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• Interface and abtract classes

  - by dan

  Why Java allows multiple inheritance from interfaces but not from abstract or concrete classes

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• PHP running as a FastCGI application (php-cgi) - how to issue concurrent requests?

  - by Sbm007

  Some background information: I'm writing my own webserver in Java and a couple of days ago I asked on SO how exactly Apache interfaces with PHP, so I can implement PHP support. I learnt that FastCGI is the best approach (since mod_php is not an option). So I have looked at the FastCGI protocol specification and have managed to write a working FastCGI wrapper for my server. I have tested phpinfo() and it works, in fact all PHP functions seem to work just fine (posting data, sessions, date/time, etc etc). My webserver is able to serve requests concurrently (ie user1 can retrieve file1.html at the same time as user2 requesting some_large_binary_file.zip), it does this by spawning a new Java thread for each user request (terminating when completed or user connection with client is cancelled). However, it cannot deal with 2 (or more) FastCGI requests at the same time. What it does is, it queues them up, so when request 1 is completed immediately thereafter it starts processing request 2. I tested this with 2 PHP pages, one contains sleep(10) and the other phpinfo(). How would I go about dealing with multiple requests as I know it can be done (PHP under IIS runs as FastCGI and it can deal with multiple requests just fine). Some more info: I am coding under windows and my batch file used to execute php-cgi.exe contains: set PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN=8 set PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS=500 php-cgi.exe -b 9000 But it does not spawn 8 children, the service simply terminates after 500 requests. I have done research and from Wikipedia: Processing of multiple requests simultaneously is achieved either by using a single connection with internal multiplexing (ie. multiple requests over a single connection) and/or by using multiple connections Now clearly the multiple connections isn't working for me, as everytime a client requests something that involves FastCGI it creates a new socket to the FastCGI application, but it does not work concurrently (it queues them up instead). I know that internal multiplexing of FastCGI requests under the same connection is accomplished by issuing each unique FastCGI request with a different request ID. (also see the last 3 paragraphs of 'The Communication Protocol' heading in this article). I have not tested this, but how would I go about implementing that? I take it I need some kind of FastCGI Java thread which contains a Map of some sort and a static function which I can use to add requests to. Then in the Thread's run() function it would have a while loop and for every cycle it would check whether the Map contains new requests, if so it would assign them a request ID and write them to the FastCGI stream. And then wait for input etc etc, As you can see this becomes too complicated. Does anyone know the correct way of doing this? Or any thoughts at all? Thanks very much. Note, if required I can supply the code for my FastCGI wrapper.

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• build SQL query string using user input

  - by user175084

  i have to make a string by using the values which the user selects on the webpage suppose i need to display files for multiple machines with differnt search criteria.. i currently use this code: DataTable dt = new DataTable(); SqlConnection connection = new SqlConnection(); connection.ConnectionString = ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings["DBConnectionString"].ConnectionString; connection.Open(); SqlCommand sqlCmd = new SqlCommand("SELECT FileID FROM Files WHERE MachineID=@machineID and date= @date", connection); SqlDataAdapter sqlDa = new SqlDataAdapter(sqlCmd); sqlCmd.Parameters.AddWithValue("@machineID", machineID); sqlCmd.Parameters.AddWithValue("@date", date); sqlDa.Fill(dt); now this is fixed query where the user just has one machine and just selects one date... i want to make a query in which the user has multiple search options like type or size if he wants depending on what he selects also if he can select multiple machines.. SELECT FileID FROM Files WHERE (MachineID=@machineID1 or MachineID = @machineID2...) and (date= @date and size=@size and type=@type... ) all of this happens in runtime... other wise i have to create a for loop to put multiple machines one by one... and have multiple queries depending on the case the user selected... this is quiet interesting and i could use some help... thanks

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• To check the default select value tag!

  - by Small Wolf

  I have a question.Here is the code! f.select(:departments,Department.all.collect{|c|[c.name,c.id]},{},:size=>10,:multiple => ture) class Emergency has many :departments end the html source like this: <select id="emergency_departments" multiple="multiple" name="emergency[departments][]" size="10"><option value ="">""</option>....</select> now I want to get the default selected tag , who can tell me how ?

