double Size { get { return (Magnitude * 3); } } } } View Now the fun part! Usually, I would create a Views folder to place all of my View controls in, but I took the easy way out and added the following XAML code to the default MainPage.xaml file. Be sure to add the bing prefix associating the Microsoft.Maps.MapControl namespace after adding the assembly reference to your project. The MVVM Light Toolkit project templates come with a ViewModelLocator class that you can use via a static resource, but I am instantiating the EarthquakeViewModel directly in my user control. I am setting the AutoLoadData property to true as a way to trigger the LoadEarthquakes() method call. The MapItemsControl found within the <bing:Map> control binds its ItemsSource property to the Earthquakes collection of the view model, and since it is an ObservableCollection<T>, we get the automatic two way data binding via the INotifyCollectionChanged interface. <UserControl x:Class="EarthquakeLocator.MainPage" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008" xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006" xmlns:bing="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Maps.MapControl;assembly=Microsoft.Maps.MapControl" xmlns:vm="clr-namespace:EarthquakeLocator.ViewModel" mc:Ignorable="d" d:DesignWidth="640" d:DesignHeight="480" > <UserControl.Resources> <DataTemplate x:Key="EarthquakeTemplate"> <Ellipse Fill="Red" Stroke="Black" StrokeThickness="1" Width="{Binding Size}" Height="{Binding Size}" bing:MapLayer.Position="{Binding Location}" bing:MapLayer.PositionOrigin="Center"> <ToolTipService.ToolTip> <StackPanel> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Title}" FontSize="14" FontWeight="Bold" /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding UtcTime}" /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding LocalTime}" /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding DepthDesc}" /> </StackPanel> </ToolTipService.ToolTip> </Ellipse> </DataTemplate> </UserControl.Resources> <UserControl.DataContext> <vm:EarthquakeViewModel AutoLoadData="True" /> </UserControl.DataContext> <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot"> <bing:Map x:Name="map" CredentialsProvider="--Your-Bing-Maps-Key--" Center="{Binding MapCenter, Mode=TwoWay}" ZoomLevel="{Binding ZoomLevel, Mode=TwoWay}"> <bing:MapItemsControl ItemsSource="{Binding Earthquakes}" ItemTemplate="{StaticResource EarthquakeTemplate}" /> </bing:Map> </Grid> </UserControl> The EarthquakeTemplate defines the Ellipse that will represent each earthquake, the Width and Height that are determined by the Magnitude, the Position on the map, and also the tooltip that will appear when we mouse over each data point. Running the application will give us the following result (shown with a tooltip example): That concludes this portion of our show but I plan on implementing additional functionality in later blog posts. Be sure to come back soon to see the next installments in this series. Enjoy! Additional Resources USGS Earthquake Data Feeds Brad Abrams shows how RIA Services and MVVM can work together

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Announcing release of ASP.NET MVC 3, IIS Express, SQL CE 4, Web Farm Framework, Orchard, WebMatrix

- by ScottGu

I’m excited to announce the release today of several products: ASP.NET MVC 3 NuGet IIS Express 7.5 SQL Server Compact Edition 4 Web Deploy and Web Farm Framework 2.0 Orchard 1.0 WebMatrix 1.0 The above products are all free. They build upon the .NET 4 and VS 2010 release, and add a ton of additional value to ASP.NET (both Web Forms and MVC) and the Microsoft Web Server stack. ASP.NET MVC 3 Today we are shipping the final release of ASP.NET MVC 3. You can download and install ASP.NET MVC 3 here. The ASP.NET MVC 3 source code (released under an OSI-compliant open source license) can also optionally be downloaded here. ASP.NET MVC 3 is a significant update that brings with it a bunch of great features. Some of the improvements include: Razor ASP.NET MVC 3 ships with a new view-engine option called “Razor” (in addition to continuing to support/enhance the existing .aspx view engine). Razor minimizes the number of characters and keystrokes required when writing a view template, and enables a fast, fluid coding workflow. Unlike most template syntaxes, with Razor you do not need to interrupt your coding to explicitly denote the start and end of server blocks within your HTML. The Razor parser is smart enough to infer this from your code. This enables a compact and expressive syntax which is clean, fast and fun to type. You can learn more about Razor from some of the blog posts I’ve done about it over the last 6 months Introducing Razor New @model keyword in Razor Layouts with Razor Server-Side Comments with Razor Razor’s @: and <text> syntax Implicit and Explicit code nuggets with Razor Layouts and Sections with Razor Today’s release supports full code intellisense support for Razor (both VB and C#) with Visual Studio 2010 and the free Visual Web Developer 2010 Express. JavaScript Improvements ASP.NET MVC 3 enables richer JavaScript scenarios and takes advantage of emerging HTML5 capabilities. The AJAX and Validation helpers in ASP.NET MVC 3 now use an Unobtrusive JavaScript based approach. Unobtrusive JavaScript avoids injecting inline JavaScript into HTML, and enables cleaner separation of behavior using the new HTML 5 “data-“ attribute convention (which conveniently works on older browsers as well – including IE6). This keeps your HTML tight and clean, and makes it easier to optionally swap out or customize JS libraries. ASP.NET MVC 3 now includes built-in support for posting JSON-based parameters from client-side JavaScript to action methods on the server. This makes it easier to exchange data across the client and server, and build rich JavaScript front-ends. We think this capability will be particularly useful going forward with scenarios involving client templates and data binding (including the jQuery plugins the ASP.NET team recently contributed to the jQuery project). Previous releases of ASP.NET MVC included the core jQuery library. ASP.NET MVC 3 also now ships the jQuery Validate plugin (which our validation helpers use for client-side validation scenarios). We are also now shipping and including jQuery UI by default as well (which provides a rich set of client-side JavaScript UI widgets for you to use within projects). Improved Validation ASP.NET MVC 3 includes a bunch of validation enhancements that make it even easier to work with data. Client-side validation is now enabled by default with ASP.NET MVC 3 (using an onbtrusive javascript implementation). Today’s release also includes built-in support for Remote Validation - which enables you to annotate a model class with a validation attribute that causes ASP.NET MVC to perform a remote validation call to a server method when validating input on the client. The validation features introduced within .NET 4’s System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations namespace are now supported by ASP.NET MVC 3. This includes support for the new IValidatableObject interface – which enables you to perform model-level validation, and allows you to provide validation error messages specific to the state of the overall model, or between two properties within the model. ASP.NET MVC 3 also supports the improvements made to the ValidationAttribute class in .NET 4. ValidationAttribute now supports a new IsValid overload that provides more information about the current validation context, such as what object is being validated. This enables richer scenarios where you can validate the current value based on another property of the model. We’ve shipped a built-in [Compare] validation attribute with ASP.NET MVC 3 that uses this support and makes it easy out of the box to compare and validate two property values. You can use any data access API or technology with ASP.NET MVC. This past year, though, we’ve worked closely with the .NET data team to ensure that the new EF Code First library works really well for ASP.NET MVC applications. These two posts of mine cover the latest EF Code First preview and demonstrates how to use it with ASP.NET MVC 3 to enable easy editing of data (with end to end client+server validation support). The final release of EF Code First will ship in the next few weeks. Today we are also publishing the first preview of a new MvcScaffolding project. It enables you to easily scaffold ASP.NET MVC 3 Controllers and Views, and works great with EF Code-First (and is pluggable to support other data providers). You can learn more about it – and install it via NuGet today - from Steve Sanderson’s MvcScaffolding blog post. Output Caching Previous releases of ASP.NET MVC supported output caching content at a URL or action-method level. With ASP.NET MVC V3 we are also enabling support for partial page output caching – which allows you to easily output cache regions or fragments of a response as opposed to the entire thing. This ends up being super useful in a lot of scenarios, and enables you to dramatically reduce the work your application does on the server. The new partial page output caching support in ASP.NET MVC 3 enables you to easily re-use cached sub-regions/fragments of a page across multiple URLs on a site. It supports the ability to cache the content either on the web-server, or optionally cache it within a distributed cache server like Windows Server AppFabric or memcached. I’ll post some tutorials on my blog that show how to take advantage of ASP.NET MVC 3’s new output caching support for partial page scenarios in the future. Better Dependency Injection ASP.NET MVC 3 provides better support for applying Dependency Injection (DI) and integrating with Dependency Injection/IOC containers. With ASP.NET MVC 3 you no longer need to author custom ControllerFactory classes in order to enable DI with Controllers. You can instead just register a Dependency Injection framework with ASP.NET MVC 3 and it will resolve dependencies not only for Controllers, but also for Views, Action Filters, Model Binders, Value Providers, Validation Providers, and Model Metadata Providers that you use within your application. This makes it much easier to cleanly integrate dependency injection within your projects. Other Goodies ASP.NET MVC 3 includes dozens of other nice improvements that help to both reduce the amount of code you write, and make the code you do write cleaner. Here are just a few examples: Improved New Project dialog that makes it easy to start new ASP.NET MVC 3 projects from templates. Improved Add->View Scaffolding support that enables the generation of even cleaner view templates. New ViewBag property that uses .NET 4’s dynamic support to make it easy to pass late-bound data from Controllers to Views. Global Filters support that allows specifying cross-cutting filter attributes (like [HandleError]) across all Controllers within an app. New [AllowHtml] attribute that allows for more granular request validation when binding form posted data to models. Sessionless controller support that allows fine grained control over whether SessionState is enabled on a Controller. New ActionResult types like HttpNotFoundResult and RedirectPermanent for common HTTP scenarios. New Html.Raw() helper to indicate that output should not be HTML encoded. New Crypto helpers for salting and hashing passwords. And much, much more… Learn More about ASP.NET MVC 3 We will be posting lots of tutorials and samples on the http://asp.net/mvc site in the weeks ahead. Below are two good ASP.NET MVC 3 tutorials available on the site today: Build your First ASP.NET MVC 3 Application: VB and C# Building the ASP.NET MVC 3 Music Store We’ll post additional ASP.NET MVC 3 tutorials and videos on the http://asp.net/mvc site in the future. Visit it regularly to find new tutorials as they are published. How to Upgrade Existing Projects ASP.NET MVC 3 is compatible with ASP.NET MVC 2 – which means it should be easy to update existing MVC projects to ASP.NET MVC 3. The new features in ASP.NET MVC 3 build on top of the foundational work we’ve already done with the MVC 1 and MVC 2 releases – which means that the skills, knowledge, libraries, and books you’ve acquired are all directly applicable with the MVC 3 release. MVC 3 adds new features and capabilities – it doesn’t obsolete existing ones. You can upgrade existing ASP.NET MVC 2 projects by following the manual upgrade steps in the release notes. Alternatively, you can use this automated ASP.NET MVC 3 upgrade tool to easily update your existing projects. Localized Builds Today’s ASP.NET MVC 3 release is available in English. We will be releasing localized versions of ASP.NET MVC 3 (in 9 languages) in a few days. I’ll blog pointers to the localized downloads once they are available. NuGet Today we are also shipping NuGet – a free, open source, package manager that makes it easy for you to find, install, and use open source libraries in your projects. It works with all .NET project types (including ASP.NET Web Forms, ASP.NET MVC, WPF, WinForms, Silverlight, and Class Libraries). You can download and install it here. NuGet enables developers who maintain open source projects (for example, .NET projects like Moq, NHibernate, Ninject, StructureMap, NUnit, Windsor, Raven, Elmah, etc) to package up their libraries and register them with an online gallery/catalog that is searchable. The client-side NuGet tools – which include full Visual Studio integration – make it trivial for any .NET developer who wants to use one of these libraries to easily find and install it within the project they are working on. NuGet handles dependency management between libraries (for example: library1 depends on library2). It also makes it easy to update (and optionally remove) libraries from your projects later. It supports updating web.config files (if a package needs configuration settings). It also allows packages to add PowerShell scripts to a project (for example: scaffold commands). Importantly, NuGet is transparent and clean – and does not install anything at the system level. Instead it is focused on making it easy to manage libraries you use with your projects. Our goal with NuGet is to make it as simple as possible to integrate open source libraries within .NET projects. NuGet Gallery This week we also launched a beta version of the http://nuget.org web-site – which allows anyone to easily search and browse an online gallery of open source packages available via NuGet. The site also now allows developers to optionally submit new packages that they wish to share with others. You can learn more about how to create and share a package here. There are hundreds of open-source .NET projects already within the NuGet Gallery today. We hope to have thousands there in the future. IIS Express 7.5 Today we are also shipping IIS Express 7.5. IIS Express is a free version of IIS 7.5 that is optimized for developer scenarios. It works for both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC project types. We think IIS Express combines the ease of use of the ASP.NET Web Server (aka Cassini) currently built-into Visual Studio today with the full power of IIS. Specifically: It’s lightweight and easy to install (less than 5Mb download and a quick install) It does not require an administrator account to run/debug applications from Visual Studio It enables a full web-server feature set – including SSL, URL Rewrite, and other IIS 7.x modules It supports and enables the same extensibility model and web.config file settings that IIS 7.x support It can be installed side-by-side with the full IIS web server as well as the ASP.NET Development Server (they do not conflict at all) It works on Windows XP and higher operating systems – giving you a full IIS 7.x developer feature-set on all Windows OS platforms IIS Express (like the ASP.NET Development Server) can be quickly launched to run a site from a directory on disk. It does not require any registration/configuration steps. This makes it really easy to launch and run for development scenarios. You can also optionally redistribute IIS Express with your own applications if you want a lightweight web-server. The standard IIS Express EULA now includes redistributable rights. Visual Studio 2010 SP1 adds support for IIS Express. Read my VS 2010 SP1 and IIS Express blog post to learn more about what it enables. SQL Server Compact Edition 4 Today we are also shipping SQL Server Compact Edition 4 (aka SQL CE 4). SQL CE is a free, embedded, database engine that enables easy database storage. No Database Installation Required SQL CE does not require you to run a setup or install a database server in order to use it. You can simply copy the SQL CE binaries into the \bin directory of your ASP.NET application, and then your web application can use it as a database engine. No setup or extra security permissions are required for it to run. You do not need to have an administrator account on the machine. Just copy your web application onto any server and it will work. This is true even of medium-trust applications running in a web hosting environment. SQL CE runs in-memory within your ASP.NET application and will start-up when you first access a SQL CE database, and will automatically shutdown when your application is unloaded. SQL CE databases are stored as files that live within the \App_Data folder of your ASP.NET Applications. Works with Existing Data APIs SQL CE 4 works with existing .NET-based data APIs, and supports a SQL Server compatible query syntax. This means you can use existing data APIs like ADO.NET, as well as use higher-level ORMs like Entity Framework and NHibernate with SQL CE. This enables you to use the same data programming skills and data APIs you know today. Supports Development, Testing and Production Scenarios SQL CE can be used for development scenarios, testing scenarios, and light production usage scenarios. With the SQL CE 4 release we’ve done the engineering work to ensure that SQL CE won’t crash or deadlock when used in a multi-threaded server scenario (like ASP.NET). This is a big change from previous releases of SQL CE – which were designed for client-only scenarios and which explicitly blocked running in web-server environments. Starting with SQL CE 4 you can use it in a web-server as well. There are no license restrictions with SQL CE. It is also totally free. Tooling Support with VS 2010 SP1 Visual Studio 2010 SP1 adds support for SQL CE 4 and ASP.NET Projects. Read my VS 2010 SP1 and SQL CE 4 blog post to learn more about what it enables. Web Deploy and Web Farm Framework 2.0 Today we are also releasing Microsoft Web Deploy V2 and Microsoft Web Farm Framework V2. These services provide a flexible and powerful way to deploy ASP.NET applications onto either a single server, or across a web farm of machines. You can learn more about these capabilities from my previous blog posts on them: Introducing the Microsoft Web Farm Framework Automating Deployment with Microsoft Web Deploy Visit the http://iis.net website to learn more and install them. Both are free. Orchard 1.0 Today we are also releasing Orchard v1.0. Orchard is a free, open source, community based project. It provides Content Management System (CMS) and Blogging System support out of the box, and makes it possible to easily create and manage web-sites without having to write code (site owners can customize a site through the browser-based editing tools built-into Orchard). Read these tutorials to learn more about how you can setup and manage your own Orchard site. Orchard itself is built as an ASP.NET MVC 3 application using Razor view templates (and by default uses SQL CE 4 for data storage). Developers wishing to extend an Orchard site with custom functionality can open and edit it as a Visual Studio project – and add new ASP.NET MVC Controllers/Views to it. WebMatrix 1.0 WebMatrix is a new, free, web development tool from Microsoft that provides a suite of technologies that make it easier to enable website development. It enables a developer to start a new site by browsing and downloading an app template from an online gallery of web applications (which includes popular apps like Umbraco, DotNetNuke, Orchard, WordPress, Drupal and Joomla). Alternatively it also enables developers to create and code web sites from scratch. WebMatrix is task focused and helps guide developers as they work on sites. WebMatrix includes IIS Express, SQL CE 4, and ASP.NET - providing an integrated web-server, database and programming framework combination. It also includes built-in web publishing support which makes it easy to find and deploy sites to web hosting providers. You can learn more about WebMatrix from my Introducing WebMatrix blog post this summer. Visit http://microsoft.com/web to download and install it today. Summary I’m really excited about today’s releases – they provide a bunch of additional value that makes web development with ASP.NET, Visual Studio and the Microsoft Web Server a lot better. A lot of folks worked hard to share this with you today. On behalf of my whole team – we hope you enjoy them! Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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Java error starting with "log4j:WARN No appenders could be found for logger" in ZuckerReports SugarC

