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  • Imagemagick convert creates monochrome output only

    - by rumtscho
    I have a book scan as a pdf. When I open it with Adobe Reader, it looks like grayscale. When I open it with IrfanView, it looks like grayscale, and the Information option tells me that the image is actually 24 bit (I don't know if this is the real bit depth of the image embedded in the pdf or if IrfanView assigns the maximal depth when opening a pdf as image). I want to OCR the scan with OmniPage SE. It doesn't read PDF, so I decided to use ImageMagick to convert the file to PNG first. But no matter what I try, the output is always monochrome and practically unreadable. I tried different conversion lines, with different depth, density and resize values, but it didn't help. What you see was made with the options convert testfile.pdf -density 600x600 -depth 8 PNG:testfile.png. Any idea what causes the problem? Edit: To make it clear, the output looks like this for any value of -density, -depth and -resize I have tried. It also looks like that when I use no options at all, as in convert testfile.pdf PNG:testfile.png.

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  • What could cause Windows 7 to hang whenever I install something?

    - by Larsenal
    I've had this problem when installing several different programs (iTunes, Adobe Acrobat Reader just to name two). Regardless of what the program is, the install usually gets at least 90% through the process and then just hangs. I don't see anything bad in the event log besides the following (and this didn't occur exactly at the time of install): wuaueng.dll (964) SUS20ClientDataStore: A request to write to the file "C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\DataStore\DataStore.edb" at offset 16252928 (0x0000000000f80000) for 32768 (0x00008000) bytes succeeded, but took an abnormally long time (185 seconds) to be serviced by the OS. This problem is likely due to faulty hardware. Please contact your hardware vendor for further assistance diagnosing the problem. I've run check disk and it passed. I've had some problems with BIOS settings in the past with Windows 7, but I'm not sure whether that could be related. Update... I also see this error in the event log: Volume Shadow Copy Service error: Unexpected error querying for the IVssWriterCallback interface. hr = 0x80070005, Access is denied. . This is often caused by incorrect security settings in either the writer or requestor process. Operation: Gathering Writer Data Context: Writer Class Id: {e8132975-6f93-4464-a53e-1050253ae220} Writer Name: System Writer Writer Instance ID: {33493f01-ac1b-4efb-a378-3053ab03100d} One last wrinkle.... I see "Previous versions" of c:\ which look like they correspond to the time of attempted installation.

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  • Print over remote CUPS server, but just show a subset of the printers.

    - by jdm
    I'd like to print from my Ubuntu laptop (karmic) to some networked printers. Our organisation uses a CUPS server with several hundred printers. What I know I can do is: CUPS_SERVER=printers.company.com acroread document.pdf and then Adobe Reader shows me all available printers to select from. However, it takes a couple of minutes to display the large list, which is really annoying. (The desktop PCs here suffer from this, too.) The other option is to add a new printer with an address like ipp://printers.company.com/printer/bldg1_hp8150 (to the Ubuntu printer configuration = local CUPS server). However, it asks me for a driver. I don't want to / can't always specify a driver, since some printers don't appear in the list. I'd like to let the remote CUPS server handle the driver part (like it does when i set CUPS_SERVER), and do no more preprocessing/"driver stuff" on my side. The ideal thing would be if I could somehow add the remote printer list to my local cups server, and apply a filter, so that it would just display printers a la bldg1_*. This feature was available in KDE3.?, but I can't find something similar in Ubuntu/Gnome. Any suggestions?

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  • Google 2-step verification: Should my phone know my password? [closed]

    - by Sir Code-A-Lot
    Hi, Just enabled 2-step verification for my Google account. I have installed Google Authenticator on my Android phone, and I set up an application specific password for the Google account associated on my phone. This works great when just using installed apps like Gmail, Calendar and Google Reader. But if I want to access Google Docs, Google Tasks or any other website that requires a Google login, I don't seem to be able to use a application specific password. I have to use my real password and then use Google Authenticator to make a code for the next step. This means if my phone is stolen, revoking the password to my phone is pointless. The phone have already been verified, and all that is needed is my password, which the phones browser will have remembered. I realize that I can take measures to ensure the phones browser doesn't remember my password, but that's just not convenient at all. Am I missing something, or is there no elegant solution to this? Should I just let my phone know my real password? As I see it, being able to login with application specific passwords on websites (which apparently isn't possible) is the only way I can revoke my phones access in a meaningful way.

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  • need to bring back win 7

    - by user290513
    I like making music and playing games and occasionally do some Photoshop. I had a windows 8 computer but my mouse pointer always got stuck, so to try out something new I installed Ubuntu. here is how I installed it: Went to advanced statup options clicked on "use a device" after plugging in my bootable USB with Ubuntu replaced my windows 8 and installed Ubuntu 14.04 LTS I hope I did it correctly though. So after a few months I could've really find out a good Audio Production (not LMMS, because I use Stagelight) software nor something that could be familiar to the UI of Photoshop. So I decided to bring back Windows, but because of the bad experience of 8 I thought about bringing back win 7 So I used an app named WinUSB to make my bootable USB drive after formatting it to NTFS in GParted But when I go to my grub menu, my USB doesn't show up and my PC being a UEFI device. I don't know how to get to the bios of my device. Can somebody tell how to install Windows 7 completely and deleting Ubuntu or at least give me a link to a tutorial. I have a netbook: it is an Acer Aspire One 725. I'm fine with using commands in terminal and another thing that my laptop doesn't have a CD drive or reader, I can't put a CD inside

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  • Printing a PDF results in garbled text (sometimes)

    - by Scott Whitlock
    We have a system that renders a report as a PDF, and displays it in the browser for the user. In the browser, the document always appears to display fine, but when printed on one machine, it sometimes changes some of the data in the report to seemingly random characters. Here are some examples of the strings it inserts: Ebuf; Bvhvt ul1: -!3122 Ti jqqf e!Wjb; Nfttf ohf s!Tf swjdf Additionally, the inter-character spacing is weird. It sometimes writes characters overlapping each other. I noticed some repetition in the garbled text, so I typed a few of them into Google, and surprisingly got a lot of hits. Here is the string I searched for: pdf cjmp ebuf nftf up! The Google search summaries contain the garbled text. However, when I click on those links in Google, I get perfectly readable PDF files. It's as if Google's PDF crawler has the same bug. Has anyone figured this out? Is this an Acrobat Reader bug?

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  • How does one debug Windows network share authentication?

    - by ajs410
    I have machine0 with 32-bit Vista, logged in as a domain user, running a VMWare image of 32-bit Vista, logged in as a local user, with the VM set to bridge the network. From an administrator account (called admin) within the VM, I try to access the hidden C$ share on machine0 (i.e. start - run - "\\machine0\C$\"). I get no prompts for credentials. Worse, machine0 has an admin account (different password), and machine0\admin gets locked out when VM\admin tries to access the network share. I get a message several seconds later, which feels like a cached credential failure leading to the lockout. I have checked several places for cached credentials; net use, Stored Usernames and Passwords, mapped shares. I rebooted (both machine0 and VM) to make sure the session was clear of any cached credentials. I can force net use to use my domain credentials when accessing machine0, and then I can see the share. I can also see shares that do not require credentials. I decided to try another machine on the network (machine1), 64-bit Vista, local user. This machine has no lockout policy, and after several seconds (feels like failed cached credentials again) it prompts me for credentials. After I enter them, it re-prompts me, saying "logon unsuccessful" (tried my domain credentials, and also machine1\admin's). Which is bogus, because I proceed to log on with remote desktop using the machine1\admin credentials. I have tried this on another machine (machine2, 64-bit Vista), running a copy of the same 32-bit VM, and I don't remember having this problem. machine0 has a fingerprint reader...could that try storing passwords and interfere? Are there any places I'm missing where there could be cached credentials? Is there a way to see what credentials are flying around when I try to connect?

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  • Why does the Mac OS X firewall dialog recurringly pop-up and disappear by itself (without letting me

    - by Chris W. Rea
    From time to time, I'll be on my Macbook using a program that accesses the network – whether Firefox, or Sony's Reader Library – really, it seems like it could happen with any program that accesses the network – and for no reason that I can discern so far (that is, it happens intermittently) the OS X firewall dialog pops up to ask me the question: Except it doesn't actually let me click anything before it disappears! That is: the dialog pops up, ... then goes away by itself a second later, then pops up again, ... then goes away by itself a second later, etc. It happens a few times before stopping. It wouldn't be so maddening to be interrupted if I could just be allowed to click "Allow" and make the darn thing go away for good. In Security preferences I have the firewall turned "On", and I would like to keep it that way. Has anybody seen this problem, found the source, and figured out a solution or workaround? Thank you.

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  • Security Token for Mac/Linux/Windows, self-managed, pref. open source?

    - by DevelopersDevelopersDevelopers
    I'm looking to buy an evaluation security token (combined smart card/usb reader) for my business that works on: Windows 7 x64 OS X 10.6.x x64 Ubuntu Linux (64 or 32 bit, 10.04 or 10.10, I can bend based on possible tokens) Functionality I need is: Login authentication Authentication for whole-disk encryption (in Linux/Windows, Mac is flexible here) Signing/encryption using PGP and x.509 certificates RSA-2048 key-capable (1024 not good enough.) I can manage the certificates myself Open source middleware/drivers (not necessarily FOSS, just source available. Can flex on this, I just want to be able to audit the code. OpenSC-compatible on Linux would be great.) Is there any token that can do all of this? Or would I need multiple ones to accomplish this? Or do I need to look at smart cards and readers to get this? I have been researching this for a while and have had a heck of a time even getting accurate information about products. Also, I am in the USA, and it appears that EU export laws prevent me from buying from there, so those vendors are out. I was looking at Feitian tokens from Gooze, but since they are in France I can't buy.

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  • can't change wallpaper real time regedit commands

    - by itagomo
    i'm a first time 'SuperUser' poster .. what i want is to programatically change Desktop Wallpaper every few hours .. i'm using a batch file (.bat) and don't want to use other languages or programs, just the pre-installed stuffs with Windows XP .. i've already made my script that will modify values in the Registry reg add "HKCU\Control Panel\Desktop" /v Wallpaper /d "C:\Pictures\picture1.jpg" but it's not taking effect real time even with this command: RUNDLL32.EXE USER32.DLL,UpdatePerUserSystemParameters ,1 ,True need to reboot first to take effect. if i'm going to use Display Properties, it'll show at once. what i've noticed is that changes will take effect real time if it's a .bmp file and not for .jpg images. Second option is to convert JPG to 24-bit BMP files (to look exactly the same, but will triple the file size), but i'm hoping a better way .. i've already googled things but no avail.. i hope you (the helpful reader) can post any .bat or even vbs script to change Desktop Wallpaper instantly with JPG pictures .. hoping there's an answer without installing other apps or scripts ..

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  • Can't login after upgrading to Windows 8.1

    - by flatline
    This afternoon, I upgraded my work laptop from Windows 8 to Windows 8.1. I had previously had a local account, but after the upgrade, it prompted me to enter my windows account credentials, which I had set up beforehand at some point. I entered my password and clicked next, went through another screen or two, grew tired with the process, and clicked whatever the equivalent button to "skip this step" that I was presented with. Now I can't log in. Not with my (previous) local account password, and not with my windows account password. It's a Dell with biometric identification, which I had set up previously, so I put my finger on the reader and it complained that I couldn't use that fingerprint because I had changed my password. But, I hadn't wittingly changed my password at all. I assume that what happened is that, by entering my credentials, my local account was tied to the Windows account, but because I cancelled the process partway through, something went wrong and I cannot log in. A few questions: 1) How do I log in with my windows account credentials? Should LOCALMACHINENAME\username, which was my previous login method, still work for the Windows account? When I booted to safemode it prompted me with WindowsAccount\myemailaddress, which allowed me to login there, but the regular login doesn't accept the '@' symbol. 2) Is there any way to make that account local-only again? I can't find any way of doing it. 3) I managed to enable the local administrator account and get back into the box; failing all else, is there a quick way to migrate my old profile over to a new user?

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  • System requirements for running windows 8 (basic office use) in virtualbox (ubuntu as host os)

    - by Tor Thommesen
    I want to run windows 8 as a guest os with virtualbox on some thinkpad (haven't bought one yet) running Ubuntu 12.04. Apart from virtualizing windows 8 (mostly just for use with the office suite app) my needs are very modest, I don't need much more than emacs and a browser. What I'd like to know is what kind of specs will be necessary to run windows 8 well as a vm, using the office apps. It would be a shame to waste money on overpowered hardware. Are there any official guidelines from oracle or windows on this? Would this lenovo x220, for example, be sufficiently strong? The specs below were taken from this review. Intel Core i5-2520M dual-core processor (2.5GHz, 3MB cache, 3.2GHz Turbo frequency) Windows 7 Professional (64-bit) 12.5-inch Premium HD (1366 x 768) LED Backlit Display (IPS) Intel Integrated HD Graphics 4GB DDR3 (1333MHz) 320GB Hitachi Travelstar hard drive (Z7K320) Intel Centrino Advanced-N 6205 (Taylor Peak) 2x2 AGN wireless card Intel 82579LM Gigabit Ethernet 720p High Definition webcam Fingerprint reader 6-cell battery (63Wh) and optional slice battery (65Wh) Dimensions: 12 (L) x 8.2 (W) x 0.5-1.5 (H) inches with 6-cell battery Weight: 3.5 pounds with 6-cell battery 4.875 pounds with 6-cell battery and optional external battery slice Price as configured: $1,299.00 (starting at $979.00)

