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• Cobol: science and fiction

  - by user847

  There are a few threads about the relevance of the Cobol programming language on this forum, e.g. this thread links to a collection of them. What I am interested in here is a frequently repeated claim based on a study by Gartner from 1997: that there were around 200 billion lines of code in active use at that time! I would like to ask some questions to verify or falsify a couple of related points. My goal is to understand if this statement has any truth to it or if it is totally unrealistic. I apologize in advance for being a little verbose in presenting my line of thought and my own opinion on the things I am not sure about, but I think it might help to put things in context and thus highlight any wrong assumptions and conclusions I have made. Sometimes, the "200 billion lines" number is accompanied by the added claim that this corresponded to 80% of all programming code in any language in active use. Other times, the 80% merely refer to so-called "business code" (or some other vague phrase hinting that the reader is not to count mainstream software, embedded systems or anything else where Cobol is practically non-existent). In the following I assume that the code does not include double-counting of multiple installations of the same software (since that is cheating!). In particular in the time prior to the y2k problem, it has been noted that a lot of Cobol code is already 20 to 30 years old. That would mean it was written in the late 60ies and 70ies. At that time, the market leader was IBM with the IBM/370 mainframe. IBM has put up a historical announcement on his website quoting prices and availability. According to the sheet, prices are about one million dollars for machines with up to half a megabyte of memory. Question 1: How many mainframes have actually been sold? I have not found any numbers for those times; the latest numbers are for the year 2000, again by Gartner. :^( I would guess that the actual number is in the hundreds or the low thousands; if the market size was 50 billion in 2000 and the market has grown exponentially like any other technology, it might have been merely a few billions back in 1970. Since the IBM/370 was sold for twenty years, twenty times a few thousand will result in a couple of ten-thousands of machines (and that is pretty optimistic)! Question 2: How large were the programs in lines of code? I don't know how many bytes of machine code result from one line of source code on that architecture. But since the IBM/370 was a 32-bit machine, any address access must have used 4 bytes plus instruction (2, maybe 3 bytes for that?). If you count in operating system and data for the program, how many lines of code would have fit into the main memory of half a megabyte? Question 3: Was there no standard software? Did every single machine sold run a unique hand-coded system without any standard software? Seriously, even if every machine was programmed from scratch without any reuse of legacy code (wait ... didn't that violate one of the claims we started from to begin with???) we might have O(50,000 l.o.c./machine) * O(20,000 machines) = O(1,000,000,000 l.o.c.). That is still far, far, far away from 200 billion! Am I missing something obvious here? Question 4: How many programmers did we need to write 200 billion lines of code? I am really not sure about this one, but if we take an average of 10 l.o.c. per day, we would need 55 million man-years to achieve this! In the time-frame of 20 to 30 years this would mean that there must have existed two to three million programmers constantly writing, testing, debugging and documenting code. That would be about as many programmers as we have in China today, wouldn't it? Question 5: What about the competition? So far, I have come up with two things here: 1) IBM had their own programming language, PL/I. Above I have assumed that the majority of code has been written exclusively using Cobol. However, all other things being equal I wonder if IBM marketing had really pushed their own development off the market in favor of Cobol on their machines. Was there really no relevant code base of PL/I? 2) Sometimes (also on this board in the thread quoted above) I come across the claim that the "200 billion lines of code" are simply invisible to anybody outside of "governments, banks ..." (and whatnot). Actually, the DoD had funded their own language in order to increase cost effectiveness and reduce the proliferation of programming language. This lead to their use of Ada. Would they really worry about having so many different programming languages if they had predominantly used Cobol? If there was any language running on "government and military" systems outside the perception of mainstream computing, wouldn't that language be Ada? I hope someone can point out any flaws in my assumptions and/or conclusions and shed some light on whether the above claim has any truth to it or not.

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• how to pass an id number string to this class

  - by Phil

  I'm very much a vb person, but have had to use this id number class in c#. I got it from http://www.codingsanity.com/idnumber.htm : using System; using System.Text.RegularExpressions; namespace Utilities.SouthAfrica { /// <summary> /// Represents a South African Identity Number. /// valid number = 7707215230080 /// invalid test number = 1234567891234 /// /// </summary> [Serializable()] public class IdentityNumber { #region Enumerations /// <summary> /// Indicates a gender. /// </summary> public enum PersonGender { Female = 0, Male = 5 } public enum PersonCitizenship { SouthAfrican = 0, Foreign = 1 } #endregion #region Declarations static Regex _expression; Match _match; const string _IDExpression = @"(?<Year>[0-9][0-9])(?<Month>([0][1-9])|([1][0-2]))(?<Day>([0-2][0-9])|([3][0-1]))(?<Gender>[0-9])(?<Series>[0-9]{3})(?<Citizenship>[0-9])(?<Uniform>[0-9])(?<Control>[0-9])"; #endregion #region Constuctors /// <summary> /// Sets up the shared objects for ID validation. /// </summary> static IdentityNumber() { _expression = new Regex(_IDExpression, RegexOptions.Compiled | RegexOptions.Singleline); } /// <summary> /// Creates the ID number from a string. /// </summary> /// <param name="IDNumber">The string ID number.</param> public IdentityNumber(string IDNumber) { _match = _expression.Match(IDNumber.Trim()); } #endregion #region Properties /// <summary> /// Indicates the date of birth encoded in the ID Number. /// </summary> /// <exception cref="System.ArgumentException">Thrown if the ID Number is not usable.</exception> public DateTime DateOfBirth { get { if(IsUsable == false) { throw new ArgumentException("ID Number is unusable!", "IDNumber"); } int year = int.Parse(_match.Groups["Year"].Value); // NOTE: Do not optimize by moving these to static, otherwise the calculation may be incorrect // over year changes, especially century changes. int currentCentury = int.Parse(DateTime.Now.Year.ToString().Substring(0, 2) + "00"); int lastCentury = currentCentury - 100; int currentYear = int.Parse(DateTime.Now.Year.ToString().Substring(2, 2)); // If the year is after or at the current YY, then add last century to it, otherwise add // this century. // TODO: YY -> YYYY logic needs thinking about if(year > currentYear) { year += lastCentury; } else { year += currentCentury; } return new DateTime(year, int.Parse(_match.Groups["Month"].Value), int.Parse(_match.Groups["Day"].Value)); } } /// <summary> /// Indicates the gender for the ID number. /// </summary> /// <exception cref="System.ArgumentException">Thrown if the ID Number is not usable.</exception> public PersonGender Gender { get { if(IsUsable == false) { throw new ArgumentException("ID Number is unusable!", "IDNumber"); } int gender = int.Parse(_match.Groups["Gender"].Value); if(gender < (int) PersonGender.Male) { return PersonGender.Female; } else { return PersonGender.Male; } } } /// <summary> /// Indicates the citizenship for the ID number. /// </summary> /// <exception cref="System.ArgumentException">Thrown if the ID Number is not usable.</exception> public PersonCitizenship Citizenship { get { if(IsUsable == false) { throw new ArgumentException("ID Number is unusable!", "IDNumber"); } return (PersonCitizenship) Enum.Parse(typeof(PersonCitizenship), _match.Groups["Citizenship"].Value); } } /// <summary> /// Indicates if the IDNumber is usable or not. /// </summary> public bool IsUsable { get { return _match.Success; } } /// <summary> /// Indicates if the IDNumber is valid or not. /// </summary> public bool IsValid { get { if(IsUsable == true) { // Calculate total A by adding the figures in the odd positions i.e. the first, third, fifth, // seventh, ninth and eleventh digits. int a = int.Parse(_match.Value.Substring(0, 1)) + int.Parse(_match.Value.Substring(2, 1)) + int.Parse(_match.Value.Substring(4, 1)) + int.Parse(_match.Value.Substring(6, 1)) + int.Parse(_match.Value.Substring(8, 1)) + int.Parse(_match.Value.Substring(10, 1)); // Calculate total B by taking the even figures of the number as a whole number, and then // multiplying that number by 2, and then add the individual figures together. int b = int.Parse(_match.Value.Substring(1, 1) + _match.Value.Substring(3, 1) + _match.Value.Substring(5, 1) + _match.Value.Substring(7, 1) + _match.Value.Substring(9, 1) + _match.Value.Substring(11, 1)); b *= 2; string bString = b.ToString(); b = 0; for(int index = 0; index < bString.Length; index++) { b += int.Parse(bString.Substring(index, 1)); } // Calculate total C by adding total A to total B. int c = a + b; // The control-figure can now be determined by subtracting the ones in figure C from 10. string cString = c.ToString() ; cString = cString.Substring(cString.Length - 1, 1) ; int control = 0; // Where the total C is a multiple of 10, the control figure will be 0. if(cString != "0") { control = 10 - int.Parse(cString.Substring(cString.Length - 1, 1)); } if(_match.Groups["Control"].Value == control.ToString()) { return true; } } return false; } } #endregion } } Here is the code from my default.aspx.cs page: using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Web; using System.Web.UI; using System.Web.UI.WebControls; using Utilities.Southafrica; <- this is the one i added to public partial class _Default : System.Web.UI.Page { protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { var someNumber = new IdentityNumber("123456"); <- gives error } } Can someone please tell the syntax for how I pass an id number to the class? Thanks

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• how to pass an id number string to this class (asp.net, c#)

  - by Phil

  I'm very much a vb person, but have had to use this id number class in c#. I got it from http://www.codingsanity.com/idnumber.htm : using System; using System.Text.RegularExpressions; namespace Utilities.SouthAfrica { /// <summary> /// Represents a South African Identity Number. /// valid number = 7707215230080 /// invalid test number = 1234567891234 /// /// </summary> [Serializable()] public class IdentityNumber { #region Enumerations /// <summary> /// Indicates a gender. /// </summary> public enum PersonGender { Female = 0, Male = 5 } public enum PersonCitizenship { SouthAfrican = 0, Foreign = 1 } #endregion #region Declarations static Regex _expression; Match _match; const string _IDExpression = @"(?<Year>[0-9][0-9])(?<Month>([0][1-9])|([1][0-2]))(?<Day>([0-2][0-9])|([3][0-1]))(?<Gender>[0-9])(?<Series>[0-9]{3})(?<Citizenship>[0-9])(?<Uniform>[0-9])(?<Control>[0-9])"; #endregion #region Constuctors /// <summary> /// Sets up the shared objects for ID validation. /// </summary> static IdentityNumber() { _expression = new Regex(_IDExpression, RegexOptions.Compiled | RegexOptions.Singleline); } /// <summary> /// Creates the ID number from a string. /// </summary> /// <param name="IDNumber">The string ID number.</param> public IdentityNumber(string IDNumber) { _match = _expression.Match(IDNumber.Trim()); } #endregion #region Properties /// <summary> /// Indicates the date of birth encoded in the ID Number. /// </summary> /// <exception cref="System.ArgumentException">Thrown if the ID Number is not usable.</exception> public DateTime DateOfBirth { get { if(IsUsable == false) { throw new ArgumentException("ID Number is unusable!", "IDNumber"); } int year = int.Parse(_match.Groups["Year"].Value); // NOTE: Do not optimize by moving these to static, otherwise the calculation may be incorrect // over year changes, especially century changes. int currentCentury = int.Parse(DateTime.Now.Year.ToString().Substring(0, 2) + "00"); int lastCentury = currentCentury - 100; int currentYear = int.Parse(DateTime.Now.Year.ToString().Substring(2, 2)); // If the year is after or at the current YY, then add last century to it, otherwise add // this century. // TODO: YY -> YYYY logic needs thinking about if(year > currentYear) { year += lastCentury; } else { year += currentCentury; } return new DateTime(year, int.Parse(_match.Groups["Month"].Value), int.Parse(_match.Groups["Day"].Value)); } } /// <summary> /// Indicates the gender for the ID number. /// </summary> /// <exception cref="System.ArgumentException">Thrown if the ID Number is not usable.</exception> public PersonGender Gender { get { if(IsUsable == false) { throw new ArgumentException("ID Number is unusable!", "IDNumber"); } int gender = int.Parse(_match.Groups["Gender"].Value); if(gender < (int) PersonGender.Male) { return PersonGender.Female; } else { return PersonGender.Male; } } } /// <summary> /// Indicates the citizenship for the ID number. /// </summary> /// <exception cref="System.ArgumentException">Thrown if the ID Number is not usable.</exception> public PersonCitizenship Citizenship { get { if(IsUsable == false) { throw new ArgumentException("ID Number is unusable!", "IDNumber"); } return (PersonCitizenship) Enum.Parse(typeof(PersonCitizenship), _match.Groups["Citizenship"].Value); } } /// <summary> /// Indicates if the IDNumber is usable or not. /// </summary> public bool IsUsable { get { return _match.Success; } } /// <summary> /// Indicates if the IDNumber is valid or not. /// </summary> public bool IsValid { get { if(IsUsable == true) { // Calculate total A by adding the figures in the odd positions i.e. the first, third, fifth, // seventh, ninth and eleventh digits. int a = int.Parse(_match.Value.Substring(0, 1)) + int.Parse(_match.Value.Substring(2, 1)) + int.Parse(_match.Value.Substring(4, 1)) + int.Parse(_match.Value.Substring(6, 1)) + int.Parse(_match.Value.Substring(8, 1)) + int.Parse(_match.Value.Substring(10, 1)); // Calculate total B by taking the even figures of the number as a whole number, and then // multiplying that number by 2, and then add the individual figures together. int b = int.Parse(_match.Value.Substring(1, 1) + _match.Value.Substring(3, 1) + _match.Value.Substring(5, 1) + _match.Value.Substring(7, 1) + _match.Value.Substring(9, 1) + _match.Value.Substring(11, 1)); b *= 2; string bString = b.ToString(); b = 0; for(int index = 0; index < bString.Length; index++) { b += int.Parse(bString.Substring(index, 1)); } // Calculate total C by adding total A to total B. int c = a + b; // The control-figure can now be determined by subtracting the ones in figure C from 10. string cString = c.ToString() ; cString = cString.Substring(cString.Length - 1, 1) ; int control = 0; // Where the total C is a multiple of 10, the control figure will be 0. if(cString != "0") { control = 10 - int.Parse(cString.Substring(cString.Length - 1, 1)); } if(_match.Groups["Control"].Value == control.ToString()) { return true; } } return false; } } #endregion } } Can someone please tell the syntax for how I pass an id number to the class? Thanks

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• Is there a better way to avoid an infinite loop using winforms?

  - by Hamish Grubijan

  I am using .Net 3.5 for now. Right now I am using a using trick to disable and enable events around certain sections of code. The user can change either days, hours, minutes or total minutes, and that should not cause an infinite cascade of events (e.g. minutes changing total, total changing minutes, etc.) While the code does what I want, there might be a better / more straight-forward way. Do you know of any? For brawny points: This control will be used by multiple teams - I do not want to make it embarrassing. I suspect that I do not need to reinvent the wheel when defining hours in a day, days in week, etc. Some other standard .Net library out there must have it. Any other remarks regarding code? This using (EventHacker.DisableEvents(this)) business - that must be a common pattern in .Net ... changing the setting temporarily. What is the name of it? I'd like to be able to refer to it in a comment and also read up more on current implementations. In the general case not only a handle to the thing being changed needs to be remembered, but also the previous state (in this case previous state does not matter - events are turned on and off unconditionally). Then there is also a possibility of multi-threaded hacking. One could also utilize generics to make the code arguably cleaner. Figuring all this out can lead to a multi-page blog post. I'd be happy to hear some of the answers. P.S. Does it seem like I suffer from obsessive compulsive disorder? Some people like to get things finished and move on; I like to keep them open ... there is always a better way. // Corresponding Designer class is omitted. using System; using System.Windows.Forms; namespace XYZ // Real name masked { interface IEventHackable { void EnableEvents(); void DisableEvents(); } public partial class PollingIntervalGroupBox : GroupBox, IEventHackable { private const int DAYS_IN_WEEK = 7; private const int MINUTES_IN_HOUR = 60; private const int HOURS_IN_DAY = 24; private const int MINUTES_IN_DAY = MINUTES_IN_HOUR * HOURS_IN_DAY; private const int MAX_TOTAL_DAYS = 100; private static readonly decimal MIN_TOTAL_NUM_MINUTES = 1; // Anything faster than once per minute can bog down our servers. private static readonly decimal MAX_TOTAL_NUM_MINUTES = (MAX_TOTAL_DAYS * MINUTES_IN_DAY) - 1; // 99 days should be plenty. // The value above was chosen so to not cause an overflow exception. // Watch out for it - numericUpDownControls each have a MaximumValue setting. public PollingIntervalGroupBox() { InitializeComponent(); InitializeComponentCustom(); } private void InitializeComponentCustom() { this.m_upDownDays.Maximum = MAX_TOTAL_DAYS - 1; this.m_upDownHours.Maximum = HOURS_IN_DAY - 1; this.m_upDownMinutes.Maximum = MINUTES_IN_HOUR - 1; this.m_upDownTotalMinutes.Maximum = MAX_TOTAL_NUM_MINUTES; this.m_upDownTotalMinutes.Minimum = MIN_TOTAL_NUM_MINUTES; } private void m_upDownTotalMinutes_ValueChanged(object sender, EventArgs e) { setTotalMinutes(this.m_upDownTotalMinutes.Value); } private void m_upDownDays_ValueChanged(object sender, EventArgs e) { updateTotalMinutes(); } private void m_upDownHours_ValueChanged(object sender, EventArgs e) { updateTotalMinutes(); } private void m_upDownMinutes_ValueChanged(object sender, EventArgs e) { updateTotalMinutes(); } private void updateTotalMinutes() { this.setTotalMinutes( MINUTES_IN_DAY * m_upDownDays.Value + MINUTES_IN_HOUR * m_upDownHours.Value + m_upDownMinutes.Value); } public decimal TotalMinutes { get { return m_upDownTotalMinutes.Value; } set { m_upDownTotalMinutes.Value = value; } } public decimal TotalHours { set { setTotalMinutes(value * MINUTES_IN_HOUR); } } public decimal TotalDays { set { setTotalMinutes(value * MINUTES_IN_DAY); } } public decimal TotalWeeks { set { setTotalMinutes(value * DAYS_IN_WEEK * MINUTES_IN_DAY); } } private void setTotalMinutes(decimal nTotalMinutes) { if (nTotalMinutes < MIN_TOTAL_NUM_MINUTES) { setTotalMinutes(MIN_TOTAL_NUM_MINUTES); return; // Must be carefull with recursion. } if (nTotalMinutes > MAX_TOTAL_NUM_MINUTES) { setTotalMinutes(MAX_TOTAL_NUM_MINUTES); return; // Must be carefull with recursion. } using (EventHacker.DisableEvents(this)) { // First set the total minutes this.m_upDownTotalMinutes.Value = nTotalMinutes; // Then set the rest this.m_upDownDays.Value = (int)(nTotalMinutes / MINUTES_IN_DAY); nTotalMinutes = nTotalMinutes % MINUTES_IN_DAY; // variable reuse. this.m_upDownHours.Value = (int)(nTotalMinutes / MINUTES_IN_HOUR); nTotalMinutes = nTotalMinutes % MINUTES_IN_HOUR; this.m_upDownMinutes.Value = nTotalMinutes; } } // Event magic public void EnableEvents() { this.m_upDownTotalMinutes.ValueChanged += this.m_upDownTotalMinutes_ValueChanged; this.m_upDownDays.ValueChanged += this.m_upDownDays_ValueChanged; this.m_upDownHours.ValueChanged += this.m_upDownHours_ValueChanged; this.m_upDownMinutes.ValueChanged += this.m_upDownMinutes_ValueChanged; } public void DisableEvents() { this.m_upDownTotalMinutes.ValueChanged -= this.m_upDownTotalMinutes_ValueChanged; this.m_upDownDays.ValueChanged -= this.m_upDownDays_ValueChanged; this.m_upDownHours.ValueChanged -= this.m_upDownHours_ValueChanged; this.m_upDownMinutes.ValueChanged -= this.m_upDownMinutes_ValueChanged; } // We give as little info as possible to the 'hacker'. private sealed class EventHacker : IDisposable { IEventHackable _hackableHandle; public static IDisposable DisableEvents(IEventHackable hackableHandle) { return new EventHacker(hackableHandle); } public EventHacker(IEventHackable hackableHandle) { this._hackableHandle = hackableHandle; this._hackableHandle.DisableEvents(); } public void Dispose() { this._hackableHandle.EnableEvents(); } } } }

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• View bound to paged collection view not updating all of the time.