- by Tom McDonnell

Greetings all. I apologise for posting this problem here, but I do so in desperation after receiving no response on the SugarCRM forums. Even if a reader is unfamiliar with ZuckerReports or SugarCRM some general advice on Java may be of use to me. I have installed ZuckerReports v1.12 in SugarCRM 5.5.1. When I attempt to run a report I get the following error message. cmdline: javaw -classpath "custom/ZuckerReports/resources/;custom/ZuckerReports/resources/contact_counts_by_first_name.jasper_files/;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/ant-1.7.1.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/antlr-2.7.6.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/asm-attrs.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/asm.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/barbecue-1.5-beta1.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/barcode4j-2.0.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/batik-anim.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/batik-awt-util.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/batik-bridge.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/batik-css.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/batik-dom.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/batik-ext.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/batik-gvt.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/batik-parser.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/batik-script.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/batik-svg-dom.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/batik-svggen.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/batik-util.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/batik-xml.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/bcel-5.2.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/bsh-2.0b4.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/castor-1.2.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/cglib-2.1.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/cincom-jr-xmla.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/commons-beanutils-1.8.2.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/commons-collections-3.2.1.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/commons-dbcp-1.2.2.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/commons-digester-1.7.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/commons-javaflow-20060411.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/commons-logging-1.1.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/commons-math-1.0.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/commons-pool-1.3.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/commons-vfs-1.0.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/dom4j-1.6.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/ehcache-1.1.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/eigenbase-properties-1.1.0.10924.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/eigenbase-resgen-1.3.0.11873.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/eigenbase-xom-1.3.0.11999.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/ejb3-persistence.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/groovy-all-1.5.5.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/hibernate-annotations.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/hibernate-commons-annotations.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/hibernate3.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/hsqldb-1.8.0-10.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/iText-2.1.0.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/iTextAsian.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/jakarta-bcel-20050813.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/jasperreports-3.7.1.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/jasperreports-chart-themes-3.6.2.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/jasperreports-extensions-3.5.3.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/jasperreports-fonts-3.6.1.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/javacup.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/javassist-3.4.GA.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/jaxen-1.1.1.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/jcommon-1.0.15.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/jdt-compiler-3.1.1.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/jfreechart-1.0.12.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/jpa.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/js_activation-1.1.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/js_axis-1.4patched.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/js_commons-codec-1.3.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/js_commons-discovery-0.2.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/js_commons-httpclient-3.1.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/js_jasperserver-common-ws-3.5.0.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/js_jaxrpc.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/js_mail-1.4.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/js_saaj-api-1.3.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/js_wsdl4j-1.5.1.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/jta.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/jxl-2.6.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/log4j-1.2.15.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/mondrian-3.1.1.12687-Jaspersoft.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/mysql-connector-java-3.1.11-bin.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/olap4j-0.9.7.145.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/png-encoder-1.5.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/poi-3.2-FINAL-20081019.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/rex-20080421.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/rhino-1.7R1.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/saaj-api-1.3.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/slf4j-api.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/slf4j-log4j12.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/spring.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/sqleonardo-2007.03.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/swingx-2007_10_07.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/xml-apis-ext.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/xml-apis.jar;modules/ZuckerReports/jasper/zuckerreports-1.0.jar" at.go_mobile.zuckerreports.JasperBatchMain custom/ZuckerReports/temp/aff882c1-684b-d2de-403e-4be367bc2f5f/cmd.properties 2&1 JasperBatchMain :: loading jasper design custom/ZuckerReports/resources/contact_counts_by_first_name.jasper JasperBatchMain :: getParameterValue(REPORT_PARAMETERS_MAP, java.util.Map) = null JasperBatchMain :: getParameterValue(JASPER_REPORT, net.sf.jasperreports.engine.JasperReport) = null JasperBatchMain :: getParameterValue(REPORT_CONNECTION, java.sql.Connection) = null JasperBatchMain :: getParameterValue(REPORT_MAX_COUNT, java.lang.Integer) = null JasperBatchMain :: getParameterValue(REPORT_DATA_SOURCE, net.sf.jasperreports.engine.JRDataSource) = null JasperBatchMain :: getParameterValue(REPORT_SCRIPTLET, net.sf.jasperreports.engine.JRAbstractScriptlet) = null JasperBatchMain :: getParameterValue(REPORT_LOCALE, java.util.Locale) = null JasperBatchMain :: getParameterValue(REPORT_RESOURCE_BUNDLE, java.util.ResourceBundle) = null JasperBatchMain :: getParameterValue(REPORT_TIME_ZONE, java.util.TimeZone) = null JasperBatchMain :: getParameterValue(REPORT_FORMAT_FACTORY, net.sf.jasperreports.engine.util.FormatFactory) = null JasperBatchMain :: getParameterValue(REPORT_CLASS_LOADER, java.lang.ClassLoader) = null JasperBatchMain :: getParameterValue(REPORT_URL_HANDLER_FACTORY, java.net.URLStreamHandlerFactory) = null JasperBatchMain :: getParameterValue(REPORT_FILE_RESOLVER, net.sf.jasperreports.engine.util.FileResolver) = null JasperBatchMain :: getParameterValue(REPORT_VIRTUALIZER, net.sf.jasperreports.engine.JRVirtualizer) = null JasperBatchMain :: getParameterValue(IS_IGNORE_PAGINATION, java.lang.Boolean) = null JasperBatchMain :: getParameterValue(REPORT_TEMPLATES, java.util.Collection) = null log4j:WARN No appenders could be found for logger (net.sf.jasperreports.extensions.ExtensionsEnviron ment). log4j:WARN Please initialize the log4j system properly. Exception in thread "main" java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Null 'key' argument. at org.jfree.data.DefaultKeyedValues.setValue(Default KeyedValues.java:229) at org.jfree.data.DefaultKeyedValues2D.setValue(Defau ltKeyedValues2D.java:337) at org.jfree.data.DefaultKeyedValues2D.addValue(Defau ltKeyedValues2D.java:303) at org.jfree.data.category.DefaultCategoryDataset.add Value(DefaultCategoryDataset.java:222) at net.sf.jasperreports.charts.fill.JRFillCategoryDat aset.customIncrement(JRFillCategoryDataset.java:14 3) at net.sf.jasperreports.engine.fill.JRFillElementData set.increment(JRFillElementDataset.java:175) at net.sf.jasperreports.engine.fill.JRCalculator.calc ulateVariables(JRCalculator.java:148) at net.sf.jasperreports.engine.fill.JRVerticalFiller. fillDetail(JRVerticalFiller.java:736) at net.sf.jasperreports.engine.fill.JRVerticalFiller. fillReportContent(JRVerticalFiller.java:272) at net.sf.jasperreports.engine.fill.JRVerticalFiller. fillReport(JRVerticalFiller.java:114) at net.sf.jasperreports.engine.fill.JRBaseFiller.fill (JRBaseFiller.java:923) at net.sf.jasperreports.engine.fill.JRBaseFiller.fill (JRBaseFiller.java:826) at net.sf.jasperreports.engine.fill.JRFiller.fillRepo rt(JRFiller.java:59) at at.go_mobile.zuckerreports.JasperBatchMain.main(Ja sperBatchMain.java:126) The same report runs correctly in another SugarCRM installation on the same server. The installation in which the report runs correctly is of the same version, and has the same version of the ZuckerReports module. The report previously ran correctly on both installations. I think that the only changes that have been made on the installation in which the report now does not work since the report was last successfully run are the additions of a few custom fields in the Contacts module. These changes should have nothing to do with ZuckerReports. I have tried uninstalling and reinstalling the ZuckerReports module, but the problem remains. A google search for the warnings given in the error message ie. * log4j:WARN No appenders could be found for logger (net.sf.jasperreports.extensions.ExtensionsEnviron ment). * log4j:WARN Please initialize the log4j system properly. Returns a few links (not specific to ZuckerReports) with tips similar to the following: * log4j.properties or log4j.xml needs to be on the classpath where log4j can find it. I cannot find a file with either of those names anywhere on my server, and yet the report can be run successfully on one of my SugarCRM installations. So I figure log4j must be being configured another way. Can anyone suggest a way to solve this problem? Or explain how I might discover how log4j is configured in ZuckerReports? Or explain how I might compare the working with the non-working installation in order to help find a solution? (I have tried searching for files containing "log4j" in both installations and comparing but all I can find are .jar files (nothing I can read with a text editor), and the .jar files found in each installation appear to be the same.)

