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  • ASP.net MVC Linq-To-SQL Many-To-Many Field Binding

    - by user336858
    Hi there, The short version of this question is "Is there a way to gracefully handle database insertion for an object that has a many-to-many field that has been set up in a partial class?" Apologies if it's been asked before. Example Suppose I have a typical MVC setup with the tables: Posts {PostID, ...} Categories {CategoryID, ...} A post can have more than one category, and a category can identify more than one post. Thus suppose further that I need an extra table: PostCategories {PostID, CategoryID, ...} This handles the many-to-many relationship between posts and categories. As far as I know, there's no way to do this in Linq-to-SQL right now so I have to shoehorn it in by adding a partial Post class to the project to add that functionality. Something like: public partial class Post { public IEnumerable<Category> Categories{ get { ... } set { ... } } } So I can now create a "Create" view that automatically populates a "Categories" UI item. This is where the trouble starts. So here's my question: How do you get automatic object model binding to work cleanly with an object that has a many-to-many relationship to control? The workaround that makes many-to-many relationships possible relies on the Post object having a PostID in order to be associated with CategoryID(s), which is only issued after the Post object has been submitted for validation and insertion. Bit of a Catch22 here. Any terminology, links, or tips you can provide would be tremendously helpful!

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  • How do I implement aasm in Rails 3 for what I want it to do?

    - by marcamillion
    I am a Rails n00b and have been advised that in order for me to keep track of the status of my user's accounts (i.e. paid, unpaid (and therefore disabled), free trial, etc.) I should use an 'AASM' gem. So I found one that seems to be the most popular: https://github.com/rubyist/aasm But the instructions are pretty vague. I have a Users model and a Plan model. User's model manages everything you might expect (username, password, first name, etc.). Plan model manages the subscription plan that users should be assigned to (with the restrictions). So I am trying to figure out how to use the AASM gem to do what I want to do, but no clue where to start. Do I create a new model ? Then do I setup a relationship between my User model and the model for AASM ? How do I setup a relationship? As in, a user 'has_many' states ? That doesn't seem to make much sense to me. Any guidance would be really appreciated. Thanks. Edit: If anyone else is confused by AASMs like myself, here is a nice explanation of their function in Rails by the fine folks at Envy Labs: http://blog.envylabs.com/2009/08/the-rails-state-machine/ Edit2: How does this look: include AASM aasm_column :current_state aasm_state :paid aasm_state :free_trial aasm_state :disabled #this is for accounts that have exceed free trial and have not paid #aasm_state :free_acct aasm_event :pay do transitions :to => :paid, :from => [:free_trial, :disabled] transitions :to => :disabled, :from => [:free_trial, :paid] end

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  • Mapping relationships from multiple databases in NHibernate

    - by mannish
    I have a multi-database application configured with NHibernate. The entities that correspond to tables from each database are in their own separate assemblies (an assembly per database if you will). I have a need/desire to relate an entity from one database to an entity of another database. Everything up to this point works as I want it to (the application handles multiple session factories, etc.). The relationship I want is many-to-one, but in reality my application only cares about one side of the relationship (for reasons that aren't relevant). The relevant entities are Project and PMProject, where a Project HAS A PMProject. When I map the many-to-one, I get the following error: NHibernate.MappingException: An association from the table PROJECTS refers to an unmapped class: SDMS.PPRM.PMProject The Project mapping itself reads (ignore the funky column naming; it's an Oracle db): <many-to-one name="PMProject" class="SDMS.PPRM.PMProject" column="PM_PROJECT_ID" cascade="none" /> In the class attribute, I'm referencing the appropriate assembly, but I get that error which seems to tell me it simply can't find the mapping file for PMProject. But that file exists (it's set as embedded resource), the session factory instantiation works without fail; so I'm at a loss on how to tell the Project mapping how/where to look for the appropriate mapping. Is there something I'm missing? A better way to go about this? Thanks in advance.