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  • Retrieving Json Array

    - by Rahul Varma
    Hi, I am trying to retrieve the values from the following url: http://rentopoly.com/ajax.php?query=Bo. I want to get the values of all the suggestions to be displayed in a list view one by one. This is how i want to do... public class AlertsAdd { public ArrayList<JSONObject> retrieveJSONArray(String urlString) { String result = queryRESTurl(urlString); ArrayList<JSONObject> ALERTS = new ArrayList<JSONObject>(); if (result != null) { try { JSONObject json = new JSONObject(result); JSONArray alertsArray = json.getJSONArray("suggestions"); for (int a = 0; a < alertsArray.length(); a++) { JSONObject alertitem = alertsArray.getJSONObject(a); ALERTS.add(alertitem); } return ALERTS; } catch (JSONException e) { Log.e("JSON", "There was an error parsing the JSON", e); } } JSONObject myObject = new JSONObject(); try { myObject.put("suggestions",myObject.getJSONArray("suggestions")); ALERTS.add(myObject); } catch (JSONException e1) { Log.e("JSON", "There was an error creating the JSONObject", e1); } return ALERTS; } private String queryRESTurl(String url) { // URLConnection connection; HttpClient httpclient = new DefaultHttpClient(); HttpGet httpget = new HttpGet(url); HttpResponse response; try { response = httpclient.execute(httpget); HttpEntity entity = response.getEntity(); if (entity != null) { InputStream instream = entity.getContent(); String result = convertStreamToString(instream); instream.close(); return result; } } catch (ClientProtocolException e) { Log.e("REST", "There was a protocol based error", e); } catch (IOException e) { Log.e("REST", "There was an IO Stream related error", e); } return null; } /** * To convert the InputStream to String we use the * BufferedReader.readLine() method. We iterate until the BufferedReader * return null which means there's no more data to read. Each line will * appended to a StringBuilder and returned as String. */ private String convertStreamToString(InputStream is) { BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(is)); StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder(); String line = null; try { while ((line = reader.readLine()) != null) { sb.append(line + "\n"); } } catch (IOException e) { e.printStackTrace(); } finally { try { is.close(); } catch (IOException e) { e.printStackTrace(); } } return sb.toString(); } } Here's the adapter code... public class AlertsAdapter extends ArrayAdapter<JSONObject> { public AlertsAdapter(Activity activity, List<JSONObject> alerts) { super(activity, 0, alerts); } @Override public View getView(int position, View convertView, ViewGroup parent) { Activity activity = (Activity) getContext(); LayoutInflater inflater = activity.getLayoutInflater(); View rowView = inflater.inflate(R.layout.list_text, null); JSONObject imageAndText = getItem(position); TextView textView = (TextView) rowView.findViewById(R.id.last_build_stat); try { textView.setText((String)imageAndText.get("suggestions")); } catch (JSONException e) { textView.setText("JSON Exception"); } return rowView; } } Here's the logcat... 04-30 13:09:46.656: INFO/ActivityManager(584): Starting activity: Intent { act=android.intent.action.MAIN cat=[android.intent.category.LAUNCHER] flg=0x10000000 cmp=com.WorldToyota/.Alerts } 04-30 13:09:50.417: ERROR/JSON(924): There was an error parsing the JSON 04-30 13:09:50.417: ERROR/JSON(924): org.json.JSONException: JSONArray[0] is not a JSONObject. 04-30 13:09:50.417: ERROR/JSON(924): at org.json.JSONArray.getJSONObject(JSONArray.java:268) 04-30 13:09:50.417: ERROR/JSON(924): at com.WorldToyota.AlertsAdd.retrieveJSONArray(AlertsAdd.java:30) 04-30 13:09:50.417: ERROR/JSON(924): at com.WorldToyota.Alerts.onCreate(Alerts.java:20) 04-30 13:09:50.417: ERROR/JSON(924): at android.app.Instrumentation.callActivityOnCreate(Instrumentation.java:1123) 04-30 13:09:50.417: ERROR/JSON(924): at android.app.ActivityThread.performLaunchActivity(ActivityThread.java:2364) 04-30 13:09:50.417: ERROR/JSON(924): at android.app.ActivityThread.handleLaunchActivity(ActivityThread.java:2417) 04-30 13:09:50.417: ERROR/JSON(924): at android.app.ActivityThread.access$2100(ActivityThread.java:116) 04-30 13:09:50.417: ERROR/JSON(924): at android.app.ActivityThread$H.handleMessage(ActivityThread.java:1794) 04-30 13:09:50.417: ERROR/JSON(924): at android.os.Handler.dispatchMessage(Handler.java:99) 04-30 13:09:50.417: ERROR/JSON(924): at android.os.Looper.loop(Looper.java:123) 04-30 13:09:50.417: ERROR/JSON(924): at android.app.ActivityThread.main(ActivityThread.java:4203) 04-30 13:09:50.417: ERROR/JSON(924): at java.lang.reflect.Method.invokeNative(Native Method) 04-30 13:09:50.417: ERROR/JSON(924): at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:521) 04-30 13:09:50.417: ERROR/JSON(924): at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit$MethodAndArgsCaller.run(ZygoteInit.java:791) 04-30 13:09:50.417: ERROR/JSON(924): at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit.main(ZygoteInit.java:549) 04-30 13:09:50.417: ERROR/JSON(924): at dalvik.system.NativeStart.main(Native Method) 04-30 13:09:50.688: ERROR/JSON(924): There was an error creating the JSONObject 04-30 13:09:50.688: ERROR/JSON(924): org.json.JSONException: JSONObject["suggestions"] not found. 04-30 13:09:50.688: ERROR/JSON(924): at org.json.JSONObject.get(JSONObject.java:287) 04-30 13:09:50.688: ERROR/JSON(924): at org.json.JSONObject.getJSONArray(JSONObject.java:362) 04-30 13:09:50.688: ERROR/JSON(924): at com.WorldToyota.AlertsAdd.retrieveJSONArray(AlertsAdd.java:41) 04-30 13:09:50.688: ERROR/JSON(924): at com.WorldToyota.Alerts.onCreate(Alerts.java:20) 04-30 13:09:50.688: ERROR/JSON(924): at android.app.Instrumentation.callActivityOnCreate(Instrumentation.java:1123) 04-30 13:09:50.688: ERROR/JSON(924): at android.app.ActivityThread.performLaunchActivity(ActivityThread.java:2364) 04-30 13:09:50.688: ERROR/JSON(924): at android.app.ActivityThread.handleLaunchActivity(ActivityThread.java:2417) 04-30 13:09:50.688: ERROR/JSON(924): at android.app.ActivityThread.access$2100(ActivityThread.java:116) 04-30 13:09:50.688: ERROR/JSON(924): at android.app.ActivityThread$H.handleMessage(ActivityThread.java:1794) 04-30 13:09:50.688: ERROR/JSON(924): at android.os.Handler.dispatchMessage(Handler.java:99) 04-30 13:09:50.688: ERROR/JSON(924): at android.os.Looper.loop(Looper.java:123) 04-30 13:09:50.688: ERROR/JSON(924): at android.app.ActivityThread.main(ActivityThread.java:4203) 04-30 13:09:50.688: ERROR/JSON(924): at java.lang.reflect.Method.invokeNative(Native Method) 04-30 13:09:50.688: ERROR/JSON(924): at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:521) 04-30 13:09:50.688: ERROR/JSON(924): at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit$MethodAndArgsCaller.run(ZygoteInit.java:791) 04-30 13:09:50.688: ERROR/JSON(924): at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit.main(ZygoteInit.java:549) 04-30 13:09:50.688: ERROR/JSON(924): at dalvik.system.NativeStart.main(Native Method) Plz help me parsing this script and displaying the values in list format....

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  • Solving embarassingly parallel problems using Python multiprocessing

    - by gotgenes
    How does one use multiprocessing to tackle embarrassingly parallel problems? Embarassingly parallel problems typically consist of three basic parts: Read input data (from a file, database, tcp connection, etc.). Run calculations on the input data, where each calculation is independent of any other calculation. Write results of calculations (to a file, database, tcp connection, etc.). We can parallelize the program in two dimensions: Part 2 can run on multiple cores, since each calculation is independent; order of processing doesn't matter. Each part can run independently. Part 1 can place data on an input queue, part 2 can pull data off the input queue and put results onto an output queue, and part 3 can pull results off the output queue and write them out. This seems a most basic pattern in concurrent programming, but I am still lost in trying to solve it, so let's write a canonical example to illustrate how this is done using multiprocessing. Here is the example problem: Given a CSV file with rows of integers as input, compute their sums. Separate the problem into three parts, which can all run in parallel: Process the input file into raw data (lists/iterables of integers) Calculate the sums of the data, in parallel Output the sums Below is traditional, single-process bound Python program which solves these three tasks: #!/usr/bin/env python # -*- coding: UTF-8 -*- # basicsums.py """A program that reads integer values from a CSV file and writes out their sums to another CSV file. """ import csv import optparse import sys def make_cli_parser(): """Make the command line interface parser.""" usage = "\n\n".join(["python %prog INPUT_CSV OUTPUT_CSV", __doc__, """ ARGUMENTS: INPUT_CSV: an input CSV file with rows of numbers OUTPUT_CSV: an output file that will contain the sums\ """]) cli_parser = optparse.OptionParser(usage) return cli_parser def parse_input_csv(csvfile): """Parses the input CSV and yields tuples with the index of the row as the first element, and the integers of the row as the second element. The index is zero-index based. :Parameters: - `csvfile`: a `csv.reader` instance """ for i, row in enumerate(csvfile): row = [int(entry) for entry in row] yield i, row def sum_rows(rows): """Yields a tuple with the index of each input list of integers as the first element, and the sum of the list of integers as the second element. The index is zero-index based. :Parameters: - `rows`: an iterable of tuples, with the index of the original row as the first element, and a list of integers as the second element """ for i, row in rows: yield i, sum(row) def write_results(csvfile, results): """Writes a series of results to an outfile, where the first column is the index of the original row of data, and the second column is the result of the calculation. The index is zero-index based. :Parameters: - `csvfile`: a `csv.writer` instance to which to write results - `results`: an iterable of tuples, with the index (zero-based) of the original row as the first element, and the calculated result from that row as the second element """ for result_row in results: csvfile.writerow(result_row) def main(argv): cli_parser = make_cli_parser() opts, args = cli_parser.parse_args(argv) if len(args) != 2: cli_parser.error("Please provide an input file and output file.") infile = open(args[0]) in_csvfile = csv.reader(infile) outfile = open(args[1], 'w') out_csvfile = csv.writer(outfile) # gets an iterable of rows that's not yet evaluated input_rows = parse_input_csv(in_csvfile) # sends the rows iterable to sum_rows() for results iterable, but # still not evaluated result_rows = sum_rows(input_rows) # finally evaluation takes place as a chain in write_results() write_results(out_csvfile, result_rows) infile.close() outfile.close() if __name__ == '__main__': main(sys.argv[1:]) Let's take this program and rewrite it to use multiprocessing to parallelize the three parts outlined above. Below is a skeleton of this new, parallelized program, that needs to be fleshed out to address the parts in the comments: #!/usr/bin/env python # -*- coding: UTF-8 -*- # multiproc_sums.py """A program that reads integer values from a CSV file and writes out their sums to another CSV file, using multiple processes if desired. """ import csv import multiprocessing import optparse import sys NUM_PROCS = multiprocessing.cpu_count() def make_cli_parser(): """Make the command line interface parser.""" usage = "\n\n".join(["python %prog INPUT_CSV OUTPUT_CSV", __doc__, """ ARGUMENTS: INPUT_CSV: an input CSV file with rows of numbers OUTPUT_CSV: an output file that will contain the sums\ """]) cli_parser = optparse.OptionParser(usage) cli_parser.add_option('-n', '--numprocs', type='int', default=NUM_PROCS, help="Number of processes to launch [DEFAULT: %default]") return cli_parser def main(argv): cli_parser = make_cli_parser() opts, args = cli_parser.parse_args(argv) if len(args) != 2: cli_parser.error("Please provide an input file and output file.") infile = open(args[0]) in_csvfile = csv.reader(infile) outfile = open(args[1], 'w') out_csvfile = csv.writer(outfile) # Parse the input file and add the parsed data to a queue for # processing, possibly chunking to decrease communication between # processes. # Process the parsed data as soon as any (chunks) appear on the # queue, using as many processes as allotted by the user # (opts.numprocs); place results on a queue for output. # # Terminate processes when the parser stops putting data in the # input queue. # Write the results to disk as soon as they appear on the output # queue. # Ensure all child processes have terminated. # Clean up files. infile.close() outfile.close() if __name__ == '__main__': main(sys.argv[1:]) These pieces of code, as well as another piece of code that can generate example CSV files for testing purposes, can be found on github. I would appreciate any insight here as to how you concurrency gurus would approach this problem. Here are some questions I had when thinking about this problem. Bonus points for addressing any/all: Should I have child processes for reading in the data and placing it into the queue, or can the main process do this without blocking until all input is read? Likewise, should I have a child process for writing the results out from the processed queue, or can the main process do this without having to wait for all the results? Should I use a processes pool for the sum operations? If yes, what method do I call on the pool to get it to start processing the results coming into the input queue, without blocking the input and output processes, too? apply_async()? map_async()? imap()? imap_unordered()? Suppose we didn't need to siphon off the input and output queues as data entered them, but could wait until all input was parsed and all results were calculated (e.g., because we know all the input and output will fit in system memory). Should we change the algorithm in any way (e.g., not run any processes concurrently with I/O)?

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  • Asynchronous Webcrawling F#, something wrong ?

    - by jlezard
    Not quite sure if it is ok to do this but, my question is: Is there something wrong with my code ? It doesn't go as fast as I would like, and since I am using lots of async workflows maybe I am doing something wrong. The goal here is to build something that can crawl 20 000 pages in less than an hour. open System open System.Text open System.Net open System.IO open System.Text.RegularExpressions open System.Collections.Generic open System.ComponentModel open Microsoft.FSharp open System.Threading //This is the Parallel.Fs file type ComparableUri ( uri: string ) = inherit System.Uri( uri ) let elts (uri:System.Uri) = uri.Scheme, uri.Host, uri.Port, uri.Segments interface System.IComparable with member this.CompareTo( uri2 ) = compare (elts this) (elts(uri2 :?> ComparableUri)) override this.Equals(uri2) = compare this (uri2 :?> ComparableUri ) = 0 override this.GetHashCode() = 0 ///////////////////////////////////////////////Funtions to retreive html string////////////////////////////// let mutable error = Set.empty<ComparableUri> let mutable visited = Set.empty<ComparableUri> let getHtmlPrimitiveAsyncDelay (delay:int) (uri : ComparableUri) = async{ try let req = (WebRequest.Create(uri)) :?> HttpWebRequest // 'use' is equivalent to ‘using’ in C# for an IDisposable req.UserAgent<-"Mozilla" //Console.WriteLine("Waiting") do! Async.Sleep(delay * 250) let! resp = (req.AsyncGetResponse()) Console.WriteLine(uri.AbsoluteUri+" got response after delay "+string delay) use stream = resp.GetResponseStream() use reader = new StreamReader(stream) let html = reader.ReadToEnd() return html with | _ as ex -> Console.WriteLine( ex.ToString() ) lock error (fun () -> error<- error.Add uri ) lock visited (fun () -> visited<-visited.Add uri ) return "BadUri" } ///////////////////////////////////////////////Active Pattern Matching to retreive href////////////////////////////// let (|Matches|_|) (pat:string) (inp:string) = let m = Regex.Matches(inp, pat) // Note the List.tl, since the first group is always the entirety of the matched string. if m.Count > 0 then Some (List.tail [ for g in m -> g.Value ]) else None let (|Match|_|) (pat:string) (inp:string) = let m = Regex.Match(inp, pat) // Note the List.tl, since the first group is always the entirety of the matched string. if m.Success then Some (List.tail [ for g in m.Groups -> g.Value ]) else None ///////////////////////////////////////////////Find Bad href////////////////////////////// let isEmail (link:string) = link.Contains("@") let isMailto (link:string) = if Seq.length link >=6 then link.[0..5] = "mailto" else false let isJavascript (link:string) = if Seq.length link >=10 then link.[0..9] = "javascript" else false let isBadUri (link:string) = link="BadUri" let isEmptyHttp (link:string) = link="http://" let isFile (link:string)= if Seq.length link >=6 then link.[0..5] = "file:/" else false let containsPipe (link:string) = link.Contains("|") let isAdLink (link:string) = if Seq.length link >=6 then link.[0..5] = "adlink" elif Seq.length link >=9 then link.[0..8] = "http://adLink" else false ///////////////////////////////////////////////Find Bad href////////////////////////////// let getHref (htmlString:string) = let urlPat = "href=\"([^\"]+)" match htmlString with | Matches urlPat urls -> urls |> List.map( fun href -> match href with | Match (urlPat) (link::[]) -> link | _ -> failwith "The href was not in correct format, there was more than one match" ) | _ -> Console.WriteLine( "No links for this page" );[] |> List.filter( fun link -> not(isEmail link) ) |> List.filter( fun link -> not(isMailto link) ) |> List.filter( fun link -> not(isJavascript link) ) |> List.filter( fun link -> not(isBadUri link) ) |> List.filter( fun link -> not(isEmptyHttp link) ) |> List.filter( fun link -> not(isFile link) ) |> List.filter( fun link -> not(containsPipe link) ) |> List.filter( fun link -> not(isAdLink link) ) let treatAjax (href:System.Uri) = let link = href.ToString() let firstPart = (link.Split([|"#"|],System.StringSplitOptions.None)).[0] new Uri(firstPart) //only follow pages with certain extnsion or ones with no exensions let followHref (href:System.Uri) = let valid2 = set[".py"] let valid3 = set[".php";".htm";".asp"] let valid4 = set[".php3";".php4";".php5";".html";".aspx"] let arrLength = href.Segments |> Array.length let lastExtension = (href.Segments).[arrLength-1] let lengthLastExtension = Seq.length lastExtension if (lengthLastExtension <= 3) then not( lastExtension.Contains(".") ) else //test for the 2 case let last4 = lastExtension.[(lengthLastExtension-1)-3..(lengthLastExtension-1)] let isValid2 = valid2|>Seq.exists(fun validEnd -> last4.EndsWith( validEnd) ) if isValid2 then true else if lengthLastExtension <= 4 then not( last4.Contains(".") ) else let last5 = lastExtension.[(lengthLastExtension-1)-4..(lengthLastExtension-1)] let isValid3 = valid3|>Seq.exists(fun validEnd -> last5.EndsWith( validEnd) ) if isValid3 then true else if lengthLastExtension <= 5 then not( last5.Contains(".") ) else let last6 = lastExtension.[(lengthLastExtension-1)-5..(lengthLastExtension-1)] let isValid4 = valid4|>Seq.exists(fun validEnd -> last6.EndsWith( validEnd) ) if isValid4 then true else not( last6.Contains(".") ) && not(lastExtension.[0..5] = "mailto") //Create the correct links / -> add the homepage , make them a comparabel Uri let hrefLinksToUri ( uri:ComparableUri ) (hrefLinks:string list) = hrefLinks |> List.map( fun link -> try if Seq.length link <4 then Some(new Uri( uri, link )) else if link.[0..3] = "http" then Some(new Uri(link)) else Some(new Uri( uri, link )) with | _ as ex -> Console.WriteLine(link); lock error (fun () ->error<-error.Add uri) None ) |> List.filter( fun link -> link.IsSome ) |> List.map( fun o -> o.Value) |> List.map( fun uri -> new ComparableUri( string uri ) ) //Treat uri , removing ajax last part , and only following links specified b Benoit let linksToFollow (hrefUris:ComparableUri list) = hrefUris |>List.map( treatAjax ) |>List.filter( fun link -> followHref link ) |>List.map( fun uri -> new ComparableUri( string uri ) ) |>Set.ofList let needToVisit uri = ( lock visited (fun () -> not( visited.Contains uri) ) ) && (lock error (fun () -> not( error.Contains uri) )) let getLinksToFollowAsyncDelay (delay:int) ( uri: ComparableUri ) = async{ let! links = getHtmlPrimitiveAsyncDelay delay uri lock visited (fun () ->visited<-visited.Add uri) let linksToFollow = getHref links |> hrefLinksToUri uri |> linksToFollow |> Set.filter( needToVisit ) |> Set.map( fun link -> if uri.Authority=link.Authority then link else link ) return linksToFollow } //Add delays if visitng same authority let getDelay(uri:ComparableUri) (authorityDelay:Dictionary<string,int>) = let uriAuthority = uri.Authority let hasAuthority,delay = authorityDelay.TryGetValue(uriAuthority) if hasAuthority then authorityDelay.[uriAuthority] <-delay+1 delay else authorityDelay.Add(uriAuthority,1) 0 let rec getLinksToFollowFromSetAsync maxIteration ( uris: seq<ComparableUri> ) = let authorityDelay = Dictionary<string,int>() if maxIteration = 100 then Console.WriteLine("Finished") else //Unite by authority add delay for those we same authority others ignore let stopwatch= System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch() stopwatch.Start() let newLinks = uris |> Seq.map( fun uri -> let delay = lock authorityDelay (fun () -> getDelay uri authorityDelay ) getLinksToFollowAsyncDelay delay uri ) |> Async.Parallel |> Async.RunSynchronously |> Seq.concat stopwatch.Stop() Console.WriteLine("\n\n\n\n\n\n\nTimeElapse : "+string stopwatch.Elapsed+"\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n") getLinksToFollowFromSetAsync (maxIteration+1) newLinks getLinksToFollowFromSetAsync 0 (seq[ComparableUri( "http://twitter.com/" )]) Console.WriteLine("Finished") Some feedBack would be great ! Thank you (note this is just something I am doing for fun)

