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• If my team has low skill, should I lower the skill of my code?

  - by Florian Margaine

  For example, there is a common snippet in JS to get a default value: function f(x) { x = x || 10; } This kind of snippet is not easily understood by all the members of my team, their JS level being low. Should I not use this trick then? It makes the code less readable by peers, but more readable than the following according to any JS dev: function f(x) { if (!x) { x = 10; } } Sure, if I use this trick and a colleague sees it, then they can learn something. But the case is often that they see this as "trying to be clever". So, should I lower the level of my code if my teammates have a lower level than me?

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• Readability of || statements

  - by Devin G Rhode

  On HTML5 Boilerplate they use this code for jQuery: <!-- Load jQuery with a protocol relative URL; fall back to local if offline --> <script src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.7.2/jquery.min.js"></scrip> <script>window.jQuery || document.write('<script src="js/libs/jquery-1.7.2.min.js"><\/script>')</script> The question is simple, what's more readable: if (!jQuery) document.write( -local jQuery- ); or window.jQuery || document.write( -local jQuery- );

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• node-xmpp-bosh error on Ubuntu 11.10

  - by megueloby

  I am newbie in Linux word. I want to implement a bosh server. Because it is hard on Windows platform I decided to deploy it on a Ubuntu virtual machine via vmware. I made installation without problems. I followed the processes on this page. Now I want to test my bosh server with the command sudo bosh or sudo /etc/init.d/bosh start, after typing those I get on the terminal Starting bosh server after, nothing. I looked on the bosh.err file and I see exec: 2: /usr/local/lib/bosh/run-server.js: Permission denied I don? t know why this error with sudo. When I try ls -l /usr/local/lib/bosh/run-server.js it show -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4889 2012-04-01 18:50 /usr/local/lib/bosh/run-server.js How can I make bosh start?

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• Largest successful JavaScript project? [closed]

  - by 80x24 console

  A common theme in the GWT community is "I wouldn't want to build a project of THAT size using a pure JavaScript library!" What is the largest project that you have successfully delivered with frontend functionality written in JavaScript? (not Java or GWT) Please provide at least a hand-wavy SLOC estimate of the unique JS code (not including libraries, frameworks, toolkits, test code, generated code, server-side processing such as PHP, etc.) that was in the finished product. Note to GWT advocates: Please read the question carefully before answering. I've heard plenty of stories about JS failures and GWT successes, but I'd like to hear some quantified JS successes. Note to mods: This is primarily a business-of-software question, not a tools question. It factors into a real-world business decision.

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• Circle vs Edge collision detection / resolution

  - by topheman

  I made a javascript class Ball.js that handles physics interactions betweens balls as well as painting. In the v1.0, the ball vs ball collision detection and resolution is well handled. In the next version (v2), I'm trying to add edgeCollision handling. I'm having some problems, maybe you will be able to help me. All the v2 branch source code is on github repository : https://github.com/topheman/Ball.js/tree/v2 The v2 demos (where you can see the bug I will be talking about) : http://labs.topheman.com/Ball-v2/#help As you will see on the demo, I have two major problems that I'm having a really hard time to solve on Ball.js : method resolveEdgeCollision : bounce angle is inconsistent method checkEdgeCollision : if the ball's velocity (the length that it runs each frame) is higher than its diameter, eventually, it will pass through an edge, without triggering any collision Any Ideas ?...

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• Is my webhost infected? [on hold]

  - by Svein Erik

  I have 2 websites, and on both websites, randomly on time, get's redirected automatically to porn sites. I can't figure out if it's something in the code or if the webhost is infected somehow. The two sites is: http://www.storkas.com/vm and http://www.prowebdesign.no/vm. Where should i start to find out what's happening..? I scanned the sites on hxxp://sitecheck.sucuri.net. One odd thing i saw there, is a reference to: hxxp://js.nohealth.org/js/jquery-1.1.js. I do not have this in my html code..

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• What set of tools make up "the rails way" of testing javascript in the browser?

  - by Jordan Feldstein

  What's the concensus for doing in-browser (either headless or remote-controlled) testing of javascript? Unit testing my JS is nice, but can't protect against irresponsible changes to the DOM. Unit testing of the JS and functional testing of the views to make sure they both provide and utilize the same, correct DOM, might work, but then the link between JS and DOM is being covered in two places which seems brittle or cumbersome. Is there an acknowledged "Rails Way" to implement full-stack tests, where I can run my javascript against the DOM rendered by the rest of the app, and check the results? (Something like what PHPUnit and Selenium give us, but inside the rails framework?)

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• Which is better? Native App or hybrid App?

  - by Prabakaran

  I want to develop a simple App for iOS, Android and windows phone. I just wondered that a simple HTML5, JS and CSS combination can work in all of these platforms. I want to know which one will be efficient? No problem with time and coding. But if i can achieve everything with HTML5-JS itself, i will chose Hybrid development. I want to know the major difference between the Native and Hybrid Development with example(I know that the main difference is HTML5-JS supports cross platform). Note : I am not making a game app.

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• .NET HTML Sanitation for rich HTML Input

  - by Rick Strahl

  Recently I was working on updating a legacy application to MVC 4 that included free form text input. When I set up the new site my initial approach was to not allow any rich HTML input, only simple text formatting that would respect a few simple HTML commands for bold, lists etc. and automatically handles line break processing for new lines and paragraphs. This is typical for what I do with most multi-line text input in my apps and it works very well with very little development effort involved. Then the client sprung another note: Oh by the way we have a bunch of customers (real estate agents) who need to post complete HTML documents. Oh uh! There goes the simple theory. After some discussion and pleading on my part (<snicker>) to try and avoid this type of raw HTML input because of potential XSS issues, the client decided to go ahead and allow raw HTML input anyway. There has been lots of discussions on this subject on StackOverFlow (and here and here) but to after reading through some of the solutions I didn't really find anything that would work even closely for what I needed. Specifically we need to be able to allow just about any HTML markup, with the exception of script code. Remote CSS and Images need to be loaded, links need to work and so. While the 'legit' HTML posted by these agents is basic in nature it does span most of the full gamut of HTML (4). Most of the solutions XSS prevention/sanitizer solutions I found were way to aggressive and rendered the posted output unusable mostly because they tend to strip any externally loaded content. In short I needed a custom solution. I thought the best solution to this would be to use an HTML parser - in this case the Html Agility Pack - and then to run through all the HTML markup provided and remove any of the blacklisted tags and a number of attributes that are prone to JavaScript injection. There's much discussion on whether to use blacklists vs. whitelists in the discussions mentioned above, but I found that whitelists can make sense in simple scenarios where you might allow manual HTML input, but when you need to allow a larger array of HTML functionality a blacklist is probably easier to manage as the vast majority of elements and attributes could be allowed. Also white listing gets a bit more complex with HTML5 and the new proliferation of new HTML tags and most new tags generally don't affect XSS issues directly. Pure whitelisting based on elements and attributes also doesn't capture many edge cases (see some of the XSS cheat sheets listed below) so even with a white list, custom logic is still required to handle many of those edge cases. The Microsoft Web Protection Library (AntiXSS) My first thought was to check out the Microsoft AntiXSS library. Microsoft has an HTML Encoding and Sanitation library in the Microsoft Web Protection Library (formerly AntiXSS Library) on CodePlex, which provides stricter functions for whitelist encoding and sanitation. Initially I thought the Sanitation class and its static members would do the trick for me,but I found that this library is way too restrictive for my needs. Specifically the Sanitation class strips out images and links which rendered the full HTML from our real estate clients completely useless. I didn't spend much time with it, but apparently I'm not alone if feeling this library is not really useful without some way to configure operation. To give you an example of what didn't work for me with the library here's a small and simple HTML fragment that includes script, img and anchor tags. I would expect the script to be stripped and everything else to be left intact. Here's the original HTML:var value = "<b>Here</b> <script>alert('hello')</script> we go. Visit the " + "<a href='http://west-wind.com'>West Wind</a> site. " + "<img src='http://west-wind.com/images/new.gif' /> " ; and the code to sanitize it with the AntiXSS Sanitize class:@Html.Raw(Microsoft.Security.Application.Sanitizer.GetSafeHtmlFragment(value)) This produced a not so useful sanitized string: Here we go. Visit the <a>West Wind</a> site. While it removed the <script> tag (good) it also removed the href from the link and the image tag altogether (bad). In some situations this might be useful, but for most tasks I doubt this is the desired behavior. While links can contain javascript: references and images can 'broadcast' information to a server, without configuration to tell the library what to restrict this becomes useless to me. I couldn't find any way to customize the white list, nor is there code available in this 'open source' library on CodePlex. Using Html Agility Pack for HTML Parsing The WPL library wasn't going to cut it. After doing a bit of research I decided the best approach for a custom solution would be to use an HTML parser and inspect the HTML fragment/document I'm trying to import. I've used the HTML Agility Pack before for a number of apps where I needed an HTML parser without requiring an instance of a full browser like the Internet Explorer Application object which is inadequate in Web apps. In case you haven't checked out the Html Agility Pack before, it's a powerful HTML parser library that you can use from your .NET code. It provides a simple, parsable HTML DOM model to full HTML documents or HTML fragments that let you walk through each of the elements in your document. If you've used the HTML or XML DOM in a browser before you'll feel right at home with the Agility Pack. Blacklist based HTML Parsing to strip XSS Code For my purposes of HTML sanitation, the process involved is to walk the HTML document one element at a time and then check each element and attribute against a blacklist. There's quite a bit of argument of what's better: A whitelist of allowed items or a blacklist of denied items. While whitelists tend to be more secure, they also require a lot more configuration. In the case of HTML5 a whitelist could be very extensive. For what I need, I only want to ensure that no JavaScript is executed, so a blacklist includes the obvious <script> tag plus any tag that allows loading of external content including <iframe>, <object>, <embed> and <link> etc. <form>  is also excluded to avoid posting content to a different location. I also disallow <head> and <meta> tags in particular for my case, since I'm only allowing posting of HTML fragments. There is also some internal logic to exclude some attributes or attributes that include references to JavaScript or CSS expressions. The default tag blacklist reflects my use case, but is customizable and can be added to. Here's my HtmlSanitizer implementation:using System.Collections.Generic; using System.IO; using System.Xml; using HtmlAgilityPack; namespace Westwind.Web.Utilities { public class HtmlSanitizer { public HashSet<string> BlackList = new HashSet<string>() { { "script" }, { "iframe" }, { "form" }, { "object" }, { "embed" }, { "link" }, { "head" }, { "meta" } }; /// <summary> /// Cleans up an HTML string and removes HTML tags in blacklist /// </summary> /// <param name="html"></param> /// <returns></returns> public static string SanitizeHtml(string html, params string[] blackList) { var sanitizer = new HtmlSanitizer(); if (blackList != null && blackList.Length > 0) { sanitizer.BlackList.Clear(); foreach (string item in blackList) sanitizer.BlackList.Add(item); } return sanitizer.Sanitize(html); } /// <summary> /// Cleans up an HTML string by removing elements /// on the blacklist and all elements that start /// with onXXX . /// </summary> /// <param name="html"></param> /// <returns></returns> public string Sanitize(string html) { var doc = new HtmlDocument(); doc.LoadHtml(html); SanitizeHtmlNode(doc.DocumentNode); //return doc.DocumentNode.WriteTo(); string output = null; // Use an XmlTextWriter to create self-closing tags using (StringWriter sw = new StringWriter()) { XmlWriter writer = new XmlTextWriter(sw); doc.DocumentNode.WriteTo(writer); output = sw.ToString(); // strip off XML doc header if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(output)) { int at = output.IndexOf("?>"); output = output.Substring(at + 2); } writer.Close(); } doc = null; return output; } private void SanitizeHtmlNode(HtmlNode node) { if (node.NodeType == HtmlNodeType.Element) { // check for blacklist items and remove if (BlackList.Contains(node.Name)) { node.Remove(); return; } // remove CSS Expressions and embedded script links if (node.Name == "style") { if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(node.InnerText)) { if (node.InnerHtml.Contains("expression") || node.InnerHtml.Contains("javascript:")) node.ParentNode.RemoveChild(node); } } // remove script attributes if (node.HasAttributes) { for (int i = node.Attributes.Count - 1; i >= 0; i--) { HtmlAttribute currentAttribute = node.Attributes[i]; var attr = currentAttribute.Name.ToLower(); var val = currentAttribute.Value.ToLower(); span style="background: white; color: green">// remove event handlers if (attr.StartsWith("on")) node.Attributes.Remove(currentAttribute); // remove script links else if ( //(attr == "href" || attr== "src" || attr == "dynsrc" || attr == "lowsrc") && val != null && val.Contains("javascript:")) node.Attributes.Remove(currentAttribute); // Remove CSS Expressions else if (attr == "style" && val != null && val.Contains("expression") || val.Contains("javascript:") || val.Contains("vbscript:")) node.Attributes.Remove(currentAttribute); } } } // Look through child nodes recursively if (node.HasChildNodes) { for (int i = node.ChildNodes.Count - 1; i >= 0; i--) { SanitizeHtmlNode(node.ChildNodes[i]); } } } } } Please note: Use this as a starting point only for your own parsing and review the code for your specific use case! If your needs are less lenient than mine were you can you can make this much stricter by not allowing src and href attributes or CSS links if your HTML doesn't allow it. You can also check links for external URLs and disallow those - lots of options.  The code is simple enough to make it easy to extend to fit your use cases more specifically. It's also quite easy to make this code work using a WhiteList approach if you want to go that route. The code above is semi-generic for allowing full featured HTML fragments that only disallow script related content. The Sanitize method walks through each node of the document and then recursively drills into all of its children until the entire document has been traversed. Note that the code here uses an XmlTextWriter to write output - this is done to preserve XHTML style self-closing tags which are otherwise left as non-self-closing tags. The sanitizer code scans for blacklist elements and removes those elements not allowed. Note that the blacklist is configurable either in the instance class as a property or in the static method via the string parameter list. Additionally the code goes through each element's attributes and looks for a host of rules gleaned from some of the XSS cheat sheets listed at the end of the post. Clearly there are a lot more XSS vulnerabilities, but a lot of them apply to ancient browsers (IE6 and versions of Netscape) - many of these glaring holes (like CSS expressions - WTF IE?) have been removed in modern browsers. What a Pain To be honest this is NOT a piece of code that I wanted to write. I think building anything related to XSS is better left to people who have far more knowledge of the topic than I do. Unfortunately, I was unable to find a tool that worked even closely for me, or even provided a working base. For the project I was working on I had no choice and I'm sharing the code here merely as a base line to start with and potentially expand on for specific needs. It's sad that Microsoft Web Protection Library is currently such a train wreck - this is really something that should come from Microsoft as the systems vendor or possibly a third party that provides security tools. Luckily for my application we are dealing with a authenticated and validated users so the user base is fairly well known, and relatively small - this is not a wide open Internet application that's directly public facing. As I mentioned earlier in the post, if I had my way I would simply not allow this type of raw HTML input in the first place, and instead rely on a more controlled HTML input mechanism like MarkDown or even a good HTML Edit control that can provide some limits on what types of input are allowed. Alas in this case I was overridden and we had to go forward and allow *any* raw HTML posted. Sometimes I really feel sad that it's come this far - how many good applications and tools have been thwarted by fear of XSS (or worse) attacks? So many things that could be done *if* we had a more secure browser experience and didn't have to deal with every little script twerp trying to hack into Web pages and obscure browser bugs. So much time wasted building secure apps, so much time wasted by others trying to hack apps… We're a funny species - no other species manages to waste as much time, effort and resources as we humans do :-) Resources Code on GitHub Html Agility Pack XSS Cheat Sheet XSS Prevention Cheat Sheet Microsoft Web Protection Library (AntiXss) StackOverflow Links: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/341872/html-sanitizer-for-net http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/06/safe-html-and-xss/ http://code.google.com/p/subsonicforums/source/browse/trunk/SubSonic.Forums.Data/HtmlScrubber.cs?r=61© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in Security  HTML  ASP.NET  JavaScript   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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• Using JSON.NET for dynamic JSON parsing

