Search Results

Search found 12511 results on 501 pages for 'itunes store'.

Page 135/501 | < Previous Page | 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142  | Next Page >

  • How to develop a Windows 8 app in 30 days!

    - by Scott Spradlin
    Begin your 30-day journey to create a Windows Store style app. Sign up to get started and receive: Insider tips and tricks on Windows 8 application development. Personal on-the-phone access to a Windows 8 architect*. An exclusive one-on-one Windows Store design consultation*. An opportunity to get expert help from a Microsoft Services Engineer at an App Excellence Lab. Sign up today and get started. Your new Windows 8 app could be mere days away. * Offer good only to legal residents in the 50 United States & D.C., age 18 or older to hobbyists, professionals or developers in the field of software tech who sign up for building a Windows 8 application on www.generationapp.com. Offer limited to 250 design consultations per month and 500 technical review consultations per month, on a first come first served basis. Limit of one session of each offer type per person. This offer is non-transferable and cannot be combined with any other offer. This offer ends when supplies are exhausted, and is not redeemable for cash.

    Read the article

  • Terrible App Review of the Week&ndash;October 2nd

    - by David Paquette
    As some people know, I have a few apps in the Windows Phone Store.  One of these apps was intended to be a gimmicky app that did NOT really do anything useful.  It was just a funny little app that you probably try it once, then almost immediately uninstall.  To my surprise, this app ended up in some of the Top App lists and actually got a large number of downloads (for the Windows Phone Store).  Along with these downloads came a large number of really terrible and offensive reviews.  People are insulting me and saying awful things that they would never say to someone in person (I hope).  I am ok with this.  I can take the bad reviews and it doesn’t really bother me, but I still think that people are incredibly dis-respectful with their app reviews.  So..I am going to start sharing the best of the worst reviews.  If by chance this is your review, please contact me.  I would love to have a quick chat… Literally THE crappiest app I could of downloaded. You might as well rub dog *** in your eyes..... You'd see more!!! Stan8976   P.S. I am not particularly proud of this app, so I am not going to reveal the name. However, as you see more of these amazing reviews, I think you might be able to guess which app it is.

    Read the article

  • Setting up a LAMP VM server for Development and Testing?

    - by TdotThomas
    Info: I would like to set up a VM server on my local computer which will serve pages in the exact same way as my current hosting (but only to me on my local computer). I currently pay a big web hosting company to host my website & web store and they are doing a great job, but I would like to be able to work on my Web site and its corresponding MySQL DB, HTML, and PHP code without being at risk of messing something completely up on the live servers. My current plan of action: Set up a VM webserver with Debian, MySQL, PHP, Apache. Copy web store (PHP/HTML) code to VM server. Copy my current MySQL databases from my hosting provider and install on VM server. Modify and test new features on VM server. Upload MySQL DB and HTML/PHP code back to web host's server where it should work as before but with new modifications. Questions: Now I'm pretty sure I have steps one and two down correctly but I can't for the life of me figure out how to proceed next, so here are my questions. I have my /etc/host file set up so www.MySite.test redirects to the IP address of the local VM webserver. Once I import my PHP/HTML files and MySQL file whats the best way to navigate around the fact that all of my files and DBs will reference www.MySite.com. I can export my MySQL dbs but do I also have to export my MySQL users and passwords to access those db or are those coded into my html/php code?

    Read the article

  • Tuning WebServer Response -

    - by Vedran Wex Maricevic
    I have this sam e question on StackOverflow and I was advised to ask it here hoping for more information. Here is the question: I am in rather unfavorable situation. I have aspdotneststore front e-commerce application and search addon called VibeTrib. I dont have source code for both of those. Store that runs on StoreFront and VibeTrib has close to 250k products. Also we have lots of filters. I spoke to ViTrib reps, and they want extra money so they could optimize Queries that they use. Money they require is nto a big deal, but the problem is I dont trust them anymore. What we got is much different then wha is being advertised. To cut the long story short. I am runing the store on Amazon AWS now, and regardless of what DB (MsSQL 2012) server I set (I tried 32GB RAM monsters instances) it is slow. Ajax search uses Full Text search and it displays search keywords relatively fast, but once the search is performed ( to display all results) it is still slow.!!! There is something that I could to do accelerate the speed on my own end? I do have full control over EC2 Instance (Web server Server 2012 and IIS 8). Can I set IIS to step in for the search and cache some of it? I was hoping to cache at least some most common words. My best bet is IIS 8 :) Is there any help in my case? Thanks

    Read the article

  • What strategy should be employed to access Facebook data offline?

    - by user686021
    I'm working on a project similar to Klout which provides detail about how you influence other people and who influenced you. We'll be fetching data from few social networking sites (i.e linked in, facebook, twitter etc) to analyze how users interacts with one another. For that we need to parse the data and store it in db and have to analyze it so that strength of relation of two user can be decided. We'll be accessing data offline as well to provide them with accurate results. If we consider facebook activities, we need to have access to Facebook users' news feed, wall data which includes likes,comments,shares etc. To decide how one user influence other, we'll store all the data and analyze it. I need suggestions on what steps need to be taken for great performance. We'll be using ASP.Net(C#) Web forms, SQL Server, jQuery. Main concern is parsing of data, it's storage and retrieval with least overhead. For that I've summarized few points as below : Should we switch over to document-oriented database, like MongoDB or RavenDB for the whole app or part of it even though none of team member have experience with them? Should we use SQL Server Analysis service? Is there any other library than Json.NET for parsing data? Is it advisable to use any C# library over FQL + GET Request ? I've tried to provide as much info as possible. Please share your views for the same.

    Read the article

  • Efficient Algorithm for Recording gameplay's objects positions

    - by Scorch
    So, I have a game idea in mind, and for that I need to record the game around the player. I'me not talking about recording it as video, but rather recording the scene objects, and their positions within the game, and then render them, giving the player the ability to go back and forth, to stop time and move around. I've made a prototype with some data structures in C#, since this is going to be the programming language we'll be using in our game, but if we want the player to be able to go back just five minutes back with the data of just 100 NPC's, it takes almost 1GB of RAM. Right now, I'm just storing a Doubly linked list, each item with the object position. In the game, I'll need to store even more data in each node, so I need something even more ligher. Of course, this algorithm is zero optimized, but still, that is a lot. The alternatives would be create the NPC's that aren't really important to the game when the user is viewing the past, but I don't really like it very much for the sake of realism. I wonder if there is a better way to store this? Thanks in advance, Scorch

    Read the article

  • Would this data requirement suit a Document -Oriented database?

    - by codecowboy
    I have a requirement to allow users to fill in journal/diary entries per day. I want to provide a handful of known journal templates with x columns to fill in. An example might be a thought diary; a user has to record a thought in one column, describe the situation, rate how they felt etc. The other requirement is that a user should be able to create their own diary templates. They might have a need for a 10 column diary entry per day and might need to rate some aspect out of 50 instead of 10. In an RDBMS, I can see this getting quite complicated. I could have individual tables for my known templates as the fields will be fixed. But for custom diary templates I imagine I would would need a table storing custom_field_types (the diary columns), a table storing entries referencing their field types (custom_entries) and then a third custom_diary table which would store rows matching custom_entries to diaries. Leaving performance / scaling aside, would it be any simpler or make more sense to use a document oriented database like MongoDB to store this data? This is for a web application which might later need an API for mobile devices.

    Read the article

  • Visual Studio 2013 now available!

    - by TATWORTH
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/TATWORTH/archive/2013/10/17/visual-studio-2013-now-available.aspxVisual Studio 2013 is now available for download! I will attach the beginning of their web page announcement. You should note that web projects may now be readily a combination of Web Forms, MVC and Web API.We are excited to announce that Visual Studio 2013 is now available to you as an MSDN subscriber! For developers and development teams, Visual Studio 2013 easily delivers applications across all Microsoft devices, cloud, desktop, server and game console platforms by providing a consistent development experience, hybrid collaboration options, and state-of-the-art tools, services, and resources. Below are just a few of the highlights in this release:   •   Innovative features for greater developer productivity:Visual Studio 2013 includes many user interface improvements; there are more than 400 modified icons with greater differentiation and increased use of color, a redesigned Start page, and other design changes.  •   Support for Windows 8.1 app development: Visual Studio 2013 provides the ideal toolset for building modern applications that leverage the next wave in Windows platform innovation (Windows 8.1), while supporting devices and services across all Microsoft platforms. Support for Windows Store app development in Windows 8.1 includes updates to the tools, controls and templates, new Coded UI test support for XAML apps, UI Responsiveness Analyzer and Energy Consumption profiler for XAML & HTML apps, enhanced memory profiling tools for HTML apps, and improved integration with the Windows Store.  •   Web development advances: Creating websites or services on the Microsoft platform provides you with many options, including ASP.NET WebForms, ASP.NET MVC, WCF or Web API services, and more. Previously, working with each of these approaches meant working with separate project types and tooling isolated to that project’s capabilities. The One ASP.NET vision unifies your web project experience in Visual Studio 2013 so that you can create ASP.NET web applications using your preference of ASP.NET component frameworks in a single project. Now you can mix and match the right tools for the job within your web projects, giving you increased flexibility and productivity.

    Read the article

  • Why are prefab customizations being applied to only a single character? [on hold]

    - by m0rgul
    I've built my (networked) game to the point where I have a room, some characters and a character customization screen. In the character customization screen I get to chose gender, chose from three different wardrobe options and assign custom colors to these wardrobe items. Then I use a custom object to store these options, serialize them and store them in PlayerPrefs, then load the next scene and apply them to my chosen character in this scene. Then I go and spawn some more characters, customize them, etc. The problem is that my character is always customized, but all other characters in the scene are default copies of the prefab. The prefabs themselves are a generic male and a generic female, both with three different wardrobes to chose from (they are included in the prefab). When I spawn my character, I go to the saved options in PlayerPrefs, destroy the two discarded wardrobes, apply color to my chosen wardrobe and then spawn the character. How would it be possible to make the other characters also show up in their customized form rather than just the generic prefab (which shows all three wardrobes at the same time)?

