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  • SQL SERVER – Solution – User Not Able to See Any User Created Object in Tables – Security and Permissions Issue

    - by pinaldave
    There is an old quote “A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words”. I believe this quote immensely. Quite often I get phone calls that something is not working if I can help. My reaction is in most of the cases, I need to know more, send me exact error or a screenshot. Until and unless I see the error or reproduce the scenario myself I prefer not to comment. Yesterday I got a similar phone call from an old friend, where he was not sure what is going on. Here is what he said. “When I try to connect to SQL Server, it lets me connect just fine as well let me open and explore the database. I noticed that I do not see any user created instances but when my colleague attempts to connect to the server, he is able to explore the database as well see all the user created tables and other objects. Can you help me fix it? “ My immediate reaction was he was facing security and permission issue. However, to make the same recommendation I suggested that he send me a screenshot of his own SSMS and his friend’s SSMS. After carefully looking at both the screenshots, I was very confident about the issue and we were able to resolve the issue. Let us reproduce the same scenario and many there is some learning for us. Issue: User not able to see user created objects First let us see the image of my friend’s SSMS screen. (Recreated on my machine) Now let us see my friend’s colleague SSMS screen. (Recreated on my machine) You can see that my friend could not see the user tables but his colleague was able to do the same for sure. Now I believed it was a permissions issue. Further to this I asked him to send me another image where I can see the various permissions of the user in the database. My friends screen My friends colleagues screen This indeed proved that my friend did not have access to the AdventureWorks database and because of the same he was not able to access the database. He did have public access which means he will have similar rights as guest access. However, their SQL Server had followed my earlier advise on having limited access for guest access, which means he was not able to see any user created objects. My next question was to validate what kind of access my friend’s colleague had. He replied that the colleague is the admin of the server. I suggested that if my friend was suppose to have admin access to the database, he should request of having admin access to his colleague. My friend promptly asked for the same to his colleague and on following screen he added him as an admin. You can do the same using following T-SQL script as well. USE [AdventureWorks2012] GO ALTER ROLE [db_owner] ADD MEMBER [testguest] GO Once my friend was admin he was able to access all the user objects just like he was expecting. Please note, this complete exercise was done on a development server. One should not play around with security on live or production server. Security is such an issue, which should be left with only senior administrator of the server. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Security, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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  • How does interpolation actually work to smooth out an object's movement?

    - by user22241
    I've asked a few similar questions over the past 8 months or so with no real joy, so I am going make the question more general. I have an Android game which is OpenGL ES 2.0. within it I have the following Game Loop: My loop works on a fixed time step principle (dt = 1 / ticksPerSecond) loops=0; while(System.currentTimeMillis() > nextGameTick && loops < maxFrameskip){ updateLogic(dt); nextGameTick+=skipTicks; timeCorrection += (1000d/ticksPerSecond) % 1; nextGameTick+=timeCorrection; timeCorrection %=1; loops++; } render(); My intergration works like this: sprite.posX+=sprite.xVel*dt; sprite.posXDrawAt=sprite.posX*width; Now, everything works pretty much as I would like. I can specify that I would like an object to move across a certain distance (screen width say) in 2.5 seconds and it will do just that. Also because of the frame skipping that I allow in my game loop, I can do this on pretty much any device and it will always take 2.5 seconds. Problem However, the problem is that when a render frame skips, the graphic stutter. It's extremely annoying. If I remove the ability to skip frames, then everything is smooth as you like, but will run at different speeds on different devices. So it's not an option. I'm still not sure why the frame skips, but I would like to point out that this is Nothing to do with poor performance, I've taken the code right back to 1 tiny sprite and no logic (apart from the logic required to move the sprite) and I still get skipped frames. And this is on a Google Nexus 10 tablet (and as mentioned above, I need frame skipping to keep the speed consistent across devices anyway). So, the only other option I have is to use interpolation (or extrapolation), I've read every article there is out there but none have really helped me to understand how it works and all of my attempted implementations have failed. Using one method I was able to get things moving smoothly but it was unworkable because it messed up my collision. I can foresee the same issue with any similar method because the interpolation is passed to (and acted upon within) the rendering method - at render time. So if Collision corrects position (character now standing right next to wall), then the renderer can alter it's position and draw it in the wall. So I'm really confused. People have said that you should never alter an object's position from within the rendering method, but all of the examples online show this. So I'm asking for a push in the right direction, please do not link to the popular game loop articles (deWitters, Fix your timestep, etc) as I've read these multiple times. I'm not asking anyone to write my code for me. Just explain please in simple terms how Interpolation actually works with some examples. I will then go and try to integrate any ideas into my code and will ask more specific questions if need-be further down the line. (I'm sure this is a problem many people struggle with).

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  • Programmatically disclosing a node in af:tree and af:treeTable

    - by Frank Nimphius
    A common developer requirement when working with af:tree or af:treeTable components is to programmatically disclose (expand) a specific node in the tree. If the node to disclose is not a top level node, like a location in a LocationsView -> DepartmentsView -> EmployeesView hierarchy, you need to also disclose the node's parent node hierarchy for application users to see the fully expanded tree node structure. Working on ADF Code Corner sample #101, I wrote the following code lines that show a generic option for disclosing a tree node starting from a handle to the node to disclose. The use case in ADF Coder Corner sample #101 is a drag and drop operation from a table component to a tree to relocate employees to a new department. The tree node that receives the drop is a department node contained in a location. In theory the location could be part of a country and so on to indicate the depth the tree may have. Based on this structure, the code below provides a generic solution to parse the current node parent nodes and its child nodes. The drop event provided a rowKey for the tree node that received the drop. Like in af:table, the tree row key is not of type oracle.jbo.domain.Key but an implementation of java.util.List that contains the row keys. The JUCtrlHierBinding class in the ADF Binding layer that represents the ADF tree binding at runtime provides a method named findNodeByKeyPath that allows you to get a handle to the JUCtrlHierNodeBinding instance that represents a tree node in the binding layer. CollectionModel model = (CollectionModel) your_af_tree_reference.getValue(); JUCtrlHierBinding treeBinding = (JUCtrlHierBinding ) model.getWrappedData(); JUCtrlHierNodeBinding treeDropNode = treeBinding.findNodeByKeyPath(dropRowKey); To disclose the tree node, you need to create a RowKeySet, which you do using the RowKeySetImpl class. Because the RowKeySet replaces any existing row key set in the tree, all other nodes are automatically closed. RowKeySetImpl rksImpl = new RowKeySetImpl(); //the first key to add is the node that received the drop //operation (departments).            rksImpl.add(dropRowKey);    Similar, from the tree binding, the root node can be obtained. The root node is the end of all parent node iteration and therefore important. JUCtrlHierNodeBinding rootNode = treeBinding.getRootNodeBinding(); The following code obtains a reference to the hierarchy of parent nodes until the root node is found. JUCtrlHierNodeBinding dropNodeParent = treeDropNode.getParent(); //walk up the tree to expand all parent nodes while(dropNodeParent != null && dropNodeParent != rootNode){    //add the node's keyPath (remember its a List) to the row key set    rksImpl.add(dropNodeParent.getKeyPath());      dropNodeParent = dropNodeParent.getParent(); } Next, you disclose the drop node immediate child nodes as otherwise all you see is the department node. Its not quite exactly "dinner for one", but the procedure is very similar to the one handling the parent node keys ArrayList<JUCtrlHierNodeBinding> childList = (ArrayList<JUCtrlHierNodeBinding>) treeDropNode.getChildren();                     for(JUCtrlHierNodeBinding nb : childList){   rksImpl.add(nb.getKeyPath()); } Next, the row key set is defined as the disclosed row keys on the tree so when you refresh (PPR) the tree, the new disclosed state shows tree.setDisclosedRowKeys(rksImpl); AdfFacesContext.getCurrentInstance().addPartialTarget(tree.getParent()); The refresh in my use case is on the tree parent component (a layout container), which usually shows the best effect for refreshing the tree component. 

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  • Clever memory usage through the years

    - by Ben Emmett
    A friend and I were recently talking about the really clever tricks people have used to get the most out of memory. I thought I’d share my favorites, and would love to hear yours too! Interleaving on drum memory Back in the ye olde days before I’d been born (we’re talking the 50s / 60s here), working memory commonly took the form of rotating magnetic drums. These would spin at a constant speed, and a fixed head would read from memory when the correct part of the drum passed it by, a bit like a primitive platter disk. Because each revolution took a few milliseconds, programmers took to manually arranging information non-sequentially on the drum, timing when an instruction or memory address would need to be accessed, then spacing information accordingly around the edge of the drum, thus reducing the access delay. Similar techniques were still used on hard disks and floppy disks into the 90s, but have become irrelevant with modern disk technologies. The Hashlife algorithm Conway’s Game of Life has attracted numerous implementations over the years, but Bill Gosper’s Hashlife algorithm is particularly impressive. Taking advantage of the repetitive nature of many cellular automata, it uses a quadtree structure to store the hashes of pieces of the overall grid. Over time there are fewer and fewer new structures which need to be evaluated, so it starts to run faster with larger grids, drastically outperforming other algorithms both in terms of speed and the size of grid which can be simulated. The actual amount of memory used is huge, but it’s used in a clever way, so makes the list . Elite’s procedural generation Ok, so this isn’t exactly a memory optimization – more a storage optimization – but it gets an honorable mention anyway. When writing Elite, David Braben and Ian Bell wanted to build a rich world which gamers could explore, but their 22K memory was something of a limitation (for comparison that’s about the size of my avatar picture at the top of this page). They procedurally generated all the characteristics of the 2048 planets in their virtual universe, including the names, which were stitched together using a lookup table of parts of names. In fact the original plans were for 2^52 planets, but it was decided that that was probably too many. Oh, and they did that all in assembly language. Other games of the time used similar techniques too – The Sentinel’s landscape generation algorithm being another example. Modern Garbage Collectors Garbage collection in managed languages like Java and .NET ensures that most of the time, developers stop needing to care about how they use and clean up memory as the garbage collector handles it automatically. Achieving this without killing performance is a near-miraculous feet of software engineering. Much like when learning chemistry, you find that every time you think you understand how the garbage collector works, it turns out to be a mere simplification; that there are yet more complexities and heuristics to help it run efficiently. Of course introducing memory problems is still possible (and there are tools like our memory profiler to help if that happens to you) but they’re much, much rarer. A cautionary note In the examples above, there were good and well understood reasons for the optimizations, but cunningly optimized code has usually had to trade away readability and maintainability to achieve its gains. Trying to optimize memory usage without being pretty confident that there’s actually a problem is doing it wrong. So what have I missed? Tell me about the ingenious (or stupid) tricks you’ve seen people use. Ben

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  • SQL SERVER – Finding Different ColumnName From Almost Identitical Tables

    - by pinaldave
    I have mentioned earlier on this blog that I love social media – Facebook and Twitter. I receive so many interesting questions that sometimes I wonder how come I never faced them in my real life scenario. Well, let us see one of the similar situation. Here is one of the questions which I received on my social media handle. “Pinal, I have a large database. I did not develop this database but I have inherited this database. In our database we have many tables but all the tables are in pairs. We have one archive table and one current table. Now here is interesting situation. For a while due to some reason our organization has stopped paying attention to archive data. We did not archive anything for a while. If this was not enough we  even changed the schema of current table but did not change the corresponding archive table. This is now becoming a huge huge problem. We know for sure that in current table we have added few column but we do not know which ones. Is there any way we can figure out what are the new column added in the current table and does not exist in the archive tables? We cannot use any third party tool. Would you please guide us?” Well here is the interesting example of how we can use sys.column catalogue views and get the details of the newly added column. I have previously written about EXCEPT over here which is very similar to MINUS of Oracle. In following example we are going to create two tables. One of the tables has extra column. In our resultset we will get the name of the extra column as we are comparing the catalogue view of the column name. USE AdventureWorks2012 GO CREATE TABLE ArchiveTable (ID INT, Col1 VARCHAR(10), Col2 VARCHAR(100), Col3 VARCHAR(100)); CREATE TABLE CurrentTable (ID INT, Col1 VARCHAR(10), Col2 VARCHAR(100), Col3 VARCHAR(100), ExtraCol INT); GO -- Columns in ArchiveTable but not in CurrentTable SELECT name ColumnName FROM sys.columns WHERE OBJECT_NAME(OBJECT_ID) = 'ArchiveTable' EXCEPT SELECT name ColumnName FROM sys.columns WHERE OBJECT_NAME(OBJECT_ID) = 'CurrentTable' GO -- Columns in CurrentTable but not in ArchiveTable SELECT name ColumnName FROM sys.columns WHERE OBJECT_NAME(OBJECT_ID) = 'CurrentTable' EXCEPT SELECT name ColumnName FROM sys.columns WHERE OBJECT_NAME(OBJECT_ID) = 'ArchiveTable' GO DROP TABLE ArchiveTable; DROP TABLE CurrentTable; GO The above query will return us following result. I hope this solves the problems. It is not the most elegant solution ever possible but it works. Here is the puzzle back to you – what native T-SQL solution would you have provided in this situation? Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL System Table, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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  • Elo system behaves oddly in program I've created

    - by adc
    Alright, so I'm looking to build a small program (C# and XAML) that, essentially, does this: Generate array of players. Each player has a current rating and a true rating. I set current rating to 1200 as a starting point right now; I've also tried setting it to true rating and the average of the two. True rating is what their skill level actually is. Their true rating is calculated based on percentages from the current League of Legends rating system; generating an array of 970 thousand generates results very similar to the data from here: (removed due to URL limit - but trust me, the results are very similar). This array is of length specified by the user. If need be, sort the array from smallest to largest. Play X number of games, again specified by the user. This is done by taking the array of players (which is sorted by Current Rating after being created) and running through it in groups of 10. The first five are on team one, the second five are on team two. It then takes the True Rating of these players and calculates an expected chance to win using the Elo system. It generates a random double and compares it to the expected chance to win; if the number is lower, team one wins - otherwise team two wins. I then update the rating of the players via, again, the Elo system - giving the winning team a score of 1 and the losing team a score of 0. I use a K value of 36 (but have tried 12, 24, and even higher ones) and an F value of 400. After going through the entire loop of players (which I have conveniently forced to be a multiple of ten), it sorts the array - again via current rating. This, if my understanding of the Elo system is correct, runs properly. However, it doesn't seem to work. I have a running test telling me how many players of the full array are within 100 current rating of their true rating. I would expect some portion of the population to be outside this range (as probability is not always going to go in their favor), but a full 40-45% of the population is outside of this range. I also have it outputting the maximum difference between true and current rating - and I have never seen this drop below 500! It hovers between 550-600, occasionally going over or under. I'm at a loss as to what to change - I've fiddled with the K and F values, where I start all the players, etc. but nothing changes the fact that eventually a good 40% of the population is outside the range. And it isn't that I have it playing too few games - it's now run through over 60 thousand games and the problem never disappears or really fluctuates. The full C# code, including everything except the XAML file and the Player class (pastebin is being very slow and I can only post two links, so I can't link to the XAML file): http://pastebin.com/rFcZRL84 The Player class: http://pastebin.com/4cJTdTRu I guess my question is did I do anything wrong? Is there a problem with the way I implemented the system, or is it just that Riot uses a significantly modified Elo system? I don't think it's the latter, as that still wouldn't explain the massive true and current rating differences to me, however.

