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  • Memory Efficient Windows SOA Server

    - by Antony Reynolds
    Installing a Memory Efficient SOA Suite 11.1.1.6 on Windows Server Well 11.1.1.6 is now available for download so I thought I would build a Windows Server environment to run it.  I will minimize the memory footprint of the installation by putting all functionality into the Admin Server of the SOA Suite domain. Required Software 64-bit JDK SOA Suite If you want 64-bit then choose “Generic” rather than “Microsoft Windows 32bit JVM” or “Linux 32bit JVM” This has links to all the required software. If you choose “Generic” then the Repository Creation Utility link does not show, you still need this so change the platform to “Microsoft Windows 32bit JVM” or “Linux 32bit JVM” to get the software. Similarly if you need a database then you need to change the platform to get the link to XE for Windows or Linux. If possible I recommend installing a 64-bit JDK as this allows you to assign more memory to individual JVMs. Windows XE will work, but it is better if you can use a full Oracle database because of the limitations on XE that sometimes cause it to run out of space with large or multiple SOA deployments. Installation Steps The following flow chart outlines the steps required in installing and configuring SOA Suite. The steps in the diagram are explained below. 64-bit? Is a 64-bit installation required?  The Windows & Linux installers will install 32-bit versions of the Sun JDK and JRockit.  A separate JDK must be installed for 64-bit. Install 64-bit JDK The 64-bit JDK can be either Hotspot or JRockit.  You can choose either JDK 1.7 or 1.6. Install WebLogic If you are using 64-bit then install WebLogic using “java –jar wls1036_generic.jar”.  Make sure you include Coherence in the installation, the easiest way to do this is to accept the “Typical” installation. SOA Suite Required? If you are not installing SOA Suite then you can jump straight ahead and create a WebLogic domain. Install SOA Suite Run the SOA Suite installer and point it at the existing Middleware Home created for WebLogic.  Note to run the SOA installer on Windows the user must have admin privileges.  I also found that on Windows Server 2008R2 I had to start the installer from a command prompt with administrative privileges, granting it privileges when it ran caused it to ignore the jreLoc parameter. Database Available? Do you have access to a database into which you can install the SOA schema.  SOA Suite requires access to an Oracle database (it is supported on other databases but I would always use an oracle database). Install Database I use an 11gR2 Oracle database to avoid XE limitations.  Make sure that you set the database character set to be unicode (AL32UTF8).  I also disabled the new security settings because they get in the way for a developer database.  Don’t forget to check that number of processes is at least 150 and number of sessions is not set, or is set to at least 200 (in the DB init parameters). Run RCU The SOA Suite database schemas are created by running the Repository Creation Utility.  Install the “SOA and BPM Infrastructure” component to support SOA Suite.  If you keep the schema prefix as “DEV” then the config wizard is easier to complete. Run Config Wizard The Config wizard creates the domain which hosts the WebLogic server instances.  To get a minimum footprint SOA installation choose the “Oracle Enterprise Manager” and “Oracle SOA Suite for developers” products.  All other required products will be automatically selected. The “for developers” installs target the appropriate components at the AdminServer rather than creating a separate managed server to house them.  This reduces the number of JVMs required to run the system and hence the amount of memory required.  This is not suitable for anything other than a developer environment as it mixes the admin and runtime functions together in a single server.  It also takes a long time to load all the required modules, making start up a slow process. If it exists I would recommend running the config wizard found in the “oracle_common/common/bin” directory under the middleware home.  This should have access to all the templates, including SOA. If you also want to run BAM in the same JVM as everything else then you need to “Select Optional Configuration” for “Managed Servers, Clusters and Machines”. To target BAM at the AdminServer delete the “bam_server1” managed server that is created by default.  This will result in BAM being targeted at the AdminServer. Installation Issues I had a few problems when I came to test everything in my mega-JVM. Following applications were not targeted and so I needed to target them at the AdminServer: b2bui composer Healthcare UI FMW Welcome Page Application (11.1.0.0.0) How Memory Efficient is It? On a Windows 2008R2 Server running under VirtualBox I was able to bring up both the 11gR2 database and SOA/BPM/BAM in 3G memory.  I allocated a minimum 512M to the PermGen and a minimum of 1.5G for the heap.  The setting from setSOADomainEnv are shown below: set DEFAULT_MEM_ARGS=-Xms1536m -Xmx2048m set PORT_MEM_ARGS=-Xms1536m -Xmx2048m set DEFAULT_MEM_ARGS=%DEFAULT_MEM_ARGS% -XX:PermSize=512m -XX:MaxPermSize=768m set PORT_MEM_ARGS=%PORT_MEM_ARGS% -XX:PermSize=512m -XX:MaxPermSize=768m I arrived at these numbers by monitoring JVM memory usage in JConsole. Task Manager showed total system memory usage at 2.9G – just below the 3G I allocated to the VM. Performance is not stellar but it runs and I could run JDeveloper alongside it on my 8G laptop, so in that sense it was a result!

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  • More BI Showcase Events - Greensboro, NC & Tampa, FL

    - by Rob Reynolds
    As the momentum around OBIEE 11g continues, we are providing more opportunities to get a hands on view of the new technology via our Oracle Business Intelligence Showcases. Next week we will have Showcases in Greensboro, NC and Tampa, FL. I will be presenting at both, so please stop by and say hello, while learning about the latest in Oracle BI & DW technology. Pre-registration is required. You can register for the events at the links below: Greensboro, NC - Tuesday December 7, 2011 Tampa, FL - Wednesday, December 8, 2011 Session Agenda: Agenda 9:00 a.m. – 10:00 a.m. Registration and Welcome 10:00 a.m. – 11:00 a.m. Session Keynote: Oracle’s New Generation of Business Intelligence Solutions and Innovations 11:00 a.m. – 12:00 noon Session 1 Track 1Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g: End User Experience Track 2Management Reporting with Oracle Essbase 12:00 noon – 1:00 p.m. Networking Lunch 1:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m. Session 2 Track 1Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g for Power Users, Developers, and Administrators Track 2Oracle BI Applications: The Value of Cross-Functional BI Break to change rooms 2:00 p.m.– 3:00 p.m. Session 3 Track 1 Extreme Performance Data Warehousing Track 2Master Data Management: The Single Source of Truth for Real Time Decisions 3:15 p.m. Wrap-Up and Raffle Prize

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  • DevConnections Session Slides, Samples and Links