    Read the article

  • Simple C: How do I scan this information in properly?

    - by Doc
    OK this is a simple question but for some reason I just can't get it right. I have to scan from a file hundreds of lines of code and store it in a array (which I can normally do a ok job with) however At one point the code will specify a number that then corresponds to the next batch of chars ints and floats going into various arrays. As I know I am not describing this correctly here is a example. one line of the file I am reading will contain something close to this. 0221 T 2 S P 850 150 0.90 0.75 500 24 2 2012 G A 7 9600.00 0.1 1000 Name_of_place 0104 L 1 F 400 1.00 0.75 500 24 2 2012 G A 7 9600.00 0.1 1000 Ballroom the problem I am having is This part here 0221 T 2 S P 850 150 0.90 0.75 500 24 2 2012 G A 7 9600.00 0.1 1000 Name_of_place 0104 L 1 F 400 1.00 0.75 500 24 2 2012 G A 7 9600.00 0.1 1000 Ballroom The rest after this is Generally the exact same however at this point the number at the front descides all the values that are going in. I am almost completely lost on how to write a way that can scan this and store the data into arrays correctly

    Read the article

  • On Developing Web Services with Global State

    - by user74418
    I'm new to web programming. I'm more experienced and comfortable with client-side code. Recently, I've been dabbling in web programming through Python's Google App Engine. I ran into some difficulty while trying to write some simple apps for the purposes of learning, mainly involving how to maintain some kind of consistent universally-accessible state for the application. I tried to write a simple queueing management system, the kind you would expect to be used in a small clinic, or at a cafeteria. Typically, this is done with hardware. You take a number from a ticketing machine, and when your number is displayed or called you approach the counter for service. Alternatively, you could be given a small pager, which will beep or vibrate when it is your turn to receive service. The former is somewhat better in that you have an idea of how many people are still ahead of you in the queue. In this situation, the global state is the last number in queue, which needs to be updated whenever a request is made to the server. I'm not sure how to best to store and maintain this value in a GAE context. The solution I thought of was to keep the value in the Datastore, attempt to query it during a ticket request, update the value, and then re-store it with put. My problem is that I haven't figured out how to lock the resource so that other requests do not check the value while it is in the middle of being updated. I am concerned that I may end up ticket requests that have the same queue number. Also, the whole solution feels awkward to me. I was wondering if there was a more natural way to accomplish this without having to go through the Datastore. Can anyone with more experience in this domain provide some advice on how to approach the design of the above application?

    Read the article

  • HgWebDir push permission denied error

    - by Gregg
    I have a new Fedora 12 server that I am attempting to set up Mercurial on. I have yum installed mercurial, and most things seem to work fine. However, after setting up hgwebdir.cgi through apache, I am unable to do an hg push to the only repo currently being hosted. The error I get back is: searching for changes abort: HTTP Error 500: Permission denied: .hg/store/lock httpd is running as user apache UID PID PPID C STIME TTY TIME CMD root 1691 1 0 13:19 ? 00:00:00 /usr/sbin/httpd apache 1694 1691 0 13:19 ? 00:00:00 /usr/sbin/httpd apache 1695 1691 0 13:19 ? 00:00:00 /usr/sbin/httpd apache 1696 1691 0 13:19 ? 00:00:00 /usr/sbin/httpd apache 1697 1691 0 13:19 ? 00:00:00 /usr/sbin/httpd apache 1698 1691 0 13:19 ? 00:00:00 /usr/sbin/httpd apache 1699 1691 0 13:19 ? 00:00:00 /usr/sbin/httpd apache 1700 1691 0 13:19 ? 00:00:00 /usr/sbin/httpd apache 1701 1691 0 13:19 ? 00:00:00 /usr/sbin/httpd and I set permissions so that the apache user owns the whole repo and everything. In a last ditch attempt, I even made the repo globally writable. [root@builds .hg]# ll total 424K drwxrwxrwx. 3 apache apache 4.0K 2010-04-19 14:43 . drwxrwxrwx. 19 apache apache 4.0K 2010-04-15 13:33 .. -rw-rw-rw-. 2 apache apache 57 2010-04-13 11:42 00changelog.i -rw-rw-rw-. 1 apache apache 93 2010-04-16 15:33 branchheads.cache -rw-rw-rw-. 1 apache apache 192K 2010-04-15 13:33 dirstate -rw-r--r--. 1 apache apache 156 2010-04-19 14:43 hgrc -rw-rw-rw-. 1 apache apache 42 2010-04-15 13:33 last-message.txt -rw-rw-rw-. 2 apache apache 23 2010-04-13 11:42 requires drwxrwxrwx. 4 apache apache 4.0K 2010-04-19 11:26 store -rw-rw-rw-. 1 apache apache 45 2010-04-14 14:08 tags.cache -rw-rw-rw-. 1 apache apache 7 2010-04-16 15:33 undo.branch -rw-rw-rw-. 1 apache apache 192K 2010-04-16 15:33 undo.dirstate [root@builds .hg]# cd store [root@builds store]# ll total 308K drwxrwxrwx. 4 apache apache 4.0K 2010-04-19 11:26 . drwxrwxrwx. 3 apache apache 4.0K 2010-04-19 14:43 .. -rw-rw-rw-. 1 apache apache 20K 2010-04-16 15:33 00changelog.i -rw-rw-rw-. 1 apache apache 81K 2010-04-16 15:33 00manifest.i drwxrwxrwx. 17 apache apache 4.0K 2010-04-13 11:47 data drwxrwxrwx. 3 apache apache 4.0K 2010-04-13 11:43 dh -rw-rw-rw-. 2 apache apache 177K 2010-04-15 11:03 fncache -rw-rw-rw-. 1 apache apache 67 2010-04-16 15:33 undo I have a clone of the repo elsewhere on the machine running as a different user. If I set the the default value in the [paths] section of the clones hgrc file to the local filepath on the server, the push works fine, but if I switch it to use the url, I get the error every time. Some possible quirks in how I've set this up... hgwebdir.cgi is sitting in /var/www/cgi-bin and the repo is a child of /opt/hg. I turned off suexec as well, and this doesn't seem to clear up the issue. The only line I added in the apache config to get hgwebdir running is: ScriptAlias /hg "/var/www/cgi-bin/hgwebdir.cgi" The hgweb.config is also in /var/www/cgi-bin and it's contents are: [collections] /opt/hg = /opt/hg [trusted] users = * [web] baseurl = /hg push_ssl = false allow_push = * The repo browser is working fine, it's just push that doesn't work. Apache error_log doesn't have anything in about this error at all.

    Read the article

  • boolean in java: what am I doing wrong?

    - by Cheesegraterr
    Hello, I am trying to make my boolean value work. I am new at programming java so I must be missing something simple. I am trying to make it so that if one of the tire pressures is below 35 or over 45 the system outputs "bad inflation" For class me must use a boolean which is what I tried. I cant figure out why this isnt working. No matter what I do the boolean is always true. Any tips? public class tirePressure { private static double getDoubleSystem1 () //Private routine to simply read a double in from the command line { String myInput1 = null; //Store the string that is read form the command line double numInput1 = 0; //Used to store the converted string into an double BufferedReader mySystem; //Buffer to store input mySystem = new BufferedReader (new InputStreamReader (System.in)); // creates a connection to system files or cmd try { myInput1 = mySystem.readLine (); //reads in data from console myInput1 = myInput1.trim (); //trim command cuts off unneccesary inputs } catch (IOException e) //checks for errors { System.out.println ("IOException: " + e); return -1; } numInput1 = Double.parseDouble (myInput1); //converts the string to an double return numInput1; //return double value to main program } static public void main (String[] args) { double TireFR; //double to store input from console double TireFL; double TireBR; double TireBL; boolean goodPressure; goodPressure = false; System.out.println ("Tire Pressure Checker"); System.out.println (" "); System.out.print ("Enter pressure of front left tire:"); TireFL = getDoubleSystem1 (); //read in an double from the user if (TireFL < 35 || TireFL > 45) { System.out.println ("Pressure out of range"); goodPressure = false; } System.out.print ("Enter pressure of front right tire:"); TireFR = getDoubleSystem1 (); //read in an double from the user if (TireFR < 35 || TireFR > 45) { System.out.println ("Pressure out of range"); goodPressure = false; } if (TireFL == TireFR) System.out.print (" "); else System.out.println ("Front tire pressures do not match"); System.out.println (" "); System.out.print ("Enter pressure of back left tire:"); TireBL = getDoubleSystem1 (); //read in an double from the user if (TireBL < 35 || TireBL > 45) { System.out.println ("Pressure out of range"); goodPressure = false; } System.out.print ("Enter pressure of back right tire:"); TireBR = getDoubleSystem1 (); //read in an double from the user if (TireBR < 35 || TireBR > 45) { System.out.println ("Pressure out of range"); goodPressure = false; } if (TireBL == TireBR) System.out.print (" "); else System.out.println ("Back tire pressures do not match"); if (goodPressure = true) System.out.println ("Inflation is OK."); else System.out.println ("Inflation is BAD."); System.out.println (goodPressure); } //mainmethod } // tirePressure Class