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• Hibernate Query - Get latest versions by timestamp?

  - by Slim

  I have a database that is being used as a sort of version control system. That is, instead of ever updating any rows, I add a new row with the same information. Each row also contains a version column that is a date timestamp, so the only difference is the new row will have a more recent timestamp. What I'm having trouble with is writing an efficient hibernate query to return the latest version of these rows. For the sake of example, these are rows in a table called Product, the timestamped column is version. There are multiple versions of multiple products in the table. So there may be multiple versions (rows) of ProductA, multiple versions of ProductB, etc. And I would like to grab the latest version of each. Can I do this in just a single hibernate query? session.createQuery("select product from Product product where...?"); Or would this require some intermediate steps?

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• javax.crypto AES encryption - Do I only need to call doFinal?

  - by Spines

  I want to do AES CBC encryption in Java. I'm using javax.crypto. After I have the Cipher initialized, do I only need to call doFinal on the clear bytes to properly encrypt it? Or do I need to do something with update? Documentation says update: Continues a multiple-part encryption or decryption operation and doFinal Encrypts or decrypts data in a single-part operation, or finishes a multiple-part operation what exactly do they mean by multiple-part encryption?

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• Can I play any Buffer only once at a given time?

  - by mystify

  From the OpenAL documentation: The basic OpenAL objects are a Listener, a Source, and a Buffer. There can be a large number of Buffers, which contain audio data. Each buffer can be attached to one or more Sources My problem is, that I have one sound file which I need to play multiple times per second, at the same time. The sound is 2 seconds long. So it will overlap. Would I need multiple filled buffers for this (= multiple times that sound in memory)? If I would attach one Buffer to multiple Sources, would I be able to play the sound 10 times, overlapping itself, with just one copy in memory? Or would I still have to deal with 10 copies of that sound in memory?

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• How to get warning massage when clicking close(X) button of browser with tabs in Google Crome

  - by Shantanu

  How to get a warning massage if i accidently click the close button of the chrome browser which have multiple tabs opened at that time? I am a regular user of Crome and having this problem while using it. I normally open multiple tabs inside a single browser but sometimes i accidently click the close button of browser and as soon as the button is clicked crome does't give any warning issue about multiple active tabs and close the entire window. Is the end user like me is browsing on normal crome window then he can open the websites again by checking the web history but if he is browsing inside private browser then he can't do anything(this happens with me very regularly because i normally browse in private browser). On the other hand if you accidently click the close button in mozilla which have multiple tabs open it throws a warning massage to the user and asks for his wish.

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• Distributed and/or Parallel SSIS processing