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UPDATE FOR BI PUBLISHER ENTERPRISE 10.1.3.4.1 MARCH 2010

- by Tim Dexter

Latest roll up patch for 10.1.3.4.1 is now out in the wild. Yep, there are bug fixes but the guys have implemented some great enhancements. I'll be covering some of them over the coming weeks, from collapsing bookmarks in your PDFs to better MS AD support to 'true' Excel templates, yes you read that correctly! Patch is available from Oracle's support site. Just search for patch 9546699. Here's the contents and readme, apologies for the big list but at least you can search against it for a particular fix. This patch contains backports of following bugs for BI Publisher Enterprise 10.1.3.4.0 and 10.1.3.4.1. 6193342 - REG:SAMPLE DATA FILE FOR PDF FORM MAPPING IS NOT VALIDATED 6261875 - ERRONEOUS PRECISION VALIDATION ON ONLINE ANALYZER 6439437 - NULL POINTER EXCEPTION WHEN PROCESSING TABLE OF CONTENT 6460974 - BACS EFT PAYMENT INSTRUCTION OUTPUT FILE IS EMPTY 6939721 - BIP: REPORT BUSTING DELIVERY KEY VALUES CANNOT CONTAIN SEVERAL SPECIAL CHARACTER 6996069 - USING XML DB FOR BI REPOSITORY FAILS WITH RESOURCENOTFOUNDEXCEPTION 7207434 - TIMEZONE:SHOULD NOT DO TIMEZONE CONVERSION AGAINST CANONICAL DATE YYYY-MM-DD 7371531 - SUPPORT FOR CSV OUTPUT FOR STRUCTURED XML AND NON SQL DATA SOURCES 7596148 - ER: LDAP FOR MS AD TO SEARCH FROM AD ROOT 7646139 - WEBSERVICES ERROR 7829516 - BIP STANDALONE FAILS TO BURST USING XSL-FO TEMPLATES 8219848 - PDF TEMPLATE REPORT NOT PERFORMING PAGE BREAK 8232116 - PARAMETER VALUE IS PASSED AS NULL,IF IT CONTAINS 'AND' WITHIN THE STRING 8250690 - NOT ABLE TO UPLOAD TEMPLATE VIA BIP API 8288459 - ER: QUERY BUILDER OPTION TO NOT INCLUDE TABLENAME. PREFIX IN SQL 8289600 - REPORT TITLE AND DESCRIPTION CAN'T SUPPORT MULTIPLE LANGUAGES 8327080 - CAN NOT CONFIGURE ORACLE EBUSINESS SUITE SECURITY MODEL WITH ORACLE RAC 8332164 - AN XDO PROPERTY TO ENABLE DEBUG LOGGING 8333289 - WEB SERVICE JOBS FAIL AFTER BIP STARTED UP 8340239 - HTTP NOTIFY IS MISSING IN SCHEDULEREPORTREQUEST 8360933 - UNABLE TO USE LOGGED IN BI USER AS THE WSSECURITY USERNAME IN A VARIABLE FORMAT 8400744 - ADMINISTRATOR USER DOES NOT HAVE FULL ADMINISTRATOR RIGHTS 8402436 - CRASH CAUSED BY UNDETERMINED ATTRKEY ERROR IN MULTI-THREADED 8403779 - IMPOSSIBLE TO CONFIGURE PARAMETER FOR A REPORT 8412259 - PDF, RTF OUTPUT NOT HANDLING THE TABLE BORDER AND CONTENT OVERFLOWS TO NEXT PAGE 8483919 - DYNAMIC DATASOURCE WEBSERVICE SHOULD WORK WITH SERVERSIDE CONNECTIONS 8444382 - ID ATTRIBUTE IN TITLE-PAGE DOES NOT WORK WITH SELECTACTION PROPERTY 8446681 - UI LANGUAGE IS NOT REFLECTED AT THE FIRST LOG IN 8449884 - PUBLICREPORTSERVICE FAILS ON EMAIL DELIVERY USING BIP 10.1.3.4.0D+ - NPE 8454858 - DB: XMLP_ADMIN CAN SEE ALL THE FOLDERS BUT ONLY HAS VIEW PERMISSIONS 8458818 - PDFBOOKBINDER FAILS WITH OUTOFMEMORY ERROR WHEN TRYING TO BIND > 1500 PDFS 8463992 - INCORRECT IMPLEMENTATION OF XLIFF SPECIFICATION 8468777 - BI PUBLISHER QUERY BUILDER NOT LOADING SCHEMA OBJECTS 8477310 - QUERY BUILDER NOT WORK WITH SSL ON STANDALONE OC4J 8506701 - POSITIVE PAY FILE WITH OPTIONS NOT CREATING FILE CHECKS OVER 2500 8506761 - PERFORMANCE: PDFBOOKBINDER CLASS TAKES 4 HOURS TO BIND 4000 PAGES 8535604 - NPE WHEN CLICKING "ANALYZER FOR EXCEL" BUTTON IN ALL_* REPORTS 8536246 - REMOVE-PDF-FIELDS DOES NOT WORK WITH CHECKBOXES WITH OPT ARRAY 8541792 - NULLPOINTER EXCEPTION WHILE USING SFTP PROTOCOL 8554443 - LOGGING TIME STAMP IN 10G: THE HOUR PART IS WRONG 8558007 - UNABLE TO LOGIN BIP WITH UNPRIVILEGED USER WHEN XDB IS USED FOR REPORSITORY STOR 8565758 - NEED TO CONNECT IMPERSONATION TO DATA SOURCE WITH PL/SQL FUNCTION 8567235 - EFTPROCESSOR AND XDO DEBUG ENABLED CAUSES ORG.XML.SAX.SAXPARSEEXCEPTION 8572216 - EFTPROCESSOR NOT THREAD SAFE - CAUSING CORRUPTED REPORTS TO BE GENERATED 8575776 - LANDSCAPE REPORT ORIENTAION NOT SELECTED WHEN REPORT IS PRINTED WITH PS 8588330 - XLIFF GENERATING WITH WRONG MAXWIDTH ATTRIBUTE IN SOME TRANS-UNITS 8584446 - EFTGENERATOR DOES NOT USE XSLT SCALABILITY - JAVA.LANG.OUTOFMEMORY EXCEPTION 8594954 - ENG: BIP NOTIFY MESSAGE BECOMES ENGLISH 8599646 - ER:EXTRA SPACE ADDED BELOW IMAGE IN A TABLE CELL OF TEMPLATE IN FIREFOX 8605110 - PDFSIGNATURE API ENCOUNTERS JAVA.LANG.NULLPOINTEREXCEPTION ON PDF WITH WATERMARK 8660915 - BURSTING WITH DATA TEMPLATE NOT WORKING WITH OPTION: VALUE=FALSE 8660920 - ER: EXTRACT XHTML DATA USING XDODTEXE IN XHTML FORMAT 8667150 - PROBLEM WITH 3RD APPLICATION ABOUT PDF GENERATED WITH BI PUBLISHER 8683547 - "CLICK VIEW REPORT BUTTON TO GENERATE THE REPORT" MESSAGE IS DISPLAYED 8713080 - SEARCH" PARAMETER IS NOT SHOWING NON ENGLISH DATA IN INTERNET EXPLORER 8724778 - EXCEL ANALYZER PARAMETERS DO NOT WORK WITH EXCEL 2007 8725450 - UIX 2.3.6.6 UPTAKE FOR 10.1.3.4.1 8728807 - DYNAMIC JDBC DATA SOURCE WITH PRE-PROCESS FUNCTION BASED ON EXISTING DATA SOURCE 8759558 - XDO TEMPLATE SHOWS CURRENCY IN WRONG FORMAT FOR DUNNING 8792894 - EFTPROCESSOR DOES NOT SUPPORT XSL TEMPLATE AS INPUTSTREAM 8793550 - BIP GENERATES CSV REPORTS OUTPUT FORMAT WITH EXTENTION .OUT NOT .CSV IN EMAIL 8819869 - PERIOD CLOSE VALUE SUMMARY REPORT (XML) RUNNING INTO WARNING 8825732 - MY FOLDERS LINK BROKEN WITH USER NAME THAT INCLUDES A SLASH (/) OBIEE SECURITY 8831948 - TRYING TO GENERATE A SCATTER PLOT USING THE CHART WIZARD 8842299 - SEEDED QUERY ALWAYS RETURNS RESULTS BASED ON FIRST COLUMN 8858027 - NODE.GETTEXTCONTEXT() NOT AVAILABLE IN 10G UNDER OC4J 8859957 - REPORT TITLE ALIGNMENT GOES BAD FOR REPORTS WITH XLIFF FILE ATTACHED 8860957 - ER: IMPROVE PERFORMANCE OF ANSWERS PARAMETERS 8891537 - GETREPORTPARAMETERS WEB SERVICE API ISSUES WITH OAAM REPORTS 8891558 - GETTING SQLEXCEPTION IN GENERATEREPORT WEB SERVICE API ON OAAM REPORTS 8927796 - ER: DYANAMIC DATA SOURCE SUPPORT BY DATA SOURCE NAME 8969898 - BI PUBLISHER WEB SERVICE GETREPORTPARAMETERS DOES NOT TRANSLATE PARAMETER LABEL 8998967 - MULTIPLE XSL PREDICATES ELEMENT[A='A'] [B='B'] CAUSES XML-22019 ERROR 9012511 - SCALABLE MODE IS NOT WORKING IN XMLPUBLISHER 10.1.3.4 9016976 - ER: PRINT XSL-T AND FOPROCESSING TIMING INFORMATION 9018580 - WEB SERVICE CALL FAILS WHEN REPORT INCLUDES SEARCH TYPE 9018657 - JOB FAILS WHEN LOV QUERY CONTAINS BIND VARIABLES :XDO_USER_UI_LOCALE 9021224 - PERFORMANCE ISSUE TO VIEW DASHBOARD PAGE WITH BIP REPORT LINKS 9022440 - ER: SUPPORT "COMB OF N CHARACTERS" FEATURE PDF FORM TEXT FIELDS 9026236 - XPATH DOES NOT WORK CORRECTLY IN 10.1.3.4.1 9051652 - FILE EXTENSION OF CSV OUTPUT IS TXT WHEN IT IS EXPORTED FROM REPORT VIEWER 9053770 - WHEN SENDING CSV REPORT OUTPUT BY EMAIL SOMETIMES IT IS SENT WITHOUT EXTENSION 9066483 - PDFBOOKBINDER LEAVE SOME TEMPORARY FILES AFTER MERGING TITLE PAGE OR TOC 9102420 - USE RELATIVE PATHS IN HYPERLINKS 9127185 - CHECKBOX NOT WORK ON SUB TEMPLATE 9149679 - BASE URL IS NOT PASSED CORRECTLY 9149691 - PROVIDE A WAY TO DISABLE THE ABILITY TO CREATE SCHEDULED REPORT JOB "PUBLIC" 9167822 - NOTIFICATION URL BREAKS ON FOLDER NAMES WITH SPACES 9167913 - CHARTS ARE MISSING IN PDF OUTPUTS WHEN THE DEFAULT OUTPUT FORMAT IS NOT A PDF 9217965 - REPORT HISTORY TAKES LONG TIME TO RENDER THE PAGE 9236674 - BI PUBLISHER PARAMETERS DO NOT CASCADE REFRESH AFTER SECOND PARAMETER 9283933 - OPTION TO COLLAPSE PDF OUTPUT BOOKMARKS BY DEFAULT 9287245 - SAVE COMPLETED SCHEDULED REPORTS IN ITS REPORT NAME AND NOT IN A GENERIC NAME 9348862 - ADD FEATURE TO DISABLE THE XSLT1.0-COMPATIBILITY IN RTF TEMPLATE 9355897 - ER: NEED A SAFE DIVIDE FUNCTION 9364169 - UIX 2.3.6.6 PATCH UPTAKE FOR 10.1.3.4.1 9365153 - LEADING WHITESPACE CHARACTERS IN A FIELD TRIMMED WHEN RUN VIEW OR EXPORT TO .CSV 9389039 - LONG TEXT IS NOT WRAPPED PROPERLY IN THE AUTOSHAPE ON RTF TEMPLATE 9475697 - ENH: SUB-TEMPLATE:DYNAMIC VARIABLE WITH PARAMETER VALUE IN CALL-TEMPLATE CLAUSE 9484549 - CHANGE DEFAULT FOR "XSLT1.0-COMPATIBILITY" TO FALSE FOR 10G 9508499 - UNABLE TO READ EXCEL FILE IF MORE THAN 1800 ROWS GENERATED 9546078 - EMAIL DELIVERY INFORMATION SHOULD NOT BE SAVED AND AUTO-FED IN JOB SUBMISSION 9546101 - EXCEPTION OCCURS WHEN SFTP/FTP REMOTE FILENAME DOSE NOT CONTAIN A SLASH '/' 9546117 - SFTP REPORT DELIVERY FAILS WITH NO CLASS DEF FOUND EXCEPTION ON WEBLOGIC 9.2 Following bugs are included in 10.1.3.4.1 and they are only applied to 10.1.3.4.0. 4612604 - FROM EDGE ATTRIBUTE OF HEADER AND FOOTER IS NOT PRESERVED 6621006 - PARAMNAMEVALUE ELEMENT DEFINITION SHOULD HAVE PARAMETER TYPE 6811967 - DATE PARAMETER NOT HANDLING DATE OFFSET WHEN PASSED UPPERCASE Z FOR OFFSET 6864451 - WHEN BIP REPORTS TIMEOUT, THE PROCESS TO LOG BACK IN IS NOT USER FRIENDLY 6869887 - FUSION CURRENCY BRD:4.1.4/4.1.6 OVERRIDINDG MASK /W XSLT._XDOCURMASKS /W SYMBOL 6959078 - "TEXT FIELD CONTAINS COMMA-SEPARATED VALUES" DOESN'T WORK IN CASE OF STRING 6994647 - GETTING ERROR MESSAGE SAYING JOB FAILED EVEN THOUGH WORKS OK IN BI PUBLISHER 7133143 - ENABLE USER TO ENTER 'TODAY' AS VALUE TO DATE PARAMETER IN SCHEDULE REPORT UI 7165117 - QA_BIP_FUNC:-CLOSED LIFE TIME REPORT ERROR MESSAGE IN CMD 7167068 - LEADER-LENGTH OR RULE-THICKNESS PROPRTY IS TOO LARGE 7219517 - NEED EXTENSION FUNCTIONS TO URL ENCODE TEXT STRING. 