    Read the article

  • Database - Designing an "Events" Table

    - by Alix Axel
    After reading the tips from this great Nettuts+ article I've come up with a table schema that would separate highly volatile data from other tables subjected to heavy reads and at the same time lower the number of tables needed in the whole database schema, however I'm not sure if this is a good idea since it doesn't follow the rules of normalization and I would like to hear your advice, here is the general idea: I've four types of users modeled in a Class Table Inheritance structure, in the main "user" table I store data common to all the users (id, username, password, several flags, ...) along with some TIMESTAMP fields (date_created, date_updated, date_activated, date_lastLogin, ...). To quote the tip #16 from the Nettuts+ article mentioned above: Example 2: You have a “last_login” field in your table. It updates every time a user logs in to the website. But every update on a table causes the query cache for that table to be flushed. You can put that field into another table to keep updates to your users table to a minimum. Now it gets even trickier, I need to keep track of some user statistics like how many unique times a user profile was seen how many unique times a ad from a specific type of user was clicked how many unique times a post from a specific type of user was seen and so on... In my fully normalized database this adds up to about 8 to 10 additional tables, it's not a lot but I would like to keep things simple if I could, so I've come up with the following "events" table: |------|----------------|----------------|--------------|-----------| | ID | TABLE | EVENT | DATE | IP | |------|----------------|----------------|--------------|-----------| | 1 | user | login | 201004190030 | 127.0.0.1 | |------|----------------|----------------|--------------|-----------| | 1 | user | login | 201004190230 | 127.0.0.1 | |------|----------------|----------------|--------------|-----------| | 2 | user | created | 201004190031 | 127.0.0.2 | |------|----------------|----------------|--------------|-----------| | 2 | user | activated | 201004190234 | 127.0.0.2 | |------|----------------|----------------|--------------|-----------| | 2 | user | approved | 201004190930 | 217.0.0.1 | |------|----------------|----------------|--------------|-----------| | 2 | user | login | 201004191200 | 127.0.0.2 | |------|----------------|----------------|--------------|-----------| | 15 | user_ads | created | 201004191230 | 127.0.0.1 | |------|----------------|----------------|--------------|-----------| | 15 | user_ads | impressed | 201004191231 | 127.0.0.2 | |------|----------------|----------------|--------------|-----------| | 15 | user_ads | clicked | 201004191231 | 127.0.0.2 | |------|----------------|----------------|--------------|-----------| | 15 | user_ads | clicked | 201004191231 | 127.0.0.2 | |------|----------------|----------------|--------------|-----------| | 15 | user_ads | clicked | 201004191231 | 127.0.0.2 | |------|----------------|----------------|--------------|-----------| | 15 | user_ads | clicked | 201004191231 | 127.0.0.2 | |------|----------------|----------------|--------------|-----------| | 15 | user_ads | clicked | 201004191231 | 127.0.0.2 | |------|----------------|----------------|--------------|-----------| | 2 | user | blocked | 201004200319 | 217.0.0.1 | |------|----------------|----------------|--------------|-----------| | 2 | user | deleted | 201004200320 | 217.0.0.1 | |------|----------------|----------------|--------------|-----------| Basically the ID refers to the primary key (id) field in the TABLE table, I believe the rest should be pretty straightforward. One thing that I've come to like in this design is that I can keep track of all the user logins instead of just the last one, and thus generate some interesting metrics with that data. Due to the nature of the events table I also thought of making some optimizations, such as: #9: Since there is only a finite number of tables and a finite (and predetermined) number of events, the TABLE and EVENTS columns could be setup as ENUMs instead of VARCHARs to save some space. #14: Store IPs as UNSIGNED INT with INET_ATON() instead of VARCHARs. Store DATEs as TIMESTAMPs instead of DATETIMEs. Use the ARCHIVE (or the CSV?) engine instead of InnoDB / MyISAM. Overall, each event would only consume 14 bytes which is okay for my traffic I guess. Pros: Ability to store more detailed data (such as logins). No need to design (and code for) almost a dozen additional tables (dates and statistics). Reduces a few columns per table and keeps volatile data separated. Cons: Non-relational (still not as bad as EAV): SELECT * FROM events WHERE id = 2 AND table = 'user' ORDER BY date DESC(); 6 bytes overhead per event (ID, TABLE and EVENT). I'm more inclined to go with this approach since the pros seem to far outweigh the cons, but I'm still a little bit reluctant.. Am I missing something? What are your thoughts on this? Thanks!

    Read the article

  • A format for storing personal contacts in a database

    - by Gart
    I'm thinking of the best way to store personal contacts in a database for a business application. The traditional and straightforward approach would be to create a table with columns for each element, i.e. Name, Telephone Number, Job title, Address, etc... However, there are known industry standards for this kind of data, like for example vCard, or hCard, or vCard-RDF/XML or even Windows Contacts XML Schema. Utilizing an standard format would offer some benefits, like inter-operablilty with other systems. But how can I decide which method to use? The requirements are mainly to store the data. Search and ordering queries are highly unlikely but possible. The volume of the data is 100,000 records at maximum. My database engine supports native XML columns. I have been thinking to use some XML-based format to store the personal contacts. Then it will be possible to utilize XML indexes on this data, if searching and ordering is needed. Is this a good approach? Which contacts format and schema would you recommend for this? Edited after first answers Here is why I think the straightforward approach is bad. This is due to the nature of this kind of data - it is not that simple. The personal contacts it is not well-structured data, it may be called semi-structured. Each contact may have different data fields, maybe even such fields which I cannot anticipate. In my opinion, each piece of this data should be treated as important information, i.e. no piece of data could be discarded just because there was no relevant column in the database. If we took it further, assuming that no data may be lost, then we could create a big text column named Comment or Description or Other and put there everything which cannot be fitted well into table columns. But then again - the data would lose structure - this might be bad. If we wanted structured data then - according to the database design principles - the data should be decomposed into entities, and relations should be established between the entities. But this adds complexity - there are just too many entities, and lots of design desicions should be made, like "How do we store Address? Personal Name? Phone number? How do we encode home phone numbers and mobile phone numbers? How about other contact info?.." The relations between entities are complex and multiple, and each relation is a table in the database. Each relation needs to be documented in the design papers. That is a lot of work to do. But it is possible to avoid the complexity entirely - just document that the data is stored according to such and such standard schema, period. Then anybody who would be reading that document should easily understand what it was all about. Finally, this is all about using an industry standard. The standard is, hopefully, designed by some clever people who anticipated and described the structure of personal contacts information much better than I ever could. Why should we all reinvent the wheel?? It's much easier to use a standard schema. The problem is, there are just too many standards - it's not easy to decide which one to use!

    Read the article

  • Need suggestions on how to extract data from .docx/.doc file then into mssql

    - by DarkPP
    I'm suppose to develop an automated application for my project, it will load past-year examination/exercises paper (word file), detect the sections accordingly, extract the questions and images in that section, and then store the questions and images into the database. (Preview of the question paper is at the bottom of this post) So I need some suggestions on how to extract data from a word file, then inserting them into a database. Currently I have a few methods to do so, however I have no idea how I could implement them when the file contains textboxes with background image. The question has to link with the image. Method One (Make use of ms office interop) Load the word file - Extract image, save into a folder - Extract text, save as .txt - Extract text from .txt then store in db Question: How i detect the section and question. How I link the image to the question. Extract text from word file (Working): private object missing = Type.Missing; private object sFilename = @"C:\temp\questionpaper.docx"; private object sFilename2 = @"C:\temp\temp.txt"; private object readOnly = true; object fileFormat = Word.WdSaveFormat.wdFormatText; private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { Word.Application wWordApp = new Word.Application(); wWordApp.DisplayAlerts = Word.WdAlertLevel.wdAlertsNone; Word.Document dFile = wWordApp.Documents.Open(ref sFilename, ref missing, ref readOnly, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing); dFile.SaveAs(ref sFilename2, ref fileFormat, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing,ref missing, ref missing,ref missing,ref missing,ref missing,ref missing, ref missing,ref missing); dFile.Close(ref missing, ref missing, ref missing); } Extract image from word file (Doesn't work on image inside textbox): private Word.Application wWordApp; private int m_i; private object missing = Type.Missing; private object filename = @"C:\temp\questionpaper.docx"; private object readOnly = true; private void CopyFromClipbordInlineShape(String imageIndex) { Word.InlineShape inlineShape = wWordApp.ActiveDocument.InlineShapes[m_i]; inlineShape.Select(); wWordApp.Selection.Copy(); Computer computer = new Computer(); if (computer.Clipboard.GetDataObject() != null) { System.Windows.Forms.IDataObject data = computer.Clipboard.GetDataObject(); if (data.GetDataPresent(System.Windows.Forms.DataFormats.Bitmap)) { Image image = (Image)data.GetData(System.Windows.Forms.DataFormats.Bitmap, true); image.Save("C:\\temp\\DoCremoveImage" + imageIndex + ".png", System.Drawing.Imaging.ImageFormat.Png); } } } private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { wWordApp = new Word.Application(); wWordApp.Documents.Open(ref filename, ref missing, ref readOnly, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing); try { for (int i = 1; i <= wWordApp.ActiveDocument.InlineShapes.Count; i++) { m_i = i; CopyFromClipbordInlineShape(Convert.ToString(i)); } } finally { object save = false; wWordApp.Quit(ref save, ref missing, ref missing); wWordApp = null; } } Method Two Unzip the word file (.docx) - Copy the media(image) folder, store somewhere - Parse the XML file - Store the text in db Any suggestion/help would be greatly appreciated :D Preview of the word file: (backup link: http://i.stack.imgur.com/YF1Ap.png)