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  • IOS : BAD ACCESS when trying to add a new Entity object

    - by Maverick447
    So i'm using coredata to model my relationships . This is the model in brief Type A can have one or more types of type B Type B has a inverse relationship of being associated with one of type A Type B can have one or more types of type C Type C has a inverse relationship of being associated with one of type B From a UI standpoint , I have a Navigation controller with controllers that successively sets up the first A object (VC-1) , then another viewcontroller (VC-2) creates a B object ( I pass in the A object to this controller) and the B object is added to the A object . Similarly the same thing happens with B and C . The third Viewcontroller (VC3) first creates a C object and assigns it to the passed B Object . Also between these viewcontrollers the managedObjectCOntext is also passed . SO my use case is such that while viewcontroller (VC-3) is the top controller a button action will keep creating multiple objects of type C and add them to the same type B object that was passed . Also as part of this function I save the managedObject context after saving each type C . e.g. code in viewcontroller 3 - (void) SaveNewTypeC { TypeC *newtypeC = (Question*)[NSEntityDescription insertNewObjectForEntityForName:@"TypeC" inManagedObjectContext:managedObjectContext]; [newtypeC setProp1:] ; [newtypeC setProp2:] .. .. **[typeBObject addTypeCInTypeBObject:newtypeC];** [section setTotalCObjectCount:[ NSNumber numberWithInt:typeCIndex++]]; NSError *error = nil; if (![managedObjectContext save:&error]) { // Handle error NSLog(@"Unresolved error %@, %@, %@", error, [error userInfo],[error localizedDescription]); exit(-1); // Fail } [newtypeC release]; } - (IBAction)selectedNewButton:(id)sender { [self SaveNewTypeC]; [self startRepeatingTimer]; } The BAD ACCESS seems to appear when the bold line above executes Relating to some HashValue . Any clues on resolving this would be helpful .

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  • manyToOne is creating new products

    - by user788721
    I am trying to implement Sylius Cart Bundle, but every time I add a product to the cart, a new product is created. This is probably link to my line: cascade: ["persist", "remove"] In my YAML File: Pharmacie\FrontBundle\Entity\CartItem: type: entity table: app_cart_item manyToOne: produit: targetEntity: Pharmacie\FrontBundle\Entity\Product cascade: ["persist", "remove"] joinColumn: name: product_id referencedColumnName: id But if take it off, I get an error: A new entity was found through the relationship 'Pharmacie\FrontBundle\Entity\CartItem#produit' that was not configured to cascade persist operations for entity: 3test2. To solve this issue: Either explicitly call EntityManager#persist() on this unknown entity or configure cascade persist this association in the mapping for example @ManyToOne(..,cascade={"persist"}) According to the doctrine doc, this error occurs when you set a new object. But I am only getting an existing object By ID: $product = $this->getProductRepository()->find($productId); $item->setProduit($product); //this generates the error $item->setUnitPrice(5); //this works fine I don't understand why it's save as a new object. If I use merge instead of persist, I get the same error: A new entity was found through the relationship...

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  • Doctrine 2 entity cannot be saved with its many-to-many related entities

    - by user1333185
    I'm writing a project in ZF and have many-to-many related accounts and videos entities and I provide the account with the videos collection. When I try to save the account I receive the following error: A new entity was found through the relationship 'Entities\Account#playlistVideos' that was not configured to cascade persist operations for entity: Entities\Video@000000004d5f02ef00000000196757dc. Explicitly persist the new entity or configure cascading persist operations on the relationship. If you cannot find out which entity causes the problem implement 'Entities\Video#__toString()' to get a clue. I found a suggested solution with cascade={"persist"} which should allow videos to be saved together with the account by only specifying $this-em-persist($account) but then I get the error: Fatal error: method_exists(): The script tried to execute a method or access a property of an incomplete object. Please ensure that the class definition "Proxies\EntitiesAccountProxy" of the object you are trying to operate on was loaded before unserialize() gets called or provide a __autoload() function to load the class definition in... The same happens when I try to manually persist videos and account. Thank you for the help in advance.