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  • Part 6: Extensions vs. Modifications

    - by volker.eckardt(at)oracle.com
    Customizations = Extensions + Modifications In the EBS terminology, a customization can be an extension or a modification. Extension means that you mainly create your own code from scratch. You may utilize existing views, packages and java classes, but your code is unique. Modifications are quite different, because here you take existing code and change or enhance certain areas to achieve a slightly different behavior. Important is that it doesn't matter if you place your code at the same or at another place – it is a modification. It is also not relevant if you leave the original code enabled or not! Why? Here is the answer: In case the original code piece you have taken as your base will get patched, you need to copy the source again and apply all your changes once more. If you don't do that, you may get different results or write different data compared to the standard – this causes a high risk! Here are some guidelines how to reduce the risk: Invest a bit longer when searching for objects to select data from. Rather choose a view than a table. In case Oracle development changes the underlying tables, the view will be more stable and is therefore a better choice. Choose rather public APIs over internal APIs. Same background as before: although internal structure might change, the public API is more stable. Use personalization and substitution rather than modification. Spend more time to check if the requirement can be covered with such techniques. Build a project code library, avoid that colleagues creating similar functionality multiple times. Otherwise you have to review lots of similar code to determine the need for correction. Use the technique of “flagged files”. Flagged files is a way to mark a standard deployment file. If you run the patch analyse (within Application Manager), the analyse result will list flagged standard files in case they will be patched. If you maintain a cross reference to your own CEMLIs, you can easily determine which CEMLIs have to be reviewed. Implement a code review process. This can be done by utilizing team internal or external persons. If you implement such a team internal process, your team members will come up with suggestions how to improve the code quality by themselves. Review heavy customizations regularly, to identify options to reduce complexity; let's say perform this every 6th month. You may not spend days for such a review, but a high level cross check if the customization can be reduced is suggested. De-install customizations which are no more required. Define a process for this. Add a section into the technical documentation how to uninstall and what are possible implications. Maintain a cross reference between CEMLIs and between CEMLIs, EBS modules and business processes. Keep this list up to date! Share this list! By following these guidelines, you are able to improve product stability. Although we might not be able to avoid modifications completely, we can give a much better advise to developers and to our test team. Summary: Extensions and Modifications have to be handled differently during their lifecycle. Modifications implicate a much higher risk and should therefore be reviewed more frequently. Good cross references allow you to give clear advise for the testing activities.

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  • Why does my Messaging Menu code not work when split into functions?

    - by fluteflute
    Below are two python programs. They're exactly the same, except for one is split into two functions. However only the one that's split into two functions doesn't work - the second function doesn't work. Why would this be? Note the code is taken from this useful blog post. Without functions (works): import gtk def show_window_function(x, y): print x print y # get the indicate module, which does all the work import indicate # Create a server item mm = indicate.indicate_server_ref_default() # If someone clicks your server item in the MM, fire the server-display signal mm.connect("server-display", show_window_function) # Set the type of messages that your item uses. It's not at all clear which types # you're allowed to use, here. mm.set_type("message.im") # You must specify a .desktop file: this is where the MM gets the name of your # app from. mm.set_desktop_file("/usr/share/applications/nautilus.desktop") # Show the item in the MM. mm.show() # Create a source item mm_source = indicate.Indicator() # Again, it's not clear which subtypes you are allowed to use here. mm_source.set_property("subtype", "im") # "Sender" is the text that appears in the source item in the MM mm_source.set_property("sender", "Unread") # If someone clicks this source item in the MM, fire the user-display signal mm_source.connect("user-display", show_window_function) # Light up the messaging menu so that people know something has changed mm_source.set_property("draw-attention", "true") # Set the count of messages in this source. mm_source.set_property("count", "15") # If you prefer, you can set the time of the last message from this source, # rather than the count. (You can't set both.) This means that instead of a # message count, the MM will show "2m" or similar for the time since this # message arrived. # mm_source.set_property_time("time", time.time()) mm_source.show() gtk.mainloop() With functions (second function is executed but doesn't actually work): import gtk def show_window_function(x, y): print x print y # get the indicate module, which does all the work import indicate def function1(): # Create a server item mm = indicate.indicate_server_ref_default() # If someone clicks your server item in the MM, fire the server-display signal mm.connect("server-display", show_window_function) # Set the type of messages that your item uses. It's not at all clear which types # you're allowed to use, here. mm.set_type("message.im") # You must specify a .desktop file: this is where the MM gets the name of your # app from. mm.set_desktop_file("/usr/share/applications/nautilus.desktop") # Show the item in the MM. mm.show() def function2(): # Create a source item mm_source = indicate.Indicator() # Again, it's not clear which subtypes you are allowed to use here. mm_source.set_property("subtype", "im") # "Sender" is the text that appears in the source item in the MM mm_source.set_property("sender", "Unread") # If someone clicks this source item in the MM, fire the user-display signal mm_source.connect("user-display", show_window_function) # Light up the messaging menu so that people know something has changed mm_source.set_property("draw-attention", "true") # Set the count of messages in this source. mm_source.set_property("count", "15") # If you prefer, you can set the time of the last message from this source, # rather than the count. (You can't set both.) This means that instead of a # message count, the MM will show "2m" or similar for the time since this # message arrived. # mm_source.set_property_time("time", time.time()) mm_source.show() function1() function2() gtk.mainloop()

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  • Grub Rescue Unknown Filesystem Error. Grub Corrupted or Filesystem?

    - by nightcrawler
    Now it has happened twice & have been pulling my hairs now... I have installed xubuntu on my external hardisk & have been using it for about 3 months. It has three partitions, one of 500 mb mounted at /boot, 2nd one of 48gb mounted at / & the rest (out of 160gb) is ntfs partition....used as normal external storage. The last storage supposedly acts as a buffer b/w Linux distributions & Win platform, buffer in the sense that it provides a universal channel for data transfers. I have constantly used this external hardisk for data transfers b/w win7 laptop & xubuntu (on this external hd) without any hassle. However, on of my desktops where I have ubuntu I (for the first time) attached this external drive which let me do data transfers where all three partitions properly mounted....but then nasty thing occurred the same that occurred before. I (as usual) tried booting via this external hd (one having xubuntu, one having being formerly used under Ubuntu) I got error Now I am totally devastated because similar thing happened ~6months before when I had fedora 17 in my external hd (instead of xubuntu) & after it was used under ubuntu the same happened...i didn't reported it because I already had planned towards debian instead of rpm! The mystery is that as long as I don't attach this external hd under ubuntu the data never** corrupts whereas under win xp/7 I can use it as a normal usb storage of coarse linux partitions aren’t available under win platforms... **From corrupts I mean hd fails to boot with the error mentioned however cant say whether data within remains untouched? It seems that my grub & or MBR is corrupted. Please sir guide me to solve this issue also why I cant attach & use linux external hds under linux platform Disk /dev/sdc: 160.0 GB, 160041884672 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders, total 312581806 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x0004e7d0 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdc1 * 2048 976895 487424 83 Linux /dev/sdc2 978942 96874495 47947777 5 Extended /dev/sdc3 96874496 312575999 107850752 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT /dev/sdc5 978944 94726143 46873600 83 Linux /dev/sdc6 94728192 96874495 1073152 82 Linux swap / Solaris I can recall for sure that have seen a thread here when a similar problem occurred & in response someone gave solution of how to mount (now invisible) partitions & recover important data in them. I have misplaced that URL so if any can guide me thither because my important documents resides in / partition What I already have done: Without success I have tried this & related solutions What I plan to do: I believe that filesystem has corrupted & would you recommend solution like this provided I cant recall whether my /boot (500mb) partition was ext4 or ext2 though I am sure that my / (48gb) partition was ext4 UPDATE 1 Attached my external hd under Ubuntu ran followinf command as root grub-install /dev/sdc where /dev/sdc was my external hd containing corrupted xubuntu....it reported all done! I re-ran fdisk -l but to my disappointment it reported Disk /dev/sdc: 160.0 GB, 160041884672 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders, total 312581806 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x1b6b9167 Disk /dev/sdc doesn't contain a valid partition table ...& now I can't even access its ntfs partition (former /dev/sdc3) please help? UPDATE 2 TestDisk (by cgsecurity) failed at founding any partition table :( TestDisk 6.13, Data Recovery Utility, November 2011 Christophe GRENIER <[email protected]> http://www.cgsecurity.org Disk /dev/sdc - 160 GB / 149 GiB - CHS 19457 255 63 Partition Start End Size in sectors

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  • The battle between Java vs. C#

    The battle between Java vs. C# has been a big debate amongst the development community over the last few years. Both languages have specific pros and cons based on the needs of a particular project. In general both languages utilize a similar coding syntax that is based on C++, and offer developers similar functionality. This being said, the communities supporting each of these languages are very different. The divide amongst the communities is much like the political divide in America, where the Java community would represent the Democrats and the .Net community would represent the Republicans. The Democratic Party is a proponent of the working class and the general population. Currently, Java is deeply entrenched in the open source community that is distributed freely to anyone who has an interest in using it. Open source communities rely on developers to keep it alive by constantly contributing code to make applications better; essentially they develop code by the community. This is in stark contrast to the C# community that is typically a pay to play community meaning that you must pay for code that you want to use because it is developed as products to be marketed and sold for a profit. This ties back into my reference to the Republicans because they typically represent the needs of business and personal responsibility. This is emphasized by the belief that code is a commodity and that it can be sold for a profit which is in direct conflict to the laissez-faire beliefs of the open source community. Beyond the general differences between Java and C#, they also target two different environments. Java is developed to be environment independent and only requires that users have a Java virtual machine running in order for the java code to execute. C# on the other hand typically targets any system running a windows operating system and has the appropriate version of the .Net Framework installed. However, recently there has been push by a segment of the Open source community based around the Mono project that lets C# code run on other non-windows operating systems. In addition, another feature of C# is that it compiles into an intermediate language, and this is what is executed when the program runs. Because C# is reduced down to an intermediate language called Common Language Runtime (CLR) it can be combined with other languages that are also compiled in to the CLR like Visual Basic (VB) .Net, and F#. The allowance and interaction between multiple languages in the .Net Framework enables projects to utilize existing code bases regardless of the actual syntax because they can be compiled in to CLR and executed as one codebase. As a software engineer I personally feel that it is really important to learn as many languages as you can or at least be open to learn as many languages as you can because no one language will work in every situation.  In some cases Java may be a better choice for a project and others may be C#. It really depends on the requirements of a project and the time constraints. In addition, I feel that is really important to concentrate on understanding the logic of programming and be able to translate business requirements into technical requirements. If you can understand both programming logic and business requirements then deciding which language to use is just basically choosing what syntax to write for a given business problem or need. In regards to code refactoring and dynamic languages it really does not matter. Eventually all projects will be refactored or decommissioned to allow for progress. This is the way of life in the software development industry. The language of a project should not be chosen based on the fact that a project will eventually be refactored because they all will get refactored.

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  • Design Pattern for building a Budget

    - by Scott
    So I've looked at the Builder Pattern, Abstract Interfaces, other design patterns, etc. - and I think I'm over thinking the simplicity behind what I'm trying to do, so I'm asking you guys for some help with either recommending a design pattern I should use, or an architecture style I'm not familiar with that fits my task. So I have one model that represents a Budget in my code. At a high level, it looks like this: public class Budget { public int Id { get; set; } public List<MonthlySummary> Months { get; set; } public float SavingsPriority { get; set; } public float DebtPriority { get; set; } public List<Savings> SavingsCollection { get; set; } public UserProjectionParameters UserProjectionParameters { get; set; } public List<Debt> DebtCollection { get; set; } public string Name { get; set; } public List<Expense> Expenses { get; set; } public List<Income> IncomeCollection { get; set; } public bool AutoSave { get; set; } public decimal AutoSaveAmount { get; set; } public FundType AutoSaveType { get; set; } public decimal TotalExcess { get; set; } public decimal AccountMinimum { get; set; } } To go into more detail about some of the properties here shouldn't be necessary, but if you have any questions about those I will fill more out for you guys. Now, I'm trying to create code that builds one of these things based on a set of BudgetBuildParameters that the user will create and supply. There are going to be multiple types of these parameters. For example, on the sites homepage, there will be an example section where you can quickly see what your numbers look like, so they would be a much simpler set of SampleBudgetBuildParameters then say after a user registers and wants to create a fully filled out Budget using much more information in the DebtBudgetBuildParameters. Now a lot of these builds are going to be using similar code for certain tasks, but might want to also check the status of a users DebtCollection when formulating a monthly spending report, where as a Budget that only focuses on savings might not want to. I'd like to reduce code duplication (obviously) as much as possible, but in my head, every way I can think to do this would require using a base BudgetBuilderFactory to return the correct builder to the caller, and then creating say a SimpleBudgetBuilder that inherits from a BudgetBuilder, and put all duplicate code in the BudgetBuilder, and let the SimpleBudgetBuilder handle it's own cases. Problem is, a lot of the unique cases are unique to 2/4 builders, so there will be duplicate code somewhere in there obviously if I did that. Can anyone think of a better way to either explain a solution to this that may or may not be similar to mine, or a completely different pattern or way of thinking here? I really appreciate it.