    Read the article

  • Calculating negative fractions in Objective C

    - by Mark Reid
    I've been coding my way through Steve Kochan's Programming in Objective-C 2.0 book. I'm up to an exercise in chapter 7, ex 4, in case anyone has the book. The question posed by the exercise it will the Fraction class written work with negative fractions such as -1/2 + -2/3? Here's the implementation code in question - @implementation Fraction @synthesize numerator, denominator; -(void) print { NSLog(@"%i/%i", numerator, denominator); } -(void) setTo: (int) n over: (int) d { numerator = n; denominator = d; } -(double) convertToNum { if (denominator != 0) return (double) numerator / denominator; else return 1.0; } -(Fraction *) add: (Fraction *) f { // To add two fractions: // a/b + c/d = ((a * d) + (b * c)) / (b * d) // result will store the result of the addition Fraction *result = [[Fraction alloc] init]; int resultNum, resultDenom; resultNum = (numerator * f.denominator) + (denominator * f.numerator); resultDenom = denominator * f.denominator; [result setTo: resultNum over: resultDenom]; [result reduce]; return result; } -(Fraction *) subtract: (Fraction *) f { // To subtract two fractions: // a/b - c/d = ((a * d) - (b * c)) / (b * d) // result will store the result of the addition Fraction *result = [[Fraction alloc] init]; int resultNum, resultDenom; resultNum = numerator * f.denominator - denominator * f.numerator; resultDenom = denominator * f.denominator; [result setTo: resultNum over: resultDenom]; [result reduce]; return result; } -(Fraction *) multiply: (Fraction *) f { // To multiply two fractions // a/b * c/d = (a*c) / (b*d) // result will store the result of the addition Fraction *result = [[Fraction alloc] init]; int resultNum, resultDenom; resultNum = numerator * f.numerator; resultDenom = denominator * f.denominator; [result setTo: resultNum over: resultDenom]; [result reduce]; return result; } -(Fraction *) divide: (Fraction *) f { // To divide two fractions // a/b / c/d = (a*d) / (b*c) // result will store the result of the addition Fraction *result = [[Fraction alloc] init]; int resultNum, resultDenom; resultNum = numerator * f.denominator; resultDenom = denominator * f.numerator; [result setTo: resultNum over: resultDenom]; [result reduce]; return result; } -(void) reduce { int u = numerator; int v = denominator; int temp; while (v != 0) { temp = u % v; u = v; v = temp; } numerator /= u; denominator /= u; } @end My question to you is will it work with negative fractions and can you explain how you know? Part of the issue is I don't know how to calculate negative fractions myself so I'm not too sure how to know. Many thanks.

    Read the article

  • Have suggestions for these assembly mnemonics?

    - by Noctis Skytower
    Greetings! Last semester in college, my teacher in the Computer Languages class taught us the esoteric language named Whitespace. In the interest of learning the language better with a very busy schedule (midterms), I wrote an interpreter and assembler in Python. An assembly language was designed to facilitate writing programs easily, and a sample program was written with the given assembly mnemonics. Now that it is summer, a new project has begun with the objective being to rewrite the interpreter and assembler for Whitespace 0.3, with further developments coming afterwards. Since there is so much extra time than before to work on its design, you are presented here with an outline that provides a revised set of mnemonics for the assembly language. This post is marked as a wiki for their discussion. Have you ever had any experience with assembly languages in the past? Were there some instructions that you thought should have been renamed to something different? Did you find yourself thinking outside the box and with a different paradigm than in which the mnemonics were named? If you can answer yes to any of those questions, you are most welcome here. Subjective answers are appreciated! Stack Manipulation (IMP: [Space]) Stack manipulation is one of the more common operations, hence the shortness of the IMP [Space]. There are four stack instructions. hold N Push the number onto the stack copy Duplicate the top item on the stack copy N Copy the nth item on the stack (given by the argument) onto the top of the stack swap Swap the top two items on the stack drop Discard the top item on the stack drop N Slide n items off the stack, keeping the top item Arithmetic (IMP: [Tab][Space]) Arithmetic commands operate on the top two items on the stack, and replace them with the result of the operation. The first item pushed is considered to be left of the operator. add Addition sub Subtraction mul Multiplication div Integer Division mod Modulo Heap Access (IMP: [Tab][Tab]) Heap access commands look at the stack to find the address of items to be stored or retrieved. To store an item, push the address then the value and run the store command. To retrieve an item, push the address and run the retrieve command, which will place the value stored in the location at the top of the stack. save Store load Retrieve Flow Control (IMP: [LF]) Flow control operations are also common. Subroutines are marked by labels, as well as the targets of conditional and unconditional jumps, by which loops can be implemented. Programs must be ended by means of [LF][LF][LF] so that the interpreter can exit cleanly. L: Mark a location in the program call L Call a subroutine goto L Jump unconditionally to a label if=0 L Jump to a label if the top of the stack is zero if<0 L Jump to a label if the top of the stack is negative return End a subroutine and transfer control back to the caller halt End the program I/O (IMP: [Tab][LF]) Finally, we need to be able to interact with the user. There are IO instructions for reading and writing numbers and individual characters. With these, string manipulation routines can be written. The read instructions take the heap address in which to store the result from the top of the stack. print chr Output the character at the top of the stack print int Output the number at the top of the stack input chr Read a character and place it in the location given by the top of the stack input int Read a number and place it in the location given by the top of the stack Question: How would you redesign, rewrite, or rename the previous mnemonics and for what reasons?

    Read the article

  • Are their any suggestions for this new assembly language?

    - by Noctis Skytower
    Greetings! Last semester in college, my teacher in the Computer Languages class taught us the esoteric language named Whitespace. In the interest of learning the language better with a very busy schedule (midterms), I wrote an interpreter and assembler in Python. An assembly language was designed to facilitate writing programs easily, and a sample program was written with the given assembly mnemonics. Now that it is summer, a new project has begun with the objective being to rewrite the interpreter and assembler for Whitespace 0.3, with further developments coming afterwards. Since there is so much extra time than before to work on its design, you are presented here with an outline that provides a revised set of mnemonics for the assembly language. This post is marked as a wiki for their discussion. Have you ever had any experience with assembly languages in the past? Were there some instructions that you thought should have been renamed to something different? Did you find yourself thinking outside the box and with a different paradigm than in which the mnemonics were named? If you can answer yes to any of those questions, you are most welcome here. Subjective answers are appreciated! Stack Manipulation (IMP: [Space]) Stack manipulation is one of the more common operations, hence the shortness of the IMP [Space]. There are four stack instructions. hold N Push the number onto the stack copy Duplicate the top item on the stack copy N Copy the nth item on the stack (given by the argument) onto the top of the stack swap Swap the top two items on the stack drop Discard the top item on the stack drop N Slide n items off the stack, keeping the top item Arithmetic (IMP: [Tab][Space]) Arithmetic commands operate on the top two items on the stack, and replace them with the result of the operation. The first item pushed is considered to be left of the operator. add Addition sub Subtraction mul Multiplication div Integer Division mod Modulo Heap Access (IMP: [Tab][Tab]) Heap access commands look at the stack to find the address of items to be stored or retrieved. To store an item, push the address then the value and run the store command. To retrieve an item, push the address and run the retrieve command, which will place the value stored in the location at the top of the stack. save Store load Retrieve Flow Control (IMP: [LF]) Flow control operations are also common. Subroutines are marked by labels, as well as the targets of conditional and unconditional jumps, by which loops can be implemented. Programs must be ended by means of [LF][LF][LF] so that the interpreter can exit cleanly. L: Mark a location in the program call L Call a subroutine goto L Jump unconditionally to a label if=0 L Jump to a label if the top of the stack is zero if<0 L Jump to a label if the top of the stack is negative return End a subroutine and transfer control back to the caller exit End the program I/O (IMP: [Tab][LF]) Finally, we need to be able to interact with the user. There are IO instructions for reading and writing numbers and individual characters. With these, string manipulation routines can be written. The read instructions take the heap address in which to store the result from the top of the stack. print chr Output the character at the top of the stack print int Output the number at the top of the stack input chr Read a character and place it in the location given by the top of the stack input int Read a number and place it in the location given by the top of the stack Question: How would you redesign, rewrite, or rename the previous mnemonics and for what reasons?

    Read the article

  • Are there any suggestions for these new assembly mnemonics?

    - by Noctis Skytower
    Greetings! Last semester in college, my teacher in the Computer Languages class taught us the esoteric language named Whitespace. In the interest of learning the language better with a very busy schedule (midterms), I wrote an interpreter and assembler in Python. An assembly language was designed to facilitate writing programs easily, and a sample program was written with the given assembly mnemonics. Now that it is summer, a new project has begun with the objective being to rewrite the interpreter and assembler for Whitespace 0.3, with further developments coming afterwards. Since there is so much extra time than before to work on its design, you are presented here with an outline that provides a revised set of mnemonics for the assembly language. This post is marked as a wiki for their discussion. Have you ever had any experience with assembly languages in the past? Were there some instructions that you thought should have been renamed to something different? Did you find yourself thinking outside the box and with a different paradigm than in which the mnemonics were named? If you can answer yes to any of those questions, you are most welcome here. Subjective answers are appreciated! Stack Manipulation (IMP: [Space]) Stack manipulation is one of the more common operations, hence the shortness of the IMP [Space]. There are four stack instructions. hold N Push the number onto the stack copy Duplicate the top item on the stack copy N Copy the nth item on the stack (given by the argument) onto the top of the stack swap Swap the top two items on the stack drop Discard the top item on the stack drop N Slide n items off the stack, keeping the top item Arithmetic (IMP: [Tab][Space]) Arithmetic commands operate on the top two items on the stack, and replace them with the result of the operation. The first item pushed is considered to be left of the operator. add Addition sub Subtraction mul Multiplication div Integer Division mod Modulo Heap Access (IMP: [Tab][Tab]) Heap access commands look at the stack to find the address of items to be stored or retrieved. To store an item, push the address then the value and run the store command. To retrieve an item, push the address and run the retrieve command, which will place the value stored in the location at the top of the stack. save Store load Retrieve Flow Control (IMP: [LF]) Flow control operations are also common. Subroutines are marked by labels, as well as the targets of conditional and unconditional jumps, by which loops can be implemented. Programs must be ended by means of [LF][LF][LF] so that the interpreter can exit cleanly. L: Mark a location in the program call L Call a subroutine goto L Jump unconditionally to a label if=0 L Jump to a label if the top of the stack is zero if<0 L Jump to a label if the top of the stack is negative return End a subroutine and transfer control back to the caller halt End the program I/O (IMP: [Tab][LF]) Finally, we need to be able to interact with the user. There are IO instructions for reading and writing numbers and individual characters. With these, string manipulation routines can be written. The read instructions take the heap address in which to store the result from the top of the stack. print chr Output the character at the top of the stack print int Output the number at the top of the stack input chr Read a character and place it in the location given by the top of the stack input int Read a number and place it in the location given by the top of the stack Question: How would you redesign, rewrite, or rename the previous mnemonics and for what reasons?