  - by Thomas

  I new to silverlight and trying to make a business application using the mvvm pattern and ria services. I have a view model class that contains a PagedCollectoinView and it is set to the item source of a datagrid. When I update the PagedCollectionView the datagrid is only updated the first time then after that subsequent changes to the data to not reflect in the view until after another edit. Things seem to be delayed one edit. Below is a summarized example of my xaml and code behind. This is the code for my view model public class CustomerContactLinks : INotifyPropertyChanged { private ObservableCollection<CustomerContactLink> _CustomerContact; public ObservableCollection<CustomerContactLink> CustomerContact { get { if (_CustomerContact == null) _CustomerContact = new ObservableCollection<CustomerContactLink>(); return _CustomerContact; } set { _CustomerContact = value; } } private PagedCollectionView _CustomerContactPaged; public PagedCollectionView CustomerContactPaged { get { if (_CustomerContactPaged == null) _CustomerContactPaged = new PagedCollectionView(CustomerContact); return _CustomerContactPaged; } } private TicketSystemDataContext _ctx; public TicketSystemDataContext ctx { get { if (_ctx == null) _ctx = new TicketSystemDataContext(); return _ctx; } } public void GetAll() { ctx.Load(ctx.GetCustomerContactInfoQuery(), LoadCustomerContactsComplete, null); } private void LoadCustomerContactsComplete(LoadOperation<CustomerContactLink> lo) { foreach (var entity in lo.Entities) { CustomerContact.Add(entity as CustomerContactLink); } } #region INotifyPropertyChanged Members public event PropertyChangedEventHandler PropertyChanged; private void RaisePropertyChanged(string propertyName) { if (PropertyChanged != null) { this.PropertyChanged(this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs(propertyName)); } } #endregion } Here is the basics of my XAML <Data:DataGrid x:Name="GridCustomers" MinHeight="100" MaxWidth="1000" IsReadOnly="True" AutoGenerateColumns="False"> <Data:DataGrid.Columns> <Data:DataGridTextColumn Header="First Name" Binding="{Binding Customer.FirstName}" Width="105" /> <Data:DataGridTextColumn Header="MI" Binding="{Binding Customer.MiddleName}" Width="35" /> <Data:DataGridTextColumn Header="Last Name" Binding="{Binding Customer.LastName}" Width="105"/> <Data:DataGridTextColumn Header="Address1" Binding="{Binding Contact.Address1}" Width="130"/> <Data:DataGridTextColumn Header="Address2" Binding="{Binding Contact.Address2}" Width="130"/> <Data:DataGridTextColumn Header="City" Binding="{Binding Contact.City}" Width="110"/> <Data:DataGridTextColumn Header="State" Binding="{Binding Contact.State}" Width="50"/> <Data:DataGridTextColumn Header="Zip" Binding="{Binding Contact.Zip}" Width="45"/> <Data:DataGridTextColumn Header="Home" Binding="{Binding Contact.PhoneHome}" Width="85"/> <Data:DataGridTextColumn Header="Cell" Binding="{Binding Contact.PhoneCell}" Width="85"/> <Data:DataGridTextColumn Header="Email" Binding="{Binding Contact.Email}" Width="118"/> </Data:DataGrid.Columns> </Data:DataGrid> <DataForm:DataForm x:Name="CustomerDetails" Header="Customer Details" AutoGenerateFields="False" AutoEdit="False" AutoCommit="False" CommandButtonsVisibility="Edit" Width="1000" Margin="0,5,0,0"> <DataForm:DataForm.EditTemplate> </DataForm:DataForm.EditTemplate> </DataForm:DataForm> And here is my code behind public Customers() { InitializeComponent(); BusyDialogIndicator.IsBusy = true; Loaded += new RoutedEventHandler(Customers_Loaded); CustomerDetails.BeginningEdit += new EventHandler(CustomerDetails_BeginningEdit); } void CustomerDetails_BeginningEdit(object sender, System.ComponentModel.CancelEventArgs e) { CustomerContacts.CustomerContactPaged.EditItem(CustomerDetails.CurrentItem); } private void Customers_Loaded(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { CustomerContacts = new CustomerContactLinks(); CustomerContacts.GetAll(); GridCustomers.ItemsSource = CustomerContacts.CustomerContactPaged; GridCustomerPager.Source = CustomerContacts.CustomerContactPaged; GridCustomers.SelectionChanged += new SelectionChangedEventHandler(GridCustomers_SelectionChanged); BusyDialogIndicator.IsBusy = false; } void GridCustomers_SelectionChanged(object sender, SelectionChangedEventArgs e) { CustomerDetails.CurrentItem = GridCustomers.SelectedItem as CustomerContactLink; } private void SaveChanges_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { if (WebContext.Current.User.IsAuthenticated) { bool commited = CustomerDetails.CommitEdit(); if (commited && (!CustomerDetails.IsItemChanged && CustomerDetails.IsItemValid)) { CustomerContacts.Update(CustomerDetails.CurrentItem as CustomerContactLink); CustomerContacts.ctx.SubmitChanges(); CustomerContacts.CustomerContactPaged.CommitEdit(); CustomerContacts.CustomerContactPaged.Refresh(); (GridCustomers.ItemsSource as PagedCollectionView).Refresh(); } } }

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• How to use iterator in nested arraylist

  - by Muhammad Abrar

  I am trying to build an NFA with a special purpose of searching, which is totally different from regex. The State has following format class State implements List{ //GLOBAL DATA static int depth; //STATE VALUES String stateName; ArrayList<String> label = new ArrayList<>(); //Label for states //LINKS TO OTHER STATES boolean finalState; ArrayList<State> nextState ; // Link with multiple next states State preState; // previous state public State() { stateName = ""; finalState = true; nextState = new ArrayList<>(); } public void addlabel(String lbl) { if(!this.label.contains(lbl)) this.label.add(lbl); } public State(String state, String lbl) { this.stateName = state; if(!this.label.contains(lbl)) this.label.add(lbl); depth++; } public State(String state, String lbl, boolean fstate) { this.stateName = state; this.label.add(lbl); this.finalState = fstate; this.nextState = new ArrayList<>(); } void displayState() { System.out.print(this.stateName+" --> "); for(Iterator<String> it = label.iterator(); it.hasNext();) { System.out.print(it.next()+" , "); } System.out.println("\nNo of States : "+State.depth); } Next, the NFA class is public class NFA { static final String[] STATES= {"A","B","C","D","E","F","G","H","I","J","K","L","M" ,"N","O","P","Q","R","S","T","U","V","W","X","Y","Z"}; State startState; State currentState; static int level; public NFA() { startState = new State(); startState = null; currentState = new State(); currentState = null; startState = currentState; } /** * * @param st */ NFA(State startstate) { startState = new State(); startState = startstate; currentState = new State(); currentState = null; currentState = startState ; // To show that their is only one element in NFA } boolean insertState(State newState) { newState.nextState = new ArrayList<>(); if(currentState == null && startState == null ) //if empty NFA { newState.preState = null; startState = newState; currentState = newState; State.depth = 0; return true; } else { if(!Exist(newState.stateName))//Exist is used to check for duplicates { newState.preState = currentState ; currentState.nextState.add(newState); currentState = newState; State.depth++; return true; } } return false; } boolean insertState(State newState, String label) { newState.label.add(label); newState.nextState = null; newState.preState = null; if(currentState == null && startState == null) { startState = newState; currentState = newState; State.depth = 0; return true; } else { if(!Exist(newState.stateName)) { newState.preState = currentState; currentState.nextState.add(newState); currentState = newState; State.depth++; return true; } else { ///code goes here } } return false; } void markFinal(State s) { s.finalState = true; } void unmarkFinal(State s) { s.finalState = false; } boolean Exist(String s) { State temp = startState; if(startState.stateName.equals(s)) return true; Iterator<State> it = temp.nextState.iterator(); while(it.hasNext()) { Iterator<State> i = it ;//startState.nextState.iterator(); { while(i.hasNext()) { if(i.next().stateName.equals(s)) return true; } } //else // return false; } return false; } void displayNfa() { State st = startState; if(startState == null && currentState == null) { System.out.println("The NFA is empty"); } else { while(st != null) { if(!st.nextState.isEmpty()) { Iterator<State> it = st.nextState.iterator(); do { st.displayState(); st = it.next(); }while(it.hasNext()); } else { st = null; } } } System.out.println(); } /** * @param args the command line arguments */ /** * * @param args the command line arguments */ public static void main(String[] args) { // TODO code application logic here NFA l = new NFA(); State s = new State("A11", "a",false); NFA ll = new NFA(s); s = new State("A111", "a",false); ll.insertState(s); ll.insertState(new State("A1","0")); ll.insertState(new State("A1111","0")); ll.displayNfa(); int j = 1; for(int i = 0 ; i < 2 ; i++) { int rand = (int) (Math.random()* 10); State st = new State(STATES[rand],String.valueOf(i), false); if(l.insertState(st)) { System.out.println(j+" : " + STATES[rand]+" and "+String.valueOf(i)+ " inserted"); j++; } } l.displayNfa(); System.out.println("No of states inserted : "+ j--); } I want to do the following This program always skip to display the last state i.e. if there are 10 states inserted, it will display only 9. In exist() method , i used two iterator but i do not know why it is working I have no idea how to perform searching for the existing class name, when dealing with iterators. How should i keep track of current State, properly iterate through the nextState List, Label List in a depth first order. How to insert unique States i.e. if State "A" is inserted once, it should not insert it again (The exist method is not working) Best Regards

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• WCF Authentication on the Internet - HELP

  - by Eddie

  I have a WCF service using the basicHTTP binding. The service will be targeted to be deployed in production in a DMZ environment on a Windows Server 2008 64 bit running IIS 7.0 and is not in an Active Directory domain. The service will be accessed by a business partner over the Internet with SSL protection. Originally, I had built the service to use x.509 Message authentication with wsHTTPBinding and after a lot of problems I punted and decided to back up and use basicHTTP with UserName authentication. Result: same exact, obscure error message as I received with certificate mode. The service works perfectly inside our domain with the exact same authentication but as soon as I move it to the DMZ I get an error reading: "An unsecured or incorrectly secured fault was received from the other party. See the inner FaultException for the fault code and detail". The inner exception message is: "An error occurred when verifying security for the message." The services' web config with binding configuration is as follows: <services> <service behaviorConfiguration="HSSanoviaFacade.Service1Behavior" name="HSSanoviaFacade.HSSanoviaFacade"> <endpoint address="" binding="basicHttpBinding" contract="HSSanoviaFacade.IHSSanoviaFacade" bindingConfiguration="basicHttp"> <identity> <dns value="localhost" /> </identity> </endpoint> <endpoint address="mex" binding="mexHttpsBinding" contract="IMetadataExchange" /> <host> <baseAddresses> <add baseAddress="https://FULLY QUALIFIED HOST NAME CHANGED TO PROTECT/> </baseAddresses> </host> </service> </services> <bindings> <basicHttpBinding> <binding name="basicHttp"> <security mode="TransportWithMessageCredential"> <message clientCredentialType="UserName" /> </security> </binding> </basicHttpBinding> </bindings> <behaviors> <serviceBehaviors> <behavior name="HSSanoviaFacade.Service1Behavior"> <serviceMetadata httpsGetEnabled="True" /> <serviceDebug includeExceptionDetailInFaults="True" /> </behavior> </serviceBehaviors> </behaviors> The test client's configuration that gets the error: <bindings> <basicHttpBinding> <binding name="BasicHttpBinding_IHSSanoviaFacade" closeTimeout="00:01:00" openTimeout="00:01:00" receiveTimeout="00:10:00" sendTimeout="00:01:00" allowCookies="false" bypassProxyOnLocal="false" hostNameComparisonMode="StrongWildcard" maxBufferSize="65536" maxBufferPoolSize="524288" maxReceivedMessageSize="65536" messageEncoding="Text" textEncoding="utf-8" transferMode="Buffered" useDefaultWebProxy="true"> <readerQuotas maxDepth="32" maxStringContentLength="8192" maxArrayLength="16384" maxBytesPerRead="4096" maxNameTableCharCount="16384" /> <security mode="TransportWithMessageCredential"> <transport clientCredentialType="None" proxyCredentialType="None" realm="" /> <message clientCredentialType="UserName" algorithmSuite="Default" /> </security> </binding> </basicHttpBinding> </bindings> <client> <endpoint address="https://HOST NAME CHANGED TO PROTECT" binding="basicHttpBinding" bindingConfiguration="BasicHttpBinding_IHSSanoviaFacade" contract="MembersService.IHSSanoviaFacade" name="BasicHttpBinding_IHSSanoviaFacade" /> </client> As mentioned earlier, the service works perfectly on the domain and the production IIS box is not on a domain. I have been tweaking and pulling my hair out for 2 weeks now and nothing seems to work. If anyone can help I would appreciate it. Even a recommendation for a work around for authentication. I'd rather not use a custom authentication scheme but use built-in SOAP capabilities. The credentials pass in thru the proxy i.e. proxy.ClientCredentials.UserName.UserName and proxy.ClientCredentials.UserName.Password are valid accounts on both the internal domain in the test environment and as a machine account on the DMZ IIS box.

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• Uploading multiple files using Spring MVC 3.0.2 after HiddenHttpMethodFilter has been enabled

  - by Tiny

  I'm using Spring version 3.0.2. I need to upload multiple files using the multiple="multiple" attribute of a file browser such as, <input type="file" id="myFile" name="myFile" multiple="multiple"/> (and not using multiple file browsers something like the one stated by this answer, it indeed works I tried). Although no versions of Internet Explorer supports this approach unless an appropriate jQuery plugin/widget is used, I don't care about it right now (since most other browsers support this). This works fine with commons fileupload but in addition to using RequestMethod.POST and RequestMethod.GET methods, I also want to use other request methods supported and suggested by Spring like RequestMethod.PUT and RequestMethod.DELETE in their own appropriate places. For this to be so, I have configured Spring with HiddenHttpMethodFilter which goes fine as this question indicates. but it can upload only one file at a time even though multiple files in the file browser are chosen. In the Spring controller class, a method is mapped as follows. @RequestMapping(method={RequestMethod.POST}, value={"admin_side/Temp"}) public String onSubmit(@RequestParam("myFile") List<MultipartFile> files, @ModelAttribute("tempBean") TempBean tempBean, BindingResult error, Map model, HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) throws IOException, FileUploadException { for(MultipartFile file:files) { System.out.println(file.getOriginalFilename()); } } Even with the request parameter @RequestParam("myFile") List<MultipartFile> files which is a List of type MultipartFile (it can always have only one file at a time). I could find a strategy which is likely to work with multiple files on this blog. I have gone through it carefully. The solution below the section SOLUTION 2 – USE THE RAW REQUEST says, If however the client insists on using the same form input name such as ‘files[]‘ or ‘files’ and then populating that name with multiple files then a small hack is necessary as follows. As noted above Spring 2.5 throws an exception if it detects the same form input name of type file more than once. CommonsFileUploadSupport – the class which throws that exception is not final and the method which throws that exception is protected so using the wonders of inheritance and subclassing one can simply fix/modify the logic a little bit as follows. The change I’ve made is literally one word representing one method invocation which enables us to have multiple files incoming under the same form input name. It attempts to override the method protected MultipartParsingResult parseFileItems(List fileItems, String encoding) {} of the abstract class CommonsFileUploadSupport by extending the class CommonsMultipartResolver such as, package multipartResolver; import java.io.UnsupportedEncodingException; import java.util.HashMap; import java.util.Iterator; import java.util.List; import java.util.Map; import javax.servlet.ServletContext; import org.apache.commons.fileupload.FileItem; import org.springframework.util.StringUtils; import org.springframework.web.multipart.MultipartException; import org.springframework.web.multipart.MultipartFile; import org.springframework.web.multipart.commons.CommonsMultipartFile; import org.springframework.web.multipart.commons.CommonsMultipartResolver; final public class MultiCommonsMultipartResolver extends CommonsMultipartResolver { public MultiCommonsMultipartResolver() { } public MultiCommonsMultipartResolver(ServletContext servletContext) { super(servletContext); } @Override @SuppressWarnings("unchecked") protected MultipartParsingResult parseFileItems(List fileItems, String encoding) { Map<String, MultipartFile> multipartFiles = new HashMap<String, MultipartFile>(); Map multipartParameters = new HashMap(); // Extract multipart files and multipart parameters. for (Iterator it = fileItems.iterator(); it.hasNext();) { FileItem fileItem = (FileItem) it.next(); if (fileItem.isFormField()) { String value = null; if (encoding != null) { try { value = fileItem.getString(encoding); } catch (UnsupportedEncodingException ex) { if (logger.isWarnEnabled()) { logger.warn("Could not decode multipart item '" + fileItem.getFieldName() + "' with encoding '" + encoding + "': using platform default"); } value = fileItem.getString(); } } else { value = fileItem.getString(); } String[] curParam = (String[]) multipartParameters.get(fileItem.getFieldName()); if (curParam == null) { // simple form field multipartParameters.put(fileItem.getFieldName(), new String[] { value }); } else { // array of simple form fields String[] newParam = StringUtils.addStringToArray(curParam, value); multipartParameters.put(fileItem.getFieldName(), newParam); } } else { // multipart file field CommonsMultipartFile file = new CommonsMultipartFile(fileItem); if (multipartFiles.put(fileItem.getName(), file) != null) { throw new MultipartException("Multiple files for field name [" + file.getName() + "] found - not supported by MultipartResolver"); } if (logger.isDebugEnabled()) { logger.debug("Found multipart file [" + file.getName() + "] of size " + file.getSize() + " bytes with original filename [" + file.getOriginalFilename() + "], stored " + file.getStorageDescription()); } } } return new MultipartParsingResult(multipartFiles, multipartParameters); } } What happens is that the last line in the method parseFileItems() (the return statement) i.e. return new MultipartParsingResult(multipartFiles, multipartParameters); causes a compile-time error because the first parameter multipartFiles is a type of Map implemented by HashMap but in reality, it requires a parameter of type MultiValueMap<String, MultipartFile> It is a constructor of a static class inside the abstract class CommonsFileUploadSupport, public abstract class CommonsFileUploadSupport { protected static class MultipartParsingResult { public MultipartParsingResult(MultiValueMap<String, MultipartFile> mpFiles, Map<String, String[]> mpParams) { } } } The reason might be - this solution is about the Spring version 2.5 and I'm using the Spring version 3.0.2 which might be inappropriate for this version. I however tried to replace the Map with MultiValueMap in various ways such as the one shown in the following segment of code, MultiValueMap<String, MultipartFile>mul=new LinkedMultiValueMap<String, MultipartFile>(); for(Entry<String, MultipartFile>entry:multipartFiles.entrySet()) { mul.add(entry.getKey(), entry.getValue()); } return new MultipartParsingResult(mul, multipartParameters); but no success. I'm not sure how to replace Map with MultiValueMap and even doing so could work either. After doing this, the browser shows the Http response, HTTP Status 400 - type Status report message description The request sent by the client was syntactically incorrect (). Apache Tomcat/6.0.26 I have tried to shorten the question as possible as I could and I haven't included unnecessary code. How could be made it possible to upload multiple files after Spring has been configured with HiddenHttpMethodFilter? That blog indicates that It is a long standing, high priority bug. If there is no solution regarding the version 3.0.2 (3 or higher) then I have to disable Spring support forever and continue to use commons-fileupolad as suggested by the third solution on that blog omitting the PUT, DELETE and other request methods forever. Just curiously waiting for a solution and/or suggestion. Very little changes to the code in the parseFileItems() method inside the class MultiCommonsMultipartResolver might make it to upload multiple files but I couldn't succeed in my attempts (again with the Spring version 3.0.2 (3 or higher)).

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• On screen orientation loads again data with Async Task