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  • C# acting weird when reading in values from a file to an array

    - by Whitey
    This is the structure of my file: 1111111111111111111111111 2222222222222222222222222 3333333333333333333333333 4444444444444444444444444 5555555555555555555555555 6666666666666666666666666 7777777777777777777777777 8888888888888888888888888 9999999999999999999999999 0000000000000000000000000 0000000000000000000000000 0000000000000000000000000 0000000000000000000000000 0000000000000000000000000 And this is the code I'm using to read it into an array: using (StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(mapPath)) { string line; for (int i = 0; i < iMapHeight; i++) { if ((line = reader.ReadLine()) != null) { for (int j = 0; j < iMapWidth; j++) { iMap[i, j] = line[j]; } } } } I have done some debugging, and line[j] correctly iterates through each character in the currently read line. The problem lies with iMap[i, j]. After this block of code executes, this is the contents of iMap: - iMap {int[14, 25]} int[,] [0, 0] 49 int [0, 1] 49 int [0, 2] 49 int [0, 3] 49 int [0, 4] 49 int [0, 5] 49 int [0, 6] 49 int [0, 7] 49 int [0, 8] 49 int [0, 9] 49 int [0, 10] 49 int [0, 11] 49 int [0, 12] 49 int [0, 13] 49 int [0, 14] 49 int [0, 15] 49 int [0, 16] 49 int [0, 17] 49 int [0, 18] 49 int [0, 19] 49 int [0, 20] 49 int [0, 21] 49 int [0, 22] 49 int [0, 23] 49 int [0, 24] 49 int [1, 0] 50 int [1, 1] 50 int [1, 2] 50 int [1, 3] 50 int [1, 4] 50 int [1, 5] 50 int [1, 6] 50 int [1, 7] 50 int [1, 8] 50 int [1, 9] 50 int [1, 10] 50 int [1, 11] 50 int [1, 12] 50 int [1, 13] 50 int [1, 14] 50 int [1, 15] 50 int [1, 16] 50 int [1, 17] 50 int [1, 18] 50 int [1, 19] 50 int [1, 20] 50 int [1, 21] 50 int [1, 22] 50 int [1, 23] 50 int [1, 24] 50 int [2, 0] 51 int [2, 1] 51 int [2, 2] 51 int [2, 3] 51 int [2, 4] 51 int [2, 5] 51 int [2, 6] 51 int [2, 7] 51 int [2, 8] 51 int [2, 9] 51 int [2, 10] 51 int [2, 11] 51 int [2, 12] 51 int [2, 13] 51 int [2, 14] 51 int [2, 15] 51 int [2, 16] 51 int [2, 17] 51 int [2, 18] 51 int [2, 19] 51 int [2, 20] 51 int [2, 21] 51 int [2, 22] 51 int [2, 23] 51 int [2, 24] 51 int [3, 0] 52 int [3, 1] 52 int [3, 2] 52 int [3, 3] 52 int [3, 4] 52 int [3, 5] 52 int [3, 6] 52 int [3, 7] 52 int [3, 8] 52 int [3, 9] 52 int [3, 10] 52 int [3, 11] 52 int [3, 12] 52 int [3, 13] 52 int [3, 14] 52 int [3, 15] 52 int [3, 16] 52 int [3, 17] 52 int [3, 18] 52 int [3, 19] 52 int [3, 20] 52 int [3, 21] 52 int [3, 22] 52 int [3, 23] 52 int [3, 24] 52 int [4, 0] 53 int [4, 1] 53 int [4, 2] 53 int [4, 3] 53 int [4, 4] 53 int [4, 5] 53 int [4, 6] 53 int [4, 7] 53 int [4, 8] 53 int [4, 9] 53 int [4, 10] 53 int [4, 11] 53 int [4, 12] 53 int [4, 13] 53 int [4, 14] 53 int [4, 15] 53 int [4, 16] 53 int [4, 17] 53 int [4, 18] 53 int [4, 19] 53 int [4, 20] 53 int [4, 21] 53 int [4, 22] 53 int [4, 23] 53 int [4, 24] 53 int [5, 0] 54 int [5, 1] 54 int [5, 2] 54 int [5, 3] 54 int [5, 4] 54 int [5, 5] 54 int [5, 6] 54 int [5, 7] 54 int [5, 8] 54 int [5, 9] 54 int [5, 10] 54 int [5, 11] 54 int [5, 12] 54 int [5, 13] 54 int [5, 14] 54 int [5, 15] 54 int [5, 16] 54 int [5, 17] 54 int [5, 18] 54 int [5, 19] 54 int [5, 20] 54 int [5, 21] 54 int [5, 22] 54 int [5, 23] 54 int [5, 24] 54 int [6, 0] 55 int [6, 1] 55 int [6, 2] 55 int [6, 3] 55 int [6, 4] 55 int [6, 5] 55 int [6, 6] 55 int [6, 7] 55 int [6, 8] 55 int [6, 9] 55 int [6, 10] 55 int [6, 11] 55 int [6, 12] 55 int [6, 13] 55 int [6, 14] 55 int [6, 15] 55 int [6, 16] 55 int [6, 17] 55 int [6, 18] 55 int [6, 19] 55 int [6, 20] 55 int [6, 21] 55 int [6, 22] 55 int [6, 23] 55 int [6, 24] 55 int [7, 0] 56 int [7, 1] 56 int [7, 2] 56 int [7, 3] 56 int [7, 4] 56 int [7, 5] 56 int [7, 6] 56 int [7, 7] 56 int [7, 8] 56 int [7, 9] 56 int [7, 10] 56 int [7, 11] 56 int [7, 12] 56 int [7, 13] 56 int [7, 14] 56 int [7, 15] 56 int [7, 16] 56 int [7, 17] 56 int [7, 18] 56 int [7, 19] 56 int [7, 20] 56 int [7, 21] 56 int [7, 22] 56 int [7, 23] 56 int [7, 24] 56 int [8, 0] 57 int [8, 1] 57 int [8, 2] 57 int [8, 3] 57 int [8, 4] 57 int [8, 5] 57 int [8, 6] 57 int [8, 7] 57 int [8, 8] 57 int [8, 9] 57 int [8, 10] 57 int [8, 11] 57 int [8, 12] 57 int [8, 13] 57 int [8, 14] 57 int [8, 15] 57 int [8, 16] 57 int [8, 17] 57 int [8, 18] 57 int [8, 19] 57 int [8, 20] 57 int [8, 21] 57 int [8, 22] 57 int [8, 23] 57 int [8, 24] 57 int [9, 0] 48 int [9, 1] 48 int [9, 2] 48 int [9, 3] 48 int [9, 4] 48 int [9, 5] 48 int [9, 6] 48 int [9, 7] 48 int [9, 8] 48 int [9, 9] 48 int [9, 10] 48 int [9, 11] 48 int [9, 12] 48 int [9, 13] 48 int [9, 14] 48 int [9, 15] 48 int [9, 16] 48 int [9, 17] 48 int [9, 18] 48 int [9, 19] 48 int [9, 20] 48 int [9, 21] 48 int [9, 22] 48 int [9, 23] 48 int [9, 24] 48 int [10, 0] 48 int [10, 1] 48 int [10, 2] 48 int [10, 3] 48 int [10, 4] 48 int [10, 5] 48 int [10, 6] 48 int [10, 7] 48 int [10, 8] 48 int [10, 9] 48 int [10, 10] 48 int [10, 11] 48 int [10, 12] 48 int [10, 13] 48 int [10, 14] 48 int [10, 15] 48 int [10, 16] 48 int [10, 17] 48 int [10, 18] 48 int [10, 19] 48 int [10, 20] 48 int [10, 21] 48 int [10, 22] 48 int [10, 23] 48 int [10, 24] 48 int [11, 0] 48 int [11, 1] 48 int [11, 2] 48 int [11, 3] 48 int [11, 4] 48 int [11, 5] 48 int [11, 6] 48 int [11, 7] 48 int [11, 8] 48 int [11, 9] 48 int [11, 10] 48 int [11, 11] 48 int [11, 12] 48 int [11, 13] 48 int [11, 14] 48 int [11, 15] 48 int [11, 16] 48 int [11, 17] 48 int [11, 18] 48 int [11, 19] 48 int [11, 20] 48 int [11, 21] 48 int [11, 22] 48 int [11, 23] 48 int [11, 24] 48 int [12, 0] 48 int [12, 1] 48 int [12, 2] 48 int [12, 3] 48 int [12, 4] 48 int [12, 5] 48 int [12, 6] 48 int [12, 7] 48 int [12, 8] 48 int [12, 9] 48 int [12, 10] 48 int [12, 11] 48 int [12, 12] 48 int [12, 13] 48 int [12, 14] 48 int [12, 15] 48 int [12, 16] 48 int [12, 17] 48 int [12, 18] 48 int [12, 19] 48 int [12, 20] 48 int [12, 21] 48 int [12, 22] 48 int [12, 23] 48 int [12, 24] 48 int [13, 0] 48 int [13, 1] 48 int [13, 2] 48 int [13, 3] 48 int [13, 4] 48 int [13, 5] 48 int [13, 6] 48 int [13, 7] 48 int [13, 8] 48 int [13, 9] 48 int [13, 10] 48 int [13, 11] 48 int [13, 12] 48 int [13, 13] 48 int [13, 14] 48 int [13, 15] 48 int [13, 16] 48 int [13, 17] 48 int [13, 18] 48 int [13, 19] 48 int [13, 20] 48 int [13, 21] 48 int [13, 22] 48 int [13, 23] 48 int [13, 24] 48 int Sorry for the lame formatting, but it's huge :P I have no idea where it's getting these values from, does anyone have an explanation? Thanks :)

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  • jQuery.closest(); traversing down the DOM not up

    - by Alex
    Afternoon peoples. I am having a bit of a nightmare traversing a DOM tree properly. I have the following markup <div class="node" id="first-wh"> <div class="content-heading has-tools"> <div class="tool-menu" style="position: relative"> <span class="menu-open stepper-down"></span> <ul class="tool-menu-tools" style="display:none;"> <li><img src="/resources/includes/images/layout/tools-menu/edit22.png" /> Edit <input type="hidden" class="variables" value="edit,hobbies,text,/theurl" /></li> <li>Menu 2</li> <li>Menu 3</li> </ul> </div> <h3>Employment History</h3></div> <div class="content-body editable disabled"> <h3 class="dates">1st January 2010 - 10th June 2010</h3> <h3>Company</h3> <h4>Some Company</h4> <h3>Job Title</h3> <h4>IT Manager</h4> <h3>Job Description</h3> <p class="desc">I headed up the IT department for all things concerning IT and infrastructure</p> <h3>Roles &amp; Responsibilities</h3> <p class="desc">It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using 'Content here, content here', making it look like readable English. Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default model text, and a search for 'lorem ipsum' will uncover many web sites still in their infancy. Various versions have evolved over the years, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose (injected humour and the like).</p> </div> <div class="content-body edit-node edit-node-hide"> <input class="variables" type="hidden" value="id,function-id" /> <h3 class="element-title">Employment Dates</h3> <span class="label">From:</span> <input class="edit-mode date date-from" type="text" value="date" /> <span class="label">To:</span> <input class="edit-mode date date-to" type="text" value="date" /> <h3 class="element-title">Company</h3> <input class="edit-mode" type="text" value="The company I worked for" /> <h3 class="element-title">Job Title</h3> <input class="edit-mode" type="text" value="My job title" /> <h3 class="element-title">Job Description</h3> <textarea class="edit-mode" type="text">The Job Title</textarea> <h3 class="element-title">Roles &amp; Responsibilities</h3> <textarea class="edit-mode" type="text">It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using 'Content here, content here', making it look like readable English. Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default model text, and a search for 'lorem ipsum' will uncover many web sites still in their infancy. Various versions have evolved over the years, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose (injected humour and the like).</textarea> <div class="node-actions"> <input type="checkbox" class="checkdisable" value="This is a checkbox"/>This element is visible .<br /> <input type="submit" class="account-button save" value="Save" /> <input type="submit" class="account-button cancel" value="Cancel" /></div> </div></div> ... And I am trying to traverse from input.save at the bottom right the way up to div.node... This all works well with one copy of the markup but if I duplicate it (obvisouly changing the ID of the uppermost div.node and use jQuery.closest('div.node') for the upper of the div.node's it will return the element below it not the element above it (which is the right one). I've tried using parents() but that also has it's caveats. Is there some kind of contexyt that can be attached to closest to make it go up and not down? or is there a better way to do this. jQuery code below. $(".save").click(function(){ var element=$(this); var enodes=element.parents('.edit-node').find('input.variables'); var variables=enodes.val(); var onode=element.closest('div.node').find('.editable'); var enode=element.closest('div.node').find('.edit-node-hide'); var vnode=element.closest('div.node-actions').find('input.checkdisable'); var isvis=(vnode.is(":checked")) ? onode.removeClass('disabled') : onode.addClass('disabled'); onode.slideDown(200); enode.fadeOut(100); }); Thanks in advance. Alex P.S It seems that stackoverflow has done something weird to the markup! - I just triple checked it and it is fine but for some reason it's concate'd it below

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  • Not able to get data from Json completely