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  • c# - what approach can I use to extend a group of classes that include implemented methods? (see des

    - by Greg
    Hi, I want to create an extendible package I am writing that has Topology, Node & Relationship classes. The idea is these base classes would have the various methods in them necessary to base graph traversal methods etc. I would then like to be able to reuse this by extending the package. For example the base requirements might see Relationship with a parentNode & childNode. Topology would have a List of Nodes and List of Relationships. Topology would have methods like FindChildren(int depth). Then the usage would be to extend these such that additional attributes for Node and Relationships could be added etc. QUESTION - What would be the best approach to package & expose the base level classes/methods? (it's kind of like a custom collection but with multiple facets). Would the following concepts come into play: Interfaces - would this be a good idea to have ITopology, INode etc, or is this not required as the user would extend these classes anyway? Abstract Classes - would the base classes be abstract classes Custom Generic Collection - would some approach using this concept assist (but how would this work if there are the 3 different classes) thanks

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  • NotApplicable marker with display pattern

    - by Jeff Barger
    Ok, so I'm pretty new to Cocoa, especially Bindings, but here's what I'm trying to do. I've got a Core Data model consisting of two entities: Category and Item. Category has a to-many relationship to Item called children, and Item has a relationship to Category called parent. Item has two attributes that Category does not have: quantity and desiredQuantity. What I'd like to do is display the tree in an NSOutlineView with two columns. One column is bound to the name of either the Category or the Item. I want to the second column to display something along the lines of 2 of 5 for the Item rows and nothing at all for the Category rows. When I use a display pattern, the Category rows end up showing of I noticed that if I don't use a display pattern for the second column, and instead just bind its Value to either the quantity or the desiredQuantity, the Category rows show nothing; its only if I try to use the display pattern. How can I make it display nothing for the Category rows and still use the display pattern? Or can I? Edit: I guess I didn't explain what the NotApplicable marker has to do with anything - Category does have properties for quantity and desiredQuantity, but they just return NSNotApplicableMarker.

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  • JPA returning null for deleted items from a set

    - by Jon
    This may be related to my question from a few days ago, but I'm not even sure how to explain this part. (It's an entirely different parent-child relationship.) In my interface, I have a set of attributes (Attribute) and valid values (ValidValue) for each one in a one-to-many relationship. In the Spring MVC frontend, I have a page for an administrator to edit these values. Once it's submitted, if any of these fields (as <input> tags) are blank, I remove the ValidValue object like so: Set<ValidValue> existingValues = new HashSet<ValidValue>(attribute.getValidValues()); Set<ValidValue> finalValues = new HashSet<ValidValue>(); for(ValidValue validValue : attribute.getValidValues()) { if(!validValue.getValue().isEmpty()) { finalValues.add(validValue); } } existingValues.removeAll(finalValues); for(ValidValue removedValue : existingValues) { getApplicationDataService().removeValidValue(removedValue); } attribute.setValidValues(finalValues); getApplicationDataService().modifyAttribute(attribute); The problem is that while the database is updated appropriately, the next time I query for the Attribute objects, they're returned with an extra entry in their ValidValue set -- a null, and thus, the next time I iterate through the values to display, it shows an extra blank value in the middle. I've confirmed that this happens at the point of a merge or find, at the point of "Execute query ReadObjectQuery(entity.Attribute). Here's the code I'm using to modify the database (in the ApplicationDataService): public void modifyAttribute(Attribute attribute) { getJpaTemplate().merge(attribute); } public void removeValidValue(ValidValue removedValue) { ValidValue merged = getJpaTemplate().merge(removedValue); getJpaTemplate().remove(merged); } Here are the relevant parts of the entity classes: Entity @Table(name = "attribute") public class Attribute { @OneToMany(cascade = CascadeType.ALL, fetch = FetchType.LAZY, mappedBy = "attribute") private Set<ValidValue> validValues = new HashSet<ValidValue>(0); } @Entity @Table(name = "valid_value") public class ValidValue { @ManyToOne(fetch = FetchType.LAZY) @JoinColumn(name = "attr_id", nullable = false) private Attribute attribute; }

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  • FluentNHibernate: multiple one-to-many relationships between the same entities.