  - by Zookey

  I make Android application with master/detail pattern. So I have ListActivity class which is FragmentActivity and ListFragment class which is Fragment It all works perfect, but when I change screen orientation it calls again AsyncTask and reload all data. Here is the code for ListActivity class where I handle all logic: @Override protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) { super.onCreate(savedInstanceState); setContentView(R.layout.activity_list); getActionBar().setDisplayHomeAsUpEnabled(true); getActionBar().setHomeButtonEnabled(true); getActionBar().setTitle("Dnevni horoskop"); if(findViewById(R.id.details_container) != null){ //Tablet mTwoPane = true; //Fragment stuff FragmentManager fm = getSupportFragmentManager(); FragmentTransaction ft = fm.beginTransaction(); DetailsFragment df = new DetailsFragment(); ft.add(R.id.details_container, df); ft.commit(); } pb = (ProgressBar) findViewById(R.id.pb_list); tvNoConnection = (TextView) findViewById(R.id.tv_no_internet); ivNoConnection = (ImageView) findViewById(R.id.iv_no_connection); list = (GridView) findViewById(R.id.gv_list); if(mTwoPane == true){ list.setNumColumns(1); //list.setPadding(16,16,16,16); } adapter = new CustomListAdapter(); list.setOnItemClickListener(new OnItemClickListener() { @Override public void onItemClick(AdapterView<?> arg0, View arg1, int position, long arg3) { pos = position; if(mTwoPane == false){ Bundle bundle = new Bundle(); bundle.putSerializable("zodiac", zodiacFeed); Intent i = new Intent(getApplicationContext(), DetailsActivity.class); i.putExtra("position", position); i.putExtras(bundle); startActivity(i); overridePendingTransition(R.anim.right_in, R.anim.right_out); } else if(mTwoPane == true){ DetailsFragment fragment = (DetailsFragment) getSupportFragmentManager().findFragmentById(R.id.details_container); fragment.setHoroscopeText(zodiacFeed.getItem(position).getText()); fragment.setLargeImage(zodiacFeed.getItem(position).getLargeImage()); fragment.setSign("Dnevni horoskop - "+zodiacFeed.getItem(position).getName()); fragment.setSignDuration(zodiacFeed.getItem(position).getDuration()); // inflate menu from xml /*if(menu != null){ MenuItem item = menu.findItem(R.id.share); Toast.makeText(getApplicationContext(), item.getTitle().toString(), Toast.LENGTH_SHORT).show(); }*/ } } }); if(!Utils.isConnected(getApplicationContext())){ pb.setVisibility(View.GONE); tvNoConnection.setVisibility(View.VISIBLE); ivNoConnection.setVisibility(View.VISIBLE); } //Calling AsyncTask to load data Log.d("TAG", "loading"); HoroscopeAsyncTask task = new HoroscopeAsyncTask(pb); task.execute(); } @Override public void onConfigurationChanged(Configuration newConfig) { // TODO Auto-generated method stub super.onConfigurationChanged(newConfig); } class CustomListAdapter extends BaseAdapter { private LayoutInflater layoutInflater; public CustomListAdapter() { layoutInflater = (LayoutInflater) getBaseContext().getSystemService( Context.LAYOUT_INFLATER_SERVICE); } public int getCount() { // TODO Auto-generated method stub // Set the total list item count return names.length; } public Object getItem(int arg0) { // TODO Auto-generated method stub return null; } public long getItemId(int arg0) { // TODO Auto-generated method stub return 0; } public View getView(int position, View convertView, ViewGroup parent) { // Inflate the item layout and set the views View listItem = convertView; int pos = position; zodiacItem = zodiacList.get(pos); if (listItem == null && mTwoPane == false) { listItem = layoutInflater.inflate(R.layout.list_item, null); } else if(mTwoPane == true){ listItem = layoutInflater.inflate(R.layout.tablet_list_item, null); } // Initialize the views in the layout ImageView iv = (ImageView) listItem.findViewById(R.id.iv_horoscope); iv.setScaleType(ScaleType.CENTER_CROP); TextView tvName = (TextView) listItem.findViewById(R.id.tv_zodiac_name); TextView tvDuration = (TextView) listItem.findViewById(R.id.tv_duration); iv.setImageResource(zodiacItem.getImage()); tvName.setText(zodiacItem.getName()); tvDuration.setText(zodiacItem.getDuration()); Animation animation = AnimationUtils.loadAnimation(getBaseContext(), R.anim.push_up); listItem.startAnimation(animation); animation = null; return listItem; } } private void getHoroscope() { String urlString = "http://balkanandroid.com/download/horoskop/examples/dnevnihoroskop.php"; try { HttpClient client = new DefaultHttpClient(); HttpPost post = new HttpPost(urlString); HttpResponse response = client.execute(post); resEntity = response.getEntity(); response_str = EntityUtils.toString(resEntity); if (resEntity != null) { Log.i("RESPONSE", response_str); runOnUiThread(new Runnable() { public void run() { try { Log.d("TAG", "Response from server : n " + response_str); } catch (Exception e) { e.printStackTrace(); } } }); } } catch (Exception ex) { Log.e("TAG", "error: " + ex.getMessage(), ex); } } private class HoroscopeAsyncTask extends AsyncTask<String, Void, Void> { public HoroscopeAsyncTask(ProgressBar pb1){ pb = pb1; } @Override protected void onPreExecute() { pb.setVisibility(View.VISIBLE); super.onPreExecute(); } @Override protected Void doInBackground(String... params) { getHoroscope(); try { Log.d("TAG", "test u try"); JSONObject jsonObject = new JSONObject(response_str); JSONArray jsonArray = jsonObject.getJSONArray("horoscope"); for(int i=0;i<jsonArray.length();i++){ Log.d("TAG", "test u for"); JSONObject horoscopeObj = jsonArray.getJSONObject(i); String horoscopeSign = horoscopeObj.getString("name_sign"); String horoscopeText = horoscopeObj.getString("txt_hrs"); zodiacItem = new ZodiacItem(horoscopeSign, horoscopeText, duration[i], images[i], largeImages[i]); zodiacList.add(zodiacItem); zodiacFeed.addItem(zodiacItem); //Treba u POJO klasu ubaciti sve. Log.d("TAG", "ZNAK: "+zodiacItem.getName()+" HOROSKOP: "+zodiacItem.getText()); } } catch (JSONException e) { // TODO Auto-generated catch block e.printStackTrace(); Log.e("TAG", "error: " + e.getMessage(), e); } return null; } @Override protected void onPostExecute(Void result) { pb.setVisibility(View.GONE); list.setAdapter(adapter); adapter.notifyDataSetChanged(); super.onPostExecute(result); } } Here is the code for ListFragment class: public class ListFragment extends Fragment { @Override public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) { // TODO Auto-generated method stub // Retain this fragment across configuration changes. setRetainInstance(true); super.onCreate(savedInstanceState); } @Override public View onCreateView(LayoutInflater inflater, ViewGroup container, Bundle savedInstanceState) { // TODO Auto-generated method stub View view = inflater.inflate(R.layout.fragment_list, container, false); return view; } }

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• why i am getting popup message when I am tryiing to update user.

  - by kumar

  I am getting Popup mesage something like You have chosen to open Update which is a:application/json From : http://localhost:1234 which ok cancel buttons.. I am using this code to run.. [HttpPost] public JsonResult MEdit(ExpenseBE e) { var cache = CacheFactory.GetCacheManager(); string F_ACTION = "U"; string F_DEBUG = "Y"; var excUpdateStatus = false; for (int i = 0; i <= cache.Count; i++) { var x = (ExpenseBE)cache.GetData("a" + i); if (x != null) { string Resolutioncode = e.Exception.ResolutionCode; string reasoncode = e.Exception.ReasonCode; string actioncode = e.Exception.ActionCode; e.Exception.ExceptionID = x.Exception.ExceptionID; e.Exception.ReasonCode = reasoncode; e.Exception.ReasonCode = Resolutioncode; e.Exception.ActionCode = actioncode; e.Exception.Sequence = x.Exception.Sequence; e.Exception.FollowupDate = x.Exception.FollowupDate; e.Exception.IOL = x.Exception.IOL; e.Exception.LastUpdateUser = User.Identity.Name.ToUpper().Remove(0, 4); excUpdateStatus = common.UpdateException(e.Exception, F_ACTION, F_DEBUG); } } return Json(excUpdateStatus.ToString()); } and my view is <%@ Control Language="C#" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewUserControl<NorthernTrust.ATP.iTool.Core.Business.Entities.Specialist.ExpenseBE>" %> <% using (Html.BeginForm("MEdit", "expense", FormMethod.Post)) { %> <%= Html.ValidationSummary(true)%> <fieldset class="clearfix" id="fieldset-exception"> <legend>Mass Edit Exception Information</legend> <div class="fiveper"> <label for="ExceptionStatus"> Status: <span> </span> </label> <label for="ResolutionCode"> Resolution: <span> <%=Html.DropDownListFor(model=>model.Exception.ResolutionCode,new SelectList(Model.LookupCodes["C_EXCPT_RESL"], "Key", "Value"))%> </span> </label> <label for="ReasonCode"> Reason: <span><%=Html.DropDownListFor(model => model.Exception.ReasonCode, new SelectList(Model.LookupCodes["C_EXCPT_RSN"], "Key", "Value"))%></span> </label> <label for="ExceptionStatus"> Action Taken: <span><%=Html.DropDownListFor(model => model.Exception.ActionCode, new SelectList(Model.LookupCodes["C_EXCPT_ACT"], "Key", "Value"))%></span> </label> </div> <div class="fiveper"> <label for="FollowupDate"> Follow-up: <span><input type="text" id="exc-flwup-" /></span> <%--<%=Html.EditorFor(model=>model.Exception.FollowupDate) %>--%> </label> <label for="IOL"> Inquiry #: <%=Html.TextBox("Inquiery", ViewData["inq"] ?? "")%> </label> <label>Comment</label> <span> <%=Html.TextArea("value") %> <%=Html.ValidationMessage("value")%> </span> </div> <br /> <br /> <div> <button id="btnSelect" class="button">Select All</button> <button id="btnCancel" class="button">Cancel</button> <input type="submit" class="button" value="Save" /> </div> </fieldset> <% } %> <script type="text/javascript"> $(document).ready(function() { $('#btnSelectAll').click(function() { function validate_excpt(formData, jqForm, options) { var form = jqForm[0]; } $('#btnSelect').click(function() { $('#input [type=checkbox]').attr('checked', 'checked'); }); // post-submit callback function showResponse(responseText, statusText, xhr, $form) { if ('success' == statusText) { $('#error-msg span:last').html('<strong>Update successful.</strong>'); } else { $('#error-msg span:last').html('<strong>Update failed.</strong> ' + responseText); } $('#error-msg').removeClass('hide'); } $('#exc').ajaxForm({ target: '#error-msg', beforeSubmit: validate_excpt, success: showResponse, dataType: 'json' }); $('.button').button(); }); $('.button').button(); $("input[id^='exc-flwup-']").datepicker({ duration: '', showTime: true, constrainInput: true, stepMinutes: 30, stepHours: 1, altTimeField: '', time24h: true, minDate: 0 }); $('#ui-timepicker-div').bgiframe(); }); </script> please correct me if i am doing somwhere wrong? thanks

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• jQuery Validation plugin: prompt for override

  - by Sam Carleton

  I have a jQuery form that has validation of a sort. It is a data entry screen with two 'recommend ranges', one is 36-84, the other 50-300. The business rules call for the values to be either blank or greater than zero, but to prompt for confirmation if the values are outside of the range listed above. I have seen some other threads that talk about setting the class="cancel" on the submit button. From what I can tell, this will simply disable the validation. I need to prompt for a "do you want to continue, yes or no?" and if no stop the submit, if yes, continue. Below is an example from the book Pro jQuery. By default the top row needs to be between 10 and 20 to submit. How would you change it so that it prompts you and if you say Yes it submits, no prevents the submit: <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <title>Example</title> <script src="jquery-1.7.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="jquery.tmpl.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="jquery.validate.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <style type="text/css"> h1 { min-width: 70px; border: thick double black; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center; font-size: x-large; padding: .5em; color: darkgreen; background-image: url("border.png"); background-size: contain; margin-top: 0; } .dtable {display: table;} .drow {display: table-row;} .dcell {display: table-cell; padding: 10px;} .dcell > * {vertical-align: middle} input {width: 2em; text-align: right; border: thin solid black; padding: 2px;} label {width: 5em; padding-left: .5em; display: inline-block;} #buttonDiv {text-align: center;} #oblock {display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; min-width: 700px; } div.errorMsg {color: red} .invalidElem {border: medium solid red} </style> <script type="text/javascript"> $(document).ready(function() { var data = [ { name: "Astor", product: "astor", stocklevel: "10", price: "2.99"}, { name: "Daffodil", product: "daffodil", stocklevel: "12", price: "1.99"}, { name: "Rose", product: "rose", stocklevel: "2", price: "4.99"}, { name: "Peony", product: "peony", stocklevel: "0", price: "1.50"}, { name: "Primula", product: "primula", stocklevel: "1", price: "3.12"}, { name: "Snowdrop", product: "snowdrop", stocklevel: "15", price: "0.99"}, ]; var templResult = $('#flowerTmpl').tmpl(data); templResult.slice(0, 3).appendTo('#row1'); templResult.slice(3).appendTo("#row2"); $('form').validate({ highlight: function(element, errorClass) { $(element).add($(element).parent()).addClass("invalidElem"); }, unhighlight: function(element, errorClass) { $(element).add($(element).parent()).removeClass("invalidElem"); }, errorElement: "div", errorClass: "errorMsg" }); $.validator.addClassRules({ flowerValidation: { required: true, min: 0, max: 100, digits: true, } }) $('#row1 input').each(function(index, elem) { $(elem).rules("add", { min: 10, max: 20 }) }); $('input').addClass("flowerValidation").change(function(e) { $('form').validate().element($(e.target)); }); }); </script> <script id="flowerTmpl" type="text/x-jquery-tmpl"> <div class="dcell"> <img src="${product}.png"/> <label for="${product}">${name}: </label> <input name="${product}" value="0" required /> </div> </script> </head> <body> <h1>Jacqui's Flower Shop</h1> <form method="post" action="http://node.jacquisflowershop.com/order"> <div id="oblock"> <div class="dtable"> <div id="row1" class="drow"> </div> <div id="row2"class="drow"> </div> </div> </div> <div id="buttonDiv"><button type="submit">Place Order</button></div> </form> </body> </html>

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• Php mail pulling form data from previous page

  - by Mark

  So I have a form being filled out on one php like so: <p> <label for="first_name">First Name: </label> <input type="text" size="30" name="first_name" id="first_name"/> </p> <p> <label for="last_name"> Last Name:</label> <input type="text" size="30" name="last_name" id="last_name"/> </p> <p> <label for="address_street">Street:</label> <input type="text" size="30" name="address_street" id="address_street"/> </p> <p> <label for="address_city">City:</label> <input type="text" size="30" name="address_city" id="address_city"/> </p> <p> <label for="address_state">State/Province:</label> <input type="text" size="30" name="address_state" id="address_state"/> </p> <p> <label for="email">Your e-mail: </label> <input type="text" size="30" name="email" id="email"/> </p> <p> <label for="phone">Your phone number: </label> <input type="text" size="30" name="phone" id="phone"/> </p> This is on one php page. From here, it goes to another php which part of it contains script to send a html email to recipient. Problem is, I cannot seem to get it to pull the variables even though I thought I declared them correctly and mixed them into the html correctly. <?php $first_name = $_POST['first_name']; $last_name = $_POST['last_name']; $to = "[email protected], [email protected]"; $subject = "HTML email for ALPS"; $message .= ' <html> <body> <div style="display: inline-block; width: 28%; float: left;"> <img src="http://englishintheusa.com/images/alps-logo.jpg" alt="ALPS Language School" /> </div> <div style="display: inline-block; width: 68%; float: right;"> <p style="color: #4F81BD; font-size: 20px; text-decoration: underline;">Thanks You For Your Inquiry!</p> </div> <div style="padding-left: 20px; color: #666666; font-size: 16.8px; clear: both;"> <p>Dear $first_name $last_name ,</p> </br > <p>Thank you for the following inquiry:</p> </br > </br > </br > </br > <p>****Comment goes here****</p> </br > </br > <p>We will contact you within 2 business days. Our office is open Monday-Friday, 8:30 AM - 5:00 PM Pacific Standard Time.</p> </br > <p>Thank you for your interest!</p> </br > </br > <p>Best Regards,</p> </br > </br > <p>ALPS Language School</p> </br > </br > <p>430 Broadway East</p> <p>Seattle WA 98102</p> <p>Phone: 206.720.6363</p> <p>Fax: 206. 720.1806</p> <p>Email: [email protected]</p> </div> </body> </html>'; // Always set content-type when sending HTML email $headers .= "MIME-Version: 1.0" . "\r\n"; $headers .= "Content-type:text/html;charset=UTF-8" . "\r\n"; // More headers mail($to,$subject,$message,$headers); ?> So you see where I am trying to get first_name and last_name. Well it doesn't come out correctly. Can someone help here?

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• questions regarding the use of A* with the 15-square puzzle

  - by Cheeso

  I'm trying to build an A* solver for a 15-square puzzle. The goal is to re-arrange the tiles so that they appear in their natural positions. You can only slide one tile at a time. Each possible state of the puzzle is a node in the search graph. For the h(x) function, I am using an aggregate sum, across all tiles, of the tile's dislocation from the goal state. In the above image, the 5 is at location 0,0, and it belongs at location 1,0, therefore it contributes 1 to the h(x) function. The next tile is the 11, located at 0,1, and belongs at 2,2, therefore it contributes 3 to h(x). And so on. EDIT: I now understand this is what they call "Manhattan distance", or "taxicab distance". I have been using a step count for g(x). In my implementation, for any node in the state graph, g is just +1 from the prior node's g. To find successive nodes, I just examine where I can possibly move the "hole" in the puzzle. There are 3 neighbors for the puzzle state (aka node) that is displayed: the hole can move north, west, or east. My A* search sometimes converges to a solution in 20s, sometimes 180s, and sometimes doesn't converge at all (waited 10 mins or more). I think h is reasonable. I'm wondering if I've modeled g properly. In other words, is it possible that my A* function is reaching a node in the graph via a path that is not the shortest path? Maybe have I not waited long enough? Maybe 10 minutes is not long enough? For a fully random arrangement, (assuming no parity problems), What is the average number of permutations an A* solution will examine? (please show the math) I'm going to look for logic errors in my code, but in the meantime, Any tips? (ps: it's done in Javascript). Also, no, this isn't CompSci homework. It's just a personal exploration thing. I'm just trying to learn Javascript. EDIT: I've found that the run-time is highly depend upon the heuristic. I saw the 10x factor applied to the heuristic from the article someone mentioned, and it made me wonder - why 10x? Why linear? Because this is done in javascript, I could modify the code to dynamically update an html table with the node currently being considered. This allowd me to peek at the algorithm as it was progressing. With a regular taxicab distance heuristic, I watched as it failed to converge. There were 5's and 12's in the top row, and they kept hanging around. I'd see 1,2,3,4 creep into the top row, but then they'd drop out, and other numbers would move up there. What I was hoping to see was 1,2,3,4 sort of creeping up to the top, and then staying there. I thought to myself - this is not the way I solve this personally. Doing this manually, I solve the top row, then the 2ne row, then the 3rd and 4th rows sort of concurrently. So I tweaked the h(x) function to more heavily weight the higher rows and the "lefter" columns. The result was that the A* converged much more quickly. It now runs in 3 minutes instead of "indefinitely". With the "peek" I talked about, I can see the smaller numbers creep up to the higher rows and stay there. Not only does this seem like the right thing, it runs much faster. I'm in the process of trying a bunch of variations. It seems pretty clear that A* runtime is very sensitive to the heuristic. Currently the best heuristic I've found uses the summation of dislocation * ((4-i) + (4-j)) where i and j are the row and column, and dislocation is the taxicab distance. One interesting part of the result I got: with a particular heuristic I find a path very quickly, but it is obviously not the shortest path. I think this is because I am weighting the heuristic. In one case I got a path of 178 steps in 10s. My own manual effort produce a solution in 87 moves. (much more than 10s). More investigation warranted. So the result is I am seeing it converge must faster, and the path is definitely not the shortest. I have to think about this more. Code: var stop = false; function Astar(start, goal, callback) { // start and goal are nodes in the graph, represented by // an array of 16 ints. The goal is: [1,2,3,...14,15,0] // Zero represents the hole. // callback is a method to call when finished. This runs a long time, // therefore we need to use setTimeout() to break it up, to avoid // the browser warning like "Stop running this script?" // g is the actual distance traveled from initial node to current node. // h is the heuristic estimate of distance from current to goal. stop = false; start.g = start.dontgo = 0; // calcHeuristic inserts an .h member into the array calcHeuristicDistance(start); // start the stack with one element var closed = []; // set of nodes already evaluated. var open = [ start ]; // set of nodes to evaluate (start with initial node) var iteration = function() { if (open.length==0) { // no more nodes. Fail. callback(null); return; } var current = open.shift(); // get highest priority node // update the browser with a table representation of the // node being evaluated $("#solution").html(stateToString(current)); // check solution returns true if current == goal if (checkSolution(current,goal)) { // reconstructPath just records the position of the hole // through each node var path= reconstructPath(start,current); callback(path); return; } closed.push(current); // get the set of neighbors. This is 3 or fewer nodes. // (nextStates is optimized to NOT turn directly back on itself) var neighbors = nextStates(current, goal); for (var i=0; i<neighbors.length; i++) { var n = neighbors[i]; // skip this one if we've already visited it if (closed.containsNode(n)) continue; // .g, .h, and .previous get assigned implicitly when // calculating neighbors. n.g is nothing more than // current.g+1 ; // add to the open list if (!open.containsNode(n)) { // slot into the list, in priority order (minimum f first) open.priorityPush(n); n.previous = current; } } if (stop) { callback(null); return; } setTimeout(iteration, 1); }; // kick off the first iteration iteration(); return null; }

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• System.ServiceModel.Channels.MessageHeader Error

  - by user220511

  I'm trying to get the following to work on my machine but I get an error (Cannot create an instance of the abstract class or interface 'System.ServiceModel.Channels.MessageHeader') using System; using System.IO; using System.Reflection; namespace com.mycompanyname.business { /// /// Summary description for SessionCreateRQClient. /// class SessionCreateRQClient { /// /// The main entry point. /// [STAThread] static void Main(string[] args) { try { // Set user information, including security credentials and the IPCC. string username = "user"; string password = "password"; string ipcc = "IPCC"; string domain = "DEFAULT"; string temp = Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("tmp"); // Get temp directory string PropsFileName = temp + "/session.properties"; // Define dir and file name DateTime dt = DateTime.UtcNow; string tstamp = dt.ToString("s") + "Z"; //Create the message header and provide the conversation ID. MessageHeader msgHeader = new MessageHeader(); msgHeader.ConversationId = "TestSession"; // Set the ConversationId From from = new From(); PartyId fromPartyId = new PartyId(); PartyId[] fromPartyIdArr = new PartyId[1]; fromPartyId.Value = "WebServiceClient"; fromPartyIdArr[0] = fromPartyId; from.PartyId = fromPartyIdArr; msgHeader.From = from; To to = new To(); PartyId toPartyId = new PartyId(); PartyId[] toPartyIdArr = new PartyId[1]; toPartyId.Value = "WebServiceSupplier"; toPartyIdArr[0] = toPartyId; to.PartyId = toPartyIdArr; msgHeader.To = to; //Add the value for eb:CPAId, which is the IPCC. //Add the value for the action code of this Web service, SessionCreateRQ. msgHeader.CPAId = ipcc; msgHeader.Action = "SessionCreateRQ"; Service service = new Service(); service.Value = "SessionCreate"; msgHeader.Service = service; MessageData msgData = new MessageData(); msgData.MessageId = "mid:[email protected]"; msgData.Timestamp = tstamp; msgHeader.MessageData = msgData; Security security = new Security(); SecurityUsernameToken securityUserToken = new SecurityUsernameToken(); securityUserToken.Username = username; securityUserToken.Password = password; securityUserToken.Organization = ipcc; securityUserToken.Domain = domain; security.UsernameToken = securityUserToken; SessionCreateRQ req = new SessionCreateRQ(); SessionCreateRQPOS pos = new SessionCreateRQPOS(); SessionCreateRQPOSSource source = new SessionCreateRQPOSSource(); source.PseudoCityCode = ipcc; pos.Source = source; req.POS = pos; SessionCreateRQService serviceObj = new SessionCreateRQService(); serviceObj.MessageHeaderValue = msgHeader; serviceObj.SecurityValue = security; SessionCreateRS resp = serviceObj.SessionCreateRQ(req); // Send the request if (resp.Errors != null && resp.Errors.Error != null) { Console.WriteLine("Error : " + resp.Errors.Error.ErrorInfo.Message); } else { msgHeader = serviceObj.MessageHeaderValue; security = serviceObj.SecurityValue; Console.WriteLine("**********************************************"); Console.WriteLine("Response of SessionCreateRQ service"); Console.WriteLine("BinarySecurityToken returned : " + security.BinarySecurityToken); Console.WriteLine("**********************************************"); string ConvIdLine = "convid="+msgHeader.ConversationId; // ConversationId to a string string TokenLine = "securitytoken="+security.BinarySecurityToken; // BinarySecurityToken to a string string ipccLine = "ipcc="+ipcc; // IPCC to a string File.Delete(PropsFileName); // Clean up TextWriter tw = new StreamWriter(PropsFileName); // Create & open the file tw.WriteLine(DateTime.Now); // Write the date for reference tw.WriteLine(TokenLine); // Write the BinarySecurityToken tw.WriteLine(ConvIdLine); // Write the ConversationId tw.WriteLine(ipccLine); // Write the IPCC tw.Close(); //Console.Read(); } } catch(Exception e) { Console.WriteLine("Exception Message : " + e.Message ); Console.WriteLine("Exception Stack Trace : " + e.StackTrace); Console.Read(); } } } } I have added the reference System.ServiceModel and the lines: using System.ServiceModel; using System.ServiceModel.Channels; but I continue to get that error when trying to compile -- "Cannot create an instance of the abstract class or interface 'System.ServiceModel.Channels.MessageHeader'" I am using Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Version 9.0.21022.8 RTM Microsoft .NET Framework Version 3.5 SP1 Professional Edition Is there another reference I have to add? Or a dll to move over? I wonder was the code above written for Framework 2.0 only? Thanks for your help.