  - by Rick Strahl

  With the release of ASP.NET Web API as part of .NET 4.5 and MVC 4.0, JSON.NET has effectively pushed out the .NET native serializers to become the default serializer for Web API. JSON.NET is vastly more flexible than the built in DataContractJsonSerializer or the older JavaScript serializer. The DataContractSerializer in particular has been very problematic in the past because it can't deal with untyped objects for serialization - like values of type object, or anonymous types which are quite common these days. The JavaScript Serializer that came before it actually does support non-typed objects for serialization but it can't do anything with untyped data coming in from JavaScript and it's overall model of extensibility was pretty limited (JavaScript Serializer is what MVC uses for JSON responses). JSON.NET provides a robust JSON serializer that has both high level and low level components, supports binary JSON, JSON contracts, Xml to JSON conversion, LINQ to JSON and many, many more features than either of the built in serializers. ASP.NET Web API now uses JSON.NET as its default serializer and is now pulled in as a NuGet dependency into Web API projects, which is great. Dynamic JSON Parsing One of the features that I think is getting ever more important is the ability to serialize and deserialize arbitrary JSON content dynamically - that is without mapping the JSON captured directly into a .NET type as DataContractSerializer or the JavaScript Serializers do. Sometimes it isn't possible to map types due to the differences in languages (think collections, dictionaries etc), and other times you simply don't have the structures in place or don't want to create them to actually import the data. If this topic sounds familiar - you're right! I wrote about dynamic JSON parsing a few months back before JSON.NET was added to Web API and when Web API and the System.Net HttpClient libraries included the System.Json classes like JsonObject and JsonArray. With the inclusion of JSON.NET in Web API these classes are now obsolete and didn't ship with Web API or the client libraries. I re-linked my original post to this one. In this post I'll discus JToken, JObject and JArray which are the dynamic JSON objects that make it very easy to create and retrieve JSON content on the fly without underlying types. Why Dynamic JSON? So, why Dynamic JSON parsing rather than strongly typed parsing? Since applications are interacting more and more with third party services it becomes ever more important to have easy access to those services with easy JSON parsing. Sometimes it just makes lot of sense to pull just a small amount of data out of large JSON document received from a service, because the third party service isn't directly related to your application's logic most of the time - and it makes little sense to map the entire service structure in your application. For example, recently I worked with the Google Maps Places API to return information about businesses close to me (or rather the app's) location. The Google API returns a ton of information that my application had no interest in - all I needed was few values out of the data. Dynamic JSON parsing makes it possible to map this data, without having to map the entire API to a C# data structure. Instead I could pull out the three or four values I needed from the API and directly store it on my business entities that needed to receive the data - no need to map the entire Maps API structure. Getting JSON.NET The easiest way to use JSON.NET is to grab it via NuGet and add it as a reference to your project. You can add it to your project with: PM> Install-Package Newtonsoft.Json From the Package Manager Console or by using Manage NuGet Packages in your project References. As mentioned if you're using ASP.NET Web API or MVC 4 JSON.NET will be automatically added to your project. Alternately you can also go to the CodePlex site and download the latest version including source code: http://json.codeplex.com/ Creating JSON on the fly with JObject and JArray Let's start with creating some JSON on the fly. It's super easy to create a dynamic object structure with any of the JToken derived JSON.NET objects. The most common JToken derived classes you are likely to use are JObject and JArray. JToken implements IDynamicMetaProvider and so uses the dynamic  keyword extensively to make it intuitive to create object structures and turn them into JSON via dynamic object syntax. Here's an example of creating a music album structure with child songs using JObject for the base object and songs and JArray for the actual collection of songs:[TestMethod] public void JObjectOutputTest() { // strong typed instance var jsonObject = new JObject(); // you can explicitly add values here using class interface jsonObject.Add("Entered", DateTime.Now); // or cast to dynamic to dynamically add/read properties dynamic album = jsonObject; album.AlbumName = "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap"; album.Artist = "AC/DC"; album.YearReleased = 1976; album.Songs = new JArray() as dynamic; dynamic song = new JObject(); song.SongName = "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap"; song.SongLength = "4:11"; album.Songs.Add(song); song = new JObject(); song.SongName = "Love at First Feel"; song.SongLength = "3:10"; album.Songs.Add(song); Console.WriteLine(album.ToString()); } This produces a complete JSON structure: { "Entered": "2012-08-18T13:26:37.7137482-10:00", "AlbumName": "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap", "Artist": "AC/DC", "YearReleased": 1976, "Songs": [ { "SongName": "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap", "SongLength": "4:11" }, { "SongName": "Love at First Feel", "SongLength": "3:10" } ] } Notice that JSON.NET does a nice job formatting the JSON, so it's easy to read and paste into blog posts :-). JSON.NET includes a bunch of configuration options that control how JSON is generated. Typically the defaults are just fine, but you can override with the JsonSettings object for most operations. The important thing about this code is that there's no explicit type used for holding the values to serialize to JSON. Rather the JSON.NET objects are the containers that receive the data as I build up my JSON structure dynamically, simply by adding properties. This means this code can be entirely driven at runtime without compile time restraints of structure for the JSON output. Here I use JObject to create a album 'object' and immediately cast it to dynamic. JObject() is kind of similar in behavior to ExpandoObject in that it allows you to add properties by simply assigning to them. Internally, JObject values are stored in pseudo collections of key value pairs that are exposed as properties through the IDynamicMetaObject interface exposed in JSON.NET's JToken base class. For objects the syntax is very clean - you add simple typed values as properties. For objects and arrays you have to explicitly create new JObject or JArray, cast them to dynamic and then add properties and items to them. Always remember though these values are dynamic - which means no Intellisense and no compiler type checking. It's up to you to ensure that the names and values you create are accessed consistently and without typos in your code. Note that you can also access the JObject instance directly (not as dynamic) and get access to the underlying JObject type. This means you can assign properties by string, which can be useful for fully data driven JSON generation from other structures. Below you can see both styles of access next to each other:// strong type instance var jsonObject = new JObject(); // you can explicitly add values here jsonObject.Add("Entered", DateTime.Now); // expando style instance you can just 'use' properties dynamic album = jsonObject; album.AlbumName = "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap"; JContainer (the base class for JObject and JArray) is a collection so you can also iterate over the properties at runtime easily:foreach (var item in jsonObject) { Console.WriteLine(item.Key + " " + item.Value.ToString()); } The functionality of the JSON objects are very similar to .NET's ExpandObject and if you used it before, you're already familiar with how the dynamic interfaces to the JSON objects works. Importing JSON with JObject.Parse() and JArray.Parse() The JValue structure supports importing JSON via the Parse() and Load() methods which can read JSON data from a string or various streams respectively. Essentially JValue includes the core JSON parsing to turn a JSON string into a collection of JsonValue objects that can be then referenced using familiar dynamic object syntax. Here's a simple example:public void JValueParsingTest() { var jsonString = @"{""Name"":""Rick"",""Company"":""West Wind"", ""Entered"":""2012-03-16T00:03:33.245-10:00""}"; dynamic json = JValue.Parse(jsonString); // values require casting string name = json.Name; string company = json.Company; DateTime entered = json.Entered; Assert.AreEqual(name, "Rick"); Assert.AreEqual(company, "West Wind"); } The JSON string represents an object with three properties which is parsed into a JObject class and cast to dynamic. Once cast to dynamic I can then go ahead and access the object using familiar object syntax. Note that the actual values - json.Name, json.Company, json.Entered - are actually of type JToken and I have to cast them to their appropriate types first before I can do type comparisons as in the Asserts at the end of the test method. This is required because of the way that dynamic types work which can't determine the type based on the method signature of the Assert.AreEqual(object,object) method. I have to either assign the dynamic value to a variable as I did above, or explicitly cast ( (string) json.Name) in the actual method call. The JSON structure can be much more complex than this simple example. Here's another example of an array of albums serialized to JSON and then parsed through with JsonValue():[TestMethod] public void JsonArrayParsingTest() { var jsonString = @"[ { ""Id"": ""b3ec4e5c"", ""AlbumName"": ""Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap"", ""Artist"": ""AC/DC"", ""YearReleased"": 1976, ""Entered"": ""2012-03-16T00:13:12.2810521-10:00"", ""AlbumImageUrl"": ""http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61kTaH-uZBL._AA115_.jpg"", ""AmazonUrl"": ""http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/…ASIN=B00008BXJ4"", ""Songs"": [ { ""AlbumId"": ""b3ec4e5c"", ""SongName"": ""Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap"", ""SongLength"": ""4:11"" }, { ""AlbumId"": ""b3ec4e5c"", ""SongName"": ""Love at First Feel"", ""SongLength"": ""3:10"" }, { ""AlbumId"": ""b3ec4e5c"", ""SongName"": ""Big Balls"", ""SongLength"": ""2:38"" } ] }, { ""Id"": ""7b919432"", ""AlbumName"": ""End of the Silence"", ""Artist"": ""Henry Rollins Band"", ""YearReleased"": 1992, ""Entered"": ""2012-03-16T00:13:12.2800521-10:00"", ""AlbumImageUrl"": ""http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51FO3rb1tuL._SL160_AA160_.jpg"", ""AmazonUrl"": ""http://www.amazon.com/End-Silence-Rollins-Band/dp/B0000040OX/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1302232195&sr=8-5"", ""Songs"": [ { ""AlbumId"": ""7b919432"", ""SongName"": ""Low Self Opinion"", ""SongLength"": ""5:24"" }, { ""AlbumId"": ""7b919432"", ""SongName"": ""Grip"", ""SongLength"": ""4:51"" } ] } ]"; JArray jsonVal = JArray.Parse(jsonString) as JArray; dynamic albums = jsonVal; foreach (dynamic album in albums) { Console.WriteLine(album.AlbumName + " (" + album.YearReleased.ToString() + ")"); foreach (dynamic song in album.Songs) { Console.WriteLine("\t" + song.SongName); } } Console.WriteLine(albums[0].AlbumName); Console.WriteLine(albums[0].Songs[1].SongName); } JObject and JArray in ASP.NET Web API Of course these types also work in ASP.NET Web API controller methods. If you want you can accept parameters using these object or return them back to the server. The following contrived example receives dynamic JSON input, and then creates a new dynamic JSON object and returns it based on data from the first:[HttpPost] public JObject PostAlbumJObject(JObject jAlbum) { // dynamic input from inbound JSON dynamic album = jAlbum; // create a new JSON object to write out dynamic newAlbum = new JObject(); // Create properties on the new instance // with values from the first newAlbum.AlbumName = album.AlbumName + " New"; newAlbum.NewProperty = "something new"; newAlbum.Songs = new JArray(); foreach (dynamic song in album.Songs) { song.SongName = song.SongName + " New"; newAlbum.Songs.Add(song); } return newAlbum; } The raw POST request to the server looks something like this: POST http://localhost/aspnetwebapi/samples/PostAlbumJObject HTTP/1.1User-Agent: FiddlerContent-type: application/jsonHost: localhostContent-Length: 88 {AlbumName: "Dirty Deeds",Songs:[ { SongName: "Problem Child"},{ SongName: "Squealer"}]} and the output that comes back looks like this: {  "AlbumName": "Dirty Deeds New",  "NewProperty": "something new",  "Songs": [    {      "SongName": "Problem Child New"    },    {      "SongName": "Squealer New"    }  ]} The original values are echoed back with something extra appended to demonstrate that we're working with a new object. When you receive or return a JObject, JValue, JToken or JArray instance in a Web API method, Web API ignores normal content negotiation and assumes your content is going to be received and returned as JSON, so effectively the parameter and result type explicitly determines the input and output format which is nice. Dynamic to Strong Type Mapping You can also map JObject and JArray instances to a strongly typed object, so you can mix dynamic and static typing in the same piece of code. Using the 2 Album jsonString shown earlier, the code below takes an array of albums and picks out only a single album and casts that album to a static Album instance.[TestMethod] public void JsonParseToStrongTypeTest() { JArray albums = JArray.Parse(jsonString) as JArray; // pick out one album JObject jalbum = albums[0] as JObject; // Copy to a static Album instance Album album = jalbum.ToObject<Album>(); Assert.IsNotNull(album); Assert.AreEqual(album.AlbumName,jalbum.Value<string>("AlbumName")); Assert.IsTrue(album.Songs.Count > 0); } This is pretty damn useful for the scenario I mentioned earlier - you can read a large chunk of JSON and dynamically walk the property hierarchy down to the item you want to access, and then either access the specific item dynamically (as shown earlier) or map a part of the JSON to a strongly typed object. That's very powerful if you think about it - it leaves you in total control to decide what's dynamic and what's static. Strongly typed JSON Parsing With all this talk of dynamic let's not forget that JSON.NET of course also does strongly typed serialization which is drop dead easy. Here's a simple example on how to serialize and deserialize an object with JSON.NET:[TestMethod] public void StronglyTypedSerializationTest() { // Demonstrate deserialization from a raw string var album = new Album() { AlbumName = "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap", Artist = "AC/DC", Entered = DateTime.Now, YearReleased = 1976, Songs = new List<Song>() { new Song() { SongName = "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap", SongLength = "4:11" }, new Song() { SongName = "Love at First Feel", SongLength = "3:10" } } }; // serialize to string string json2 = JsonConvert.SerializeObject(album,Formatting.Indented); Console.WriteLine(json2); // make sure we can serialize back var album2 = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<Album>(json2); Assert.IsNotNull(album2); Assert.IsTrue(album2.AlbumName == "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap"); Assert.IsTrue(album2.Songs.Count == 2); } JsonConvert is a high level static class that wraps lower level functionality, but you can also use the JsonSerializer class, which allows you to serialize/parse to and from streams. It's a little more work, but gives you a bit more control. The functionality available is easy to discover with Intellisense, and that's good because there's not a lot in the way of documentation that's actually useful. Summary JSON.NET is a pretty complete JSON implementation with lots of different choices for JSON parsing from dynamic parsing to static serialization, to complex querying of JSON objects using LINQ. It's good to see this open source library getting integrated into .NET, and pushing out the old and tired stock .NET parsers so that we finally have a bit more flexibility - and extensibility - in our JSON parsing. Good to go! Resources Sample Test Project http://json.codeplex.com/© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in .NET  Web Api  AJAX   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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• Using an alternate JSON Serializer in ASP.NET Web API