    - by Venemo
    Hi, I'm working on a bug tracking application. There are tickets, and each ticket has an opener user and an assigned user. So, basically, I have two entities, which have two many-to-one relationships with each other. Their schematic is this: User: public class User { public virtual int Id { get; private set; } ... public virtual IList<Ticket> OpenedTickets { get; set; } public virtual IList<Ticket> AssignedTickets { get; set; } } Ticket: public class Ticket { public virtual int Id { get; protected set; } ... [Required] public virtual User OpenerUser { get; set; } public virtual User AssignedUser { get; set; } } I use FluentNHibernate's auto mapping feature. The problem is, that no matter whether relationship I set, on the side of the User, both collections always contain the same data. I guess Fluent can't tell which end of which relationship belongs to where. I googled around but haven't found anything useful. Could anyone help me, please?

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  • Why is a DataViewManager not sorting?

    - by Alarion
    First off, a quick rundown of what the code is doing. I have two tables: Companies and Clients. There is a one to many relationship between Companies and Clients (one company can have many clients). In some processing logic, I have both tables loaded into a DataSet - each are DataTables. I have added a DataRelation to set the relationship, and it works when I use GetChildRows on a record from the Companies table. However, I need to sort the records returned. After googling around some it looks like the DataViewManager is the way to go, and I have examined several basic examples. However, I cannot get my rows sorted. Am I missing something, or am I not using this how it is supposed to be used? Example code: Dim ldvmManager As New DataViewManager(mdsData) ldvmManager.DataViewSettings("Companies").Sort = "comName ASC" ldvmManager.DataViewSettings("Clients").ApplyDefaultSort = False ldvmManager.DataViewSettings("Clients").Sort = "entLastName ASC, entFirstName ASC" For Each mdrCurrentCompany in ldvmManager.DataViewSettings("Companies").Table.Rows Dim ldrClients() as DataRow = mdrCurrentCompany.GetChildRows("CompaniesClients") Next No matter what I do, the first Client returned has a last name that starts with a 'B' and the second has one that starts with a 'A'. From there, the order is all mixed up. If I use my entire data instead of the subset I was using to test with, the first Client returned has a last name that starts with 'J'. It seems like it is still using whatever default sort was being used before I tried to use the DataViewManager. Any ideas?

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  • Risky Business with LINQ to SQL and OR Designer?

    - by Toadmyster
    I have two tables with a one to many relationship in SQL 2008. The first table (BBD) PK | BBDataID | int       | Floor_Qty | tinyint       | Construct_Year | char(4)       | etc, etc describes the data common to all buildings and the second (BBDCerts) PK | BBDCertsID | int       | BBDataID | int       | Certification_Type | varchar(20)       | etc, etc is a collection of certifications for a particular building. Thus, the primary key in BBD (BBDataID) is mapped to the corresponding field in BBDCerts via an FK relationship, but BBDCertsID is the second table's primary key and BBDataID is not because it will not be unique. My problem is that I want to be able to use the OR generated data context to get at the list of certs when I access a particular record in the BBD table. For instance: Dim vals = (From q in db.BBD Where q.BBDataID = x Select q.Floor_Qty, q.Construct_Year, q.BBDCerts).SingleOrDefault and later be able to access a particular certification like this: vals.BBDCerts.Certification_Type.First Now, the automatic associations created when the SQL tables are dropped on the design surface don't generate the EntityRef associations that are needed to access the other table using the dot notation. So, I have to use the OR designer to make the BBDCerts BBDataID a primary key (this doesn't affect the actual database), and then manually change the association properties to the appropriate OneToMany settings. There might be a better way to approach this solution but my question is, is the way I've done it safe? I've done a barrage of tests and the correct cert is referenced or updated every time. Frankly, the whole thing makes me nervous.