    Read the article

  • Do you have suggestions for these assembly mnemonics?

    - by Noctis Skytower
    Greetings! Last semester in college, my teacher in the Computer Languages class taught us the esoteric language named Whitespace. In the interest of learning the language better with a very busy schedule (midterms), I wrote an interpreter and assembler in Python. An assembly language was designed to facilitate writing programs easily, and a sample program was written with the given assembly mnemonics. Now that it is summer, a new project has begun with the objective being to rewrite the interpreter and assembler for Whitespace 0.3, with further developments coming afterwards. Since there is so much extra time than before to work on its design, you are presented here with an outline that provides a revised set of mnemonics for the assembly language. This post is marked as a wiki for their discussion. Have you ever had any experience with assembly languages in the past? Were there some instructions that you thought should have been renamed to something different? Did you find yourself thinking outside the box and with a different paradigm than in which the mnemonics were named? If you can answer yes to any of those questions, you are most welcome here. Subjective answers are appreciated! Stack Manipulation (IMP: [Space]) Stack manipulation is one of the more common operations, hence the shortness of the IMP [Space]. There are four stack instructions. hold N Push the number onto the stack copy Duplicate the top item on the stack copy N Copy the nth item on the stack (given by the argument) onto the top of the stack swap Swap the top two items on the stack drop Discard the top item on the stack drop N Slide n items off the stack, keeping the top item Arithmetic (IMP: [Tab][Space]) Arithmetic commands operate on the top two items on the stack, and replace them with the result of the operation. The first item pushed is considered to be left of the operator. add Addition sub Subtraction mul Multiplication div Integer Division mod Modulo Heap Access (IMP: [Tab][Tab]) Heap access commands look at the stack to find the address of items to be stored or retrieved. To store an item, push the address then the value and run the store command. To retrieve an item, push the address and run the retrieve command, which will place the value stored in the location at the top of the stack. save Store load Retrieve Flow Control (IMP: [LF]) Flow control operations are also common. Subroutines are marked by labels, as well as the targets of conditional and unconditional jumps, by which loops can be implemented. Programs must be ended by means of [LF][LF][LF] so that the interpreter can exit cleanly. L: Mark a location in the program call L Call a subroutine goto L Jump unconditionally to a label if=0 L Jump to a label if the top of the stack is zero if<0 L Jump to a label if the top of the stack is negative return End a subroutine and transfer control back to the caller halt End the program I/O (IMP: [Tab][LF]) Finally, we need to be able to interact with the user. There are IO instructions for reading and writing numbers and individual characters. With these, string manipulation routines can be written. The read instructions take the heap address in which to store the result from the top of the stack. print chr Output the character at the top of the stack print int Output the number at the top of the stack input chr Read a character and place it in the location given by the top of the stack input int Read a number and place it in the location given by the top of the stack Question: How would you redesign, rewrite, or rename the previous mnemonics and for what reasons?

    Read the article

  • Having trouble storing a CRTP based class in a vector

    - by user366834
    Hi, Im not sure if this can be done, im just delving into templates so perhaps my understanding is a bit wrong. I have a Platoon of soldiers, the platoon inherits from a formation to pick up the formations properties, but because i could have as many formations as i can think of I chose to use the CRTP to create the formations, hoping that i could make a vector or array of Platoon to store the platoons in. but, of course, when i make a Platoon, it wont store it in the vector, "types are unrelated" Is there any way around this ? i read about "Veneers" which are similar and that they work with arrays but i cant get it to work, perhaps im missing something. here's some code: (sorry about the formatting, the code is here in my post but its not showing up for some reason ) template < class TBase > class IFormation { public : ~IFormation(){} bool IsFull() { return m_uiMaxMembers == m_uiCurrentMemCount; } protected: unsigned int m_uiCurrentMemCount; unsigned int m_uiMaxMembers; IFormation( unsigned int _uiMaxMembers ): m_uiMaxMembers( _uiMaxMembers ), m_uiCurrentMemCount( 0 ){} // only allow use as a base class. void SetupFormation( std::vector<MySoldier*>& _soldierList ){}; // must be implemented in derived class }; ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// // PHALANX FORMATION class Phalanx : public IFormation<Phalanx> { public: Phalanx( ): IFormation( 12 ), m_fDistance( 4.0f ) {} ~Phalanx(){} protected: float m_fDistance; // the distance between soldiers void SetupFormation( std::vector<MySoldier*>& _soldierList ); }; /////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// // COLUMN FORMATINO class Column : public IFormation< Column > { public : Column( int _numOfMembers ): IFormation( _numOfMembers ) {} ~Column(); protected: void SetupFormation( std::vector<MySoldier*>& _soldierList ); }; I then use these formations in the platoon class to derive, so that platoon gets the relevant SetupFormation() function: template < class Formation > class Platoon : public Formation { public: **** platoon code here }; everything works great and as expected up until this point. now, as my general can have multiple platoons, I need to store the platoons. typedef Platoon< IFormation<> > TPlatoon; // FAIL typedef std::vector<TPlatoon*> TPlatoons; TPlatoon m_pPlatoons m_pPlatoons.push_back( new Platoon<Phalanx> ); // FAIL, types unrelated. typedef Platoon< IFormation< TPlatoon; fails because i need to specify a template parameter, yet specifying this will only allow me to store platoons created with the same template parameter. so i then created FormationBase class FormationBase { public: virtual bool IsFull() = 0; virtual void SetupFormation( std::vector<MySoldier*>& _soldierList ) = 0; }; and made IFormation publicly inherit from that, and then changed the typedef to typedef Platoon< IFormation< FormationBase > > TPlatoon; but still no love. now in my searches i have not found info that says this is possible - or not possible.

    Read the article

  • not able to show the file from the array...

    - by sjl
    Hi, i'm trying to do an image gallery. i was not able to display the thumbnails stored in the array. instead it keep showing the same thumbnails. anyone can help? very much appreciated.. // Arrays that store the filenames of the text, images and thumbnails var thumbnails:Array = [ "images/image1_thumb.jpg", "images/image2_thumb.jpg", "images/image3_thumb.jpg", "images/image4_thumb.jpg", "images/image5_thumb.jpg", "images/image6_thumb.jpg", "images/image7_thumb.jpg" ]; var images:Array = [ "images/image1.jpg", "images/image2.jpg", "images/image3.jpg", "images/image4.jpg", "images/image5.jpg", "images/image6.jpg", "images/image7.jpg" ]; var textFiles:Array = [ "text/picture1.txt", "text/picture2.txt", "text/picture3.txt", "text/picture4.txt", "text/picture5.txt", "text/picture6.txt", "text/picture7.txt" ]; // NOTE: thumbnail images are 60 x 43 pixels in size // loop through the array and create the thumbnails and position them vertically for (var i:int = 0; i <7; i++) { // create an instance of MyUIThumbnail var thumbs:MyUIThumbnail = new MyUIThumbnail(); // position the thumbnails on the left vertically thumbs.y = 43 * i;/*** FILL IN THE BLANK HERE ***/ // store the corresponding full size image name in the thumbnail // use the "images" array thumbs.image = "images/image1.jpg"; thumbs.image = "images/image2.jpg"; thumbs.image = "images/image3.jpg"; thumbs.image = "images/image4.jpg"; thumbs.image = "images/image5.jpg"; thumbs.image = "images/image6.jpg"; thumbs.image = "images/image7.jpg"; // store the corresponding text file name in the thumbnail // use the "textFiles" array thumbs.textFile = "text/picture1.txt"; thumbs.textFile = "text/picture2.txt"; thumbs.textFile = "text/picture3.txt"; thumbs.textFile = "text/picture4.txt"; thumbs.textFile = "text/picture5.txt"; thumbs.textFile = "text/picture6.txt"; thumbs.textFile = "text/picture7.txt"; thumbs.imageFullSize = full_image_mc ; // store the reference to the textfield in the thumbnail thumbs.infoText = info; // load and display the thumbnails // use the "thumbnails" array thumbs.loadThumbnail("images/image1_thumb.jpg"); thumbs.loadThumbnail("images/image2_thumb.jpg"); thumbs.loadThumbnail("images/image3_thumb.jpg"); thumbs.loadThumbnail("images/image4_thumb.jpg"); thumbs.loadThumbnail("images/image5_thumb.jpg"); thumbs.loadThumbnail("images/image6_thumb.jpg"); thumbs.loadThumbnail("images/image7_thumb.jpg"); addChild(thumbs); } below is my thumbanail. as package{ import fl.containers.; import flash.events.; import flash.text.; import flash.net.; import flash.display.*; public class MyUIThumbnail extends MovieClip { public var image:String = ""; public var textFile:String = ""; var loader:UILoader = new UILoader(); public var imageFullSize:MyFullSizeImage; // reference to loader to show the full size image public var infoText:TextField; // reference to textfield that displays image infoText var txtLoader:URLLoader = new URLLoader(); // loader to load the text file public function MyUIThumbnail() { buttonMode = true; addChild(loader); this.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, myClick); txtLoader.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, displayText); loader.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, thumbnailLoaded); } public function loadThumbnail(filename:String):void { loader.source = filename; preloader.trackLoading(loader); } function myClick(e:MouseEvent):void { // load and display the full size image imageFullSize.loadImage("my_full_mc"); // load and display the text textLoad("info"); } function textLoad(file:String) { // load the text description from the text file loader.load(new URLRequest(textFile)); } function displayText(e:Event) { //display the text when loading is completed addChild(infoText); } function thumbnailLoaded(e:Event) { loader.width = 60; loader.height = 43; } } }