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• wrong return value with jquery ajax and codeigniter

  - by matthew

  I do not know if this is specifically a jquery problem, actually I think it has to mostly do with my logic in the php code. What Im trying to do is make a voting system that when the user clicks on the vote up or vote down link in the web page, it triggers an ajax call to a php function that first updates the database with with the required value, on success of the database updating the another function is called just to get the required updated html for the that particular post that the user has voted on. (hope I havnt lost you). The problem I think deals with specifically with this one line of code. When I make the call it only returns the value of $row-beer_down and completly ignores everything else in that line. Funny thing is the same php code to display the html view works perfectly before the ajax function updates it. echo "<p>Score " . $row->beer_up + $row->beer_down . "</p>"; so here is the code to hope you can help as I have absolutely no idea how to fix this. here is the view file where it generates the page. This part is the query ajax function. <script type="text/javascript"> $(function() { $(".vote").click(function(){ var id = $(this).attr("id"); var name = $(this).attr("name"); var dataString = 'id='+ id ; var parent = $(this); if(name=='up') { $.ajax({ type: "POST", url: "http://127.0.0.1/CodeIgniter/blog/add_vote/" + id, data: dataString, cache: false, success: function(html) { //parent.html(html); $("." + id).load('http://127.0.0.1/CodeIgniter/blog/get_post/' + id).fadeIn("slow"); } }); } else { $.ajax({ type: "POST", url: "http://127.0.0.1/CodeIgniter/blog/minus_vote/" + id, data: dataString, cache: false, success: function(html) { //parent.html(html); $("." + id).load('http://127.0.0.1/CodeIgniter/blog/get_post/' + id).fadeIn("slow"); } }); } return false; }); }); </script> Here is the html and php part of the page to display the post. div id="post_container"> <?php //echo $this->table->generate($records); ?> <?php foreach($records->result() as $row) { ?> <?php echo "<div id=\"post\" class=\"" . $row->id . "\">"; ?> <h2><?php echo $row->id ?></h2> <?php echo "<img src=\"" . base_url() . $dir . $row->account_id . "/" . $row->file_name . "\">" ?> <p><?php echo $row->content ?></p> <p><?php echo $row->user_name ?> On <?php echo $row->time ?></p> <p>Score <?php echo $row->beer_up + $row->beer_down ?></p> <?php echo anchor('blog/add_vote/' . $row->id, 'Up Vote', array('class' => 'vote', 'id' => $row->id, 'name' => 'up')); echo anchor('blog/minus_vote/' . $row->id, 'Down Vote', array('class' => 'vote', 'id' => $row->id, 'name' => 'down')); echo anchor('blog/comments/' . $row->id, 'View Comments'); ?> </div> <?php } ?> here is the function the ajax calls when it is successfull: function get_post() { $this->db->where('id', $this->uri->segment(3)); $records = $this->db->get('post'); $dir = "/uploads/user_uploads/"; foreach($records->result() as $row) { echo "<div id=\"post\" class=\"" . $row->id . "\">"; echo "<h2>" . $row->id . "</h2>"; echo "<img src=\"" . base_url() . $dir . $row->account_id . "/" . $row->file_name . "\">"; echo "<p>" . $row->content . "</p>"; echo "<p>" . $row->user_name . " On " . $row->time . "</p>"; echo "<p>Score " . $row->beer_up + $row->beer_down . "</p>"; echo "<p>Up score" . $row->beer_up . "beer down" . $row->beer_down . "</p>"; echo anchor('blog/comments/' . $row->id, 'View Comments'); echo "</div>"; }

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• Only show items owned by the currently logged in user in category list view

  - by jalbasri

  I'd like to be able to provide a "Category List" view that only shows Articles that the currently logged in user owns. Is there somewhere I can edit the query used to populate the Category List view or an extension that provides this functionality. Thank you for any help you can provide. -J. Thank you for your answer. I've written the plugin. Instead of passing in an array of Articles the onContentBeforeDisplay function is called for every article and an ArrayObject of the single article gets passed in. I've been able to identify the articles I want not to be displayed but still cannot get them not to display. The $params variable has values such as "list_show_xxx" but I can't seem to change or access them. here is a var_dump($params): object(Joomla\Registry\Registry)#190 (1) { ["data":protected]=> object(stdClass)#250 (83) { ["article_layout"]=> string(9) "_:default" ["show_title"]=> string(1) "1" ["link_titles"]=> string(1) "1" ["show_intro"]=> string(1) "1" ["info_block_position"]=> string(1) "1" ["show_category"]=> string(1) "1" ["link_category"]=> string(1) "1" ["show_parent_category"]=> string(1) "0" ["link_parent_category"]=> string(1) "0" ["show_author"]=> string(1) "1" ["link_author"]=> string(1) "0" ["show_create_date"]=> string(1) "0" ["show_modify_date"]=> string(1) "0" ["show_publish_date"]=> string(1) "1" ["show_item_navigation"]=> string(1) "1" ["show_vote"]=> string(1) "0" ["show_readmore"]=> string(1) "1" ["show_readmore_title"]=> string(1) "1" ["readmore_limit"]=> string(3) "100" ["show_tags"]=> string(1) "1" ["show_icons"]=> string(1) "1" ["show_print_icon"]=> string(1) "1" ["show_email_icon"]=> string(1) "1" ["show_hits"]=> string(1) "1" ["show_noauth"]=> string(1) "0" ["urls_position"]=> string(1) "0" ["show_publishing_options"]=> string(1) "0" ["show_article_options"]=> string(1) "0" ["save_history"]=> string(1) "1" ["history_limit"]=> int(10) ["show_urls_images_frontend"]=> string(1) "0" ["show_urls_images_backend"]=> string(1) "1" ["targeta"]=> int(0) ["targetb"]=> int(0) ["targetc"]=> int(0) ["float_intro"]=> string(4) "left" ["float_fulltext"]=> string(4) "left" ["category_layout"]=> string(9) "_:default" ["show_category_heading_title_text"]=> string(1) "1" ["show_category_title"]=> string(1) "0" ["show_description"]=> string(1) "0" ["show_description_image"]=> string(1) "0" ["maxLevel"]=> string(1) "1" ["show_empty_categories"]=> string(1) "0" ["show_no_articles"]=> string(1) "1" ["show_subcat_desc"]=> string(1) "1" ["show_cat_num_articles"]=> string(1) "0" ["show_base_description"]=> string(1) "1" ["maxLevelcat"]=> string(2) "-1" ["show_empty_categories_cat"]=> string(1) "0" ["show_subcat_desc_cat"]=> string(1) "1" ["show_cat_num_articles_cat"]=> string(1) "1" ["num_leading_articles"]=> string(1) "1" ["num_intro_articles"]=> string(1) "4" ["num_columns"]=> string(1) "1" ["num_links"]=> string(1) "4" ["multi_column_order"]=> string(1) "0" ["show_subcategory_content"]=> string(1) "0" ["show_pagination_limit"]=> string(1) "1" ["filter_field"]=> string(5) "title" ["show_headings"]=> string(1) "1" ["list_show_date"]=> string(1) "0" ["date_format"]=> string(0) "" ["list_show_hits"]=> string(1) "1" ["list_show_author"]=> string(1) "1" ["orderby_pri"]=> string(5) "order" ["orderby_sec"]=> string(5) "rdate" ["order_date"]=> string(9) "published" ["show_pagination"]=> string(1) "2" ["show_pagination_results"]=> string(1) "1" ["show_feed_link"]=> string(1) "1" ["feed_summary"]=> string(1) "0" ["feed_show_readmore"]=> string(1) "0" ["display_num"]=> string(2) "10" ["menu_text"]=> int(1) ["show_page_heading"]=> int(0) ["secure"]=> int(0) ["page_title"]=> string(16) "Non-K2 News List" ["page_description"]=> string(33) "Bahrain Business Incubator Centre" ["page_rights"]=> NULL ["robots"]=> NULL ["access-edit"]=> bool(true) ["access-view"]=> bool(true) } } I've tried $params-data-list_show_author = "0" but then the page doesn't load, problem is accessing and changing the variables in $param. So the last step is to figure out how not to show the article. Any ideas?

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• Databinding, using formulas for unusual binding possible?

  - by Rattenmann

  Edit: added Info for WPF being used I am trying to bind a list of custom objects to a DataGrid. Straight binding seems easy enough, but i need to specify some complex formulas for some extra fields that do not directly show up in my class. Also i want to be able to EDIT the data in the Grid and get updates on related fields. Let me show you an example, because it is really hard to explain. I will simplify it to rooms with items. Each item can be red and blue. My Class looks like this: public class room { public string strRoomName { set; get; } public string strItemname { set; get; } public int intRedItem { set; get; } public int intBlueItem { set; get; } } Now if i use dataTable.ItemSource = myList; i get something like this: nr. | room | name | red | blue 1. living room, ball, 2, 1 2. sleeping room, bunny, 4, 1 3. living room, chair, 3, 2 4. kitchen, ball, 4, 7 5. garage, chair, 1, 4 Now for the complex part i need help with. I want every item to be the same number, red and blue. And because this does not hold true i want to see the "inbalance" per room AND globally like this: nr. | room | name | red | blue | missing | global red | global blue | global missing 1. living room, ball, 2, 1, 1 blue, 6, 7, 1 red 2. sleeping room, bunny, 4, 1, 3 blue, 4, 1, 3 blue 3. living room, chair, 3, 2, 1 blue, 4, 6, 2 red 4. kitchen, ball, 4, 7, 3 red, 6, 7, 1 red 5. garage, chair, 1, 4, 3 red, 4, 6, 2 red As you can see this smeels like excel formulas, i am unsure how to handle this in c# code however. You can also see i need to use data in the same row, but also get data from other rows that match one propertiy (the items name). Also if i change the blue value=1 in line 1 to value=2, i want line 1 to read like this: 1. living room, ball, 2, 2, even, 6, 8, 2 red and of corse line 4 needs to change to: 4. kitchen, ball, 4, 7, 3 red, 6, 8, 2 red As i said, this smells like excel, that's why i am really upset about myself not finding an easy solution. Surely enough c# offers some way to handle this stuff, right? Disclaimer: It is totally possible that i need a complete differend approach, pointing that out ot me is perfectly fine. Be it other ways to handle this, or a better way to structure my class. I am ok with every way to handle this as it is for learning purposes. I am simply doing programms for fun next to my college and just so happen to hit these kinda things that bug me out because i don't find a clean solution. And then i neglect my studies because i want to solve my (unreleated to studys,...) issue. Just can't stand having unsolved coding stuff around, don't judge me! ;-) And big thanks in advance if you have gotten this far in my post. It sure must be confusing with all those reds and blues. Edit: After reading trough your answers and testing my skills to implement your hints, i now have the following code as my class: public class RoomList : ObservableCollection<room> { public RoomList() : base() { Add(new room() { strRoomName = "living room", strItemname = "ball", intRedItem = 2, intBlueItem = 1 }); Add(new room() { strRoomName = "sleeping room", strItemname = "bunny", intRedItem = 4, intBlueItem = 1 }); Add(new room() { strRoomName = "living room", strItemname = "chair", intRedItem = 3, intBlueItem = 2 }); Add(new room() { strRoomName = "kitchen", strItemname = "ball", intRedItem = 4, intBlueItem = 7 }); Add(new room() { strRoomName = "garage", strItemname = "chair", intRedItem = 1, intBlueItem = 4 }); } } //rooms public class room : INotifyPropertyChanged { public string strRoomName { set; get; } public string strItemname { set; get; } public int intRedItem { get { return intRedItem; } set { intRedItem = value; NotifyPropertyChanged("intRedItem", "strMissing"); } } public int intBlueItem { get { return intBlueItem; } set { intBlueItem = value; NotifyPropertyChanged("intBlueItem", "strMissing"); } } public string strMissing { get { int missingCount = intRedItem - intBlueItem; return missingCount == 0 ? "Even" : missingCount.ToString(); } } public event PropertyChangedEventHandler PropertyChanged; public void NotifyPropertyChanged(params string[] propertyNames) { if (PropertyChanged != null) { foreach (string propertyName in propertyNames) { PropertyChanged(this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs(propertyName)); } } } } I got the "missing" field working right away, thanks alot for that tip. It really was as easy as i imagined and will be of great use for future projects. Still two (three maybe....) things i am missing tho. The above code terminates with a "System.StackOverflowException" in the setter of intRedItem and intBlueItem. I fail to see the error, that could be due to being 4:30am here, or my lack of understanding. Second issue: I followed the link to ObservableCollections as you can see from my code above. Yet i am unsure how to actually use that collection. Putting it as DataContent like suggested on that page shows a missing ressource. Adding it as a ressource like listed there crashes my VSExpress designer and leads to the programm not starting. So for now i am still using my old approach of a list like this: listRooms.Add(new room() { strRoomName = "living room", strItemname = "ball", intRedItem = 2, intBlueItem = 1 }); listRooms.Add(new room() { strRoomName = "sleeping room", strItemname = "bunny", intRedItem = 4, intBlueItem = 1 }); listRooms.Add(new room() { strRoomName = "living room", strItemname = "chair", intRedItem = 3, intBlueItem = 2 }); listRooms.Add(new room() { strRoomName = "kitchen", strItemname = "ball", intRedItem = 4, intBlueItem = 7 }); listRooms.Add(new room() { strRoomName = "garage", strItemname = "chair", intRedItem = 1, intBlueItem = 4 }); datagridRooms.ItemsSource = listRooms; And lastly: When testing before adding the notifyevents i tried to implement a proterty that looped trough the other objects, without any luck. The "missingItem" property worked so easy, yet it only tries to access "it's own" properties kind of. I need to access other objects, like "all objects that have the same room value". The idea behind this is that i am trying to calculate a value from other objects without even having those objects yet, at least in my logic. Where is the flaw in my thinking? Those 5 objects are added and created (?) one after another. So if the first tries to set it's "all red balls in my room AND all other rooms" value,.. how could it know about the balls in the kitchen, that get added as 4th object? So far so good tho, got on the right track i think. Just need some sleep first.

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• Strange (Undefined?) Behavior of Free in C

  - by Chris Cirefice

  This is really strange... and I can't debug it (tried for about two hours, debugger starts going haywire after a while...). Anyway, I'm trying to do something really simple: Free an array of strings. The array is in the form: char **myStrings. The array elements are initialized as: myString[index] = malloc(strlen(word)); myString[index] = word; and I'm calling a function like this: free_memory(myStrings, size); where size is the length of the array (I know this is not the problem, I tested it extensively and everything except this function is working). free_memory looks like this: void free_memory(char **list, int size) { for (int i = 0; i < size; i ++) { free(list[i]); } free(list); } Now here comes the weird part. if (size> strlen(list[i])) then the program crashes. For example, imagine that I have a list of strings that looks something like this: myStrings[0] = "Some"; myStrings[1] = "random"; myStrings[2] = "strings"; And thus the length of this array is 3. If I pass this to my free_memory function, strlen(myStrings[0]) > 3 (4 3), and the program crashes. However, if I change myStrings[0] to be "So" instead, then strlen(myStrings[0]) < 3 (2 < 3) and the program does not crash. So it seems to me that free(list[i]) is actually going through the char[] that is at that location and trying to free each character, which I imagine is undefined behavior. The only reason I say this is because I can play around with the size of the first element of myStrings and make the program crash whenever I feel like it, so I'm assuming that this is the problem area. Note: I did try to debug this by stepping through the function that calls free_memory, noting any weird values and such, but the moment I step into the free_memory function, the debugger crashes, so I'm not really sure what is going on. Nothing is out of the ordinary until I enter the function, then the world explodes. Another note: I also posted the shortened version of the source for this program (not too long; Pastebin) here. I am compiling on MinGW with the c99 flag on. PS - I just thought of this. I am indeed passing numUniqueWords to the free function, and I know that this does not actually free the entire piece of memory that I allocated. I've called it both ways, that's not the issue. And I left it how I did because that is the way that I will be calling it after I get it to work in the first place, I need to revise some of my logic in that function. Source, as per request (on-site): #include <stdio.h> #include <string.h> #include <ctype.h> #include <stdlib.h> #include "words.h" int getNumUniqueWords(char text[], int size); int main(int argc, char* argv[]) { setvbuf(stdout, NULL, 4, _IONBF); // For Eclipse... stupid bug. --> does NOT affect the program, just the output to console! int nbr_words; char text[] = "Some - \"text, a stdin\". We'll have! also repeat? We'll also have a repeat!"; int length = sizeof(text); nbr_words = getNumUniqueWords(text, length); return 0; } void free_memory(char **list, int size) { for (int i = 0; i < size; i ++) { // You can see that printing the values is fine, as long as free is not called. // When free is called, the program will crash if (size > strlen(list[i])) //printf("Wanna free value %d w/len of %d: %s\n", i, strlen(list[i]), list[i]); free(list[i]); } free(list); } int getNumUniqueWords(char text[], int length) { int numTotalWords = 0; char *word; printf("Length: %d characters\n", length); char totalWords[length]; strcpy(totalWords, text); word = strtok(totalWords, " ,.-!?()\"0123456789"); while (word != NULL) { numTotalWords ++; printf("%s\n", word); word = strtok(NULL, " ,.-!?()\"0123456789"); } printf("Looks like we counted %d total words\n\n", numTotalWords); char *uniqueWords[numTotalWords]; char *tempWord; int wordAlreadyExists = 0; int numUniqueWords = 0; char totalWordsCopy[length]; strcpy(totalWordsCopy, text); for (int i = 0; i < numTotalWords; i++) { uniqueWords[i] = NULL; } // Tokenize until all the text is consumed. word = strtok(totalWordsCopy, " ,.-!?()\"0123456789"); while (word != NULL) { // Look through the word list for the current token. for (int j = 0; j < numTotalWords; j ++) { // Just for clarity, no real meaning. tempWord = uniqueWords[j]; // The word list is either empty or the current token is not in the list. if (tempWord == NULL) { break; } //printf("Comparing (%s) with (%s)\n", tempWord, word); // If the current token is the same as the current element in the word list, mark and break if (strcmp(tempWord, word) == 0) { printf("\nDuplicate: (%s)\n\n", word); wordAlreadyExists = 1; break; } } // Word does not exist, add it to the array. if (!wordAlreadyExists) { uniqueWords[numUniqueWords] = malloc(strlen(word)); uniqueWords[numUniqueWords] = word; numUniqueWords ++; printf("Unique: %s\n", word); } // Reset flags and continue. wordAlreadyExists = 0; word = strtok(NULL, " ,.-!?()\"0123456789"); } // Print out the array just for funsies - make sure it's working properly. for (int x = 0; x <numUniqueWords; x++) { printf("Unique list %d: %s\n", x, uniqueWords[x]); } printf("\nNumber of unique words: %d\n\n", numUniqueWords); // Right below is where things start to suck. free_memory(uniqueWords, numUniqueWords); return numUniqueWords; }

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• How should I implement simple caches with concurrency on Redis?