    - by Abhinav Raja
    i am getting JSON data from http://abinet.org/?json=1 and displaying the titles in a ListView. the code is working fine but the problem is, it is skipping few titles in my ListView and one title is being repeated. You can see the json data from url given above by copy paste it in JSON editor online http://www.jsoneditoronline.org/ i want titles in the "posts" array to be displayed in ListView, however it is being displayed like this: if you see the JSON data from the link above, its missing like 3 titles (they should come between the first and second title) and 5th title is being repeated. Dont know why this is happening. What minor adjustments i need to do? Please help me. this is my code : public class MainActivity extends Activity { // URL to get contacts JSON private static String url = "http://abinet.org/?json=1"; // JSON Node names private static final String TAG_POSTS = "posts"; static final String TAG_TITLE = "title"; private ProgressDialog pDialog; JSONArray contacts = null; TextView img_url; ArrayList<HashMap<String, Object>> contactList; ListView lv; LazyAdapter adapter; @Override public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) { super.onCreate(savedInstanceState); setContentView(R.layout.activity_main); lv = (ListView) findViewById(R.id.newslist); contactList = new ArrayList<HashMap<String, Object>>(); new GetContacts().execute(); } private class GetContacts extends AsyncTask<Void, Void, Void> { protected void onPreExecute() { super.onPreExecute(); // Showing progress dialog pDialog = new ProgressDialog(MainActivity.this); pDialog.setMessage("Please wait..."); pDialog.setCancelable(false); pDialog.show(); } protected Void doInBackground(Void... arg0) { // Making a request to url and getting response JSONParser jParser = new JSONParser(); // Getting JSON from URL JSONObject jsonObj = jParser.getJSONFromUrl(url); // if (jsonStr != null) { try { // Getting JSON Array node contacts = jsonObj.getJSONArray(TAG_POSTS); // looping through All Contacts for (int i = 0; i < contacts.length(); i++) { // JSONObject c = contacts.getJSONObject(i); JSONObject posts = contacts.getJSONObject(i); String title = posts.getString(TAG_TITLE).replace("&#8217;", "'"); JSONArray attachment = posts.getJSONArray("attachments"); for (int j = 0; j< attachment.length(); j++){ JSONObject obj = attachment.getJSONObject(j); JSONObject image = obj.getJSONObject("images"); JSONObject image_small = image.getJSONObject("thumbnail"); String imgurl = image_small.getString("url"); HashMap<String, Object> contact = new HashMap<String, Object>(); contact.put("image_url", imgurl); contact.put(TAG_TITLE, title); contactList.add(contact); } } } catch (JSONException e) { e.printStackTrace(); } return null; } @Override protected void onPostExecute(Void result) { super.onPostExecute(result); // Dismiss the progress dialog if (pDialog.isShowing()) pDialog.dismiss(); adapter=new LazyAdapter(MainActivity.this, contactList); lv.setAdapter(adapter); } } } this is my JsonParser class (although its not required): public JSONParser() { } public JSONObject getJSONFromUrl(String url) { // Making HTTP request try { // defaultHttpClient DefaultHttpClient httpClient = new DefaultHttpClient(); HttpPost httpPost = new HttpPost(url); HttpResponse httpResponse = httpClient.execute(httpPost); HttpEntity httpEntity = httpResponse.getEntity(); is = httpEntity.getContent(); } catch (UnsupportedEncodingException e) { e.printStackTrace(); } catch (ClientProtocolException e) { e.printStackTrace(); } catch (IOException e) { e.printStackTrace(); } try { BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader( is, "iso-8859-1"), 8); StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder(); String line = null; while ((line = reader.readLine()) != null) { sb.append(line + "n"); } is.close(); json = sb.toString(); } catch (Exception e) { Log.e("Buffer Error", "Error converting result " + e.toString()); } // try parse the string to a JSON object try { jObj = new JSONObject(json); } catch (JSONException e) { Log.e("JSON Parser", "Error parsing data " + e.toString()); } // return JSON String return jObj; } } and this is adapter class: public class LazyAdapter extends BaseAdapter { private Activity activity; private ArrayList<HashMap<String, Object>> data; private static LayoutInflater inflater=null; public LazyAdapter(Activity a,ArrayList<HashMap<String, Object>> d) { activity = a; data=d; inflater = (LayoutInflater)activity.getSystemService(Context.LAYOUT_INFLATER_SERVICE); } public int getCount() { return data.size(); } public Object getItem(int position) { return position; } public long getItemId(int position) { return position; } public View getView(int position, View convertView, ViewGroup parent) { View vi=convertView; if(convertView==null) vi = inflater.inflate(R.layout.third_row, null); TextView title = (TextView)vi.findViewById(R.id.headline3); // title SmartImageView iv = (SmartImageView) vi.findViewById(R.id.imageicon); HashMap<String, Object> song = new HashMap<String, Object>(); song = data.get(position); // Setting all values in listview title.setText((CharSequence) song.get(MainActivity.TAG_TITLE)); iv.setImageUrl((String) song.get("image_url")); thumb_image); return vi; } } Please help me. I am stuck at this for more than a week now. I think there is just something to be changed in my MainActivity class.

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  • Error with my Android Application httpGet

    - by Coombes
    Basically I'm getting a strange issue with my Android application, it's supposed to grab a JSON Array and print out some values, the class looks like this: ShowComedianActivity.class package com.example.connecttest; public class ShowComedianActivity extends Activity{ TextView name; TextView add; TextView email; TextView tel; String id; // Progress Dialog private ProgressDialog pDialog; //JSON Parser class JSONParser jsonParser = new JSONParser(); // Single Comedian url private static final String url_comedian_details = "http://86.9.71.17/connect/get_comedian_details.php"; // JSON Node names private static final String TAG_SUCCESS = "success"; private static final String TAG_COMEDIAN = "comedian"; private static final String TAG_ID = "id"; private static final String TAG_NAME = "name"; private static final String TAG_ADDRESS = "address"; private static final String TAG_EMAIL = "email"; private static final String TAG_TEL = "tel"; public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState){ super.onCreate(savedInstanceState); setContentView(R.layout.show_comedian); // Getting Comedian Details from intent Intent i = getIntent(); // Getting id from intent id = i.getStringExtra(TAG_ID); new GetComedianDetails().execute(); } class GetComedianDetails extends AsyncTask<String, String, String>{ protected void onPreExecute(){ super.onPreExecute(); pDialog = new ProgressDialog(ShowComedianActivity.this); pDialog.setMessage("Fetching Comedian details. Please wait..."); pDialog.setIndeterminate(false); pDialog.setCancelable(true); pDialog.show(); } @Override protected String doInBackground(String... params) { runOnUiThread(new Runnable(){ public void run(){ int success; try{ //Building parameters List<NameValuePair> params = new ArrayList<NameValuePair>(); params.add(new BasicNameValuePair("id",id)); // Getting comedian details via HTTP request // Uses a GET request JSONObject json = jsonParser.makeHttpRequest(url_comedian_details, "GET", params); // Check Log for json response Log.d("Single Comedian details", json.toString()); //JSON Success tag success = json.getInt(TAG_SUCCESS); if(success == 1){ // Succesfully received product details JSONArray comedianObj = json.getJSONArray(TAG_COMEDIAN); //JSON Array // get first comedian object from JSON Array JSONObject comedian = comedianObj.getJSONObject(0); // comedian with id found name = (TextView) findViewById(R.id.name); add = (TextView) findViewById(R.id.add); email = (TextView) findViewById(R.id.email); tel = (TextView) findViewById(R.id.tel); // Set text to details name.setText(comedian.getString(TAG_NAME)); add.setText(comedian.getString(TAG_ADDRESS)); email.setText(comedian.getString(TAG_EMAIL)); tel.setText(comedian.getString(TAG_TEL)); } } catch (JSONException e){ e.printStackTrace(); } } }); return null; } } } And my JSON Parser class looks like: package com.example.connecttest; public class JSONParser { static InputStream is = null; static JSONObject jObj = null; static String json = ""; // constructor public JSONParser() { } // function get json from url // by making HTTP POST or GET method public JSONObject makeHttpRequest(String url, String method, List<NameValuePair> params) { // Making HTTP request try { // check for request method if(method == "POST"){ // request method is POST // defaultHttpClient DefaultHttpClient httpClient = new DefaultHttpClient(); HttpPost httpPost = new HttpPost(url); httpPost.setEntity(new UrlEncodedFormEntity(params)); HttpResponse httpResponse = httpClient.execute(httpPost); HttpEntity httpEntity = httpResponse.getEntity(); is = httpEntity.getContent(); }else if(method == "GET"){ // request method is GET DefaultHttpClient httpClient = new DefaultHttpClient(); String paramString = URLEncodedUtils.format(params, "utf-8"); url += "?" + paramString; HttpGet httpGet = new HttpGet(url); HttpResponse httpResponse = httpClient.execute(httpGet); HttpEntity httpEntity = httpResponse.getEntity(); is = httpEntity.getContent(); } } catch (UnsupportedEncodingException e) { e.printStackTrace(); } catch (ClientProtocolException e) { e.printStackTrace(); } catch (IOException e) { e.printStackTrace(); } try { BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader( is, "iso-8859-1"), 8); StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder(); String line = null; while ((line = reader.readLine()) != null) { sb.append(line + "\n"); } is.close(); json = sb.toString(); } catch (Exception e) { Log.e("Buffer Error", "Error converting result " + e.toString()); } // try parse the string to a JSON object try { jObj = new JSONObject(json); } catch (JSONException e) { Log.e("JSON Parser", "Error parsing data " + e.toString()); } // return JSON String return jObj; } } Now when I run a debug it's querying the correct address with ?id=1 on the end of the URL, and when I navigate to that url I get the following JSON Array: {"success":1,"comedian":[{"id":"1","name":"Michael Coombes","address":"5 Trevethenick Road","email":"[email protected]","tel":"xxxxxxxxxxxx"}]} However my app just crashes, the log-cat report looks like this: 03-22 02:05:02.140: E/Trace(3776): error opening trace file: No such file or directory (2) 03-22 02:05:04.590: E/AndroidRuntime(3776): FATAL EXCEPTION: main 03-22 02:05:04.590: E/AndroidRuntime(3776): android.os.NetworkOnMainThreadException 03-22 02:05:04.590: E/AndroidRuntime(3776): at android.os.StrictMode$AndroidBlockGuardPolicy.onNetwork(StrictMode.java:1117) 03-22 02:05:04.590: E/AndroidRuntime(3776): at libcore.io.BlockGuardOs.connect(BlockGuardOs.java:84) 03-22 02:05:04.590: E/AndroidRuntime(3776): at libcore.io.IoBridge.connectErrno(IoBridge.java:127) 03-22 02:05:04.590: E/AndroidRuntime(3776): at libcore.io.IoBridge.connect(IoBridge.java:112) 03-22 02:05:04.590: E/AndroidRuntime(3776): at java.net.PlainSocketImpl.connect(PlainSocketImpl.java:192) 03-22 02:05:04.590: E/AndroidRuntime(3776): at java.net.PlainSocketImpl.connect(PlainSocketImpl.java:459) 03-22 02:05:04.590: E/AndroidRuntime(3776): at java.net.Socket.connect(Socket.java:842) 03-22 02:05:04.590: E/AndroidRuntime(3776): at org.apache.http.conn.scheme.PlainSocketFactory.connectSocket(PlainSocketFactory.java:119) 03-22 02:05:04.590: E/AndroidRuntime(3776): at org.apache.http.impl.conn.DefaultClientConnectionOperator.openConnection(DefaultClientConnectionOperator.java:144) 03-22 02:05:04.590: E/AndroidRuntime(3776): at org.apache.http.impl.conn.AbstractPoolEntry.open(AbstractPoolEntry.java:164) 03-22 02:05:04.590: E/AndroidRuntime(3776): at org.apache.http.impl.conn.AbstractPooledConnAdapter.open(AbstractPooledConnAdapter.java:119) 03-22 02:05:04.590: E/AndroidRuntime(3776): at org.apache.http.impl.client.DefaultRequestDirector.execute(DefaultRequestDirector.java:360) 03-22 02:05:04.590: E/AndroidRuntime(3776): at org.apache.http.impl.client.AbstractHttpClient.execute(AbstractHttpClient.java:555) 03-22 02:05:04.590: E/AndroidRuntime(3776): at org.apache.http.impl.client.AbstractHttpClient.execute(AbstractHttpClient.java:487) 03-22 02:05:04.590: E/AndroidRuntime(3776): at org.apache.http.impl.client.AbstractHttpClient.execute(AbstractHttpClient.java:465) 03-22 02:05:04.590: E/AndroidRuntime(3776): at com.example.connecttest.JSONParser.makeHttpRequest(JSONParser.java:62) 03-22 02:05:04.590: E/AndroidRuntime(3776): at com.example.connecttest.ShowComedianActivity$GetComedianDetails$1.run(ShowComedianActivity.java:89) 03-22 02:05:04.590: E/AndroidRuntime(3776): at android.os.Handler.handleCallback(Handler.java:615) 03-22 02:05:04.590: E/AndroidRuntime(3776): at android.os.Handler.dispatchMessage(Handler.java:92) 03-22 02:05:04.590: E/AndroidRuntime(3776): at android.os.Looper.loop(Looper.java:137) 03-22 02:05:04.590: E/AndroidRuntime(3776): at android.app.ActivityThread.main(ActivityThread.java:4745) 03-22 02:05:04.590: E/AndroidRuntime(3776): at java.lang.reflect.Method.invokeNative(Native Method) 03-22 02:05:04.590: E/AndroidRuntime(3776): at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:511) 03-22 02:05:04.590: E/AndroidRuntime(3776): at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit$MethodAndArgsCaller.run(ZygoteInit.java:786) 03-22 02:05:04.590: E/AndroidRuntime(3776): at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit.main(ZygoteInit.java:553) 03-22 02:05:04.590: E/AndroidRuntime(3776): at dalvik.system.NativeStart.main(Native Method) From this I'm guessing the error is in the jsonParser.makeHttpRequest however I can't for the life of me figure out what's going wrong and was hoping someone brighter than I could illuminate me.

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  • A free standing ASP.NET Pager Web Control