  - by Rick Strahl

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

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• Use IIS Application Initialization for keeping ASP.NET Apps alive

  - by Rick Strahl

  I've been working quite a bit with Windows Services in the recent months, and well, it turns out that Windows Services are quite a bear to debug, deploy, update and maintain. The process of getting services set up,  debugged and updated is a major chore that has to be extensively documented and or automated specifically. On most projects when a service is built, people end up scrambling for the right 'process' to use for administration. Web app deployment and maintenance on the other hand are common and well understood today, as we are constantly dealing with Web apps. There's plenty of infrastructure and tooling built into Web Tools like Visual Studio to facilitate the process. By comparison Windows Services or anything self-hosted for that matter seems convoluted.In fact, in a recent blog post I mentioned that on a recent project I'd been using self-hosting for SignalR inside of a Windows service, because the application is in fact a 'service' that also needs to send out lots of messages via SignalR. But the reality is that it could just as well be an IIS application with a service component that runs in the background. Either way you look at it, it's either a Windows Service with a built in Web Server, or an IIS application running a Service application, neither of which follows the standard Service or Web App template.Personally I much prefer Web applications. Running inside of IIS I get all the benefits of the IIS platform including service lifetime management (crash and restart), controlled shutdowns, the whole security infrastructure including easy certificate support, hot-swapping of code and the the ability to publish directly to IIS from within Visual Studio with ease.Because of these benefits we set out to move from the self hosted service into an ASP.NET Web app instead.The Missing Link for ASP.NET as a Service: Auto-LoadingI've had moments in the past where I wanted to run a 'service like' application in ASP.NET because when you think about it, it's so much easier to control a Web application remotely. Services are locked into start/stop operations, but if you host inside of a Web app you can write your own ticket and control it from anywhere. In fact nearly 10 years ago I built a background scheduling application that ran inside of ASP.NET and it worked great and it's still running doing its job today.The tricky part for running an app as a service inside of IIS then and now, is how to get IIS and ASP.NET launched so your 'service' stays alive even after an Application Pool reset. 7 years ago I faked it by using a web monitor (my own West Wind Web Monitor app) I was running anyway to monitor my various web sites for uptime, and having the monitor ping my 'service' every 20 seconds to effectively keep ASP.NET alive or fire it back up after a reload. I used a simple scheduler class that also includes some logic for 'self-reloading'. Hacky for sure, but it worked reliably.Luckily today it's much easier and more integrated to get IIS to launch ASP.NET as soon as an Application Pool is started by using the Application Initialization Module. The Application Initialization Module basically allows you to turn on Preloading on the Application Pool and the Site/IIS App, which essentially fires a request through the IIS pipeline as soon as the Application Pool has been launched. This means that effectively your ASP.NET app becomes active immediately, Application_Start is fired making sure your app stays up and running at all times. All the other features like Application Pool recycling and auto-shutdown after idle time still work, but IIS will then always immediately re-launch the application.Getting started with Application InitializationAs of IIS 8 Application Initialization is part of the IIS feature set. For IIS 7 and 7.5 there's a separate download available via Web Platform Installer. Using IIS 8 Application Initialization is an optional install component in Windows or the Windows Server Role Manager: This is an optional component so make sure you explicitly select it.IIS Configuration for Application InitializationInitialization needs to be applied on the Application Pool as well as the IIS Application level. As of IIS 8 these settings can be made through the IIS Administration console.Start with the Application Pool:Here you need to set both the Start Automatically which is always set, and the StartMode which should be set to AlwaysRunning. Both have to be set - the Start Automatically flag is set true by default and controls the starting of the application pool itself while Always Running flag is required in order to launch the application. Without the latter flag set the site settings have no effect.Now on the Site/Application level you can specify whether the site should pre load: Set the Preload Enabled flag to true.At this point ASP.NET apps should auto-load. This is all that's needed to pre-load the site if all you want is to get your site launched automatically.If you want a little more control over the load process you can add a few more settings to your web.config file that allow you to show a static page while the App is starting up. This can be useful if startup is really slow, so rather than displaying blank screen while the user is fiddling their thumbs you can display a static HTML page instead: <system.webServer> <applicationInitialization remapManagedRequestsTo="Startup.htm" skipManagedModules="true"> <add initializationPage="ping.ashx" /> </applicationInitialization> </system.webServer>This allows you to specify a page to execute in a dry run. IIS basically fakes request and pushes it directly into the IIS pipeline without hitting the network. You specify a page and IIS will fake a request to that page in this case ping.ashx which just returns a simple OK string - ie. a fast pipeline request. This request is run immediately after Application Pool restart, and while this request is running and your app is warming up, IIS can display an alternate static page - Startup.htm above. So instead of showing users an empty loading page when clicking a link on your site you can optionally show some sort of static status page that says, "we'll be right back".  I'm not sure if that's such a brilliant idea since this can be pretty disruptive in some cases. Personally I think I prefer letting people wait, but at least get the response they were supposed to get back rather than a random page. But it's there if you need it.Note that the web.config stuff is optional. If you don't provide it IIS hits the default site link (/) and even if there's no matching request at the end of that request it'll still fire the request through the IIS pipeline. Ideally though you want to make sure that an ASP.NET endpoint is hit either with your default page, or by specify the initializationPage to ensure ASP.NET actually gets hit since it's possible for IIS fire unmanaged requests only for static pages (depending how your pipeline is configured).What about AppDomain Restarts?In addition to full Worker Process recycles at the IIS level, ASP.NET also has to deal with AppDomain shutdowns which can occur for a variety of reasons:Files are updated in the BIN folderWeb Deploy to your siteweb.config is changedHard application crashThese operations don't cause the worker process to restart, but they do cause ASP.NET to unload the current AppDomain and start up a new one. Because the features above only apply to Application Pool restarts, AppDomain restarts could also cause your 'ASP.NET service' to stop processing in the background.In order to keep the app running on AppDomain recycles, you can resort to a simple ping in the Application_End event:protected void Application_End() { var client = new WebClient(); var url = App.AdminConfiguration.MonitorHostUrl + "ping.aspx"; client.DownloadString(url); Trace.WriteLine("Application Shut Down Ping: " + url); }which fires any ASP.NET url to the current site at the very end of the pipeline shutdown which in turn ensures that the site immediately starts back up.Manual Configuration in ApplicationHost.configThe above UI corresponds to the following ApplicationHost.config settings. If you're using IIS 7, there's no UI for these flags so you'll have to manually edit them.When you install the Application Initialization component into IIS it should auto-configure the module into ApplicationHost.config. Unfortunately for me, with Mr. Murphy in his best form for me, the module registration did not occur and I had to manually add it.<globalModules> <add name="ApplicationInitializationModule" image="%windir%\System32\inetsrv\warmup.dll" /> </globalModules>Most likely you won't need ever need to add this, but if things are not working it's worth to check if the module is actually registered.Next you need to configure the ApplicationPool and the Web site. The following are the two relevant entries in ApplicationHost.config.<system.applicationHost> <applicationPools> <add name="West Wind West Wind Web Connection" autoStart="true" startMode="AlwaysRunning" managedRuntimeVersion="v4.0" managedPipelineMode="Integrated"> <processModel identityType="LocalSystem" setProfileEnvironment="true" /> </add> </applicationPools> <sites> <site name="Default Web Site" id="1"> <application path="/MPress.Workflow.WebQueueMessageManager" applicationPool="West Wind West Wind Web Connection" preloadEnabled="true"> <virtualDirectory path="/" physicalPath="C:\Clients\…" /> </application> </site> </sites> </system.applicationHost>On the Application Pool make sure to set the autoStart and startMode flags to true and AlwaysRunning respectively. On the site make sure to set the preloadEnabled flag to true.And that's all you should need. You can still set the web.config settings described above as well.ASP.NET as a Service?In the particular application I'm working on currently, we have a queue manager that runs as standalone service that polls a database queue and picks out jobs and processes them on several threads. The service can spin up any number of threads and keep these threads alive in the background while IIS is running doing its own thing. These threads are newly created threads, so they sit completely outside of the IIS thread pool. In order for this service to work all it needs is a long running reference that keeps it alive for the life time of the application.In this particular app there are two components that run in the background on their own threads: A scheduler that runs various scheduled tasks and handles things like picking up emails to send out outside of IIS's scope and the QueueManager. Here's what this looks like in global.asax:public class Global : System.Web.HttpApplication { private static ApplicationScheduler scheduler; private static ServiceLauncher launcher; protected void Application_Start(object sender, EventArgs e) { // Pings the service and ensures it stays alive scheduler = new ApplicationScheduler() { CheckFrequency = 600000 }; scheduler.Start(); launcher = new ServiceLauncher(); launcher.Start(); // register so shutdown is controlled HostingEnvironment.RegisterObject(launcher); }}By keeping these objects around as static instances that are set only once on startup, they survive the lifetime of the application. The code in these classes is essentially unchanged from the Windows Service code except that I could remove the various overrides required for the Windows Service interface (OnStart,OnStop,OnResume etc.). Otherwise the behavior and operation is very similar.In this application ASP.NET serves two purposes: It acts as the host for SignalR and provides the administration interface which allows remote management of the 'service'. I can start and stop the service remotely by shutting down the ApplicationScheduler very easily. I can also very easily feed stats from the queue out directly via a couple of Web requests or (as we do now) through the SignalR service.Registering a Background Object with ASP.NETNotice also the use of the HostingEnvironment.RegisterObject(). This function registers an object with ASP.NET to let it know that it's a background task that should be notified if the AppDomain shuts down. RegisterObject() requires an interface with a Stop() method that's fired and allows your code to respond to a shutdown request. Here's what the IRegisteredObject::Stop() method looks like on the launcher:public void Stop(bool immediate = false) { LogManager.Current.LogInfo("QueueManager Controller Stopped."); Controller.StopProcessing(); Controller.Dispose(); Thread.Sleep(1500); // give background threads some time HostingEnvironment.UnregisterObject(this); }Implementing IRegisterObject should help with reliability on AppDomain shutdowns. Thanks to Justin Van Patten for pointing this out to me on Twitter.RegisterObject() is not required but I would highly recommend implementing it on whatever object controls your background processing to all clean shutdowns when the AppDomain shuts down.Testing it outI'm still in the testing phase with this particular service to see if there are any side effects. But so far it doesn't look like it. With about 50 lines of code I was able to replace the Windows service startup to Web start up - everything else just worked as is. An honorable mention goes to SignalR 2.0's oWin hosting, because with the new oWin based hosting no code changes at all were required, merely a couple of configuration file settings and an assembly directive needed, to point at the SignalR startup class. Sweet!It also seems like SignalR is noticeably faster running inside of IIS compared to self-host. Startup feels faster because of the preload.Starting and Stopping the 'Service'Because the application is running as a Web Server, it's easy to have a Web interface for starting and stopping the services running inside of the service. For our queue manager the SignalR service and front monitoring app has a play and stop button for toggling the queue.If you want more administrative control and have it work more like a Windows Service you can also stop the application pool explicitly from the command line which would be equivalent to stopping and restarting a service.To start and stop from the command line you can use the IIS appCmd tool. To stop:> %windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd stop apppool /apppool.name:"Weblog"and to start> %windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd start apppool /apppool.name:"Weblog"Note that when you explicitly force the AppPool to stop running either in the UI (on the ApplicationPools page use Start/Stop) or via command line tools, the application pool will not auto-restart immediately. You have to manually start it back up.What's not to like?There are certainly a lot of benefits to running a background service in IIS, but… ASP.NET applications do have more overhead in terms of memory footprint and startup time is a little slower, but generally for server applications this is not a big deal. If the application is stable the service should fire up and stay running indefinitely. A lot of times this kind of service interface can simply be attached to an existing Web application, or if scalability requires be offloaded to its own Web server.Easier to work withBut the ultimate benefit here is that it's much easier to work with a Web app as opposed to a service. While developing I can simply turn off the auto-launch features and launch the service on demand through IIS simply by hitting a page on the site. If I want to shut down an IISRESET -stop will shut down the service easily enough. I can then attach a debugger anywhere I want and this works like any other ASP.NET application. Yes you end up on a background thread for debugging but Visual Studio handles that just fine and if you stay on a single thread this is no different than debugging any other code.SummaryUsing ASP.NET to run background service operations is probably not a super common scenario, but it probably should be something that is considered carefully when building services. Many applications have service like features and with the auto-start functionality of the Application Initialization module, it's easy to build this functionality into ASP.NET. Especially when combined with the notification features of SignalR it becomes very, very easy to create rich services that can also communicate their status easily to the outside world.Whether it's existing applications that need some background processing for scheduling related tasks, or whether you just create a separate site altogether just to host your service it's easy to do and you can leverage the same tool chain you're already using for other Web projects. If you have lots of service projects it's worth considering… give it some thought…© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2013Posted in ASP.NET  SignalR  IIS   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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• Setting up and using Bing Translate API Service for Machine Translation