  - by Jeff

  Background: Our company hosts SaaS DSS applications, where clients provide us data Daily and/or Weekly, which we process & merge into their existing database. During business hours, load in the servers are pretty minimal as it's mostly users running simple pre-defined queries via the website, or running drill-through reports that mostly hit the SSAS OLAP cube. I manage the IT Operations Team, and so far this has presented an interesting "scaling" issue for us. For our daily-refreshed clients, the server is only "busy" for about 4-6 hrs at night. For our weekly-refresh clients, the server is only "busy" for maybe 8-10 hrs per week! We've done our best to use some simple methods of distributing the load by spreading the daily clients evenly among the servers such that we're not trying to process daily clients back-to-back over night. But long-term this scaling strategy creates two notable issues. First, it's going to consume a pretty immense amount of hardware that sits idle for large periods of time. Second, it takes significant Production Support over-head to basically "schedule" the ETL such that they don't over-lap, and move clients/schedules around if they out-grow the resources on a particular server or allocated time-slot. As the title would imply, one option we've tried is running multiple SSIS packages in parallel, but in most cases this has yielded VERY inconsistent results. The most common failures are DTExec, SQL, and SSAS fighting for physical memory and throwing out-of-memory errors, and ETLs running 3,4,5x longer than expected. So from my practical experience thus far, it seems like running multiple ETL packages on the same hardware isn't a good idea, but I can't be the first person that doesn't want to scale multiple ETLs around manual scheduling, and sequential processing. One option we've considered is virtualizing the servers, which obviously doesn't give you any additional resources, but moves the resource contention onto the hypervisor, which (from my experience) seems to manage simultaneous CPU/RAM/Disk I/O a little more gracefully than letting DTExec, SQL, and SSAS battle it out within Windows. Question to the forum: So my question to the forum is, are we missing something obvious here? Are there tools out there that can help manage running multiple SSIS packages on the same hardware? Would it be more "efficient" in terms of parallel execution if instead of running DTExec, SQL, and SSAS same machine (with every machine running that configuration), we run in pairs of three machines with SSIS running on one machine, SQL on another, and SSAS on a third? Obviously that would only make sense if we could process more than the three ETL we were able to process on the machine independently. Another option we've considered is completely re-architecting our SSIS package to have one "master" package for all clients that attempts to intelligently chose a server based off how "busy" it already is in terms of CPU/Memory/Disk utilization, but that would be a herculean effort, and seems like we're trying to reinvent something that you would think someone would sell (although I haven't had any luck finding it). So in summary, are we missing an obvious solution for this, and does anyone know if any tools (for free or for purchase, doesn't matter) that facilitate running multiple SSIS ETL packages in parallel and on multiple servers? (What I would call a "queue & node based" system, but that's not an official term). Ultimately VMWare's Distributed Resource Scheduler addresses this as you simply run a consistent number of clients per VM that you know will never conflict scheduleing-wise, then leave it up to VMWare to move the VMs around to balance out hardware usage. I'm definitely not against using VMWare to do this, but since we're a 100% Microsoft app stack, it seems like -someone- out there would have solved this problem at the application layer instead of the hypervisor layer by checking on resource utilization at the OS, SQL, SSAS levels. I'm open to ANY discussion on this, and remember no suggestion is too crazy or radical! :-) Right now, VMWare is the only option we've found to get away from "manually" balancing our resources, so any suggestions that leave us on a pure Microsoft stack would be great. Thanks guys, Jeff

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• Removing the XML Formatter from ASP.NET Web API Applications

  - by Rick Strahl

  ASP.NET Web API's default output format is supposed to be JSON, but when I access my Web APIs using the browser address bar I'm always seeing an XML result instead. When working on AJAX application I like to test many of my AJAX APIs with the browser while working on them. While I can't debug all requests this way, GET requests are easy to test in the browser especially if you have JSON viewing options set up in your various browsers. If I preview a Web API request in most browsers I get an XML response like this: Why is that? Web API checks the HTTP Accept headers of a request to determine what type of output it should return by looking for content typed that it has formatters registered for. This automatic negotiation is one of the great features of Web API because it makes it easy and transparent to request different kinds of output from the server. In the case of browsers it turns out that most send Accept headers that look like this (Chrome in this case): Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8 Web API inspects the entire list of headers from left to right (plus the quality/priority flag q=) and tries to find a media type that matches its list of supported media types in the list of formatters registered. In this case it matches application/xml to the Xml formatter and so that's what gets returned and displayed. To verify that Web API indeed defaults to JSON output by default you can open the request in Fiddler and pop it into the Request Composer, remove the application/xml header and see that the output returned comes back in JSON instead. An accept header like this: Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,*/*;q=0.9 or leaving the Accept header out altogether should give you a JSON response. Interestingly enough Internet Explorer 9 also displays JSON because it doesn't include an application/xml Accept header: Accept: text/html, application/xhtml+xml, */* which for once actually seems more sensible. Removing the XML Formatter We can't easily change the browser Accept headers (actually you can by delving into the config but it's a bit of a hassle), so can we change the behavior on the server? When working on AJAX applications I tend to not be interested in XML results and I always want to see JSON results at least during development. Web API uses a collection of formatters and you can go through this list and remove the ones you don't want to use - in this case the XmlMediaTypeFormatter. To do this you can work with the HttpConfiguration object and the static GlobalConfiguration object used to configure it: protected void Application_Start(object sender, EventArgs e) { // Action based routing (used for RPC calls) RouteTable.Routes.MapHttpRoute( name: "StockApi", routeTemplate: "stocks/{action}/{symbol}", defaults: new { symbol = RouteParameter.Optional, controller = "StockApi" } ); // WebApi Configuration to hook up formatters and message handlers RegisterApis(GlobalConfiguration.Configuration); } public static void RegisterApis(HttpConfiguration config) { // remove default Xml handler var matches = config.Formatters .Where(f = f.SupportedMediaTypes .Where(m = m.MediaType.ToString() == "application/xml" || m.MediaType.ToString() == "text/xml") .Count() 0) .ToList() ; foreach (var match in matches) config.Formatters.Remove(match); } } That LINQ code is quite a mouthful of nested collections, but it does the trick to remove the formatter based on the content type. You can also look for the specific formatter (XmlMediatTypeFormatter) by its type name which is simpler, but it's better to search for the supported types as this will work even if there are other custom formatters added. Once removed, now the browser request results in a JSON response: It's a simple solution to a small debugging task that's made my life easier. Maybe you find it useful too…© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in Web Api  ASP.NET   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• An Introduction to ASP.NET Web API