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  • Missing Fields and Default Values

    - by PointsToShare
    © 2011 By: Dov Trietsch. All rights reserved Dealing with Missing Fields and Default Values New fields and new default values are not propagated throughout the list. They only apply to new and updated items and not to items already entered. They are only prospective. We need to be able to deal with this issue. Here is a scenario. The user has an old list with old items and adds a new field. The field is not created for any of the old items. Trying to get its value raises an Argument Exception. Here is another: a default value is added to a field. All the old items, where the field was not assigned a value, do not get the new default value. The two can also happen in tandem – a new field is added with a default. The older items have neither. Even better, if the user changes the default value, the old items still carry the old defaults. Let’s go a bit further. You have already written code for the list, be it an event receiver, a feature receiver, a console app or a command extension, in which you span all the fields and run on selected items – some new (no problem) and some old (problems aplenty). Had you written defensive code, you would be able to handle the situation, including similar changes in the future. So, without further ado, here’s how. Instead of just getting the value of a field in an item – item[field].ToString() – use the function below. I use ItemValue(item, fieldname, “mud in your eye”) and if “mud in your eye” is what I get, I know that the item did not have the field.   /// <summary> /// Return the column value or a default value /// </summary> private static string ItemValue(SPItem item, string column, string defaultValue) {     try     {         return item[column].ToString();     }     catch (NullReferenceException ex)     {         return defaultValue;     }     catch (ArgumentException ex)     {         return defaultValue;     } } I also use a similar function to return the default and a funny default-default to ascertain that the default does not exist. Here it is:  /// <summary> /// return a fields default or the "default" default. /// </summary> public static string GetFieldDefault(SPField fld, string defValue) {     try     {         // -- Check if default exists.         return fld.DefaultValue.ToString();     }     catch (NullReferenceException ex)     {         return defValue;     }     catch (ArgumentException ex)     {         return defValue;     } } How is this defensive? You have trapped an expected error and dealt with it. Therefore the program did not stop cold in its track and the required code ran to its end. Now, take a further step - write to a log (See Logging – a log blog). Read your own log every now and then, and act accordingly. That’s all Folks!

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  • concurrency::extent<N> from amp.h

    - by Daniel Moth
    Overview We saw in a previous post how index<N> represents a point in N-dimensional space and in this post we'll see how to define the N-dimensional space itself. With C++ AMP, an N-dimensional space can be specified with the template class extent<N> where you define the size of each dimension. From a look and feel perspective, you'd expect the programmatic interface of a point type and size type to be similar (even though the concepts are different). Indeed, exactly like index<N>, extent<N> is essentially a coordinate vector of N integers ordered from most- to least- significant, BUT each integer represents the size for that dimension (and hence cannot be negative). So, if you read the description of index, you won't be surprised with the below description of extent<N> There is the rank field returning the value of N you passed as the template parameter. You can construct one extent from another (via the copy constructor or the assignment operator), you can construct it by passing an integer array, or via convenience constructor overloads for 1- 2- and 3- dimension extents. Note that the parameterless constructor creates an extent of the specified rank with all bounds initialized to 0. You can access the components of the extent through the subscript operator (passing it an integer). You can perform some arithmetic operations between extent objects through operator overloading, i.e. ==, !=, +=, -=, +, -. There are operator overloads so that you can perform operations between an extent and an integer: -- (pre- and post- decrement), ++ (pre- and post- increment), %=, *=, /=, +=, –= and, finally, there are additional overloads for plus and minus (+,-) between extent<N> and index<N> objects, returning a new extent object as the result. In addition to the usual suspects, extent offers a contains function that tests if an index is within the bounds of the extent (assuming an origin of zero). It also has a size function that returns the total linear size of this extent<N> in units of elements. Example code extent<2> e(3, 4); _ASSERT(e.rank == 2); _ASSERT(e.size() == 3 * 4); e += 3; e[1] += 6; e = e + index<2>(3,-4); _ASSERT(e == extent<2>(9, 9)); _ASSERT( e.contains(index<2>(8, 8))); _ASSERT(!e.contains(index<2>(8, 9))); grid<N> Our upcoming pre-release bits also have a similar type to extent, grid<N>. The way you create a grid is by passing it an extent, e.g. extent<3> e(4,2,6); grid<3> g(e); I am not going to dive deeper into grid, suffice for now to think of grid<N> simply as an alias for the extent<N> object, that you create when you encounter a function that expects a grid object instead of an extent object. Usage The extent class on its own simply defines the size of the N-dimensional space. We'll see in future posts that when you create containers (arrays) and wrappers (array_views) for your data, it is an extent<N> object that you'll need to use to create those (and use an index<N> object to index into them). We'll also see that it is a grid<N> object that you pass to the new parallel_for_each function that I'll cover in the next post. Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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  • My architecture has a problem with views that required information from different objects. How can I solve this?

    - by Oscar
    I am building an architecture like this: These are my SW layers ______________ | | | Views | |______________| ______________ | | |Business Logic| |______________| ______________ | | | Repository | |______________| My views are going to generate my HTML to be sent to the user Business logic is where all the business logics are Repository is a layer to access the DB My idea is that the repository uses entities (that are basically the representation of the tables, in order to perform DB queries. The layers communicate between themselves using Business Objects, that are objects that represent the real-world-object itself. They can contain business rules and methods. The views build/use DTOs, they are basically objects that have the information required to be shown on the screen. They expect also this kind of object on actions and, before calling the business logic, they create BO. First question: what is your overall feeling about this architecture? I've used similar architecture for some projects and I always got this problem: If my view has this list to show : Student1, age, course, Date Enrolled, Already paid? It has information from different BO. How do you think one should build the structure? These were the alternatives I could think of: The view layer could call the methods to get the student, then the course it studies, then the payment information. This would cause a lot of DB accesses and my view would have the knowledge about how to act to generate this information. This just seems wrong for me. I could have an "adapter object", that has the required information (a class that would have a properties Student, Course and Payment). But I would required one adapter object for each similar case, this may get very bad for big projects. I still don't like them. Would you have ideas? How would you change the architecture to avoid this kind of problems? @Rory: I read the CQRS and I don't think this suits my needs. As taken from a link references in your link Before describing the details of CQRS we need to understand the two main driving forces behind it: collaboration and staleness That means: many different actors using the same object (collaboration) and once data has been shown to a user, that same data may have been changed by another actor – it is stale (staleness). My problem is that I want to show to the user information from different BO, so I would need to receive them from the service layer. How can my service layer assemble and deliver this information? Edit to @AndrewM: Yes, you understood it correctly, the original idea was to have the view layer to build the BOs, but you have a very nice point about the creation of the BO inside the business layers. Assuming I follow your advice and move the creation logic inside the business layer, my business layer interface would contain the DTOs, for instance public void foo(MyDTO object) But as far as I understand, the DTO is tightly coupled to each view, so it would not be reusable by a second view. In order to use it, the second view would need to build a specific DTO from a specific view or I would have to duplicate the code in the business layer. Is this correct or am I missing something?

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  • Profiling Startup Of VS2012 &ndash; dotTrace Profiler

    - by Alois Kraus
    Jetbrains which is famous for the Resharper tool has also a profiler in its portfolio. I downloaded dotTrace 5.2 Professional (569€+VAT) to check how far I can profile the startup of VS2012. The most interesting startup option is “.NET Process”. With that you can profile the next started .NET process which is very useful if you want to profile an application which is not started by you.     I did select Tracing as and Wall time to get similar options across all profilers. For some reason the attach option did not work with .NET 4.5 on my home machine. But I am sure that it did work with .NET 4.0 some time ago. Since we are profiling devenv.exe we can also select “Standalone Application” and start it from the profiler. The startup time of VS does increase about a factor 3 but that is ok. You get mainly three windows to work with. The first one shows the threads where you can drill down thread wise where most time is spent. I The next window is the call tree which does merge all threads together in a similar view. The last and most useful view in my opinion is the Plain List window which is nearly the same as the Method Grid in Ants Profiler. But this time we do get when I enable the Show system functions checkbox not a 150 but 19407 methods to choose from! I really tried with Ants Profiler to find something about out how VS does work but look how much we were missing! When I double click on a method I do get in the lower pane the called methods and their respective timings. This is something really useful and I can nicely drill down to the most important stuff. The measured time seems to be Wall Clock time which is a good thing to see where my time is really spent. You can also use Sampling as profiling method but this does give you much less information. Except for getting a first idea where to look first this profiling mode is not very useful to understand how you system does interact.   The options have a good list of presets to hide by default many method and gray them out to concentrate on your code. It does not filter anything out if you enable Show system functions. By default methods from these assemblies are hidden or if the checkbox is checked grayed out. All in all JetBrains has made a nice profiler which does show great detail and it has nice drill down capabilities. The only thing is that I do not trust its measured timings. I did fall several times into the trap with this one to optimize at places which were already fast but the profiler did show high times in these methods. After measuring with Tracing I was certain that the measured times were greatly exaggerated. Especially when IO is involved it seems to have a hard time to subtract its own overhead. What I did miss most was the possibility to profile not only the next started process but to be able to select a process by name and perhaps a count to profile the next n processes of this name. Next: YourKit

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  • Admin Panel like Custom Framework

    - by bhuvin
    I want to Create a Framework , like Admin panel , which can rule almost all the aspects of what is shown on the frontend. For an (most basic) example: If suppose the links which are to be shown in a navigation area is passed from the server, with the order and the url , etc. The whole aim is to save the time on the tedious tasks. You can just start creating menus and start assigning pages to it. Give a url, actual files which are to be rendered (in case of static files.), in case of dynamic files, giving the file accordingly. And all this is fully server side manageable using different portlets, sort of things. So basic Roadmap is having : Areas like: Header Area - Which can contain logos, links etc. Navigation Area - Which can contains links and submenus. Content Area - Now this is where the tricky part is that that it has zones like: left, center & right. It contains Order in which it has to be displayed. So, when someday we want to change the way the articles appear on the page, we can do so easily, without any deployments. Now these zones can have n number of internal elements, like the word cloud, or the advertisement area. Footer Area: Again similar as Header Area. Currently there is a preexisting custom framework, which uses XSLT files for pulling out data from the server side. And it has the above capabilities. For example: If there's a grid it will be having a <table> tag embedded in the XSLT file. Now whatever might be the source of the data, we serialize this as XML and give it to the XSLT file and the html is derived from this and is appended to the layer in a page. The problem with this approach is: The XSLT conversion is occurring on the server side, so the server is responsible for getting the data, running XSLT transform, and append the html generated to the layer div. So, according to me, firstly this isn't the server's concern to do so. Secondly for larger applications this might be slower. Debugging isn't possible for XSLT transformation. So, whenever we face problems with data its always a bit of a trial & error method. Maintaining it is a bit of an eerie job i.e. styling changes, and other stuff. Adding dynamic values. Like JavaScript can't actually be very easily used in this. Secondly, we can't use JQuery or any other libraries with this since this is all occurring on the server. For now what I have thought about is using Templating - Javascript - JSON combination in place of XSLT, this will be offloaded to the client and the rendering will take place accordingly. This could solve the above problems and also could add mobile support for the same. Only problem which I could think of is that: It is much work and adding new portlets on the go needs to be looked into. What could be the alternatives for this? What kind of problems are there with the JavaScript approach? What are the different ways to implement the same? Are there any existing frameworks for similar usage?

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  • django/python: is one view that handles two sibling models a good idea?