    - by Rick Strahl
    Paging in ASP.NET has been relatively easy with stock controls supporting basic paging functionality. However, recently I built an MVC application and one of the things I ran into was that I HAD TO build manual paging support into a few of my pages. Dealing with list controls and rendering markup is easy enough, but doing paging is a little more involved. I ended up with a small but flexible component that can be dropped anywhere. As it turns out the task of creating a semi-generic Pager control for MVC was fairly easily. Now I’m back to working in Web Forms and thought to myself that the way I created the pager in MVC actually would also work in ASP.NET – in fact quite a bit easier since the whole thing can be conveniently wrapped up into an easily reusable control. A standalone pager would provider easier reuse in various pages and a more consistent pager display regardless of what kind of 'control’ the pager is associated with. Why a Pager Control? At first blush it might sound silly to create a new pager control – after all Web Forms has pretty decent paging support, doesn’t it? Well, sort of. Yes the GridView control has automatic paging built in and the ListView control has the related DataPager control. The built in ASP.NET paging has several issues though: Postback and JavaScript requirements If you look at paging links in ASP.NET they are always postback links with javascript:__doPostback() calls that go back to the server. While that works fine and actually has some benefit like the fact that paging saves changes to the page and post them back, it’s not very SEO friendly. Basically if you use javascript based navigation nosearch engine will follow the paging links which effectively cuts off list content on the first page. The DataPager control does support GET based links via the QueryStringParameter property, but the control is effectively tied to the ListView control (which is the only control that implements IPageableItemContainer). DataSource Controls required for Efficient Data Paging Retrieval The only way you can get paging to work efficiently where only the few records you display on the page are queried for and retrieved from the database you have to use a DataSource control - only the Linq and Entity DataSource controls  support this natively. While you can retrieve this data yourself manually, there’s no way to just assign the page number and render the pager based on this custom subset. Other than that default paging requires a full resultset for ASP.NET to filter the data and display only a subset which can be very resource intensive and wasteful if you’re dealing with largish resultsets (although I’m a firm believer in returning actually usable sets :-}). If you use your own business layer that doesn’t fit an ObjectDataSource you’re SOL. That’s a real shame too because with LINQ based querying it’s real easy to retrieve a subset of data that is just the data you want to display but the native Pager functionality doesn’t support just setting properties to display just the subset AFAIK. DataPager is not Free Standing The DataPager control is the closest thing to a decent Pager implementation that ASP.NET has, but alas it’s not a free standing component – it works off a related control and the only one that it effectively supports from the stock ASP.NET controls is the ListView control. This means you can’t use the same data pager formatting for a grid and a list view or vice versa and you’re always tied to the control. Paging Events In order to handle paging you have to deal with paging events. The events fire at specific time instances in the page pipeline and because of this you often have to handle data binding in a way to work around the paging events or else end up double binding your data sources based on paging. Yuk. Styling The GridView pager is a royal pain to beat into submission for styled rendering. The DataPager control has many more options and template layout and it renders somewhat cleaner, but it too is not exactly easy to get a decent display for. Not a Generic Solution The problem with the ASP.NET controls too is that it’s not generic. GridView, DataGrid use their own internal paging, ListView can use a DataPager and if you want to manually create data layout – well you’re on your own. IOW, depending on what you use you likely have very different looking Paging experiences. So, I figured I’ve struggled with this once too many and finally sat down and built a Pager control. The Pager Control My goal was to create a totally free standing control that has no dependencies on other controls and certainly no requirements for using DataSource controls. The idea is that you should be able to use this pager control without any sort of data requirements at all – you should just be able to set properties and be able to display a pager. The Pager control I ended up with has the following features: Completely free standing Pager control – no control or data dependencies Complete manual control – Pager can render without any data dependency Easy to use: Only need to set PageSize, ActivePage and TotalItems Supports optional filtering of IQueryable for efficient queries and Pager rendering Supports optional full set filtering of IEnumerable<T> and DataTable Page links are plain HTTP GET href Links Control automatically picks up Page links on the URL and assigns them (automatic page detection no page index changing events to hookup) Full CSS Styling support On the downside there’s no templating support for the control so the layout of the pager is relatively fixed. All elements however are stylable and there are options to control the text, and layout options such as whether to display first and last pages and the previous/next buttons and so on. To give you an idea what the pager looks like, here are two differently styled examples (all via CSS):   The markup for these two pagers looks like this: <ww:Pager runat="server" id="ItemPager" PageSize="5" PageLinkCssClass="gridpagerbutton" SelectedPageCssClass="gridpagerbutton-selected" PagesTextCssClass="gridpagertext" CssClass="gridpager" RenderContainerDiv="true" ContainerDivCssClass="gridpagercontainer" MaxPagesToDisplay="6" PagesText="Item Pages:" NextText="next" PreviousText="previous" /> <ww:Pager runat="server" id="ItemPager2" PageSize="5" RenderContainerDiv="true" MaxPagesToDisplay="6" /> The latter example uses default style settings so it there’s not much to set. The first example on the other hand explicitly assigns custom styles and overrides a few of the formatting options. Styling The styling is based on a number of CSS classes of which the the main pager, pagerbutton and pagerbutton-selected classes are the important ones. Other styles like pagerbutton-next/prev/first/last are based on the pagerbutton style. The default styling shown for the red outlined pager looks like this: .pagercontainer { margin: 20px 0; background: whitesmoke; padding: 5px; } .pager { float: right; font-size: 10pt; text-align: left; } .pagerbutton,.pagerbutton-selected,.pagertext { display: block; float: left; text-align: center; border: solid 2px maroon; min-width: 18px; margin-left: 3px; text-decoration: none; padding: 4px; } .pagerbutton-selected { font-size: 130%; font-weight: bold; color: maroon; border-width: 0px; background: khaki; } .pagerbutton-first { margin-right: 12px; } .pagerbutton-last,.pagerbutton-prev { margin-left: 12px; } .pagertext { border: none; margin-left: 30px; font-weight: bold; } .pagerbutton a { text-decoration: none; } .pagerbutton:hover { background-color: maroon; color: cornsilk; } .pagerbutton-prev { background-image: url(images/prev.png); background-position: 2px center; background-repeat: no-repeat; width: 35px; padding-left: 20px; } .pagerbutton-next { background-image: url(images/next.png); background-position: 40px center; background-repeat: no-repeat; width: 35px; padding-right: 20px; margin-right: 0px; } Yup that’s a lot of styling settings although not all of them are required. The key ones are pagerbutton, pager and pager selection. The others (which are implicitly created by the control based on the pagerbutton style) are for custom markup of the ‘special’ buttons. In my apps I tend to have two kinds of pages: Those that are associated with typical ‘grid’ displays that display purely tabular data and those that have a more looser list like layout. The two pagers shown above represent these two views and the pager and gridpager styles in my standard style sheet reflect these two styles. Configuring the Pager with Code Finally lets look at what it takes to hook up the pager. As mentioned in the highlights the Pager control is completely independent of other controls so if you just want to display a pager on its own it’s as simple as dropping the control and assigning the PageSize, ActivePage and either TotalPages or TotalItems. So for this markup: <ww:Pager runat="server" id="ItemPagerManual" PageSize="5" MaxPagesToDisplay="6" /> I can use code as simple as: ItemPagerManual.PageSize = 3; ItemPagerManual.ActivePage = 4;ItemPagerManual.TotalItems = 20; Note that ActivePage is not required - it will automatically use any Page=x query string value and assign it, although you can override it as I did above. TotalItems can be any value that you retrieve from a result set or manually assign as I did above. A more realistic scenario based on a LINQ to SQL IQueryable result is even easier. In this example, I have a UserControl that contains a ListView control that renders IQueryable data. I use a User Control here because there are different views the user can choose from with each view being a different user control. This incidentally also highlights one of the nice features of the pager: Because the pager is independent of the control I can put the pager on the host page instead of into each of the user controls. IOW, there’s only one Pager control, but there are potentially many user controls/listviews that hold the actual display data. The following code demonstrates how to use the Pager with an IQueryable that loads only the records it displays: protected voidPage_Load(objectsender, EventArgs e) {     Category = Request.Params["Category"] ?? string.Empty;     IQueryable<wws_Item> ItemList = ItemRepository.GetItemsByCategory(Category);     // Update the page and filter the list down     ItemList = ItemPager.FilterIQueryable<wws_Item>(ItemList); // Render user control with a list view Control ulItemList = LoadControl("~/usercontrols/" + App.Configuration.ItemListType + ".ascx"); ((IInventoryItemListControl)ulItemList).InventoryItemList = ItemList; phItemList.Controls.Add(ulItemList); // placeholder } The code uses a business object to retrieve Items by category as an IQueryable which means that the result is only an expression tree that hasn’t execute SQL yet and can be further filtered. I then pass this IQueryable to the FilterIQueryable() helper method of the control which does two main things: Filters the IQueryable to retrieve only the data displayed on the active page Sets the Totaltems property and calculates TotalPages on the Pager and that’s it! When the Pager renders it uses those values, plus the PageSize and ActivePage properties to render the Pager. In addition to IQueryable there are also filter methods for IEnumerable<T> and DataTable, but these versions just filter the data by removing rows/items from the entire already retrieved data. Output Generated and Paging Links The output generated creates pager links as plain href links. Here’s what the output looks like: <div id="ItemPager" class="pagercontainer"> <div class="pager"> <span class="pagertext">Pages: </span><a href="http://localhost/WestWindWebStore/itemlist.aspx?Page=1" class="pagerbutton" />1</a> <a href="http://localhost/WestWindWebStore/itemlist.aspx?Page=2" class="pagerbutton" />2</a> <a href="http://localhost/WestWindWebStore/itemlist.aspx?Page=3" class="pagerbutton" />3</a> <span class="pagerbutton-selected">4</span> <a href="http://localhost/WestWindWebStore/itemlist.aspx?Page=5" class="pagerbutton" />5</a> <a href="http://localhost/WestWindWebStore/itemlist.aspx?Page=6" class="pagerbutton" />6</a> <a href="http://localhost/WestWindWebStore/itemlist.aspx?Page=20" class="pagerbutton pagerbutton-last" />20</a>&nbsp;<a href="http://localhost/WestWindWebStore/itemlist.aspx?Page=3" class="pagerbutton pagerbutton-prev" />Prev</a>&nbsp;<a href="http://localhost/WestWindWebStore/itemlist.aspx?Page=5" class="pagerbutton pagerbutton-next" />Next</a></div> <br clear="all" /> </div> </div> The links point back to the current page and simply append a Page= page link into the page. When the page gets reloaded with the new page number the pager automatically detects the page number and automatically assigns the ActivePage property which results in the appropriate page to be displayed. The code shown in the previous section is all that’s needed to handle paging. Note that HTTP GET based paging is different than the Postback paging ASP.NET uses by default. Postback paging preserves modified page content when clicking on pager buttons, but this control will simply load a new page – no page preservation at this time. The advantage of not using Postback paging is that the URLs generated are plain HTML links that a search engine can follow where __doPostback() links are not. Pager with a Grid The pager also works in combination with grid controls so it’s easy to bypass the grid control’s paging features if desired. In the following example I use a gridView control and binds it to a DataTable result which is also filterable by the Pager control. The very basic plain vanilla ASP.NET grid markup looks like this: <div style="width: 600px; margin: 0 auto;padding: 20px; "> <asp:DataGrid runat="server" AutoGenerateColumns="True" ID="gdItems" CssClass="blackborder" style="width: 600px;"> <AlternatingItemStyle CssClass="gridalternate" /> <HeaderStyle CssClass="gridheader" /> </asp:DataGrid> <ww:Pager runat="server" ID="Pager" CssClass="gridpager" ContainerDivCssClass="gridpagercontainer" PageLinkCssClass="gridpagerbutton" SelectedPageCssClass="gridpagerbutton-selected" PageSize="8" RenderContainerDiv="true" MaxPagesToDisplay="6" /> </div> and looks like this when rendered: using custom set of CSS styles. The code behind for this code is also very simple: protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { string category = Request.Params["category"] ?? ""; busItem itemRep = WebStoreFactory.GetItem(); var items = itemRep.GetItemsByCategory(category) .Select(itm => new {Sku = itm.Sku, Description = itm.Description}); // run query into a DataTable for demonstration DataTable dt = itemRep.Converter.ToDataTable(items,"TItems"); // Remove all items not on the current page dt = Pager.FilterDataTable(dt,0); // bind and display gdItems.DataSource = dt; gdItems.DataBind(); } A little contrived I suppose since the list could already be bound from the list of elements, but this is to demonstrate that you can also bind against a DataTable if your business layer returns those. Unfortunately there’s no way to filter a DataReader as it’s a one way forward only reader and the reader is required by the DataSource to perform the bindings.  However, you can still use a DataReader as long as your business logic filters the data prior to rendering and provides a total item count (most likely as a second query). Control Creation The control itself is a pretty brute force ASP.NET control. Nothing clever about this other than some basic rendering logic and some simple calculations and update routines to determine which buttons need to be shown. You can take a look at the full code from the West Wind Web Toolkit’s Repository (note there are a few dependencies). To give you an idea how the control works here is the Render() method: /// <summary> /// overridden to handle custom pager rendering for runtime and design time /// </summary> /// <param name="writer"></param> protected override void Render(HtmlTextWriter writer) { base.Render(writer); if (TotalPages == 0 && TotalItems > 0) TotalPages = CalculateTotalPagesFromTotalItems(); if (DesignMode) TotalPages = 10; // don't render pager if there's only one page if (TotalPages < 2) return; if (RenderContainerDiv) { if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(ContainerDivCssClass)) writer.AddAttribute("class", ContainerDivCssClass); writer.RenderBeginTag("div"); } // main pager wrapper writer.WriteBeginTag("div"); writer.AddAttribute("id", this.ClientID); if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(CssClass)) writer.WriteAttribute("class", this.CssClass); writer.Write(HtmlTextWriter.TagRightChar + "\r\n"); // Pages Text writer.WriteBeginTag("span"); if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(PagesTextCssClass)) writer.WriteAttribute("class", PagesTextCssClass); writer.Write(HtmlTextWriter.TagRightChar); writer.Write(this.PagesText); writer.WriteEndTag("span"); // if the base url is empty use the current URL FixupBaseUrl(); // set _startPage and _endPage ConfigurePagesToRender(); // write out first page link if (ShowFirstAndLastPageLinks && _startPage != 1) { writer.WriteBeginTag("a"); string pageUrl = StringUtils.SetUrlEncodedKey(BaseUrl, QueryStringPageField, (1).ToString()); writer.WriteAttribute("href", pageUrl); if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(PageLinkCssClass)) writer.WriteAttribute("class", PageLinkCssClass + " " + PageLinkCssClass + "-first"); writer.Write(HtmlTextWriter.SelfClosingTagEnd); writer.Write("1"); writer.WriteEndTag("a"); writer.Write("&nbsp;"); } // write out all the page links for (int i = _startPage; i < _endPage + 1; i++) { if (i == ActivePage) { writer.WriteBeginTag("span"); if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(SelectedPageCssClass)) writer.WriteAttribute("class", SelectedPageCssClass); writer.Write(HtmlTextWriter.TagRightChar); writer.Write(i.ToString()); writer.WriteEndTag("span"); } else { writer.WriteBeginTag("a"); string pageUrl = StringUtils.SetUrlEncodedKey(BaseUrl, QueryStringPageField, i.ToString()).TrimEnd('&'); writer.WriteAttribute("href", pageUrl); if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(PageLinkCssClass)) writer.WriteAttribute("class", PageLinkCssClass); writer.Write(HtmlTextWriter.SelfClosingTagEnd); writer.Write(i.ToString()); writer.WriteEndTag("a"); } writer.Write("\r\n"); } // write out last page link if (ShowFirstAndLastPageLinks && _endPage < TotalPages) { writer.WriteBeginTag("a"); string pageUrl = StringUtils.SetUrlEncodedKey(BaseUrl, QueryStringPageField, TotalPages.ToString()); writer.WriteAttribute("href", pageUrl); if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(PageLinkCssClass)) writer.WriteAttribute("class", PageLinkCssClass + " " + PageLinkCssClass + "-last"); writer.Write(HtmlTextWriter.SelfClosingTagEnd); writer.Write(TotalPages.ToString()); writer.WriteEndTag("a"); } // Previous link if (ShowPreviousNextLinks && !string.IsNullOrEmpty(PreviousText) && ActivePage > 1) { writer.Write("&nbsp;"); writer.WriteBeginTag("a"); string pageUrl = StringUtils.SetUrlEncodedKey(BaseUrl, QueryStringPageField, (ActivePage - 1).ToString()); writer.WriteAttribute("href", pageUrl); if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(PageLinkCssClass)) writer.WriteAttribute("class", PageLinkCssClass + " " + PageLinkCssClass + "-prev"); writer.Write(HtmlTextWriter.SelfClosingTagEnd); writer.Write(PreviousText); writer.WriteEndTag("a"); } // Next link if (ShowPreviousNextLinks && !string.IsNullOrEmpty(NextText) && ActivePage < TotalPages) { writer.Write("&nbsp;"); writer.WriteBeginTag("a"); string pageUrl = StringUtils.SetUrlEncodedKey(BaseUrl, QueryStringPageField, (ActivePage + 1).ToString()); writer.WriteAttribute("href", pageUrl); if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(PageLinkCssClass)) writer.WriteAttribute("class", PageLinkCssClass + " " + PageLinkCssClass + "-next"); writer.Write(HtmlTextWriter.SelfClosingTagEnd); writer.Write(NextText); writer.WriteEndTag("a"); } writer.WriteEndTag("div"); if (RenderContainerDiv) { if (RenderContainerDivBreak) writer.Write("<br clear=\"all\" />\r\n"); writer.WriteEndTag("div"); } } As I said pretty much brute force rendering based on the control’s property settings of which there are quite a few: You can also see the pager in the designer above. unfortunately the VS designer (both 2010 and 2008) fails to render the float: left CSS styles properly and starts wrapping after margins are applied in the special buttons. Not a big deal since VS does at least respect the spacing (the floated elements overlay). Then again I’m not using the designer anyway :-}. Filtering Data What makes the Pager easy to use is the filter methods built into the control. While this functionality is clearly not the most politically correct design choice as it violates separation of concerns, it’s very useful for typical pager operation. While I actually have filter methods that do something similar in my business layer, having it exposed on the control makes the control a lot more useful for typical databinding scenarios. Of course these methods are optional – if you have a business layer that can provide filtered page queries for you can use that instead and assign the TotalItems property manually. There are three filter method types available for IQueryable, IEnumerable and for DataTable which tend to be the most common use cases in my apps old and new. The IQueryable version is pretty simple as it can simply rely on on .Skip() and .Take() with LINQ: /// <summary> /// <summary> /// Queries the database for the ActivePage applied manually /// or from the Request["page"] variable. This routine /// figures out and sets TotalPages, ActivePage and /// returns a filtered subset IQueryable that contains /// only the items from the ActivePage. /// </summary> /// <param name="query"></param> /// <param name="activePage"> /// The page you want to display. Sets the ActivePage property when passed. /// Pass 0 or smaller to use ActivePage setting. /// </param> /// <returns></returns> public IQueryable<T> FilterIQueryable<T>(IQueryable<T> query, int activePage) where T : class, new() { ActivePage = activePage < 1 ? ActivePage : activePage; if (ActivePage < 1) ActivePage = 1; TotalItems = query.Count(); if (TotalItems <= PageSize) { ActivePage = 1; TotalPages = 1; return query; } int skip = ActivePage - 1; if (skip > 0) query = query.Skip(skip * PageSize); _TotalPages = CalculateTotalPagesFromTotalItems(); return query.Take(PageSize); } The IEnumerable<T> version simply  converts the IEnumerable to an IQuerable and calls back into this method for filtering. The DataTable version requires a little more work to manually parse and filter records (I didn’t want to add the Linq DataSetExtensions assembly just for this): /// <summary> /// Filters a data table for an ActivePage. /// /// Note: Modifies the data set permanently by remove DataRows /// </summary> /// <param name="dt">Full result DataTable</param> /// <param name="activePage">Page to display. 0 to use ActivePage property </param> /// <returns></returns> public DataTable FilterDataTable(DataTable dt, int activePage) { ActivePage = activePage < 1 ? ActivePage : activePage; if (ActivePage < 1) ActivePage = 1; TotalItems = dt.Rows.Count; if (TotalItems <= PageSize) { ActivePage = 1; TotalPages = 1; return dt; } int skip = ActivePage - 1; if (skip > 0) { for (int i = 0; i < skip * PageSize; i++ ) dt.Rows.RemoveAt(0); } while(dt.Rows.Count > PageSize) dt.Rows.RemoveAt(PageSize); return dt; } Using the Pager Control The pager as it is is a first cut I built a couple of weeks ago and since then have been tweaking a little as part of an internal project I’m working on. I’ve replaced a bunch of pagers on various older pages with this pager without any issues and have what now feels like a more consistent user interface where paging looks and feels the same across different controls. As a bonus I’m only loading the data from the database that I need to display a single page. With the preset class tags applied too adding a pager is now as easy as dropping the control and adding the style sheet for styling to be consistent – no fuss, no muss. Schweet. Hopefully some of you may find this as useful as I have or at least as a baseline to build ontop of… Resources The Pager is part of the West Wind Web & Ajax Toolkit Pager.cs Source Code (some toolkit dependencies) Westwind.css base stylesheet with .pager and .gridpager styles Pager Example Page © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in ASP.NET  