7269228 - TEMPLATEHELPER PRODUCES A GARBLED OUTPUT WHEN INVOKED BY MULTIPLE THREADS 7276813 - GETREPORTPARAMETERSRETURN ELEMENT SHOULD HAVE DEFAULT VALUE 7279046 - SCHDEULER:UNABLE TO DELETE A JOB USING API 7280336 - ER: BI PUBLISHER - SITEMINDER SUPPORT - GENERIC NON-ORACLE SSO SUPPORT 7281468 - MODIFY SQL SERVER PROPERTIES TO USE HYP DATA DIRECT IN JDBCDEFAULTS.XML 7281495 - PLEASE ADD SUPPORTED DBS TO JDBCDEFAULT.XML AND LIST EACH DB VERSION SEPARATELY 7282456 - FUSION CURRENCY BRD 4.1.9.2: CURRENCY AMOUTS SHOULD NOT BE WRAPPED. MINUS SIGN 7282507 - FUSION CURRENCY BRD4.1.2.5:DISPLAY CURRENCY AND LOCALE DERIVED CURRENCY SYMBOL 7284780 - FUSION CURRENCY BRD 4.1.12.4 CORRECTLY ALIGN NEGATIVE CURRENCY AMOUNTS 7306874 - OPP ERROR - JAVA.LANG.OUTOFMEMORYERROR: ZIP002:OUTOFMEMORYERROR, MEM_ERROR 7309596 - SIEBELCRM: BIP ENHANCEMENT REQUEST FOR SIEBEL PARAMETERIZATION 7337173 - UI LOCALE IS ALWAYS REWRITTEN TO EN WHEN MOVE FROM DASHBOARD 7338349 - REG:ANALYZER REPORT WITH AVERAGE FUNCTION FAIL TO RUN FOR NON INTERACTIVE FORMAT 7343757 - OUTPUT FORMAT OF TEMPLATES IS NOT SAVING 7345989 - SET XDK REPLACEILLEGALCHARS AND ENHANCE XSLTWRAPPER WARNING 7354775 - UNEXPECTED BEHAVIOR OF LAYOUT TEMPLATE PARAMETER OF RUNREPORT WEBSERVICES API 7354798 - SEQUENCE ORDER OF PARAMETERS FOR THE RUNREPORT WEBSERVICES API 7358973 - PARALLEL SFTP DELIVERY FAILS DUE TO SSHEXCEPTION: CORRUPT MAC ON INPUT 7370110 - REGN:FAIL WHEN USE JNDI TO XMLDB REPORT REPOSITORY 7375859 - NEW WEBSERVICE REQUIRED FOR RUNREPORT 7375892 - REQUIRE NEW WEBSERVICE TO CHECK IF REPORTFOLDER EXISTS 7377686 - TEXT-ALIGN NOT APPLIED IN PDF IN HEBREW LOCALE 7413722 - RUNREPORT API DOES NOT PASS BACK ANY GENERATED EXCEPTIONS TO SCHEDULEREPORT 7435420 - FUSION CURRENCY: SUPPORT MICROSOFT(JAVA) FORMAT MASK WITH CURRENCY 7441486 - ER: ADD PARAMETER FOR SFTP TO BURSTING QUERY 7458169 - SSO WITH OID LDAP COULD NOT FETCH OID ROLES 7461161 - EMAIL DELIVERY FAILS - DELIVERYEXCEPTION: 0 BYTE AVAILABLE IN THE GIVEN INPU 7580715 - INCORRECT FORMATTING OF DATES IN TIMEZONE GMT+13 7582694 - INVALID MAXWIDTH VALUE CAUSES NLS FAILURES 7583693 - JAVA.LANG.NULLPOINTEREXCEPTION RAISED WHEN GENERATING HRMS BENEFITS PDF REPORT 7587998 - NEWLY CREATED USERS IN OID CANT ACCESS REPORTS UNTILL BI PUBLISHER IS RESTARTED 7588317 - TABLE OF CONTENT ALWAYS IN THE SAME FONT 7590084 - REMOVING THE BIP ENTERPRISE BANNER BUT KEEPING THE REPORTS & SCHEDULES TAB 7590112 - SOMEONE NOT PRIVILEGED ACCESS BIP DIRECTLY SHOULD GET A CUSTOM PAGE 7590125 - AUTOMATING CREATION OF USERS AND ROLES 7597902 - TIMEZONE SUPPORT IN RUNREPORT WEBSERVICE API 7599031 - XML PUBLISHER SUM(CURRENT-GROUP()) FAILS 7609178 - ISSUE WITH TAGS EXTRACTED FROM RTF TEMPLATE 7613024 - HEADER/FOOTER SETTINGS OF RTF TEMPLATE ARE NOT RETAINING IN THE RTF OUTPUT 7623988 - ADD XSLT FUNCTION TO PRINT XDO PROPERTIES 7625975 - RETRIEVING PARAMETER LOV FROM RTF TEMPLATE 7629445 - SPELL OUT A NUMBER INTO WORDS 7641827 - ANALYTICS FROZED AFTER PAGE TAB WHICH INCLUDES [BI PUBLISHER REPORT] WERE CLICKE 7645504 - BIP REPORT FROZED AFTER THE SAME DASHBOARD BIP REPORTS WERE CLICKED SIMULTANEOUS 7649561 - RECEIVE 'TO MANY OPEN FILE HANDLES' ERROR CAUSING BI TO CRASH 7654155 - BIP REMOVES THE FIRST FILE SEPARATOR WHEN RE-ENTER REPOSITORY LOCATION IN ADMIN 7656834 - NEED AN OPTION TO NOT APPEND SCHEMA NAME IN GENERATED QUERY 7660292 - ER: XDOPARSER UPGRADE TO XDK 11G 7687862 - BIP DATA EXTRACTING ENHANCEMENT FOR SIEBEL BIP INTEGRATION 7694875 - ADMINISTRATOR IS SUPER USER WHETHER CONFIGURED MANDATORY_USER_ROLE OR NOT 7697592 - BI PUBLISHER STRINGINDEXOUTOFBOUNDSEXCEPTION WHEN PRINTING LABEL FROM SIM 7702372 - ARABIC/ENGLISH NUMBER/DATE PROBLEM, TOTAL PAGE NUMBER NOT RENDERED IN ENGLISH 7707987 - OUTOFMEMORY BURSTING A BI PUBLISHER REPORT BI SERVER DATA SOURCE 7712026 - ER: CHANGE CHART OUTPUT FORMAT TO PNG IN HTML OUTPUT 7833732 - THE 'SEARCH' PARAMETER TYPE CANNOT BE USED IN IE6 UNDER WINDOWS 8214839 - ER: INCREASE COLUMN SIZE IN SCHEDULER TABLE XMLP_SCHED_JOB 8218271 - ISSUES WHILE CONVERTING EXCEL TO XML 8218452 - BI PUBLISHER STANDALONE : GRAPHICS WITHOUT COLORS IF MORE THAN 33 PAGES 8250980 - USER WITH XMLP_ADMIN RESPONSIBILITY IS NOT ABLE TO EDIT REPORT IN BIP 8262410 - IMPOSSIBLE TO PRINT PDF CREATED BY BI PUBLISHER VIA 3RD PARTY PDF APPLICATION 8274369 - QA: CANNOT DELETE EMAIL SERVER UNDER DELIVERY CONFIGURATION 8284173 - FO:VISIBILITY="HIDDEN" DOESN'T WORK WITH FO:PAGE-NUMBER-CITATION 8288421 - THE VALUE OF VIEW BY GO BACK TO MY HISTORY IN SCHEDULES TAB 8299212 - REG: THE SPECIFICAL BI USER DIDN'T GET THE CORRECT REPORT HISTORY 8301767 - ORA-01795 ERROR OCCURED AFTER ACCESSING DASHBOARD PAGE WHICH INCLUDES BIP 8304944 - ADD SIEBEL SECURITY MODEL IN BI PUBLISHER 10.1.3.4.1 8312814 - QA:HOT:OBI SERVER JDBC DRIVER BIJDBC14.JAR IN XMLPSERVER.WAR IS INCORRECT 8323679 - BI PUBLISHER SENDS HTML REPORT TO OUTLOOK CLIENT AS ATTACHMENT NOT INLINE 8370794 - HISTORY OF COMPLETED SCHEDULER JOBS STILL SHOW ONE AS RUNNING ON CLUSTER ENV 8390970 - OUT OF MEMORY EXCEPTION RAISED, WHILE SAVING THE DATA 8393681 - CHECKBOX IS SHOWING UP AS CHECKED WHEN DATA IS NOT CHECKED VALUE 8725450 - UIX 2.3.6.6 UPTAKE FOR 10.1.3.4.1 UIX fixes: 6866363 - SUPPORT FOR JAVA DATE FORMAT AS PER JDK 1.4 AND ABOVE 6829124 - DATE PARAMETER NOT HANDLING DATE OFFSET AS PER JAVA STANDARDS ---------------------------- INSTALLATION FOR ENTERPRISE ---------------------------- Upgrade from 10.1.3.4.0d (patch 8284524, 8398280) and 10.1.3.4.1 does not require step 8 and step 9. 1 - Make a backup copy of the xmlp-server-config.xml file located in <application installation>/WEB-INF/ directory, where your application server unpacked the BI Publisher war or ear file. Example: In an Oracle AS/OC4J 10.1.3 deployment, the location is <ORACLE_HOME>/j2ee/home/applications/xmlpserver/xmlpserver/WEB-INF/xmlp-server-config.xml 2 - Back up all the directories under the BI Publisher repository (for example: {Oracle_Home}/xmlp/XMLP). 3 - If you are using Scheduling, back up your existing BI Publisher Scheduler schema. 4 - Shut down BI Publisher. 5 - Undeploy the BI Publisher application ("xmlpserver") from your J2EE application server. See your application server documentation for instructions how to undeploy an application. 6 - Deploy the 10.1.3.4 xmlpserver.ear or xmlpserver.war to your application server. See "Manually Installing BI Publisher to Your J2EE Application Server" secition of BI Publisher Installation Guide for guidelines for your application server type. 7 - Copy the saved backup copy of the xmlp-server-config.xml file from step 1 to the newly created BI Publisher <application installation>/WEB-INF/ directory, where your application server unpacked the BI Publisher war or ear file. Example: In an Oracle AS/OC4J 10.1.3 deployment, the location is <ORACLE_HOME>/j2ee/home/applications/xmlpserver/xmlpserver/WEB-INF/xmlp-server-config.xml 8 - Copy ssodefaults.xml to the following directory. And replace [host]:[port] with your server's information. Default values for other properties can be updated depending on your configuration. <Existing Repository>\XMLP\Admin\Security 9 - Copy database-config.xml to the following directory. <Existing Repository>\XMLP\Admin\Scheduler 10 - Restart xmlpserver application or Application Server ---------------------------------- IBM WEBSPHERE 6.1 DEPLOYMENT NOTE ---------------------------------- When users fail to log on to BI Publisher with "HTTP 500 Internal Server Error" on WebSphere 6.1, you must change Class Loader configuration to avoid the error. (bug7506253 - XMLPSERVER WON'T START AFTER DEPLOYMENT TO WEBSPHERE 6.1) SystemErr.log: java.lang.VerifyError: class loading constraint violated (class: oracle/xml/parser/v2/XMLNode method: xdkSetQxName(Loracle/xml/util/QxName;)V) at pc: 0 .... Class Loader Configuration Steps: 1 - Login to WebSphere Admin console. Click Enterprise Applications under Applications menu 2 - Click xmlpserver application name from the list 3 - Select "Class loading and update detection" 4 - Update class loader configuration as follows in Class Loader -> General Properties * Polling interval for updated files: [0] Seconds * Class loader order: [x] Classes loaded with application class loader first * WAR class loader policy: [x] Single class loader for application 5 - Apply this change and save the new configuration. 6 - Restart xmlpserver application Please refer to WebSphere 6.1 documentation for more details. "http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/wasinfo/v6r1/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.websphere.base.doc/info/aes/ae/trun_classload_entapp.html"> http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/wasinfo/v6r1/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.websphere.base.doc/info/aes/ae/trun_classload_entapp.html ------------------------------------------------------- Oracle WebLogic Server 11g R1 (10.3.1) Deployment NOTE ------------------------------------------------------- If you are deploying BI Publisher to WebLogic Server 10.3.1, you must add the following setting at startup for the domain that contains the BI Publisher server in the /weblogic_home/user_projects/domains/base_domain/bin/startWebLogic.sh script : -Dtoplink.xml.platform=oracle.toplink.platform.xml.jaxp.JAXPPlatform This setting is required to enable BI Publisher to find the TopLink JAR files to create the Scheduler tables.