  - by Rick Strahl

  Last week I spent quite a bit of time trying to set up the Bing Translate API service. I can honestly say this was one of the most screwed up developer experiences I've had in a long while - specifically related to the byzantine sign up process that Microsoft has in place. Not only is it nearly impossible to find decent documentation on the required signup process, some of the links in the docs are just plain wrong, and some of the account pages you need to access the actual account information once signed up are not linked anywhere from the administration UI. To make things even harder is the fact that the APIs changed a while back, with a completely new authentication scheme that's described and not directly linked documentation topic also made for a very frustrating search experience. It's a bummer that this is the case too, because the actual API itself is easy to use and works very well - fast and reasonably accurate (as accurate as you can expect machine translation to be). But the sign up process is a pain in the ass doubtlessly leaving many people giving up in frustration. In this post I'll try to hit all the points needed to set up to use the Bing Translate API in one place since such a document seems to be missing from Microsoft. Hopefully the API folks at Microsoft will get their shit together and actually provide this sort of info on their site… Signing Up The first step required is to create a Windows Azure MarketPlace account. Go to: https://datamarket.azure.com/ Sign in with your Windows Live Id If you don't have an account you will be taken to a registration page which you have to fill out. Follow the links and complete the registration. Once you're signed in you can start adding services. Click on the Data Link on the main page Select Microsoft Translator from the list This adds the Microsoft Bing Translator to your services. Pricing The page shows the pricing matrix and the free service which provides 2 megabytes for translations a month for free. Prices go up steeply from there. Pricing is determined by actual bytes of the result translations used. Max translations are 1000 characters so at minimum this means you get around 2000 translations a month for free. However most translations are probable much less so you can expect larger number of translations to go through. For testing or low volume translations this should be just fine. Once signed up there are no further instructions and you're left in limbo on the MS site. Register your Application Once you've created the Data association with Translator the next step is registering your application. To do this you need to access your developer account. Go to https://datamarket.azure.com/developer/applications/register Provide a ClientId, which is effectively the unique string identifier for your application (not your customer id!) Provide your name The client secret was auto-created and this becomes your 'password' For the redirect url provide any https url: https://microsoft.com works Give this application a description of your choice so you can identify it in the list of apps Now, once you've registered your application, keep track of the ClientId and ClientSecret - those are the two keys you need to authenticate before you can call the Translate API. Oddly the applications page is hidden from the Azure Portal UI. I couldn't find a direct link from anywhere on the site back to this page where I can examine my developer application keys. To find them you can go to: https://datamarket.azure.com/developer/applications You can come back here to look at your registered applications and pick up the ClientID and ClientSecret. Fun eh? But we're now ready to actually call the API and do some translating. Using the Bing Translate API The good news is that after this signup hell, using the API is pretty straightforward. To use the translation API you'll need to actually use two services: You need to call an authentication API service first, before you can call the actual translator API. These two APIs live on different domains, and the authentication API returns JSON data while the translator service returns XML. So much for consistency. Authentication The first step is authentication. The service uses oAuth authentication with a  bearer token that has to be passed to the translator API. The authentication call retrieves the oAuth token that you can then use with the translate API call. The bearer token has a short 10 minute life time, so while you can cache it for successive calls, the token can't be cached for long periods. This means for Web backend requests you typically will have to authenticate each time unless you build a more elaborate caching scheme that takes the timeout into account (perhaps using the ASP.NET Cache object). For low volume operations you can probably get away with simply calling the auth API for every translation you do. To call the Authentication API use code like this:/// /// Retrieves an oAuth authentication token to be used on the translate /// API request. The result string needs to be passed as a bearer token /// to the translate API. /// /// You can find client ID and Secret (or register a new one) at: /// https://datamarket.azure.com/developer/applications/ /// /// The client ID of your application /// The client secret or password /// public string GetBingAuthToken(string clientId = null, string clientSecret = null) { string authBaseUrl = https://datamarket.accesscontrol.windows.net/v2/OAuth2-13; if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(clientId) || string.IsNullOrEmpty(clientSecret)) { ErrorMessage = Resources.Resources.Client_Id_and_Client_Secret_must_be_provided; return null; } var postData = string.Format("grant_type=client_credentials&client_id={0}" + "&client_secret={1}" + "&scope=http://api.microsofttranslator.com", HttpUtility.UrlEncode(clientId), HttpUtility.UrlEncode(clientSecret)); // POST Auth data to the oauth API string res, token; try { var web = new WebClient(); web.Encoding = Encoding.UTF8; res = web.UploadString(authBaseUrl, postData); } catch (Exception ex) { ErrorMessage = ex.GetBaseException().Message; return null; } var ser = new JavaScriptSerializer(); var auth = ser.Deserialize<BingAuth>(res); if (auth == null) return null; token = auth.access_token; return token; } private class BingAuth { public string token_type { get; set; } public string access_token { get; set; } } This code basically takes the client id and secret and posts it at the oAuth endpoint which returns a JSON string. Here I use the JavaScript serializer to deserialize the JSON into a custom object I created just for deserialization. You can also use JSON.NET and dynamic deserialization if you are already using JSON.NET in your app in which case you don't need the extra type. In my library that houses this component I don't, so I just rely on the built in serializer. The auth method returns a long base64 encoded string which can be used as a bearer token in the translate API call. Translation Once you have the authentication token you can use it to pass to the translate API. The auth token is passed as an Authorization header and the value is prefixed with a 'Bearer ' prefix for the string. Here's what the simple Translate API call looks like:/// /// Uses the Bing API service to perform translation /// Bing can translate up to 1000 characters. /// /// Requires that you provide a CLientId and ClientSecret /// or set the configuration values for these two. /// /// More info on setup: /// http://www.west-wind.com/weblog/ /// /// Text to translate /// Two letter culture name /// Two letter culture name /// Pass an access token retrieved with GetBingAuthToken. /// If not passed the default keys from .config file are used if any /// public string TranslateBing(string text, string fromCulture, string toCulture, string accessToken = null) { string serviceUrl = "http://api.microsofttranslator.com/V2/Http.svc/Translate"; if (accessToken == null) { accessToken = GetBingAuthToken(); if (accessToken == null) return null; } string res; try { var web = new WebClient(); web.Headers.Add("Authorization", "Bearer " + accessToken); string ct = "text/plain"; string postData = string.Format("?text={0}&from={1}&to={2}&contentType={3}", HttpUtility.UrlEncode(text), fromCulture, toCulture, HttpUtility.UrlEncode(ct)); web.Encoding = Encoding.UTF8; res = web.DownloadString(serviceUrl + postData); } catch (Exception e) { ErrorMessage = e.GetBaseException().Message; return null; } // result is a single XML Element fragment var doc = new XmlDocument(); doc.LoadXml(res); return doc.DocumentElement.InnerText; } The first of this code deals with ensuring the auth token exists. You can either pass the token into the method manually or let the method automatically retrieve the auth code on its own. In my case I'm using this inside of a Web application and in that situation I simply need to re-authenticate every time as there's no convenient way to manage the lifetime of the auth cookie. The auth token is added as an Authorization HTTP header prefixed with 'Bearer ' and attached to the request. The text to translate, the from and to language codes and a result format are passed on the query string of this HTTP GET request against the Translate API. The translate API returns an XML string which contains a single element with the translated string. Using the Wrapper Methods It should be pretty obvious how to use these two methods but here are a couple of test methods that demonstrate the two usage scenarios:[TestMethod] public void TranslateBingWithAuthTest() { var translate = new TranslationServices(); string clientId = DbResourceConfiguration.Current.BingClientId; string clientSecret = DbResourceConfiguration.Current.BingClientSecret; string auth = translate.GetBingAuthToken(clientId, clientSecret); Assert.IsNotNull(auth); string text = translate.TranslateBing("Hello World we're back home!", "en", "de",auth); Assert.IsNotNull(text, translate.ErrorMessage); Console.WriteLine(text); } [TestMethod] public void TranslateBingIntegratedTest() { var translate = new TranslationServices(); string text = translate.TranslateBing("Hello World we're back home!","en","de"); Assert.IsNotNull(text, translate.ErrorMessage); Console.WriteLine(text); } Other API Methods The Translate API has a number of methods available and this one is the simplest one but probably also the most common one that translates a single string. You can find additional methods for this API here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff512419.aspx Soap and AJAX APIs are also available and documented on MSDN: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd576287.aspx These links will be your starting points for calling other methods in this API. Dual Interface I've talked about my database driven localization provider here in the past, and it's for this tool that I added the Bing localization support. Basically I have a localization administration form that allows me to translate individual strings right out of the UI, using both Google and Bing APIs: As you can see in this example, the results from Google and Bing can vary quite a bit - in this case Google is stumped while Bing actually generated a valid translation. At other times it's the other way around - it's pretty useful to see multiple translations at the same time. Here I can choose from one of the values and driectly embed them into the translated text field. Lost in Translation There you have it. As I mentioned using the API once you have all the bureaucratic crap out of the way calling the APIs is fairly straight forward and reasonably fast, even if you have to call the Auth API for every call. Hopefully this post will help out a few of you trying to navigate the Microsoft bureaucracy, at least until next time Microsoft upends everything and introduces new ways to sign up again. Until then - happy translating… Related Posts Translation method Source on Github Translating with Google Translate without Google API Keys Creating a data-driven ASP.NET Resource Provider© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2013Posted in Localization  ASP.NET  .NET   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• 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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• DevConnections Session Slides, Samples and Links