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  • Building a better mouse-trap &ndash; Improving the creation of XML Message Requests using Reflection, XML &amp; XSLT

    - by paulschapman
    Introduction The way I previously created messages to send to the GovTalk service I used the XMLDocument to create the request. While this worked it left a number of problems; not least that for every message a special function would need to created. This is OK for the short term but the biggest cost in any software project is maintenance and this would be a headache to maintain. So the following is a somewhat better way of achieving the same thing. For the purposes of this article I am going to be using the CompanyNumberSearch request of the GovTalk service – although this technique would work for any service that accepted XML. The C# functions which send and receive the messages remain the same. The magic sauce in this is the XSLT which defines the structure of the request, and the use of objects in conjunction with reflection to provide the content. It is a bit like Sweet Chilli Sauce added to Chicken on a bed of rice. So on to the Sweet Chilli Sauce The Sweet Chilli Sauce The request to search for a company based on it’s number is as follows; <GovTalkMessage xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/CM/envelope http://xmlgw.companieshouse.gov.uk/v1-0/schema/Egov_ch-v2-0.xsd" xmlns="http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/CM/envelope" xmlns:dsig="http://www.w3.org/2000/09/xmldsig#" xmlns:gt="http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/schemas/govtalk/core" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" > <EnvelopeVersion>1.0</EnvelopeVersion> <Header> <MessageDetails> <Class>NumberSearch</Class> <Qualifier>request</Qualifier> <TransactionID>1</TransactionID> </MessageDetails> <SenderDetails> <IDAuthentication> <SenderID>????????????????????????????????</SenderID> <Authentication> <Method>CHMD5</Method> <Value>????????????????????????????????</Value> </Authentication> </IDAuthentication> </SenderDetails> </Header> <GovTalkDetails> <Keys/> </GovTalkDetails> <Body> <NumberSearchRequest xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="http://xmlgw.companieshouse.gov.uk/v1-0/schema/NumberSearch.xsd"> <PartialCompanyNumber>99999999</PartialCompanyNumber> <DataSet>LIVE</DataSet> <SearchRows>1</SearchRows> </NumberSearchRequest> </Body> </GovTalkMessage> This is the XML that we send to the GovTalk Service and we get back a list of companies that match the criteria passed A message is structured in two parts; The envelope which identifies the person sending the request, with the name of the request, and the body which gives the detail of the company we are looking for. The Chilli What makes it possible is the use of XSLT to define the message – and serialization to convert each request object into XML. To start we need to create an object which will represent the contents of the message we are sending. However there is a common properties in all the messages that we send to Companies House. These properties are as follows SenderId – the id of the person sending the message SenderPassword – the password associated with Id TransactionId – Unique identifier for the message AuthenticationValue – authenticates the request Because these properties are unique to the Companies House message, and because they are shared with all messages they are perfect candidates for a base class. The class is as follows; using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Web; using System.Security.Cryptography; using System.Text; using System.Text.RegularExpressions; using Microsoft.WindowsAzure.ServiceRuntime; namespace CompanyHub.Services { public class GovTalkRequest { public GovTalkRequest() { try { SenderID = RoleEnvironment.GetConfigurationSettingValue("SenderId"); SenderPassword = RoleEnvironment.GetConfigurationSettingValue("SenderPassword"); TransactionId = DateTime.Now.Ticks.ToString(); AuthenticationValue = EncodePassword(String.Format("{0}{1}{2}", SenderID, SenderPassword, TransactionId)); } catch (System.Exception ex) { throw ex; } } /// <summary> /// returns the Sender ID to be used when communicating with the GovTalk Service /// </summary> public String SenderID { get; set; } /// <summary> /// return the password to be used when communicating with the GovTalk Service /// </summary> public String SenderPassword { get; set; } // end SenderPassword /// <summary> /// Transaction Id - uses the Time and Date converted to Ticks /// </summary> public String TransactionId { get; set; } // end TransactionId /// <summary> /// calculate the authentication value that will be used when /// communicating with /// </summary> public String AuthenticationValue { get; set; } // end AuthenticationValue property /// <summary> /// encodes password(s) using MD5 /// </summary> /// <param name="clearPassword"></param> /// <returns></returns> public static String EncodePassword(String clearPassword) { MD5CryptoServiceProvider md5Hasher = new MD5CryptoServiceProvider(); byte[] hashedBytes; UTF32Encoding encoder = new UTF32Encoding(); hashedBytes = md5Hasher.ComputeHash(ASCIIEncoding.Default.GetBytes(clearPassword)); String result = Regex.Replace(BitConverter.ToString(hashedBytes), "-", "").ToLower(); return result; } } } There is nothing particularly clever here, except for the EncodePassword method which hashes the value made up of the SenderId, Password and Transaction id. Each message inherits from this object. So for the Company Number Search in addition to the properties above we need a partial number, which dataset to search – for the purposes of the project we only need to search the LIVE set so this can be set in the constructor and the SearchRows. Again all are set as properties. With the SearchRows and DataSet initialized in the constructor. public class CompanyNumberSearchRequest : GovTalkRequest, IDisposable { /// <summary> /// /// </summary> public CompanyNumberSearchRequest() : base() { DataSet = "LIVE"; SearchRows = 1; } /// <summary> /// Company Number to search against /// </summary> public String PartialCompanyNumber { get; set; } /// <summary> /// What DataSet should be searched for the company /// </summary> public String DataSet { get; set; } /// <summary> /// How many rows should be returned /// </summary> public int SearchRows { get; set; } public void Dispose() { DataSet = String.Empty; PartialCompanyNumber = String.Empty; DataSet = "LIVE"; SearchRows = 1; } } As well as inheriting from our base class, I have also inherited from IDisposable – not just because it is just plain good practice to dispose of objects when coding, but it gives also gives us more versatility when using the object. There are four stages in making a request and this is reflected in the four methods we execute in making a call to the Companies House service; Create a request Send a request Check the status If OK then get the results of the request I’ve implemented each of these stages within a static class called Toolbox – which also means I don’t need to create an instance of the class to use it. When making a request there are three stages; Get the template for the message Serialize the object representing the message Transform the serialized object using a predefined XSLT file. Each of my templates I have defined as an embedded resource. When retrieving a resource of this kind we have to include the full namespace to the resource. In making the code re-usable as much as possible I defined the full ‘path’ within the GetRequest method. requestFile = String.Format("CompanyHub.Services.Schemas.{0}", RequestFile); So we now have the full path of the file within the assembly. Now all we need do is retrieve the assembly and get the resource. asm = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly(); sr = asm.GetManifestResourceStream(requestFile); Once retrieved  So this can be returned to the calling function and we now have a stream of XSLT to define the message. Time now to serialize the request to create the other side of this message. // Serialize object containing Request, Load into XML Document t = Obj.GetType(); ms = new MemoryStream(); serializer = new XmlSerializer(t); xmlTextWriter = new XmlTextWriter(ms, Encoding.ASCII); serializer.Serialize(xmlTextWriter, Obj); ms = (MemoryStream)xmlTextWriter.BaseStream; GovTalkRequest = Toolbox.ConvertByteArrayToString(ms.ToArray()); First off we need the type of the object so we make a call to the GetType method of the object containing the Message properties. Next we need a MemoryStream, XmlSerializer and an XMLTextWriter so these can be initialized. The object is serialized by making the call to the Serialize method of the serializer object. The result of that is then converted into a MemoryStream. That MemoryStream is then converted into a string. ConvertByteArrayToString This is a fairly simple function which uses an ASCIIEncoding object found within the System.Text namespace to convert an array of bytes into a string. public static String ConvertByteArrayToString(byte[] bytes) { System.Text.ASCIIEncoding enc = new System.Text.ASCIIEncoding(); return enc.GetString(bytes); } I only put it into a function because I will be using this in various places. The Sauce When adding support for other messages outside of creating a new object to store the properties of the message, the C# components do not need to change. It is in the XSLT file that the versatility of the technique lies. The XSLT file determines the format of the message. For the CompanyNumberSearch the XSLT file is as follows; <?xml version="1.0"?> <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"> <xsl:template match="/"> <GovTalkMessage xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/CM/envelope http://xmlgw.companieshouse.gov.uk/v1-0/schema/Egov_ch-v2-0.xsd" xmlns="http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/CM/envelope" xmlns:dsig="http://www.w3.org/2000/09/xmldsig#" xmlns:gt="http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/schemas/govtalk/core" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" > <EnvelopeVersion>1.0</EnvelopeVersion> <Header> <MessageDetails> <Class>NumberSearch</Class> <Qualifier>request</Qualifier> <TransactionID> <xsl:value-of select="CompanyNumberSearchRequest/TransactionId"/> </TransactionID> </MessageDetails> <SenderDetails> <IDAuthentication> <SenderID><xsl:value-of select="CompanyNumberSearchRequest/SenderID"/></SenderID> <Authentication> <Method>CHMD5</Method> <Value> <xsl:value-of select="CompanyNumberSearchRequest/AuthenticationValue"/> </Value> </Authentication> </IDAuthentication> </SenderDetails> </Header> <GovTalkDetails> <Keys/> </GovTalkDetails> <Body> <NumberSearchRequest xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="http://xmlgw.companieshouse.gov.uk/v1-0/schema/NumberSearch.xsd"> <PartialCompanyNumber> <xsl:value-of select="CompanyNumberSearchRequest/PartialCompanyNumber"/> </PartialCompanyNumber> <DataSet> <xsl:value-of select="CompanyNumberSearchRequest/DataSet"/> </DataSet> <SearchRows> <xsl:value-of select="CompanyNumberSearchRequest/SearchRows"/> </SearchRows> </NumberSearchRequest> </Body> </GovTalkMessage> </xsl:template> </xsl:stylesheet> The outer two tags define that this is a XSLT stylesheet and the root tag from which the nodes are searched for. The GovTalkMessage is the format of the message that will be sent to Companies House. We first set up the XslCompiledTransform object which will transform the XSLT template and the serialized object into the request to Companies House. xslt = new XslCompiledTransform(); resultStream = new MemoryStream(); writer = new XmlTextWriter(resultStream, Encoding.ASCII); doc = new XmlDocument(); The Serialize method require XmlTextWriter to write the XML (writer) and a stream to place the transferred object into (writer). The XML will be loaded into an XMLDocument object (doc) prior to the transformation. // create XSLT Template xslTemplate = Toolbox.GetRequest(Template); xslTemplate.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin); templateReader = XmlReader.Create(xslTemplate); xslt.Load(templateReader); I have stored all the templates as a series of Embedded Resources and the GetRequestCall takes the name of the template and extracts the relevent XSLT file. /// <summary> /// Gets the framwork XML which makes the request /// </summary> /// <param name="RequestFile"></param> /// <returns></returns> public static Stream GetRequest(String RequestFile) { String requestFile = String.Empty; Stream sr = null; Assembly asm = null; try { requestFile = String.Format("CompanyHub.Services.Schemas.{0}", RequestFile); asm = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly(); sr = asm.GetManifestResourceStream(requestFile); } catch (Exception) { throw; } finally { asm = null; } return sr; } // end private static stream GetRequest We first take the template name and expand it to include the full namespace to the Embedded Resource I like to keep all my schemas in the same directory and so the namespace reflects this. The rest is the default namespace for the project. Then we get the currently executing assembly (which will contain the resources with the call to GetExecutingAssembly() ) Finally we get a stream which contains the XSLT file. We use this stream and then load an XmlReader with the contents of the template, and that is in turn loaded into the XslCompiledTransform object. We convert the object containing the message properties into Xml by serializing it; calling the Serialize() method of the XmlSerializer object. To set up the object we do the following; t = Obj.GetType(); ms = new MemoryStream(); serializer = new XmlSerializer(t); xmlTextWriter = new XmlTextWriter(ms, Encoding.ASCII); We first determine the type of the object being transferred by calling GetType() We create an XmlSerializer object by passing the type of the object being serialized. The serializer writes to a memory stream and that is linked to an XmlTextWriter. Next job is to serialize the object and load it into an XmlDocument. serializer.Serialize(xmlTextWriter, Obj); ms = (MemoryStream)xmlTextWriter.BaseStream; xmlRequest = new XmlTextReader(ms); GovTalkRequest = Toolbox.ConvertByteArrayToString(ms.ToArray()); doc.LoadXml(GovTalkRequest); Time to transform the XML to construct the full request. xslt.Transform(doc, writer); resultStream.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin); request = Toolbox.ConvertByteArrayToString(resultStream.ToArray()); So that creates the full request to be sent  to Companies House. Sending the request So far we have a string with a request for the Companies House service. Now we need to send the request to the Companies House Service. Configuration within an Azure project There are entire blog entries written about configuration within an Azure project – most of this is out of scope for this article but the following is a summary. Configuration is defined in two files within the parent project *.csdef which contains the definition of configuration setting. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceDefinition name="OnlineCompanyHub" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceDefinition"> <WebRole name="CompanyHub.Host"> <InputEndpoints> <InputEndpoint name="HttpIn" protocol="http" port="80" /> </InputEndpoints> <ConfigurationSettings> <Setting name="DiagnosticsConnectionString" /> <Setting name="DataConnectionString" /> </ConfigurationSettings> </WebRole> <WebRole name="CompanyHub.Services"> <InputEndpoints> <InputEndpoint name="HttpIn" protocol="http" port="8080" /> </InputEndpoints> <ConfigurationSettings> <Setting name="DiagnosticsConnectionString" /> <Setting name="SenderId"/> <Setting name="SenderPassword" /> <Setting name="GovTalkUrl"/> </ConfigurationSettings> </WebRole> <WorkerRole name="CompanyHub.Worker"> <ConfigurationSettings> <Setting name="DiagnosticsConnectionString" /> </ConfigurationSettings> </WorkerRole> </ServiceDefinition>   Above is the configuration definition from the project. What we are interested in however is the ConfigurationSettings tag of the CompanyHub.Services WebRole. There are four configuration settings here, but at the moment we are interested in the second to forth settings; SenderId, SenderPassword and GovTalkUrl The value of these settings are defined in the ServiceDefinition.cscfg file; <?xml version="1.0"?> <ServiceConfiguration serviceName="OnlineCompanyHub" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceConfiguration"> <Role name="CompanyHub.Host"> <Instances count="2" /> <ConfigurationSettings> <Setting name="DiagnosticsConnectionString" value="UseDevelopmentStorage=true" /> <Setting name="DataConnectionString" value="UseDevelopmentStorage=true" /> </ConfigurationSettings> </Role> <Role name="CompanyHub.Services"> <Instances count="2" /> <ConfigurationSettings> <Setting name="DiagnosticsConnectionString" value="UseDevelopmentStorage=true" /> <Setting name="SenderId" value="UserID"/> <Setting name="SenderPassword" value="Password"/> <Setting name="GovTalkUrl" value="http://xmlgw.companieshouse.gov.uk/v1-0/xmlgw/Gateway"/> </ConfigurationSettings> </Role> <Role name="CompanyHub.Worker"> <Instances count="2" /> <ConfigurationSettings> <Setting name="DiagnosticsConnectionString" value="UseDevelopmentStorage=true" /> </ConfigurationSettings> </Role> </ServiceConfiguration>   Look for the Role tag that contains our project name (CompanyHub.Services). Having configured the parameters we can now transmit the request. This is done by ‘POST’ing a stream of XML to the Companies House servers. govTalkUrl = RoleEnvironment.GetConfigurationSettingValue("GovTalkUrl"); request = WebRequest.Create(govTalkUrl); request.Method = "POST"; request.ContentType = "text/xml"; writer = new StreamWriter(request.GetRequestStream()); writer.WriteLine(RequestMessage); writer.Close(); We use the WebRequest object to send the object. Set the method of sending to ‘POST’ and the type of data as text/xml. Once set up all we do is write the request to the writer – this sends the request to Companies House. Did the Request Work Part I – Getting the response Having sent a request – we now need the result of that request. response = request.GetResponse(); reader = response.GetResponseStream(); result = Toolbox.ConvertByteArrayToString(Toolbox.ReadFully(reader));   The WebRequest object has a GetResponse() method which allows us to get the response sent back. Like many of these calls the results come in the form of a stream which we convert into a string. Did the Request Work Part II – Translating the Response Much like XSLT and XML were used to create the original request, so it can be used to extract the response and by deserializing the result we create an object that contains the response. Did it work? It would be really great if everything worked all the time. Of course if it did then I don’t suppose people would pay me and others the big bucks so that our programmes do not a) Collapse in a heap (this is an area of memory) b) Blow every fuse in the place in a shower of sparks (this will probably not happen this being real life and not a Hollywood movie, but it was possible to blow the sound system of a BBC Model B with a poorly coded setting) c) Go nuts and trap everyone outside the airlock (this was from a movie, and unless NASA get a manned moon/mars mission set up unlikely to happen) d) Go nuts and take over the world (this was also from a movie, but please note life has a habit of being of exceeding the wildest imaginations of Hollywood writers (note writers – Hollywood executives have no imagination and judging by recent output of that town have turned plagiarism into an art form). e) Freeze in total confusion because the cleaner pulled the plug to the internet router (this has happened) So anyway – we need to check to see if our request actually worked. Within the GovTalk response there is a section that details the status of the message and a description of what went wrong (if anything did). I have defined an XSLT template which will extract these into an XML document. <?xml version="1.0"?> <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" xmlns:ev="http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/CM/envelope" xmlns:gt="http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/schemas/govtalk/core" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"> <xsl:template match="/"> <GovTalkStatus xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"> <Status> <xsl:value-of select="ev:GovTalkMessage/ev:Header/ev:MessageDetails/ev:Qualifier"/> </Status> <Text> <xsl:value-of select="ev:GovTalkMessage/ev:GovTalkDetails/ev:GovTalkErrors/ev:Error/ev:Text"/> </Text> <Location> <xsl:value-of select="ev:GovTalkMessage/ev:GovTalkDetails/ev:GovTalkErrors/ev:Error/ev:Location"/> </Location> <Number> <xsl:value-of select="ev:GovTalkMessage/ev:GovTalkDetails/ev:GovTalkErrors/ev:Error/ev:Number"/> </Number> <Type> <xsl:value-of select="ev:GovTalkMessage/ev:GovTalkDetails/ev:GovTalkErrors/ev:Error/ev:Type"/> </Type> </GovTalkStatus> </xsl:template> </xsl:stylesheet>   Only thing different about previous XSL files is the references to two namespaces ev & gt. These are defined in the GovTalk response at the top of the response; xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/CM/envelope http://xmlgw.companieshouse.gov.uk/v1-0/schema/Egov_ch-v2-0.xsd" xmlns="http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/CM/envelope" xmlns:dsig="http://www.w3.org/2000/09/xmldsig#" xmlns:gt="http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/schemas/govtalk/core" If we do not put these references into the XSLT template then  the XslCompiledTransform object will not be able to find the relevant tags. Deserialization is a fairly simple activity. encoder = new ASCIIEncoding(); ms = new MemoryStream(encoder.GetBytes(statusXML)); serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(GovTalkStatus)); xmlTextWriter = new XmlTextWriter(ms, Encoding.ASCII); messageStatus = (GovTalkStatus)serializer.Deserialize(ms);   We set up a serialization object using the object type containing the error state and pass to it the results of a transformation between the XSLT above and the GovTalk response. Now we have an object containing any error state, and the error message. All we need to do is check the status. If there is an error then we can flag an error. If not then  we extract the results and pass that as an object back to the calling function. We go this by guess what – defining an XSLT template for the result and using that to create an Xml Stream which can be deserialized into a .Net object. In this instance the XSLT to create the result of a Company Number Search is; <?xml version="1.0" encoding="us-ascii"?> <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" xmlns:ev="http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/CM/envelope" xmlns:sch="http://xmlgw.companieshouse.gov.uk/v1-0/schema" exclude-result-prefixes="ev"> <xsl:template match="/"> <CompanySearchResult xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"> <CompanyNumber> <xsl:value-of select="ev:GovTalkMessage/ev:Body/sch:NumberSearch/sch:CoSearchItem/sch:CompanyNumber"/> </CompanyNumber> <CompanyName> <xsl:value-of select="ev:GovTalkMessage/ev:Body/sch:NumberSearch/sch:CoSearchItem/sch:CompanyName"/> </CompanyName> </CompanySearchResult> </xsl:template> </xsl:stylesheet> and the object definition is; using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Web; namespace CompanyHub.Services { public class CompanySearchResult { public CompanySearchResult() { CompanyNumber = String.Empty; CompanyName = String.Empty; } public String CompanyNumber { get; set; } public String CompanyName { get; set; } } } Our entire code to make calls to send a request, and interpret the results are; String request = String.Empty; String response = String.Empty; GovTalkStatus status = null; fault = null; try { using (CompanyNumberSearchRequest requestObj = new CompanyNumberSearchRequest()) { requestObj.PartialCompanyNumber = CompanyNumber; request = Toolbox.CreateRequest(requestObj, "CompanyNumberSearch.xsl"); response = Toolbox.SendGovTalkRequest(request); status = Toolbox.GetMessageStatus(response); if (status.Status.ToLower() == "error") { fault = new HubFault() { Message = status.Text }; } else { Object obj = Toolbox.GetGovTalkResponse(response, "CompanyNumberSearchResult.xsl", typeof(CompanySearchResult)); } } } catch (FaultException<ArgumentException> ex) { fault = new HubFault() { FaultType = ex.Detail.GetType().FullName, Message = ex.Detail.Message }; } catch (System.Exception ex) { fault = new HubFault() { FaultType = ex.GetType().FullName, Message = ex.Message }; } finally { } Wrap up So there we have it – a reusable set of functions to send and interpret XML results from an internet based service. The code is reusable with a little change with any service which uses XML as a transport mechanism – and as for the Companies House GovTalk service all I need to do is create various objects for the result and message sent and the relevent XSLT files. I might need minor changes for other services but something like 70-90% will be exactly the same.