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VS 2010 SP1 and SQL CE

- by ScottGu

Last month we released the Beta of VS 2010 Service Pack 1 (SP1). You can learn more about the VS 2010 SP1 Beta from Jason Zander’s two blog posts about it, and from Scott Hanselman’s blog post that covers some of the new capabilities enabled with it. You can download and install the VS 2010 SP1 Beta here. Last week I blogged about the new Visual Studio support for IIS Express that we are adding with VS 2010 SP1. In today’s post I’m going to talk about the new VS 2010 SP1 tooling support for SQL CE, and walkthrough some of the cool scenarios it enables. SQL CE – What is it and why should you care? SQL CE is a free, embedded, database engine that enables easy database storage. No Database Installation Required SQL CE does not require you to run a setup or install a database server in order to use it. You can simply copy the SQL CE binaries into the \bin directory of your ASP.NET application, and then your web application can use it as a database engine. No setup or extra security permissions are required for it to run. You do not need to have an administrator account on the machine. Just copy your web application onto any server and it will work. This is true even of medium-trust applications running in a web hosting environment. SQL CE runs in-memory within your ASP.NET application and will start-up when you first access a SQL CE database, and will automatically shutdown when your application is unloaded. SQL CE databases are stored as files that live within the \App_Data folder of your ASP.NET Applications. Works with Existing Data APIs SQL CE 4 works with existing .NET-based data APIs, and supports a SQL Server compatible query syntax. This means you can use existing data APIs like ADO.NET, as well as use higher-level ORMs like Entity Framework and NHibernate with SQL CE. This enables you to use the same data programming skills and data APIs you know today. Supports Development, Testing and Production Scenarios SQL CE can be used for development scenarios, testing scenarios, and light production usage scenarios. With the SQL CE 4 release we’ve done the engineering work to ensure that SQL CE won’t crash or deadlock when used in a multi-threaded server scenario (like ASP.NET). This is a big change from previous releases of SQL CE – which were designed for client-only scenarios and which explicitly blocked running in web-server environments. Starting with SQL CE 4 you can use it in a web-server as well. There are no license restrictions with SQL CE. It is also totally free. Easy Migration to SQL Server SQL CE is an embedded database – which makes it ideal for development, testing, and light-usage scenarios. For high-volume sites and applications you’ll probably want to migrate your database to use SQL Server Express (which is free), SQL Server or SQL Azure. These servers enable much better scalability, more development features (including features like Stored Procedures – which aren’t supported with SQL CE), as well as more advanced data management capabilities. We’ll ship migration tools that enable you to optionally take SQL CE databases and easily upgrade them to use SQL Server Express, SQL Server, or SQL Azure. You will not need to change your code when upgrading a SQL CE database to SQL Server or SQL Azure. Our goal is to enable you to be able to simply change the database connection string in your web.config file and have your application just work. New Tooling Support for SQL CE in VS 2010 SP1 VS 2010 SP1 includes much improved tooling support for SQL CE, and adds support for using SQL CE within ASP.NET projects for the first time. With VS 2010 SP1 you can now: Create new SQL CE Databases Edit and Modify SQL CE Database Schema and Indexes Populate SQL CE Databases within Data Use the Entity Framework (EF) designer to create model layers against SQL CE databases Use EF Code First to define model layers in code, then create a SQL CE database from them, and optionally edit the DB with VS Deploy SQL CE databases to remote servers using Web Deploy and optionally convert them to full SQL Server databases You can take advantage of all of the above features from within both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC based projects. Download You can enable SQL CE tooling support within VS 2010 by first installing VS 2010 SP1 (beta). Once SP1 is installed, you’ll also then need to install the SQL CE Tools for Visual Studio download. This is a separate download that enables the SQL CE tooling support for VS 2010 SP1. Walkthrough of Two Scenarios In this blog post I’m going to walkthrough how you can take advantage of SQL CE and VS 2010 SP1 using both an ASP.NET Web Forms and an ASP.NET MVC based application. Specifically, we’ll walkthrough: How to create a SQL CE database using VS 2010 SP1, then use the EF4 visual designers in Visual Studio to construct a model layer from it, and then display and edit the data using an ASP.NET GridView control. How to use an EF Code First approach to define a model layer using POCO classes and then have EF Code-First “auto-create” a SQL CE database for us based on our model classes. We’ll then look at how we can use the new VS 2010 SP1 support for SQL CE to inspect the database that was created, populate it with data, and later make schema changes to it. We’ll do all this within the context of an ASP.NET MVC based application. You can follow the two walkthroughs below on your own machine by installing VS 2010 SP1 (beta) and then installing the SQL CE Tools for Visual Studio download (which is a separate download that enables SQL CE tooling support for VS 2010 SP1). Walkthrough 1: Create a SQL CE Database, Create EF Model Classes, Edit the Data with a GridView This first walkthrough will demonstrate how to create and define a SQL CE database within an ASP.NET Web Form application. We’ll then build an EF model layer for it and use that model layer to enable data editing scenarios with an <asp:GridView> control. Step 1: Create a new ASP.NET Web Forms Project We’ll begin by using the File->New Project menu command within Visual Studio to create a new ASP.NET Web Forms project. We’ll use the “ASP.NET Web Application” project template option so that it has a default UI skin implemented: Step 2: Create a SQL CE Database Right click on the “App_Data” folder within the created project and choose the “Add->New Item” menu command: This will bring up the “Add Item” dialog box. Select the “SQL Server Compact 4.0 Local Database” item (new in VS 2010 SP1) and name the database file to create “Store.sdf”: Note that SQL CE database files have a .sdf filename extension. Place them within the /App_Data folder of your ASP.NET application to enable easy deployment. When we clicked the “Add” button above a Store.sdf file was added to our project: Step 3: Adding a “Products” Table Double-clicking the “Store.sdf” database file will open it up within the Server Explorer tab. Since it is a new database there are no tables within it: Right click on the “Tables” icon and choose the “Create Table” menu command to create a new database table. We’ll name the new table “Products” and add 4 columns to it. We’ll mark the first column as a primary key (and make it an identify column so that its value will automatically increment with each new row): When we click “ok” our new Products table will be created in the SQL CE database. Step 4: Populate with Data Once our Products table is created it will show up within the Server Explorer. We can right-click it and choose the “Show Table Data” menu command to edit its data: Let’s add a few sample rows of data to it: Step 5: Create an EF Model Layer We have a SQL CE database with some data in it – let’s now create an EF Model Layer that will provide a way for us to easily query and update data within it. Let’s right-click on our project and choose the “Add->New Item” menu command. This will bring up the “Add New Item” dialog – select the “ADO.NET Entity Data Model” item within it and name it “Store.edmx” This will add a new Store.edmx item to our solution explorer and launch a wizard that allows us to quickly create an EF model: Select the “Generate From Database” option above and click next. Choose to use the Store.sdf SQL CE database we just created and then click next again. The wizard will then ask you what database objects you want to import into your model. Let’s choose to import the “Products” table we created earlier: When we click the “Finish” button Visual Studio will open up the EF designer. It will have a Product entity already on it that maps to the “Products” table within our SQL CE database: The VS 2010 SP1 EF designer works exactly the same with SQL CE as it does already with SQL Server and SQL Express. The Product entity above will be persisted as a class (called “Product”) that we can programmatically work against within our ASP.NET application. Step 6: Compile the Project Before using your model layer you’ll need to build your project. Do a Ctrl+Shift+B to compile the project, or use the Build->Build Solution menu command. Step 7: Create a Page that Uses our EF Model Layer Let’s now create a simple ASP.NET Web Form that contains a GridView control that we can use to display and edit the our Products data (via the EF Model Layer we just created). Right-click on the project and choose the Add->New Item command. Select the “Web Form from Master Page” item template, and name the page you create “Products.aspx”. Base the master page on the “Site.Master” template that is in the root of the project. Add an <h2>Products</h2> heading the new Page, and add an <asp:gridview> control within it: Then click the “Design” tab to switch into design-view. Select the GridView control, and then click the top-right corner to display the GridView’s “Smart Tasks” UI: Choose the “New data source…” drop down option above. This will bring up the below dialog which allows you to pick your Data Source type: Select the “Entity” data source option – which will allow us to easily connect our GridView to the EF model layer we created earlier. This will bring up another dialog that allows us to pick our model layer: Select the “StoreEntities” option in the dropdown – which is the EF model layer we created earlier. Then click next – which will allow us to pick which entity within it we want to bind to: Select the “Products” entity in the above dialog – which indicates that we want to bind against the “Product” entity class we defined earlier. Then click the “Enable automatic updates” checkbox to ensure that we can both query and update Products. When you click “Finish” VS will wire-up an <asp:EntityDataSource> to your <asp:GridView> control: The last two steps we’ll do will be to click the “Enable Editing” checkbox on the Grid (which will cause the Grid to display an “Edit” link on each row) and (optionally) use the Auto Format dialog to pick a UI template for the Grid. Step 8: Run the Application Let’s now run our application and browse to the /Products.aspx page that contains our GridView. When we do so we’ll see a Grid UI of the Products within our SQL CE database. Clicking the “Edit” link for any of the rows will allow us to edit their values: When we click “Update” the GridView will post back the values, persist them through our EF Model Layer, and ultimately save them within our SQL CE database. Learn More about using EF with ASP.NET Web Forms Read this tutorial series on the http://asp.net site to learn more about how to use EF with ASP.NET Web Forms. The tutorial series uses SQL Express as the database – but the nice thing is that all of the same steps/concepts can also now also be done with SQL CE. Walkthrough 2: Using EF Code-First with SQL CE and ASP.NET MVC 3 We used a database-first approach with the sample above – where we first created the database, and then used the EF designer to create model classes from the database. In addition to supporting a designer-based development workflow, EF also enables a more code-centric option which we call “code first development”. Code-First Development enables a pretty sweet development workflow. It enables you to: Define your model objects by simply writing “plain old classes” with no base classes or visual designer required Use a “convention over configuration” approach that enables database persistence without explicitly configuring anything Optionally override the convention-based persistence and use a fluent code API to fully customize the persistence mapping Optionally auto-create a database based on the model classes you define – allowing you to start from code first I’ve done several blog posts about EF Code First in the past – I really think it is great. The good news is that it also works very well with SQL CE. The combination of SQL CE, EF Code First, and the new VS tooling support for SQL CE, enables a pretty nice workflow. Below is a simple example of how you can use them to build a simple ASP.NET MVC 3 application. Step 1: Create a new ASP.NET MVC 3 Project We’ll begin by using the File->New Project menu command within Visual Studio to create a new ASP.NET MVC 3 project. We’ll use the “Internet Project” template so that it has a default UI skin implemented: Step 2: Use NuGet to Install EFCodeFirst Next we’ll use the NuGet package manager (automatically installed by ASP.NET MVC 3) to add the EFCodeFirst library to our project. We’ll use the Package Manager command shell to do this. Bring up the package manager console within Visual Studio by selecting the View->Other Windows->Package Manager Console menu command. Then type: install-package EFCodeFirst within the package manager console to download the EFCodeFirst library and have it be added to our project: When we enter the above command, the EFCodeFirst library will be downloaded and added to our application: Step 3: Build Some Model Classes Using a “code first” based development workflow, we will create our model classes first (even before we have a database). We create these model classes by writing code. For this sample, we will right click on the “Models” folder of our project and add the below three classes to our project: The “Dinner” and “RSVP” model classes above are “plain old CLR objects” (aka POCO). They do not need to derive from any base classes or implement any interfaces, and the properties they expose are standard .NET data-types. No data persistence attributes or data code has been added to them. The “NerdDinners” class derives from the DbContext class (which is supplied by EFCodeFirst) and handles the retrieval/persistence of our Dinner and RSVP instances from a database. Step 4: Listing Dinners We’ve written all of the code necessary to implement our model layer for this simple project. Let’s now expose and implement the URL: /Dinners/Upcoming within our project. We’ll use it to list upcoming dinners that happen in the future. We’ll do this by right-clicking on our “Controllers” folder and select the “Add->Controller” menu command. We’ll name the Controller we want to create “DinnersController”. We’ll then implement an “Upcoming” action method within it that lists upcoming dinners using our model layer above. We will use a LINQ query to retrieve the data and pass it to a View to render with the code below: We’ll then right-click within our Upcoming method and choose the “Add-View” menu command to create an “Upcoming” view template that displays our dinners. We’ll use the “empty” template option within the “Add View” dialog and write the below view template using Razor: Step 4: Configure our Project to use a SQL CE Database We have finished writing all of our code – our last step will be to configure a database connection-string to use. We will point our NerdDinners model class to a SQL CE database by adding the below <connectionString> to the web.config file at the top of our project: EF Code First uses a default convention where context classes will look for a connection-string that matches the DbContext class name. Because we created a “NerdDinners” class earlier, we’ve also named our connectionstring “NerdDinners”. Above we are configuring our connection-string to use SQL CE as the database, and telling it that our SQL CE database file will live within the \App_Data directory of our ASP.NET project. Step 5: Running our Application Now that we’ve built our application, let’s run it! We’ll browse to the /Dinners/Upcoming URL – doing so will display an empty list of upcoming dinners: You might ask – but where did it query to get the dinners from? We didn’t explicitly create a database?!? One of the cool features that EF Code-First supports is the ability to automatically create a database (based on the schema of our model classes) when the database we point it at doesn’t exist. Above we configured EF Code-First to point at a SQL CE database in the \App_Data\ directory of our project. When we ran our application, EF Code-First saw that the SQL CE database didn’t exist and automatically created it for us. Step 6: Using VS 2010 SP1 to Explore our newly created SQL CE Database Click the “Show all Files” icon within the Solution Explorer and you’ll see the “NerdDinners.sdf” SQL CE database file that was automatically created for us by EF code-first within the \App_Data\ folder: We can optionally right-click on the file and “Include in Project" to add it to our solution: We can also double-click the file (regardless of whether it is added to the project) and VS 2010 SP1 will open it as a database we can edit within the “Server Explorer” tab of the IDE. Below is the view we get when we double-click our NerdDinners.sdf SQL CE file. We can drill in to see the schema of the Dinners and RSVPs tables in the tree explorer. Notice how two tables - Dinners and RSVPs – were automatically created for us within our SQL CE database. This was done by EF Code First when we accessed the NerdDinners class by running our application above: We can right-click on a Table and use the “Show Table Data” command to enter some upcoming dinners in our database: We’ll use the built-in editor that VS 2010 SP1 supports to populate our table data below: And now when we hit “refresh” on the /Dinners/Upcoming URL within our browser we’ll see some upcoming dinners show up: Step 7: Changing our Model and Database Schema Let’s now modify the schema of our model layer and database, and walkthrough one way that the new VS 2010 SP1 Tooling support for SQL CE can make this easier. With EF Code-First you typically start making database changes by modifying the model classes. For example, let’s add an additional string property called “UrlLink” to our “Dinner” class. We’ll use this to point to a link for more information about the event: Now when we re-run our project, and visit the /Dinners/Upcoming URL we’ll see an error thrown: We are seeing this error because EF Code-First automatically created our database, and by default when it does this it adds a table that helps tracks whether the schema of our database is in sync with our model classes. EF Code-First helpfully throws an error when they become out of sync – making it easier to track down issues at development time that you might otherwise only find (via obscure errors) at runtime. Note that if you do not want this feature you can turn it off by changing the default conventions of your DbContext class (in this case our NerdDinners class) to not track the schema version. Our model classes and database schema are out of sync in the above example – so how do we fix this? There are two approaches you can use today: Delete the database and have EF Code First automatically re-create the database based on the new model class schema (losing the data within the existing DB) Modify the schema of the existing database to make it in sync with the model classes (keeping/migrating the data within the existing DB) There are a couple of ways you can do the second approach above. Below I’m going to show how you can take advantage of the new VS 2010 SP1 Tooling support for SQL CE to use a database schema tool to modify our database structure. We are also going to be supporting a “migrations” feature with EF in the future that will allow you to automate/script database schema migrations programmatically. Step 8: Modify our SQL CE Database Schema using VS 2010 SP1 The new SQL CE Tooling support within VS 2010 SP1 makes it easy to modify the schema of our existing SQL CE database. To do this we’ll right-click on our “Dinners” table and choose the “Edit Table Schema” command: This will bring up the below “Edit Table” dialog. We can rename, change or delete any of the existing columns in our table, or click at the bottom of the column listing and type to add a new column. Below I’ve added a new “UrlLink” column of type “nvarchar” (since our property is a string): When we click ok our database will be updated to have the new column and our schema will now match our model classes. Because we are manually modifying our database schema, there is one additional step we need to take to let EF Code-First know that the database schema is in sync with our model classes. As i mentioned earlier, when a database is automatically created by EF Code-First it adds a “EdmMetadata” table to the database to track schema versions (and hash our model classes against them to detect mismatches between our model classes and the database schema): Since we are manually updating and maintaining our database schema, we don’t need this table – and can just delete it: This will leave us with just the two tables that correspond to our model classes: And now when we re-run our /Dinners/Upcoming URL it will display the dinners correctly: One last touch we could do would be to update our view to check for the new UrlLink property and render a <a> link to it if an event has one: And now when we refresh our /Dinners/Upcoming we will see hyperlinks for the events that have a UrlLink stored in the database: Summary SQL CE provides a free, embedded, database engine that you can use to easily enable database storage. With SQL CE 4 you can now take advantage of it within ASP.NET projects and applications (both Web Forms and MVC). VS 2010 SP1 provides tooling support that enables you to easily create, edit and modify SQL CE databases – as well as use the standard EF designer against them. This allows you to re-use your existing skills and data knowledge while taking advantage of an embedded database option. This is useful both for small applications (where you don’t need the scalability of a full SQL Server), as well as for development and testing scenarios – where you want to be able to rapidly develop/test your application without having a full database instance. SQL CE makes it easy to later migrate your data to a full SQL Server or SQL Azure instance if you want to – without having to change any code in your application. All we would need to change in the above two scenarios is the <connectionString> value within the web.config file in order to have our code run against a full SQL Server. This provides the flexibility to scale up your application starting from a small embedded database solution as needed. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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Implementing History Support using jQuery for AJAX websites built on asp.net AJAX