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  • The best way to return related data in a SQL statement

    - by Darvis Lombardo
    I have a question on the best method to get back to a piece of data that is in a related table on the other side of a many-to-many relationship table. My first method uses joins to get back to the data, but because there are multiple matching rows in the relationship table, I had to use a TOP 1 to get a single row result. My second method uses a subquery to get the data but this just doesn't feel right. So, my question is, which is the preferred method, or is there a better method? The script needed to create the test tables, insert data, and run the two queries is below. Thanks for your advice! Darvis -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- Create Tables -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- DECLARE @TableA TABLE ( [A_ID] [int] IDENTITY(1,1) NOT NULL, [Description] [varchar](50) NULL) DECLARE @TableB TABLE ( [B_ID] [int] IDENTITY(1,1) NOT NULL, [A_ID] [int] NOT NULL, [Description] [varchar](50) NOT NULL) DECLARE @TableC TABLE ( [C_ID] [int] IDENTITY(1,1) NOT NULL, [Description] [varchar](50) NOT NULL) DECLARE @TableB_C TABLE ( [B_ID] [int] NOT NULL, [C_ID] [int] NOT NULL) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- Insert Test Data -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- INSERT INTO @TableA VALUES('A-One') INSERT INTO @TableA VALUES('A-Two') INSERT INTO @TableA VALUES('A-Three') INSERT INTO @TableB (A_ID, Description) VALUES(1,'B-One') INSERT INTO @TableB (A_ID, Description) VALUES(1,'B-Two') INSERT INTO @TableB (A_ID, Description) VALUES(1,'B-Three') INSERT INTO @TableB (A_ID, Description) VALUES(2,'B-Four') INSERT INTO @TableB (A_ID, Description) VALUES(2,'B-Five') INSERT INTO @TableB (A_ID, Description) VALUES(3,'B-Six') INSERT INTO @TableC VALUES('C-One') INSERT INTO @TableC VALUES('C-Two') INSERT INTO @TableC VALUES('C-Three') INSERT INTO @TableB_C (B_ID, C_ID) VALUES(1, 1) INSERT INTO @TableB_C (B_ID, C_ID) VALUES(2, 1) INSERT INTO @TableB_C (B_ID, C_ID) VALUES(3, 1) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- Get result - method 1 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- SELECT TOP 1 C.*, A.Description FROM @TableC C JOIN @TableB_C BC ON BC.C_ID = C.C_ID JOIN @TableB B ON B.B_ID = BC.B_ID JOIN @TableA A ON B.A_ID = A.A_ID WHERE C.C_ID = 1 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- Get result - method 2 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- SELECT C.*, (SELECT A.Description FROM @TableA A WHERE EXISTS (SELECT * FROM @TableB_C BC JOIN @TableB B ON B.B_ID = BC.B_ID WHERE BC.C_ID = C.C_ID AND B.A_ID = A.A_ID)) FROM @TableC C WHERE C.C_ID = 1

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  • dm_exec_query_stats returning stale data?

    - by VoiceOfUnreason
    I've been testing my app on a SQL Server 2005 database, and am trying to establish a preliminary picture of the query performance using sys.dm_exec_query_stats. Problem: there's a particular query that I'm interested in, because total_elapsed_time and last_elapsed_time are both large numbers. When I tickle my app to invoke that query (this runs successfully), then refresh my view of the stats, I find that 1) execution_count has incremented (expected) 2) last_execution_time has updated to now (expected) 3) last_elapsed_time is still a large value (not expected - I anticipated a new value) 4) total_elapsed_time is unchanged (contradiction?) If last_elapsed_time refers to the execution that happened @ last_execution_time, then the total_elapsed_time should have increased? This documentation: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms189741(SQL.90).aspx tells me that last_execution_time is the last time the plan was executed, and last_elapsed_time comes from the "most recently executed plan", but doesn't tell me why those might be different. The query itself is uncomplicated (SELECT/WHERE/ORDER BY - parameters appearing in the where clause, but no clever operations), the table has maybe 25 rows in it right now. Questions: 1) What's the real relationship between execution_count, last_execution_time, and last_elapsed_time? 2) Where is the documentation of this relationship (manual, third party book, blog, bug ticket, stone tablets...) ?