  - by Rick Strahl

  Finally coming up for air this week, after catching up with being on the road for the better part of three weeks. Here are my slides, samples and links for my four DevConnections Session two weeks ago in Vegas. I ended up doing one extra un-prepared for session on WebAPI and AJAX, as some of the speakers were either delayed or unable to make it at all to Vegas due to Sandy's mayhem. It was pretty hectic in the speaker room as Erik (our event coordinator extrodinaire) was scrambling to fill session slots with speakers :-). Surprisingly it didn't feel like the storm affected attendance drastically though, but I guess it's hard to tell without actual numbers. The conference was a lot of fun - it's been a while since I've been speaking at one of these larger conferences. I'd been taking a hiatus, and I forgot how much I enjoy actually giving talks. Preparing - well not  quite so much, especially since I ended up essentially preparing or completely rewriting for all three of these talks and I was stressing out a bit as I was sick the week before the conference and didn't get as much time to prepare as I wanted to. But - as always seems to be the case - it all worked out, but I guess those that attended have to be the judge of that… It was great to catch up with my speaker friends as well - man I feel out of touch. I got to spend a bunch of time with Dan Wahlin, Ward Bell, Julie Lerman and for about 10 minutes even got to catch up with the ever so busy Michele Bustamante. Lots of great technical discussions including a fun and heated REST controversy with Ward and Howard Dierking. There were also a number of great discussions with attendees, describing how they're using the technologies touched in my talks in live applications. I got some great ideas from some of these and I wish there would have been more opportunities for these kinds of discussions. One thing I miss at these Vegas events though is some sort of coherent event where attendees and speakers get to mingle. These Vegas conferences are just like "go to sessions, then go out and PARTY on the town" - it's Vegas after all! But I think that it's always nice to have at least one evening event where everybody gets to hang out together and trade stories and geek talk. Overall there didn't seem to be much opportunity for that beyond lunch or the small and short exhibit hall events which it seemed not many people actually went to. Anyways, a good time was had. I hope those of you that came to my sessions learned something useful. There were lots of great questions and discussions after the sessions - always appreciate hearing the real life scenarios that people deal with in relation to the abstracted scenarios in sessions. Here are the Session abstracts, a few comments and the links for downloading slides and  samples. It's not quite like being there, but I hope this stuff turns out to be useful to some of you. I'll be following up a couple of these sessions with white papers in the following weeks. Enjoy. ASP.NET Architecture: How ASP.NET Works at the Low Level Abstract:Interested in how ASP.NET works at a low level? ASP.NET is extremely powerful and flexible technology, but it's easy to forget about the core framework that underlies the higher level technologies like ASP.NET MVC, WebForms, WebPages, Web Services that we deal with on a day to day basis. The ASP.NET core drives all the higher level handlers and frameworks layered on top of it and with the core power comes some complexity in the form of a very rich object model that controls the flow of a request through the ASP.NET pipeline from Windows HTTP services down to the application level. To take full advantage of it, it helps to understand the underlying architecture and model. This session discusses the architecture of ASP.NET along with a number of useful tidbits that you can use for building and debugging your ASP.NET applications more efficiently. We look at overall architecture, how requests flow from the IIS (7 and later) Web Server to the ASP.NET runtime into HTTP handlers, modules and filters and finally into high-level handlers like MVC, Web Forms or Web API. Focus of this session is on the low-level aspects on the ASP.NET runtime, with examples that demonstrate the bootstrapping of ASP.NET, threading models, how Application Domains are used, startup bootstrapping, how configuration files are applied and how all of this relates to the applications you write either using low-level tools like HTTP handlers and modules or high-level pages or services sitting at the top of the ASP.NET runtime processing chain. Comments:I was surprised to see so many people show up for this session - especially since it was the last session on the last day and a short 1 hour session to boot. The room was packed and it was to see so many people interested the abstracts of architecture of ASP.NET beyond the immediate high level application needs. Lots of great questions in this talk as well - I only wish this session would have been the full hour 15 minutes as we just a little short of getting through the main material (didn't make it to Filters and Error handling). I haven't done this session in a long time and I had to pretty much re-figure all the system internals having to do with the ASP.NET bootstrapping in light for the changes that came with IIS 7 and later. The last time I did this talk was with IIS6, I guess it's been a while. I love doing this session, mainly because in my mind the core of ASP.NET overall is so cleanly designed to provide maximum flexibility without compromising performance that has clearly stood the test of time in the 10 years or so that .NET has been around. While there are a lot of moving parts, the technology is easy to manage once you understand the core components and the core model hasn't changed much even while the underlying architecture that drives has been almost completely revamped especially with the introduction of IIS 7 and later. Download Samples and Slides   Introduction to using jQuery with ASP.NET Abstract:In this session you'll learn how to take advantage of jQuery in your ASP.NET applications. Starting with an overview of jQuery client features via many short and fun examples, you'll find out about core features like the power of selectors for document element selection, manipulating these elements with jQuery's wrapped set methods in a browser independent way, how to hook up and handle events easily and generally apply concepts of unobtrusive JavaScript principles to client scripting. The second half of the session then delves into jQuery's AJAX features and several different ways how you can interact with ASP.NET on the server. You'll see examples of using ASP.NET MVC for serving HTML and JSON AJAX content, as well as using the new ASP.NET Web API to serve JSON and hypermedia content. You'll also see examples of client side templating/databinding with Handlebars and Knockout. Comments:This session was in a monster of a room and to my surprise it was nearly packed, given that this was a 100 level session. I can see that it's a good idea to continue to do intro sessions to jQuery as there appeared to be quite a number of folks who had not worked much with jQuery yet and who most likely could greatly benefit from using it. Seemed seemed to me the session got more than a few people excited to going if they hadn't yet :-).  Anyway I just love doing this session because it's mostly live coding and highly interactive - not many sessions that I can build things up from scratch and iterate on in an hour. jQuery makes that easy though. Resources: Slides and Code Samples Introduction to jQuery White Paper Introduction to ASP.NET Web API   Hosting the Razor Scripting Engine in Your Own Applications Abstract:The Razor Engine used in ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET Web Pages is a free-standing scripting engine that can be disassociated from these Web-specific implementations and can be used in your own applications. Razor allows for a powerful mix of code and text rendering that makes it a wonderful tool for any sort of text generation, from creating HTML output in non-Web applications, to rendering mail merge-like functionality, to code generation for developer tools and even as a plug-in scripting engine. In this session, we'll look at the components that make up the Razor engine and how you can bootstrap it in your own applications to hook up templating. You'll find out how to create custom templates and manage Razor requests that can be pre-compiled, detecting page changes and act in ways similar to a full runtime. We look at ways that you can pass data into the engine and retrieve both the rendered output as well as result values in a package that makes it easy to plug Razor into your own applications. Comments:That this session was picked was a bit of a surprise to me, since it's a bit of a niche topic. Even more of a surprise was that during the session quite a few people who attended had actually used Razor externally and were there to find out more about how the process works and how to extend it. In the session I talk a bit about a custom Razor hosting implementation (Westwind.RazorHosting) and drilled into the various components required to build a custom Razor Hosting engine and a runtime around it. This sessions was a bit of a chore to prepare for as there are lots of technical implementation details that needed to be dealt with and squeezing that into an hour 15 is a bit tight (and that aren't addressed even by some of the wrapper libraries that exist). Found out though that there's quite a bit of interest in using a templating engine outside of web applications, or often side by side with the HTML output generated by frameworks like MVC or WebForms. An extra fun part of this session was that this was my first session and when I went to set up I realized I forgot my mini-DVI to VGA adapter cable to plug into the projector in my room - 6 minutes before the session was about to start. So I ended up sprinting the half a mile + back to my room - and back at a full sprint. I managed to be back only a couple of minutes late, but when I started I was out of breath for the first 10 minutes or so, while trying to talk. Musta sounded a bit funny as I was trying to not gasp too much :-) Resources: Slides and Code Samples Westwind.RazorHosting GitHub Project Original RazorHosting Blog Post   Introduction to ASP.NET Web API for AJAX Applications Abstract:WebAPI provides a new framework for creating REST based APIs, but it can also act as a backend to typical AJAX operations. This session covers the core features of Web API as it relates to typical AJAX application development. We’ll cover content-negotiation, routing and a variety of output generation options as well as managing data updates from the client in the context of a small Single Page Application style Web app. Finally we’ll look at some of the extensibility features in WebAPI to customize and extend Web API in a number and useful useful ways. Comments:This session was a fill in for session slots not filled due MIA speakers stranded by Sandy. I had samples from my previous Web API article so decided to go ahead and put together a session from it. Given that I spent only a couple of hours preparing and putting slides together I was glad it turned out as it did - kind of just ran itself by way of the examples I guess as well as nice audience interactions and questions. Lots of interest - and also some confusion about when Web API makes sense. Both this session and the jQuery session ended up getting a ton of questions about when to use Web API vs. MVC, whether it would make sense to switch to Web API for all AJAX backend work etc. In my opinion there's no need to jump to Web API for existing applications that already have a good AJAX foundation. Web API is awesome for real externally consumed APIs and clearly defined application AJAX APIs. For typical application level AJAX calls, it's still a good idea, but ASP.NET MVC can serve most if not all of that functionality just as well. There's no need to abandon MVC (or even ASP.NET AJAX or third party AJAX backends) just to move to Web API. For new projects Web API probably makes good sense for isolation of AJAX calls, but it really depends on how the application is set up. In some cases sharing business logic between the HTML and AJAX interfaces with a single MVC API can be cleaner than creating two completely separate code paths to serve essentially the same business logic. Resources: Slides and Code Samples Sample Code on GitHub Introduction to ASP.NET Web API White Paper© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in Conferences  ASP.NET   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Creating ASP.NET MVC Negotiated Content Results

  - by Rick Strahl

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

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• MVC 2 jQuery Client-side Validation

  - by nmarun

  Well, I watched Phil Haack’s show What's New in Microsoft ASP.NET MVC 2 and was impressed about the client-side validation (starts at 17:45) that MVC 2 offers. I tried creating the same, but Phil does not show what .js files need to be included and also I was not able to find the source code for the application that he used. In order to find out the required JavaScript file references, I added all of the files in my application to the page and ran it. Of course it worked, but this is definitely not an optimum solution. By removing one at a time and testing the app, I’ve short-listed the following ones: 1: <script src="../../Scripts/jquery-1.4.1.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script 2: <script src="../../Scripts/MicrosoftAjax.js" type="text/javascript"></script> 3: <script src="../../Scripts/MicrosoftMvcValidation.js" type="text/javascript"></script> Now, a little about the feature itself. Say, I’m working with a Book application so my model will look something like: 1: public class Book 2: { 3: [HiddenInput(DisplayValue = false)] 4: public int BookId { get; set; } 5:  6: [DisplayName("Book Title")] 7: [Required(ErrorMessage = "Book title is required")] 8: [StringLength(20, ErrorMessage = "Must be under 20 characters")] 9: public string Title { get; set; } 10:  11: [Required(ErrorMessage = "Author is required")] 12: [StringLength(40, ErrorMessage = "Must be under 40 characters")] 13: public string Author { get; set; } 14:  15: public decimal Price { get; set; } 16: 17: [DisplayName("ISBN")] 18: [StringLength(13, ErrorMessage = "Must be 13 characters")] 19: public string Isbn { get; set; } 20: } This ensures that the data passed will be validated upon post. But what would happen if you add the line (along with the above mentioned .js files): 1: <% Html.EnableClientValidation(); %> Now, this acts as ‘on-the-fly’ or ‘real-time’ validation. Now, when the user types 20 characters for the Title, the error shows up right on the 21st character. Beautiful… and you do not have to create the JavaScript function(s) for this. They’re auto-magically created for you. (Doing a ‘View Source’ on the browser page shows you the JavaScript logic that goes on behind the scenes). I bumped into another post that shows how .net 4 allows us to create custom validation attributes: Dynamic Range validation in MVC 2. This will help us attach virtually any business logic to the model itself. Please see the source code I’ve worked with.