  - by solublefish

  Background I have a 2-tier web service - just my app server and an RDBMS. I want to move to a pool of identical app servers behind a load balancer. I currently cache a bunch of objects in-process. I hope to move them to a shared Redis. I have a dozen or so caches of simple, small-sized business objects. For example, I have a set of Foos. Each Foo has a unique FooId and an OwnerId. One "owner" may own multiple Foos. In a traditional RDBMS this is just a table with an index on the PK FooId and one on OwnerId. I'm caching this in one process simply: Dictionary<int,Foo> _cacheFooById; Dictionary<int,HashSet<int>> _indexFooIdsByOwnerId; Reads come straight from here, and writes go here and to the RDBMS. I usually have this invariant: "For a given group [say by OwnerId], the whole group is in cache or none of it is." So when I cache miss on a Foo, I pull that Foo and all the owner's other Foos from the RDBMS. Updates make sure to keep the index up to date and respect the invariant. When an owner calls GetMyFoos I never have to worry that some are cached and some aren't. What I did already The first/simplest answer seems to be to use plain ol' SET and GET with a composite key and json value: SET( "ServiceCache:Foo:" + theFoo.Id, JsonSerialize(theFoo)); I later decided I liked: HSET( "ServiceCache:Foo", theFoo.FooId, JsonSerialize(theFoo)); That lets me get all the values in one cache as HVALS. It also felt right - I'm literally moving hashtables to Redis, so perhaps my top-level items should be hashes. This works to first order. If my high-level code is like: UpdateCache(myFoo); AddToIndex(myFoo); That translates into: HSET ("ServiceCache:Foo", theFoo.FooId, JsonSerialize(theFoo)); var myFoos = JsonDeserialize( HGET ("ServiceCache:FooIndex", theFoo.OwnerId) ); myFoos.Add(theFoo.OwnerId); HSET ("ServiceCache:FooIndex", theFoo.OwnerId, JsonSerialize(myFoos)); However, this is broken in two ways. Two concurrent operations can read/modify/write at the same time. The latter "wins" the final HSET and the former's index update is lost. Another operation could read the index in between the first and second lines. It would miss a Foo that it should find. So how do I index properly? I think I could use a Redis set instead of a json-encoded value for the index. That would solve part of the problem since the "add-to-index-if-not-already-present" would be atomic. I also read about using MULTI as a "transaction" but it doesn't seem like it does what I want. Am I right that I can't really MULTI; HGET; {update}; HSET; EXEC since it doesn't even do the HGET before I issue the EXEC? I also read about using WATCH and MULTI for optimistic concurrency, then retrying on failure. But WATCH only works on top-level keys. So it's back to SET/GET instead of HSET/HGET. And now I need a new index-like-thing to support getting all the values in a given cache. If I understand it right, I can combine all these things to do the job. Something like: while(!succeeded) { WATCH( "ServiceCache:Foo:" + theFoo.FooId ); WATCH( "ServiceCache:FooIndexByOwner:" + theFoo.OwnerId ); WATCH( "ServiceCache:FooIndexAll" ); MULTI(); SET ("ServiceCache:Foo:" + theFoo.FooId, JsonSerialize(theFoo)); SADD ("ServiceCache:FooIndexByOwner:" + theFoo.OwnerId, theFoo.FooId); SADD ("ServiceCache:FooIndexAll", theFoo.FooId); EXEC(); //TODO somehow set succeeded properly } Finally I'd have to translate this pseudocode into real code depending how my client library uses WATCH/MULTI/EXEC; it looks like they need some sort of context to hook them together. All in all this seems like a lot of complexity for what has to be a very common case; I can't help but think there's a better, smarter, Redis-ish way to do things that I'm just not seeing. How do I lock properly? Even if I had no indexes, there's still a (probably rare) race condition. A: HGET - cache miss B: HGET - cache miss A: SELECT B: SELECT A: HSET C: HGET - cache hit C: UPDATE C: HSET B: HSET ** this is stale data that's clobbering C's update. Note that C could just be a really-fast A. Again I think WATCH, MULTI, retry would work, but... ick. I know in some places people use special Redis keys as locks for other objects. Is that a reasonable approach here? Should those be top-level keys like ServiceCache:FooLocks:{Id} or ServiceCache:Locks:Foo:{Id}? Or make a separate hash for them - ServiceCache:Locks with subkeys Foo:{Id}, or ServiceCache:Locks:Foo with subkeys {Id} ? How would I work around abandoned locks, say if a transaction (or a whole server) crashes while "holding" the lock?

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

  - by MylesRip

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

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• What's New in ASP.NET 4

  - by Navaneeth

  The .NET Framework version 4 includes enhancements for ASP.NET 4 in targeted areas. Visual Studio 2010 and Microsoft Visual Web Developer Express also include enhancements and new features for improved Web development. This document provides an overview of many of the new features that are included in the upcoming release. This topic contains the following sections: ASP.NET Core Services ASP.NET Web Forms ASP.NET MVC Dynamic Data ASP.NET Chart Control Visual Web Developer Enhancements Web Application Deployment with Visual Studio 2010 Enhancements to ASP.NET Multi-Targeting ASP.NET Core Services ASP.NET 4 introduces many features that improve core ASP.NET services such as output caching and session state storage. Extensible Output Caching Since the time that ASP.NET 1.0 was released, output caching has enabled developers to store the generated output of pages, controls, and HTTP responses in memory. On subsequent Web requests, ASP.NET can serve content more quickly by retrieving the generated output from memory instead of regenerating the output from scratch. However, this approach has a limitation — generated content always has to be stored in memory. On servers that experience heavy traffic, the memory requirements for output caching can compete with memory requirements for other parts of a Web application. ASP.NET 4 adds extensibility to output caching that enables you to configure one or more custom output-cache providers. Output-cache providers can use any storage mechanism to persist HTML content. These storage options can include local or remote disks, cloud storage, and distributed cache engines. Output-cache provider extensibility in ASP.NET 4 lets you design more aggressive and more intelligent output-caching strategies for Web sites. For example, you can create an output-cache provider that caches the "Top 10" pages of a site in memory, while caching pages that get lower traffic on disk. Alternatively, you can cache every vary-by combination for a rendered page, but use a distributed cache so that the memory consumption is offloaded from front-end Web servers. You create a custom output-cache provider as a class that derives from the OutputCacheProvider type. You can then configure the provider in the Web.config file by using the new providers subsection of the outputCache element For more information and for examples that show how to configure the output cache, see outputCache Element for caching (ASP.NET Settings Schema). For more information about the classes that support caching, see the documentation for the OutputCache and OutputCacheProvider classes. By default, in ASP.NET 4, all HTTP responses, rendered pages, and controls use the in-memory output cache. The defaultProvider attribute for ASP.NET is AspNetInternalProvider. You can change the default output-cache provider used for a Web application by specifying a different provider name for defaultProvider attribute. In addition, you can select different output-cache providers for individual control and for individual requests and programmatically specify which provider to use. For more information, see the HttpApplication.GetOutputCacheProviderName(HttpContext) method. The easiest way to choose a different output-cache provider for different Web user controls is to do so declaratively by using the new providerName attribute in a page or control directive, as shown in the following example: <%@ OutputCache Duration="60" VaryByParam="None" providerName="DiskCache" %> Preloading Web Applications Some Web applications must load large amounts of data or must perform expensive initialization processing before serving the first request. In earlier versions of ASP.NET, for these situations you had to devise custom approaches to "wake up" an ASP.NET application and then run initialization code during the Application_Load method in the Global.asax file. To address this scenario, a new application preload manager (autostart feature) is available when ASP.NET 4 runs on IIS 7.5 on Windows Server 2008 R2. The preload feature provides a controlled approach for starting up an application pool, initializing an ASP.NET application, and then accepting HTTP requests. It lets you perform expensive application initialization prior to processing the first HTTP request. For example, you can use the application preload manager to initialize an application and then signal a load-balancer that the application was initialized and ready to accept HTTP traffic. To use the application preload manager, an IIS administrator sets an application pool in IIS 7.5 to be automatically started by using the following configuration in the applicationHost.config file: <applicationPools> <add name="MyApplicationPool" startMode="AlwaysRunning" /> </applicationPools> Because a single application pool can contain multiple applications, you specify individual applications to be automatically started by using the following configuration in the applicationHost.config file: <sites> <site name="MySite" id="1"> <application path="/" serviceAutoStartEnabled="true" serviceAutoStartProvider="PrewarmMyCache" > <!-- Additional content --> </application> </site> </sites> <!-- Additional content --> <serviceAutoStartProviders> <add name="PrewarmMyCache" type="MyNamespace.CustomInitialization, MyLibrary" /> </serviceAutoStartProviders> When an IIS 7.5 server is cold-started or when an individual application pool is recycled, IIS 7.5 uses the information in the applicationHost.config file to determine which Web applications have to be automatically started. For each application that is marked for preload, IIS7.5 sends a request to ASP.NET 4 to start the application in a state during which the application temporarily does not accept HTTP requests. When it is in this state, ASP.NET instantiates the type defined by the serviceAutoStartProvider attribute (as shown in the previous example) and calls into its public entry point. You create a managed preload type that has the required entry point by implementing the IProcessHostPreloadClient interface, as shown in the following example: public class CustomInitialization : System.Web.Hosting.IProcessHostPreloadClient { public void Preload(string[] parameters) { // Perform initialization. } } After your initialization code runs in the Preload method and after the method returns, the ASP.NET application is ready to process requests. Permanently Redirecting a Page Content in Web applications is often moved over the lifetime of the application. This can lead to links to be out of date, such as the links that are returned by search engines. In ASP.NET, developers have traditionally handled requests to old URLs by using the Redirect method to forward a request to the new URL. However, the Redirect method issues an HTTP 302 (Found) response (which is used for a temporary redirect). This results in an extra HTTP round trip. ASP.NET 4 adds a RedirectPermanent helper method that makes it easy to issue HTTP 301 (Moved Permanently) responses, as in the following example: RedirectPermanent("/newpath/foroldcontent.aspx"); Search engines and other user agents that recognize permanent redirects will store the new URL that is associated with the content, which eliminates the unnecessary round trip made by the browser for temporary redirects. Session State Compression By default, ASP.NET provides two options for storing session state across a Web farm. The first option is a session state provider that invokes an out-of-process session state server. The second option is a session state provider that stores data in a Microsoft SQL Server database. Because both options store state information outside a Web application's worker process, session state has to be serialized before it is sent to remote storage. If a large amount of data is saved in session state, the size of the serialized data can become very large. ASP.NET 4 introduces a new compression option for both kinds of out-of-process session state providers. By using this option, applications that have spare CPU cycles on Web servers can achieve substantial reductions in the size of serialized session state data. You can set this option using the new compressionEnabled attribute of the sessionState element in the configuration file. When the compressionEnabled configuration option is set to true, ASP.NET compresses (and decompresses) serialized session state by using the .NET Framework GZipStreamclass. The following example shows how to set this attribute. <sessionState mode="SqlServer" sqlConnectionString="data source=dbserver;Initial Catalog=aspnetstate" allowCustomSqlDatabase="true" compressionEnabled="true" /> ASP.NET Web Forms Web Forms has been a core feature in ASP.NET since the release of ASP.NET 1.0. Many enhancements have been in this area for ASP.NET 4, such as the following: The ability to set meta tags. More control over view state. Support for recently introduced browsers and devices. Easier ways to work with browser capabilities. Support for using ASP.NET routing with Web Forms. More control over generated IDs. The ability to persist selected rows in data controls. More control over rendered HTML in the FormView and ListView controls. Filtering support for data source controls. Enhanced support for Web standards and accessibility Setting Meta Tags with the Page.MetaKeywords and Page.MetaDescription Properties Two properties have been added to the Page class: MetaKeywords and MetaDescription. These two properties represent corresponding meta tags in the HTML rendered for a page, as shown in the following example: <head id="Head1" runat="server"> <title>Untitled Page</title> <meta name="keywords" content="keyword1, keyword2' /> <meta name="description" content="Description of my page" /> </head> These two properties work like the Title property does, and they can be set in the @ Page directive. For more information, see Page.MetaKeywords and Page.MetaDescription. Enabling View State for Individual Controls A new property has been added to the Control class: ViewStateMode. You can use this property to disable view state for all controls on a page except those for which you explicitly enable view state. View state data is included in a page's HTML and increases the amount of time it takes to send a page to the client and post it back. Storing more view state than is necessary can cause significant decrease in performance. In earlier versions of ASP.NET, you could reduce the impact of view state on a page's performance by disabling view state for specific controls. But sometimes it is easier to enable view state for a few controls that need it instead of disabling it for many that do not need it. For more information, see Control.ViewStateMode. Support for Recently Introduced Browsers and Devices ASP.NET includes a feature that is named browser capabilities that lets you determine the capabilities of the browser that a user is using. Browser capabilities are represented by the HttpBrowserCapabilities object which is stored in the HttpRequest.Browser property. Information about a particular browser's capabilities is defined by a browser definition file. In ASP.NET 4, these browser definition files have been updated to contain information about recently introduced browsers and devices such as Google Chrome, Research in Motion BlackBerry smart phones, and Apple iPhone. Existing browser definition files have also been updated. For more information, see How to: Upgrade an ASP.NET Web Application to ASP.NET 4 and ASP.NET Web Server Controls and Browser Capabilities. The browser definition files that are included with ASP.NET 4 are shown in the following list: •blackberry.browser •chrome.browser •Default.browser •firefox.browser •gateway.browser •generic.browser •ie.browser •iemobile.browser •iphone.browser •opera.browser •safari.browser A New Way to Define Browser Capabilities ASP.NET 4 includes a new feature referred to as browser capabilities providers. As the name suggests, this lets you build a provider that in turn lets you write custom code to determine browser capabilities. In ASP.NET version 3.5 Service Pack 1, you define browser capabilities in an XML file. This file resides in a machine-level folder or an application-level folder. Most developers do not need to customize these files, but for those who do, the provider approach can be easier than dealing with complex XML syntax. The provider approach makes it possible to simplify the process by implementing a common browser definition syntax, or a database that contains up-to-date browser definitions, or even a Web service for such a database. For more information about the new browser capabilities provider, see the What's New for ASP.NET 4 White Paper. Routing in ASP.NET 4 ASP.NET 4 adds built-in support for routing with Web Forms. Routing is a feature that was introduced with ASP.NET 3.5 SP1 and lets you configure an application to use URLs that are meaningful to users and to search engines because they do not have to specify physical file names. This can make your site more user-friendly and your site content more discoverable by search engines. For example, the URL for a page that displays product categories in your application might look like the following example: http://website/products.aspx?categoryid=12 By using routing, you can use the following URL to render the same information: http://website/products/software The second URL lets the user know what to expect and can result in significantly improved rankings in search engine results. the new features include the following: The PageRouteHandler class is a simple HTTP handler that you use when you define routes. You no longer have to write a custom route handler. The HttpRequest.RequestContext and Page.RouteData properties make it easier to access information that is passed in URL parameters. The RouteUrl expression provides a simple way to create a routed URL in markup. The RouteValue expression provides a simple way to extract URL parameter values in markup. The RouteParameter class makes it easier to pass URL parameter values to a query for a data source control (similar to FormParameter). You no longer have to change the Web.config file to enable routing. For more information about routing, see the following topics: ASP.NET Routing Walkthrough: Using ASP.NET Routing in a Web Forms Application How to: Define Routes for Web Forms Applications How to: Construct URLs from Routes How to: Access URL Parameters in a Routed Page Setting Client IDs The new ClientIDMode property makes it easier to write client script that references HTML elements rendered for server controls. Increasing use of Microsoft Ajax makes the need to do this more common. For example, you may have a data control that renders a long list of products with prices and you want to use client script to make a Web service call and update individual prices in the list as they change without refreshing the entire page. Typically you get a reference to an HTML element in client script by using the document.GetElementById method. You pass to this method the value of the id attribute of the HTML element you want to reference. In the case of elements that are rendered for ASP.NET server controls earlier versions of ASP.NET could make this difficult or impossible. You were not always able to predict what id values ASP.NET would generate, or ASP.NET could generate very long id values. The problem was especially difficult for data controls that would generate multiple rows for a single instance of the control in your markup. ASP.NET 4 adds two new algorithms for generating id attributes. These algorithms can generate id attributes that are easier to work with in client script because they are more predictable and that are easier to work with because they are simpler. For more information about how to use the new algorithms, see the following topics: ASP.NET Web Server Control Identification Walkthrough: Making Data-Bound Controls Easier to Access from JavaScript Walkthrough: Making Controls Located in Web User Controls Easier to Access from JavaScript How to: Access Controls from JavaScript by ID Persisting Row Selection in Data Controls The GridView and ListView controls enable users to select a row. In previous versions of ASP.NET, row selection was based on the row index on the page. For example, if you select the third item on page 1 and then move to page 2, the third item on page 2 is selected. In most cases, is more desirable not to select any rows on page 2. ASP.NET 4 supports Persisted Selection, a new feature that was initially supported only in Dynamic Data projects in the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1. When this feature is enabled, the selected item is based on the row data key. This means that if you select the third row on page 1 and move to page 2, nothing is selected on page 2. When you move back to page 1, the third row is still selected. This is a much more natural behavior than the behavior in earlier versions of ASP.NET. Persisted selection is now supported for the GridView and ListView controls in all projects. You can enable this feature in the GridView control, for example, by setting the EnablePersistedSelection property, as shown in the following example: <asp:GridView id="GridView2" runat="server" PersistedSelection="true"> </asp:GridView> FormView Control Enhancements The FormView control is enhanced to make it easier to style the content of the control with CSS. In previous versions of ASP.NET, the FormView control rendered it contents using an item template. This made styling more difficult in the markup because unexpected table row and table cell tags were rendered by the control. The FormView control supports RenderOuterTable, a property in ASP.NET 4. When this property is set to false, as show in the following example, the table tags are not rendered. This makes it easier to apply CSS style to the contents of the control. <asp:FormView ID="FormView1" runat="server" RenderTable="false"> For more information, see FormView Web Server Control Overview. ListView Control Enhancements The ListView control, which was introduced in ASP.NET 3.5, has all the functionality of the GridView control while giving you complete control over the output. This control has been made easier to use in ASP.NET 4. The earlier version of the control required that you specify a layout template that contained a server control with a known ID. The following markup shows a typical example of how to use the ListView control in ASP.NET 3.5. <asp:ListView ID="ListView1" runat="server"> <LayoutTemplate> <asp:PlaceHolder ID="ItemPlaceHolder" runat="server"></asp:PlaceHolder> </LayoutTemplate> <ItemTemplate> <% Eval("LastName")%> </ItemTemplate> </asp:ListView> In ASP.NET 4, the ListView control does not require a layout template. The markup shown in the previous example can be replaced with the following markup: <asp:ListView ID="ListView1" runat="server"> <ItemTemplate> <% Eval("LastName")%> </ItemTemplate> </asp:ListView> For more information, see ListView Web Server Control Overview. Filtering Data with the QueryExtender Control A very common task for developers who create data-driven Web pages is to filter data. This traditionally has been performed by building Where clauses in data source controls. This approach can be complicated, and in some cases the Where syntax does not let you take advantage of the full functionality of the underlying database. To make filtering easier, a new QueryExtender control has been added in ASP.NET 4. This control can be added to EntityDataSource or LinqDataSource controls in order to filter the data returned by these controls. Because the QueryExtender control relies on LINQ, but you do not to need to know how to write LINQ queries to use the query extender. The QueryExtender control supports a variety of filter options. The following lists QueryExtender filter options. Term Definition SearchExpression Searches a field or fields for string values and compares them to a specified string value. RangeExpression Searches a field or fields for values in a range specified by a pair of values. PropertyExpression Compares a specified value to a property value in a field. If the expression evaluates to true, the data that is being examined is returned. OrderByExpression Sorts data by a specified column and sort direction. CustomExpression Calls a function that defines custom filter in the page. For more information, see QueryExtenderQueryExtender Web Server Control Overview. Enhanced Support for Web Standards and Accessibility Earlier versions of ASP.NET controls sometimes render markup that does not conform to HTML, XHTML, or accessibility standards. ASP.NET 4 eliminates most of these exceptions. For details about how the HTML that is rendered by each control meets accessibility standards, see ASP.NET Controls and Accessibility. CSS for Controls that Can be Disabled In ASP.NET 3.5, when a control is disabled (see WebControl.Enabled), a disabled attribute is added to the rendered HTML element. For example, the following markup creates a Label control that is disabled: <asp:Label id="Label1" runat="server"   Text="Test" Enabled="false" /> In ASP.NET 3.5, the previous control settings generate the following HTML: <span id="Label1" disabled="disabled">Test</span> In HTML 4.01, the disabled attribute is not considered valid on span elements. It is valid only on input elements because it specifies that they cannot be accessed. On display-only elements such as span elements, browsers typically support rendering for a disabled appearance, but a Web page that relies on this non-standard behavior is not robust according to accessibility standards. For display-only elements, you should use CSS to indicate a disabled visual appearance. Therefore, by default ASP.NET 4 generates the following HTML for the control settings shown previously: <span id="Label1" class="aspNetDisabled">Test</span> You can change the value of the class attribute that is rendered by default when a control is disabled by setting the DisabledCssClass property. CSS for Validation Controls In ASP.NET 3.5, validation controls render a default color of red as an inline style. For example, the following markup creates a RequiredFieldValidator control: <asp:RequiredFieldValidator ID="RequiredFieldValidator1" runat="server"   ErrorMessage="Required Field" ControlToValidate="RadioButtonList1" /> ASP.NET 3.5 renders the following HTML for the validator control: <span id="RequiredFieldValidator1"   style="color:Red;visibility:hidden;">RequiredFieldValidator</span> By default, ASP.NET 4 does not render an inline style to set the color to red. An inline style is used only to hide or show the validator, as shown in the following example: <span id="RequiredFieldValidator1"   style"visibility:hidden;">RequiredFieldValidator</span> Therefore, ASP.NET 4 does not automatically show error messages in red. For information about how to use CSS to specify a visual style for a validation control, see Validating User Input in ASP.NET Web Pages. CSS for the Hidden Fields Div Element ASP.NET uses hidden fields to store state information such as view state and control state. These hidden fields are contained by a div element. In ASP.NET 3.5, this div element does not have a class attribute or an id attribute. Therefore, CSS rules that affect all div elements could unintentionally cause this div to be visible. To avoid this problem, ASP.NET 4 renders the div element for hidden fields with a CSS class that you can use to differentiate the hidden fields div from others. The new classvalue is shown in the following example: <div class="aspNetHidden"> CSS for the Table, Image, and ImageButton Controls By default, in ASP.NET 3.5, some controls set the border attribute of rendered HTML to zero (0). The following example shows HTML that is generated by the Table control in ASP.NET 3.5: <table id="Table2" border="0"> The Image control and the ImageButton control also do this. Because this is not necessary and provides visual formatting information that should be provided by using CSS, the attribute is not generated in ASP.NET 4. CSS for the UpdatePanel and UpdateProgress Controls In ASP.NET 3.5, the UpdatePanel and UpdateProgress controls do not support expando attributes. This makes it impossible to set a CSS class on the HTMLelements that they render. In ASP.NET 4 these controls have been changed to accept expando attributes, as shown in the following example: <asp:UpdatePanel runat="server" class="myStyle"> </asp:UpdatePanel> The following HTML is rendered for this markup: <div id="ctl00_MainContent_UpdatePanel1" class="expandoclass"> </div> Eliminating Unnecessary Outer Tables In ASP.NET 3.5, the HTML that is rendered for the following controls is wrapped in a table element whose purpose is to apply inline styles to the entire control: FormView Login PasswordRecovery ChangePassword If you use templates to customize the appearance of these controls, you can specify CSS styles in the markup that you provide in the templates. In that case, no extra outer table is required. In ASP.NET 4, you can prevent the table from being rendered by setting the new RenderOuterTable property to false. Layout Templates for Wizard Controls In ASP.NET 3.5, the Wizard and CreateUserWizard controls generate an HTML table element that is used for visual formatting. In ASP.NET 4 you can use a LayoutTemplate element to specify the layout. If you do this, the HTML table element is not generated. In the template, you create placeholder controls to indicate where items should be dynamically inserted into the control. (This is similar to how the template model for the ListView control works.) For more information, see the Wizard.LayoutTemplate property. New HTML Formatting Options for the CheckBoxList and RadioButtonList Controls ASP.NET 3.5 uses HTML table elements to format the output for the CheckBoxList and RadioButtonList controls. To provide an alternative that does not use tables for visual formatting, ASP.NET 4 adds two new options to the RepeatLayout enumeration: UnorderedList. This option causes the HTML output to be formatted by using ul and li elements instead of a table. OrderedList. This option causes the HTML output to be formatted by using ol and li elements instead of a table. For examples of HTML that is rendered for the new options, see the RepeatLayout enumeration. Header and Footer Elements for the Table Control In ASP.NET 3.5, the Table control can be configured to render thead and tfoot elements by setting the TableSection property of the TableHeaderRow class and the TableFooterRow class. In ASP.NET 4 these properties are set to the appropriate values by default. CSS and ARIA Support for the Menu Control In ASP.NET 3.5, the Menu control uses HTML table elements for visual formatting, and in some configurations it is not keyboard-accessible. ASP.NET 4 addresses these problems and improves accessibility in the following ways: The generated HTML is structured as an unordered list (ul and li elements). CSS is used for visual formatting. The menu behaves in accordance with ARIA standards for keyboard access. You can use arrow keys to navigate menu items. (For information about ARIA, see Accessibility in Visual Studio and ASP.NET.) ARIA role and property attributes are added to the generated HTML. (Attributes are added by using JavaScript instead of included in the HTML, to avoid generating HTML that would cause markup validation errors.) Styles for the Menu control are rendered in a style block at the top of the page, instead of inline with the rendered HTML elements. If you want to use a separate CSS file so that you can modify the menu styles, you can set the Menu control's new IncludeStyleBlock property to false, in which case the style block is not generated. Valid XHTML for the HtmlForm Control In ASP.NET 3.5, the HtmlForm control (which is created implicitly by the <form runat="server"> tag) renders an HTML form element that has both name and id attributes. The name attribute is deprecated in XHTML 1.1. Therefore, this control does not render the name attribute in ASP.NET 4. Maintaining Backward Compatibility in Control Rendering An existing ASP.NET Web site might have code in it that assumes that controls are rendering HTML the way they do in ASP.NET 3.5. To avoid causing backward compatibility problems when you upgrade the site to ASP.NET 4, you can have ASP.NET continue to generate HTML the way it does in ASP.NET 3.5 after you upgrade the site. To do so, you can set the controlRenderingCompatibilityVersion attribute of the pages element to "3.5" in the Web.config file of an ASP.NET 4 Web site, as shown in the following example: <system.web>   <pages controlRenderingCompatibilityVersion="3.5"/> </system.web> If this setting is omitted, the default value is the same as the version of ASP.NET that the Web site targets. (For information about multi-targeting in ASP.NET, see .NET Framework Multi-Targeting for ASP.NET Web Projects.) ASP.NET MVC ASP.NET MVC helps Web developers build compelling standards-based Web sites that are easy to maintain because it decreases the dependency among application layers by using the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern. MVC provides complete control over the page markup. It also improves testability by inherently supporting Test Driven Development (TDD). Web sites created using ASP.NET MVC have a modular architecture. This allows members of a team to work independently on the various modules and can be used to improve collaboration. For example, developers can work on the model and controller layers (data and logic), while the designer work on the view (presentation). For tutorials, walkthroughs, conceptual content, code samples, and a complete API reference, see ASP.NET MVC 2. Dynamic Data Dynamic Data was introduced in the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 release in mid-2008. This feature provides many enhancements for creating data-driven applications, such as the following: A RAD experience for quickly building a data-driven Web site. Automatic validation that is based on constraints defined in the data model. The ability to easily change the markup that is generated for fields in the GridView and DetailsView controls by using field templates that are part of your Dynamic Data project. For ASP.NET 4, Dynamic Data has been enhanced to give developers even more power for quickly building data-driven Web sites. For more information, see ASP.NET Dynamic Data Content Map. Enabling Dynamic Data for Individual Data-Bound Controls in Existing Web Applications You can use Dynamic Data features in existing ASP.NET Web applications that do not use scaffolding by enabling Dynamic Data for individual data-bound controls. Dynamic Data provides the presentation and data layer support for rendering these controls. When you enable Dynamic Data for data-bound controls, you get the following benefits: Setting default values for data fields. Dynamic Data enables you to provide default values at run time for fields in a data control. Interacting with the database without creating and registering a data model. Automatically validating the data that is entered by the user without writing any code. For more information, see Walkthrough: Enabling Dynamic Data in ASP.NET Data-Bound Controls. New Field Templates for URLs and E-mail Addresses ASP.NET 4 introduces two new built-in field templates, EmailAddress.ascx and Url.ascx. These templates are used for fields that are marked as EmailAddress or Url using the DataTypeAttribute attribute. For EmailAddress objects, the field is displayed as a hyperlink that is created by using the mailto: protocol. When users click the link, it opens the user's e-mail client and creates a skeleton message. Objects typed as Url are displayed as ordinary hyperlinks. The following example shows how to mark fields. [DataType(DataType.EmailAddress)] public object HomeEmail { get; set; } [DataType(DataType.Url)] public object Website { get; set; } Creating Links with the DynamicHyperLink Control Dynamic Data uses the new routing feature that was added in the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 to control the URLs that users see when they access the Web site. The new DynamicHyperLink control makes it easy to build links to pages in a Dynamic Data site. For information, see How to: Create Table Action Links in Dynamic Data Support for Inheritance in the Data Model Both the ADO.NET Entity Framework and LINQ to SQL support inheritance in their data models. An example of this might be a database that has an InsurancePolicy table. It might also contain CarPolicy and HousePolicy tables that have the same fields as InsurancePolicy and then add more fields. Dynamic Data has been modified to understand inherited objects in the data model and to support scaffolding for the inherited tables. For more information, see Walkthrough: Mapping Table-per-Hierarchy Inheritance in Dynamic Data. Support for Many-to-Many Relationships (Entity Framework Only) The Entity Framework has rich support for many-to-many relationships between tables, which is implemented by exposing the relationship as a collection on an Entity object. New field templates (ManyToMany.ascx and ManyToMany_Edit.ascx) have been added to provide support for displaying and editing data that is involved in many-to-many relationships. For more information, see Working with Many-to-Many Data Relationships in Dynamic Data. New Attributes to Control Display and Support Enumerations The DisplayAttribute has been added to give you additional control over how fields are displayed. The DisplayNameAttribute attribute in earlier versions of Dynamic Data enabled you to change the name that is used as a caption for a field. The new DisplayAttribute class lets you specify more options for displaying a field, such as the order in which a field is displayed and whether a field will be used as a filter. The attribute also provides independent control of the name that is used for the labels in a GridView control, the name that is used in a DetailsView control, the help text for the field, and the watermark used for the field (if the field accepts text input). The EnumDataTypeAttribute class has been added to let you map fields to enumerations. When you apply this attribute to a field, you specify an enumeration type. Dynamic Data uses the new Enumeration.ascx field template to create UI for displaying and editing enumeration values. The template maps the values from the database to the names in the enumeration. Enhanced Support for Filters Dynamic Data 1.0 had built-in filters for Boolean columns and foreign-key columns. The filters did not let you specify the order in which they were displayed. The new DisplayAttribute attribute addresses this by giving you control over whether a column appears as a filter and in what order it will be displayed. An additional enhancement is that filtering support has been rewritten to use the new QueryExtender feature of Web Forms. This lets you create filters without requiring knowledge of the data source control that the filters will be used with. Along with these extensions, filters have also been turned into template controls, which lets you add new ones. Finally, the DisplayAttribute class mentioned earlier allows the default filter to be overridden, in the same way that UIHint allows the default field template for a column to be overridden. For more information, see Walkthrough: Filtering Rows in Tables That Have a Parent-Child Relationship and QueryableFilterRepeater. ASP.NET Chart Control The ASP.NET chart server control enables you to create ASP.NET pages applications that have simple, intuitive charts for complex statistical or financial analysis. The chart control supports the following features: Data series, chart areas, axes, legends, labels, titles, and more. Data binding. Data manipulation, such as copying, splitting, merging, alignment, grouping, sorting, searching, and filtering. Statistical formulas and financial formulas. Advanced chart appearance, such as 3-D, anti-aliasing, lighting, and perspective. Events and customizations. Interactivity and Microsoft Ajax. Support for the Ajax Content Delivery Network (CDN), which provides an optimized way for you to add Microsoft Ajax Library and jQuery scripts to your Web applications. For more information, see Chart Web Server Control Overview. Visual Web Developer Enhancements The following sections provide information about enhancements and new features in Visual Studio 2010 and Visual Web Developer Express. The Web page designer in Visual Studio 2010 has been enhanced for better CSS compatibility, includes additional support for HTML and ASP.NET markup snippets, and features a redesigned version of IntelliSense for JScript. Improved CSS Compatibility The Visual Web Developer designer in Visual Studio 2010 has been updated to improve CSS 2.1 standards compliance. The designer better preserves HTML source code and is more robust than in previous versions of Visual Studio. HTML and JScript Snippets In the HTML editor, IntelliSense auto-completes tag names. The IntelliSense Snippets feature auto-completes whole tags and more. In Visual Studio 2010, IntelliSense snippets are supported for JScript, alongside C# and Visual Basic, which were supported in earlier versions of Visual Studio. Visual Studio 2010 includes over 200 snippets that help you auto-complete common ASP.NET and HTML tags, including required attributes (such as runat="server") and common attributes specific to a tag (such as ID, DataSourceID, ControlToValidate, and Text). You can download additional snippets, or you can write your own snippets that encapsulate the blocks of markup that you or your team use for common tasks. For more information on HTML snippets, see Walkthrough: Using HTML Snippets. JScript IntelliSense Enhancements In Visual 2010, JScript IntelliSense has been redesigned to provide an even richer editing experience. IntelliSense now recognizes objects that have been dynamically generated by methods such as registerNamespace and by similar techniques used by other JavaScript frameworks. Performance has been improved to analyze large libraries of script and to display IntelliSense with little or no processing delay. Compatibility has been significantly increased to support almost all third-party libraries and to support diverse coding styles. Documentation comments are now parsed as you type and are immediately leveraged by IntelliSense. Web Application Deployment with Visual Studio 2010 For Web application projects, Visual Studio now provides tools that work with the IIS Web Deployment Tool (Web Deploy) to automate many processes that had to be done manually in earlier versions of ASP.NET. For example, the following tasks can now be automated: Creating an IIS application on the destination computer and configuring IIS settings. Copying files to the destination computer. Changing Web.config settings that must be different in the destination environment. Propagating changes to data or data structures in SQL Server databases that are used by the Web application. For more information about Web application deployment, see ASP.NET Deployment Content Map. Enhancements to ASP.NET Multi-Targeting ASP.NET 4 adds new features to the multi-targeting feature to make it easier to work with projects that target earlier versions of the .NET Framework. Multi-targeting was introduced in ASP.NET 3.5 to enable you to use the latest version of Visual Studio without having to upgrade existing Web sites or Web services to the latest version of the .NET Framework. In Visual Studio 2008, when you work with a project targeted for an earlier version of the .NET Framework, most features of the development environment adapt to the targeted version. However, IntelliSense displays language features that are available in the current version, and property windows display properties available in the current version. In Visual Studio 2010, only language features and properties available in the targeted version of the .NET Framework are shown. For more information about multi-targeting, see the following topics: .NET Framework Multi-Targeting for ASP.NET Web Projects ASP.NET Side-by-Side Execution Overview How to: Host Web Applications That Use Different Versions of the .NET Framework on the Same Server How to: Deploy Web Site Projects Targeted for Earlier Versions of the .NET Framework