    - by clime
    I am using django multi-table inheritance: Video and Image are models derived from Media. I have implemented two views: video_list and image_list, which are just proxies to media_list. media_list returns images or videos (based on input parameter model) for a certain object, which can be of type Event, Member, or Crag. The view alters its behaviour based on input parameter action (better name would be mode), which can be of value "edit" or "view". The problem is that I need to ask whether the input parameter model contains Video or Image in media_list so that I can do the right thing. Similar condition is also in helper method media_edit_list that is called from the view. I don't particularly like it but the only alternative I can think of is to have separate (but almost the same) logic for video_list and image_list and then probably also separate helper methods for videos and images: video_edit_list, image_edit_list, video_view_list, image_view_list. So four functions instead of just two. That I like even less because the video functions would be very similar to the respective image functions. What do you recommend? Here is extract of relevant parts: http://pastebin.com/07t4bdza. I'll also paste the code here: #urls url(r'^media/images/(?P<rel_model_tag>(event|member|crag))/(?P<rel_object_id>\d+)/(?P<action>(view|edit))/$', views.image_list, name='image-list') url(r'^media/videos/(?P<rel_model_tag>(event|member|crag))/(?P<rel_object_id>\d+)/(?P<action>(view|edit))/$', views.video_list, name='video-list') #views def image_list(request, rel_model_tag, rel_object_id, mode): return media_list(request, Image, rel_model_tag, rel_object_id, mode) def video_list(request, rel_model_tag, rel_object_id, mode): return media_list(request, Video, rel_model_tag, rel_object_id, mode) def media_list(request, model, rel_model_tag, rel_object_id, mode): rel_model = tag_to_model(rel_model_tag) rel_object = get_object_or_404(rel_model, pk=rel_object_id) if model == Image: star_media = rel_object.star_image else: star_media = rel_object.star_video filter_params = {} if rel_model == Event: filter_params['event'] = rel_object_id elif rel_model == Member: filter_params['members'] = rel_object_id elif rel_model == Crag: filter_params['crag'] = rel_object_id media_list = model.objects.filter(~Q(id=star_media.id)).filter(**filter_params).order_by('date_added').all() context = { 'media_list': media_list, 'star_media': star_media, } if mode == 'edit': return media_edit_list(request, model, rel_model_tag, rel_object_id, context) return media_view_list(request, model, rel_model_tag, rel_object_id, context) def media_view_list(request, model, rel_model_tag, rel_object_id, context): if request.is_ajax(): context['base_template'] = 'boxes/base-lite.html' return render(request, 'media/list-items.html', context) def media_edit_list(request, model, rel_model_tag, rel_object_id, context): if model == Image: get_media_edit_record = get_image_edit_record else: get_media_edit_record = get_video_edit_record media_list = [get_media_edit_record(media, rel_model_tag, rel_object_id) for media in context['media_list']] if context['star_media']: star_media = get_media_edit_record(context['star_media'], rel_model_tag, rel_object_id) else: star_media = None json = simplejson.dumps({ 'star_media': star_media, 'media_list': media_list, }) return HttpResponse(json, content_type=json_response_mimetype(request)) def get_image_edit_record(image, rel_model_tag, rel_object_id): record = { 'url': image.image.url, 'name': image.title or image.filename, 'type': mimetypes.guess_type(image.image.path)[0] or 'image/png', 'thumbnailUrl': image.thumbnail_2.url, 'size': image.image.size, 'id': image.id, 'media_id': image.media_ptr.id, 'starUrl':reverse('image-star', kwargs={'image_id': image.id, 'rel_model_tag': rel_model_tag, 'rel_object_id': rel_object_id}), } return record def get_video_edit_record(video, rel_model_tag, rel_object_id): record = { 'url': video.embed_url, 'name': video.title or video.url, 'type': None, 'thumbnailUrl': video.thumbnail_2.url, 'size': None, 'id': video.id, 'media_id': video.media_ptr.id, 'starUrl': reverse('video-star', kwargs={'video_id': video.id, 'rel_model_tag': rel_model_tag, 'rel_object_id': rel_object_id}), } return record # models class Media(models.Model, WebModel): title = models.CharField('title', max_length=128, default='', db_index=True, blank=True) event = models.ForeignKey(Event, null=True, default=None, blank=True) crag = models.ForeignKey(Crag, null=True, default=None, blank=True) members = models.ManyToManyField(Member, blank=True) added_by = models.ForeignKey(Member, related_name='added_images') date_added = models.DateTimeField('date added', auto_now_add=True, null=True, default=None, editable=False) class Image(Media): image = ProcessedImageField(upload_to='uploads', processors=[ResizeToFit(width=1024, height=1024, upscale=False)], format='JPEG', options={'quality': 75}) thumbnail_1 = ImageSpecField(source='image', processors=[SmartResize(width=178, height=134)], format='JPEG', options={'quality': 75}) thumbnail_2 = ImageSpecField(source='image', #processors=[SmartResize(width=256, height=192)], processors=[ResizeToFit(height=164)], format='JPEG', options={'quality': 75}) class Video(Media): url = models.URLField('url', max_length=256, default='') embed_url = models.URLField('embed url', max_length=256, default='', blank=True) author = models.CharField('author', max_length=64, default='', blank=True) thumbnail = ProcessedImageField(upload_to='uploads', processors=[ResizeToFit(width=1024, height=1024, upscale=False)], format='JPEG', options={'quality': 75}, null=True, default=None, blank=True) thumbnail_1 = ImageSpecField(source='thumbnail', processors=[SmartResize(width=178, height=134)], format='JPEG', options={'quality': 75}) thumbnail_2 = ImageSpecField(source='thumbnail', #processors=[SmartResize(width=256, height=192)], processors=[ResizeToFit(height=164)], format='JPEG', options={'quality': 75}) class Crag(models.Model, WebModel): name = models.CharField('name', max_length=64, default='', db_index=True) normalized_name = models.CharField('normalized name', max_length=64, default='', editable=False) type = models.IntegerField('crag type', null=True, default=None, choices=crag_types) description = models.TextField('description', default='', blank=True) country = models.ForeignKey('country', null=True, default=None) #TODO: make this not null when db enables it latitude = models.FloatField('latitude', null=True, default=None) longitude = models.FloatField('longitude', null=True, default=None) location_index = FixedCharField('location index', length=24, default='', editable=False, db_index=True) # handled by db, used for marker clustering added_by = models.ForeignKey('member', null=True, default=None) #route_count = models.IntegerField('route count', null=True, default=None, editable=False) date_created = models.DateTimeField('date created', auto_now_add=True, null=True, default=None, editable=False) last_modified = models.DateTimeField('last modified', auto_now=True, null=True, default=None, editable=False) star_image = models.ForeignKey('Image', null=True, default=None, related_name='star_crags', on_delete=models.SET_NULL) star_video = models.ForeignKey('Video', null=True, default=None, related_name='star_crags', on_delete=models.SET_NULL)

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  • F# Objects &ndash; Integration with the other .Net Languages &ndash; Part 2

    - by MarkPearl
    So in part one of my posting I covered the real basics of object creation. Today I will hopefully dig a little deeper… My expert F# book brings up an interesting point – properties in F# are just syntactic sugar for method calls. This makes sense… for instance assume I had the following object with the property exposed called Firstname. type Person(Firstname : string, Lastname : string) = member v.Firstname = Firstname I could extend the Firstname property with the following code and everything would be hunky dory… type Person(Firstname : string, Lastname : string) = member v.Firstname = Console.WriteLine("Side Effect") Firstname   All that this would do is each time I use the property Firstname, I would see the side effect printed to the screen saying “Side Effect”. Member methods have a very similar look & feel to properties, in fact the only difference really is that you declare that parameters are being passed in. type Person(Firstname : string, Lastname : string) = member v.FullName(middleName) = Firstname + " " + middleName + " " + Lastname   In the code above, FullName requires the parameter middleName, and if viewed from another project in C# would show as a method and not a property. Precomputation Optimizations Okay, so something that is obvious once you think of it but that poses an interesting side effect of mutable value holders is pre-computation of results. All it is, is a slight difference in code but can result in quite a huge saving in performance. Basically pre-computation means you would not need to compute a value every time a method is called – but could perform the computation at the creation of the object (I hope I have got it right). In a way I battle to differentiate this from lazy evaluation but I will show an example to explain the principle. Let me try and show an example to illustrate the principle… assume the following F# module namespace myNamespace open System module myMod = let Add val1 val2 = Console.WriteLine("Compute") val1 + val2 type MathPrecompute(val1 : int, val2 : int) = let precomputedsum = Add val1 val2 member v.Sum = precomputedsum type MathNormalCompute(val1 : int, val2 : int) = member v.Sum = Add val1 val2 Now assume you have a C# console app that makes use of the objects with code similar to the following… using System; using myNamespace; namespace CSharpTest { class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { Console.WriteLine("Constructing Objects"); var myObj1 = new myMod.MathNormalCompute(10, 11); var myObj2 = new myMod.MathPrecompute(10, 11); Console.WriteLine(""); Console.WriteLine("Normal Compute Sum..."); Console.WriteLine(myObj1.Sum); Console.WriteLine(myObj1.Sum); Console.WriteLine(myObj1.Sum); Console.WriteLine(""); Console.WriteLine("Pre Compute Sum..."); Console.WriteLine(myObj2.Sum); Console.WriteLine(myObj2.Sum); Console.WriteLine(myObj2.Sum); Console.ReadKey(); } } } The output when running the console application would be as follows…. You will notice with the normal compute object that the system would call the Add function every time the method was called. With the Precompute object it only called the compute method when the object was created. Subtle, but something that could lead to major performance benefits. So… this post has gone off in a slight tangent but still related to F# objects.

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  • Is this over-abstraction? (And is there a name for it?)

    - by mwhite
    I work on a large Django application that uses CouchDB as a database and couchdbkit for mapping CouchDB documents to objects in Python, similar to Django's default ORM. It has dozens of model classes and a hundred or two CouchDB views. The application allows users to register a "domain", which gives them a unique URL containing the domain name that gives them access to a project whose data has no overlap with the data of other domains. Each document that is part of a domain has its domain property set to that domain's name. As far as relationships between the documents go, all domains are effectively mutually exclusive subsets of the data, except for a few edge cases (some users can be members of more than one domain, and there are some administrative reports that include all domains, etc.). The code is full of explicit references to the domain name, and I'm wondering if it would be worth the added complexity to abstract this out. I'd also like to know if there's a name for the sort of bound property approach I'm taking here. Basically, I have something like this in mind: Before in models.py class User(Document): domain = StringProperty() class Group(Document): domain = StringProperty() name = StringProperty() user_ids = StringListProperty() # method that returns related document set def users(self): return [User.get(id) for id in self.user_ids] # method that queries a couch view optimized for a specific lookup @classmethod def by_name(cls, domain, name): # the view method is provided by couchdbkit and handles # wrapping json CouchDB results as Python objects, and # can take various parameters modifying behavior return cls.view('groups/by_name', key=[domain, name]) # method that creates a related document def get_new_user(self): user = User(domain=self.domain) user.save() self.user_ids.append(user._id) return user in views.py: from models import User, Group # there are tons of views like this, (request, domain, ...) def create_new_user_in_group(request, domain, group_name): group = Group.by_name(domain, group_name)[0] user = User(domain=domain) user.save() group.user_ids.append(user._id) group.save() in group/by_name/map.js: function (doc) { if (doc.doc_type == "Group") { emit([doc.domain, doc.name], null); } } After models.py class DomainDocument(Document): domain = StringProperty() @classmethod def domain_view(cls, *args, **kwargs): kwargs['key'] = [cls.domain.default] + kwargs['key'] return super(DomainDocument, cls).view(*args, **kwargs) @classmethod def get(cls, *args, **kwargs, validate_domain=True): ret = super(DomainDocument, cls).get(*args, **kwargs) if validate_domain and ret.domain != cls.domain.default: raise Exception() return ret def models(self): # a mapping of all models in the application. accessing one returns the equivalent of class BoundUser(User): domain = StringProperty(default=self.domain) class User(DomainDocument): pass class Group(DomainDocument): name = StringProperty() user_ids = StringListProperty() def users(self): return [self.models.User.get(id) for id in self.user_ids] @classmethod def by_name(cls, name): return cls.domain_view('groups/by_name', key=[name]) def get_new_user(self): user = self.models.User() user.save() views.py @domain_view # decorator that sets request.models to the same sort of object that is returned by DomainDocument.models and removes the domain argument from the URL router def create_new_user_in_group(request, group_name): group = request.models.Group.by_name(group_name) user = request.models.User() user.save() group.user_ids.append(user._id) group.save() (Might be better to leave the abstraction leaky here in order to avoid having to deal with a couchapp-style //! include of a wrapper for emit that prepends doc.domain to the key or some other similar solution.) function (doc) { if (doc.doc_type == "Group") { emit([doc.name], null); } } Pros and Cons So what are the pros and cons of this? Pros: DRYer prevents you from creating related documents but forgetting to set the domain. prevents you from accidentally writing a django view - couch view execution path that leads to a security breach doesn't prevent you from accessing underlying self.domain and normal Document.view() method potentially gets rid of the need for a lot of sanity checks verifying whether two documents whose domains we expect to be equal are. Cons: adds some complexity hides what's really happening requires no model modules to have classes with the same name, or you would need to add sub-attributes to self.models for modules. However, requiring project-wide unique class names for models should actually be fine because they correspond to the doc_type property couchdbkit uses to decide which class to instantiate them as, which should be unique. removes explicit dependency documentation (from group.models import Group)

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  • django/python: is one view that handles two separate models a good idea?

    - by clime
    I am using django multi-table inheritance: Video and Image are models derived from Media. I have implemented two views: video_list and image_list, which are just proxies to media_list. media_list returns images or videos (based on input parameter model) for a certain object, which can be of type Event, Member, or Crag. It alters its behaviour based on input parameter action, which can be either "edit" or "view". The problem is that I need to ask whether the input parameter model contains Video or Image in media_list so that I can do the right thing. Similar condition is also in helper method media_edit_list that is called from the view. I don't particularly like it but the only alternative I can think of is to have separate logic for video_list and image_list and then probably also separate helper methods for videos and images: video_edit_list, image_edit_list, video_view_list, image_view_list. So four functions instead of just two. That I like even less because the video functions would be very similar to the respective image functions. What do you recommend? Here is extract of relevant parts: http://pastebin.com/07t4bdza. I'll also paste the code here: #urls url(r'^media/images/(?P<rel_model_tag>(event|member|crag))/(?P<rel_object_id>\d+)/(?P<action>(view|edit))/$', views.video_list, name='image-list') url(r'^media/videos/(?P<rel_model_tag>(event|member|crag))/(?P<rel_object_id>\d+)/(?P<action>(view|edit))/$', views.image_list, name='video-list') #views def image_list(request, rel_model_tag, rel_object_id, action): return media_list(request, Image, rel_model_tag, rel_object_id, action) def video_list(request, rel_model_tag, rel_object_id, action): return media_list(request, Video, rel_model_tag, rel_object_id, action) def media_list(request, model, rel_model_tag, rel_object_id, action): rel_model = tag_to_model(rel_model_tag) rel_object = get_object_or_404(rel_model, pk=rel_object_id) if model == Image: star_media = rel_object.star_image else: star_media = rel_object.star_video filter_params = {} if rel_model == Event: filter_params['media__event'] = rel_object_id elif rel_model == Member: filter_params['media__members'] = rel_object_id elif rel_model == Crag: filter_params['media__crag'] = rel_object_id media_list = model.objects.filter(~Q(id=star_media.id)).filter(**filter_params).order_by('media__date_added').all() context = { 'media_list': media_list, 'star_media': star_media, } if action == 'edit': return media_edit_list(request, model, rel_model_tag, rel_model_id, context) return media_view_list(request, model, rel_model_tag, rel_model_id, context) def media_view_list(request, model, rel_model_tag, rel_object_id, context): if request.is_ajax(): context['base_template'] = 'boxes/base-lite.html' return render(request, 'media/list-items.html', context) def media_edit_list(request, model, rel_model_tag, rel_object_id, context): if model == Image: get_media_record = get_image_record else: get_media_record = get_video_record media_list = [get_media_record(media, rel_model_tag, rel_object_id) for media in context['media_list']] if context['star_media']: star_media = get_media_record(star_media, rel_model_tag, rel_object_id) star_media['starred'] = True else: star_media = None json = simplejson.dumps({ 'star_media': star_media, 'media_list': media_list, }) return HttpResponse(json, content_type=json_response_mimetype(request)) # models class Media(models.Model, WebModel): title = models.CharField('title', max_length=128, default='', db_index=True, blank=True) event = models.ForeignKey(Event, null=True, default=None, blank=True) crag = models.ForeignKey(Crag, null=True, default=None, blank=True) members = models.ManyToManyField(Member, blank=True) added_by = models.ForeignKey(Member, related_name='added_images') date_added = models.DateTimeField('date added', auto_now_add=True, null=True, default=None, editable=False) def __unicode__(self): return self.title def get_absolute_url(self): return self.image.url if self.image else self.video.embed_url class Image(Media): image = ProcessedImageField(upload_to='uploads', processors=[ResizeToFit(width=1024, height=1024, upscale=False)], format='JPEG', options={'quality': 75}) thumbnail_1 = ImageSpecField(source='image', processors=[SmartResize(width=178, height=134)], format='JPEG', options={'quality': 75}) thumbnail_2 = ImageSpecField(source='image', #processors=[SmartResize(width=256, height=192)], processors=[ResizeToFit(height=164)], format='JPEG', options={'quality': 75}) class Video(Media): url = models.URLField('url', max_length=256, default='') embed_url = models.URLField('embed url', max_length=256, default='', blank=True) author = models.CharField('author', max_length=64, default='', blank=True) thumbnail = ProcessedImageField(upload_to='uploads', processors=[ResizeToFit(width=1024, height=1024, upscale=False)], format='JPEG', options={'quality': 75}, null=True, default=None, blank=True) thumbnail_1 = ImageSpecField(source='thumbnail', processors=[SmartResize(width=178, height=134)], format='JPEG', options={'quality': 75}) thumbnail_2 = ImageSpecField(source='thumbnail', #processors=[SmartResize(width=256, height=192)], processors=[ResizeToFit(height=164)], format='JPEG', options={'quality': 75}) class Crag(models.Model, WebModel): name = models.CharField('name', max_length=64, default='', db_index=True) normalized_name = models.CharField('normalized name', max_length=64, default='', editable=False) type = models.IntegerField('crag type', null=True, default=None, choices=crag_types) description = models.TextField('description', default='', blank=True) country = models.ForeignKey('country', null=True, default=None) #TODO: make this not null when db enables it latitude = models.FloatField('latitude', null=True, default=None) longitude = models.FloatField('longitude', null=True, default=None) location_index = FixedCharField('location index', length=24, default='', editable=False, db_index=True) # handled by db, used for marker clustering added_by = models.ForeignKey('member', null=True, default=None) #route_count = models.IntegerField('route count', null=True, default=None, editable=False) date_created = models.DateTimeField('date created', auto_now_add=True, null=True, default=None, editable=False) last_modified = models.DateTimeField('last modified', auto_now=True, null=True, default=None, editable=False) star_image = models.OneToOneField('Image', null=True, default=None, related_name='star_crags', on_delete=models.SET_NULL) star_video = models.OneToOneField('Video', null=True, default=None, related_name='star_crags', on_delete=models.SET_NULL)