    Read the article

  • Top 20 Daily Deal Sites In India

    - by Damodhar
    If you have never heard of Groupon recently, you probably are not working in the tech industry because it is all over the blogosphere. After all, growing from zero to US$1.35 billion valuation in 18 months is pretty AMAZING. Inspired by this, the following bunch of Groupon clone’s are already rising in India. Definitely this business model is emerging and changes the way online shopping happens in India. SnapDeal SnapDeal features a Best deals Coupons at an unbeatable price on the best stuff to do, see, eat, and buy in our city. It provides vouchers and discounts in all the major cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Bangalore. KhojGuru Exclusive Discount coupons from hundreds of brands and retailers. These discounts can be easily downloaded as an SMS on to the mobile phone or their print out can be taken. MyDala A platform which gets us great deals in our city.Leveraging the “power of group buying”. Group buying happens when like minded people come together to get deals that we can never get on our own as individuals. SoSasta Great place which would not only tell us about the hidden treasures of our city — but also made them affordable to us at the end of the month. DealsAndYou Deals and You is a group buying portal that features a daily deal on the best stuff in some of India’s leading cities. AajKaCatch Its concept is to provide you the most unique, useful and qualitative product at a very low price. So you can now shop without the hassles of clustered products. BindassBargain Bindaas Bargain offers a new deal every day! Great stuff ranging from cool gadgets, home theatres, luxury watches, smash games. MasthiDeals It get you a great deal on a great stuff to do, eat, buy or see in your city. They have a team of about 25 wonderful people working in Chennai office working side by side with folks in MasthiDeal’s other cities. Koovs Founded by a team of IIT alumni who have brought in their expertise from the internet industry. Koovs is a Bangalore based start up and one point solution for all your desires. Taggle It brings you a variety of offers from some of the most respected brands in the country.This website uses collective buying to create a win-win for local businesses and their customers. BuzzInTown Buzzintown.com is a portal owned by Wortal Inc. There are a US headquartered company, with a presence pan-India through their India subsidiary, managed by a vastly experienced set of global leaders from the media, entertainment and technology industries. BuyThePrice It lines up the best win – win deals for both consumers and vendors and also ensures that each of the orders are dispatched in the shortest time possible. 24HoursLoot 24hoursLoot is an online store for selling a new t-shirt (sometime other products) everyday at deep discounted price in limited quantity/stock. DealMagic Customers get exposure to the best their city has to offer, at unbeatable prices (50-90% off).  We never feature more than one business on our website on any given day, so we have to be very very selective on who gets featured. Dealivore ICUMI Technologies Pvt Ltd is the company operating the Dealivore service. Founded in December 2009, ICUMI is privately owned and funded. LootMore An online store that exclusively focuses on selling cool quality stuff at cheap prices. Here you’ll always find the latest and greatest brands at prices you can afford. Foodome The deals features the best coupons at an unbeatable price on restaurants, fine dining on where to spend your birthday party.They provide coupon only in Chennai as of now. Top Online Shopping Sites- Nation Wide ebay.in eBay is The World’s Online Marketplace, enabling trade on a local, national and international basis. With a diverse and passionate community of individuals and small businesses, eBay offers an online platform where millions of items are traded each day. FutureBazzar Future Group, led by its founder and Group CEO, Mr. Kishore Biyani, is one of India’s leading business houses with multiple businesses spanning across the consumption space. TradeUs Launched in July 2009 and in a short span of time it has turned into one of India’s foremost shopping portals setting the Indian e-commerce abode aflame. BigShoeBazzar (BSB) is the largest online authorized shoe store in South Asia. Croma Promoted by Infiniti Retail Ltd, a 100% subsidiary of Tata Sons.One of the world’s leading retailers, ensuring that you buy nothing but the best. This article titled,Top 20 Daily Deal Sites In India, was originally published at Tech Dreams. Grab our rss feed or fan us on Facebook to get updates from us.

    Read the article

  • Upload File to Windows Azure Blob in Chunks through ASP.NET MVC, JavaScript and HTML5