    - by Rick Strahl
    Finally coming up for air this week, after catching up with being on the road for the better part of three weeks. Here are my slides, samples and links for my four DevConnections Session two weeks ago in Vegas. I ended up doing one extra un-prepared for session on WebAPI and AJAX, as some of the speakers were either delayed or unable to make it at all to Vegas due to Sandy's mayhem. It was pretty hectic in the speaker room as Erik (our event coordinator extrodinaire) was scrambling to fill session slots with speakers :-). Surprisingly it didn't feel like the storm affected attendance drastically though, but I guess it's hard to tell without actual numbers. The conference was a lot of fun - it's been a while since I've been speaking at one of these larger conferences. I'd been taking a hiatus, and I forgot how much I enjoy actually giving talks. Preparing - well not  quite so much, especially since I ended up essentially preparing or completely rewriting for all three of these talks and I was stressing out a bit as I was sick the week before the conference and didn't get as much time to prepare as I wanted to. But - as always seems to be the case - it all worked out, but I guess those that attended have to be the judge of that… It was great to catch up with my speaker friends as well - man I feel out of touch. I got to spend a bunch of time with Dan Wahlin, Ward Bell, Julie Lerman and for about 10 minutes even got to catch up with the ever so busy Michele Bustamante. Lots of great technical discussions including a fun and heated REST controversy with Ward and Howard Dierking. There were also a number of great discussions with attendees, describing how they're using the technologies touched in my talks in live applications. I got some great ideas from some of these and I wish there would have been more opportunities for these kinds of discussions. One thing I miss at these Vegas events though is some sort of coherent event where attendees and speakers get to mingle. These Vegas conferences are just like "go to sessions, then go out and PARTY on the town" - it's Vegas after all! But I think that it's always nice to have at least one evening event where everybody gets to hang out together and trade stories and geek talk. Overall there didn't seem to be much opportunity for that beyond lunch or the small and short exhibit hall events which it seemed not many people actually went to. Anyways, a good time was had. I hope those of you that came to my sessions learned something useful. There were lots of great questions and discussions after the sessions - always appreciate hearing the real life scenarios that people deal with in relation to the abstracted scenarios in sessions. Here are the Session abstracts, a few comments and the links for downloading slides and  samples. It's not quite like being there, but I hope this stuff turns out to be useful to some of you. I'll be following up a couple of these sessions with white papers in the following weeks. Enjoy. ASP.NET Architecture: How ASP.NET Works at the Low Level Abstract:Interested in how ASP.NET works at a low level? ASP.NET is extremely powerful and flexible technology, but it's easy to forget about the core framework that underlies the higher level technologies like ASP.NET MVC, WebForms, WebPages, Web Services that we deal with on a day to day basis. The ASP.NET core drives all the higher level handlers and frameworks layered on top of it and with the core power comes some complexity in the form of a very rich object model that controls the flow of a request through the ASP.NET pipeline from Windows HTTP services down to the application level. To take full advantage of it, it helps to understand the underlying architecture and model. This session discusses the architecture of ASP.NET along with a number of useful tidbits that you can use for building and debugging your ASP.NET applications more efficiently. We look at overall architecture, how requests flow from the IIS (7 and later) Web Server to the ASP.NET runtime into HTTP handlers, modules and filters and finally into high-level handlers like MVC, Web Forms or Web API. Focus of this session is on the low-level aspects on the ASP.NET runtime, with examples that demonstrate the bootstrapping of ASP.NET, threading models, how Application Domains are used, startup bootstrapping, how configuration files are applied and how all of this relates to the applications you write either using low-level tools like HTTP handlers and modules or high-level pages or services sitting at the top of the ASP.NET runtime processing chain. Comments:I was surprised to see so many people show up for this session - especially since it was the last session on the last day and a short 1 hour session to boot. The room was packed and it was to see so many people interested the abstracts of architecture of ASP.NET beyond the immediate high level application needs. Lots of great questions in this talk as well - I only wish this session would have been the full hour 15 minutes as we just a little short of getting through the main material (didn't make it to Filters and Error handling). I haven't done this session in a long time and I had to pretty much re-figure all the system internals having to do with the ASP.NET bootstrapping in light for the changes that came with IIS 7 and later. The last time I did this talk was with IIS6, I guess it's been a while. I love doing this session, mainly because in my mind the core of ASP.NET overall is so cleanly designed to provide maximum flexibility without compromising performance that has clearly stood the test of time in the 10 years or so that .NET has been around. While there are a lot of moving parts, the technology is easy to manage once you understand the core components and the core model hasn't changed much even while the underlying architecture that drives has been almost completely revamped especially with the introduction of IIS 7 and later. Download Samples and Slides   Introduction to using jQuery with ASP.NET Abstract:In this session you'll learn how to take advantage of jQuery in your ASP.NET applications. Starting with an overview of jQuery client features via many short and fun examples, you'll find out about core features like the power of selectors for document element selection, manipulating these elements with jQuery's wrapped set methods in a browser independent way, how to hook up and handle events easily and generally apply concepts of unobtrusive JavaScript principles to client scripting. The second half of the session then delves into jQuery's AJAX features and several different ways how you can interact with ASP.NET on the server. You'll see examples of using ASP.NET MVC for serving HTML and JSON AJAX content, as well as using the new ASP.NET Web API to serve JSON and hypermedia content. You'll also see examples of client side templating/databinding with Handlebars and Knockout. Comments:This session was in a monster of a room and to my surprise it was nearly packed, given that this was a 100 level session. I can see that it's a good idea to continue to do intro sessions to jQuery as there appeared to be quite a number of folks who had not worked much with jQuery yet and who most likely could greatly benefit from using it. Seemed seemed to me the session got more than a few people excited to going if they hadn't yet :-).  Anyway I just love doing this session because it's mostly live coding and highly interactive - not many sessions that I can build things up from scratch and iterate on in an hour. jQuery makes that easy though. Resources: Slides and Code Samples Introduction to jQuery White Paper Introduction to ASP.NET Web API   Hosting the Razor Scripting Engine in Your Own Applications Abstract:The Razor Engine used in ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET Web Pages is a free-standing scripting engine that can be disassociated from these Web-specific implementations and can be used in your own applications. Razor allows for a powerful mix of code and text rendering that makes it a wonderful tool for any sort of text generation, from creating HTML output in non-Web applications, to rendering mail merge-like functionality, to code generation for developer tools and even as a plug-in scripting engine. In this session, we'll look at the components that make up the Razor engine and how you can bootstrap it in your own applications to hook up templating. You'll find out how to create custom templates and manage Razor requests that can be pre-compiled, detecting page changes and act in ways similar to a full runtime. We look at ways that you can pass data into the engine and retrieve both the rendered output as well as result values in a package that makes it easy to plug Razor into your own applications. Comments:That this session was picked was a bit of a surprise to me, since it's a bit of a niche topic. Even more of a surprise was that during the session quite a few people who attended had actually used Razor externally and were there to find out more about how the process works and how to extend it. In the session I talk a bit about a custom Razor hosting implementation (Westwind.RazorHosting) and drilled into the various components required to build a custom Razor Hosting engine and a runtime around it. This sessions was a bit of a chore to prepare for as there are lots of technical implementation details that needed to be dealt with and squeezing that into an hour 15 is a bit tight (and that aren't addressed even by some of the wrapper libraries that exist). Found out though that there's quite a bit of interest in using a templating engine outside of web applications, or often side by side with the HTML output generated by frameworks like MVC or WebForms. An extra fun part of this session was that this was my first session and when I went to set up I realized I forgot my mini-DVI to VGA adapter cable to plug into the projector in my room - 6 minutes before the session was about to start. So I ended up sprinting the half a mile + back to my room - and back at a full sprint. I managed to be back only a couple of minutes late, but when I started I was out of breath for the first 10 minutes or so, while trying to talk. Musta sounded a bit funny as I was trying to not gasp too much :-) Resources: Slides and Code Samples Westwind.RazorHosting GitHub Project Original RazorHosting Blog Post   Introduction to ASP.NET Web API for AJAX Applications Abstract:WebAPI provides a new framework for creating REST based APIs, but it can also act as a backend to typical AJAX operations. This session covers the core features of Web API as it relates to typical AJAX application development. We’ll cover content-negotiation, routing and a variety of output generation options as well as managing data updates from the client in the context of a small Single Page Application style Web app. Finally we’ll look at some of the extensibility features in WebAPI to customize and extend Web API in a number and useful useful ways. Comments:This session was a fill in for session slots not filled due MIA speakers stranded by Sandy. I had samples from my previous Web API article so decided to go ahead and put together a session from it. Given that I spent only a couple of hours preparing and putting slides together I was glad it turned out as it did - kind of just ran itself by way of the examples I guess as well as nice audience interactions and questions. Lots of interest - and also some confusion about when Web API makes sense. Both this session and the jQuery session ended up getting a ton of questions about when to use Web API vs. MVC, whether it would make sense to switch to Web API for all AJAX backend work etc. In my opinion there's no need to jump to Web API for existing applications that already have a good AJAX foundation. Web API is awesome for real externally consumed APIs and clearly defined application AJAX APIs. For typical application level AJAX calls, it's still a good idea, but ASP.NET MVC can serve most if not all of that functionality just as well. There's no need to abandon MVC (or even ASP.NET AJAX or third party AJAX backends) just to move to Web API. For new projects Web API probably makes good sense for isolation of AJAX calls, but it really depends on how the application is set up. In some cases sharing business logic between the HTML and AJAX interfaces with a single MVC API can be cleaner than creating two completely separate code paths to serve essentially the same business logic. Resources: Slides and Code Samples Sample Code on GitHub Introduction to ASP.NET Web API White Paper© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in Conferences  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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  • SOA Suite 11g Releases

    - by antony.reynolds
    A few years ago Mars renamed one of the most popular chocolate bars in England from Marathon to Snickers.  Even today there are still some people confused by the name change and refer to them as marathons. Well last week we released SOA Suite 11.1.1.3 and BPM Suite 11.1.1.3 as well as OSB 11.1.1.3.  Seems that some people are a little confused by the naming and how to install these new versions, probably the same Brits who call Snickers a Marathon :-).  Seems that calling all the revisions 11g Release 1 has caused confusion.  To help these people I have created a little diagram to show how you can get the latest version onto your machine.  The dotted lines indicate dependencies. Note that SOA Suite 11.1.1.3 and BPM 11.1.1.3 are provided as a patch that is applied to SOA Suite 11.1.1.2.  For a new install there is no need to run the 11.1.1.2 RCU, you can run the 11.1.1.3 RCU directly. All SOA & BPM Suite 11g installations are built on a WebLogic Server base.  The WebLogic 11g Release 1 version is 10.3 with an additional number indicating the revision.  Similarly the 11g Release 1 SOA Suite, Service Bus and BPM Suite have a version 11.1.1 with an additional number indicating the revision.  The final revision number should match the final revision in the WebLogic Server version.  The products are also sometimes identified by a Patch Set number, indicating whether this is the 11gR1 product with the first or second patch set.  The table below show the different revisions with their alias. Product Version Base WebLogic Alias SOA Suite 11gR1 11.1.1.1 10.3.1 Release 1 or R1 SOA Suite 11gR1 11.1.1.2 10.3.2 Patch Set 1 or PS1 SOA Suite 11gR1 11.1.1.3 10.3.3 Patch Set 2 or PS2 BPM Suite 11gR1 11.1.1.3 10.3.3 Release 1 or R1 OSB 11gR1 11.1.1.3 10.3.3 Release 1 or R1 Hope this helps some people, if you find it useful you could always send me a Marathon bar, sorry Snickers!

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  • Open World Day 3

    - by Antony Reynolds
    A Day in the Life of an Oracle OpenWorld Attendee Part IV My third day was exhibition day for me!  I took the opportunity to wander around the JavaOne and OpenWorld exhibitions to see what might be useful for me when selling WebLogic, Coherence & SOA Suite.  I found a number of interesting vendors and thought I would share what I found here.  These are not necessarily endorsements, but observations on companies that I thought had interesting looking products that fill a need I have seen at customers. Highly Available EBS Upgrades A few years ago I worked with a customer that was a port authority.  They wanted to tie E-Business Suite into their operations to provide faster processing of cargo and passengers.  However they only had a 2 hour downtime window to perform upgrades.  This was not a problem for core database and middleware technology, this could accommodate those upgrade timescales easily.  It was a problem for EBS however so I intrigued to find Rapid E-Suite Inc offering an 11i to 12i upgrade service that claims to require no outage.  This could be a real boon to EBS customers like my port friends that need to upgrade without disruption to their business. Mobile on WebLogic I have come across a number of customers who want a comprehensive mobile solution, connected and disconnected operation and so forth.  ADF only addresses part of these requirements currently so I was excited to discover mFrontiers Inc offering an apparently comprehensive solution that should integrate easily with Oracle SOA Suite to mobile enable a SOA infrastructure.  The ability to operate without a network is important for many applications, particularly in industries that require their engineers to enter buildings to perform maintenance or repairs, because network access is not always available – many of my colleagues don’t have mobile access from their homes because they live in the middle of nowhere – and disconnected support is crucial in these situations. Sharepoint Connector for WebCenter Content Obviously Sharepoint is an evil pernicious intrusion into a companies IT estate but it is widely deployed and many people like it but also would like to take advantage of Oracle products such as WebCenter Content.  So I was encouraged to see that Fishbowl Solutions have created a connector for Sharepoint that allows it to bring in content from WebCenter, it looks like a valuable way to maintain the Sharepoint interface end users are used to but extend the range of content by pulling stuff (technical term for content) from WebCenter.   Load Balancing The Enterprise Deployment Guides are Oracles bible on building highly available FMW environments, and each of them requires a front end load balancer.  I have been asked to help configure F5 Load Balancers on a number of occasions over my time at Oracle and each time I come back to it I find more useful features have been added to the BigIP line of load balancers that F5 sell, many of their documents are tailored to FMW.  I like F5, they provide (relatively) easy to use products that do what they say on the side of the box.  They may not have all the bells and whistles of some of their more expensive competitors but they do the job and do it well!  Besides which I like their logo! Other Stuff I saw lots of other interesting products and services, such as a lightweight monitoring tool for Coherence, Forms migration services, JCAPS migration services and lots of cool freebies to take home to the children! A Quiet Night Wednesday night was the partner appreciation event and I had decided to go back to the hotel and have an early night.  I decided to attend the last session of the day – a Maven/Hudson/WebLogic tutorial.  I got the wrong hotel for the session and snuck in 20 minutes late at the back and starting working on the hands on workshop.  One of my co-attendees raised his hand for help and as the presenter came over to help he suddenly stopped and yelled – “Is that Antony”!  It was my old friend Steve Button who used to be based in Redwood Shores but is now a WebLogic guru PM in Australia.  It was good to catch up with him.  As he yelled out a guy with really bad posture turned around to see who he was talking to, this turned out to be my friend Simon Haslan, Oracle ACE from the UK.  After the tutorial Simon and I retired to the coffee shop to catch up and share stories.  2 and half hours later we decided it was time to retire, so much for an early night but great to renew old friendships and find out what real customers are worrying about.