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  • Data transformation question

    - by tkm
    I have data composed of a list of employers and a list of workers. Each has a many-to-many relationship with the other (so an employer can have many workers, and a worker can have many employers). The way the data is retrieved (and given to me) is as follows: each employer has an array of workers. In other words: employer n has: worker x, worker y etc. So I have a bunch of employer objects each containing an array of workers. I need to transform this data (and basically invert the relationship). I need to have a bunch of worker objects, each containing and array of employers. In other words: worker x has: employer n1, employer n2 etc. The context is hypothetical so please don't comment on why I need this or why I am doing it this way. I would really just like help on the algorithm to perform this transformation (there isn't that much data so I would prefer readability over complex optimizations which reduce complexity). (Oh and I am using Java, but pseudocode would be fine). Thanks!

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  • PHP: Need help with simple XML.

    - by Jack
    I am beginner in PHP. I am trying to parse this xml file. <relationship> <target> <following type="boolean">true</following> <followed_by type="boolean">true</followed_by> <screen_name>xxxx</screen_name> <id type="integer">xxxx</id> </target> </relationship> I need to get the value of the field 'following type="boolean" ' and here's my code - $xml = simplexml_load_string($response); foreach($xml->children() as $child) { if ($child->getName() == 'target') { foreach($child->children() as $child_1) if ( $child_1->getName() == 'following') { $is_my_friend = (bool)$child_1; break; } break; } } but I am not getting the correct output. I think the ' type="boolean" ' part of the field is creating problems. I know this might be a very trivial problem. Kindly bear with my ignorance. Please help.

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  • Auto-creating a "link" table between 2 main tables (ex table EmployeeProject from Employee and Project tables)

    - by user573382
    Hello! I have these 2 tables, Medication containing: IDMedication, IDCategory, Name, and Supplier, containing: IDSupplier, Name. I want to automatically create a relationship table, MedicationSupplier, containing: IDMedication and IDSupplier as keys, Price, and Quantity. My idea was to have a main page where i request the following data: (Medication)Name, IDCAtegory, (Supplier)Name, Price, Quantity. I'm not sure if i'm doing the right thing here. So this is what i'm receiveing in the .php where i do the insert: $Denumire=$_POST['Denumire']; //Medication Name $IDCategorie=$_POST['IDCategorie']; //IDCategory $Nume=$_POST['Nume']; //Supplier Name $Pret=$_POST['Pret']; //Price $Stoc=$_POST['Stoc']; //Quantity And this is my insert: $q_produse = "INSERT INTO produse VALUES ('','$IDCategorie','$Denumire')"; $q_prodfurniz = "INSERT INTO produsfurnizor VALUES ('','$IDFurnizor','$Pret','$Stoc')"; mysql_query($q_produse) or die($error); mysql_query($q_prodfurniz) or die($error); mysql_close(); My main problem at the moment is that i don't know how to insert IDMedication in the relationship table. Any help / suggestions of improving my code would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

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  • Is there a Telecommunications Reference Architecture?

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

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

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

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  • How many MSDN accounts per MSDN subscription?

    - by ladenedge
    We recently bought a handful of MSDN subscriptions. Should we have received one MSDN account per subscription? Or must all of our subscriptions be managed through a single account? (In case you're curious about why we can't just examine whatever we received from Microsoft, the problem is that engineering and IT have a very antagonistic relationship around here.)

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  • Linux installation analysis

    - by blunders
    "Ending company IT Admin relationship" has a good checklist for taking over an existing IT system, but I'm wondering as it relates to Linux: What is the most effective way to assess the scope of existing custom configurations, installs, scripts, etc done? Is there any software that will check if the kernel, system files, etc mirror the default files for the version installed? At this point I don't know what distro of Linux the server (though using Netcraft I do know the server appears to be Linux) -- so it's possible without knowing that information that this would be a hard question to answer.

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  • mysql master-slave setup with synchronous replication

    - by imaginative
    I have a very trivial mysql master-slave setup going on between two servers. The problem is, replication is asynchronous, and this can cause issues (even on a low latency link), if the master server was to crash after a COMMIT before the replication thread from the slave was able to fetch the last bin log. Is there anyway to force mysql to do synchronous commits so that data consistency is guaranteed in a mysql-slave relationship?