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• jqgrid with asp.net webmethod and json working with sorting, paging, searching and LINQ

  - by aimlessWonderer

  THIS WORKS! Most topics covering jqgrid and asp.net seem to relate to just receiving JSON, or working in the MVC framework, or utilizing other handlers or web services... but not many dealt with actually passing parameters back to an actual webmethod in the codebehind. Furthermore, scarce are the examples that contain successful implementation the AJAX paging, sorting, or searching along with LINQ to SQL for asp.net jqGrid. Below is a working example that may help others who need help to pass parameters to jqGrid in order to have correct paging, sorting, filtering.. it uses pieces from here and there... ================================================== First, THE JAVASCRIPT <script type="text/javascript"> $(document).ready(function() { var grid = $("#list"); $("#list").jqGrid({ // setup custom parameter names to pass to server prmNames: { search: "isSearch", nd: null, rows: "numRows", page: "page", sort: "sortField", order: "sortOrder" }, // add by default to avoid webmethod parameter conflicts postData: { searchString: '', searchField: '', searchOper: '' }, // setup ajax call to webmethod datatype: function(postdata) { mtype: "GET", $.ajax({ url: 'PageName.aspx/getGridData', type: "POST", contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8", data: JSON.stringify(postdata), dataType: "json", success: function(data, st) { if (st == "success") { var grid = jQuery("#list")[0]; grid.addJSONData(JSON.parse(data.d)); } }, error: function() { alert("Error with AJAX callback"); } }); }, // this is what jqGrid is looking for in json callback jsonReader: { root: "rows", page: "page", total: "totalpages", records: "totalrecords", cell: "cell", id: "id", //index of the column with the PK in it userdata: "userdata", repeatitems: true }, colNames: ['Id', 'First Name', 'Last Name'], colModel: [ { name: 'id', index: 'id', width: 55, search: false }, { name: 'fname', index: 'fname', width: 200, searchoptions: { sopt: ['eq', 'ne', 'cn']} }, { name: 'lname', index: 'lname', width: 200, searchoptions: { sopt: ['eq', 'ne', 'cn']} } ], rowNum: 10, rowList: [10, 20, 30], pager: jQuery("#pager"), sortname: "fname", sortorder: "asc", viewrecords: true, caption: "Grid Title Here" }).jqGrid('navGrid', '#pager', { edit: false, add: false, del: false }, {}, // default settings for edit {}, // add {}, // delete { closeOnEscape: true, closeAfterSearch: true}, //search {} ) }); </script> ================================================== Second, THE C# WEBMETHOD [WebMethod] public static string getGridData(int? numRows, int? page, string sortField, string sortOrder, bool isSearch, string searchField, string searchString, string searchOper) { string result = null; MyDataContext db = null; try { //--- retrieve the data db = new MyDataContext("my connection string path"); var query = from u in db.TBL_USERs select u; //--- determine if this is a search filter if (isSearch) { searchOper = getOperator(searchOper); // need to associate correct operator to value sent from jqGrid string whereClause = String.Format("{0} {1} {2}", searchField, searchOper, "@" + searchField); //--- associate value to field parameter Dictionary<string, object> param = new Dictionary<string, object>(); param.Add("@" + searchField, searchString); query = query.Where(whereClause, new object[1] { param }); } //--- setup calculations int pageIndex = page ?? 1; //--- current page int pageSize = numRows ?? 10; //--- number of rows to show per page int totalRecords = query.Count(); //--- number of total items from query int totalPages = (int)Math.Ceiling((decimal)totalRecords / (decimal)pageSize); //--- number of pages //--- filter dataset for paging and sorting IQueryable<TBL_USER> orderedRecords = query.OrderBy(sortfield); IEnumerable<TBL_USER> sortedRecords = orderedRecords.ToList(); if (sortorder == "desc") sortedRecords= sortedRecords.Reverse(); sortedRecords= sortedRecords .Skip((pageIndex - 1) * pageSize) //--- page the data .Take(pageSize); //--- format json var jsonData = new { totalpages = totalPages, //--- number of pages page = pageIndex, //--- current page totalrecords = totalRecords, //--- total items rows = ( from row in sortedRecords select new { i = row.USER_ID, cell = new string[] { row.USER_ID.ToString(), row.FNAME.ToString(), row.LNAME } } ).ToArray() }; result = Newtonsoft.Json.JsonConvert.SerializeObject(jsonData); } catch (Exception ex) { Debug.WriteLine(ex); } finally { if (db != null) db.Dispose(); } return result; } ================================================== Third, NECESSITIES In order to have dynamic OrderBy clauses in the LINQ, I had to pull in a class to my AppCode folder called 'Dynamic.cs'. You can retrieve the file from downloading here. You will find the file in the "DynamicQuery" folder. That file will give you the ability to utilized dynamic ORDERBY clause since we don't know what column we're filtering by except on the initial load. To serialize the JSON back from the C-sharp to the JS, I incorporated the James Newton-King JSON.net DLL found here : http://json.codeplex.com/releases/view/37810. After downloading, there is a "Newtonsoft.Json.Compact.dll" which you can add in your Bin folder as a reference Here's my USING's block using System; using System.Collections; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Web.UI.WebControls; using System.Web.Services; using System.Linq.Dynamic; For the Javascript references, I'm using the following scripts in respective order in case that helps some folks: 1) jquery-1.3.2.min.js ... 2) jquery-ui-1.7.2.custom.min.js ... 3) json.min.js ... 4) i18n/grid.locale-en.js ... 5) jquery.jqGrid.min.js For the CSS, I'm using jqGrid's necessities as well as the jQuery UI Theme: 1) jquery_theme/jquery-ui-1.7.2.custom.css ... 2) ui.jqgrid.css The key to getting the parameters from the JS to the WebMethod without having to parse an unserialized string on the backend or having to setup some JS logic to switch methods for different numbers of parameters was this block postData: { searchString: '', searchField: '', searchOper: '' }, Those parameters will still be set correctly when you actually do a search and then reset to empty when you "reset" or want the grid to not do any filtering Hope this helps some others!!!! Please reply if you find major issues or ways of refactoring or doing better that I haven't considered.

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• JsTree v1.0 - How to manipulate effectively the data from the backend to render the trees and operate correctly?