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  • Creating ASP.NET MVC Negotiated Content Results

    - by Rick Strahl
    In a recent ASP.NET MVC application I’m involved with, we had a late in the process request to handle Content Negotiation: Returning output based on the HTTP Accept header of the incoming HTTP request. This is standard behavior in ASP.NET Web API but ASP.NET MVC doesn’t support this functionality directly out of the box. Another reason this came up in discussion is last week’s announcements of ASP.NET vNext, which seems to indicate that ASP.NET Web API is not going to be ported to the cloud version of vNext, but rather be replaced by a combined version of MVC and Web API. While it’s not clear what new API features will show up in this new framework, it’s pretty clear that the ASP.NET MVC style syntax will be the new standard for all the new combined HTTP processing framework. Why negotiated Content? Content negotiation is one of the key features of Web API even though it’s such a relatively simple thing. But it’s also something that’s missing in MVC and once you get used to automatically having your content returned based on Accept headers it’s hard to go back to manually having to create separate methods for different output types as you’ve had to with Microsoft server technologies all along (yes, yes I know other frameworks – including my own – have done this for years but for in the box features this is relatively new from Web API). As a quick review,  Accept Header content negotiation works off the request’s HTTP Accept header:POST http://localhost/mydailydosha/Editable/NegotiateContent HTTP/1.1 Content-Type: application/json Accept: application/json Host: localhost Content-Length: 76 Pragma: no-cache { ElementId: "header", PageName: "TestPage", Text: "This is a nice header" } If I make this request I would expect to get back a JSON result based on my application/json Accept header. To request XML  I‘d just change the accept header:Accept: text/xml and now I’d expect the response to come back as XML. Now this only works with media types that the server can process. In my case here I need to handle JSON, XML, HTML (using Views) and Plain Text. HTML results might need more than just a data return – you also probably need to specify a View to render the data into either by specifying the view explicitly or by using some sort of convention that can automatically locate a view to match. Today ASP.NET MVC doesn’t support this sort of automatic content switching out of the box. Unfortunately, in my application scenario we have an application that started out primarily with an AJAX backend that was implemented with JSON only. So there are lots of JSON results like this:[Route("Customers")] public ActionResult GetCustomers() { return Json(repo.GetCustomers(),JsonRequestBehavior.AllowGet); } These work fine, but they are of course JSON specific. Then a couple of weeks ago, a requirement came in that an old desktop application needs to also consume this API and it has to use XML to do it because there’s no JSON parser available for it. Ooops – stuck with JSON in this case. While it would have been easy to add XML specific methods I figured it’s easier to add basic content negotiation. And that’s what I show in this post. Missteps – IResultFilter, IActionFilter My first attempt at this was to use IResultFilter or IActionFilter which look like they would be ideal to modify result content after it’s been generated using OnResultExecuted() or OnActionExecuted(). Filters are great because they can look globally at all controller methods or individual methods that are marked up with the Filter’s attribute. But it turns out these filters don’t work for raw POCO result values from Action methods. What we wanted to do for API calls is get back to using plain .NET types as results rather than result actions. That is  you write a method that doesn’t return an ActionResult, but a standard .NET type like this:public Customer UpdateCustomer(Customer cust) { … do stuff to customer :-) return cust; } Unfortunately both OnResultExecuted and OnActionExecuted receive an MVC ContentResult instance from the POCO object. MVC basically takes any non-ActionResult return value and turns it into a ContentResult by converting the value using .ToString(). Ugh. The ContentResult itself doesn’t contain the original value, which is lost AFAIK with no way to retrieve it. So there’s no way to access the raw customer object in the example above. Bummer. Creating a NegotiatedResult This leaves mucking around with custom ActionResults. ActionResults are MVC’s standard way to return action method results – you basically specify that you would like to render your result in a specific format. Common ActionResults are ViewResults (ie. View(vn,model)), JsonResult, RedirectResult etc. They work and are fairly effective and work fairly well for testing as well as it’s the ‘standard’ interface to return results from actions. The problem with the this is mainly that you’re explicitly saying that you want a specific result output type. This works well for many things, but sometimes you do want your result to be negotiated. My first crack at this solution here is to create a simple ActionResult subclass that looks at the Accept header and based on that writes the output. I need to support JSON and XML content and HTML as well as text – so effectively 4 media types: application/json, text/xml, text/html and text/plain. Everything else is passed through as ContentResult – which effecively returns whatever .ToString() returns. Here’s what the NegotiatedResult usage looks like:public ActionResult GetCustomers() { return new NegotiatedResult(repo.GetCustomers()); } public ActionResult GetCustomer(int id) { return new NegotiatedResult("Show", repo.GetCustomer(id)); } There are two overloads of this method – one that returns just the raw result value and a second version that accepts an optional view name. The second version returns the Razor view specified only if text/html is requested – otherwise the raw data is returned. This is useful in applications where you have an HTML front end that can also double as an API interface endpoint that’s using the same model data you send to the View. For the application I mentioned above this was another actual use-case we needed to address so this was a welcome side effect of creating a custom ActionResult. There’s also an extension method that directly attaches a Negotiated() method to the controller using the same syntax:public ActionResult GetCustomers() { return this.Negotiated(repo.GetCustomers()); } public ActionResult GetCustomer(int id) { return this.Negotiated("Show",repo.GetCustomer(id)); } Using either of these mechanisms now allows you to return JSON, XML, HTML or plain text results depending on the Accept header sent. Send application/json you get just the Customer JSON data. Ditto for text/xml and XML data. Pass text/html for the Accept header and the "Show.cshtml" Razor view is rendered passing the result model data producing final HTML output. While this isn’t as clean as passing just POCO objects back as I had intended originally, this approach fits better with how MVC action methods are intended to be used and we get the bonus of being able to specify a View to render (optionally) for HTML. How does it work An ActionResult implementation is pretty straightforward. You inherit from ActionResult and implement the ExecuteResult method to send your output to the ASP.NET output stream. ActionFilters are an easy way to effectively do post processing on ASP.NET MVC controller actions just before the content is sent to the output stream, assuming your specific action result was used. Here’s the full code to the NegotiatedResult class (you can also check it out on GitHub):/// <summary> /// Returns a content negotiated result based on the Accept header. /// Minimal implementation that works with JSON and XML content, /// can also optionally return a view with HTML. /// </summary> /// <example> /// // model data only /// public ActionResult GetCustomers() /// { /// return new NegotiatedResult(repo.Customers.OrderBy( c=> c.Company) ) /// } /// // optional view for HTML /// public ActionResult GetCustomers() /// { /// return new NegotiatedResult("List", repo.Customers.OrderBy( c=> c.Company) ) /// } /// </example> public class NegotiatedResult : ActionResult { /// <summary> /// Data stored to be 'serialized'. Public /// so it's potentially accessible in filters. /// </summary> public object Data { get; set; } /// <summary> /// Optional name of the HTML view to be rendered /// for HTML responses /// </summary> public string ViewName { get; set; } public static bool FormatOutput { get; set; } static NegotiatedResult() { FormatOutput = HttpContext.Current.IsDebuggingEnabled; } /// <summary> /// Pass in data to serialize /// </summary> /// <param name="data">Data to serialize</param> public NegotiatedResult(object data) { Data = data; } /// <summary> /// Pass in data and an optional view for HTML views /// </summary> /// <param name="data"></param> /// <param name="viewName"></param> public NegotiatedResult(string viewName, object data) { Data = data; ViewName = viewName; } public override void ExecuteResult(ControllerContext context) { if (context == null) throw new ArgumentNullException("context"); HttpResponseBase response = context.HttpContext.Response; HttpRequestBase request = context.HttpContext.Request; // Look for specific content types if (request.AcceptTypes.Contains("text/html")) { response.ContentType = "text/html"; if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(ViewName)) { var viewData = context.Controller.ViewData; viewData.Model = Data; var viewResult = new ViewResult { ViewName = ViewName, MasterName = null, ViewData = viewData, TempData = context.Controller.TempData, ViewEngineCollection = ((Controller)context.Controller).ViewEngineCollection }; viewResult.ExecuteResult(context.Controller.ControllerContext); } else response.Write(Data); } else if (request.AcceptTypes.Contains("text/plain")) { response.ContentType = "text/plain"; response.Write(Data); } else if (request.AcceptTypes.Contains("application/json")) { using (JsonTextWriter writer = new JsonTextWriter(response.Output)) { var settings = new JsonSerializerSettings(); if (FormatOutput) settings.Formatting = Newtonsoft.Json.Formatting.Indented; JsonSerializer serializer = JsonSerializer.Create(settings); serializer.Serialize(writer, Data); writer.Flush(); } } else if (request.AcceptTypes.Contains("text/xml")) { response.ContentType = "text/xml"; if (Data != null) { using (var writer = new XmlTextWriter(response.OutputStream, new UTF8Encoding())) { if (FormatOutput) writer.Formatting = System.Xml.Formatting.Indented; XmlSerializer serializer = new XmlSerializer(Data.GetType()); serializer.Serialize(writer, Data); writer.Flush(); } } } else { // just write data as a plain string response.Write(Data); } } } /// <summary> /// Extends Controller with Negotiated() ActionResult that does /// basic content negotiation based on the Accept header. /// </summary> public static class NegotiatedResultExtensions { /// <summary> /// Return content-negotiated content of the data based on Accept header. /// Supports: /// application/json - using JSON.NET /// text/xml - Xml as XmlSerializer XML /// text/html - as text, or an optional View /// text/plain - as text /// </summary> /// <param name="controller"></param> /// <param name="data">Data to return</param> /// <returns>serialized data</returns> /// <example> /// public ActionResult GetCustomers() /// { /// return this.Negotiated( repo.Customers.OrderBy( c=> c.Company) ) /// } /// </example> public static NegotiatedResult Negotiated(this Controller controller, object data) { return new NegotiatedResult(data); } /// <summary> /// Return content-negotiated content of the data based on Accept header. /// Supports: /// application/json - using JSON.NET /// text/xml - Xml as XmlSerializer XML /// text/html - as text, or an optional View /// text/plain - as text /// </summary> /// <param name="controller"></param> /// <param name="viewName">Name of the View to when Accept is text/html</param> /// /// <param name="data">Data to return</param> /// <returns>serialized data</returns> /// <example> /// public ActionResult GetCustomers() /// { /// return this.Negotiated("List", repo.Customers.OrderBy( c=> c.Company) ) /// } /// </example> public static NegotiatedResult Negotiated(this Controller controller, string viewName, object data) { return new NegotiatedResult(viewName, data); } } Output Generation – JSON and XML Generating output for XML and JSON is simple – you use the desired serializer and off you go. Using XmlSerializer and JSON.NET it’s just a handful of lines each to generate serialized output directly into the HTTP output stream. Please note this implementation uses JSON.NET for its JSON generation rather than the default JavaScriptSerializer that MVC uses which I feel is an additional bonus to implementing this custom action. I’d already been using a custom JsonNetResult class previously, but now this is just rolled into this custom ActionResult. Just keep in mind that JSON.NET outputs slightly different JSON for certain things like collections for example, so behavior may change. One addition to this implementation might be a flag to allow switching the JSON serializer. Html View Generation Html View generation actually turned out to be easier than anticipated. Initially I used my generic ASP.NET ViewRenderer Class that can render MVC views from any ASP.NET application. However it turns out since we are executing inside of an active MVC request there’s an easier way: We can simply create a custom ViewResult and populate its members and then execute it. The code in text/html handling code that renders the view is simply this:response.ContentType = "text/html"; if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(ViewName)) { var viewData = context.Controller.ViewData; viewData.Model = Data; var viewResult = new ViewResult { ViewName = ViewName, MasterName = null, ViewData = viewData, TempData = context.Controller.TempData, ViewEngineCollection = ((Controller)context.Controller).ViewEngineCollection }; viewResult.ExecuteResult(context.Controller.ControllerContext); } else response.Write(Data); which is a neat and easy way to render a Razor view assuming you have an active controller that’s ready for rendering. Sweet – dependency removed which makes this class self-contained without any external dependencies other than JSON.NET. Summary While this isn’t exactly a new topic, it’s the first time I’ve actually delved into this with MVC. I’ve been doing content negotiation with Web API and prior to that with my REST library. This is the first time it’s come up as an issue in MVC. But as I have worked through this I find that having a way to specify both HTML Views *and* JSON and XML results from a single controller certainly is appealing to me in many situations as we are in this particular application returning identical data models for each of these operations. Rendering content negotiated views is something that I hope ASP.NET vNext will provide natively in the combined MVC and WebAPI model, but we’ll see how this actually will be implemented. In the meantime having a custom ActionResult that provides this functionality is a workable and easily adaptable way of handling this going forward. Whatever ends up happening in ASP.NET vNext the abstraction can probably be changed to support the native features of the future. Anyway I hope some of you found this useful if not for direct integration then as insight into some of the rendering logic that MVC uses to get output into the HTTP stream… Related Resources Latest Version of NegotiatedResult.cs on GitHub Understanding Action Controllers Rendering ASP.NET Views To String© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2014Posted in MVC  ASP.NET  HTTP   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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  • Coming to a City Near You: Oracle Business Analytics Summits