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  • IIS/ASP.NET performance incident - Perfmon Current Annonymous Users going through roof but Requests/sec low

    - by Laurence
    Setup: ASP.NET 4.0 website on IIS 6.0 on Win 2003 64 bit, 8xCPUs, 16GB memory, separate SQL 2005 DB server. Had a serious slowdown today with any otherwise fairly well performing ASP.NET site. For a period of a couple of hours all page requests were taking a very long time to be served - e.g. 30-60s compared to usual 2s. The w3wp.exe's CPU and memory usage on the webserver was not much higher than normal. The application pool was not in the middle of recycling (and it hadn't recycled for several hours). Bottlenecks in the database were ruled out - no blocks occurring and query results were being returned quickly. I couldn't make any sense of it and set up the following Perfmon counters: Current Anonymous Users (for site in question) Get requests/sec (ditto) Requests/sec for the ASP.NET application running the site Get requests/sec was averaging 100-150. Requests/sec for ASP.NET was averaging 5-10. However Current Anonymous Users was around 200. And then as I was watching, the Current Anonymous Users began to climb steeply going up to about 500 within a few minutes. All this time Get requests/sec & Requests/sec for ASP.NET was if anything going down. I did a whole load of things (in a panic!) to try to get the site working, like shutting it down, recycling the app pool, and adding another worker process to the pool. I also extended the expiration time for content (in IIS under HTTP Headers) in an attempt to lower the number of requests for static files (there are a lot of images on the site). The site is now back to normal, and the counters are fairly steady and reading (added Current Connections counter): Current Anonymous Users : average 30 Get requests/sec : average 100 Requests/sec for ASP.NET : 5 Current Connections : average 300 I have also observed an inverse relationship between Get requests/sec & Current Anonymous Users. Usually both are fairly steady but there will be short periods when Get requests/sec will go down dramatically and Current Anonymous Users will go up in a perfect mirror image. Then they will flip back to their usual levels. So, my questions are: Thinking of the original performance issue - if w3wp.exe CPU, memory usage were normal and there was no DB bottleneck, what could explain page requests taking 20 times longer to be served than usual? What other counters should I be looking at if this happens again? What explains the inverse relationship between Get requests/sec & Current Anonymous Users? What could explain Current Anonymous Users going from 200 to 500 within a few minutes? Many thanks for any insight into this.

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  • Any issues with computer on one domain in a separate forest and user account in another domain/forest?

    - by TheCleaner
    I have a few of my sites with a trust relationship among two different forests with a single domain in each AD forest. I'll skip all the politics and details that don't matter and just ask the question: Will having a machine with a computer account in one domain and their user account in another cause any issues? (besides GPO behavior that would need to be understood such as their computer getting a GPO applied from the computer's domain, and their user account getting a GPO applied from their user domain)

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  • Self-relation messes up contents in fetching