  - by Jean Paul

  Backend info: PHP 5 / MySQL URL: http://github.com/downloads/vakata/jstree/jstree_pre1.0_fix_1.zip Table structure for table discussions_tree -- CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `discussions_tree` ( `id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT, `parent_id` int(11) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0', `user_id` int(11) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0', `label` varchar(16) DEFAULT NULL, `position` bigint(20) unsigned NOT NULL DEFAULT '0', `left` bigint(20) unsigned NOT NULL DEFAULT '0', `right` bigint(20) unsigned NOT NULL DEFAULT '0', `level` bigint(20) unsigned NOT NULL DEFAULT '0', `type` varchar(255) CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci DEFAULT NULL, `h_label` varchar(16) NOT NULL DEFAULT '', `fulllabel` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL, UNIQUE KEY `uidx_3` (`id`), KEY `idx_1` (`user_id`), KEY `idx_2` (`parent_id`) ) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 AUTO_INCREMENT=8 ; /*The first element should in my understanding not even be shown*/ INSERT INTO `discussions_tree` (`id`, `parent_id`, `user_id`, `label`, `position`, `left`, `right`, `level`, `type`, `h_label`, `fulllabel`) VALUES (0, 0, 0, 'Contacts', 0, 1, 1, 0, NULL, '', NULL); INSERT INTO `discussions_tree` (`id`, `parent_id`, `user_id`, `label`, `position`, `left`, `right`, `level`, `type`, `h_label`, `fulllabel`) VALUES (1, 0, 0, 'How to Tag', 1, 2, 2, 0, 'drive', '', NULL); Front End : I've simplified the logic, it has 6 trees actually inside of a panel and that works fine $array = array("Discussions"); $id_arr = array("d"); $nid = 0; foreach ($array as $k=> $value) { $nid++; ?> <li id="<?=$value?>" class="label"> <a href='#<?=$value?>'><span> <?=$value?> </span></a> <div class="sub-menu" style="height:auto; min-height:120px; background-color:#E5E5E5" > <div class="menu" id="menu_<?=$id_arr[$k]?>" style="position:relative; margin-left:56%"> <img src="./js/jsTree/create.png" alt="" id="create" title="Create" > <img src="./js/jsTree/rename.png" alt="" id="rename" title="Rename" > <img src="./js/jsTree/remove.png" alt="" id="remove" title="Delete"> <img src="./js/jsTree/cut.png" alt="" id="cut" title="Cut" > <img src="./js/jsTree/copy.png" alt="" id="copy" title="Copy"> <img src="./js/jsTree/paste.png" alt="" id="paste" title="Paste"> </div> <div id="<?=$id_arr[$k]?>" class="jstree_container"></div> </div> </li> <!-- JavaScript neccessary for this tree : <?=$value?> --> <script type="text/javascript" > jQuery(function ($) { $("#<?=$id_arr[$k]?>").jstree({ // List of active plugins used "plugins" : [ "themes", "json_data", "ui", "crrm" , "hotkeys" , "types" , "dnd", "contextmenu"], // "ui" :{ "initially_select" : ["#node_"+ $nid ] } , "crrm": { "move": { "always_copy": "multitree" }, "input_width_limit":128 }, "core":{ "strings":{ "new_node" : "New Tag" }}, "themes": {"theme": "classic"}, "json_data" : { "ajax" : { "url" : "./js/jsTree/server-<?=$id_arr[$k]?>.php", "data" : function (n) { // the result is fed to the AJAX request `data` option return { "operation" : "get_children", "id" : n.attr ? n.attr("id").replace("node_","") : 1, "state" : "", "user_id": <?=$uid?> }; } } } , "types" : { "max_depth" : -1, "max_children" : -1, "types" : { // The default type "default" : { "hover_node":true, "valid_children" : [ "default" ], }, // The `drive` nodes "drive" : { // can have files and folders inside, but NOT other `drive` nodes "valid_children" : [ "default", "folder" ], "hover_node":true, "icon" : { "image" : "./js/jsTree/root.png" }, // those prevent the functions with the same name to be used on `drive` nodes.. internally the `before` event is used "start_drag" : false, "move_node" : false, "remove_node" : false } } }, "contextmenu" : { "items" : customMenu , "select_node": true} }) //Hover function binded to jstree .bind("hover_node.jstree", function (e, data) { $('ul li[rel="drive"], ul li[rel="default"], ul li[rel=""]').each(function(i) { $(this).find("a").attr('href', $(this).attr("id")+".php" ); }) }) //Create function binded to jstree .bind("create.jstree", function (e, data) { $.post( "./js/jsTree/server-<?=$id_arr[$k]?>.php", { "operation" : "create_node", "id" : data.rslt.parent.attr("id").replace("node_",""), "position" : data.rslt.position, "label" : data.rslt.name, "href" : data.rslt.obj.attr("href"), "type" : data.rslt.obj.attr("rel"), "user_id": <?=$uid?> }, function (r) { if(r.status) { $(data.rslt.obj).attr("id", "node_" + r.id); } else { $.jstree.rollback(data.rlbk); } } ); }) //Remove operation .bind("remove.jstree", function (e, data) { data.rslt.obj.each(function () { $.ajax({ async : false, type: 'POST', url: "./js/jsTree/server-<?=$id_arr[$k]?>.php", data : { "operation" : "remove_node", "id" : this.id.replace("node_",""), "user_id": <?=$uid?> }, success : function (r) { if(!r.status) { data.inst.refresh(); } } }); }); }) //Rename operation .bind("rename.jstree", function (e, data) { data.rslt.obj.each(function () { $.ajax({ async : true, type: 'POST', url: "./js/jsTree/server-<?=$id_arr[$k]?>.php", data : { "operation" : "rename_node", "id" : this.id.replace("node_",""), "label" : data.rslt.new_name, "user_id": <?=$uid?> }, success : function (r) { if(!r.status) { data.inst.refresh(); } } }); }); }) //Move operation .bind("move_node.jstree", function (e, data) { data.rslt.o.each(function (i) { $.ajax({ async : false, type: 'POST', url: "./js/jsTree/server-<?=$id_arr[$k]?>.php", data : { "operation" : "move_node", "id" : $(this).attr("id").replace("node_",""), "ref" : data.rslt.cr === -1 ? 1 : data.rslt.np.attr("id").replace("node_",""), "position" : data.rslt.cp + i, "label" : data.rslt.name, "copy" : data.rslt.cy ? 1 : 0, "user_id": <?=$uid?> }, success : function (r) { if(!r.status) { $.jstree.rollback(data.rlbk); } else { $(data.rslt.oc).attr("id", "node_" + r.id); if(data.rslt.cy && $(data.rslt.oc).children("UL").length) { data.inst.refresh(data.inst._get_parent(data.rslt.oc)); } } } }); }); }); // This is for the context menu to bind with operations on the right clicked node function customMenu(node) { // The default set of all items var control; var items = { createItem: { label: "Create", action: function (node) { return {createItem: this.create(node) }; } }, renameItem: { label: "Rename", action: function (node) { return {renameItem: this.rename(node) }; } }, deleteItem: { label: "Delete", action: function (node) { return {deleteItem: this.remove(node) }; }, "separator_after": true }, copyItem: { label: "Copy", action: function (node) { $(node).addClass("copy"); return {copyItem: this.copy(node) }; } }, cutItem: { label: "Cut", action: function (node) { $(node).addClass("cut"); return {cutItem: this.cut(node) }; } }, pasteItem: { label: "Paste", action: function (node) { $(node).addClass("paste"); return {pasteItem: this.paste(node) }; } } }; // We go over all the selected items as the context menu only takes action on the one that is right clicked $.jstree._reference("#<?=$id_arr[$k]?>").get_selected(false, true).each(function(index,element) { if ( $(element).attr("id") != $(node).attr("id") ) { // Let's deselect all nodes that are unrelated to the context menu -- selected but are not the one right clicked $("#<?=$id_arr[$k]?>").jstree("deselect_node", '#'+$(element).attr("id") ); } }); //if any previous click has the class for copy or cut $("#<?=$id_arr[$k]?>").find("li").each(function(index,element) { if ($(element) != $(node) ) { if( $(element).hasClass("copy") || $(element).hasClass("cut") ) control=1; } else if( $(node).hasClass("cut") || $(node).hasClass("copy")) { control=0; } }); //only remove the class for cut or copy if the current operation is to paste if($(node).hasClass("paste") ) { control=0; // Let's loop through all elements and try to find if the paste operation was done already $("#<?=$id_arr[$k]?>").find("li").each(function(index,element) { if( $(element).hasClass("copy") ) $(this).removeClass("copy"); if ( $(element).hasClass("cut") ) $(this).removeClass("cut"); if ( $(element).hasClass("paste") ) $(this).removeClass("paste"); }); } switch (control) { //Remove the paste item from the context menu case 0: switch ($(node).attr("rel")) { case "drive": delete items.renameItem; delete items.deleteItem; delete items.cutItem; delete items.copyItem; delete items.pasteItem; break; case "default": delete items.pasteItem; break; } break; //Remove the paste item from the context menu only on the node that has either copy or cut added class case 1: if( $(node).hasClass("cut") || $(node).hasClass("copy") ) { switch ($(node).attr("rel")) { case "drive": delete items.renameItem; delete items.deleteItem; delete items.cutItem; delete items.copyItem; delete items.pasteItem; break; case "default": delete items.pasteItem; break; } } else //Re-enable it on the clicked node that does not have the cut or copy class { switch ($(node).attr("rel")) { case "drive": delete items.renameItem; delete items.deleteItem; delete items.cutItem; delete items.copyItem; break; } } break; //initial state don't show the paste option on any node default: switch ($(node).attr("rel")) { case "drive": delete items.renameItem; delete items.deleteItem; delete items.cutItem; delete items.copyItem; delete items.pasteItem; break; case "default": delete items.pasteItem; break; } break; } return items; } $("#menu_<?=$id_arr[$k]?> img").hover( function () { $(this).css({'cursor':'pointer','outline':'1px double teal'}) }, function () { $(this).css({'cursor':'none','outline':'1px groove transparent'}) } ); $("#menu_<?=$id_arr[$k]?> img").click(function () { switch(this.id) { //Create only the first element case "create": if ( $.jstree._reference("#<?=$id_arr[$k]?>").get_selected(false, true).length ) { $.jstree._reference("#<?=$id_arr[$k]?>").get_selected(false, true).each(function(index,element){ switch(index) { case 0: $("#<?=$id_arr[$k]?>").jstree("create", '#'+$(element).attr("id"), null, /*{attr : {href: '#' }}*/null ,null, false); break; default: $("#<?=$id_arr[$k]?>").jstree("deselect_node", '#'+$(element).attr("id") ); break; } }); } else { $.facebox('<p class=\'p_inner error bold\'>A selection needs to be made to work with this operation'); setTimeout(function(){ $.facebox.close(); }, 2000); } break; //REMOVE case "remove": if ( $.jstree._reference("#<?=$id_arr[$k]?>").get_selected(false, true).length ) { $.jstree._reference("#<?=$id_arr[$k]?>").get_selected(false, true).each(function(index,element){ //only execute if the current node is not the first one (drive) if( $(element).attr("id") != $("div.jstree > ul > li").first().attr("id") ) { $("#<?=$id_arr[$k]?>").jstree("remove",'#'+$(element).attr("id")); } else $("#<?=$id_arr[$k]?>").jstree("deselect_node", '#'+$(element).attr("id") ); }); } else { $.facebox('<p class=\'p_inner error bold\'>A selection needs to be made to work with this operation'); setTimeout(function(){ $.facebox.close(); }, 2000); } break; //RENAME NODE only one selection case "rename": if ( $.jstree._reference("#<?=$id_arr[$k]?>").get_selected(false, true).length ) { $.jstree._reference("#<?=$id_arr[$k]?>").get_selected(false, true).each(function(index,element){ if( $(element).attr("id") != $("div.jstree > ul > li").first().attr("id") ) { switch(index) { case 0: $("#<?=$id_arr[$k]?>").jstree("rename", '#'+$(element).attr("id") ); break; default: $("#<?=$id_arr[$k]?>").jstree("deselect_node", '#'+$(element).attr("id") ); break; } } else $("#<?=$id_arr[$k]?>").jstree("deselect_node", '#'+$(element).attr("id") ); }); } else { $.facebox('<p class=\'p_inner error bold\'>A selection needs to be made to work with this operation'); setTimeout(function(){ $.facebox.close(); }, 2000); } break; //Cut case "cut": if ( $.jstree._reference("#<?=$id_arr[$k]?>").get_selected(false, true).length ) { $.jstree._reference("#<?=$id_arr[$k]?>").get_selected(false, true).each(function(index,element){ switch(index) { case 0: $("#<?=$id_arr[$k]?>").jstree("cut", '#'+$(element).attr("id")); $.facebox('<p class=\'p_inner teal\'>Operation "Cut" successfully done.<p class=\'p_inner teal bold\'>Where to place it?'); setTimeout(function(){ $.facebox.close(); $("#<?=$id_arr[$k]?>").jstree("deselect_node", '#'+$(element).attr("id")); }, 2000); break; default: $("#<?=$id_arr[$k]?>").jstree("deselect_node", '#'+$(element).attr("id") ); break; } }); } else { $.facebox('<p class=\'p_inner error bold\'>A selection needs to be made to work with this operation'); setTimeout(function(){ $.facebox.close(); }, 2000); } break; //Copy case "copy": if ( $.jstree._reference("#<?=$id_arr[$k]?>").get_selected(false, true).length ) { $.jstree._reference("#<?=$id_arr[$k]?>").get_selected(false, true).each(function(index,element){ switch(index) { case 0: $("#<?=$id_arr[$k]?>").jstree("copy", '#'+$(element).attr("id")); $.facebox('<p class=\'p_inner teal\'>Operation "Copy": Successfully done.<p class=\'p_inner teal bold\'>Where to place it?'); setTimeout(function(){ $.facebox.close(); $("#<?=$id_arr[$k]?>").jstree("deselect_node", '#'+$(element).attr("id") ); }, 2000); break; default: $("#<?=$id_arr[$k]?>").jstree("deselect_node", '#'+$(element).attr("id") ); break; } }); } else { $.facebox('<p class=\'p_inner error bold\'>A selection needs to be made to work with this operation'); setTimeout(function(){ $.facebox.close(); }, 2000); } break; case "paste": if ( $.jstree._reference("#<?=$id_arr[$k]?>").get_selected(false, true).length ) { $.jstree._reference("#<?=$id_arr[$k]?>").get_selected(false, true).each(function(index,element){ switch(index) { case 0: $("#<?=$id_arr[$k]?>").jstree("paste", '#'+$(element).attr("id")); break; default: $("#<?=$id_arr[$k]?>").jstree("deselect_node", '#'+$(element).attr("id") ); break; } }); } else { $.facebox('<p class=\'p_inner error bold\'>A selection needs to be made to work with this operation'); setTimeout(function(){ $.facebox.close(); }, 2000); } break; } }); <? } ?> server.php $path='../../../..'; require_once "$path/phpfoo/dbif.class"; require_once "$path/global.inc"; // Database config & class $db_config = array( "servername"=> $dbHost, "username" => $dbUser, "password" => $dbPW, "database" => $dbName ); if(extension_loaded("mysqli")) require_once("_inc/class._database_i.php"); else require_once("_inc/class._database.php"); //Tree class require_once("_inc/class.ctree.php"); $dbLink = new dbif(); $dbErr = $dbLink->connect($dbName,$dbUser,$dbPW,$dbHost); $jstree = new json_tree(); if(isset($_GET["reconstruct"])) { $jstree->_reconstruct(); die(); } if(isset($_GET["analyze"])) { echo $jstree->_analyze(); die(); } $table = '`discussions_tree`'; if($_REQUEST["operation"] && strpos($_REQUEST["operation"], "_") !== 0 && method_exists($jstree, $_REQUEST["operation"])) { foreach($_REQUEST as $k => $v) { switch($k) { case 'user_id': //We are passing the user_id from the $_SESSION on each request and trying to pick up the min and max value from the table that matches the 'user_id' $sql = "SELECT max(`right`) , min(`left`) FROM $table WHERE `user_id`=$v"; //If the select does not return any value then just let it be :P if (!list($right, $left)=$dbLink->getRow($sql)) { $sql = $dbLink->dbSubmit("UPDATE $table SET `user_id`=$v WHERE `id` = 1 AND `parent_id` = 0"); $sql = $dbLink->dbSubmit("UPDATE $table SET `user_id`=$v WHERE `parent_id` = 1 AND `label`='How to Tag' "); } else { $sql = $dbLink->dbSubmit("UPDATE $table SET `user_id`=$v, `right`=$right+2 WHERE `id` = 1 AND `parent_id` = 0"); $sql = $dbLink->dbSubmit("UPDATE $table SET `user_id`=$v, `left`=$left+1, `right`=$right+1 WHERE `parent_id` = 1 AND `label`='How to Tag' "); } break; } } header("HTTP/1.0 200 OK"); header('Content-type: application/json; charset=utf-8'); header("Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate"); header("Expires: Mon, 26 Jul 1997 05:00:00 GMT"); header("Pragma: no-cache"); echo $jstree->{$_REQUEST["operation"]}($_REQUEST); die(); } header("HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found"); ?> The problem: DND *(Drag and Drop) works, Delete works, Create works, Rename works, but Copy, Cut and Paste don't work

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• Struts 1 ActionForm - retrieving a collection from pure HTML