  - by Rick Strahl

  Microsoft recently released ASP.NET MVC 4.0 and .NET 4.5 and along with it, the brand spanking new ASP.NET Web API. Web API is an exciting new addition to the ASP.NET stack that provides a new, well-designed HTTP framework for creating REST and AJAX APIs (API is Microsoft’s new jargon for a service, in case you’re wondering). Although Web API ships and installs with ASP.NET MVC 4, you can use Web API functionality in any ASP.NET project, including WebForms, WebPages and MVC or just a Web API by itself. And you can also self-host Web API in your own applications from Console, Desktop or Service applications. If you're interested in a high level overview on what ASP.NET Web API is and how it fits into the ASP.NET stack you can check out my previous post: Where does ASP.NET Web API fit? In the following article, I'll focus on a practical, by example introduction to ASP.NET Web API. All the code discussed in this article is available in GitHub: https://github.com/RickStrahl/AspNetWebApiArticle [republished from my Code Magazine Article and updated for RTM release of ASP.NET Web API] Getting Started To start I’ll create a new empty ASP.NET application to demonstrate that Web API can work with any kind of ASP.NET project. Although you can create a new project based on the ASP.NET MVC/Web API template to quickly get up and running, I’ll take you through the manual setup process, because one common use case is to add Web API functionality to an existing ASP.NET application. This process describes the steps needed to hook up Web API to any ASP.NET 4.0 application. Start by creating an ASP.NET Empty Project. Then create a new folder in the project called Controllers. Add a Web API Controller Class Once you have any kind of ASP.NET project open, you can add a Web API Controller class to it. Web API Controllers are very similar to MVC Controller classes, but they work in any kind of project. Add a new item to this folder by using the Add New Item option in Visual Studio and choose Web API Controller Class, as shown in Figure 1. Figure 1: This is how you create a new Controller Class in Visual Studio   Make sure that the name of the controller class includes Controller at the end of it, which is required in order for Web API routing to find it. Here, the name for the class is AlbumApiController. For this example, I’ll use a Music Album model to demonstrate basic behavior of Web API. The model consists of albums and related songs where an album has properties like Name, Artist and YearReleased and a list of songs with a SongName and SongLength as well as an AlbumId that links it to the album. You can find the code for the model (and the rest of these samples) on Github. To add the file manually, create a new folder called Model, and add a new class Album.cs and copy the code into it. There’s a static AlbumData class with a static CreateSampleAlbumData() method that creates a short list of albums on a static .Current that I’ll use for the examples. Before we look at what goes into the controller class though, let’s hook up routing so we can access this new controller. Hooking up Routing in Global.asax To start, I need to perform the one required configuration task in order for Web API to work: I need to configure routing to the controller. Like MVC, Web API uses routing to provide clean, extension-less URLs to controller methods. Using an extension method to ASP.NET’s static RouteTable class, you can use the MapHttpRoute() (in the System.Web.Http namespace) method to hook-up the routing during Application_Start in global.asax.cs shown in Listing 1.using System; using System.Web.Routing; using System.Web.Http; namespace AspNetWebApi { public class Global : System.Web.HttpApplication { protected void Application_Start(object sender, EventArgs e) { RouteTable.Routes.MapHttpRoute( name: "AlbumVerbs", routeTemplate: "albums/{title}", defaults: new { symbol = RouteParameter.Optional, controller="AlbumApi" } ); } } } This route configures Web API to direct URLs that start with an albums folder to the AlbumApiController class. Routing in ASP.NET is used to create extensionless URLs and allows you to map segments of the URL to specific Route Value