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  • SQL SERVER – Update Statistics are Sampled By Default

    - by pinaldave
    After reading my earlier post SQL SERVER – Create Primary Key with Specific Name when Creating Table on Statistics, I have received another question by a blog reader. The question is as follows: Question: Are the statistics sampled by default? Answer: Yes. The sampling rate can be specified by the user and it can be anywhere between a very low value to 100%. Let us do a small experiment to verify if the auto update on statistics is left on. Also, let’s examine a very large table that is created and statistics by default- whether the statistics are sampled or not. USE [AdventureWorks] GO -- Create Table CREATE TABLE [dbo].[StatsTest]( [ID] [int] IDENTITY(1,1) NOT NULL, [FirstName] [varchar](100) NULL, [LastName] [varchar](100) NULL, [City] [varchar](100) NULL, CONSTRAINT [PK_StatsTest] PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED ([ID] ASC) ) ON [PRIMARY] GO -- Insert 1 Million Rows INSERT INTO [dbo].[StatsTest] (FirstName,LastName,City) SELECT TOP 1000000 'Bob', CASE WHEN ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY a.name)%2 = 1 THEN 'Smith' ELSE 'Brown' END, CASE WHEN ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY a.name)%10 = 1 THEN 'New York' WHEN ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY a.name)%10 = 5 THEN 'San Marino' WHEN ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY a.name)%10 = 3 THEN 'Los Angeles' ELSE 'Houston' END FROM sys.all_objects a CROSS JOIN sys.all_objects b GO -- Update the statistics UPDATE STATISTICS [dbo].[StatsTest] GO -- Shows the statistics DBCC SHOW_STATISTICS ("StatsTest"PK_StatsTest) GO -- Clean up DROP TABLE [dbo].[StatsTest] GO Now let us observe the result of the DBCC SHOW_STATISTICS. The result shows that Resultset is for sure sampling for a large dataset. The percentage of sampling is based on data distribution as well as the kind of data in the table. Before dropping the table, let us check first the size of the table. The size of the table is 35 MB. Now, let us run the above code with lesser number of the rows. USE [AdventureWorks] GO -- Create Table CREATE TABLE [dbo].[StatsTest]( [ID] [int] IDENTITY(1,1) NOT NULL, [FirstName] [varchar](100) NULL, [LastName] [varchar](100) NULL, [City] [varchar](100) NULL, CONSTRAINT [PK_StatsTest] PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED ([ID] ASC) ) ON [PRIMARY] GO -- Insert 1 Hundred Thousand Rows INSERT INTO [dbo].[StatsTest] (FirstName,LastName,City) SELECT TOP 100000 'Bob', CASE WHEN ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY a.name)%2 = 1 THEN 'Smith' ELSE 'Brown' END, CASE WHEN ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY a.name)%10 = 1 THEN 'New York' WHEN ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY a.name)%10 = 5 THEN 'San Marino' WHEN ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY a.name)%10 = 3 THEN 'Los Angeles' ELSE 'Houston' END FROM sys.all_objects a CROSS JOIN sys.all_objects b GO -- Update the statistics UPDATE STATISTICS [dbo].[StatsTest] GO -- Shows the statistics DBCC SHOW_STATISTICS ("StatsTest"PK_StatsTest) GO -- Clean up DROP TABLE [dbo].[StatsTest] GO You can see that Rows Sampled is just the same as Rows of the table. In this case, the sample rate is 100%. Before dropping the table, let us also check the size of the table. The size of the table is less than 4 MB. Let us compare the Result set just for a valid reference. Test 1: Total Rows: 1000000, Rows Sampled: 255420, Size of the Table: 35.516 MB Test 2: Total Rows: 100000, Rows Sampled: 100000, Size of the Table: 3.555 MB The reason behind the sample in the Test1 is that the data space is larger than 8 MB, and therefore it uses more than 1024 data pages. If the data space is smaller than 8 MB and uses less than 1024 data pages, then the sampling does not happen. Sampling aids in reducing excessive data scan; however, sometimes it reduces the accuracy of the data as well. Please note that this is just a sample test and there is no way it can be claimed as a benchmark test. The result can be dissimilar on different machines. There are lots of other information can be included when talking about this subject. I will write detail post covering all the subject very soon. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Index, SQL Optimization, SQL Performance, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology Tagged: SQL Statistics

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  • Tools and Utilities for the .NET Developer