    - by Rob Reynolds
    More and more organizations use analytics to identify new business opportunities, reduce costs, and optimize business processes. How? By making business information available throughout the enterprise—and making sure that it is relevant, actionable, and easy to access.Oracle invites you to join us for an information-packed event where you’ll learn about the latest trends, best practices, and innovations in business intelligence, analytic applications, and data warehousing.If you are an IT professional involved in BI strategy, program management, systems management, architecture, or deployment, this event is for you. You’ll find out about: New ways of deploying and delivering business intelligence on premise, in the cloud, and on mobile devices to a diverse base of business users New approaches for integrating, storing, managing, securing, and accessing your ever-growing volumes of structured and unstructured data The latest strategies for dramatically increasing the ROI of your ERP and CRM deployments Click here to view the presentation abstracts. Agenda 9:00 a.m. Registration 10:00 a.m. Keynote: Business Analytics—Be the First to Know 11:00 a.m. Break Breakout Sessions Technology and Architecture Strategy Track Business Insight and Analytic Delivery Track 11:15 a.m. Emerging Trends in Enterprise BI Platforms 11:15 a.m. Mobile BI—More than Dashboards on a Tablet 12:00 noon Networking Lunch 12:00 noon Networking Lunch 1:00 p.m. Is Your Business Intelligence Data at Risk? 1:00 p.m. Geospatial Intelligence—Location, Location, Location! 1:45 p.m. What Extreme Performance Means for Your Business 1:45 p.m. The Role of BI in Your ERP and Performance Management Initiatives 2:30 p.m. Become a BI Architect 2:30 p.m. BI Applications: Step 1 in Your ERP Upgrade or Expansion 3:00 p.m. Partner Spotlight Registration links for each city are below: New York , NY- July 26 Miami, FL - July 27 Reston, VA, July 27 Atlanta, GA - July 28 Boston, MA - July 28 Rochester, NY - Aug 2 (event link coming soon!) Menlo Park, CA - August 2 Charlotte, NC - August 3 Newport Beach, CA - August 3 Register online at the links above or call 1.800.820.5592 ext. 9218 to reserve your place.

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  • OpenWorld Day 1

    - by Antony Reynolds
    A Day in the Life of an OpenWorld Attendee Part I Lots of people are blogging insightfully about OpenWorld so I thought I would provide some non-insightful remarks to buck the trend! With 50,000 attendees I didn’t expect to bump into too many people I knew, boy was I wrong!  I walked into the registration area and immediately was hailed by a couple of customers I had worked with a few months ago.  Moving to the employee registration area in a different hall I bumped into a colleague from the UK who was also registering.  As soon as I got my badge I bumped into a friend from Ireland!  So maybe OpenWorld isn’t so big after all! First port of call was Larrys Keynote.  As always Larry was provocative and thought provoking.  His key points were announcing the Oracle cloud offering in IaaS, PaaS and SaaS, pointing out that Fusion Apps are cloud enabled and finally announcing the 12c Database, making a big play of its new multi-tenancy features.  His contention was that multi-tenancy will simplify cloud development and provide better security by providing DB level isolation for applications and customers. Next day, Monday, was my first full day at OpenWorld.  The first session I attended was on monitoring of OSB, very interesting presentation on the benefits achieved by an Illinois area telco – US Cellular.  Great discussion of why they bought the SOA Management Packs and the benefits they are already seeing from their investment in terms of improved provisioning and time to market, as well as better performance insight and assistance with capacity planning. Craig Blitz provided a nice walkthrough of where Coherence has been and where it is going. Last night I attended the BOF on Managed File Transfer where Dave Berry replayed Oracles thoughts on providing dedicated Managed File Transfer as part of the 12c SOA release.  Dave laid out the perceived requirements and solicited feedback from the audience on what if anything was missing.  He also demoed an early version of the functionality that would simplify setting up MFT in SOA Suite and make tracking activity much easier. So much for Day 1.  I also ran into scores of old friends and colleagues and had a pleasant dinner with my friend from Ireland where I caught up on the latest news from Oracle UK.  Not bad for Day 1!

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  • Free WebLogic Administration Cookbook

    - by Antony Reynolds
    Free WebLogic Admin Cookbook Packt Publishing are offering free copies of Oracle WebLogic Server 12c Advanced Administration Cookbook : http://www.packtpub.com/oracle-weblogic-server-12c-advanced-administration-cookbook/book  in exchange for a review either on your blog or on the title’s Amazon page. Here’s the blurb: Install, create and configure WebLogic Server Configure an Administration Server with high availability Create and configure JDBC data sources, multi data sources and gridlink data sources Tune the multi data source to survive database failures Setup JMS distributed queues Use WLDF to send threshold notifications Configure WebLogic Server for stability and resilience If you’re a datacenter operator, system administrator or even a Java developer this book could be exactly what you are looking for to take you one step further with Oracle WebLogic Server, this is a good way to bag yourself a free cookbook (current retail price $25.49). Free review copies are available until Tuesday 2nd July 2013, so if you are interested, email Harleen Kaur Bagga at: harleenb-AT-packtpub.com. I will be posting my own review shortly!

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  • A Virtual Dilemma

    - by antony.reynolds
    Solving a Gotcha with VirtualBox Guest Additions I was just building a new virtual machine based off an existing image that didn’t have the Virtual Box Guest Additions enabled.  The guest additions allow tight integration between the guest OS and the host environment, providing seemless mouse transfer and the ability to take advantage of full video screen size.  The guest additions need to be linked with the kernel which requires the kernel-devel package to be installed.  After installing this package and then trying to add the guest additions it failed, suggesting that I might not have the kernel-devel package that I had installed.  After a little though I finally realized what had happened.  When I grabbed the kernel-devel package I hadn’t checked the version of my kernel.  The kernel-devel I downloaded didn’t match the revision of the kernel I was running!  Hence my problems.  I upgraded the kernel to the same revision as my kernel-devel package and rebooted.  I had installed dkms so I was pleased to see that my VBox Additions successfully built and the mouse and screen now worked as expected. So now you know my embarrassing story for the day :-)

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  • Open World Day 2

    - by Antony Reynolds
    A Day in the Life of an Oracle OpenWorld Attendee Part III My second full day started with me waking up and realising that I was supposed to meet my friend Tejas Joshi (co-author of the Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud Handbook) at the station in 20 minutes!  Needless to say I didn’t make it, but then I felt better later when I found out he had caught the wrong shuttle bus and ended up at the airport instead of the BART! The morning was spent in the Authors Seminar arranged to give authors a whirlwind tour of Oracle Product updates and strategy plans.  It was useful to see what was happening in areas I knew little or nothing about.  In the afternoon I wandered around Java One, a very different show to OpenWorld with much more bleeding edge stuff and just plain blue sky thinking.  Of course who couldn’t love a show with a full size Duke wondering around and available for photographs. Attended a presentation on a highly available Weblogic JMS environment wich did a great job of laying out to architect a highly available solution. Dinner with customers and then collapsed exhausted into bed!

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  • Oracle SOA Suite 11g Administrator's Handbook

    - by Antony Reynolds
    SOA Administration Book I have just received a copy of the “Oracle SOA Suite 11g Administrator's Handbook” so as soon as I have read it I will let you know what I think.  In the meantime the first thing that struck me was the author credentials, although I have never met either of them as I remember, I have read Admeds blog postings and they are a great community resource, so immediately I am well disposed towards the book.  Similarly Arun is an employee of my friend and co-author Matt Wright, and I have heard good things about him from Rubicon Red people. A first glance at the table of contents looks encouraging, I particularly like their approach to performance tuning where they give a clear concise explanation of the knobs they are using. More when I have read more.

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  • SOA Suite 11g Developers Cookbook Published

    - by Antony Reynolds
    SOA Suite 11g Developers Cookbook Available Just realized that I failed to mention that Matt & mine’s most recent book, the SOA Suite 11g Developers Cookbook was published over Christmas last year! In some ways this was an easier book to write than the Developers Guide, the hard bit was deciding what recipes to include.  Once we had decided that the writing of the book was pretty straight forward. The book focuses on areas that we felt we had neglected in the Developers Guide, and so there is more about Java integration and OSB, both of which we see a lot of questions about when working with customers. Amazon has a couple of reviews. Table of Contents Chapter 1: Building an SOA Suite ClusterChapter 2: Using the Metadata Service to Share XML ArtifactsChapter 3: Working with TransactionsChapter 4: Mapping DataChapter 5: Composite Messaging PatternsChapter 6: OSB Messaging PatternsChapter 7: Integrating OSB with JSONChapter 8: Compressed File Adapter PatternsChapter 9: Integrating Java with SOA SuiteChapter 10: Securing Composites and Calling Secure Web ServicesChapter 11: Configuring the Identity ServiceChapter 12: Configuring OSB to Use Foreign JMS QueuesChapter 13: Monitoring and Management

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  • Oracle's Business Analytics Strategy Webcast

    - by Rob Reynolds
    Join Mark Hurd and Balaji Yelamanchili as they unveil the latest advances in Oracle’s strategy for placing analytics into the hands of every one of your decision-makers—so that they can see more, think smarter, and act faster. Learn about the latest developments in business intelligence technology and applications, advanced analytics, performance management applications, and engineered systems. You’ll find out how you can harness the exploding volumes of data being generated inside your organization—and beyond the firewall—to: Deliver real-time intelligence to your mobile workforce globally Forecast and plan at the speed of business Accelerate your financial close and reporting process Discover how Oracle business analytics can change the way you do business. Register today for this on demand event.