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  • Loading jQuery Consistently in a .NET Web App

    - by Rick Strahl
    One thing that frequently comes up in discussions when using jQuery is how to best load the jQuery library (as well as other commonly used and updated libraries) in a Web application. Specifically the issue is the one of versioning and making sure that you can easily update and switch versions of script files with application wide settings in one place and having your script usage reflect those settings in the entire application on all pages that use the script. Although I use jQuery as an example here, the same concepts can be applied to any script library - for example in my Web libraries I use the same approach for jQuery.ui and my own internal jQuery support library. The concepts used here can be applied both in WebForms and MVC. Loading jQuery Properly From CDN Before we look at a generic way to load jQuery via some server logic, let me first point out my preferred way to embed jQuery into the page. I use the Google CDN to load jQuery and then use a fallback URL to handle the offline or no Internet connection scenario. Why use a CDN? CDN links tend to be loaded more quickly since they are very likely to be cached in user's browsers already as jQuery CDN is used by many, many sites on the Web. Using a CDN also removes load from your Web server and puts the load bearing on the CDN provider - in this case Google - rather than on your Web site. On the downside, CDN links gives the provider (Google, Microsoft) yet another way to track users through their Web usage. Here's how I use jQuery CDN plus a fallback link on my WebLog for example: <!DOCTYPE HTML> <html> <head> <script src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.6.4/jquery.min.js"></script> <script> if (typeof (jQuery) == 'undefined') document.write(unescape("%3Cscript " + "src='/Weblog/wwSC.axd?r=Westwind.Web.Controls.Resources.jquery.js' %3E%3C/script%3E")); </script> <title>Rick Strahl's Web Log</title> ... </head>   You can see that the CDN is referenced first, followed by a small script block that checks to see whether jQuery was loaded (jQuery object exists). If it didn't load another script reference is added to the document dynamically pointing to a backup URL. In this case my backup URL points at a WebResource in my Westwind.Web  assembly, but the URL can also be local script like src="/scripts/jquery.min.js". Important: Use the proper Protocol/Scheme for  for CDN Urls [updated based on comments] If you're using a CDN to load an external script resource you should always make sure that the script is loaded with the same protocol as the parent page to avoid mixed content warnings by the browser. You don't want to load a script link to an http:// resource when you're on an https:// page. The easiest way to use this is by using a protocol relative URL: <script src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.6.4/jquery.min.js"></script> which is an easy way to load resources from other domains. This URL syntax will automatically use the parent page's protocol (or more correctly scheme). As long as the remote domains support both http:// and https:// access this should work. BTW this also works in CSS (with some limitations) and links. BTW, I didn't know about this until it was pointed out in the comments. This is a very useful feature for many things - ah the benefits of my blog to myself :-) Version Numbers When you use a CDN you notice that you have to reference a specific version of jQuery. When using local files you may not have to do this as you can rename your private copy of jQuery.js, but for CDN the references are always versioned. The version number is of course very important to ensure you getting the version you have tested with, but it's also important to the provider because it ensures that cached content is always correct. If an existing file was updated the updates might take a very long time to get past the locally cached content and won't refresh properly. The version number ensures you get the right version and not some cached content that has been changed but not updated in your cache. On the other hand version numbers also mean that once you decide to use a new version of the script you now have to change all your script references in your pages. Depending on whether you use some sort of master/layout page or not this may or may not be easy in your application. Even if you do use master/layout pages, chances are that you probably have a few of them and at the very least all of those have to be updated for the scripts. If you use individual pages for all content this issue then spreads to all of your pages. Search and Replace in Files will do the trick, but it's still something that's easy to forget and worry about. Personaly I think it makes sense to have a single place where you can specify common script libraries that you want to load and more importantly which versions thereof and where they are loaded from. Loading Scripts via Server Code Script loading has always been important to me and as long as I can remember I've always built some custom script loading routines into my Web frameworks. WebForms makes this fairly easy because it has a reasonably useful script manager (ClientScriptManager and the ScriptManager) which allow injecting script into the page easily from anywhere in the Page cycle. What's nice about these components is that they allow scripts to be injected by controls so components can wrap up complex script/resource dependencies more easily without having to require long lists of CSS/Scripts/Image includes. In MVC or pure script driven applications like Razor WebPages  the process is more raw, requiring you to embed script references in the right place. But its also more immediate - it lets you know exactly which versions of scripts to use because you have to manually embed them. In WebForms with different controls loading resources this often can get confusing because it's quite possible to load multiple versions of the same script library into a page, the results of which are less than optimal… In this post I look a simple routine that embeds jQuery into the page based on a few application wide configuration settings. It returns only a string of the script tags that can be manually embedded into a Page template. It's a small function that merely a string of the script tags shown at the begging of this post along with some options on how that string is comprised. You'll be able to specify in one place which version loads and then all places where the help function is used will automatically reflect this selection. Options allow specification of the jQuery CDN Url, the fallback Url and where jQuery should be loaded from (script folder, Resource or CDN in my case). While this is specific to jQuery you can apply this to other resources as well. For example I use a similar approach with jQuery.ui as well using practically the same semantics. Providing Resources in ControlResources In my Westwind.Web Web utility library I have a class called ControlResources which is responsible for holding resource Urls, resource IDs and string contants that reference those resource IDs. The library also provides a few helper methods for loading common scriptscripts into a Web page. There are specific versions for WebForms which use the ClientScriptManager/ScriptManager and script link methods that can be used in any .NET technology that can embed an expression into the output template (or code for that matter). The ControlResources class contains mostly static content - references to resources mostly. But it also contains a few static properties that configure script loading: A Script LoadMode (CDN, Resource, or script url) A default CDN Url A fallback url They are  static properties in the ControlResources class: public class ControlResources { /// <summary> /// Determines what location jQuery is loaded from /// </summary> public static JQueryLoadModes jQueryLoadMode = JQueryLoadModes.ContentDeliveryNetwork; /// <summary> /// jQuery CDN Url on Google /// </summary> public static string jQueryCdnUrl = "//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.6.4/jquery.min.js"; /// <summary> /// jQuery CDN Url on Google /// </summary> public static string jQueryUiCdnUrl = "//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.8.16/jquery-ui.min.js"; /// <summary> /// jQuery UI fallback Url if CDN is unavailable or WebResource is used /// Note: The file needs to exist and hold the minimized version of jQuery ui /// </summary> public static string jQueryUiLocalFallbackUrl = "~/scripts/jquery-ui.min.js"; } These static properties are fixed values that can be changed at application startup to reflect your preferences. Since they're static they are application wide settings and respected across the entire Web application running. It's best to set these default in Application_Init or similar startup code if you need to change them for your application: protected void Application_Start(object sender, EventArgs e) { // Force jQuery to be loaded off Google Content Network ControlResources.jQueryLoadMode = JQueryLoadModes.ContentDeliveryNetwork; // Allow overriding of the Cdn url ControlResources.jQueryCdnUrl = "http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.6.2/jquery.min.js"; // Route to our own internal handler App.OnApplicationStart(); } With these basic settings in place you can then embed expressions into a page easily. In WebForms use: <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head runat="server"> <%= ControlResources.jQueryLink() %> <script src="scripts/ww.jquery.min.js"></script> </head> In Razor use: <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> @Html.Raw(ControlResources.jQueryLink()) <script src="scripts/ww.jquery.min.js"></script> </head> Note that in Razor you need to use @Html.Raw() to force the string NOT to escape. Razor by default escapes string results and this ensures that the HTML content is properly expanded as raw HTML text. Both the WebForms and Razor output produce: <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.6.2/jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> if (typeof (jQuery) == 'undefined') document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='/WestWindWebToolkitWeb/WebResource.axd?d=-b6oWzgbpGb8uTaHDrCMv59VSmGhilZP5_T_B8anpGx7X-PmW_1eu1KoHDvox-XHqA1EEb-Tl2YAP3bBeebGN65tv-7-yAimtG4ZnoWH633pExpJor8Qp1aKbk-KQWSoNfRC7rQJHXVP4tC0reYzVw2&t=634535391996872492' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));</script> <script src="scripts/ww.jquery.min.js"></script> </head> which produces the desired effect for both CDN load and fallback URL. The implementation of jQueryLink is pretty basic of course: /// <summary> /// Inserts a script link to load jQuery into the page based on the jQueryLoadModes settings /// of this class. Default load is by CDN plus WebResource fallback /// </summary> /// <param name="url"> /// An optional explicit URL to load jQuery from. Url is resolved. /// When specified no fallback is applied /// </param> /// <returns>full script tag and fallback script for jQuery to load</returns> public static string jQueryLink(JQueryLoadModes jQueryLoadMode = JQueryLoadModes.Default, string url = null) { string jQueryUrl = string.Empty; string fallbackScript = string.Empty; if (jQueryLoadMode == JQueryLoadModes.Default) jQueryLoadMode = ControlResources.jQueryLoadMode; if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(url)) jQueryUrl = WebUtils.ResolveUrl(url); else if (jQueryLoadMode == JQueryLoadModes.WebResource) { Page page = new Page(); jQueryUrl = page.ClientScript.GetWebResourceUrl(typeof(ControlResources), ControlResources.JQUERY_SCRIPT_RESOURCE); } else if (jQueryLoadMode == JQueryLoadModes.ContentDeliveryNetwork) { jQueryUrl = ControlResources.jQueryCdnUrl; if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(jQueryCdnUrl)) { // check if jquery loaded - if it didn't we're not online and use WebResource fallbackScript = @"<script type=""text/javascript"">if (typeof(jQuery) == 'undefined') document.write(unescape(""%3Cscript src='{0}' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E""));</script>"; fallbackScript = string.Format(fallbackScript, WebUtils.ResolveUrl(ControlResources.jQueryCdnFallbackUrl)); } } string output = "<script src=\"" + jQueryUrl + "\" type=\"text/javascript\"></script>"; // add in the CDN fallback script code if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(fallbackScript)) output += "\r\n" + fallbackScript + "\r\n"; return output; } There's one dependency here on WebUtils.ResolveUrl() which resolves Urls without access to a Page/Control (another one of those features that should be in the runtime, not in the WebForms or MVC engine). You can see there's only a little bit of logic in this code that deals with potentially different load modes. I can load scripts from a Url, WebResources or - my preferred way - from CDN. Based on the static settings the scripts to embed are composed to be returned as simple string <script> tag(s). I find this extremely useful especially when I'm not connected to the internet so that I can quickly swap in a local jQuery resource instead of loading from CDN. While CDN loading with the fallback works it can be a bit slow as the CDN is probed first before the fallback kicks in. Switching quickly in one place makes this trivial. It also makes it very easy once a new version of jQuery rolls around to move up to the new version and ensure that all pages are using the new version immediately. I'm not trying to make this out as 'the' definite way to load your resources, but rather provide it here as a pointer so you can maybe apply your own logic to determine where scripts come from and how they load. You could even automate this some more by using configuration settings or reading the locations/preferences out of some sort of data/metadata store that can be dynamically updated instead via recompilation. FWIW, I use a very similar approach for loading jQuery UI and my own ww.jquery library - the same concept can be applied to any kind of script you might be loading from different locations. Hopefully some of you find this a useful addition to your toolset. Resources Google CDN for jQuery Full ControlResources Source Code ControlResource Documentation Westwind.Web NuGet This method is part of the Westwind.Web library of the West Wind Web Toolkit or you can grab the Web library from NuGet and add to your Visual Studio project. This package includes a host of Web related utilities and script support features. © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in ASP.NET  jQuery   Tweet (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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  • Working with PivotTables in Excel