    - by mbcrump
    Tweet this list! Add a link to my site to your bookmarks to quickly find this page again! Add me to twitter! This is a list of the tools/utilities that I use to do my job/hobby. I wanted this page to load fast and contain information that only you care about. If I have missed a tool that you like, feel free to contact me and I will add it to the list. Also, this list took a lot of time to complete. Please do not steal my work, if you like the page then please link back to my site. I will keep the links/information updated as new tools/utilities are created.  Windows/.NET Development – This is a list of tools that any Windows/.NET developer should have in his bag. I have used at some point in my career everything listed on this page and below is the tools worth keeping. Name Description License AnkhSVN Subversion support for Visual Studio. It also works with VS2010. Free Aurora XAML Designer One of the best XAML creation tools available. Has a ton of built in templates that you can copy/paste into VS2010. COST/Trial BeyondCompare Beyond Compare 3 is the ideal tool for comparing files and folders on your Windows or Linux system. Visualize changes in your code and carefully reconcile them. COST/Trial BuildIT Automated Task Tool Its main purpose is to automate tasks, whether it is the final packaging of a product, an automated daily build, maybe sending out a mailing list, even backing-up files. Free C Sharper for VB Convert VB to C#. COST CLRProfiler Analyze and improve the behavior of your .NET app. Free CodeRush Direct competitor to ReSharper, contains similar feature. This is one of those decide for yourself. COST/Trial Disk2VHD Disk2vhd is a utility that creates VHD (Virtual Hard Disk - Microsoft's Virtual Machine disk format) versions of physical disks for use in Microsoft Virtual PC or Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs). Free Eazfuscator.NET Is a free obfuscator for .NET. The main purpose is to protect intellectual property of software. Free EQATEC Profiler Make your .NET app run faster. No source code changes are needed. Just point the profiler to your app, run the modified code, and get a visual report. COST Expression Studio 3/4 Comes with Web, Blend, Sketch Flow and more. You can create websites, produce beautiful XAML and more. COST/Trial Expresso The award-winning Expresso editor is equally suitable as a teaching tool for the beginning user of regular expressions or as a full-featured development environment for the experienced programmer or web designer with an extensive knowledge of regular expressions. Free Fiddler Fiddler is a web debugging proxy which logs all HTTP(s) traffic between your computer and the internet. Free Firebug Powerful Web development tool. If you build websites, you will need this. Free FxCop FxCop is an application that analyzes managed code assemblies (code that targets the .NET Framework common language runtime) and reports information about the assemblies, such as possible design, localization, performance, and security improvements. Free GAC Browser and Remover Easy way to remove multiple assemblies from the GAC. Assemblies registered by programs like Install Shield can also be removed. Free GAC Util The Global Assembly Cache tool allows you to view and manipulate the contents of the global assembly cache and download cache. Free HelpScribble Help Scribble is a full-featured, easy-to-use help authoring tool for creating help files from start to finish. You can create Win Help (.hlp) files, HTML Help (.chm) files, a printed manual and online documentation (on a web site) all from the same Help Scribble project. COST/Trial IETester IETester is a free Web Browser that allows you to have the rendering and JavaScript engines of IE9 preview, IE8, IE7 IE 6 and IE5.5 on Windows 7, Vista and XP, as well as the installed IE in the same process. Free iTextSharp iText# (iTextSharp) is a port of the iText open source java library for PDF generation written entirely in C# for the .NET platform. Use the iText mailing list to get support. Free Kaxaml Kaxaml is a lightweight XAML editor that gives you a "split view" so you can see both your XAML and your rendered content. Free LINQPad LinqPad lets you interactively query databases in a LINQ. Free Linquer Many programmers are familiar with SQL and will need a help in the transition to LINQ. Sometimes there are complicated queries to be written and Linqer can help by converting SQL scripts to LINQ. COST/Trial LiquidXML Liquid XML Studio 2010 is an advanced XML developers toolkit and IDE, containing all the tools needed for designing and developing XML schema and applications. COST/Trial Log4Net log4net is a tool to help the programmer output log statements to a variety of output targets. log4net is a port of the excellent log4j framework to the .NET runtime. We have kept the framework similar in spirit to the original log4j while taking advantage of new features in the .NET runtime. For more information on log4net see the features document. Free Microsoft Web Platform Installer The Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0 (Web PI) is a free tool that makes getting the latest components of the Microsoft Web Platform, including Internet Information Services (IIS), SQL Server Express, .NET Framework and Visual Web Developer easy. Free Mono Development Don't have Visual Studio - no problem! This is an open Source C# and .NET development environment for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X Free Net Mass Downloader While it’s great that Microsoft has released the .NET Reference Source Code, you can only get it one file at a time while you’re debugging. If you’d like to batch download it for reading or to populate the cache, you’d have to write a program that instantiated and called each method in the Framework Class Library. Fortunately, .NET Mass Downloader comes to the rescue! Free nMap Nmap ("Network Mapper") is a free and open source (license) utility for network exploration or security auditing. Many systems and network administrators also find it useful for tasks such as network inventory, managing service upgrade schedules, and monitoring host or service uptime. Free NoScript (Firefox add-in) The NoScript Firefox extension provides extra protection for Firefox, Flock, Seamonkey and other Mozilla-based browsers: this free, open source add-on allows JavaScript, Java and Flash and other plug-ins to be executed only by trusted web sites of your choice (e.g. your online bank), and provides the most powerful Anti-XSS protection available in a browser. Free NotePad 2 Notepad2, a fast and light-weight Notepad-like text editor with syntax highlighting. This program can be run out of the box without installation, and does not touch your system's registry. Free PageSpy PageSpy is a small add-on for Internet Explorer that allows you to select any element within a webpage, select an option in the context menu, and view detailed information about both the coding behind the page and the element you selected. Free Phrase Express PhraseExpress manages your frequently used text snippets in customizable categories for quick access. Free PowerGui PowerGui is a free community for PowerGUI, a graphical user interface and script editor for Microsoft Windows PowerShell! Free Powershell Comes with Win7, but you can automate tasks by using the .NET Framework. Great for network admins. Free Process Explorer Ever wondered which program has a particular file or directory open? Now you can find out. Process Explorer shows you information about which handles and DLLs processes have opened or loaded. Also, included in the SysInterals Suite. Free Process Monitor Process Monitor is an advanced monitoring tool for Windows that shows real-time file system, Registry and process/thread activity. Free Reflector Explore and analyze compiled .NET assemblies, viewing them in C#, Visual Basic, and IL. This is an Essential for any .NET developer. Free Regular Expression Library Stuck on a Regular Expression but you think someone has already figured it out? Chances are they have. Free Regulator Regulator makes Regular Expressions easy. This is a must have for a .NET Developer. Free RenameMaestro RenameMaestro is probably the easiest batch file renamer you'll find to instantly rename multiple files COST ReSharper The one program that I cannot live without. Supports VS2010 and offers simple refactoring, code analysis/assistance/cleanup/templates. One of the few applications that is worth the $$$. COST/Trial ScrewTurn Wiki ScrewTurn Wiki allows you to create, manage and share wikis. A wiki is a collaboratively-edited, information-centered website: the most famous is Wikipedia. Free SharpDevelop What is #develop? SharpDevelop is a free IDE for C# and VB.NET projects on Microsoft's .NET platform. Free Show Me The Template Show Me The Template is a tool for exploring the templates, be their data, control or items panel, that comes with the controls built into WPF for all 6 themes. Free SnippetCompiler Compiles code snippets without opening Visual Studio. It does not support .NET 4. Free SQL Prompt SQL Prompt is a plug-in that increases how fast you can work with SQL. It provides code-completion for SQL server, reformatting, db schema information and snippets. Awesome! COST/Trial SQLinForm SQLinForm is an automatic SQL code formatter for all major databases  including ORACLE, SQL Server, DB2, UDB, Sybase, Informix, PostgreSQL, Teradata, MySQL, MS Access etc. with over 70 formatting options. COST/OnlineFree SSMS Tools SSMS Tools Pack is an add-in for Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) including SSMS Express. Free Storm STORM is a free and open source tool for testing web services. Free Telerik Code Convertor Convert code from VB to C Sharp and Vice Versa. Free TurtoiseSVN TortoiseSVN is a really easy to use Revision control / version control / source control software for Windows.Since it's not an integration for a specific IDE you can use it with whatever development tools you like. Free UltraEdit UltraEdit is the ideal text, HTML and hex editor, and an advanced PHP, Perl, Java and JavaScript editor for programmers. UltraEdit is also an XML editor including a tree-style XML parser. An industry-award winner, UltraEdit supports disk-based 64-bit file handling (standard) on 32-bit Windows platforms (Windows 2000 and later). COST/Trial Virtual Windows XP Comes with some W7 version and allows you to run WinXP along side W7. Free VirtualBox Virtualization by Sun Microsystems. You can virtualize Windows, Linux and more. Free Visual Log Parser SQL queries against a variety of log files and other system data sources. Free WinMerge WinMerge is an Open Source differencing and merging tool for Windows. WinMerge can compare both folders and files, presenting differences in a visual text format that is easy to understand and handle. Free Wireshark Wireshark is one of the best network protocol analyzer's for Unix and windows. This has been used several times to get me out of a bind. Free XML Notepad 07 Old, but still one of my favorite XML viewers. Free Productivity Tools – This is the list of tools that I use to save time or quickly navigate around Windows. Name Description License AutoHotKey Automate almost anything by sending keystrokes and mouse clicks. You can write a mouse or keyboard macro by hand or use the macro recorder. Free CLCL CLCL is clipboard caching utility. Free Ditto Ditto is an extension to the standard windows clipboard. It saves each item placed on the clipboard allowing you access to any of those items at a later time. Ditto allows you to save any type of information that can be put on the clipboard, text, images, html, custom formats, ..... Free Evernote Remember everything from notes to photos. It will synch between computers/devices. Free InfoRapid Inforapid is a search tool that will display all you search results in a html like browser. If you click on a word in that browser, it will start another search to the word you clicked on. Handy if you want to trackback something to it's true origin. The word you looked for will be highlighted in red. Clicking on the red word will open the containing file in a text based viewer. Clicking on any word in the opened document will start another search on that word. Free KatMouse The prime purpose of the KatMouse utility is to enhance the functionality of mice with a scroll wheel, offering 'universal' scrolling: moving the mouse wheel will scroll the window directly beneath the mouse cursor (not the one with the keyboard focus, which is default on Windows OSes). This is a major increase in the usefulness of the mouse wheel. Free ScreenR Instant Screencast with nothing to download. Works with Mac or PC and free. Free Start++ Start++ is an enhancement for the Start Menu in Windows Vista. It also extends the Run box and the command-line with customizable commands.  For example, typing "w Windows Vista" will take you to the Windows Vista page on Wikipedia! Free Synergy Synergy lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, without special hardware. It's intended for users with multiple computers on their desk since each system uses its own monitor(s). Free Texter Texter lets you define text substitution hot strings that, when triggered, will replace hotstring with a larger piece of text. By entering your most commonly-typed snippets of text into Texter, you can save countless keystrokes in the course of the day. Free Total Commander File handling, FTP, Archive handling and much more. Even works with Win3.11. COST/Trial Available Wizmouse WizMouse is a mouse enhancement utility that makes your mouse wheel work on the window currently under the mouse pointer, instead of the currently focused window. This means you no longer have to click on a window before being able to scroll it with the mouse wheel. This is a far more comfortable and practical way to make use of the mouse wheel. Free Xmarks Bookmark sync and search between computers. Free General Utilities – This is a list for power user users or anyone that wants more out of Windows. I usually install a majority of these whenever I get a new system. Name Description License µTorrent µTorrent is a lightweight and efficient BitTorrent client for Windows or Mac with many features. I use this for downloading LEGAL media. Free Audacity Audacity® is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It is available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems. Learn more about Audacity... Also check our Wiki and Forum for more information. Free AVast Free FREE Antivirus. Free CD Burner XP Pro CDBurnerXP is a free application to burn CDs and DVDs, including Blu-Ray and HD-DVDs. It also includes the feature to burn and create ISOs, as well as a multilanguage interface. Free CDEX You can extract digital audio CDs into mp3/wav. Free Combofix Combofix is a freeware (a legitimate spyware remover created by sUBs), Combofix was designed to scan a computer for known malware, spyware (SurfSideKick, QooLogic, and Look2Me as well as any other combination of the mentioned spyware applications) and remove them. Free Cpu-Z Provides information about some of the main devices of your system. Free Cropper Cropper is a screen capture utility written in C#. It makes it fast and easy to grab parts of your screen. Use it to easily crop out sections of vector graphic files such as Fireworks without having to flatten the files or open in a new editor. Use it to easily capture parts of a web site, including text and images. It's also great for writing documentation that needs images of your application or web site. Free DropBox Drag and Drop files to sync between computers. Free DVD-Fab Converts/Copies DVDs/Blu-Ray to different formats. (like mp4, mkv, avi) COST/Trial Available FastStone Capture FastStone Capture is a powerful, lightweight, yet full-featured screen capture tool that allows you to easily capture and annotate anything on the screen including windows, objects, menus, full screen, rectangular/freehand regions and even scrolling windows/web pages. Free ffdshow FFDShow is a DirectShow decoding filter for decompressing DivX, XviD, H.264, FLV1, WMV, MPEG-1 and MPEG-2, MPEG-4 movies. Free Filezilla FileZilla Client is a fast and reliable cross-platform FTP, FTPS and SFTP client with lots of useful features and an intuitive graphical user interface. You can also download a server version. Free FireFox Web Browser, do you really need an explanation? Free FireGestures A customizable mouse gestures extension which enables you to execute various commands and user scripts with five types of gestures. Free FoxIt Reader Light weight PDF viewer. You should install this with the advanced setting or it will install a toolbar and setup some shortcuts. Free gSynchIt Synch Gmail and Outlook. Even supports Outlook 2010 32/64 bit COST/Trial Available Hulu Desktop At home or in a hotel, this has replaced my cable/satellite subscription. Free ImgBurn ImgBurn is a lightweight CD / DVD / HD DVD / Blu-ray burning application that everyone should have in their toolkit! Free Infrarecorder InfraRecorder is a free CD/DVD burning solution for Microsoft Windows. It offers a wide range of powerful features; all through an easy to use application interface and Windows Explorer integration. Free KeePass KeePass is a free open source password manager, which helps you to manage your passwords in a secure way. Free LastPass Another password management, synchronize between browsers, automatic form filling and more. Free Live Essentials One download and lots of programs including Mail, Live Writer, Movie Maker and more! Free Monitores MonitorES is a small windows utility that helps you to turnoff monitor display when you lock down your machine.Also when you lock your machine, it will pause all your running media programs & set your IM status message to "Away" / Custom message(via options) and restore it back to normal when you back. Free mRemote mRemote is a full-featured, multi-tab remote connections manager. Free Open Office OpenOffice.org 3 is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages. It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose. Free Paint.NET Simple, intuitive, and innovative user interface for editing photos. Free Picasa Picasa is free photo editing software from Google that makes your pictures look great. Free Pidgin Pidgin is an easy to use and free chat client used by millions. Connect to AIM, MSN, Yahoo, and more chat networks all at once. Free PING PING is a live Linux ISO, based on the excellent Linux From Scratch (LFS) documentation. It can be burnt on a CD and booted, or integrated into a PXE / RIS environment. Free Putty PuTTY is an SSH and telnet client, developed originally by Simon Tatham for the Windows platform. Free Revo Uninstaller Revo Uninstaller Pro helps you to uninstall software and remove unwanted programs installed on your computer easily! Even if you have problems uninstalling and cannot uninstall them from "Windows Add or Remove Programs" control panel applet.Revo Uninstaller is a much faster and more powerful alternative to "Windows Add or Remove Programs" applet! It has very powerful features to uninstall and remove programs. Free Security Essentials Microsoft Security Essentials is a new, free consumer anti-malware solution for your computer. Free SetupVirtualCloneDrive Virtual CloneDrive works and behaves just like a physical CD/DVD drive, however it exists only virtually. Point to the .ISO file and it appears in Windows Explorer as a Drive. Free Shark 007 Codec Pack Play just about any file format with this download. Also includes my W7 Media Playlist Generator. Free Snagit 9 Screen Capture on steroids. Add arrows, captions, etc to any screenshot. COST/Trial Available SysinternalsSuite Go ahead and download the entire sys internals suite. I have mentioned multiple programs in this suite already. Free TeraCopy TeraCopy is a compact program designed to copy and move files at the maximum possible speed, providing the user with a lot of features. Free for Home TrueCrypt Free open-source disk encryption software for Windows 7/Vista/XP, Mac OS X, and Linux Free TweetDeck Fully featured Twitter client. Free UltraVNC UltraVNC is a powerful, easy to use and free software that can display the screen of another computer (via internet or network) on your own screen. The program allows you to use your mouse and keyboard to control the other PC remotely. It means that you can work on a remote computer, as if you were sitting in front of it, right from your current location. Free Unlocker Unlocks locked files. Pretty simple right? Free VLC Media Player VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player and multimedia framework capable of reading most audio and video formats Free Windows 7 Media Playlist This program is special to my heart because I wrote it. It has been mentioned on podcast and various websites. It allows you to quickly create wvx video playlist for Windows Media Center. Free WinRAR WinRAR is a powerful archive manager. It can backup your data and reduce the size of email attachments, decompress RAR, ZIP and other files downloaded from Internet and create new archives in RAR and ZIP file format. COST/Trial Available Blogging – I use the following for my blog. Name Description License Insert Code for Windows Live Writer Insert Code for Windows Live Writer will format a snippet of text in a number of programming languages such as C#, HTML, MSH, JavaScript, Visual Basic and TSQL. Free LiveWriter Included in Live Essentials, but the ultimate in Windows Blogging Free PasteAsVSCode Plug-in for Windows Live Writer that pastes clipboard content as Visual Studio code. Preserves syntax highlighting, indentation and background color. Converts RTF, outputted by Visual Studio, into HTML. Free Desktop Management – The list below represent the best in Windows Desktop Management. Name Description License 7 Stacks Allows users to have "stacks" of icons in their taskbar. Free Executor Executor is a multi purpose launcher and a more advanced and customizable version of windows run. Free Fences Fences is a program that helps you organize your desktop and can hide your icons when they are not in use. Free RocketDock Rocket Dock is a smoothly animated, alpha blended application launcher. It provides a nice clean interface to drop shortcuts on for easy access and organization. With each item completely customizable there is no end to what you can add and launch from the dock. Free WindowsTab Tabbing is an essential feature of modern web browsers. Window Tabs brings the productivity of tabbed window management to all of your desktop applications. Free

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  • SQL SERVER – SHRINKFILE and TRUNCATE Log File in SQL Server 2008

    - by pinaldave
    Note: Please read the complete post before taking any actions. This blog post would discuss SHRINKFILE and TRUNCATE Log File. The script mentioned in the email received from reader contains the following questionable code: “Hi Pinal, If you could remember, I and my manager met you at TechEd in Bangalore. We just upgraded to SQL Server 2008. One of our jobs failed as it was using the following code. The error was: Msg 155, Level 15, State 1, Line 1 ‘TRUNCATE_ONLY’ is not a recognized BACKUP option. The code was: DBCC SHRINKFILE(TestDBLog, 1) BACKUP LOG TestDB WITH TRUNCATE_ONLY DBCC SHRINKFILE(TestDBLog, 1) GO I have modified that code to subsequent code and it works fine. But, are there other suggestions you have at the moment? USE [master] GO ALTER DATABASE [TestDb] SET RECOVERY SIMPLE WITH NO_WAIT DBCC SHRINKFILE(TestDbLog, 1) ALTER DATABASE [TestDb] SET RECOVERY FULL WITH NO_WAIT GO Configuration of our server and system is as follows: [Removed not relevant data]“ An email like this that suddenly pops out in early morning is alarming email. Because I am a dead, busy mind, so I had only one min to reply. I wrote down quickly the following note. (As I said, it was a single-minute email so it is not completely accurate). Here is that quick email shared with all of you. “Hi Mr. DBA [removed the name] Thanks for your email. I suggest you stop this practice. There are many issues included here, but I would list two major issues: 1) From the setting database to simple recovery, shrinking the file and once again setting in full recovery, you are in fact losing your valuable log data and will be not able to restore point in time. Not only that, you will also not able to use subsequent log files. 2) Shrinking file or database adds fragmentation. There are a lot of things you can do. First, start taking proper log backup using following command instead of truncating them and losing them frequently. BACKUP LOG [TestDb] TO  DISK = N'C:\Backup\TestDb.bak' GO Remove the code of SHRINKING the file. If you are taking proper log backups, your log file usually (again usually, special cases are excluded) do not grow very big. There are so many things to add here, but you can call me on my [phone number]. Before you call me, I suggest for accuracy you read Paul Randel‘s two posts here and here and Brent Ozar‘s Post here. Kind Regards, Pinal Dave” I guess this post is very much clear to you. Please leave your comments here. As mentioned, this is a very huge subject; I have just touched a tip of the ice-berg and have tried to point to authentic knowledge. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Backup and Restore, SQL Data Storage, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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  • SQLAuthority News – 1600 Blog Post Articles – A Milestone

    - by pinaldave
    It was really a very interesting moment for me when I was writing my 1600th milestone blog post. Now it`s a lot more exciting because this time it`s my 1600th blog post. Every time I write a milestone blog post such as this, I have the same excitement as when I was writing my very first blog post. Today I want to write about a few statistics of the blog. Statistics I am frequently asked about my blog stats, so I have already published my blog stats which are measured by WordPress.com. Currently, I have more than 22 Million+ Views on this blog from various sources. There are more than 6200+ feed subscribers in Google Reader only; I think I don`t have to count all other subscribers. My LinkedIn has 1250+ connection, while my Twitter has 2150+. Because I feel that I`m well connected with the Community, I am very thankful to you, my readers. Today I also want to say Thank You to those experts who have helped me to improve. I have maintained a list of all the articles I have written. If you go to my first articles, you will notice that they were a little different from the articles I am writing today. The reason for this is simple: I have two kinds of people helping me write all the better: readers and experts. To my Readers You read the articles and gave me feedback about what was right or wrong, what you liked or disliked. Quite often, you were helpful in writing guest posts, and I also recognize how you were a bit brutal in criticizing some articles, making me re-write them. Because of you, I was able to write better blog posts. To Experts You read the articles and helped me improve. I get inspiration from you and learned a lot from you. Just like everybody, I am a guy who is trying to learn. There are times when I had vague understanding of some subjects, and you did not hesitate to help me. Number of Posts Many ask me if the number of posts is important to me. My answer is YES. Actually, it`s just not about the number of my posts; it is about my blog, my routine, my learning experience and my journey. During the last four years, I have decided that I would be learning one thing a day. This blog has helped me accomplish this goal because in here I have been able to keep my notes and bookmarks. Whatever I learn or experience, I blog and share it with the Community. For me, the blog post number is more than just a number: it`s a summary of my experiences and memories. Once again, thanks for reading and supporting my blog! Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: About Me, Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Milestone, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority News, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology

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