    - by holographix
    Hi folks, I'm dealing with an annoying problem in core data I've got a table named Character, which is made as follows I'm filling the table in various steps: 1) fill the attributes of the table 2) fill the Character Relation (charRel) FYI charRel is defined as follows I'm feeding the contents by pulling the data from an xml, the feeding code is this curStr = [[NSMutableString stringWithString:[curStr stringByTrimmingCharactersInSet:[NSCharacterSet whitespaceAndNewlineCharacterSet]]] retain]; NSLog(@"Parsing relation within these keys %@, in order to get'em associated",curStr); NSArray *chunks = [curStr componentsSeparatedByString: @","]; for( NSString *relId in chunks ) { NSLog(@"Associating %@ with id %@",[currentCharacter valueForKey:@"character_id"], relId); NSFetchRequest *request = [[NSFetchRequest alloc] init]; NSPredicate *predicate = [NSPredicate predicateWithFormat:@"character_id == %@", relId]; [request setEntity:[NSEntityDescription entityForName:@"Character" inManagedObjectContext:[self managedObjectContext] ]]; [request setPredicate:predicate]; NSerror *error = nil; NSArray *results = [[self managedObjectContext] executeFetchRequest:request error:&error]; // error handling code if(error != nil) { NSLog(@"[SYMBOL CORRELATION]: retrieving correlated symbol error: %@", [error localizedDescription]); } else if([results count] > 0) { Character *relatedChar = [results objectAtIndex:0]; // grab the first result in the stack, could be done better! [currentCharacter addCharRelObject:relatedChar]; //VICE VERSA RELATIONS NSArray *charRels = [relatedChar valueForKey:@"charRel"]; BOOL alreadyRelated = NO; for(Character *charRel in charRels) { if([[charRel valueForKey:@"character_id"] isEqual:[currentCharacter valueForKey:@"character_id"]]) { alreadyRelated = YES; break; } } if(!alreadyRelated) { NSLog(@"\n\t\trelating %@ with %@", [relatedChar valueForKey:@"character_id"], [currentCharacter valueForKey:@"character_id"]); [relatedChar addCharRelObject:currentCharacter]; } } else { NSLog(@"[SYMBOL CORRELATION]: related symbol was not found! ##SKIPPING-->"); } [request release]; } NSLog(@"\t\t### TOTAL OF REALTIONS FOR ID %@: %d\n%@", [currentCharacter valueForKey:@"character_id"], [[currentCharacter valueForKey:@"charRel"] count], currentCharacter); error = nil; /* SAVE THE CONTEXT */ if (![managedObjectContext save:&error]) { NSLog(@"Whoops, couldn't save the symbol record: %@", [error localizedDescription]); NSArray* detailedErrors = [[error userInfo] objectForKey:NSDetailedErrorsKey]; if(detailedErrors != nil && [detailedErrors count] > 0) { for(NSError* detailedError in detailedErrors) { NSLog(@"\n################\t\tDetailedError: %@\n################", [detailedError userInfo]); } } else { NSLog(@" %@", [error userInfo]); } } at this point when I print out the values of the currentCharacter, everything looks perfect. every relation is in its place. in example in this log we can clearly see that this element has got 3 items in charRel: <Character: 0x5593af0> (entity: Character; id: 0x55938c0 <x-coredata://67288D50-D349-4B19-B7CB-F7AC4671AD61/Character/p86> ; data: { catRel = "<relationship fault: 0x9a29db0 'catRel'>"; charRel = ( "0x9a1f870 <x-coredata://67288D50-D349-4B19-B7CB-F7AC4671AD61/Character/p74>", "0x9a14bd0 <x-coredata://67288D50-D349-4B19-B7CB-F7AC4671AD61/Character/p109>", "0x558ba00 <x-coredata://67288D50-D349-4B19-B7CB-F7AC4671AD61/Character/p5>" ); "character_id" = 254; examplesRel = "<relationship fault: 0x9a29df0 'examplesRel'>"; meaning = "\n Left"; pinyin = "\n zu\U01d2"; "pronunciation_it" = "\n zu\U01d2"; strokenumber = 5; text = "\n \n <p>The most ancient form of this symbol"; unicodevalue = "\n \U5de6"; }) then when I'm in need of retrieving this item I perform an extraction, like this: // at first I get the single Character record NSFetchRequest *request = [[NSFetchRequest alloc] init]; NSError *error; NSPredicate *predicate = [NSPredicate predicateWithFormat:@"character_id == %@", self.char_id ]; [request setEntity:[NSEntityDescription entityForName:@"Character" inManagedObjectContext:_context ]]; [request setPredicate:predicate]; NSArray *fetchedObjs = [_context executeFetchRequest:request error:&error]; when, for instance, I print out in NSLog the contents of charRel NSArray *correlations = [singleCharacter valueForKey:@"charRel"]; NSLog(@"CHARACTER OBJECT \n%@", correlations); I get this Relationship fault for (<NSRelationshipDescription: 0x5568520>), name charRel, isOptional 1, isTransient 0, entity Character, renamingIdentifier charRel, validation predicates (), warnings (), versionHashModifier (null), destination entity Character, inverseRelationship (null), minCount 1, maxCount 99 on 0x6937f00 hope that I made myself clear. this thing is driving me insane, I've googled all over world, but I couldn't find a solution (and this make me think to as issue related to bad coding somehow :P). thank you in advance guys. k

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