    - by Mark Virtue
    PivotTables are one of the most powerful features of Microsoft Excel.  They allow large amounts of data to be analyzed and summarized in just a few mouse clicks. In this article, we explore PivotTables, understand what they are, and learn how to create and customize them. Note:  This article is written using Excel 2010 (Beta).  The concept of a PivotTable has changed little over the years, but the method of creating one has changed in nearly every iteration of Excel.  If you are using a version of Excel that is not 2010, expect different screens from the ones you see in this article. A Little History In the early days of spreadsheet programs, Lotus 1-2-3 ruled the roost.  Its dominance was so complete that people thought it was a waste of time for Microsoft to bother developing their own spreadsheet software (Excel) to compete with Lotus.  Flash-forward to 2010, and Excel’s dominance of the spreadsheet market is greater than Lotus’s ever was, while the number of users still running Lotus 1-2-3 is approaching zero.  How did this happen?  What caused such a dramatic reversal of fortunes? Industry analysts put it down to two factors:  Firstly, Lotus decided that this fancy new GUI platform called “Windows” was a passing fad that would never take off.  They declined to create a Windows version of Lotus 1-2-3 (for a few years, anyway), predicting that their DOS version of the software was all anyone would ever need.  Microsoft, naturally, developed Excel exclusively for Windows.  Secondly, Microsoft developed a feature for Excel that Lotus didn’t provide in 1-2-3, namely PivotTables.  The PivotTables feature, exclusive to Excel, was deemed so staggeringly useful that people were willing to learn an entire new software package (Excel) rather than stick with a program (1-2-3) that didn’t have it.  This one feature, along with the misjudgment of the success of Windows, was the death-knell for Lotus 1-2-3, and the beginning of the success of Microsoft Excel. Understanding PivotTables So what is a PivotTable, exactly? Put simply, a PivotTable is a summary of some data, created to allow easy analysis of said data.  But unlike a manually created summary, Excel PivotTables are interactive.  Once you have created one, you can easily change it if it doesn’t offer the exact insights into your data that you were hoping for.  In a couple of clicks the summary can be “pivoted” – rotated in such a way that the column headings become row headings, and vice versa.  There’s a lot more that can be done, too.  Rather than try to describe all the features of PivotTables, we’ll simply demonstrate them… The data that you analyze using a PivotTable can’t be just any data – it has to be raw data, previously unprocessed (unsummarized) – typically a list of some sort.  An example of this might be the list of sales transactions in a company for the past six months. Examine the data shown below: Notice that this is not raw data.  In fact, it is already a summary of some sort.  In cell B3 we can see $30,000, which apparently is the total of James Cook’s sales for the month of January.  So where is the raw data?  How did we arrive at the figure of $30,000?  Where is the original list of sales transactions that this figure was generated from?  It’s clear that somewhere, someone must have gone to the trouble of collating all of the sales transactions for the past six months into the summary we see above.  How long do you suppose this took?  An hour?  Ten?  Probably. If we were to track down the original list of sales transactions, it might look something like this: You may be surprised to learn that, using the PivotTable feature of Excel, we can create a monthly sales summary similar to the one above in a few seconds, with only a few mouse clicks.  We can do this – and a lot more too! How to Create a PivotTable First, ensure that you have some raw data in a worksheet in Excel.  A list of financial transactions is typical, but it can be a list of just about anything:  Employee contact details, your CD collection, or fuel consumption figures for your company’s fleet of cars. So we start Excel… …and we load such a list… Once we have the list open in Excel, we’re ready to start creating the PivotTable. Click on any one single cell within the list: Then, from the Insert tab, click the PivotTable icon: The Create PivotTable box appears, asking you two questions:  What data should your new PivotTable be based on, and where should it be created?  Because we already clicked on a cell within the list (in the step above), the entire list surrounding that cell is already selected for us ($A$1:$G$88 on the Payments sheet, in this example).  Note that we could select a list in any other region of any other worksheet, or even some external data source, such as an Access database table, or even a MS-SQL Server database table.  We also need to select whether we want our new PivotTable to be created on a new worksheet, or on an existing one.  In this example we will select a new one: The new worksheet is created for us, and a blank PivotTable is created on that worksheet: Another box also appears:  The PivotTable Field List.  This field list will be shown whenever we click on any cell within the PivotTable (above): The list of fields in the top part of the box is actually the collection of column headings from the original raw data worksheet.  The four blank boxes in the lower part of the screen allow us to choose the way we would like our PivotTable to summarize the raw data.  So far, there is nothing in those boxes, so the PivotTable is blank.  All we need to do is drag fields down from the list above and drop them in the lower boxes.  A PivotTable is then automatically created to match our instructions.  If we get it wrong, we only need to drag the fields back to where they came from and/or drag new fields down to replace them. The Values box is arguably the most important of the four.  The field that is dragged into this box represents the data that needs to be summarized in some way (by summing, averaging, finding the maximum, minimum, etc).  It is almost always numerical data.  A perfect candidate for this box in our sample data is the “Amount” field/column.  Let’s drag that field into the Values box: Notice that (a) the “Amount” field in the list of fields is now ticked, and “Sum of Amount” has been added to the Values box, indicating that the amount column has been summed. If we examine the PivotTable itself, we indeed find the sum of all the “Amount” values from the raw data worksheet: We’ve created our first PivotTable!  Handy, but not particularly impressive.  It’s likely that we need a little more insight into our data than that. Referring to our sample data, we need to identify one or more column headings that we could conceivably use to split this total.  For example, we may decide that we would like to see a summary of our data where we have a row heading for each of the different salespersons in our company, and a total for each.  To achieve this, all we need to do is to drag the “Salesperson” field into the Row Labels box: Now, finally, things start to get interesting!  Our PivotTable starts to take shape….   With a couple of clicks we have created a table that would have taken a long time to do manually. So what else can we do?  Well, in one sense our PivotTable is complete.  We’ve created a useful summary of our source data.  The important stuff is already learned!  For the rest of the article, we will examine some ways that more complex PivotTables can be created, and ways that those PivotTables can be customized. First, we can create a two-dimensional table.  Let’s do that by using “Payment Method” as a column heading.  Simply drag the “Payment Method” heading to the Column Labels box: Which looks like this: Starting to get very cool! Let’s make it a three-dimensional table.  What could such a table possibly look like?  Well, let’s see… Drag the “Package” column/heading to the Report Filter box: Notice where it ends up…. This allows us to filter our report based on which “holiday package” was being purchased.  For example, we can see the breakdown of salesperson vs payment method for all packages, or, with a couple of clicks, change it to show the same breakdown for the “Sunseekers” package: And so, if you think about it the right way, our PivotTable is now three-dimensional.  Let’s keep customizing… If it turns out, say, that we only want to see cheque and credit card transactions (i.e. no cash transactions), then we can deselect the “Cash” item from the column headings.  Click the drop-down arrow next to Column Labels, and untick “Cash”: Let’s see what that looks like…As you can see, “Cash” is gone. Formatting This is obviously a very powerful system, but so far the results look very plain and boring.  For a start, the numbers that we’re summing do not look like dollar amounts – just plain old numbers.  Let’s rectify that. A temptation might be to do what we’re used to doing in such circumstances and simply select the whole table (or the whole worksheet) and use the standard number formatting buttons on the toolbar to complete the formatting.  The problem with that approach is that if you ever change the structure of the PivotTable in the future (which is 99% likely), then those number formats will be lost.  We need a way that will make them (semi-)permanent. First, we locate the “Sum of Amount” entry in the Values box, and click on it.  A menu appears.  We select Value Field Settings… from the menu: The Value Field Settings box appears. Click the Number Format button, and the standard Format Cells box appears: From the Category list, select (say) Accounting, and drop the number of decimal places to 0.  Click OK a few times to get back to the PivotTable… As you can see, the numbers have been correctly formatted as dollar amounts. While we’re on the subject of formatting, let’s format the entire PivotTable.  There are a few ways to do this.  Let’s use a simple one… Click the PivotTable Tools/Design tab: Then drop down the arrow in the bottom-right of the PivotTable Styles list to see a vast collection of built-in styles: Choose any one that appeals, and look at the result in your PivotTable:   Other Options We can work with dates as well.  Now usually, there are many, many dates in a transaction list such as the one we started with.  But Excel provides the option to group data items together by day, week, month, year, etc.  Let’s see how this is done. First, let’s remove the “Payment Method” column from the Column Labels box (simply drag it back up to the field list), and replace it with the “Date Booked” column: As you can see, this makes our PivotTable instantly useless, giving us one column for each date that a transaction occurred on – a very wide table! To fix this, right-click on any date and select Group… from the context-menu: The grouping box appears.  We select Months and click OK: Voila!  A much more useful table: (Incidentally, this table is virtually identical to the one shown at the beginning of this article – the original sales summary that was created manually.) Another cool thing to be aware of is that you can have more than one set of row headings (or column headings): …which looks like this…. You can do a similar thing with column headings (or even report filters). Keeping things simple again, let’s see how to plot averaged values, rather than summed values. First, click on “Sum of Amount”, and select Value Field Settings… from the context-menu that appears: In the Summarize value field by list in the Value Field Settings box, select Average: While we’re here, let’s change the Custom Name, from “Average of Amount” to something a little more concise.  Type in something like “Avg”: Click OK, and see what it looks like.  Notice that all the values change from summed totals to averages, and the table title (top-left cell) has changed to “Avg”: If we like, we can even have sums, averages and counts (counts = how many sales there were) all on the same PivotTable! Here are the steps to get something like that in place (starting from a blank PivotTable): Drag “Salesperson” into the Column Labels Drag “Amount” field down into the Values box three times For the first “Amount” field, change its custom name to “Total” and it’s number format to Accounting (0 decimal places) For the second “Amount” field, change its custom name to “Average”, its function to Average and it’s number format to Accounting (0 decimal places) For the third “Amount” field, change its name to “Count” and its function to Count Drag the automatically created field from Column Labels to Row Labels Here’s what we end up with: Total, average and count on the same PivotTable! Conclusion There are many, many more features and options for PivotTables created by Microsoft Excel – far too many to list in an article like this.  To fully cover the potential of PivotTables, a small book (or a large website) would be required.  Brave and/or geeky readers can explore PivotTables further quite easily:  Simply right-click on just about everything, and see what options become available to you.  There are also the two ribbon-tabs: PivotTable Tools/Options and Design.  It doesn’t matter if you make a mistake – it’s easy to delete the PivotTable and start again – a possibility old DOS users of Lotus 1-2-3 never had. We’ve included an Excel that should work with most versions of Excel, so you can download to practice your PivotTable skills. Download Our Practice Excel File Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Magnify Selected Cells In Excel 2007Share Access Data with Excel in Office 2010Make Excel 2007 Print Gridlines In Workbook FileMake Excel 2007 Always Save in Excel 2003 FormatConvert Older Excel Documents to Excel 2007 Format TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Ben & Jerry’s Free Cone Day, 3/23/10 New Stinger from McAfee Helps Remove ‘FakeAlert’ Threats Google Apps Marketplace: Tools & Services For Google Apps Users Get News Quick and Precise With Newser Scan for Viruses in Ubuntu using ClamAV Replace Your Windows Task Manager With System Explorer

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  • Using an alternate search platform in Commerce Server 2009