  - by Yaneeve

  Hi all I have (just like the rest) inherited some struts 1 code. I have had need to add a few more pages to this project. What I cannot figure out is how to map several distinct but similarly natured input elements to the my ActionForm. Let me elaborate. I create a new <Input> element dynamically as the user inputs more and more items (I use the YUI autocomplete form element and for each entered input I add it as an input element to my form and draw a new YUI autocomplete - complex sounding, I know) So... My form looks a bit like (... after some prettifying and some such...): <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd"> <html> <head> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> <title>My Cool App - Test Case Builder</title> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="../script/yui/fonts/fonts-min.css" /> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="../skins/myCoolApp/button/button.css" /> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="../script/yui/autocomplete/assets/skins/sam/autocomplete.css" /> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen" href="../skins/myCoolApp/testcase.css" /> <!-- YUI JAVA SCRIPTS --> <script type="text/javascript" src="../script/yui/yahoo-dom-event/yahoo-dom-event.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="../script/yui/element/element-min.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="../script/yui/button/button-min.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="../script/yui/datasource/datasource-min.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="../script/yui/autocomplete/autocomplete-min.js"></script> <!-- APP JAVA SCRIPTS --> <script type="text/javascript" src="../script/myCoolApp/myCoolApp.js" ></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="../script/myCoolApp/stack.js" ></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="../script/myCoolApp/testcase/testcase.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="../script/myCoolApp/testcase/default-data.js" ></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="../script/myCoolApp/testcase/data-structs.js" ></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="../script/myCoolApp/testcase/ui-elements.js" ></script> </head> <body class="cf010"> <div id="wrap"> <div id="header"> <div id="main-header"> COOL APP </div> </div> <div id="main-body"> <div id="content"> <div class="col main"> <div id="main"> <form method="post" id="testcaseForm" class="typea" action=""> <fieldset> <legend>Test Case Builder</legend> <div id="tk1" class="tabcontrol"> <ul class="tabs"> <li class="first active"> <a href="#"> <span>General</span> </a> </li> <li class="last"> <a href="#"> <span>Parameters</span> </a> </li> </ul> <div id="tab0" class="tc-panel"> <dl class="cls9"> <dt> <label for="scenario">Choose Scenario:</label> </dt> <dd> <input type="text" id="scenario" name="scenario" class="text" /> <span id="scenarioToggle"></span> <div class="auto-complete" id="scenarioContainer"></div> </dd> <dt> <label for="ruleID">Choose Rule ID:</label> </dt> <dd> <input type="text" id="ruleID" name="ruleID" class="text" /> <span id="ruleIDToggle"></span> <div class="auto-complete" id="ruleIDContainer"></div> </dd> <dt> <label for="Test Case Name" accesskey="t"><span class="accesskey">T</span>est Case Name:</label> </dt> <dd> <input type="text" id="testCaseName" name="testCaseName" class="text" /> </dd> </dl> </div> <div id="tab1" class="tc-panel hidden"> <div class="toolbar" id="action-bar"> <ul> <li class="first"> <a title="select all" href="#" id="btmSelectAll" class="button"> <span>select all</span> </a> </li> <li> <a title="remove row" href="#" id="btmRemove" class="button"> <span>remove row</span> </a> </li> <li> <a title="undo last" href="#" id="btmRollBack" class="button disabled"> <span>undo last</span> </a> </li> <li class="last"> <a title="accept row" href="#" id="btmAccept" class="button disabled"> <span>accept row</span> </a> </li> </ul> </div> <div id="param.list" class="gridclip"> <table id='param.list.tbl' class='grid modela' > <caption>Test Case Summary</caption> <col/><col/><col/> <thead> <tr> <th class='hl center first'> <input class='grid-select-all' type='checkbox' /> <th> <th scope='col'>Row</th> <th scope='col'>Parameter</th> <th scope='col' class='last'>Value</th> </tr> </thead> <tfoot> <tr> <th scope='row'>Total</th> <td colspan='3'>2 parameters as Test Case input</td> </tr> </tfoot> <tbody id='param.list.tbl.body'> <tr class='odd'> <td class='rowcheck center first'> <input value='param1###value1' id='cb1' name='SelectedRows' class='grid-select-row' type='checkbox'/> </td> <td class='id'>1</td> <td>param1</td> <td class='last'>value1</td> </tr> <tr class='even'> <td class='rowcheck center first'> <input value='param2###value2' id='cb1' name='SelectedRows' class='grid-select-row' type='checkbox'/> </td> <td class='id'>2</td> <td>param2</td> <td class='last'>value2</td> </tr> <tr class='odd'> <td class='rowcheck center first' /> <td class='id'><em>new</em></td> <td> <dl class='clsTable'> <dt> <input type='text' id='param' name='param' class='text paramInput' /> </dt> <dd> <span id='paramToggle' /> </dd> <div class='auto-complete' id='paramContainer' /> </dl> </td> <td class='last'> <dl class='clsTable'> <dt> <input type='text' id='value' name='value' class='text valueInput' /> </dt> </dl> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </div> </div> </div> <!-- tabcontrol --> </fieldset> <div class="submit-box"> <input type="submit" name="formRun" id="formRun" class="form-save" value="Execute" accesskey="x" title="Run: Press Alt + [Shift] + x" /> <input type="submit" name="formSave" id="formSave" value="Save" accesskey="s" title="Save: Press Alt + [Shift] + s" /> <input type="submit" name="formLoad" id="formLoad" value="Load" accesskey="l" title="Load: Press Alt + [Shift] + l" /> <input type="submit" name="formCancel" id="formCancel" class="form-cancel" value="Cancel" accesskey="c" title="Cancel: Press Alt + [Shift] + c" /> </div> </form> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </body> </html> As you can see the following is pretty much a duplicate: <tr class='odd'> <td class='rowcheck center first'> <input value='param1###value1' id='cb1' name='SelectedRows' class='grid-select-row' type='checkbox'/> </td> <td class='id'>1</td> <td>param1</td> <td class='last'>value1</td> </tr> <tr class='even'> <td class='rowcheck center first'> <input value='param2###value2' id='cb1' name='SelectedRows' class='grid-select-row' type='checkbox'/> </td> <td class='id'>2</td> <td>param2</td> <td class='last'>value2</td> </tr> The relevant part of my stuts-config.xml file is: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!DOCTYPE struts-config PUBLIC "-//Apache Software Foundation//DTD Struts Configuration 1.2//EN" "http://struts.apache.org/dtds/struts-config_1_2.dtd"> <struts-config> <data-sources /> <form-beans> <form-bean name="TestCaseForm" type="com.blahblah.mycoolapp.forms.TestCaseForm" /> </form-beans> <action-mappings> <action path="/pages/SaveTestCase" name="TestCaseForm" type="org.springframework.web.struts.DelegatingActionProxy" scope="request"> </action> </action-mappings> <message-resources parameter="MessageResources" /> </struts-config> I also use spring 2.56 (The relevant part being): <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-2.5.xsd"> <bean name="/pages/SaveTestCase" class="com.blahblah.mycoolapp.actions.TestCaseBuilderSaveAction" /> </beans> My Java ActionForm class (from what I had learned off the net) is: package com.blahblah.mycoolapp.forms; import java.util.ArrayList; import java.util.List; import org.apache.struts.action.ActionForm; public class TestCaseForm extends ActionForm { private static final long serialVersionUID = 2352146257739099766L; private String scenario; private String ruleID; private String testCaseName; private List<String> SelectedRows = new ArrayList<String>() ; public String getScenario() { return scenario; } public void setScenario(String scenario) { this.scenario = scenario; } public String getRuleID() { return ruleID; } public void setRuleID(String ruleID) { this.ruleID = ruleID; } public String getTestCaseName() { return testCaseName; } public void setTestCaseName(String testCaseName) { this.testCaseName = testCaseName; } public List<String> getSelectedRows() { return SelectedRows; } public void setSelectedRows(int index, String value) { this.SelectedRows.add(value); } } The question is why do I get an empty SelectedRows in my TestCaseBuilderSave Action? Thanks all who have the patience to read such a long question... and (hopefully) thanks to all you potential saviors :)

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• Facebook Connect - Security Warning

  - by Skoder

  Hey all, I'm using Facebook connect using FBML tags. Although it works, when I run the site in Internet Explorer, a security warning comes up similar to this: The current webpage is trying to open a site in your Trusted sites list. Do you want to allow this? Current site: http://www.facebook.com Trusted site: http://localhost" My Facebook code involves these two: http://static.ak.connect.facebook.com/js/api_lib/v0.4/FeatureLoader.js.php http://static.ak.connect.facebook.com/js/api_lib/v0.4/XdCommReceiver.js I tried changing them to HTTPS: https://ssl.connect... but the errors still appear. None of my pages use SSL. I've also tried turning facebook-logo='false' but still no luck. Any ideas on how to fix this? Although it's not show-stopping, it doesn't give a good impression to users who may be feel it insecure. Thanks

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• JQuery validation without requiring MS scripts in asp.net mvc2 project

  - by Jim Geurts

  Is it possible to use the new client side validation features of asp.net MVC 2 without having to use the MS scripts (MicrosoftAjax.js, MicrosoftMvcAjax.js, MicrosoftMvcValidation.js)? I use JQuery throughout my application; JQuery has a great plugin for validation and I don't really want to force my users to load MS scripts just for validation. Is this possible? If so, any suggestions for how to accomplish it are appreciated.

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• jqgrid sample using array data, what am I missing

  - by Dennis

  Hello. I'm new in jqgrid, I'm just trying thes example to work. I have a html file only, nothing more. When I ran this file, array data is not showing. What am I missing here? Thanks in advance. <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> <title>jqGrid Demos</title> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen" href="lib/jquery-ui-1.7.1.custom.css" /> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen" href="lib/ui.jqgrid.css" /> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen" href="lib/ui.multiselect.css" /> <style type="text/css"> html, body { margin: 0; /* Remove body margin/padding */ padding: 0; overflow: hidden; /* Remove scroll bars on browser window */ font-size: 75%; } /*Splitter style */ #LeftPane { /* optional, initial splitbar position */ overflow: auto; } /* * Right-side element of the splitter. */ #RightPane { padding: 2px; overflow: auto; } .ui-tabs-nav li {position: relative;} .ui-tabs-selected a span {padding-right: 10px;} .ui-tabs-close {display: none;position: absolute;top: 3px;right: 0px;z-index: 800;width: 16px;height: 14px;font-size: 10px; font-style: normal;cursor: pointer;} .ui-tabs-selected .ui-tabs-close {display: block;} .ui-layout-west .ui-jqgrid tr.jqgrow td { border-bottom: 0px none;} .ui-datepicker {z-index:1200;} </style> <script src="lib/jquery-1.4.2.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="lib/jquery-ui-1.7.2.custom.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="lib/jquery.layout.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="lib/grid.locale-en.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="lib/jquery.jqGrid.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="lib/jquery.tablednd.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="lib/jquery.contextmenu.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="lib/ui.multiselect.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> // We use a document ready jquery function. jQuery(document).ready(function(){ jQuery("#list").jqGrid({ datatype: "local", height: 250, colNames:['Inv No','Date', 'Client', 'Amount','Tax','Total', 'Notes'], colModel:[ {name:'id',index:'id', width:60, sorttype:"int"}, {name:'invdate',index:'invdate', width:90, sorttype:"date"}, {name:'name',index:'name', width:100}, {name:'amount',index:'amount', width:80, align:"right",sorttype:"float"}, {name:'tax',index:'tax', width:80, align:"right",sorttype:"float"}, {name:'total',index:'total', width:80,align:"right",sorttype:"float"}, {name:'note',index:'note', width:150, sortable:false} ], pager: '#pager', rowNum:10, rowList:[10,20,30], sortname: 'id', sortorder: 'desc', viewrecords: true, multiselect: true, imgpath: "lib/basic/images", caption: "Manipulating Array Data" }); }); var mydata = [ {id:"1",invdate:"2007-10-01",name:"test",note:"note",amount:"200.00",tax:"10.00",total:"210.00"}, {id:"2",invdate:"2007-10-02",name:"test2",note:"note2",amount:"300.00",tax:"20.00",total:"320.00"}, {id:"3",invdate:"2007-09-01",name:"test3",note:"note3",amount:"400.00",tax:"30.00",total:"430.00"}, {id:"4",invdate:"2007-10-04",name:"test",note:"note",amount:"200.00",tax:"10.00",total:"210.00"}, {id:"5",invdate:"2007-10-05",name:"test2",note:"note2",amount:"300.00",tax:"20.00",total:"320.00"}, {id:"6",invdate:"2007-09-06",name:"test3",note:"note3",amount:"400.00",tax:"30.00",total:"430.00"}, {id:"7",invdate:"2007-10-04",name:"test",note:"note",amount:"200.00",tax:"10.00",total:"210.00"}, {id:"8",invdate:"2007-10-03",name:"test2",note:"note2",amount:"300.00",tax:"20.00",total:"320.00"}, {id:"9",invdate:"2007-09-01",name:"test3",note:"note3",amount:"400.00",tax:"30.00",total:"430.00"} ]; for(var i=0;i<=mydata.length;i++) jQuery("#list").jqGrid('addRowData',i + 1, mydata1[i]); </script> </head> <body> <table id="list" class="scroll"></table> <div id="pager" class="scroll" style="text-align:center;"></div> </body>

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• Open flash chart not working

  - by Axel

  I'm trying to implement Open Flash Chart in my website but it doesn't work. The chart just start loading for a second and the loader animation disappear and nothing happening (Only a black swf area). i've downloaded the latest version which is 2 and here is my folders scheme: // ROOT // ? JS ? open-flash-chart ? php-ofc-library - open-flash-chart.swf - mydata.php - mypage.html This is mydata.php content: {"elements":[{"type":"bar","values":[1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]}],"title":{"text":"Wed Apr 21 2010"}} This is mypage.html content: <script type="text/javascript" src="js/swfobject.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> swfobject.embedSWF("open-flash-chart.swf", "my_chart", "550", "200","9.0.0", expressInstall.swf", {"data-file":"mydata.php"} ); </script> <div id="my_chart"></div> The JS folder contain swfobject and the open-flash-chart folder contain the action script classes of the chart Is there any mistake i did? Thanks

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• How to make an inner shadow effect on big font ?

  - by Relax

  I want to make the effect as demonstrate on this site http://dropshadow.webvex.limebits.com/ with arguments - left:0 top:0 blur:1 opacity:1 examples:engraved font:sans serif I tried #333333 -1px -1px but seems not enough to make an inner shadow on such big font, it may be much more complex than i thought? And worse is i'm using Cufon to replace the font but Cufon doesn't support blur of text-shadow I guess maybe i should use JS to make this effect, but i doubt JS will work together with Cufon, or JS font replacement together with JS shadow maker? Any ideas?

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