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• SimpleMembership, Membership Providers, Universal Providers and the new ASP.NET 4.5 Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC 4 templates

  - by Jon Galloway

  The ASP.NET MVC 4 Internet template adds some new, very useful features which are built on top of SimpleMembership. These changes add some great features, like a much simpler and extensible membership API and support for OAuth. However, the new account management features require SimpleMembership and won't work against existing ASP.NET Membership Providers. I'll start with a summary of top things you need to know, then dig into a lot more detail. Summary: SimpleMembership has been designed as a replacement for traditional the previous ASP.NET Role and Membership provider system SimpleMembership solves common problems people ran into with the Membership provider system and was designed for modern user / membership / storage needs SimpleMembership integrates with the previous membership system, but you can't use a MembershipProvider with SimpleMembership The new ASP.NET MVC 4 Internet application template AccountController requires SimpleMembership and is not compatible with previous MembershipProviders You can continue to use existing ASP.NET Role and Membership providers in ASP.NET 4.5 and ASP.NET MVC 4 - just not with the ASP.NET MVC 4 AccountController The existing ASP.NET Role and Membership provider system remains supported as is part of the ASP.NET core ASP.NET 4.5 Web Forms does not use SimpleMembership; it implements OAuth on top of ASP.NET Membership The ASP.NET Web Site Administration Tool (WSAT) is not compatible with SimpleMembership The following is the result of a few conversations with Erik Porter (PM for ASP.NET MVC) to make sure I had some the overall details straight, combined with a lot of time digging around in ILSpy and Visual Studio's assembly browsing tools. SimpleMembership: The future of membership for ASP.NET The ASP.NET Membership system was introduces with ASP.NET 2.0 back in 2005. It was designed to solve common site membership requirements at the time, which generally involved username / password based registration and profile storage in SQL Server. It was designed with a few extensibility mechanisms - notably a provider system (which allowed you override some specifics like backing storage) and the ability to store additional profile information (although the additional  profile information was packed into a single column which usually required access through the API). While it's sometimes frustrating to work with, it's held up for seven years - probably since it handles the main use case (username / password based membership in a SQL Server database) smoothly and can be adapted to most other needs (again, often frustrating, but it can work). The ASP.NET Web Pages and WebMatrix efforts allowed the team an opportunity to take a new look at a lot of things - e.g. the Razor syntax started with ASP.NET Web Pages, not ASP.NET MVC. The ASP.NET Web Pages team designed SimpleMembership to (wait for it) simplify the task of dealing with membership. As Matthew Osborn said in his post Using SimpleMembership With ASP.NET WebPages: With the introduction of ASP.NET WebPages and the WebMatrix stack our team has really be focusing on making things simpler for the developer. Based on a lot of customer feedback one of the areas that we wanted to improve was the built in security in ASP.NET. So with this release we took that time to create a new built in (and default for ASP.NET WebPages) security provider. I say provider because the new stuff is still built on the existing ASP.NET framework. So what do we call this new hotness that we have created? Well, none other than SimpleMembership. SimpleMembership is an umbrella term for both SimpleMembership and SimpleRoles. Part of simplifying membership involved fixing some common problems with ASP.NET Membership. Problems with ASP.NET Membership ASP.NET Membership was very obviously designed around a set of assumptions: Users and user information would most likely be stored in a full SQL Server database or in Active Directory User and profile information would be optimized around a set of common attributes (UserName, Password, IsApproved, CreationDate, Comment, Role membership...) and other user profile information would be accessed through a profile provider Some problems fall out of these assumptions. Requires Full SQL Server for default cases The default, and most fully featured providers ASP.NET Membership providers (SQL Membership Provider, SQL Role Provider, SQL Profile Provider) require full SQL Server. They depend on stored procedure support, and they rely on SQL Server cache dependencies, they depend on agents for clean up and maintenance. So the main SQL Server based providers don't work well on SQL Server CE, won't work out of the box on SQL Azure, etc. Note: Cory Fowler recently let me know about these Updated ASP.net scripts for use with Microsoft SQL Azure which do support membership, personalization, profile, and roles. But the fact that we need a support page with a set of separate SQL scripts underscores the underlying problem. Aha, you say! Jon's forgetting the Universal Providers, a.k.a. System.Web.Providers! Hold on a bit, we'll get to those... Custom Membership Providers have to work with a SQL-Server-centric API If you want to work with another database or other membership storage system, you need to to inherit from the provider base classes and override a bunch of methods which are tightly focused on storing a MembershipUser in a relational database. It can be done (and you can often find pretty good ones that have already been written), but it's a good amount of work and often leaves you with ugly code that has a bunch of System.NotImplementedException fun since there are a lot of methods that just don't apply. Designed around a specific view of users, roles and profiles The existing providers are focused on traditional membership - a user has a username and a password, some specific roles on the site (e.g. administrator, premium user), and may have some additional "nice to have" optional information that can be accessed via an API in your application. This doesn't fit well with some modern usage patterns: In OAuth and OpenID, the user doesn't have a password Often these kinds of scenarios map better to user claims or rights instead of monolithic user roles For many sites, profile or other non-traditional information is very important and needs to come from somewhere other than an API call that maps to a database blob What would work a lot better here is a system in which you were able to define your users, rights, and other attributes however you wanted and the membership system worked with your model - not the other way around. Requires specific schema, overflow in blob columns I've already mentioned this a few times, but it bears calling out separately - ASP.NET Membership focuses on SQL Server storage, and that storage is based on a very specific database schema. SimpleMembership as a better membership system As you might have guessed, SimpleMembership was designed to address the above problems. Works with your Schema As Matthew Osborn explains in his Using SimpleMembership With ASP.NET WebPages post, SimpleMembership is designed to integrate with your database schema: All SimpleMembership requires is that there are two columns on your users table so that we can hook up to it – an “ID” column and a “username” column. The important part here is that they can be named whatever you want. For instance username doesn't have to be an alias it could be an email column you just have to tell SimpleMembership to treat that as the “username” used to log in. Matthew's example shows using a very simple user table named Users (it could be named anything) with a UserID and Username column, then a bunch of other columns he wanted in his app. Then we point SimpleMemberhip at that table with a one-liner: WebSecurity.InitializeDatabaseFile("SecurityDemo.sdf", "Users", "UserID", "Username", true); No other tables are needed, the table can be named anything we want, and can have pretty much any schema we want as long as we've got an ID and something that we can map to a username. Broaden database support to the whole SQL Server family While SimpleMembership is not database agnostic, it works across the SQL Server family. It continues to support full SQL Server, but it also works with SQL Azure, SQL Server CE, SQL Server Express, and LocalDB. Everything's implemented as SQL calls rather than requiring stored procedures, views, agents, and change notifications. Note that SimpleMembership still requires some flavor of SQL Server - it won't work with MySQL, NoSQL databases, etc. You can take a look at the code in WebMatrix.WebData.dll using a tool like ILSpy if you'd like to see why - there places where SQL Server specific SQL statements are being executed, especially when creating and initializing tables. It seems like you might be able to work with another database if you created the tables separately, but I haven't tried it and it's not supported at this point. Note: I'm thinking it would be possible for SimpleMembership (or something compatible) to run Entity Framework so it would work with any database EF supports. That seems useful to me - thoughts? Note: SimpleMembership has the same database support - anything in the SQL Server family - that Universal Providers brings to the ASP.NET Membership system. Easy to with Entity Framework Code First The problem with with ASP.NET Membership's system for storing additional account information is that it's the gate keeper. That means you're stuck with its schema and accessing profile information through its API. SimpleMembership flips that around by allowing you to use any table as a user store. That means you're in control of the user profile information, and you can access it however you'd like - it's just data. Let's look at a practical based on the AccountModel.cs class in an ASP.NET MVC 4 Internet project. Here I'm adding a Birthday property to the UserProfile class. [Table("UserProfile")] public class UserProfile { [Key] [DatabaseGeneratedAttribute(DatabaseGeneratedOption.Identity)] public int UserId { get; set; } public string UserName { get; set; } public DateTime Birthday { get; set; } } Now if I want to access that information, I can just grab the account by username and read the value. var context = new UsersContext(); var username = User.Identity.Name; var user = context.UserProfiles.SingleOrDefault(u => u.UserName == username); var birthday = user.Birthday; So instead of thinking of SimpleMembership as a big membership API, think of it as something that handles membership based on your user database. In SimpleMembership, everything's keyed off a user row in a table you define rather than a bunch of entries in membership tables that were out of your control. How SimpleMembership integrates with ASP.NET Membership Okay, enough sales pitch (and hopefully background) on why things have changed. How does this affect you? Let's start with a diagram to show the relationship (note: I've simplified by removing a few classes to show the important relationships): So SimpleMembershipProvider is an implementaiton of an ExtendedMembershipProvider, which inherits from MembershipProvider and adds some other account / OAuth related things. Here's what ExtendedMembershipProvider adds to MembershipProvider: The important thing to take away here is that a SimpleMembershipProvider is a MembershipProvider, but a MembershipProvider is not a SimpleMembershipProvider. This distinction is important in practice: you cannot use an existing MembershipProvider (including the Universal Providers found in System.Web.Providers) with an API that requires a SimpleMembershipProvider, including any of the calls in WebMatrix.WebData.WebSecurity or Microsoft.Web.WebPages.OAuth.OAuthWebSecurity. However, that's as far as it goes. Membership Providers still work if you're accessing them through the standard Membership API, and all of the core stuff  - including the AuthorizeAttribute, role enforcement, etc. - will work just fine and without any change. Let's look at how that affects you in terms of the new templates. Membership in the ASP.NET MVC 4 project templates ASP.NET MVC 4 offers six Project Templates: Empty - Really empty, just the assemblies, folder structure and a tiny bit of basic configuration. Basic - Like Empty, but with a bit of UI preconfigured (css / images / bundling). Internet - This has both a Home and Account controller and associated views. The Account Controller supports registration and login via either local accounts and via OAuth / OpenID providers. Intranet - Like the Internet template, but it's preconfigured for Windows Authentication. Mobile - This is preconfigured using jQuery Mobile and is intended for mobile-only sites. Web API - This is preconfigured for a service backend built on ASP.NET Web API. Out of these templates, only one (the Internet template) uses SimpleMembership. ASP.NET MVC 4 Basic template The Basic template has configuration in place to use ASP.NET Membership with the Universal Providers. You can see that configuration in the ASP.NET MVC 4 Basic template's web.config: <profile defaultProvider="DefaultProfileProvider"> <providers> <add name="DefaultProfileProvider" type="System.Web.Providers.DefaultProfileProvider, System.Web.Providers, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" connectionStringName="DefaultConnection" applicationName="/" /> </providers> </profile> <membership defaultProvider="DefaultMembershipProvider"> <providers> <add name="DefaultMembershipProvider" type="System.Web.Providers.DefaultMembershipProvider, System.Web.Providers, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" connectionStringName="DefaultConnection" enablePasswordRetrieval="false" enablePasswordReset="true" requiresQuestionAndAnswer="false" requiresUniqueEmail="false" maxInvalidPasswordAttempts="5" minRequiredPasswordLength="6" minRequiredNonalphanumericCharacters="0" passwordAttemptWindow="10" applicationName="/" /> </providers> </membership> <roleManager defaultProvider="DefaultRoleProvider"> <providers> <add name="DefaultRoleProvider" type="System.Web.Providers.DefaultRoleProvider, System.Web.Providers, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" connectionStringName="DefaultConnection" applicationName="/" /> </providers> </roleManager> <sessionState mode="InProc" customProvider="DefaultSessionProvider"> <providers> <add name="DefaultSessionProvider" type="System.Web.Providers.DefaultSessionStateProvider, System.Web.Providers, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" connectionStringName="DefaultConnection" /> </providers> </sessionState> This means that it's business as usual for the Basic template as far as ASP.NET Membership works. ASP.NET MVC 4 Internet template The Internet template has a few things set up to bootstrap SimpleMembership: \Models\AccountModels.cs defines a basic user account and includes data annotations to define keys and such \Filters\InitializeSimpleMembershipAttribute.cs creates the membership database using the above model, then calls WebSecurity.InitializeDatabaseConnection which verifies that the underlying tables are in place and marks initialization as complete (for the application's lifetime) \Controllers\AccountController.cs makes heavy use of OAuthWebSecurity (for OAuth account registration / login / management) and WebSecurity. WebSecurity provides account management services for ASP.NET MVC (and Web Pages) WebSecurity can work with any ExtendedMembershipProvider. There's one in the box (SimpleMembershipProvider) but you can write your own. Since a standard MembershipProvider is not an ExtendedMembershipProvider, WebSecurity will throw exceptions if the default membership provider is a MembershipProvider rather than an ExtendedMembershipProvider. Practical example: Create a new ASP.NET MVC 4 application using the Internet application template Install the Microsoft ASP.NET Universal Providers for LocalDB NuGet package Run the application, click on Register, add a username and password, and click submit You'll get the following execption in AccountController.cs::Register: To call this method, the "Membership.Provider" property must be an instance of "ExtendedMembershipProvider". This occurs because the ASP.NET Universal Providers packages include a web.config transform that will update your web.config to add the Universal Provider configuration I showed in the Basic template example above. When WebSecurity tries to use the configured ASP.NET Membership Provider, it checks if it can be cast to an ExtendedMembershipProvider before doing anything else. So, what do you do? Options: If you want to use the new AccountController, you'll either need to use the SimpleMembershipProvider or another valid ExtendedMembershipProvider. This is pretty straightforward. If you want to use an existing ASP.NET Membership Provider in ASP.NET MVC 4, you can't use the new AccountController. You can do a few things: Replace  the AccountController.cs and AccountModels.cs in an ASP.NET MVC 4 Internet project with one from an ASP.NET MVC 3 application (you of course won't have OAuth support). Then, if you want, you can go through and remove other things that were built around SimpleMembership - the OAuth partial view, the NuGet packages (e.g. the DotNetOpenAuthAuth package, etc.) Use an ASP.NET MVC 4 Internet application template and add in a Universal Providers NuGet package. Then copy in the AccountController and AccountModel classes. Create an ASP.NET MVC 3 project and upgrade it to ASP.NET MVC 4 using the steps shown in the ASP.NET MVC 4 release notes. None of these are particularly elegant or simple. Maybe we (or just me?) can do something to make this simpler - perhaps a NuGet package. However, this should be an edge case - hopefully the cases where you'd need to create a new ASP.NET but use legacy ASP.NET Membership Providers should be pretty rare. Please let me (or, preferably the team) know if that's an incorrect assumption. Membership in the ASP.NET 4.5 project template ASP.NET 4.5 Web Forms took a different approach which builds off ASP.NET Membership. Instead of using the WebMatrix security assemblies, Web Forms uses Microsoft.AspNet.Membership.OpenAuth assembly. I'm no expert on this, but from a bit of time in ILSpy and Visual Studio's (very pretty) dependency graphs, this uses a Membership Adapter to save OAuth data into an EF managed database while still running on top of ASP.NET Membership. Note: There may be a way to use this in ASP.NET MVC 4, although it would probably take some plumbing work to hook it up. How does this fit in with Universal Providers (System.Web.Providers)? Just to summarize: Universal Providers are intended for cases where you have an existing ASP.NET Membership Provider and you want to use it with another SQL Server database backend (other than SQL Server). It doesn't require agents to handle expired session cleanup and other background tasks, it piggybacks these tasks on other calls. Universal Providers are not really, strictly speaking, universal - at least to my way of thinking. They only work with databases in the SQL Server family. Universal Providers do not work with Simple Membership. The Universal Providers packages include some web config transforms which you would normally want when you're using them. What about the Web Site Administration Tool? Visual Studio includes tooling to launch the Web Site Administration Tool (WSAT) to configure users and roles in your application. WSAT is built to work with ASP.NET Membership, and is not compatible with Simple Membership. There are two main options there: Use the WebSecurity and OAuthWebSecurity API to manage the users and roles Create a web admin using the above APIs Since SimpleMembership runs on top of your database, you can update your users as you would any other data - via EF or even in direct database edits (in development, of course)