- by anil.kasalanati

Problem Statement: Most modern day website use AJAX for page navigation and gone are the days of complete HTTP redirection so it is imperative that we support back and forward buttons on the browser so that end users navigation is not broken. In this article we discuss about solutions which are already available and problems with them. Microsoft History Support: Post .Net 3.5 sp1 Microsoft’s Script manager supports history for websites using Update panels. This is achieved by enabling the ENABLE HISTORY property for the script manager and then the event “Page_Browser_Navigate” needs to be handled. So whenever the browser buttons are clicked the event is fired and the application can write code to do the navigation. The following articles provide good tutorials on how to do that http://www.asp.net/aspnet-in-net-35-sp1/videos/introduction-to-aspnet-ajax-history http://www.codeproject.com/KB/aspnet/ajaxhistorymanagement.aspx And Microsoft api internally creates an IFrame and changes the bookmark of the url. Unfortunately this has a bug and it does not work in Ie6 and 7 which are the major browsers but it works in ie8 and Firefox. And Microsoft has apparently fixed this bug in .Net 4.0. Following is the blog http://weblogs.asp.net/joshclose/archive/2008/11/11/asp-net-ajax-addhistorypoint-bug.aspx For solutions which are still running on .net 3.5 sp1 there is no solution which Microsoft offers so there is are two way to solve this o Disable the back button. o Develop custom solution. Disable back button Even though this might look like a very simple thing to do there are issues around doing this because there is no event which can be manipulated from the javascript. The browser does not provide an api to do this. So most of the technical solution on internet offer work arounds like doing a history.forward(1) so that even if the user clicks a back button the destination page redirects the user to the original page. This is not a good customer experience and does not work for asp.net website where there are different views in the same page. There are other ways around detecting the window unload events and writing code there. So there are 2 events onbeforeUnload and onUnload and we can write code to show a confirmation message to the user. If we write code in onUnLoad then we can only show a message but it is too late to stop the navigation. And if we write on onBeforeUnLoad we can stop the navigation if the user clicks cancel but this event would be triggered for all AJAX calls and hyperlinks where the href is anything other than #. We can do this but the website has to be checked properly to ensure there are no links where href is not # otherwise the user would see a popup message saying “you are leaving the website”. Believe me after doing a lot of research on the back button disable I found it easier to support it rather than disabling the button. So I am going to discuss a solution which work using jQuery with some tweaking. Custom Solution JQuery already provides an api to manage the history of a AJAX website - http://plugins.jquery.com/project/history We need to integrate this with Microsoft Page request manager so that both of them work in tandem. The page state is maintained in the cookie so that it can be passed to the server and I used jQuery cookie plug in for that – http://plugins.jquery.com/node/1386/release Firstly when the page loads there is a need to hook up all the events on the page which needs to cause browser history and following is the code to that. jQuery(document).ready(function() { // Initialize history plugin. // The callback is called at once by present location.hash. jQuery.history.init(pageload); // set onlick event for buttons jQuery("a[@rel='history']").click(function() { // var hash = this.page; hash = hash.replace(/^.*#/, ''); isAsyncPostBack = true; // moves to a new page. // pageload is called at once. jQuery.history.load(hash); return true; }); }); The above scripts basically gets all the DOM objects which have the attribute rel=”history” and add the event. In our test page we have the link button which has the attribute rel set to history. <asp:LinkButton ID="Previous" rel="history" runat="server" onclick="PreviousOnClick">Previous</asp:LinkButton> <asp:LinkButton ID="AsyncPostBack" rel="history" runat="server" onclick="NextOnClick">Next</asp:LinkButton> <asp:LinkButton ID="HistoryLinkButton" runat="server" style="display:none" onclick="HistoryOnClick"></asp:LinkButton> And you can see that there is an hidden HistoryLinkButton which used to send a sever side postback in case of browser back or previous buttons. And note that we need to use display:none and not visible= false because asp.net AJAX would disallow any post backs if visible=false. And in general the pageload event get executed on the client side when a back or forward is pressed and the function is shown below function pageload(hash) { if (hash) { if (!isAsyncPostBack) { jQuery.cookie("page", hash); __doPostBack("HistoryLinkButton", ""); } isAsyncPostBack = false; } else { // start page jQuery("#load").empty(); } } As you can see in case there is an hash in the url we are basically do an asp.net AJAX post back using the following statement __doPostBack("HistoryLinkButton", ""); So whenever the user clicks back or forward the post back happens using the event statement we provide and Previous event code is invoked in the code behind. We need to have the code to use the pageId present in the url to change the page content. And there is an important thing to note – because the hash is worked out using the pageId’s there is a need to recalculate the hash after every AJAX post back so following code is plugged in function ReWorkHash() { jQuery("a[@rel='history']").unbind("click"); jQuery("a[@rel='history']").click(function() { // var hash = jQuery(this).attr("page"); hash = hash.replace(/^.*#/, ''); jQuery.cookie("page", hash); isAsyncPostBack = true; // moves to a new page. // pageload is called at once. jQuery.history.load(hash); return true; }); } This code is executed from the code behind using ScriptManager RegisterClientScriptBlock as shown below – ScriptManager.RegisterClientScriptBlock(this, typeof(_Default), "Recalculater", "ReWorkHash();", true); A sample application is available to be downloaded at the following location – http://techconsulting.vpscustomer.com/Source/HistoryTest.zip And a working sample is available at – http://techconsulting.vpscustomer.com/Samples/Default.aspx

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Announcing the Release of Visual Studio 2013 and Great Improvements to ASP.NET and Entity Framework