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  • Slicing the EDG

    - by Antony Reynolds
    Different SOA Domain Configurations In this blog entry I would like to introduce three different configurations for a SOA environment.  I have omitted load balancers and OTD/OHS as they introduce a whole new round of discussion.  For each possible deployment architecture I have identified some of the advantages. Super Domain This is a single EDG style domain for everything needed for SOA/OSB.   It extends the standard EDG slightly but otherwise assumes a single “super” domain. This is basically the SOA EDG.  I have broken out JMS servers and Coherence servers to improve scalability and reduce dependencies. Key Points Separate JMS allows those servers to be kept up separately from rest of SOA Domain, allowing JMS clients to post messages even if rest of domain is unavailable. JMS servers are only used to host application specific JMS destinations, SOA/OSB JMS destinations remain in relevant SOA/OSB managed servers. Separate Coherence servers allow OSB cache to be offloaded from OSB servers. Use of Coherence by other components as a shared infrastructure data grid service. Coherence cluster may be managed by WLS but more likely run as a standalone Coherence cluster. Benefits Single Administration Point (1 Admin Server) Closely follows EDG with addition of application specific JMS servers and standalone Coherence servers for OSB caching and application specific caches. Coherence grid can be scaled independent of OSB/SOA. JMS queues provide for inter-application communication. Drawbacks Patching is an all or nothing affair. Startup time for SOA may be slow if large number of composites deployed. Multiple Domains This extends the EDG into multiple domains, allowing separate management and update of these domains.  I see this type of configuration quite often with customers, although some don't have OWSM, others don't have separate Coherence etc. SOA & BAM are kept in the same domain as little benefit is obtained by separating them. Key Points Separate JMS allows those servers to be kept up separately from rest of SOA Domain, allowing JMS clients to post messages even if other domains are unavailable. JMS servers are only used to host application specific JMS destinations, SOA/OSB JMS destinations remain in relevant SOA/OSB managed servers. Separate Coherence servers allow OSB cache to be offloaded from OSB servers. Use of Coherence by other components as a shared infrastructure data grid service. Coherence cluster may be managed by WLS but more likely run as a standalone Coherence cluster. Benefits Follows EDG but in separate domains and with addition of application specific JMS servers and standalone Coherence servers for OSB caching and application specific caches. Coherence grid can be scaled independent of OSB/SOA. JMS queues provide for inter-application communication. Patch lifecycle of OSB/SOA/JMS are no longer lock stepped. JMS may be kept running independently of other domains allowing applications to insert messages fro later consumption by SOA/OSB. OSB may be kept running independent of other domains, allowing service virtualization to continue independent of other domains availability. All domains use same OWSM policy store (MDS-WSM). Drawbacks Multiple domains to manage and configure. Multiple Admin servers (single view requires use of Grid Control) Multiple Admin servers/WSM clusters waste resources. Additional homes needed to enjoy benefits of separate patching. Cross domain trust needs setting up to simplify cross domain interactions. Startup time for SOA may be slow if large number of composites deployed. Shared Service Environment This model extends the previous multiple domain arrangement to provide a true shared service environment.This extends the previous model by allowing multiple additional SOA domains and/or other domains to take advantage of the shared services.  Only one non-shared domain is shown, but there could be multiple, allowing groups of applications to share patching independent of other application groups. Key Points Separate JMS allows those servers to be kept up separately from rest of SOA Domain, allowing JMS clients to post messages even if other domains are unavailable. JMS servers are only used to host application specific JMS destinations, SOA/OSB JMS destinations remain in relevant SOA/OSB managed servers. Separate Coherence servers allow OSB cache to be offloaded from OSB servers. Use of Coherence by other components as a shared infrastructure data grid service Coherence cluster may be managed by WLS but more likely run as a standalone Coherence cluster. Shared SOA Domain hosts Human Workflow Tasks BAM Common "utility" composites Single OSB domain provides "Enterprise Service Bus" All domains use same OWSM policy store (MDS-WSM) Benefits Follows EDG but in separate domains and with addition of application specific JMS servers and standalone Coherence servers for OSB caching and application specific caches. Coherence grid can be scaled independent of OSB/SOA. JMS queues provide for inter-application communication. Patch lifecycle of OSB/SOA/JMS are no longer lock stepped. JMS may be kept running independently of other domains allowing applications to insert messages fro later consumption by SOA/OSB. OSB may be kept running independent of other domains, allowing service virtualization to continue independent of other domains availability. All domains use same OWSM policy store (MDS-WSM). Supports large numbers of deployed composites in multiple domains. Single URL for Human Workflow end users. Single URL for BAM end users. Drawbacks Multiple domains to manage and configure. Multiple Admin servers (single view requires use of Grid Control) Multiple Admin servers/WSM clusters waste resources. Additional homes needed to enjoy benefits of separate patching. Cross domain trust needs setting up to simplify cross domain interactions. Human Workflow needs to be specially configured to point to shared services domain. Summary The alternatives in this blog allow for patching to have different impacts, depending on the model chosen.  Each organization must decide the tradeoffs for itself.  One extreme is to go for the shared services model and have one domain per SOA application.  This requires a lot of administration of the multiple domains.  The other extreme is to have a single super domain.  This makes the entire enterprise susceptible to an outage at the same time due to patching or other domain level changes.  Hopefully this blog will help your organization choose the right model for you.

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  • Open World Day 4

    - by Antony Reynolds
    A Day in the Life of an OpenWorld Attendee Part V Last day at OpenWorld.  The exhibits are closed, and the final few presentations are being given.  I spent much of the day meeting with customers to talk about SOA/OSB and Coherence.  Main event of the day was the farewell party which was loud and surprisingly well attended.  I was able to have lunch with Dave Felcey, Coherence PM, who has a great blog and is always ready to share his expertise with people. So that was OpenWOrld for another year.  I met a friend of a friend who attends OpenWorld every year and attends the Demo Grounds with a list of questions to ask people.  I think that illustrates the point that everyone approaches OpenWorld in a different way and looks to get different things from it.  For me OpenWorld is a great experience to feel the energy in Oracle and network with customers and partners.  Hope to see you there next year!

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  • Display Problems running Ubuntu 12.04 in Windows VMware Player

    - by Alex Reynolds
    I am posting this again because I have changed to VMWare Player and I discovered something new. I am running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Guest) in VMWare Player 6.0.2 on Windows 7 64-bit Host. I have VMWare Tools installed properly. I am running MATE but the problem persists when I change (to and from) xfce, gnome, mate a-- and back again I had been using this for a couple of years without any graphics issues. After an Ubuntu update (typical) -- my video is corrupt and will not refresh correctly. My desktop icons are "mirrored" and when I open a terminal window (for instance) -- sometimes -- the window appears multiple times. Of course, only one is the real image. It seems to be a refresh problem. When I move an active window around the screen the "older" images "erase" and my icons (for instance) are in the correct location. For instance, I can move the terminal around a pretty corrupted window and the screen behind it is repainted correctly. NEW: Next, I got the idea to try and Remote Desktop in to the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Guest OS from my Windows 7 64-bit Host. Once working, and connected via Win RDC -- using MATE as default in my /etc/xrdp/startws.sh -- my video is not corrupted and works fine (as in the past). Any ideas about what is going on ? or how to fix this ?

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  • Exalytics Webcast - Extreme Analytics Without Limits

    - by Rob Reynolds
    Event Date: October 18, 2012 Event Time: 11 a.m. PT / 2 p.m. ET If your organization is like most, you grapple with an ongoing struggle to obtain timely and relevant information from your enterprise systems. So, while you may have the data needed to answer key questions, the volume, complexity, and dispersal of that data makes getting those answers tough. Attend this Webcast to learn how the combination of Oracle Exalytics In- Memory Machine and Oracle’s market leading analytic applications enables you to go beyond the traditional boundaries of data analysis and get the insight you need from massive volumes of data – all at the speed of thought. See how you can benefit from running your analytic applications on Oracle Exalytics to: Lower TCO Improve Operational Decision Making and Enhance Competitive Advantage Deliver Speed-of-thought Analysis – Anytime, Anywhere Register today. Learn how Oracle Business Analytics can move your business ahead. Register Here

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  • Webcast: Extreme Analytics Without Limits

    - by Rob Reynolds
    Event Date: November 8, 2012 Event Time: 1 p.m. PT / 4 p.m. ET If you are a current Oracle Business Intelligence Applications customer, or thinking about implementing the BI Apps, please join us for this Webcast to learn how the combination of Oracle Exalytics In- Memory Machine and Oracle’s market leading analytic applications enables you to go beyond the traditional boundaries of data analysis and get the insight you need from massive volumes of data – all at the speed of thought. See how you can benefit from running your analytic applications on Oracle Exalytics to: Lower TCO Improve Operational Decision Making and Enhance Competitive Advantage Deliver Speed-of-thought Analysis – Anytime, Anywhere Click here to register.

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  • best way to receive email for multiple domains with multiple user accouts into rails app

    - by rick moss
    hi all I have a cms that runs on multiple domains and therefore needs to pull emails into the app for multiple email addresses. I have setup rackspace email for a hosted email solution and am trying to find the best way to pull the emails into my app from all the mailboxes. Should i be using pop3 or imap ? should i be pulling into a que system then into rails app ? Is there a gem / plugin for this ? thanks alot for help in advance Rick

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  • Using FiddlerCore to capture HTTP Requests with .NET

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

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  • WCF WS-Security and WSE Nonce Authentication