    - by Lewis Benge
    Although Microsoft Commerce Server 2009's architecture is built upon Microsoft SQL Server, and has the full power of the SQL Full Text Indexing Search Platform, there are time however when you may require a richer or alternate search platform. One of these scenarios if when you want to implement a faceted (refinement) search into your site, which provides dynamic refinements based on the search results dataset. Faceted search is becoming popular in most online retail environments as a way of providing an enhanced user experience when browsing a larger catalogue. This is powerful for two reasons, firstly with a traditional search it is down to a user to think of a search term suitable for the product they are trying to find. This typically will not return similar products or help in any way to refine a larger dataset. Faceted searches on the other hand provide a comprehensive list of product properties, grouped together by similarity to help the user narrow down the results returned, as the user progressively restricts the search criteria by selecting additional criteria to search again, these facets needs to continually refresh. The whole experience allows users to explore alternate brands, price-ranges, or find products they hadn't initially thought of or where looking for in a bid to enhance cross sell in the retail environment. The second advantage of this type of search from a business perspective is also to harvest the search result to start to profile your user. Even though anonymous users may routinely visit your site, and will not necessarily register or complete a transaction to build up marketing data- profiling, you can still achieve the same result by recording search facets used within the search sequence. Below is a faceted search scenario generated from eBay using the search term "server". By creating a search profile of clicking through Computer & Networking -> Servers -> Dell - > New and recording this information against my user profile you can start to predict with a lot more certainty what types of products I am interested in. This will allow you to apply shopping-cart analysis against your search data and provide great cross-sale or advertising opportunity, or personalise the user experience based on your prediction of what the user may be interested in. This type of search is extremely beneficial in e-Commerce environments but achieving it out of the box with Commerce Server and SQL Full Text indexing can be challenging. In many deployments it is often easier to use an alternate search platform such as Microsoft's FAST, Apache SOLR, or Endecca, however you still want these products to integrate natively into Commerce Server to ensure that up-to-date inventory information is presented, profile information is generated, and you provide a consistant API. To do so we make the most of the Commerce Server extensibilty points called operation sequence components. In this example I will be talking about Apache Solr hosted on Apache Tomcat, in this specific example I have used the SolrNet C# library to interface to the Java platform. Also I am not going to talk about Solr configuration of indexing – but in a production envionrment this would typically happen by using Powershell to call the Commerce Server management webservice to export your catalog as XML, apply an XSLT transform to the file to make it conform to SOLR and use a simple HTTP Post to send it to the search enginge for indexing. Essentially a sequance component is a step in a serial workflow used to call a data repository (which in most cases is usually the Commerce Server pipelines or databases) and map to and from a Commerce Entity object whilst enforcing any business rules. So the first step in the process is to add a new class library to your existing Commerce Server site. You will need to use a new library as Sequence Components will need to be strongly named to be deployed. Once you are inside of your new project, add a new class file and add a reference to the Microsoft.Commerce.Providers, Microsoft.Commerce.Contracts and the Microsoft.Commerce.Broker assemblies. Now make your new class derive from the base object Microsoft.Commerce.Providers.Components.OperationSequanceComponent and overide the ExecuteQueryMethod. Your screen will then look something similar ot this: As all we are doing on this component is conducting a search we are only interested in the ExecuteQuery method. This method accepts three arguments, queryOperation, operationCache, and response. The queryOperation will be the object in which we receive our search parameters, the cache allows access to the Commerce Server cache allowing us to store regulary accessed information, and the response object is the object which we will return the result of our search upon. Inside this method is simply where we are going to inject our logic for our third party search platform. As I am not going to explain the inner-workings of actually making a SOLR call, I'll simply provide the sample code here. I would highly recommend however looking at the SolrNet wiki as they have some great explinations of how the API works. What you will find however is that there are some further extensions required when attempting to integrate a custom search provider. Firstly you out of the box the CommerceQueryOperation you will receive into the method when conducting a search against a catalog is specifically geared towards a SQL Full Text Search with properties such as a Where clause. To make the operation you receive more relevant you will need to create another class, this time derived from Microsoft.Commerce.Contract.Messages.CommerceSearchCriteria and within this you need to detail the properties you will require to allow you to submit as parameters to the SOLR search API. My exmaple looks like this: [DataContract(Namespace = "http://schemas.microsoft.com/microsoft-multi-channel-commerce-foundation/types/2008/03")] public class CommerceCatalogSolrSearch : CommerceSearchCriteria { private Dictionary<string, string> _facetQueries;   public CommerceCatalogSolrSearch() { _facetQueries = new Dictionary<String, String>();   }     public Dictionary<String, String> FacetQueries { get { return _facetQueries; } set { _facetQueries = value; } }   public String SearchPhrase{ get; set; } public int PageIndex { get; set; } public int PageSize { get; set; } public IEnumerable<String> Facets { get; set; }   public string Sort { get; set; }   public new int FirstItemIndex { get { return (PageIndex-1)*PageSize; } }   public int LastItemIndex { get { return FirstItemIndex + PageSize; } } }  To allow you to construct a CommerceQueryOperation call within the API you will also need to construct another class to derived from Microsoft.Commerce.Common.MessageBuilders.CommerceSearchCriteriaBuilder and is simply used to construct an instance of the CommerceQueryOperation you have just created and expose the properties you want set. My Message builder looks like this: public class CommerceCatalogSolrSearchBuilder : CommerceSearchCriteriaBuilder { private CommerceCatalogSolrSearch _solrSearch;   public CommerceCatalogSolrSearchBuilder() { _solrSearch = new CommerceCatalogSolrSearch(); }   public String SearchPhrase { get { return _solrSearch.SearchPhrase; } set { _solrSearch.SearchPhrase = value; } }   public int PageIndex { get { return _solrSearch.PageIndex; } set { _solrSearch.PageIndex = value; } }   public int PageSize { get { return _solrSearch.PageSize; } set { _solrSearch.PageSize = value; } }   public Dictionary<String,String> FacetQueries { get { return _solrSearch.FacetQueries; } set { _solrSearch.FacetQueries = value; } }   public String[] Facets { get { return _solrSearch.Facets.ToArray(); } set { _solrSearch.Facets = value; } } public override CommerceSearchCriteria ToSearchCriteria() { return _solrSearch; } }  Once you have these two classes in place you can now safely cast the CommerceOperation you receive as an argument of the overidden ExecuteQuery method in the SequenceComponent to the CommerceCatalogSolrSearch operation you have just created, e.g. public CommerceCatalogSolrSearch TryGetSearchCriteria(CommerceOperation operation) { var searchCriteria = operation as CommerceQueryOperation; if (searchCriteria == null) throw new Exception("No search criteria present");   var local = (CommerceCatalogSolrSearch) searchCriteria.SearchCriteria; if (local == null) throw new Exception("Unexpected Search Criteria in Operation");   return local; }  Now you have all of your search parameters present, you can go off an call the external search platform API. You will of-course get proprietry objects returned, so the next step in the process is to convert the results being returned back into CommerceEntities. You do this via another extensibility point within the Commerce Server API called translatators. Translators are another separate class, this time derived inheriting the interface Microsoft.Commerce.Providers.Translators.IToCommerceEntityTranslator . As you can imaginge this interface is specific for the conversion of the object TO a CommerceEntity, you will need to implement a separate interface if you also need to go in the opposite direction. If you implement the required method for the interace you will get a single translate method which has a source onkect, destination CommerceEntity, and a collection of properties as arguments. For simplicity sake in this example I have hard-coded the mappings, however best practice would dictate you map the objects using your metadatadefintions.xml file . Once complete your translator would look something like the following: public class SolrEntityTranslator : IToCommerceEntityTranslator { #region IToCommerceEntityTranslator Members   public void Translate(object source, CommerceEntity destinationCommerceEntity, CommercePropertyCollection propertiesToReturn) { if (source.GetType().Equals(typeof (SearchProduct))) { var searchResult = (SearchProduct) source;   destinationCommerceEntity.Id = searchResult.ProductId; destinationCommerceEntity.SetPropertyValue("DisplayName", searchResult.Title); destinationCommerceEntity.ModelName = "Product";   } }  Once you have a translator in place you can then safely map the results of your search platform into Commerce Entities and attach them on to the CommerceResponse object in a fashion similar to this: foreach (SearchProduct result in matchingProducts) { var destinationEntity = new CommerceEntity(_returnModelName);   Translator.ToCommerceEntity(result, destinationEntity, _queryOperation.Model.Properties); response.CommerceEntities.Add(destinationEntity); }  In SOLR I actually have two objects being returned – a product, and a collection of facets so I have an additional translator for facet (which maps to a custom facet CommerceEntity) and my facet response from SOLR is passed into the Translator helper class seperatley. When all of this is pieced together you have sucessfully completed the extensiblity point coding. You would have created a new OperationSequanceComponent, a custom SearchCritiera object and message builder class, and translators to convert the objects into Commerce Entities. Now you simply need to configure them, and can start calling them in your code. Make sure you sign you assembly, compile it and identiy its signature. Next you need to put this a reference of your new assembly into the Channel.Config configuration file replacing that of the existing SQL Full Text component: You will also need to add your translators to the Translators node of your Channel.Config too: Lastly add any custom CommerceEntities you have developed to your MetaDataDefintions.xml file. Your configuration is now complete, and you should now be able to happily make a call to the Commerce Foundation API, which will act as a proxy to your third party search platform and return back CommerceEntities of your search results. If you require data to be enriched, or logged, or any other logic applied then simply add further sequence components into the OperationSequence (obviously keeping the search response first) to the node of your Channel.Config file. Now to call your code you simply request it as per any other CommerceQuery operation, but taking into account you may be receiving multiple types of CommerceEntity returned: public KeyValuePair<FacetCollection ,List<Product>> DoFacetedProductQuerySearch(string searchPhrase, string orderKey, string sortOrder, int recordIndex, int recordsPerPage, Dictionary<string, string> facetQueries, out int totalItemCount) { var products = new List<Product>(); var query = new CommerceQuery<CatalogEntity, CommerceCatalogSolrSearchBuilder>();   query.SearchCriteria.PageIndex = recordIndex; query.SearchCriteria.PageSize = recordsPerPage; query.SearchCriteria.SearchPhrase = searchPhrase; query.SearchCriteria.FacetQueries = facetQueries;     totalItemCount = 0; CommerceResponse response = SiteContext.ProcessRequest(query.ToRequest()); var queryResponse = response.OperationResponses[0] as CommerceQueryOperationResponse;   // No results. Return the empty list if (queryResponse != null && queryResponse.CommerceEntities.Count == 0) return new KeyValuePair<FacetCollection, List<Product>>();   totalItemCount = (int)queryResponse.TotalItemCount;   // Prepare a multi-operation to retrieve the product variants var multiOperation = new CommerceMultiOperation();     //Add products to results foreach (Product product in queryResponse.CommerceEntities.Where(x => x.ModelName == "Product")) { var productQuery = new CommerceQuery<Product>(Product.ModelNameDefinition); productQuery.SearchCriteria.Model.Id = product.Id; productQuery.SearchCriteria.Model.CatalogId = product.CatalogId;   var variantQuery = new CommerceQueryRelatedItem<Variant>(Product.RelationshipName.Variants);   productQuery.RelatedOperations.Add(variantQuery);   multiOperation.Add(productQuery); }   CommerceResponse variantsResponse = SiteContext.ProcessRequest(multiOperation.ToRequest()); foreach (CommerceQueryOperationResponse queryOpResponse in variantsResponse.OperationResponses) { if (queryOpResponse.CommerceEntities.Count() > 0) products.Add(queryOpResponse.CommerceEntities[0]); }   //Get facet collection FacetCollection facetCollection = queryResponse.CommerceEntities.Where(x => x.ModelName == "FacetCollection").FirstOrDefault();     return new KeyValuePair<FacetCollection, List<Product>>(facetCollection, products); }    ..And that is it – simply a few classes and some configuration will allow you to extend the Commerce Server query operations to call a third party search platform, whilst still maintaing a unifed API in the remainder of your code. This logic stands for any extensibility within CommerceServer, which requires excution in a serial fashioon such as call to LOB systems or web service to validate or enrich data. Feel free to use this example on other applications, and if you have any questions please feel free to e-mail and I'll help out where I can!

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  • Passing multiple POST parameters to Web API Controller Methods