- by ScottGu

Today we released VS 2013 and .NET 4.5.1. These releases include a ton of great improvements, and include some fantastic enhancements to ASP.NET and the Entity Framework. You can download and start using them now. Below are details on a few of the great ASP.NET, Web Development, and Entity Framework improvements you can take advantage of with this release. Please visit http://www.asp.net/vnext for additional release notes, documentation, and tutorials. One ASP.NET With the release of Visual Studio 2013, we have taken a step towards unifying the experience of using the different ASP.NET sub-frameworks (Web Forms, MVC, Web API, SignalR, etc), and you can now easily mix and match the different ASP.NET technologies you want to use within a single application. When you do a File-New Project with VS 2013 you’ll now see a single ASP.NET Project option: Selecting this project will bring up an additional dialog that allows you to start with a base project template, and then optionally add/remove the technologies you want to use in it. For example, you could start with a Web Forms template and add Web API or Web Forms support for it, or create a MVC project and also enable Web Forms pages within it: This makes it easy for you to use any ASP.NET technology you want within your apps, and take advantage of any feature across the entire ASP.NET technology span. Richer Authentication Support The new “One ASP.NET” project dialog also includes a new Change Authentication button that, when pushed, enables you to easily change the authentication approach used by your applications – and makes it much easier to build secure applications that enable SSO from a variety of identity providers. For example, when you start with the ASP.NET Web Forms or MVC templates you can easily add any of the following authentication options to the application: No Authentication Individual User Accounts (Single Sign-On support with FaceBook, Twitter, Google, and Microsoft ID – or Forms Auth with ASP.NET Membership) Organizational Accounts (Single Sign-On support with Windows Azure Active Directory ) Windows Authentication (Active Directory in an intranet application) The Windows Azure Active Directory support is particularly cool. Last month we updated Windows Azure Active Directory so that developers can now easily create any number of Directories using it (for free and deployed within seconds). It now takes only a few moments to enable single-sign-on support within your ASP.NET applications against these Windows Azure Active Directories. Simply choose the “Organizational Accounts” radio button within the Change Authentication dialog and enter the name of your Windows Azure Active Directory to do this: This will automatically configure your ASP.NET application to use Windows Azure Active Directory and register the application with it. Now when you run the app your users can easily and securely sign-in using their Active Directory credentials within it – regardless of where the application is hosted on the Internet. For more information about the new process for creating web projects, see Creating ASP.NET Web Projects in Visual Studio 2013. Responsive Project Templates with Bootstrap The new default project templates for ASP.NET Web Forms, MVC, Web API and SPA are built using Bootstrap. Bootstrap is an open source CSS framework that helps you build responsive websites which look great on different form factors such as mobile phones, tables and desktops. For example in a browser window the home page created by the MVC template looks like the following: When you resize the browser to a narrow window to see how it would like on a phone, you can notice how the contents gracefully wrap around and the horizontal top menu turns into an icon: When you click the menu-icon above it expands into a vertical menu – which enables a good navigation experience for small screen real-estate devices: We think Bootstrap will enable developers to build web applications that work even better on phones, tablets and other mobile devices – and enable you to easily build applications that can leverage the rich ecosystem of Bootstrap CSS templates already out there. You can learn more about Bootstrap here. Visual Studio Web Tooling Improvements Visual Studio 2013 includes a new, much richer, HTML editor for Razor files and HTML files in web applications. The new HTML editor provides a single unified schema based on HTML5. It has automatic brace completion, jQuery UI and AngularJS attribute IntelliSense, attribute IntelliSense Grouping, and other great improvements. For example, typing “ng-“ on an HTML element will show the intellisense for AngularJS: This support for AngularJS, Knockout.js, Handlebars and other SPA technologies in this release of ASP.NET and VS 2013 makes it even easier to build rich client web applications: The screen shot below demonstrates how the HTML editor can also now inspect your page at design-time to determine all of the CSS classes that are available. In this case, the auto-completion list contains classes from Bootstrap’s CSS file. No more guessing at which Bootstrap element names you need to use: Visual Studio 2013 also comes with built-in support for both CoffeeScript and LESS editing support. The LESS editor comes with all the cool features from the CSS editor and has specific Intellisense for variables and mixins across all the LESS documents in the @import chain. Browser Link – SignalR channel between browser and Visual Studio The new Browser Link feature in VS 2013 lets you run your app within multiple browsers on your dev machine, connect them to Visual Studio, and simultaneously refresh all of them just by clicking a button in the toolbar. You can connect multiple browsers (including IE, FireFox, Chrome) to your development site, including mobile emulators, and click refresh to refresh all the browsers all at the same time. This makes it much easier to easily develop/test against multiple browsers in parallel. Browser Link also exposes an API to enable developers to write Browser Link extensions. By enabling developers to take advantage of the Browser Link API, it becomes possible to create very advanced scenarios that crosses boundaries between Visual Studio and any browser that’s connected to it. Web Essentials takes advantage of the API to create an integrated experience between Visual Studio and the browser’s developer tools, remote controlling mobile emulators and a lot more. You will see us take advantage of this support even more to enable really cool scenarios going forward. ASP.NET Scaffolding ASP.NET Scaffolding is a new code generation framework for ASP.NET Web applications. It makes it easy to add boilerplate code to your project that interacts with a data model. In previous versions of Visual Studio, scaffolding was limited to ASP.NET MVC projects. With Visual Studio 2013, you can now use scaffolding for any ASP.NET project, including Web Forms. When using scaffolding, we ensure that all required dependencies are automatically installed for you in the project. For example, if you start with an ASP.NET Web Forms project and then use scaffolding to add a Web API Controller, the required NuGet packages and references to enable Web API are added to your project automatically. To do this, just choose the Add->New Scaffold Item context menu: Support for scaffolding async controllers uses the new async features from Entity Framework 6. ASP.NET Identity ASP.NET Identity is a new membership system for ASP.NET applications that we are introducing with this release. ASP.NET Identity makes it easy to integrate user-specific profile data with application data. ASP.NET Identity also allows you to choose the persistence model for user profiles in your application. You can store the data in a SQL Server database or another data store, including NoSQL data stores such as Windows Azure Storage Tables. ASP.NET Identity also supports Claims-based authentication, where the user’s identity is represented as a set of claims from a trusted issuer. Users can login by creating an account on the website using username and password, or they can login using social identity providers (such as Microsoft Account, Twitter, Facebook, Google) or using organizational accounts through Windows Azure Active Directory or Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS). To learn more about how to use ASP.NET Identity visit http://www.asp.net/identity. ASP.NET Web API 2 ASP.NET Web API 2 has a bunch of great improvements including: Attribute routing ASP.NET Web API now supports attribute routing, thanks to a contribution by Tim McCall, the author of http://attributerouting.net. With attribute routing you can specify your Web API routes by annotating your actions and controllers like this: OAuth 2.0 support The Web API and Single Page Application project templates now support authorization using OAuth 2.0. OAuth 2.0 is a framework for authorizing client access to protected resources. It works for a variety of clients including browsers and mobile devices. OData Improvements ASP.NET Web API also now provides support for OData endpoints and enables support for both ATOM and JSON-light formats. With OData you get support for rich query semantics, paging, $metadata, CRUD operations, and custom actions over any data source. Below are some of the specific enhancements in ASP.NET Web API 2 OData. Support for $select, $expand, $batch, and $value Improved extensibility Type-less support Reuse an existing model OWIN Integration ASP.NET Web API now fully supports OWIN and can be run on any OWIN capable host. With OWIN integration, you can self-host Web API in your own process alongside other OWIN middleware, such as SignalR. For more information, see Use OWIN to Self-Host ASP.NET Web API. More Web API Improvements In addition to the features above there have been a host of other features in ASP.NET Web API, including CORS support Authentication Filters Filter Overrides Improved Unit Testability Portable ASP.NET Web API Client To learn more go to http://www.asp.net/web-api/ ASP.NET SignalR 2 ASP.NET SignalR is library for ASP.NET developers that dramatically simplifies the process of adding real-time web functionality to your applications. Real-time web functionality is the ability to have server-side code push content to connected clients instantly as it becomes available. SignalR 2.0 introduces a ton of great improvements. We’ve added support for Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) to SignalR 2.0. iOS and Android support for SignalR have also been added using the MonoTouch and MonoDroid components from the Xamarin library (for more information on how to use these additions, see the article Using Xamarin Components from the SignalR wiki). We’ve also added support for the Portable .NET Client in SignalR 2.0 and created a new self-hosting package. This change makes the setup process for SignalR much more consistent between web-hosted and self-hosted SignalR applications. To learn more go to http://www.asp.net/signalr. ASP.NET MVC 5 The ASP.NET MVC project templates integrate seamlessly with the new One ASP.NET experience and enable you to integrate all of the above ASP.NET Web API, SignalR and Identity improvements. You can also customize your MVC project and configure authentication using the One ASP.NET project creation wizard. The MVC templates have also been updated to use ASP.NET Identity and Bootstrap as well. An introductory tutorial to ASP.NET MVC 5 can be found at Getting Started with ASP.NET MVC 5. This release of ASP.NET MVC also supports several nice new MVC-specific features including: Authentication filters: These filters allow you to specify authentication logic per-action, per-controller or globally for all controllers. Attribute Routing: Attribute Routing allows you to define your routes on actions or controllers. To learn more go to http://www.asp.net/mvc Entity Framework 6 Improvements Visual Studio 2013 ships with Entity Framework 6, which bring a lot of great new features to the data access space: Async and Task<T> Support EF6’s new Async Query and Save support enables you to perform asynchronous data access and take advantage of the Task<T> support introduced in .NET 4.5 within data access scenarios. This allows you to free up threads that might otherwise by blocked on data access requests, and enable them to be used to process other requests whilst you wait for the database engine to process operations. When the database server responds the thread will be re-queued within your ASP.NET application and execution will continue. This enables you to easily write significantly more scalable server code. Here is an example ASP.NET WebAPI action that makes use of the new EF6 async query methods: Interception and Logging Interception and SQL logging allows you to view – or even change – every command that is sent to the database by Entity Framework. This includes a simple, human readable log – which is great for debugging – as well as some lower level building blocks that give you access to the command and results. Here is an example of wiring up the simple log to Debug in the constructor of an MVC controller: Custom Code-First Conventions The new Custom Code-First Conventions enable bulk configuration of a Code First model – reducing the amount of code you need to write and maintain. Conventions are great when your domain classes don’t match the Code First conventions. For example, the following convention configures all properties that are called ‘Key’ to be the primary key of the entity they belong to. This is different than the default Code First convention that expects Id or <type name>Id. Connection Resiliency The new Connection Resiliency feature in EF6 enables you to register an execution strategy to handle – and potentially retry – failed database operations. This is especially useful when deploying to cloud environments where dropped connections become more common as you traverse load balancers and distributed networks. EF6 includes a built-in execution strategy for SQL Azure that knows about retryable exception types and has some sensible – but overridable – defaults for the number of retries and time between retries when errors occur. Registering it is simple using the new Code-Based Configuration support: These are just some of the new features in EF6. You can visit the release notes section of the Entity Framework site for a complete list of new features. Microsoft OWIN Components Open Web Interface for .NET (OWIN) defines an open abstraction between .NET web servers and web applications, and the ASP.NET “Katana” project brings this abstraction to ASP.NET. OWIN decouples the web application from the server, making web applications host-agnostic. For example, you can host an OWIN-based web application in IIS or self-host it in a custom process. For more information about OWIN and Katana, see What's new in OWIN and Katana. Summary Today’s Visual Studio 2013, ASP.NET and Entity Framework release delivers some fantastic new features that streamline your web development lifecycle. These feature span from server framework to data access to tooling to client-side HTML development. They also integrate some great open-source technology and contributions from our developer community. Download and start using them today! Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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Creating Custom Ajax Control Toolkit Controls