    - by Rick Strahl
    WCF makes it fairly easy to access WS-* Web Services, except when you run into a service format that it doesn't support. Even then WCF provides a huge amount of flexibility to make the service clients work, however finding the proper interfaces to make that happen is not easy to discover and for the most part undocumented unless you're lucky enough to run into a blog, forum or StackOverflow post on the matter. This is definitely true for the Password Nonce as part of the WS-Security/WSE protocol, which is not natively supported in WCF. Specifically I had a need to create a WCF message on the client that includes a WS-Security header that looks like this from their spec document:<soapenv:Header> <wsse:Security soapenv:mustUnderstand="1" xmlns:wsse="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-secext-1.0.xsd"> <wsse:UsernameToken wsu:Id="UsernameToken-8" xmlns:wsu="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-utility-1.0.xsd"> <wsse:Username>TeStUsErNaMe1</wsse:Username> <wsse:Password Type="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-username-token-profile-1.0#PasswordText" >TeStPaSsWoRd1</wsse:Password> <wsse:Nonce EncodingType="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-soap-message-security-1.0#Base64Binary" >f8nUe3YupTU5ISdCy3X9Gg==</wsse:Nonce> <wsu:Created>2011-05-04T19:01:40.981Z</wsu:Created> </wsse:UsernameToken> </wsse:Security> </soapenv:Header> Specifically, the Nonce and Created keys are what WCF doesn't create or have a built in formatting for. Why is there a nonce? My first thought here was WTF? The username and password are there in clear text, what does the Nonce accomplish? The Nonce and created keys are are part of WSE Security specification and are meant to allow the server to detect and prevent replay attacks. The hashed nonce should be unique per request which the server can store and check for before running another request thus ensuring that a request is not replayed with exactly the same values. Basic ServiceUtl Import - not much Luck The first thing I did when I imported this service with a service reference was to simply import it as a Service Reference. The Add Service Reference import automatically detects that WS-Security is required and appropariately adds the WS-Security to the basicHttpBinding in the config file:<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <configuration> <system.serviceModel> <bindings> <basicHttpBinding> <binding name="RealTimeOnlineSoapBinding"> <security mode="Transport" /> </binding> <binding name="RealTimeOnlineSoapBinding1" /> </basicHttpBinding> </bindings> <client> <endpoint address="https://notarealurl.com:443/services/RealTimeOnline" binding="basicHttpBinding" bindingConfiguration="RealTimeOnlineSoapBinding" contract="RealTimeOnline.RealTimeOnline" name="RealTimeOnline" /> </client> </system.serviceModel> </configuration> If if I run this as is using code like this:var client = new RealTimeOnlineClient(); client.ClientCredentials.UserName.UserName = "TheUsername"; client.ClientCredentials.UserName.Password = "ThePassword"; … I get nothing in terms of WS-Security headers. The request is sent, but the the binding expects transport level security to be applied, rather than message level security. To fix this so that a WS-Security message header is sent the security mode can be changed to: <security mode="TransportWithMessageCredential" /> Now if I re-run I at least get a WS-Security header which looks like this:<s:Envelope xmlns:s="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/" xmlns:u="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-utility-1.0.xsd"> <s:Header> <o:Security s:mustUnderstand="1" xmlns:o="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-secext-1.0.xsd"> <u:Timestamp u:Id="_0"> <u:Created>2012-11-24T02:55:18.011Z</u:Created> <u:Expires>2012-11-24T03:00:18.011Z</u:Expires> </u:Timestamp> <o:UsernameToken u:Id="uuid-18c215d4-1106-40a5-8dd1-c81fdddf19d3-1"> <o:Username>TheUserName</o:Username> <o:Password Type="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-username-token-profile-1.0#PasswordText" >ThePassword</o:Password> </o:UsernameToken> </o:Security> </s:Header> Closer! Now the WS-Security header is there along with a timestamp field (which might not be accepted by some WS-Security expecting services), but there's no Nonce or created timestamp as required by my original service. Using a CustomBinding instead My next try was to go with a CustomBinding instead of basicHttpBinding as it allows a bit more control over the protocol and transport configurations for the binding. Specifically I can explicitly specify the message protocol(s) used. Using configuration file settings here's what the config file looks like:<?xml version="1.0"?> <configuration> <system.serviceModel> <bindings> <customBinding> <binding name="CustomSoapBinding"> <security includeTimestamp="false" authenticationMode="UserNameOverTransport" defaultAlgorithmSuite="Basic256" requireDerivedKeys="false" messageSecurityVersion="WSSecurity10WSTrustFebruary2005WSSecureConversationFebruary2005WSSecurityPolicy11BasicSecurityProfile10"> </security> <textMessageEncoding messageVersion="Soap11"></textMessageEncoding> <httpsTransport maxReceivedMessageSize="2000000000"/> </binding> </customBinding> </bindings> <client> <endpoint address="https://notrealurl.com:443/services/RealTimeOnline" binding="customBinding" bindingConfiguration="CustomSoapBinding" contract="RealTimeOnline.RealTimeOnline" name="RealTimeOnline" /> </client> </system.serviceModel> <startup> <supportedRuntime version="v4.0" sku=".NETFramework,Version=v4.0"/> </startup> </configuration> This ends up creating a cleaner header that's missing the timestamp field which can cause some services problems. The WS-Security header output generated with the above looks like this:<s:Header> <o:Security s:mustUnderstand="1" xmlns:o="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-secext-1.0.xsd"> <o:UsernameToken u:Id="uuid-291622ca-4c11-460f-9886-ac1c78813b24-1"> <o:Username>TheUsername</o:Username> <o:Password Type="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-username-token-profile-1.0#PasswordText" >ThePassword</o:Password> </o:UsernameToken> </o:Security> </s:Header> This is closer as it includes only the username and password. The key here is the protocol for WS-Security:messageSecurityVersion="WSSecurity10WSTrustFebruary2005WSSecureConversationFebruary2005WSSecurityPolicy11BasicSecurityProfile10" which explicitly specifies the protocol version. There are several variants of this specification but none of them seem to support the nonce unfortunately. This protocol does allow for optional omission of the Nonce and created timestamp provided (which effectively makes those keys optional). With some services I tried that requested a Nonce just using this protocol actually worked where the default basicHttpBinding failed to connect, so this is a possible solution for access to some services. Unfortunately for my target service that was not an option. The nonce has to be there. Creating Custom ClientCredentials As it turns out WCF doesn't have support for the Digest Nonce as part of WS-Security, and so as far as I can tell there's no way to do it just with configuration settings. I did a bunch of research on this trying to find workarounds for this, and I did find a couple of entries on StackOverflow as well as on the MSDN forums. However, none of these are particularily clear and I ended up using bits and pieces of several of them to arrive at a working solution in the end. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/896901/wcf-adding-nonce-to-usernametoken http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/wcf/thread/4df3354f-0627-42d9-b5fb-6e880b60f8ee The latter forum message is the more useful of the two (the last message on the thread in particular) and it has most of the information required to make this work. But it took some experimentation for me to get this right so I'll recount the process here maybe a bit more comprehensively. In order for this to work a number of classes have to be overridden: ClientCredentials ClientCredentialsSecurityTokenManager WSSecurityTokenizer The idea is that we need to create a custom ClientCredential class to hold the custom properties so they can be set from the UI or via configuration settings. The TokenManager and Tokenizer are mainly required to allow the custom credentials class to flow through the WCF pipeline and eventually provide custom serialization. Here are the three classes required and their full implementations:public class CustomCredentials : ClientCredentials { public CustomCredentials() { } protected CustomCredentials(CustomCredentials cc) : base(cc) { } public override System.IdentityModel.Selectors.SecurityTokenManager CreateSecurityTokenManager() { return new CustomSecurityTokenManager(this); } protected override ClientCredentials CloneCore() { return new CustomCredentials(this); } } public class CustomSecurityTokenManager : ClientCredentialsSecurityTokenManager { public CustomSecurityTokenManager(CustomCredentials cred) : base(cred) { } public override System.IdentityModel.Selectors.SecurityTokenSerializer CreateSecurityTokenSerializer(System.IdentityModel.Selectors.SecurityTokenVersion version) { return new CustomTokenSerializer(System.ServiceModel.Security.SecurityVersion.WSSecurity11); } } public class CustomTokenSerializer : WSSecurityTokenSerializer { public CustomTokenSerializer(SecurityVersion sv) : base(sv) { } protected override void WriteTokenCore(System.Xml.XmlWriter writer, System.IdentityModel.Tokens.SecurityToken token) { UserNameSecurityToken userToken = token as UserNameSecurityToken; string tokennamespace = "o"; DateTime created = DateTime.Now; string createdStr = created.ToString("yyyy-MM-ddThh:mm:ss.fffZ"); // unique Nonce value - encode with SHA-1 for 'randomness' // in theory the nonce could just be the GUID by itself string phrase = Guid.NewGuid().ToString(); var nonce = GetSHA1String(phrase); // in this case password is plain text // for digest mode password needs to be encoded as: // PasswordAsDigest = Base64(SHA-1(Nonce + Created + Password)) // and profile needs to change to //string password = GetSHA1String(nonce + createdStr + userToken.Password); string password = userToken.Password; writer.WriteRaw(string.Format( "<{0}:UsernameToken u:Id=\"" + token.Id + "\" xmlns:u=\"http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-utility-1.0.xsd\">" + "<{0}:Username>" + userToken.UserName + "</{0}:Username>" + "<{0}:Password Type=\"http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-username-token-profile-1.0#PasswordText\">" + password + "</{0}:Password>" + "<{0}:Nonce EncodingType=\"http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-soap-message-security-1.0#Base64Binary\">" + nonce + "</{0}:Nonce>" + "<u:Created>" + createdStr + "</u:Created></{0}:UsernameToken>", tokennamespace)); } protected string GetSHA1String(string phrase) { SHA1CryptoServiceProvider sha1Hasher = new SHA1CryptoServiceProvider(); byte[] hashedDataBytes = sha1Hasher.ComputeHash(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(phrase)); return Convert.ToBase64String(hashedDataBytes); } } Realistically only the CustomTokenSerializer has any significant code in. The code there deals with actually serializing the custom credentials using low level XML semantics by writing output into an XML writer. I can't take credit for this code - most of the code comes from the MSDN forum post mentioned earlier - I made a few adjustments to simplify the nonce generation and also added some notes to allow for PasswordDigest generation. Per spec the nonce is nothing more than a unique value that's supposed to be 'random'. I'm thinking that this value can be any string that's unique and a GUID on its own probably would have sufficed. Comments on other posts that GUIDs can be potentially guessed are highly exaggerated to say the least IMHO. To satisfy even that aspect though I added the SHA1 encryption and binary decoding to give a more random value that would be impossible to 'guess'. The original example from the forum post used another level of encoding and decoding to string in between - but that really didn't accomplish anything but extra overhead. The header output generated from this looks like this:<s:Header> <o:Security s:mustUnderstand="1" xmlns:o="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-secext-1.0.xsd"> <o:UsernameToken u:Id="uuid-f43d8b0d-0ebb-482e-998d-f544401a3c91-1" xmlns:u="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-utility-1.0.xsd"> <o:Username>TheUsername</o:Username> <o:Password Type="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-username-token-profile-1.0#PasswordText">ThePassword</o:Password> <o:Nonce EncodingType="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-soap-message-security-1.0#Base64Binary" >PjVE24TC6HtdAnsf3U9c5WMsECY=</o:Nonce> <u:Created>2012-11-23T07:10:04.670Z</u:Created> </o:UsernameToken> </o:Security> </s:Header> which is exactly as it should be. Password Digest? In my case the password is passed in plain text over an SSL connection, so there's no digest required so I was done with the code above. Since I don't have a service handy that requires a password digest,  I had no way of testing the code for the digest implementation, but here is how this is likely to work. If you need to pass a digest encoded password things are a little bit trickier. The password type namespace needs to change to: http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-username-token-profile-1.0#Digest and then the password value needs to be encoded. The format for password digest encoding is this: Base64(SHA-1(Nonce + Created + Password)) and it can be handled in the code above with this code (that's commented in the snippet above): string password = GetSHA1String(nonce + createdStr + userToken.Password); The entire WriteTokenCore method for digest code looks like this:protected override void WriteTokenCore(System.Xml.XmlWriter writer, System.IdentityModel.Tokens.SecurityToken token) { UserNameSecurityToken userToken = token as UserNameSecurityToken; string tokennamespace = "o"; DateTime created = DateTime.Now; string createdStr = created.ToString("yyyy-MM-ddThh:mm:ss.fffZ"); // unique Nonce value - encode with SHA-1 for 'randomness' // in theory the nonce could just be the GUID by itself string phrase = Guid.NewGuid().ToString(); var nonce = GetSHA1String(phrase); string password = GetSHA1String(nonce + createdStr + userToken.Password); writer.WriteRaw(string.Format( "<{0}:UsernameToken u:Id=\"" + token.Id + "\" xmlns:u=\"http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-utility-1.0.xsd\">" + "<{0}:Username>" + userToken.UserName + "</{0}:Username>" + "<{0}:Password Type=\"http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-username-token-profile-1.0#Digest\">" + password + "</{0}:Password>" + "<{0}:Nonce EncodingType=\"http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-soap-message-security-1.0#Base64Binary\">" + nonce + "</{0}:Nonce>" + "<u:Created>" + createdStr + "</u:Created></{0}:UsernameToken>", tokennamespace)); } I had no service to connect to to try out Digest auth - if you end up needing it and get it to work please drop a comment… How to use the custom Credentials The easiest way to use the custom credentials is to create the client in code. Here's a factory method I use to create an instance of my service client:  public static RealTimeOnlineClient CreateRealTimeOnlineProxy(string url, string username, string password) { if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(url)) url = "https://notrealurl.com:443/cows/services/RealTimeOnline"; CustomBinding binding = new CustomBinding(); var security = TransportSecurityBindingElement.CreateUserNameOverTransportBindingElement(); security.IncludeTimestamp = false; security.DefaultAlgorithmSuite = SecurityAlgorithmSuite.Basic256; security.MessageSecurityVersion = MessageSecurityVersion.WSSecurity10WSTrustFebruary2005WSSecureConversationFebruary2005WSSecurityPolicy11BasicSecurityProfile10; var encoding = new TextMessageEncodingBindingElement(); encoding.MessageVersion = MessageVersion.Soap11; var transport = new HttpsTransportBindingElement(); transport.MaxReceivedMessageSize = 20000000; // 20 megs binding.Elements.Add(security); binding.Elements.Add(encoding); binding.Elements.Add(transport); RealTimeOnlineClient client = new RealTimeOnlineClient(binding, new EndpointAddress(url)); // to use full client credential with Nonce uncomment this code: // it looks like this might not be required - the service seems to work without it client.ChannelFactory.Endpoint.Behaviors.Remove<System.ServiceModel.Description.ClientCredentials>(); client.ChannelFactory.Endpoint.Behaviors.Add(new CustomCredentials()); client.ClientCredentials.UserName.UserName = username; client.ClientCredentials.UserName.Password = password; return client; } This returns a service client that's ready to call other service methods. The key item in this code is the ChannelFactory endpoint behavior modification that that first removes the original ClientCredentials and then adds the new one. The ClientCredentials property on the client is read only and this is the way it has to be added.   Summary It's a bummer that WCF doesn't suport WSE Security authentication with nonce values out of the box. From reading the comments in posts/articles while I was trying to find a solution, I found that this feature was omitted by design as this protocol is considered unsecure. While I agree that plain text passwords are rarely a good idea even if they go over secured SSL connection as WSE Security does, there are unfortunately quite a few services (mosly Java services I suspect) that use this protocol. I've run into this twice now and trying to find a solution online I can see that this is not an isolated problem - many others seem to have struggled with this. It seems there are about a dozen questions about this on StackOverflow all with varying incomplete answers. Hopefully this post provides a little more coherent content in one place. Again I marvel at WCF and its breadth of support for protocol features it has in a single tool. And even when it can't handle something there are ways to get it working via extensibility. But at the same time I marvel at how freaking difficult it is to arrive at these solutions. I mean there's no way I could have ever figured this out on my own. It takes somebody working on the WCF team or at least being very, very intricately involved in the innards of WCF to figure out the interconnection of the various objects to do this from scratch. Luckily this is an older problem that has been discussed extensively online and I was able to cobble together a solution from the online content. I'm glad it worked out that way, but it feels dirty and incomplete in that there's a whole learning path that was omitted to get here… Man am I glad I'm not dealing with SOAP services much anymore. REST service security - even when using some sort of federation is a piece of cake by comparison :-) I'm sure once standards bodies gets involved we'll be right back in security standard hell…© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in WCF  Web Services   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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  • West Wind WebSurge - an easy way to Load Test Web Applications