    - by Shaun
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/shaunxu/archive/2013/07/01/upload-file-to-windows-azure-blob-in-chunks-through-asp.net.aspxMany people are using Windows Azure Blob Storage to store their data in the cloud. Blob storage provides 99.9% availability with easy-to-use API through .NET SDK and HTTP REST. For example, we can store JavaScript files, images, documents in blob storage when we are building an ASP.NET web application on a Web Role in Windows Azure. Or we can store our VHD files in blob and mount it as a hard drive in our cloud service. If you are familiar with Windows Azure, you should know that there are two kinds of blob: page blob and block blob. The page blob is optimized for random read and write, which is very useful when you need to store VHD files. The block blob is optimized for sequential/chunk read and write, which has more common usage. Since we can upload block blob in blocks through BlockBlob.PutBlock, and them commit them as a whole blob with invoking the BlockBlob.PutBlockList, it is very powerful to upload large files, as we can upload blocks in parallel, and provide pause-resume feature. There are many documents, articles and blog posts described on how to upload a block blob. Most of them are focus on the server side, which means when you had received a big file, stream or binaries, how to upload them into blob storage in blocks through .NET SDK.  But the problem is, how can we upload these large files from client side, for example, a browser. This questioned to me when I was working with a Chinese customer to help them build a network disk production on top of azure. The end users upload their files from the web portal, and then the files will be stored in blob storage from the Web Role. My goal is to find the best way to transform the file from client (end user’s machine) to the server (Web Role) through browser. In this post I will demonstrate and describe what I had done, to upload large file in chunks with high speed, and save them as blocks into Windows Azure Blob Storage.   Traditional Upload, Works with Limitation The simplest way to implement this requirement is to create a web page with a form that contains a file input element and a submit button. 1: @using (Html.BeginForm("About", "Index", FormMethod.Post, new { enctype = "multipart/form-data" })) 2: { 3: <input type="file" name="file" /> 4: <input type="submit" value="upload" /> 5: } And then in the backend controller, we retrieve the whole content of this file and upload it in to the blob storage through .NET SDK. We can split the file in blocks and upload them in parallel and commit. The code had been well blogged in the community. 1: [HttpPost] 2: public ActionResult About(HttpPostedFileBase file) 3: { 4: var container = _client.GetContainerReference("test"); 5: container.CreateIfNotExists(); 6: var blob = container.GetBlockBlobReference(file.FileName); 7: var blockDataList = new Dictionary<string, byte[]>(); 8: using (var stream = file.InputStream) 9: { 10: var blockSizeInKB = 1024; 11: var offset = 0; 12: var index = 0; 13: while (offset < stream.Length) 14: { 15: var readLength = Math.Min(1024 * blockSizeInKB, (int)stream.Length - offset); 16: var blockData = new byte[readLength]; 17: offset += stream.Read(blockData, 0, readLength); 18: blockDataList.Add(Convert.ToBase64String(BitConverter.GetBytes(index)), blockData); 19:  20: index++; 21: } 22: } 23:  24: Parallel.ForEach(blockDataList, (bi) => 25: { 26: blob.PutBlock(bi.Key, new MemoryStream(bi.Value), null); 27: }); 28: blob.PutBlockList(blockDataList.Select(b => b.Key).ToArray()); 29:  30: return RedirectToAction("About"); 31: } This works perfect if we selected an image, a music or a small video to upload. But if I selected a large file, let’s say a 6GB HD-movie, after upload for about few minutes the page will be shown as below and the upload will be terminated. In ASP.NET there is a limitation of request length and the maximized request length is defined in the web.config file. It’s a number which less than about 4GB. So if we want to upload a really big file, we cannot simply implement in this way. Also, in Windows Azure, a cloud service network load balancer will terminate the connection if exceed the timeout period. From my test the timeout looks like 2 - 3 minutes. Hence, when we need to upload a large file we cannot just use the basic HTML elements. Besides the limitation mentioned above, the simple HTML file upload cannot provide rich upload experience such as chunk upload, pause and pause-resume. So we need to find a better way to upload large file from the client to the server.   Upload in Chunks through HTML5 and JavaScript In order to break those limitation mentioned above we will try to upload the large file in chunks. This takes some benefit to us such as - No request size limitation: Since we upload in chunks, we can define the request size for each chunks regardless how big the entire file is. - No timeout problem: The size of chunks are controlled by us, which means we should be able to make sure request for each chunk upload will not exceed the timeout period of both ASP.NET and Windows Azure load balancer. It was a big challenge to upload big file in chunks until we have HTML5. There are some new features and improvements introduced in HTML5 and we will use them to implement our solution.   In HTML5, the File interface had been improved with a new method called “slice”. It can be used to read part of the file by specifying the start byte index and the end byte index. For example if the entire file was 1024 bytes, file.slice(512, 768) will read the part of this file from the 512nd byte to 768th byte, and return a new object of interface called "Blob”, which you can treat as an array of bytes. In fact,  a Blob object represents a file-like object of immutable, raw data. The File interface is based on Blob, inheriting blob functionality and expanding it to support files on the user's system. For more information about the Blob please refer here. File and Blob is very useful to implement the chunk upload. We will use File interface to represent the file the user selected from the browser and then use File.slice to read the file in chunks in the size we wanted. For example, if we wanted to upload a 10MB file with 512KB chunks, then we can read it in 512KB blobs by using File.slice in a loop.   Assuming we have a web page as below. User can select a file, an input box to specify the block size in KB and a button to start upload. 1: <div> 2: <input type="file" id="upload_files" name="files[]" /><br /> 3: Block Size: <input type="number" id="block_size" value="512" name="block_size" />KB<br /> 4: <input type="button" id="upload_button_blob" name="upload" value="upload (blob)" /> 5: </div> Then we can have the JavaScript function to upload the file in chunks when user clicked the button. 1: <script type="text/javascript"> 1: 2: $(function () { 3: $("#upload_button_blob").click(function () { 4: }); 5: });</script> Firstly we need to ensure the client browser supports the interfaces we are going to use. Just try to invoke the File, Blob and FormData from the “window” object. If any of them is “undefined” the condition result will be “false” which means your browser doesn’t support these premium feature and it’s time for you to get your browser updated. FormData is another new feature we are going to use in the future. It could generate a temporary form for us. We will use this interface to create a form with chunk and associated metadata when invoked the service through ajax. 1: $("#upload_button_blob").click(function () { 2: // assert the browser support html5 3: if (window.File && window.Blob && window.FormData) { 4: alert("Your brwoser is awesome, let's rock!"); 5: } 6: else { 7: alert("Oh man plz update to a modern browser before try is cool stuff out."); 8: return; 9: } 10: }); Each browser supports these interfaces by their own implementation and currently the Blob, File and File.slice are supported by Chrome 21, FireFox 13, IE 10, Opera 12 and Safari 5.1 or higher. After that we worked on the files the user selected one by one since in HTML5, user can select multiple files in one file input box. 1: var files = $("#upload_files")[0].files; 2: for (var i = 0; i < files.length; i++) { 3: var file = files[i]; 4: var fileSize = file.size; 5: var fileName = file.name; 6: } Next, we calculated the start index and end index for each chunks based on the size the user specified from the browser. We put them into an array with the file name and the index, which will be used when we upload chunks into Windows Azure Blob Storage as blocks since we need to specify the target blob name and the block index. At the same time we will store the list of all indexes into another variant which will be used to commit blocks into blob in Azure Storage once all chunks had been uploaded successfully. 1: $("#upload_button_blob").click(function () { 2: // assert the browser support html5 3: ... ... 4: // start to upload each files in chunks 5: var files = $("#upload_files")[0].files; 6: for (var i = 0; i < files.length; i++) { 7: var file = files[i]; 8: var fileSize = file.size; 9: var fileName = file.name; 10:  11: // calculate the start and end byte index for each blocks(chunks) 12: // with the index, file name and index list for future using 13: var blockSizeInKB = $("#block_size").val(); 14: var blockSize = blockSizeInKB * 1024; 15: var blocks = []; 16: var offset = 0; 17: var index = 0; 18: var list = ""; 19: while (offset < fileSize) { 20: var start = offset; 21: var end = Math.min(offset + blockSize, fileSize); 22:  23: blocks.push({ 24: name: fileName, 25: index: index, 26: start: start, 27: end: end 28: }); 29: list += index + ","; 30:  31: offset = end; 32: index++; 33: } 34: } 35: }); Now we have all chunks’ information ready. The next step should be upload them one by one to the server side, and at the server side when received a chunk it will upload as a block into Blob Storage, and finally commit them with the index list through BlockBlobClient.PutBlockList. But since all these invokes are ajax calling, which means not synchronized call. So we need to introduce a new JavaScript library to help us coordinate the asynchronize operation, which named “async.js”. You can download this JavaScript library here, and you can find the document here. I will not explain this library too much in this post. We will put all procedures we want to execute as a function array, and pass into the proper function defined in async.js to let it help us to control the execution sequence, in series or in parallel. Hence we will define an array and put the function for chunk upload into this array. 1: $("#upload_button_blob").click(function () { 2: // assert the browser support html5 3: ... ... 4:  5: // start to upload each files in chunks 6: var files = $("#upload_files")[0].files; 7: for (var i = 0; i < files.length; i++) { 8: var file = files[i]; 9: var fileSize = file.size; 10: var fileName = file.name; 11: // calculate the start and end byte index for each blocks(chunks) 12: // with the index, file name and index list for future using 13: ... ... 14:  15: // define the function array and push all chunk upload operation into this array 16: blocks.forEach(function (block) { 17: putBlocks.push(function (callback) { 18: }); 19: }); 20: } 21: }); 22: }); As you can see, I used File.slice method to read each chunks based on the start and end byte index we calculated previously, and constructed a temporary HTML form with the file name, chunk index and chunk data through another new feature in HTML5 named FormData. Then post this form to the backend server through jQuery.ajax. This is the key part of our solution. 1: $("#upload_button_blob").click(function () { 2: // assert the browser support html5 3: ... ... 4: // start to upload each files in chunks 5: var files = $("#upload_files")[0].files; 6: for (var i = 0; i < files.length; i++) { 7: var file = files[i]; 8: var fileSize = file.size; 9: var fileName = file.name; 10: // calculate the start and end byte index for each blocks(chunks) 11: // with the index, file name and index list for future using 12: ... ... 13: // define the function array and push all chunk upload operation into this array 14: blocks.forEach(function (block) { 15: putBlocks.push(function (callback) { 16: // load blob based on the start and end index for each chunks 17: var blob = file.slice(block.start, block.end); 18: // put the file name, index and blob into a temporary from 19: var fd = new FormData(); 20: fd.append("name", block.name); 21: fd.append("index", block.index); 22: fd.append("file", blob); 23: // post the form to backend service (asp.net mvc controller action) 24: $.ajax({ 25: url: "/Home/UploadInFormData", 26: data: fd, 27: processData: false, 28: contentType: "multipart/form-data", 29: type: "POST", 30: success: function (result) { 31: if (!result.success) { 32: alert(result.error); 33: } 34: callback(null, block.index); 35: } 36: }); 37: }); 38: }); 39: } 40: }); Then we will invoke these functions one by one by using the async.js. And once all functions had been executed successfully I invoked another ajax call to the backend service to commit all these chunks (blocks) as the blob in Windows Azure Storage. 1: $("#upload_button_blob").click(function () { 2: // assert the browser support html5 3: ... ... 4: // start to upload each files in chunks 5: var files = $("#upload_files")[0].files; 6: for (var i = 0; i < files.length; i++) { 7: var file = files[i]; 8: var fileSize = file.size; 9: var fileName = file.name; 10: // calculate the start and end byte index for each blocks(chunks) 11: // with the index, file name and index list for future using 12: ... ... 13: // define the function array and push all chunk upload operation into this array 14: ... ... 15: // invoke the functions one by one 16: // then invoke the commit ajax call to put blocks into blob in azure storage 17: async.series(putBlocks, function (error, result) { 18: var data = { 19: name: fileName, 20: list: list 21: }; 22: $.post("/Home/Commit", data, function (result) { 23: if (!result.success) { 24: alert(result.error); 25: } 26: else { 27: alert("done!"); 28: } 29: }); 30: }); 31: } 32: }); That’s all in the client side. The outline of our logic would be - Calculate the start and end byte index for each chunks based on the block size. - Defined the functions of reading the chunk form file and upload the content to the backend service through ajax. - Execute the functions defined in previous step with “async.js”. - Commit the chunks by invoking the backend service in Windows Azure Storage finally.   