- by Stephen Walther

The goal of this blog entry is to explain how you can extend the Ajax Control Toolkit with custom Ajax Control Toolkit controls. I describe how you can create the two halves of an Ajax Control Toolkit control: the server-side control extender and the client-side control behavior. Finally, I explain how you can use the new Ajax Control Toolkit control in a Web Forms page. At the end of this blog entry, there is a link to download a Visual Studio 2010 solution which contains the code for two Ajax Control Toolkit controls: SampleExtender and PopupHelpExtender. The SampleExtender contains the minimum skeleton for creating a new Ajax Control Toolkit control. You can use the SampleExtender as a starting point for your custom Ajax Control Toolkit controls. The PopupHelpExtender control is a super simple custom Ajax Control Toolkit control. This control extender displays a help message when you start typing into a TextBox control. The animated GIF below demonstrates what happens when you click into a TextBox which has been extended with the PopupHelp extender. Here’s a sample of a Web Forms page which uses the control: <%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeBehind="ShowPopupHelp.aspx.cs" Inherits="MyACTControls.Web.Default" %> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html > <head runat="server"> <title>Show Popup Help</title> </head> <body> <form id="form1" runat="server"> <div> <act:ToolkitScriptManager ID="tsm" runat="server" /> <%-- Social Security Number --%> <asp:Label ID="lblSSN" Text="SSN:" AssociatedControlID="txtSSN" runat="server" /> <asp:TextBox ID="txtSSN" runat="server" /> <act:PopupHelpExtender id="ph1" TargetControlID="txtSSN" HelpText="Please enter your social security number." runat="server" /> <%-- Social Security Number --%> <asp:Label ID="lblPhone" Text="Phone Number:" AssociatedControlID="txtPhone" runat="server" /> <asp:TextBox ID="txtPhone" runat="server" /> <act:PopupHelpExtender id="ph2" TargetControlID="txtPhone" HelpText="Please enter your phone number." runat="server" /> </div> </form> </body> </html> In the page above, the PopupHelp extender is used to extend the functionality of the two TextBox controls. When focus is given to a TextBox control, the popup help message is displayed. An Ajax Control Toolkit control extender consists of two parts: a server-side control extender and a client-side behavior. For example, the PopupHelp extender consists of a server-side PopupHelpExtender control (PopupHelpExtender.cs) and a client-side PopupHelp behavior JavaScript script (PopupHelpBehavior.js). Over the course of this blog entry, I describe how you can create both the server-side extender and the client-side behavior. Writing the Server-Side Code Creating a Control Extender You create a control extender by creating a class that inherits from the abstract ExtenderControlBase class. For example, the PopupHelpExtender control is declared like this: public class PopupHelpExtender: ExtenderControlBase { } The ExtenderControlBase class is part of the Ajax Control Toolkit. This base class contains all of the common server properties and methods of every Ajax Control Toolkit extender control. The ExtenderControlBase class inherits from the ExtenderControl class. The ExtenderControl class is a standard class in the ASP.NET framework located in the System.Web.UI namespace. This class is responsible for generating a client-side behavior. The class generates a call to the Microsoft Ajax Library $create() method which looks like this: <script type="text/javascript"> $create(MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior, {"HelpText":"Please enter your social security number.","id":"ph1"}, null, null, $get("txtSSN")); }); </script> The JavaScript $create() method is part of the Microsoft Ajax Library. The reference for this method can be found here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb397487.aspx This method accepts the following parameters: type – The type of client behavior to create. The $create() method above creates a client PopupHelpBehavior. Properties – Enables you to pass initial values for the properties of the client behavior. For example, the initial value of the HelpText property. This is how server property values are passed to the client. Events – Enables you to pass client-side event handlers to the client behavior. References – Enables you to pass references to other client components. Element – The DOM element associated with the client behavior. This will be the DOM element associated with the control being extended such as the txtSSN TextBox. The $create() method is generated for you automatically. You just need to focus on writing the server-side control extender class. Specifying the Target Control All Ajax Control Toolkit extenders inherit a TargetControlID property from the ExtenderControlBase class. This property, the TargetControlID property, points at the control that the extender control extends. For example, the Ajax Control Toolkit TextBoxWatermark control extends a TextBox, the ConfirmButton control extends a Button, and the Calendar control extends a TextBox. You must indicate the type of control which your extender is extending. You indicate the type of control by adding a [TargetControlType] attribute to your control. For example, the PopupHelp extender is declared like this: [TargetControlType(typeof(TextBox))] public class PopupHelpExtender: ExtenderControlBase { } The PopupHelp extender can be used to extend a TextBox control. If you try to use the PopupHelp extender with another type of control then an exception is thrown. If you want to create an extender control which can be used with any type of ASP.NET control (Button, DataView, TextBox or whatever) then use the following attribute: [TargetControlType(typeof(Control))] Decorating Properties with Attributes If you decorate a server-side property with the [ExtenderControlProperty] attribute then the value of the property gets passed to the control’s client-side behavior. The value of the property gets passed to the client through the $create() method discussed above. The PopupHelp control contains the following HelpText property: [ExtenderControlProperty] [RequiredProperty] public string HelpText { get { return GetPropertyValue("HelpText", "Help Text"); } set { SetPropertyValue("HelpText", value); } } The HelpText property determines the help text which pops up when you start typing into a TextBox control. Because the HelpText property is decorated with the [ExtenderControlProperty] attribute, any value assigned to this property on the server is passed to the client automatically. For example, if you declare the PopupHelp extender in a Web Form page like this: <asp:TextBox ID="txtSSN" runat="server" /> <act:PopupHelpExtender id="ph1" TargetControlID="txtSSN" HelpText="Please enter your social security number." runat="server" /> Then the PopupHelpExtender renders the call to the the following Microsoft Ajax Library $create() method: $create(MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior, {"HelpText":"Please enter your social security number.","id":"ph1"}, null, null, $get("txtSSN")); You can see this call to the JavaScript $create() method by selecting View Source in your browser. This call to the $create() method calls a method named set_HelpText() automatically and passes the value “Please enter your social security number”. There are several attributes which you can use to decorate server-side properties including: ExtenderControlProperty – When a property is marked with this attribute, the value of the property is passed to the client automatically. ExtenderControlEvent – When a property is marked with this attribute, the property represents a client event handler. Required – When a value is not assigned to this property on the server, an error is displayed. DefaultValue – The default value of the property passed to the client. ClientPropertyName – The name of the corresponding property in the JavaScript behavior. For example, the server-side property is named ID (uppercase) and the client-side property is named id (lower-case). IDReferenceProperty – Applied to properties which refer to the IDs of other controls. URLProperty – Calls ResolveClientURL() to convert from a server-side URL to a URL which can be used on the client. ElementReference – Returns a reference to a DOM element by performing a client $get(). The WebResource, ClientResource, and the RequiredScript Attributes The PopupHelp extender uses three embedded resources named PopupHelpBehavior.js, PopupHelpBehavior.debug.js, and PopupHelpBehavior.css. The first two files are JavaScript files and the final file is a Cascading Style sheet file. These files are compiled as embedded resources. You don’t need to mark them as embedded resources in your Visual Studio solution because they get added to the assembly when the assembly is compiled by a build task. You can see that these files get embedded into the MyACTControls assembly by using Red Gate’s .NET Reflector tool: In order to use these files with the PopupHelp extender, you need to work with both the WebResource and the ClientScriptResource attributes. The PopupHelp extender includes the following three WebResource attributes. [assembly: WebResource("PopupHelp.PopupHelpBehavior.js", "text/javascript")] [assembly: WebResource("PopupHelp.PopupHelpBehavior.debug.js", "text/javascript")] [assembly: WebResource("PopupHelp.PopupHelpBehavior.css", "text/css", PerformSubstitution = true)] These WebResource attributes expose the embedded resource from the assembly so that they can be accessed by using the ScriptResource.axd or WebResource.axd handlers. The first parameter passed to the WebResource attribute is the name of the embedded resource and the second parameter is the content type of the embedded resource. The PopupHelp extender also includes the following ClientScriptResource and ClientCssResource attributes: [ClientScriptResource("MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior", "PopupHelp.PopupHelpBehavior.js")] [ClientCssResource("PopupHelp.PopupHelpBehavior.css")] Including these attributes causes the PopupHelp extender to request these resources when you add the PopupHelp extender to a page. If you open View Source in a browser which uses the PopupHelp extender then you will see the following link for the Cascading Style Sheet file: <link href="/WebResource.axd?d=0uONMsWXUuEDG-pbJHAC1kuKiIMteQFkYLmZdkgv7X54TObqYoqVzU4mxvaa4zpn5H9ch0RDwRYKwtO8zM5mKgO6C4WbrbkWWidKR07LD1d4n4i_uNB1mHEvXdZu2Ae5mDdVNDV53znnBojzCzwvSw2&t=634417392021676003" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" /> You also will see the following script include for the JavaScript file: <script src="/ScriptResource.axd?d=pIS7xcGaqvNLFBvExMBQSp_0xR3mpDfS0QVmmyu1aqDUjF06TrW1jVDyXNDMtBHxpRggLYDvgFTWOsrszflZEDqAcQCg-hDXjun7ON0Ol7EXPQIdOe1GLMceIDv3OeX658-tTq2LGdwXhC1-dE7_6g2&t=ffffffff88a33b59" type="text/javascript"></script> The JavaScrpt file returned by this request to ScriptResource.axd contains the combined scripts for any and all Ajax Control Toolkit controls in a page. By default, the Ajax Control Toolkit combines all of the JavaScript files required by a page into a single JavaScript file. Combining files in this way really speeds up how quickly all of the JavaScript files get delivered from the web server to the browser. So, by default, there will be only one ScriptResource.axd include for all of the JavaScript files required by a page. If you want to disable Script Combining, and create separate links, then disable Script Combining like this: <act:ToolkitScriptManager ID="tsm" runat="server" CombineScripts="false" /> There is one more important attribute used by Ajax Control Toolkit extenders. The PopupHelp behavior uses the following two RequirdScript attributes to load the JavaScript files which are required by the PopupHelp behavior: [RequiredScript(typeof(CommonToolkitScripts), 0)] [RequiredScript(typeof(PopupExtender), 1)] The first parameter of the RequiredScript attribute represents either the string name of a JavaScript file or the type of an Ajax Control Toolkit control. The second parameter represents the order in which the JavaScript files are loaded (This second parameter is needed because .NET attributes are intrinsically unordered). In this case, the RequiredScript attribute will load the JavaScript files associated with the CommonToolkitScripts type and the JavaScript files associated with the PopupExtender in that order. The PopupHelp behavior depends on these JavaScript files. Writing the Client-Side Code The PopupHelp extender uses a client-side behavior written with the Microsoft Ajax Library. Here is the complete code for the client-side behavior: (function () { // The unique name of the script registered with the // client script loader var scriptName = "PopupHelpBehavior"; function execute() { Type.registerNamespace('MyACTControls'); MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior = function (element) { /// <summary> /// A behavior which displays popup help for a textbox /// </summmary> /// <param name="element" type="Sys.UI.DomElement">The element to attach to</param> MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior.initializeBase(this, [element]); this._textbox = Sys.Extended.UI.TextBoxWrapper.get_Wrapper(element); this._cssClass = "ajax__popupHelp"; this._popupBehavior = null; this._popupPosition = Sys.Extended.UI.PositioningMode.BottomLeft; this._popupDiv = null; this._helpText = "Help Text"; this._element$delegates = { focus: Function.createDelegate(this, this._element_onfocus), blur: Function.createDelegate(this, this._element_onblur) }; } MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior.prototype = { initialize: function () { MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior.callBaseMethod(this, 'initialize'); // Add event handlers for focus and blur var element = this.get_element(); $addHandlers(element, this._element$delegates); }, _ensurePopup: function () { if (!this._popupDiv) { var element = this.get_element(); var id = this.get_id(); this._popupDiv = $common.createElementFromTemplate({ nodeName: "div", properties: { id: id + "_popupDiv" }, cssClasses: ["ajax__popupHelp"] }, element.parentNode); this._popupBehavior = new $create(Sys.Extended.UI.PopupBehavior, { parentElement: element }, {}, {}, this._popupDiv); this._popupBehavior.set_positioningMode(this._popupPosition); } }, get_HelpText: function () { return this._helpText; }, set_HelpText: function (value) { if (this._HelpText != value) { this._helpText = value; this._ensurePopup(); this._popupDiv.innerHTML = value; this.raisePropertyChanged("Text") } }, _element_onfocus: function (e) { this.show(); }, _element_onblur: function (e) { this.hide(); }, show: function () { this._popupBehavior.show(); }, hide: function () { if (this._popupBehavior) { this._popupBehavior.hide(); } }, dispose: function() { var element = this.get_element(); $clearHandlers(element); if (this._popupBehavior) { this._popupBehavior.dispose(); this._popupBehavior = null; } } }; MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior.registerClass('MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior', Sys.Extended.UI.BehaviorBase); Sys.registerComponent(MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior, { name: "popupHelp" }); } // execute if (window.Sys && Sys.loader) { Sys.loader.registerScript(scriptName, ["ExtendedBase", "ExtendedCommon"], execute); } else { execute(); } })(); In the following sections, we’ll discuss how this client-side behavior works. Wrapping the Behavior for the Script Loader The behavior is wrapped with the following script: (function () { // The unique name of the script registered with the // client script loader var scriptName = "PopupHelpBehavior"; function execute() { // Behavior Content } // execute if (window.Sys && Sys.loader) { Sys.loader.registerScript(scriptName, ["ExtendedBase", "ExtendedCommon"], execute); } else { execute(); } })(); This code is required by the Microsoft Ajax Library Script Loader. You need this code if you plan to use a behavior directly from client-side code and you want to use the Script Loader. If you plan to only use your code in the context of the Ajax Control Toolkit then you can leave out this code. Registering a JavaScript Namespace The PopupHelp behavior is declared within a namespace named MyACTControls. In the code above, this namespace is created with the following registerNamespace() method: Type.registerNamespace('MyACTControls'); JavaScript does not have any built-in way of creating namespaces to prevent naming conflicts. The Microsoft Ajax Library extends JavaScript with support for namespaces. You can learn more about the registerNamespace() method here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb397723.aspx Creating the Behavior The actual Popup behavior is created with the following code. MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior = function (element) { /// <summary> /// A behavior which displays popup help for a textbox /// </summmary> /// <param name="element" type="Sys.UI.DomElement">The element to attach to</param> MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior.initializeBase(this, [element]); this._textbox = Sys.Extended.UI.TextBoxWrapper.get_Wrapper(element); this._cssClass = "ajax__popupHelp"; this._popupBehavior = null; this._popupPosition = Sys.Extended.UI.PositioningMode.BottomLeft; this._popupDiv = null; this._helpText = "Help Text"; this._element$delegates = { focus: Function.createDelegate(this, this._element_onfocus), blur: Function.createDelegate(this, this._element_onblur) }; } MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior.prototype = { initialize: function () { MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior.callBaseMethod(this, 'initialize'); // Add event handlers for focus and blur var element = this.get_element(); $addHandlers(element, this._element$delegates); }, _ensurePopup: function () { if (!this._popupDiv) { var element = this.get_element(); var id = this.get_id(); this._popupDiv = $common.createElementFromTemplate({ nodeName: "div", properties: { id: id + "_popupDiv" }, cssClasses: ["ajax__popupHelp"] }, element.parentNode); this._popupBehavior = new $create(Sys.Extended.UI.PopupBehavior, { parentElement: element }, {}, {}, this._popupDiv); this._popupBehavior.set_positioningMode(this._popupPosition); } }, get_HelpText: function () { return this._helpText; }, set_HelpText: function (value) { if (this._HelpText != value) { this._helpText = value; this._ensurePopup(); this._popupDiv.innerHTML = value; this.raisePropertyChanged("Text") } }, _element_onfocus: function (e) { this.show(); }, _element_onblur: function (e) { this.hide(); }, show: function () { this._popupBehavior.show(); }, hide: function () { if (this._popupBehavior) { this._popupBehavior.hide(); } }, dispose: function() { var element = this.get_element(); $clearHandlers(element); if (this._popupBehavior) { this._popupBehavior.dispose(); this._popupBehavior = null; } } }; The code above has two parts. The first part of the code is used to define the constructor function for the PopupHelp behavior. This is a factory method which returns an instance of a PopupHelp behavior: MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior = function (element) { } The second part of the code modified the prototype for the PopupHelp behavior: MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior.prototype = { } Any code which is particular to a single instance of the PopupHelp behavior should be placed in the constructor function. For example, the default value of the _helpText field is assigned in the constructor function: this._helpText = "Help Text"; Any code which is shared among all instances of the PopupHelp behavior should be added to the PopupHelp behavior’s prototype. For example, the public HelpText property is added to the prototype: get_HelpText: function () { return this._helpText; }, set_HelpText: function (value) { if (this._HelpText != value) { this._helpText = value; this._ensurePopup(); this._popupDiv.innerHTML = value; this.raisePropertyChanged("Text") } }, Registering a JavaScript Class After you create the PopupHelp behavior, you must register the behavior as a class by using the Microsoft Ajax registerClass() method like this: MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior.registerClass('MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior', Sys.Extended.UI.BehaviorBase); This call to registerClass() registers PopupHelp behavior as a class which derives from the base Sys.Extended.UI.BehaviorBase class. Like the ExtenderControlBase class on the server side, the BehaviorBase class on the client side contains method used by every behavior. The documentation for the BehaviorBase class can be found here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb311020.aspx The most important methods and properties of the BehaviorBase class are the following: dispose() – Use this method to clean up all resources used by your behavior. In the case of the PopupHelp behavior, the dispose() method is used to remote the event handlers created by the behavior and disposed the Popup behavior. get_element() -- Use this property to get the DOM element associated with the behavior. In other words, the DOM element which the behavior extends. get_id() – Use this property to the ID of the current behavior. initialize() – Use this method to initialize the behavior. This method is called after all of the properties are set by the $create() method. Creating Debug and Release Scripts You might have noticed that the PopupHelp behavior uses two scripts named PopupHelpBehavior.js and PopupHelpBehavior.debug.js. However, you never create these two scripts. Instead, you only create a single script named PopupHelpBehavior.pre.js. The pre in PopupHelpBehavior.pre.js stands for preprocessor. When you build the Ajax Control Toolkit (or the sample Visual Studio Solution at the end of this blog entry), a build task named JSBuild generates the PopupHelpBehavior.js release script and PopupHelpBehavior.debug.js debug script automatically. The JSBuild preprocessor supports the following directives: #IF #ELSE #ENDIF #INCLUDE #LOCALIZE #DEFINE #UNDEFINE The preprocessor directives are used to mark code which should only appear in the debug version of the script. The directives are used extensively in the Microsoft Ajax Library. For example, the Microsoft Ajax Library Array.contains() method is created like this: $type.contains = function Array$contains(array, item) { //#if DEBUG var e = Function._validateParams(arguments, [ {name: "array", type: Array, elementMayBeNull: true}, {name: "item", mayBeNull: true} ]); if (e) throw e; //#endif return (indexOf(array, item) >= 0); } Notice that you add each of the preprocessor directives inside a JavaScript comment. The comment prevents Visual Studio from getting confused with its Intellisense. The release version, but not the debug version, of the PopupHelpBehavior script is also minified automatically by the Microsoft Ajax Minifier. The minifier is invoked by a build step in the project file. Conclusion The goal of this blog entry was to explain how you can create custom AJAX Control Toolkit controls. In the first part of this blog entry, you learned how to create the server-side portion of an Ajax Control Toolkit control. You learned how to derive a new control from the ExtenderControlBase class and decorate its properties with the necessary attributes. Next, in the second part of this blog entry, you learned how to create the client-side portion of an Ajax Control Toolkit control by creating a client-side behavior with JavaScript. You learned how to use the methods of the Microsoft Ajax Library to extend your client behavior from the BehaviorBase class. Download the Custom ACT Starter Solution

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