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

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  • Rendering ASP.NET Script References into the Html Header

    - by Rick Strahl
    One thing that I’ve come to appreciate in control development in ASP.NET that use JavaScript is the ability to have more control over script and script include placement than ASP.NET provides natively. Specifically in ASP.NET you can use either the ClientScriptManager or ScriptManager to embed scripts and script references into pages via code. This works reasonably well, but the script references that get generated are generated into the HTML body and there’s very little operational control for placement of scripts. If you have multiple controls or several of the same control that need to place the same scripts onto the page it’s not difficult to end up with scripts that render in the wrong order and stop working correctly. This is especially critical if you load script libraries with dependencies either via resources or even if you are rendering referenced to CDN resources. Natively ASP.NET provides a host of methods that help embedding scripts into the page via either Page.ClientScript or the ASP.NET ScriptManager control (both with slightly different syntax): RegisterClientScriptBlock Renders a script block at the top of the HTML body and should be used for embedding callable functions/classes. RegisterStartupScript Renders a script block just prior to the </form> tag and should be used to for embedding code that should execute when the page is first loaded. Not recommended – use jQuery.ready() or equivalent load time routines. RegisterClientScriptInclude Embeds a reference to a script from a url into the page. RegisterClientScriptResource Embeds a reference to a Script from a resource file generating a long resource file string All 4 of these methods render their <script> tags into the HTML body. The script blocks give you a little bit of control by having a ‘top’ and ‘bottom’ of the document location which gives you some flexibility over script placement and precedence. Script includes and resource url unfortunately do not even get that much control – references are simply rendered into the page in the order of declaration. The ASP.NET ScriptManager control facilitates this task a little bit with the abililty to specify scripts in code and the ability to programmatically check what scripts have already been registered, but it doesn’t provide any more control over the script rendering process itself. Further the ScriptManager is a bear to deal with generically because generic code has to always check and see if it is actually present. Some time ago I posted a ClientScriptProxy class that helps with managing the latter process of sending script references either to ClientScript or ScriptManager if it’s available. Since I last posted about this there have been a number of improvements in this API, one of which is the ability to control placement of scripts and script includes in the page which I think is rather important and a missing feature in the ASP.NET native functionality. Handling ScriptRenderModes One of the big enhancements that I’ve come to rely on is the ability of the various script rendering functions described above to support rendering in multiple locations: /// <summary> /// Determines how scripts are included into the page /// </summary> public enum ScriptRenderModes { /// <summary> /// Inherits the setting from the control or from the ClientScript.DefaultScriptRenderMode /// </summary> Inherit, /// Renders the script include at the location of the control /// </summary> Inline, /// <summary> /// Renders the script include into the bottom of the header of the page /// </summary> Header, /// <summary> /// Renders the script include into the top of the header of the page /// </summary> HeaderTop, /// <summary> /// Uses ClientScript or ScriptManager to embed the script include to /// provide standard ASP.NET style rendering in the HTML body. /// </summary> Script, /// <summary> /// Renders script at the bottom of the page before the last Page.Controls /// literal control. Note this may result in unexpected behavior /// if /body and /html are not the last thing in the markup page. /// </summary> BottomOfPage } This enum is then applied to the various Register functions to allow more control over where scripts actually show up. Why is this useful? For me I often render scripts out of control resources and these scripts often include things like a JavaScript Library (jquery) and a few plug-ins. The order in which these can be loaded is critical so that jQuery.js always loads before any plug-in for example. Typically I end up with a general script layout like this: Core Libraries- HeaderTop Plug-ins: Header ScriptBlocks: Header or Script depending on other dependencies There’s also an option to render scripts and CSS at the very bottom of the page before the last Page control on the page which can be useful for speeding up page load when lots of scripts are loaded. The API syntax of the ClientScriptProxy methods is closely compatible with ScriptManager’s using static methods and control references to gain access to the page and embedding scripts. For example, to render some script into the current page in the header: // Create script block in header ClientScriptProxy.Current.RegisterClientScriptBlock(this, typeof(ControlResources), "hello_function", "function helloWorld() { alert('hello'); }", true, ScriptRenderModes.Header); // Same again - shouldn't be rendered because it's the same id ClientScriptProxy.Current.RegisterClientScriptBlock(this, typeof(ControlResources), "hello_function", "function helloWorld() { alert('hello'); }", true, ScriptRenderModes.Header); // Create a second script block in header ClientScriptProxy.Current.RegisterClientScriptBlock(this, typeof(ControlResources), "hello_function2", "function helloWorld2() { alert('hello2'); }", true, ScriptRenderModes.Header); // This just calls ClientScript and renders into bottom of document ClientScriptProxy.Current.RegisterStartupScript(this,typeof(ControlResources), "call_hello", "helloWorld();helloWorld2();", true); which generates: <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" > <head><title> </title> <script type="text/javascript"> function helloWorld() { alert('hello'); } </script> <script type="text/javascript"> function helloWorld2() { alert('hello2'); } </script> </head> <body> … <script type="text/javascript"> //<![CDATA[ helloWorld();helloWorld2();//]]> </script> </form> </body> </html> Note that the scripts are generated into the header rather than the body except for the last script block which is the call to RegisterStartupScript. In general I wouldn’t recommend using RegisterStartupScript – ever. It’s a much better practice to use a script base load event to handle ‘startup’ code that should fire when the page first loads. So instead of the code above I’d actually recommend doing: ClientScriptProxy.Current.RegisterClientScriptBlock(this, typeof(ControlResources), "call_hello", "$().ready( function() { alert('hello2'); });", true, ScriptRenderModes.Header); assuming you’re using jQuery on the page. For script includes from a Url the following demonstrates how to embed scripts into the header. This example injects a jQuery and jQuery.UI script reference from the Google CDN then checks each with a script block to ensure that it has loaded and if not loads it from a server local location: // load jquery from CDN ClientScriptProxy.Current.RegisterClientScriptInclude(this, typeof(ControlResources), "http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.2/jquery.min.js", ScriptRenderModes.HeaderTop); // check if jquery loaded - if it didn't we're not online string scriptCheck = @"if (typeof jQuery != 'object') document.write(unescape(""%3Cscript src='{0}' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E""));"; string jQueryUrl = ClientScriptProxy.Current.GetWebResourceUrl(this, typeof(ControlResources), ControlResources.JQUERY_SCRIPT_RESOURCE); ClientScriptProxy.Current.RegisterClientScriptBlock(this, typeof(ControlResources), "jquery_register", string.Format(scriptCheck,jQueryUrl),true, ScriptRenderModes.HeaderTop); // Load jquery-ui from cdn ClientScriptProxy.Current.RegisterClientScriptInclude(this, typeof(ControlResources), "http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.7.2/jquery-ui.min.js", ScriptRenderModes.Header); // check if we need to load from local string jQueryUiUrl = ResolveUrl("~/scripts/jquery-ui-custom.min.js"); ClientScriptProxy.Current.RegisterClientScriptBlock(this, typeof(ControlResources), "jqueryui_register", string.Format(scriptCheck, jQueryUiUrl), true, ScriptRenderModes.Header); // Create script block in header ClientScriptProxy.Current.RegisterClientScriptBlock(this, typeof(ControlResources), "hello_function", "$().ready( function() { alert('hello'); });", true, ScriptRenderModes.Header); which in turn generates this HTML: <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" > <head> <script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.2/jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> if (typeof jQuery != 'object') document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='/WestWindWebToolkitWeb/WebResource.axd?d=DIykvYhJ_oXCr-TA_dr35i4AayJoV1mgnQAQGPaZsoPM2LCdvoD3cIsRRitHKlKJfV5K_jQvylK7tsqO3lQIFw2&t=633979863959332352' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E")); </script> <title> </title> <script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.7.2/jquery-ui.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> if (typeof jQuery != 'object') document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='/WestWindWebToolkitWeb/scripts/jquery-ui-custom.min.