    - by Rick Strahl
    ASP.NET Web API introduces a new API for creating REST APIs and making AJAX callbacks to the server. This new API provides a host of new great functionality that unifies many of the features of many of the various AJAX/REST APIs that Microsoft created before it - ASP.NET AJAX, WCF REST specifically - and combines them into a whole more consistent API. Web API addresses many of the concerns that developers had with these older APIs, namely that it was very difficult to build consistent REST style resource APIs easily. While Web API provides many new features and makes many scenarios much easier, a lot of the focus has been on making it easier to build REST compliant APIs that are focused on resource based solutions and HTTP verbs. But  RPC style calls that are common with AJAX callbacks in Web applications, have gotten a lot less focus and there are a few scenarios that are not that obvious, especially if you're expecting Web API to provide functionality similar to ASP.NET AJAX style AJAX callbacks. RPC vs. 'Proper' REST RPC style HTTP calls mimic calling a method with parameters and returning a result. Rather than mapping explicit server side resources or 'nouns' RPC calls tend simply map a server side operation, passing in parameters and receiving a typed result where parameters and result values are marshaled over HTTP. Typically RPC calls - like SOAP calls - tend to always be POST operations rather than following HTTP conventions and using the GET/POST/PUT/DELETE etc. verbs to implicitly determine what operation needs to be fired. RPC might not be considered 'cool' anymore, but for typical private AJAX backend operations of a Web site I'd wager that a large percentage of use cases of Web API will fall towards RPC style calls rather than 'proper' REST style APIs. Web applications that have needs for things like live validation against data, filling data based on user inputs, handling small UI updates often don't lend themselves very well to limited HTTP verb usage. It might not be what the cool kids do, but I don't see RPC calls getting replaced by proper REST APIs any time soon.  Proper REST has its place - for 'real' API scenarios that manage and publish/share resources, but for more transactional operations RPC seems a better choice and much easier to implement than trying to shoehorn a boatload of endpoint methods into a few HTTP verbs. In any case Web API does a good job of providing both RPC abstraction as well as the HTTP Verb/REST abstraction. RPC works well out of the box, but there are some differences especially if you're coming from ASP.NET AJAX service or WCF Rest when it comes to multiple parameters. Action Routing for RPC Style Calls If you've looked at Web API demos you've probably seen a bunch of examples of how to create HTTP Verb based routing endpoints. Verb based routing essentially maps a controller and then uses HTTP verbs to map the methods that are called in response to HTTP requests. This works great for resource APIs but doesn't work so well when you have many operational methods in a single controller. HTTP Verb routing is limited to the few HTTP verbs available (plus separate method signatures) and - worse than that - you can't easily extend the controller with custom routes or action routing beyond that. Thankfully Web API also supports Action based routing which allows you create RPC style endpoints fairly easily:RouteTable.Routes.MapHttpRoute( name: "AlbumRpcApiAction", routeTemplate: "albums/{action}/{title}", defaults: new { title = RouteParameter.Optional, controller = "AlbumApi", action = "GetAblums" } ); This uses traditional MVC style {action} method routing which is different from the HTTP verb based routing you might have read a bunch about in conjunction with Web API. Action based routing like above lets you specify an end point method in a Web API controller either via the {action} parameter in the route string or via a default value for custom routes. Using routing you can pass multiple parameters either on the route itself or pass parameters on the query string, via ModelBinding or content value binding. For most common scenarios this actually works very well. As long as you are passing either a single complex type via a POST operation, or multiple simple types via query string or POST buffer, there's no issue. But if you need to pass multiple parameters as was easily done with WCF REST or ASP.NET AJAX things are not so obvious. Web API has no issue allowing for single parameter like this:[HttpPost] public string PostAlbum(Album album) { return String.Format("{0} {1:d}", album.AlbumName, album.Entered); } There are actually two ways to call this endpoint: albums/PostAlbum Using the Model Binder with plain POST values In this mechanism you're sending plain urlencoded POST values to the server which the ModelBinder then maps the parameter. Each property value is matched to each matching POST value. This works similar to the way that MVC's  ModelBinder works. Here's how you can POST using the ModelBinder and jQuery:$.ajax( { url: "albums/PostAlbum", type: "POST", data: { AlbumName: "Dirty Deeds", Entered: "5/1/2012" }, success: function (result) { alert(result); }, error: function (xhr, status, p3, p4) { var err = "Error " + " " + status + " " + p3; if (xhr.responseText && xhr.responseText[0] == "{") err = JSON.parse(xhr.responseText).message; alert(err); } }); Here's what the POST data looks like for this request: The model binder and it's straight form based POST mechanism is great for posting data directly from HTML pages to model objects. It avoids having to do manual conversions for many operations and is a great boon for AJAX callback requests. Using Web API JSON Formatter The other option is to post data using a JSON string. The process for this is similar except that you create a JavaScript object and serialize it to JSON first.album = { AlbumName: "PowerAge", Entered: new Date(1977,0,1) } $.ajax( { url: "albums/PostAlbum", type: "POST", contentType: "application/json", data: JSON.stringify(album), success: function (result) { alert(result); } }); Here the data is sent using a JSON object rather than form data and the data is JSON encoded over the wire. The trace reveals that the data is sent using plain JSON (Source above), which is a little more efficient since there's no UrlEncoding that occurs. BTW, notice that WebAPI automatically deals with the date. I provided the date as a plain string, rather than a JavaScript date value and the Formatter and ModelBinder both automatically map the date propertly to the Entered DateTime property of the Album object. Passing multiple Parameters to a Web API Controller Single parameters work fine in either of these RPC scenarios and that's to be expected. ModelBinding always works against a single object because it maps a model. But what happens when you want to pass multiple parameters? Consider an API Controller method that has a signature like the following:[HttpPost] public string PostAlbum(Album album, string userToken) Here I'm asking to pass two objects to an RPC method. Is that possible? This used to be fairly straight forward either with WCF REST and ASP.NET AJAX ASMX services, but as far as I can tell this is not directly possible using a POST operation with WebAPI. There a few workarounds that you can use to make this work: Use both POST *and* QueryString Parameters in Conjunction If you have both complex and simple parameters, you can pass simple parameters on the query string. The above would actually work with: /album/PostAlbum?userToken=sekkritt but that's not always possible. In this example it might not be a good idea to pass a user token on the query string though. It also won't work if you need to pass multiple complex objects, since query string values do not support complex type mapping. They only work with simple types. Use a single Object that wraps the two Parameters If you go by service based architecture guidelines every service method should always pass and return a single value only. The input should wrap potentially multiple input parameters and the output should convey status as well as provide the result value. You typically have a xxxRequest and a xxxResponse class that wraps the inputs and outputs. Here's what this method might look like:public PostAlbumResponse PostAlbum(PostAlbumRequest request) { var album = request.Album; var userToken = request.UserToken; return new PostAlbumResponse() { IsSuccess = true, Result = String.Format("{0} {1:d} {2}", album.AlbumName, album.Entered,userToken) }; } with these support types:public class PostAlbumRequest { public Album Album { get; set; } public User User { get; set; } public string UserToken { get; set; } } public class PostAlbumResponse { public string Result { get; set; } public bool IsSuccess { get; set; } public string ErrorMessage { get; set; } }   To call this method you now have to assemble these objects on the client and send it up as JSON:var album = { AlbumName: "PowerAge", Entered: "1/1/1977" } var user = { Name: "Rick" } var userToken = "sekkritt"; $.ajax( { url: "samples/PostAlbum", type: "POST", contentType: "application/json", data: JSON.stringify({ Album: album, User: user, UserToken: userToken }), success: function (result) { alert(result.Result); } }); I assemble the individual types first and then combine them in the data: property of the $.ajax() call into the actual object passed to the server, that mimics the structure of PostAlbumRequest server class that has Album, User and UserToken properties. This works well enough but it gets tedious if you have to create Request and Response types for each method signature. If you have common parameters that are always passed (like you always pass an album or usertoken) you might be able to abstract this to use a single object that gets reused for all methods, but this gets confusing too: Overload a single 'parameter' too much and it becomes a nightmare to decipher what your method actual can use. Use JObject to parse multiple Property Values out of an Object If you recall, ASP.NET AJAX and WCF REST used a 'wrapper' object to make default AJAX calls. Rather than directly calling a service you always passed an object which contained properties for each parameter: { parm1: Value, parm2: Value2 } WCF REST/ASP.NET AJAX would then parse this top level property values and map them to the parameters of the endpoint method. This automatic type wrapping functionality is no longer available directly in Web API, but since Web API now uses JSON.NET for it's JSON serializer you can actually simulate that behavior with a little extra code. You can use the JObject class to receive a dynamic JSON result and then using the dynamic cast of JObject to walk through the child objects and even parse them into strongly typed objects. Here's how to do this on the API Controller end:[HttpPost] public string PostAlbum(JObject jsonData) { dynamic json = jsonData; JObject jalbum = json.Album; JObject juser = json.User; string token = json.UserToken; var album = jalbum.ToObject<Album>(); var user = juser.ToObject<User>(); return String.Format("{0} {1} {2}", album.AlbumName, user.Name, token); } This is clearly not as nice as having the parameters passed directly, but it works to allow you to pass multiple parameters and access them using Web API. JObject is JSON.NET's generic object container which sports a nice dynamic interface that allows you to walk through the object's properties using standard 'dot' object syntax. All you have to do is cast the object to dynamic to get access to the property interface of the JSON type. Additionally JObject also allows you to parse JObject instances into strongly typed objects, which enables us here to retrieve the two objects passed as parameters from this jquery code:var album = { AlbumName: "PowerAge", Entered: "1/1/1977" } var user = { Name: "Rick" } var userToken = "sekkritt"; $.ajax( { url: "samples/PostAlbum", type: "POST", contentType: "application/json", data: JSON.stringify({ Album: album, User: user, UserToken: userToken }), success: function (result) { alert(result); } }); Summary ASP.NET Web API brings many new features and many advantages over the older Microsoft AJAX and REST APIs, but realize that some things like passing multiple strongly typed object parameters will work a bit differently. It's not insurmountable, but just knowing what options are available to simulate this behavior is good to know. Now let me say here that it's probably not a good practice to pass a bunch of parameters to an API call. Ideally APIs should be closely factored to accept single parameters or a single content parameter at least along with some identifier parameters that can be passed on the querystring. But saying that doesn't mean that occasionally you don't run into a situation where you have the need to pass several objects to the server and all three of the options I mentioned might have merit in different situations. For now I'm sure the question of how to pass multiple parameters will come up quite a bit from people migrating WCF REST or ASP.NET AJAX code to Web API. At least there are options available to make it work.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in Web Api   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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  • Configure Forms based authentication in SharePoint 2010

    - by sreejukg
      Configuring form authentication is a straight forward task in SharePoint. Mostly public facing websites built on SharePoint requires form based authentication. Recently, one of the WCM implementation where I was included in the project team required registration system. Any internet user can register to the site and the site offering them some membership specific functionalities once the user logged in. Since the registration open for all, I don’t want to store all those users in Active Directory. I have decided to use Forms based authentication for those users. This is a typical scenario of form authentication in SharePoint implementation. To implement form authentication you require the following A data store where you are storing the users – technically this can be active directory, SQL server database, LDAP etc. Form authentication will redirect the user to the login page, if the request is not authenticated. In the login page, there will be controls that validate the user inputs against the configured data store. In this article, I am going to use SQL server database with ASP.Net membership API’s to configure form based authentication in SharePoint 2010. This article assumes that you have SQL membership database available. I already configured the membership and roles database using aspnet_regsql command. If you want to know how to configure membership database using aspnet_regsql command, read the below blog post. http://weblogs.asp.net/sreejukg/archive/2011/06/16/usage-of-aspnet-regsql-exe-in-asp-net-4.aspx The snapshot of the database after implementing membership and role manager is as follows. I have used the database name “aspnetdb_claim”. Make sure you have created the database and make sure your database contains tables and stored procedures for membership. Create a web application with claims based authentication. This article assumes you already created a web application using claims based authentication. If you want to enable forms based authentication in SharePoint 2010, you must enable claims based authentication. Read this post for creating a web application using claims based authentication. http://weblogs.asp.net/sreejukg/archive/2011/06/15/create-a-web-application-in-sharepoint-2010-using-claims-based-authentication.aspx  You make sure, you have selected enable form authentication, and then selected Membership provider and Role manager name. To make sure you are done with the configuration, navigate to central administration website, from central administration, navigate to the Web Applications page, select the web application and click on icon, you will see the authentication providers for the current web application. Go to the section Claims authentication types, and make sure you have enabled forms based authentication. As mentioned in the snapshot, I have named the membership provider as SPFormAuthMembership and role manager as SPFormAuthRoleManager. You can choose your own names as you need. Modify the configuration files(Web.Config) to enable form authentication There are three applications that needs to be configured to support form authentication. The following are those applications. Central Administration If you want to assign permissions to web application using the credentials from form authentication, you need to update Central Administration configuration. If you do not want to access form authentication credentials from Central Administration, just leave this step.  STS service application Security Token service is the service application that issues security token when users are logging in. You need to modify the configuration of STS application to make sure users are able to login. To find the STS application, follow the following steps Go to the IIS Manager Expand the sites Node, you will see SharePoint Web Services Expand SharePoint Web Services, you can see SecurityTokenServiceApplication Right click SecuritytokenServiceApplication and click explore, it will open the corresponding file system. By default, the path for STS is C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\WebServices\SecurityToken You need to modify the configuration file available in the mentioned location. The web application that needs to be enabled with form authentication. You need to modify the configuration of your web application to make sure your web application identifies users from the form authentication.   Based on the above, I am going to modify the web configuration. At end of each step, I have mentioned the expected output. I recommend you to go step by step and after each step, make sure the configuration changes are working as expected. If you do everything all together, and test your application at the end, you may face difficulties in troubleshooting the configuration errors. Modifications for Central Administration Web.Config Open the web.config for the Central administration in a text editor. I always prefer Visual Studio, for editing web.config. In most cases, the path of the web.config for the central administration website is as follows C:\inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\<port number> Make sure you keep a backup copy of the web.config, before editing it. Let me summarize what we are going to do with Central Administration web.config. First I am going to add a connection string that points to the form authentication database, that I created as mentioned in previous steps. Then I need to add a membership provider and a role manager with the corresponding connectionstring. Then I need to update the peoplepickerwildcards section to make sure the users are appearing in search results. By default there is no connection string available in the web.config of Central Administration. Add a connection string just after the configsections element. The below is the connection string I have used all over the article. <add name="FormAuthConnString" connectionString="Initial Catalog=yourdatabasename;data source=databaseservername;Integrated Security=SSPI;" /> Once you added the connection string, the web.config look similar to Now add membership provider to the code. In web.config for CA, there will be <membership> tag, search for it. You will find membership and role manager under the <system.web> element. Under the membership providers section add the below code… <add name="SPFormAuthMembership" type="System.Web.Security.SqlMembershipProvider, System.Web, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a" applicationName="FormAuthApplication" connectionStringName="FormAuthConnString" /> After adding memberhip element, see the snapshot of the web.config. Now you need to add role manager element to the web.config. Insider providers element under rolemanager, add the below code. <add name="SPFormAuthRoleManager" type="System.Web.Security.SqlRoleProvider, System.Web, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a" applicationName="FormAuthApplication" connectionStringName="FormAuthConnString" /> After adding, your role manager will look similar to the following. As a last step, you need to update the people picker wildcard element in web.config, so that the users from your membership provider are available for browsing in Central Administration. Search for PeoplePickerWildcards in the web.config, add the following inside the <PeoplePickerWildcards> tag. <add key="SPFormAuthMembership" value="%" /> After adding this element, your web.config will look like After completing these steps, you can browse the users available in the SQL server database from central administration website. Go to the site collection administrator’s page from central administration. Select the site collection you have created for form authentication. Click on the people picker icon, choose Forms Auth and click on the search icon, you will see the users listed from the SQL server database. Once you complete these steps, make sure the users are available for browsing from central administration website. If you are unable to find the users, there must be some errors in the configuration, check windows event logs to find related errors and fix them. Change the web.config for STS application Open the web.config for STS application in text editor. By default, STS web.config does not have system.Web or connectionstrings section. Just after the System.Webserver element, add the following code. <connectionStrings> <add name="FormAuthConnString" connectionString="Initial Catalog=aspnetdb_claim;data source=sp2010_db;Integrated Security=SSPI;" /> </connectionStrings> <system.web> <roleManager enabled="true" cacheRolesInCookie="false" cookieName=".ASPXROLES" cookieTimeout="30" cookiePath="/" cookieRequireSSL="false" cookieSlidingExpiration="true" cookieProtection="All" createPersistentCookie="false" maxCachedResults="25"> <providers> <add name="SPFormAuthRoleManager" type="System.Web.Security.SqlRoleProvider, System.Web, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a" applicationName="FormAuthApplication" connectionStringName="FormAuthConnString" /> </providers> </roleManager> <membership userIsOnlineTimeWindow="15" hashAlgorithmType=""> <providers> <add name="SPFormAuthMembership" type="System.Web.Security.SqlMembershipProvider, System.Web, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a" applicationName="FormAuthApplication" connectionStringName="FormAuthConnString" /> </providers> </membership> </system.web> See the snapshot of the web.config after adding the required elements. After adding this, you should be able to login using the credentials from SQL server. Try assigning a user as primary/secondary administrator for your site collection from Central Administration and login to your site using form authentication. If you made everything correct, you should be able to login. This means you have successfully completed configuration of STS Configuration of Web Application for Form Authentication As a last step, you need to modify the web.config of the form authentication web application. Once you have done this, you should be able to grant permissions to users stored in the membership database. Open the Web.config of the web application you created for form authentication. You can find the web.config for the application under the path C:\inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\<port number> Basically you need to add connection string, membership provider, role manager and update the people picker wild card configuration. Add the connection string (same as the one you added to the web.config in Central Administration). See the screenshot after the connection string has added. Search for <membership> in the web.config, you will find this inside system.web element. There will be other providers already available there. You add your form authentication membership provider (similar to the one added to Central Administration web.config) to the provider element under membership. Find the snapshot of membership configuration as follows. Search for <roleManager> element in web.config, add the new provider name under providers section of the roleManager element. See the snapshot of web.config after new provider added. Now you need to configure the peoplepickerwildcard configuration in web.config. As I specified earlier, this is to make sure, you can locate the users by entering a part of their username. Add the following line under the <PeoplePickerWildcards> element in web.config. See the screenshot of the peoplePickerWildcards element after the element has been added. Now you have completed all the setup for form authentication. Navigate to the web application. From the site actions -> site settings -> go to peope and groups Click on new -> add users, it will popup the people picker dialog. Click on the icon, select Form Auth, enter a username in the search textbox, and click on search icon. See the screenshot of admin search when I tried searching the users If it displays the user, it means you are done with the configuration. If you add users to the form authentication database, the users will be able to access SharePoint portal as normal.

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