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• Using an alternate JSON Serializer in ASP.NET Web API

  - by Rick Strahl

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

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• SQL SERVER – Securing TRUNCATE Permissions in SQL Server

  - by pinaldave

  Download the Script of this article from here. On December 11, 2010, Vinod Kumar, a Databases & BI technology evangelist from Microsoft Corporation, graced Ahmedabad by spending some time with the Community during the Community Tech Days (CTD) event. As he was running through a few demos, Vinod asked the audience one of the most fundamental and common interview questions – “What is the difference between a DELETE and TRUNCATE?“ Ahmedabad SQL Server User Group Expert Nakul Vachhrajani has come up with excellent solutions of the same. I must congratulate Nakul for this excellent solution and as a encouragement to User Group member, I am publishing the same article over here. Nakul Vachhrajani is a Software Specialist and systems development professional with Patni Computer Systems Limited. He has functional experience spanning legacy code deprecation, system design, documentation, development, implementation, testing, maintenance and support of complex systems, providing business intelligence solutions, database administration, performance tuning, optimization, product management, release engineering, process definition and implementation. He has comprehensive grasp on Database Administration, Development and Implementation with MS SQL Server and C, C++, Visual C++/C#. He has about 6 years of total experience in information technology. Nakul is an member of the Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar SQL Server User Groups, and actively contributes to the community by actively participating in multiple forums and websites like SQLAuthority.com, BeyondRelational.com, SQLServerCentral.com and many others. Please note: The opinions expressed herein are Nakul own personal opinions and do not represent his employer’s view in anyway. All data from everywhere here on Earth go through a series of  four distinct operations, identified by the words: CREATE, READ, UPDATE and DELETE, or simply, CRUD. Putting in Microsoft SQL Server terms, is the process goes like this: INSERT, SELECT, UPDATE and DELETE/TRUNCATE. Quite a few interesting responses were received and evaluated live during the session. To summarize them, the most important similarity that came out was that both DELETE and TRUNCATE participate in transactions. The major differences (not all) that came out of the exercise were: DELETE: DELETE supports a WHERE clause DELETE removes rows from a table, row-by-row Because DELETE moves row-by-row, it acquires a row-level lock Depending upon the recovery model of the database, DELETE is a fully-logged operation. Because DELETE moves row-by-row, it can fire off triggers TRUNCATE: TRUNCATE does not support a WHERE clause TRUNCATE works by directly removing the individual data pages of a table TRUNCATE directly occupies a table-level lock. (Because a lock is acquired, and because TRUNCATE can also participate in a transaction, it has to be a logged operation) TRUNCATE is, therefore, a minimally-logged operation; again, this depends upon the recovery model of the database Triggers are not fired when TRUNCATE is used (because individual row deletions are not logged) Finally, Vinod popped the big homework question that must be critically analyzed: “We know that we can restrict a DELETE operation to a particular user, but how can we restrict the TRUNCATE operation to a particular user?” After returning home and having a nice cup of coffee, I noticed that my gray cells immediately started to work. Below was the result of my research. As what is always said, the devil is in the details. Upon looking at the Permissions section for the TRUNCATE statement in Books On Line, the following jumps right out: “The minimum permission required is ALTER on table_name. TRUNCATE TABLE permissions default to the table owner, members of the sysadmin fixed server role, and the db_owner and db_ddladmin fixed database roles, and are not transferable. However, you can incorporate the TRUNCATE TABLE statement within a module, such as a stored procedure, and grant appropriate permissions to the module using the EXECUTE AS clause.“ Now, what does this mean? Unlike DELETE, one cannot directly assign permissions to a user/set of users allowing or revoking TRUNCATE rights. However, there is a way to circumvent this. It is important to recall that in Microsoft SQL Server, database engine security surrounds the concept of a “securable”, which is any object like a table, stored procedure, trigger, etc. Rights are assigned to a principal on a securable. Refer to the image below (taken from the SQL Server Books On Line). urable”, which is any object like a table, stored procedure, trigger, etc. Rights are assigned to a principal on a securable. Refer to the image below (taken from the SQL Server Books On Line). SETTING UP THE ENVIRONMENT – (01A_Truncate Table Permissions.sql) Script Provided at the end of the article. By the end of this demo, one will be able to do all the CRUD operations, except the TRUNCATE, and the other will only be able to execute the TRUNCATE. All you will need for this test is any edition of SQL Server 2008. (With minor changes, these scripts can be made to work with SQL 2005.) We begin by creating the following: 1.       A test database 2.        Two database roles: associated logins and users 3.       Switch over to the test database and create a test table. Then, add some data into it. I am using row constructors, which is new to SQL 2008. Creating the modules that will be used to enforce permissions 1.       We have already created one of the modules that we will be assigning permissions to. That module is the table: TruncatePermissionsTest 2.       We will now create two stored procedures; one is for the DELETE operation and the other for the TRUNCATE operation. Please note that for all practical purposes, the end result is the same – all data from the table TruncatePermissionsTest is removed Assigning the permissions Now comes the most important part of the demonstration – assigning permissions. A permissions matrix can be worked out as under: To apply the security rights, we use the GRANT and DENY clauses, as under: That’s it! We are now ready for our big test! THE TEST (01B_Truncate Table Test Queries.sql) Script Provided at the end of the article. I will now need two separate SSMS connections, one with the login AllowedTruncate and the other with the login RestrictedTruncate. Running the test is simple; all that’s required is to run through the script – 01B_Truncate Table Test Queries.sql. What I will demonstrate here via screen-shots is the behavior of SQL Server when logged in as the AllowedTruncate user. There are a few other combinations than what are highlighted here. I will leave the reader the right to explore the behavior of the RestrictedTruncate user and these additional scenarios, as a form of self-study. 1.       Testing SELECT permissions 2.       Testing TRUNCATE permissions (Remember, “deny by default”?) 3.       Trying to circumvent security by trying to TRUNCATE the table using the stored procedure Hence, we have now proved that a user can indeed be assigned permissions to specifically assign TRUNCATE permissions. I also hope that the above has sparked curiosity towards putting some security around the probably “destructive” operations of DELETE and TRUNCATE. I would like to wish each and every one of the readers a very happy and secure time with Microsoft SQL Server. (Please find the scripts – 01A_Truncate Table Permissions.sql and 01B_Truncate Table Test Queries.sql that have been used in this demonstration. Please note that these scripts contain purely test-level code only. These scripts must not, at any cost, be used in the reader’s production environments). 01A_Truncate Table Permissions.sql /* ***************************************************************************************************************** Developed By          : Nakul Vachhrajani Functionality         : This demo is focused on how to allow only TRUNCATE permissions to a particular user How to Use            : 1. Run through, step-by-step through the sequence till Step 08 to create a test database 2. Switch over to the "Truncate Table Test Queries.sql" and execute it step-by-step in two different SSMS windows, one where you have logged in as 'RestrictedTruncate', and the other as 'AllowedTruncate' 3. Come back to "Truncate Table Permissions.sql" 4. Execute Step 10 to cleanup! Modifications         : December 13, 2010 - NAV - Updated to add a security matrix and improve code readability when applying security December 12, 2010 - NAV - Created ***************************************************************************************************************** */ -- Step 01: Create a new test database CREATE DATABASE TruncateTestDB GO USE TruncateTestDB GO -- Step 02: Add roles and users to demonstrate the security of the Truncate operation -- 2a. Create the new roles CREATE ROLE AllowedTruncateRole; GO CREATE ROLE RestrictedTruncateRole; GO -- 2b. Create new logins CREATE LOGIN AllowedTruncate WITH PASSWORD = 'truncate@2010', CHECK_POLICY = ON GO CREATE LOGIN RestrictedTruncate WITH PASSWORD = 'truncate@2010', CHECK_POLICY = ON GO -- 2c. Create new Users using the roles and logins created aboave CREATE USER TruncateUser FOR LOGIN AllowedTruncate WITH DEFAULT_SCHEMA = dbo GO CREATE USER NoTruncateUser FOR LOGIN RestrictedTruncate WITH DEFAULT_SCHEMA = dbo GO -- 2d. Add the newly created login to the newly created role sp_addrolemember 'AllowedTruncateRole','TruncateUser' GO sp_addrolemember 'RestrictedTruncateRole','NoTruncateUser' GO -- Step 03: Change over to the test database USE TruncateTestDB GO -- Step 04: Create a test table within the test databse CREATE TABLE TruncatePermissionsTest (Id INT IDENTITY(1,1), Name NVARCHAR(50)) GO -- Step 05: Populate the required data INSERT INTO TruncatePermissionsTest VALUES (N'Delhi'), (N'Mumbai'), (N'Ahmedabad') GO -- Step 06: Encapsulate the DELETE within another module CREATE PROCEDURE proc_DeleteMyTable WITH EXECUTE AS SELF AS DELETE FROM TruncateTestDB..TruncatePermissionsTest GO -- Step 07: Encapsulate the TRUNCATE within another module CREATE PROCEDURE proc_TruncateMyTable WITH EXECUTE AS SELF AS TRUNCATE TABLE TruncateTestDB..TruncatePermissionsTest GO -- Step 08: Apply Security /* *****************************SECURITY MATRIX*************************************** =================================================================================== Object                   | Permissions |                 Login |             | AllowedTruncate   |   RestrictedTruncate |             |User:NoTruncateUser|   User:TruncateUser =================================================================================== TruncatePermissionsTest  | SELECT,     |      GRANT        |      (Default) | INSERT,     |                   | | UPDATE,     |                   | | DELETE      |                   | -------------------------+-------------+-------------------+----------------------- TruncatePermissionsTest  | ALTER       |      DENY         |      (Default) -------------------------+-------------+----*/----------------+----------------------- proc_DeleteMyTable | EXECUTE | GRANT | DENY -------------------------+-------------+-------------------+----------------------- proc_TruncateMyTable | EXECUTE | DENY | GRANT -------------------------+-------------+-------------------+----------------------- *****************************SECURITY MATRIX*************************************** */ /* Table: TruncatePermissionsTest*/ GRANT SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE ON TruncateTestDB..TruncatePermissionsTest TO NoTruncateUser GO DENY ALTER ON TruncateTestDB..TruncatePermissionsTest TO NoTruncateUser GO /* Procedure: proc_DeleteMyTable*/ GRANT EXECUTE ON TruncateTestDB..proc_DeleteMyTable TO NoTruncateUser GO DENY EXECUTE ON TruncateTestDB..proc_DeleteMyTable TO TruncateUser GO /* Procedure: proc_TruncateMyTable*/ DENY EXECUTE ON TruncateTestDB..proc_TruncateMyTable TO NoTruncateUser GO GRANT EXECUTE ON TruncateTestDB..proc_TruncateMyTable TO TruncateUser GO -- Step 09: Test --Switch over to the "Truncate Table Test Queries.sql" and execute it step-by-step in two different SSMS windows: --    1. one where you have logged in as 'RestrictedTruncate', and --    2. the other as 'AllowedTruncate' -- Step 10: Cleanup sp_droprolemember 'AllowedTruncateRole','TruncateUser' GO sp_droprolemember 'RestrictedTruncateRole','NoTruncateUser' GO DROP USER TruncateUser GO DROP USER NoTruncateUser GO DROP LOGIN AllowedTruncate GO DROP LOGIN RestrictedTruncate GO DROP ROLE AllowedTruncateRole GO DROP ROLE RestrictedTruncateRole GO USE MASTER GO DROP DATABASE TruncateTestDB GO 01B_Truncate Table Test Queries.sql /* ***************************************************************************************************************** Developed By          : Nakul Vachhrajani Functionality         : This demo is focused on how to allow only TRUNCATE permissions to a particular user How to Use            : 1. Switch over to this from "Truncate Table Permissions.sql", Step #09 2. Execute this step-by-step in two different SSMS windows a. One where you have logged in as 'RestrictedTruncate', and b. The other as 'AllowedTruncate' 3. Return back to "Truncate Table Permissions.sql" 4. Execute Step 10 to cleanup! Modifications         : December 12, 2010 - NAV - Created ***************************************************************************************************************** */ -- Step 09A: Switch to the test database USE TruncateTestDB GO -- Step 09B: Ensure that we have valid data SELECT * FROM TruncatePermissionsTest GO -- (Expected: Following error will occur if logged in as "AllowedTruncate") -- Msg 229, Level 14, State 5, Line 1 -- The SELECT permission was denied on the object 'TruncatePermissionsTest', database 'TruncateTestDB', schema 'dbo'. --Step 09C: Attempt to Truncate Data from the table without using the stored procedure TRUNCATE TABLE TruncatePermissionsTest GO -- (Expected: Following error will occur) --  Msg 1088, Level 16, State 7, Line 2 --  Cannot find the object "TruncatePermissionsTest" because it does not exist or you do not have permissions. -- Step 09D:Regenerate Test Data INSERT INTO TruncatePermissionsTest VALUES (N'London'), (N'Paris'), (N'Berlin') GO -- (Expected: Following error will occur if logged in as "AllowedTruncate") -- Msg 229, Level 14, State 5, Line 1 -- The INSERT permission was denied on the object 'TruncatePermissionsTest', database 'TruncateTestDB', schema 'dbo'. --Step 09E: Attempt to Truncate Data from the table using the stored procedure EXEC proc_TruncateMyTable GO -- (Expected: Will execute successfully with 'AllowedTruncate' user, will error out as under with 'RestrictedTruncate') -- Msg 229, Level 14, State 5, Procedure proc_TruncateMyTable, Line 1 -- The EXECUTE permission was denied on the object 'proc_TruncateMyTable', database 'TruncateTestDB', schema 'dbo'. -- Step 09F:Regenerate Test Data INSERT INTO TruncatePermissionsTest VALUES (N'Madrid'), (N'Rome'), (N'Athens') GO --Step 09G: Attempt to Delete Data from the table without using the stored procedure DELETE FROM TruncatePermissionsTest GO -- (Expected: Following error will occur if logged in as "AllowedTruncate") -- Msg 229, Level 14, State 5, Line 2 -- The DELETE permission was denied on the object 'TruncatePermissionsTest', database 'TruncateTestDB', schema 'dbo'. -- Step 09H:Regenerate Test Data INSERT INTO TruncatePermissionsTest VALUES (N'Spain'), (N'Italy'), (N'Greece') GO --Step 09I: Attempt to Delete Data from the table using the stored procedure EXEC proc_DeleteMyTable GO -- (Expected: Following error will occur if logged in as "AllowedTruncate") -- Msg 229, Level 14, State 5, Procedure proc_DeleteMyTable, Line 1 -- The EXECUTE permission was denied on the object 'proc_DeleteMyTable', database 'TruncateTestDB', schema 'dbo'. --Step 09J: Close this SSMS window and return back to "Truncate Table Permissions.sql" Thank you Nakul to take up the challenge and prove that Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar SQL Server User Group has talent to solve difficult problems. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Best Practices, Pinal Dave, Readers Contribution, Readers Question, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Security, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Using the West Wind Web Toolkit to set up AJAX and REST Services