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E")); </script> <script type="text/javascript"> $().ready(function() { alert('hello'); }); </script> </head> <body> …</body> </html> As you can see there’s a bit more control in this process as you can inject both script includes and script blocks into the document at the top or bottom of the header, plus if necessary at the usual body locations. This is quite useful especially if you create custom server controls that interoperate with script and have certain dependencies. The above is a good example of a useful switchable routine where you can switch where scripts load from by default – the above pulls from Google CDN but a configuration switch may automatically switch to pull from the local development copies if your doing development for example. How does it work? As mentioned the ClientScriptProxy object mimicks many of the ScriptManager script related methods and so provides close API compatibility with it although it contains many additional overloads that enhance functionality. It does however work against ScriptManager if it’s available on the page, or Page.ClientScript if it’s not so it provides a single unified frontend to script access. There are however many overloads of the original SM methods like the above to provide additional functionality. The implementation of script header rendering is pretty straight forward – as long as a server header (ie. it has to have runat=”server” set) is available. Otherwise these routines fall back to using the default document level insertions of ScriptManager/ClientScript. Given that there is a server header it’s relatively easy to generate the script tags and code and append them to the header either at the top or bottom. I suspect Microsoft didn’t provide header rendering functionality precisely because a runat=”server” header is not required by ASP.NET so behavior would be slightly unpredictable. That’s not really a problem for a custom implementation however. Here’s the RegisterClientScriptBlock implementation that takes a ScriptRenderModes parameter to allow header rendering: /// <summary> /// Renders client script block with the option of rendering the script block in /// the Html header /// /// For this to work Header must be defined as runat="server" /// </summary> /// <param name="control">any control that instance typically page</param> /// <param name="type">Type that identifies this rendering</param> /// <param name="key">unique script block id</param> /// <param name="script">The script code to render</param> /// <param name="addScriptTags">Ignored for header rendering used for all other insertions</param> /// <param name="renderMode">Where the block is rendered</param> public void RegisterClientScriptBlock(Control control, Type type, string key, string script, bool addScriptTags, ScriptRenderModes renderMode) { if (renderMode == ScriptRenderModes.Inherit) renderMode = DefaultScriptRenderMode; if (control.Page.Header == null || renderMode != ScriptRenderModes.HeaderTop && renderMode != ScriptRenderModes.Header && renderMode != ScriptRenderModes.BottomOfPage) { RegisterClientScriptBlock(control, type, key, script, addScriptTags); return; } // No dupes - ref script include only once const string identifier = "scriptblock_"; if (HttpContext.Current.Items.Contains(identifier + key)) return; HttpContext.Current.Items.Add(identifier + key, string.Empty); StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder(); // Embed in header sb.AppendLine("\r\n<script type=\"text/javascript\">"); sb.AppendLine(script); sb.AppendLine("</script>"); int? index = HttpContext.Current.Items["__ScriptResourceIndex"] as int?; if (index == null) index = 0; if (renderMode == ScriptRenderModes.HeaderTop) { control.Page.Header.Controls.AddAt(index.Value, new LiteralControl(sb.ToString())); index++; } else if(renderMode == ScriptRenderModes.Header) control.Page.Header.Controls.Add(new LiteralControl(sb.ToString())); else if (renderMode == ScriptRenderModes.BottomOfPage) control.Page.Controls.AddAt(control.Page.Controls.Count-1,new LiteralControl(sb.ToString())); HttpContext.Current.Items["__ScriptResourceIndex"] = index; } Note that the routine has to keep track of items inserted by id so that if the same item is added again with the same key it won’t generate two script entries. Additionally the code has to keep track of how many insertions have been made at the top of the document so that entries are added in the proper order. The RegisterScriptInclude method is similar but there’s some additional logic in here to deal with script file references and ClientScriptProxy’s (optional) custom resource handler that provides script compression /// <summary> /// Registers a client script reference into the page with the option to specify /// the script location in the page /// </summary> /// <param name="control">Any control instance - typically page</param> /// <param name="type">Type that acts as qualifier (uniqueness)</param> /// <param name="url">the Url to the script resource</param> /// <param name="ScriptRenderModes">Determines where the script is rendered</param> public void RegisterClientScriptInclude(Control control, Type type, string url, ScriptRenderModes renderMode) { const string STR_ScriptResourceIndex = "__ScriptResourceIndex"; if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(url)) return; if (renderMode == ScriptRenderModes.Inherit) renderMode = DefaultScriptRenderMode; // Extract just the script filename string fileId = null; // Check resource IDs and try to match to mapped file resources // Used to allow scripts not to be loaded more than once whether // embedded manually (script tag) or via resources with ClientScriptProxy if (url.Contains(".axd?r=")) { string res = HttpUtility.UrlDecode( StringUtils.ExtractString(url, "?r=", "&", false, true) ); foreach (ScriptResourceAlias item in ScriptResourceAliases) { if (item.Resource == res) { fileId = item.Alias + ".js"; break; } } if (fileId == null) fileId = url.ToLower(); } else fileId = Path.GetFileName(url).ToLower(); // No dupes - ref script include only once const string identifier = "script_"; if (HttpContext.Current.Items.Contains( identifier + fileId ) ) return; HttpContext.Current.Items.Add(identifier + fileId, string.Empty); // just use script manager or ClientScriptManager if (control.Page.Header == null || renderMode == ScriptRenderModes.Script || renderMode == ScriptRenderModes.Inline) { RegisterClientScriptInclude(control, type,url, url); return; } // Retrieve script index in header int? index = HttpContext.Current.Items[STR_ScriptResourceIndex] as int?; if (index == null) index = 0; StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder(256); url = WebUtils.ResolveUrl(url); // Embed in header sb.AppendLine("\r\n<script src=\"" + url + "\" type=\"text/javascript\"></script>"); if (renderMode == ScriptRenderModes.HeaderTop) { control.Page.Header.Controls.AddAt(index.Value, new LiteralControl(sb.ToString())); index++; } else if (renderMode == ScriptRenderModes.Header) control.Page.Header.Controls.Add(new LiteralControl(sb.ToString())); else if (renderMode == ScriptRenderModes.BottomOfPage) control.Page.Controls.AddAt(control.Page.Controls.Count-1, new LiteralControl(sb.ToString())); HttpContext.Current.Items[STR_ScriptResourceIndex] = index; } There’s a little more code here that deals with cleaning up the passed in Url and also some custom handling of script resources that run through the ScriptCompressionModule – any script resources loaded in this fashion are automatically cached based on the resource id. Raw urls extract just the filename from the URL and cache based on that. All of this to avoid doubling up of scripts if called multiple times by multiple instances of the same control for example or several controls that all load the same resources/includes. Finally RegisterClientScriptResource utilizes the previous method to wrap the WebResourceUrl as well as some custom functionality for the resource compression module: /// <summary> /// Returns a WebResource or ScriptResource URL for script resources that are to be /// embedded as script includes. /// </summary> /// <param name="control">Any control</param> /// <param name="type">A type in assembly where resources are located</param> /// <param name="resourceName">Name of the resource to load</param> /// <param name="renderMode">Determines where in the document the link is rendered</param> public void RegisterClientScriptResource(Control control, Type type, string resourceName, ScriptRenderModes renderMode) { string resourceUrl = GetClientScriptResourceUrl(control, type, resourceName); RegisterClientScriptInclude(control, type, resourceUrl, renderMode); } /// <summary> /// Works like GetWebResourceUrl but can be used with javascript resources /// to allow using of resource compression (if the module is loaded). /// </summary> /// <param name="control"></param> /// <param name="type"></param> /// <param name="resourceName"></param> /// <returns></returns> public string GetClientScriptResourceUrl(Control control, Type type, string resourceName) { #if IncludeScriptCompressionModuleSupport // If wwScriptCompression Module through Web.config is loaded use it to compress // script resources by using wcSC.axd Url the module intercepts if (ScriptCompressionModule.ScriptCompressionModuleActive) { string url = "~/wwSC.axd?r=" + HttpUtility.UrlEncode(resourceName); if (type.Assembly != GetType().Assembly) url += "&t=" + HttpUtility.UrlEncode(type.FullName); return WebUtils.ResolveUrl(url); } #endif return control.Page.ClientScript.GetWebResourceUrl(type, resourceName); } This code merely retrieves the resource URL and then simply calls back to RegisterClientScriptInclude with the URL to be embedded which means there’s nothing specific to deal with other than the custom compression module logic which is nice and easy. What else is there in ClientScriptProxy? ClientscriptProxy also provides a few other useful services beyond what I’ve already covered here: Transparent ScriptManager and ClientScript calls ClientScriptProxy includes a host of routines that help figure out whether a script manager is available or not and all functions in this class call the appropriate object – ScriptManager or ClientScript – that is available in the current page to ensure that scripts get embedded into pages properly. This is especially useful for control development where controls have no control over the scripting environment in place on the page. RegisterCssLink and RegisterCssResource Much like the script embedding functions these two methods allow embedding of CSS links. CSS links are appended to the header or to a form declared with runat=”server”. LoadControlScript Is a high level resource loading routine that can be used to easily switch between different script linking modes. It supports loading from a WebResource, a url or not loading anything at all. This is very useful if you build controls that deal with specification of resource urls/ids in a standard way. Check out the full Code You can check out the full code to the ClientScriptProxyClass here: ClientScriptProxy.cs ClientScriptProxy Documentation (class reference) Note that the ClientScriptProxy has a few dependencies in the West Wind Web Toolkit of which it is part of. ControlResources holds a few standard constants and script resource links and the ScriptCompressionModule which is referenced in a few of the script inclusion methods. There’s also another useful ScriptContainer companion control  to the ClientScriptProxy that allows scripts to be placed onto the page’s markup including the ability to specify the script location and script minification options. You can find all the dependencies in the West Wind Web Toolkit repository: West Wind Web Toolkit Repository West Wind Web Toolkit Home Page© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in ASP.NET  JavaScript  

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