Save Chunks as Blocks into Blob Storage In above we finished the client size JavaScript code. It uploaded the file in chunks to the backend service which we are going to implement in this step. We will use ASP.NET MVC as our backend service, and it will receive the chunks, upload into Windows Azure Bob Storage in blocks, then finally commit as one blob. As in the client side we uploaded chunks by invoking the ajax call to the URL "/Home/UploadInFormData", I created a new action under the Index controller and it only accepts HTTP POST request. 1: [HttpPost] 2: public JsonResult UploadInFormData() 3: { 4: var error = string.Empty; 5: try 6: { 7: } 8: catch (Exception e) 9: { 10: error = e.ToString(); 11: } 12:  13: return new JsonResult() 14: { 15: Data = new 16: { 17: success = string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(error), 18: error = error 19: } 20: }; 21: } Then I retrieved the file name, index and the chunk content from the Request.Form object, which was passed from our client side. And then, used the Windows Azure SDK to create a blob container (in this case we will use the container named “test”.) and create a blob reference with the blob name (same as the file name). Then uploaded the chunk as a block of this blob with the index, since in Blob Storage each block must have an index (ID) associated with so that finally we can put all blocks as one blob by specifying their block ID list. 1: [HttpPost] 2: public JsonResult UploadInFormData() 3: { 4: var error = string.Empty; 5: try 6: { 7: var name = Request.Form["name"]; 8: var index = int.Parse(Request.Form["index"]); 9: var file = Request.Files[0]; 10: var id = Convert.ToBase64String(BitConverter.GetBytes(index)); 11:  12: var container = _client.GetContainerReference("test"); 13: container.CreateIfNotExists(); 14: var blob = container.GetBlockBlobReference(name); 15: blob.PutBlock(id, file.InputStream, null); 16: } 17: catch (Exception e) 18: { 19: error = e.ToString(); 20: } 21:  22: return new JsonResult() 23: { 24: Data = new 25: { 26: success = string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(error), 27: error = error 28: } 29: }; 30: } Next, I created another action to commit the blocks into blob once all chunks had been uploaded. Similarly, I retrieved the blob name from the Request.Form. I also retrieved the chunks ID list, which is the block ID list from the Request.Form in a string format, split them as a list, then invoked the BlockBlob.PutBlockList method. After that our blob will be shown in the container and ready to be download. 1: [HttpPost] 2: public JsonResult Commit() 3: { 4: var error = string.Empty; 5: try 6: { 7: var name = Request.Form["name"]; 8: var list = Request.Form["list"]; 9: var ids = list 10: .Split(',') 11: .Where(id => !string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(id)) 12: .Select(id => Convert.ToBase64String(BitConverter.GetBytes(int.Parse(id)))) 13: .ToArray(); 14:  15: var container = _client.GetContainerReference("test"); 16: container.CreateIfNotExists(); 17: var blob = container.GetBlockBlobReference(name); 18: blob.PutBlockList(ids); 19: } 20: catch (Exception e) 21: { 22: error = e.ToString(); 23: } 24:  25: return new JsonResult() 26: { 27: Data = new 28: { 29: success = string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(error), 30: error = error 31: } 32: }; 33: } Now we finished all code we need. The whole process of uploading would be like this below. Below is the full client side JavaScript code. 1: <script type="text/javascript" src="~/Scripts/async.js"></script> 2: <script type="text/javascript"> 3: $(function () { 4: $("#upload_button_blob").click(function () { 5: // assert the browser support html5 6: if (window.File && window.Blob && window.FormData) { 7: alert("Your brwoser is awesome, let's rock!"); 8: } 9: else { 10: alert("Oh man plz update to a modern browser before try is cool stuff out."); 11: return; 12: } 13:  14: // start to upload each files in chunks 15: var files = $("#upload_files")[0].files; 16: for (var i = 0; i < files.length; i++) { 17: var file = files[i]; 18: var fileSize = file.size; 19: var fileName = file.name; 20:  21: // calculate the start and end byte index for each blocks(chunks) 22: // with the index, file name and index list for future using 23: var blockSizeInKB = $("#block_size").val(); 24: var blockSize = blockSizeInKB * 1024; 25: var blocks = []; 26: var offset = 0; 27: var index = 0; 28: var list = ""; 29: while (offset < fileSize) { 30: var start = offset; 31: var end = Math.min(offset + blockSize, fileSize); 32:  33: blocks.push({ 34: name: fileName, 35: index: index, 36: start: start, 37: end: end 38: }); 39: list += index + ","; 40:  41: offset = end; 42: index++; 43: } 44:  45: // define the function array and push all chunk upload operation into this array 46: var putBlocks = []; 47: blocks.forEach(function (block) { 48: putBlocks.push(function (callback) { 49: // load blob based on the start and end index for each chunks 50: var blob = file.slice(block.start, block.end); 51: // put the file name, index and blob into a temporary from 52: var fd = new FormData(); 53: fd.append("name", block.name); 54: fd.append("index", block.index); 55: fd.append("file", blob); 56: // post the form to backend service (asp.net mvc controller action) 57: $.ajax({ 58: url: "/Home/UploadInFormData", 59: data: fd, 60: processData: false, 61: contentType: "multipart/form-data", 62: type: "POST", 63: success: function (result) { 64: if (!result.success) { 65: alert(result.error); 66: } 67: callback(null, block.index); 68: } 69: }); 70: }); 71: }); 72:  73: // invoke the functions one by one 74: // then invoke the commit ajax call to put blocks into blob in azure storage 75: async.series(putBlocks, function (error, result) { 76: var data = { 77: name: fileName, 78: list: list 79: }; 80: $.post("/Home/Commit", data, function (result) { 81: if (!result.success) { 82: alert(result.error); 83: } 84: else { 85: alert("done!"); 86: } 87: }); 88: }); 89: } 90: }); 91: }); 92: </script> And below is the full ASP.NET MVC controller code. 1: public class HomeController : Controller 2: { 3: private CloudStorageAccount _account; 4: private CloudBlobClient _client; 5:  6: public HomeController() 7: : base() 8: { 9: _account = CloudStorageAccount.Parse(CloudConfigurationManager.GetSetting("DataConnectionString")); 10: _client = _account.CreateCloudBlobClient(); 11: } 12:  13: public ActionResult Index() 14: { 15: ViewBag.Message = "Modify this template to jump-start your ASP.NET MVC application."; 16:  17: return View(); 18: } 19:  20: [HttpPost] 21: public JsonResult UploadInFormData() 22: { 23: var error = string.Empty; 24: try 25: { 26: var name = Request.Form["name"]; 27: var index = int.Parse(Request.Form["index"]); 28: var file = Request.Files[0]; 29: var id = Convert.ToBase64String(BitConverter.GetBytes(index)); 30:  31: var container = _client.GetContainerReference("test"); 32: container.CreateIfNotExists(); 33: var blob = container.GetBlockBlobReference(name); 34: blob.PutBlock(id, file.InputStream, null); 35: } 36: catch (Exception e) 37: { 38: error = e.ToString(); 39: } 40:  41: return new JsonResult() 42: { 43: Data = new 44: { 45: success = string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(error), 46: error = error 47: } 48: }; 49: } 50:  51: [HttpPost] 52: public JsonResult Commit() 53: { 54: var error = string.Empty; 55: try 56: { 57: var name = Request.Form["name"]; 58: var list = Request.Form["list"]; 59: var ids = list 60: .Split(',') 61: .Where(id => !string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(id)) 62: .Select(id => Convert.ToBase64String(BitConverter.GetBytes(int.Parse(id)))) 63: .ToArray(); 64:  65: var container = _client.GetContainerReference("test"); 66: container.CreateIfNotExists(); 67: var blob = container.GetBlockBlobReference(name); 68: blob.PutBlockList(ids); 69: } 70: catch (Exception e) 71: { 72: error = e.ToString(); 73: } 74:  75: return new JsonResult() 76: { 77: Data = new 78: { 79: success = string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(error), 80: error = error 81: } 82: }; 83: } 84: } And if we selected a file from the browser we will see our application will upload chunks in the size we specified to the server through ajax call in background, and then commit all chunks in one blob. Then we can find the blob in our Windows Azure Blob Storage.   Optimized by Parallel Upload In previous example we just uploaded our file in chunks. This solved the problem that ASP.NET MVC request content size limitation as well as the Windows Azure load balancer timeout. But it might introduce the performance problem since we uploaded chunks in sequence. In order to improve the upload performance we could modify our client side code a bit to make the upload operation invoked in parallel. The good news is that, “async.js” library provides the parallel execution function. If you remembered the code we invoke the service to upload chunks, it utilized “async.series” which means all functions will be executed in sequence. Now we will change this code to “async.parallel”. This will invoke all functions in parallel. 1: $("#upload_button_blob").click(function () { 2: // assert the browser support html5 3: ... ... 4: // start to upload each files in chunks 5: var files = $("#upload_files")[0].files; 6: for (var i = 0; i < files.length; i++) { 7: var file = files[i]; 8: var fileSize = file.size; 9: var fileName = file.name; 10: // calculate the start and end byte index for each blocks(chunks) 11: // with the index, file name and index list for future using 12: ... ... 13: // define the function array and push all chunk upload operation into this array 14: ... ... 15: // invoke the functions one by one 16: // then invoke the commit ajax call to put blocks into blob in azure storage 17: async.parallel(putBlocks, function (error, result) { 18: var data = { 19: name: fileName, 20: list: list 21: }; 22: $.post("/Home/Commit", data, function (result) { 23: if (!result.success) { 24: alert(result.error); 25: } 26: else { 27: alert("done!"); 28: } 29: }); 30: }); 31: } 32: }); In this way all chunks will be uploaded to the server side at the same time to maximize the bandwidth usage. This should work if the file was not very large and the chunk size was not very small. But for large file this might introduce another problem that too many ajax calls are sent to the server at the same time. So the best solution should be, upload the chunks in parallel with maximum concurrency limitation. The code below specified the concurrency limitation to 4, which means at the most only 4 ajax calls could be invoked at the same time. 1: $("#upload_button_blob").click(function () { 2: // assert the browser support html5 3: ... ... 4: // start to upload each files in chunks 5: var files = $("#upload_files")[0].files; 6: for (var i = 0; i < files.length; i++) { 7: var file = files[i]; 8: var fileSize = file.size; 9: var fileName = file.name; 10: // calculate the start and end byte index for each blocks(chunks) 11: // with the index, file name and index list for future using 12: ... ... 13: // define the function array and push all chunk upload operation into this array 14: ... ... 15: // invoke the functions one by one 16: // then invoke the commit ajax call to put blocks into blob in azure storage 17: async.parallelLimit(putBlocks, 4, function (error, result) { 18: var data = { 19: name: fileName, 20: list: list 21: }; 22: $.post("/Home/Commit", data, function (result) { 23: if (!result.success) { 24: alert(result.error); 25: } 26: else { 27: alert("done!"); 28: } 29: }); 30: }); 31: } 32: });   Summary In this post we discussed how to upload files in chunks to the backend service and then upload them into Windows Azure Blob Storage in blocks. We focused on the frontend side and leverage three new feature introduced in HTML 5 which are - File.slice: Read part of the file by specifying the start and end byte index. - Blob: File-like interface which contains the part of the file content. - FormData: Temporary form element that we can pass the chunk alone with some metadata to the backend service. Then we discussed the performance consideration of chunk uploading. Sequence upload cannot provide maximized upload speed, but the unlimited parallel upload might crash the browser and server if too many chunks. So we finally came up with the solution to upload chunks in parallel with the concurrency limitation. We also demonstrated how to utilize “async.js” JavaScript library to help us control the asynchronize call and the parallel limitation.   Regarding the chunk size and the parallel limitation value there is no “best” value. You need to test vary composition and find out the best one for your particular scenario. It depends on the local bandwidth, client machine cores and the server side (Windows Azure Cloud Service Virtual Machine) cores, memory and bandwidth. Below is one of my performance test result. The client machine was Windows 8 IE 10 with 4 cores. I was using Microsoft Cooperation Network. The web site was hosted on Windows Azure China North data center (in Beijing) with one small web role (1.7GB 1 core CPU, 1.75GB memory with 100Mbps bandwidth). The test cases were - Chunk size: 512KB, 1MB, 2MB, 4MB. - Upload Mode: Sequence, parallel (unlimited), parallel with limit (4 threads, 8 threads). - Chunk Format: base64 string, binaries. - Target file: 100MB. - Each case was tested 3 times. Below is the test result chart. Some thoughts, but not guidance or best practice: - Parallel gets better performance than series. - No significant performance improvement between parallel 4 threads and 8 threads. - Transform with binaries provides better performance than base64. - In all cases, chunk size in 1MB - 2MB gets better performance.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

    Read the article

< Previous Page | 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142  | Next Page >