  - by Rick Strahl

  I frequently get questions about which option to use for creating AJAX and REST backends for ASP.NET applications. There are many solutions out there to do this actually, but when I have a choice - not surprisingly - I fall back to my own tools in the West Wind West Wind Web Toolkit. I've talked a bunch about the 'in-the-box' solutions in the past so for a change in this post I'll talk about the tools that I use in my own and customer applications to handle AJAX and REST based access to service resources using the West Wind West Wind Web Toolkit. Let me preface this by saying that I like things to be easy. Yes flexible is very important as well but not at the expense of over-complexity. The goal I've had with my tools is make it drop dead easy, with good performance while providing the core features that I'm after, which are: Easy AJAX/JSON Callbacks Ability to return any kind of non JSON content (string, stream, byte[], images) Ability to work with both XML and JSON interchangeably for input/output Access endpoints via POST data, RPC JSON calls, GET QueryString values or Routing interface Easy to use generic JavaScript client to make RPC calls (same syntax, just what you need) Ability to create clean URLS with Routing Ability to use standard ASP.NET HTTP Stack for HTTP semantics It's all about options! In this post I'll demonstrate most of these features (except XML) in a few simple and short samples which you can download. So let's take a look and see how you can build an AJAX callback solution with the West Wind Web Toolkit. Installing the Toolkit Assemblies The easiest and leanest way of using the Toolkit in your Web project is to grab it via NuGet: West Wind Web and AJAX Utilities (Westwind.Web) and drop it into the project by right clicking in your Project and choosing Manage NuGet Packages from anywhere in the Project.   When done you end up with your project looking like this: What just happened? Nuget added two assemblies - Westwind.Web and Westwind.Utilities and the client ww.jquery.js library. It also added a couple of references into web.config: The default namespaces so they can be accessed in pages/views and a ScriptCompressionModule that the toolkit optionally uses to compress script resources served from within the assembly (namely ww.jquery.js and optionally jquery.js). Creating a new Service The West Wind Web Toolkit supports several ways of creating and accessing AJAX services, but for this post I'll stick to the lower level approach that works from any plain HTML page or of course MVC, WebForms, WebPages. There's also a WebForms specific control that makes this even easier but I'll leave that for another post. So, to create a new standalone AJAX/REST service we can create a new HttpHandler in the new project either as a pure class based handler or as a generic .ASHX handler. Both work equally well, but generic handlers don't require any web.config configuration so I'll use that here. In the root of the project add a Generic Handler. I'm going to call this one StockService.ashx. Once the handler has been created, edit the code and remove all of the handler body code. Then change the base class to CallbackHandler and add methods that have a [CallbackMethod] attribute. Here's the modified base handler implementation now looks like with an added HelloWorld method: using System; using Westwind.Web; namespace WestWindWebAjax { /// <summary> /// Handler implements CallbackHandler to provide REST/AJAX services /// </summary> public class SampleService : CallbackHandler { [CallbackMethod] public string HelloWorld(string name) { return "Hello " + name + ". Time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString(); } } } Notice that the class inherits from CallbackHandler and that the HelloWorld service method is marked up with [CallbackMethod]. We're done here. Services Urlbased Syntax Once you compile, the 'service' is live can respond to requests. All CallbackHandlers support input in GET and POST formats, and can return results as JSON or XML. To check our fancy HelloWorld method we can now access the service like this: http://localhost/WestWindWebAjax/StockService.ashx?Method=HelloWorld&name=Rick which produces a default JSON response - in this case a string (wrapped in quotes as it's JSON): (note by default JSON will be downloaded by most browsers not displayed - various options are available to view JSON right in the browser) If I want to return the same data as XML I can tack on a &format=xml at the end of the querystring which produces: <string>Hello Rick. Time is: 11/1/2011 12:11:13 PM</string> Cleaner URLs with Routing Syntax If you want cleaner URLs for each operation you can also configure custom routes on a per URL basis similar to the way that WCF REST does. To do this you need to add a new RouteHandler to your application's startup code in global.asax.cs one for each CallbackHandler based service you create: protected void Application_Start(object sender, EventArgs e) { CallbackHandlerRouteHandler.RegisterRoutes<StockService>(RouteTable.Routes); } With this code in place you can now add RouteUrl properties to any of your service methods. For the HelloWorld method that doesn't make a ton of sense but here is what a routed clean URL might look like in definition: [CallbackMethod(RouteUrl="stocks/HelloWorld/{name}")] public string HelloWorld(string name) { return "Hello " + name + ". Time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString(); } The same URL I previously used now becomes a bit shorter and more readable with: http://localhost/WestWindWebAjax/HelloWorld/Rick It's an easy way to create cleaner URLs and still get the same functionality. Calling the Service with $.getJSON() Since the result produced is JSON you can now easily consume this data using jQuery's getJSON method. First we need a couple of scripts - jquery.js and ww.jquery.js in the page: <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <link href="Css/Westwind.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> <script src="scripts/jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="scripts/ww.jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> </head> <body> Next let's add a small HelloWorld example form (what else) that has a single textbox to type a name, a button and a div tag to receive the result: <fieldset> <legend>Hello World</legend> Please enter a name: <input type="text" name="txtHello" id="txtHello" value="" /> <input type="button" id="btnSayHello" value="Say Hello (POST)" /> <input type="button" id="btnSayHelloGet" value="Say Hello (GET)" /> <div id="divHelloMessage" class="errordisplay" style="display:none;width: 450px;" > </div> </fieldset> Then to call the HelloWorld method a little jQuery is used to hook the document startup and the button click followed by the $.getJSON call to retrieve the data from the server. <script type="text/javascript"> $(document).ready(function () { $("#btnSayHelloGet").click(function () { $.getJSON("SampleService.ashx", { Method: "HelloWorld", name: $("#txtHello").val() }, function (result) { $("#divHelloMessage") .text(result) .fadeIn(1000); }); });</script> .getJSON() expects a full URL to the endpoint of our service, which is the ASHX file. We can either provide a full URL (SampleService.ashx?Method=HelloWorld&name=Rick) or we can just provide the base URL and an object that encodes the query string parameters for us using an object map that has a property that matches each parameter for the server method. We can also use the clean URL routing syntax, but using the object parameter encoding actually is safer as the parameters will get properly encoded by jQuery. The result returned is whatever the result on the server method is - in this case a string. The string is applied to the divHelloMessage element and we're done. Obviously this is a trivial example, but it demonstrates the basics of getting a JSON response back to the browser. AJAX Post Syntax - using ajaxCallMethod() The previous example allows you basic control over the data that you send to the server via querystring parameters. This works OK for simple values like short strings, numbers and boolean values, but doesn't really work if you need to pass something more complex like an object or an array back up to the server. To handle traditional RPC type messaging where the idea is to map server side functions and results to a client side invokation, POST operations can be used. The easiest way to use this functionality is to use ww.jquery.js and the ajaxCallMethod() function. ww.jquery wraps jQuery's AJAX functions and knows implicitly how to call a CallbackServer method with parameters and parse the result. Let's look at another simple example that posts a simple value but returns something more interesting. Let's start with the service method: [CallbackMethod(RouteUrl="stocks/{symbol}")] public StockQuote GetStockQuote(string symbol) { Response.Cache.SetExpires(DateTime.UtcNow.Add(new TimeSpan(0, 2, 0))); StockServer server = new StockServer(); var quote = server.GetStockQuote(symbol); if (quote == null) throw new ApplicationException("Invalid Symbol passed."); return quote; } This sample utilizes a small StockServer helper class (included in the sample) that downloads a stock quote from Yahoo's financial site via plain HTTP GET requests and formats it into a StockQuote object. Lets create a small HTML block that lets us query for the quote and display it: <fieldset> <legend>Single Stock Quote</legend> Please enter a stock symbol: <input type="text" name="txtSymbol" id="txtSymbol" value="msft" /> <input type="button" id="btnStockQuote" value="Get Quote" /> <div id="divStockDisplay" class="errordisplay" style="display:none; width: 450px;"> <div class="label-left">Company:</div> <div id="stockCompany"></div> <div class="label-left">Last Price:</div> <div id="stockLastPrice"></div> <div class="label-left">Quote Time:</div> <div id="stockQuoteTime"></div> </div> </fieldset> The final result looks something like this:   Let's hook up the button handler to fire the request and fill in the data as shown: $("#btnStockQuote").click(function () { ajaxCallMethod("SampleService.ashx", "GetStockQuote", [$("#txtSymbol").val()], function (quote) { $("#divStockDisplay").show().fadeIn(1000); $("#stockCompany").text(quote.Company + " (" + quote.Symbol + ")"); $("#stockLastPrice").text(quote.LastPrice); $("#stockQuoteTime").text(quote.LastQuoteTime.formatDate("MMM dd, HH:mm EST")); }, onPageError); }); So we point at SampleService.ashx and the GetStockQuote method, passing a single parameter of the input symbol value. Then there are two handlers for success and failure callbacks.  The success handler is the interesting part - it receives the stock quote as a result and assigns its values to various 'holes' in the stock display elements. The data that comes back over the wire is JSON and it looks like this: { "Symbol":"MSFT", "Company":"Microsoft Corpora", "OpenPrice":26.11, "LastPrice":26.01, "NetChange":0.02, "LastQuoteTime":"2011-11-03T02:00:00Z", "LastQuoteTimeString":"Nov. 11, 2011 4:20pm" } which is an object representation of the data. JavaScript can evaluate this JSON string back into an object easily and that's the reslut that gets passed to the success function. The quote data is then applied to existing page content by manually selecting items and applying them. There are other ways to do this more elegantly like using templates, but here we're only interested in seeing how the data is returned. The data in the object is typed - LastPrice is a number and QuoteTime is a date. Note about the date value: JavaScript doesn't have a date literal although the JSON embedded ISO string format used above  ("2011-11-03T02:00:00Z") is becoming fairly standard for JSON serializers. However, JSON parsers don't deserialize dates by default and return them by string. This is why the StockQuote actually returns a string value of LastQuoteTimeString for the same date. ajaxMethodCallback always converts dates properly into 'real' dates and the example above uses the real date value along with a .formatDate() data extension (also in ww.jquery.js) to display the raw date properly. Errors and Exceptions So what happens if your code fails? For example if I pass an invalid stock symbol to the GetStockQuote() method you notice that the code does this: if (quote == null) throw new ApplicationException("Invalid Symbol passed."); CallbackHandler automatically pushes the exception message back to the client so it's easy to pick up the error message. Regardless of what kind of error occurs: Server side, client side, protocol errors - any error will fire the failure handler with an error object parameter. The error is returned to the client via a JSON response in the error callback. In the previous examples I called onPageError which is a generic routine in ww.jquery that displays a status message on the bottom of the screen. But of course you can also take over the error handling yourself: $("#btnStockQuote").click(function () { ajaxCallMethod("SampleService.ashx", "GetStockQuote", [$("#txtSymbol").val()], function (quote) { $("#divStockDisplay").fadeIn(1000); $("#stockCompany").text(quote.Company + " (" + quote.Symbol + ")"); $("#stockLastPrice").text(quote.LastPrice); $("#stockQuoteTime").text(quote.LastQuoteTime.formatDate("MMM dd, hh:mmt")); }, function (error, xhr) { $("#divErrorDisplay").text(error.message).fadeIn(1000); }); }); The error object has a isCallbackError, message and  stackTrace properties, the latter of which is only populated when running in Debug mode, and this object is returned for all errors: Client side, transport and server side errors. Regardless of which type of error you get the same object passed (as well as the XHR instance optionally) which makes for a consistent error retrieval mechanism. Specifying HttpVerbs You can also specify HTTP Verbs that are allowed using the AllowedHttpVerbs option on the CallbackMethod attribute: [CallbackMethod(AllowedHttpVerbs=HttpVerbs.GET | HttpVerbs.POST)] public string HelloWorld(string name) { … } If you're building REST style API's this might be useful to force certain request semantics onto the client calling. For the above if call with a non-allowed HttpVerb the request returns a 405 error response along with a JSON (or XML) error object result. The default behavior is to allow all verbs access (HttpVerbs.All). Passing in object Parameters Up to now the parameters I passed were very simple. But what if you need to send something more complex like an object or an array? Let's look at another example now that passes an object from the client to the server. Keeping with the Stock theme here lets add a method called BuyOrder that lets us buy some shares for a stock. Consider the following service method that receives an StockBuyOrder object as a parameter: [CallbackMethod] public string BuyStock(StockBuyOrder buyOrder) { var server = new StockServer(); var quote = server.GetStockQuote(buyOrder.Symbol); if (quote == null) throw new ApplicationException("Invalid or missing stock symbol."); return string.Format("You're buying {0} shares of {1} ({2}) stock at {3} for a total of {4} on {5}.", buyOrder.Quantity, quote.Company, quote.Symbol, quote.LastPrice.ToString("c"), (quote.LastPrice * buyOrder.Quantity).ToString("c"), buyOrder.BuyOn.ToString("MMM d")); } public class StockBuyOrder { public string Symbol { get; set; } public int Quantity { get; set; } public DateTime BuyOn { get; set; } public StockBuyOrder() { BuyOn = DateTime.Now; } } This is a contrived do-nothing example that simply echoes back what was passed in, but it demonstrates how you can pass complex data to a callback method. On the client side we now have a very simple form that captures the three values on a form: <fieldset> <legend>Post a Stock Buy Order</legend> Enter a symbol: <input type="text" name="txtBuySymbol" id="txtBuySymbol" value="GLD" />&nbsp;&nbsp; Qty: <input type="text" name="txtBuyQty" id="txtBuyQty" value="10" style="width: 50px" />&nbsp;&nbsp; Buy on: <input type="text" name="txtBuyOn" id="txtBuyOn" value="<%= DateTime.Now.ToString("d") %>" style="width: 70px;" /> <input type="button" id="btnBuyStock" value="Buy Stock" /> <div id="divStockBuyMessage" class="errordisplay" style="display:none"></div> </fieldset> The completed form and demo then looks something like this:   The client side code that picks up the input values and assigns them to object properties and sends the AJAX request looks like this: $("#btnBuyStock").click(function () { // create an object map that matches StockBuyOrder signature var buyOrder = { Symbol: $("#txtBuySymbol").val(), Quantity: $("#txtBuyQty").val() * 1, // number Entered: new Date() } ajaxCallMethod("SampleService.ashx", "BuyStock", [buyOrder], function (result) { $("#divStockBuyMessage").text(result).fadeIn(1000); }, onPageError); }); The code creates an object and attaches the properties that match the server side object passed to the BuyStock method. Each property that you want to update needs to be included and the type must match (ie. string, number, date in this case). Any missing properties will not be set but also not cause any errors. Pass POST data instead of Objects In the last example I collected a bunch of values from form variables and stuffed them into object variables in JavaScript code. While that works, often times this isn't really helping - I end up converting my types on the client and then doing another conversion on the server. If lots of input controls are on a page and you just want to pick up the values on the server via plain POST variables - that can be done too - and it makes sense especially if you're creating and filling the client side object only to push data to the server. Let's add another method to the server that once again lets us buy a stock. But this time let's not accept a parameter but rather send POST data to the server. Here's the server method receiving POST data: [CallbackMethod] public string BuyStockPost() { StockBuyOrder buyOrder = new StockBuyOrder(); buyOrder.Symbol = Request.Form["txtBuySymbol"]; ; int qty; int.TryParse(Request.Form["txtBuyQuantity"], out qty); buyOrder.Quantity = qty; DateTime time; DateTime.TryParse(Request.Form["txtBuyBuyOn"], out time); buyOrder.BuyOn = time; // Or easier way yet //FormVariableBinder.Unbind(buyOrder,null,"txtBuy"); var server = new StockServer(); var quote = server.GetStockQuote(buyOrder.Symbol); if (quote == null) throw new ApplicationException("Invalid or missing stock symbol."); return string.Format("You're buying {0} shares of {1} ({2}) stock at {3} for a total of {4} on {5}.", buyOrder.Quantity, quote.Company, quote.Symbol, quote.LastPrice.ToString("c"), (quote.LastPrice * buyOrder.Quantity).ToString("c"), buyOrder.BuyOn.ToString("MMM d")); } Clearly we've made this server method take more code than it did with the object parameter. We've basically moved the parameter assignment logic from the client to the server. As a result the client code to call this method is now a bit shorter since there's no client side shuffling of values from the controls to an object. $("#btnBuyStockPost").click(function () { ajaxCallMethod("SampleService.ashx", "BuyStockPost", [], // Note: No parameters - function (result) { $("#divStockBuyMessage").text(result).fadeIn(1000); }, onPageError, // Force all page Form Variables to be posted { postbackMode: "Post" }); }); The client simply calls the BuyStockQuote method and pushes all the form variables from the page up to the server which parses them instead. The feature that makes this work is one of the options you can pass to the ajaxCallMethod() function: { postbackMode: "Post" }); which directs the function to include form variable POST data when making the service call. Other options include PostNoViewState (for WebForms to strip out WebForms crap vars), PostParametersOnly (default), None. If you pass parameters those are always posted to the server except when None is set. The above code can be simplified a bit by using the FormVariableBinder helper, which can unbind form variables directly into an object: FormVariableBinder.Unbind(buyOrder,null,"txtBuy"); which replaces the manual Request.Form[] reading code. It receives the object to unbind into, a string of properties to skip, and an optional prefix which is stripped off form variables to match property names. The component is similar to the MVC model binder but it's independent of MVC. Returning non-JSON Data CallbackHandler also supports returning non-JSON/XML data via special return types. You can return raw non-JSON encoded strings like this: [CallbackMethod(ReturnAsRawString=true,ContentType="text/plain")] public string HelloWorldNoJSON(string name) { return "Hello " + name + ". Time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString(); } Calling this method results in just a plain string - no JSON encoding with quotes around the result. This can be useful if your server handling code needs to return a string or HTML result that doesn't fit well for a page or other UI component. Any string output can be returned. You can also return binary data. Stream, byte[] and Bitmap/Image results are automatically streamed back to the client. Notice that you should set the ContentType of the request either on the CallbackMethod attribute or using Response.ContentType. This ensures the Web Server knows how to display your binary response. Using a stream response makes it possible to return any of data. Streamed data can be pretty handy to return bitmap data from a method. The following is a method that returns a stock history graph for a particular stock over a provided number of years: [CallbackMethod(ContentType="image/png",RouteUrl="stocks/history/graph/{symbol}/{years}")] public Stream GetStockHistoryGraph(string symbol, int years = 2,int width = 500, int height=350) { if (width == 0) width = 500; if (height == 0) height = 350; StockServer server = new StockServer(); return server.GetStockHistoryGraph(symbol,"Stock History for " + symbol,width,height,years); } I can now hook this up into the JavaScript code when I get a stock quote. At the end of the process I can assign the URL to the service that returns the image into the src property and so force the image to display. Here's the changed code: $("#btnStockQuote").click(function () { var symbol = $("#txtSymbol").val(); ajaxCallMethod("SampleService.ashx", "GetStockQuote", [symbol], function (quote) { $("#divStockDisplay").fadeIn(1000); $("#stockCompany").text(quote.Company + " (" + quote.Symbol + ")"); $("#stockLastPrice").text(quote.LastPrice); $("#stockQuoteTime").text(quote.LastQuoteTime.formatDate("MMM dd, hh:mmt")); // display a stock chart $("#imgStockHistory").attr("src", "stocks/history/graph/" + symbol + "/2"); },onPageError); }); The resulting output then looks like this: The charting code uses the new ASP.NET 4.0 Chart components via code to display a bar chart of the 2 year stock data as part of the StockServer class which you can find in the sample download. The ability to return arbitrary data from a service is useful as you can see - in this case the chart is clearly associated with the service and it's nice that the graph generation can happen off a handler rather than through a page. Images are common resources, but output can also be PDF reports, zip files for downloads etc. which is becoming increasingly more common to be returned from REST endpoints and other applications. Why reinvent? Obviously the examples I've shown here are pretty basic in terms of functionality. But I hope they demonstrate the core features of AJAX callbacks that you need to work through in most applications which is simple: return data, send back data and potentially retrieve data in various formats. While there are other solutions when it comes down to making AJAX callbacks and servicing REST like requests, I like the flexibility my home grown solution provides. Simply put it's still the easiest solution that I've found that addresses my common use cases: AJAX JSON RPC style callbacks Url based access XML and JSON Output from single method endpoint XML and JSON POST support, querystring input, routing parameter mapping UrlEncoded POST data support on callbacks Ability to return stream/raw string data Essentially ability to return ANYTHING from Service and pass anything All these features are available in various solutions but not together in one place. I've been using this code base for over 4 years now in a number of projects both for myself and commercial work and it's served me extremely well. Besides the AJAX functionality CallbackHandler provides, it's also an easy way to create any kind of output endpoint I need to create. Need to create a few simple routines that spit back some data, but don't want to create a Page or View or full blown handler for it? Create a CallbackHandler and add a method or multiple methods and you have your generic endpoints.  It's a quick and easy way to add small code pieces that are pretty efficient as they're running through a pretty small handler implementation. I can have this up and running in a couple of minutes literally without any setup and returning just about any kind of data. Resources Download the Sample NuGet: Westwind Web and AJAX Utilities (Westwind.Web) ajaxCallMethod() Documentation Using the AjaxMethodCallback WebForms Control West Wind Web Toolkit Home Page West Wind Web Toolkit Source Code © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in ASP.NET  jQuery  AJAX   Tweet (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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