parameters. A route parameter, with a name inside curly brackets like {name}, is mapped to parameters on the controller methods. Route parameters can be optional, and there are two special route parameters – controller and action – that determine the controller to call and the method to activate respectively. HTTP Verb Routing Routing in Web API can route requests by HTTP Verb in addition to standard {controller},{action} routing. For the first examples, I use HTTP Verb routing, as shown Listing 1. Notice that the route I’ve defined does not include an {action} route value or action value in the defaults. Rather, Web API can use the HTTP Verb in this route to determine the method to call the controller, and a GET request maps to any method that starts with Get. So methods called Get() or GetAlbums() are matched by a GET request and a POST request maps to a Post() or PostAlbum(). Web API matches a method by name and parameter signature to match a route, query string or POST values. In lieu of the method name, the [HttpGet,HttpPost,HttpPut,HttpDelete, etc] attributes can also be used to designate the accepted verbs explicitly if you don’t want to follow the verb naming conventions. Although HTTP Verb routing is a good practice for REST style resource APIs, it’s not required and you can still use more traditional routes with an explicit {action} route parameter. When {action} is supplied, the HTTP verb routing is ignored. I’ll talk more about alternate routes later. When you’re finished with initial creation of files, your project should look like Figure 2.   Figure 2: The initial project has the new API Controller Album model   Creating a small Album Model Now it’s time to create some controller methods to serve data. For these examples, I’ll use a very simple Album and Songs model to play with, as shown in Listing 2. public class Song { public string AlbumId { get; set; } [Required, StringLength(80)] public string SongName { get; set; } [StringLength(5)] public string SongLength { get; set; } } public class Album { public string Id { get; set; } [Required, StringLength(80)] public string AlbumName { get; set; } [StringLength(80)] public string Artist { get; set; } public int YearReleased { get; set; } public DateTime Entered { get; set; } [StringLength(150)] public string AlbumImageUrl { get; set; } [StringLength(200)] public string AmazonUrl { get; set; } public virtual List<Song> Songs { get; set; } public Album() { Songs = new List<Song>(); Entered = DateTime.Now; // Poor man's unique Id off GUID hash Id = Guid.NewGuid().GetHashCode().ToString("x"); } public void AddSong(string songName, string songLength = null) { this.Songs.Add(new Song() { AlbumId = this.Id, SongName = songName, SongLength = songLength }); } } Once the model has been created, I also added an AlbumData class that generates some static data in memory that is loaded onto a static .Current member. The signature of this class looks like this and that's what I'll access to retrieve the base data:public static class AlbumData { // sample data - static list public static List<Album> Current = CreateSampleAlbumData(); /// <summary> /// Create some sample data /// </summary> /// <returns></returns> public static List<Album> CreateSampleAlbumData() { … }} You can check out the full code for the data generation online. Creating an AlbumApiController Web API shares many concepts of ASP.NET MVC, and the implementation of your API logic is done by implementing a subclass of the System.Web.Http.ApiController class. Each public method in the implemented controller is a potential endpoint for the HTTP API, as long as a matching route can be found to invoke it. The class name you create should end in Controller, which is how Web API matches the controller route value to figure out which class to invoke. Inside the controller you can implement methods that take standard .NET input parameters and return .NET values as results. Web API’s binding tries to match POST data, route values, form values or query string values to your parameters. Because the controller is configured for HTTP Verb based routing (no {action} parameter in the route), any methods that start with Getxxxx() are called by an HTTP GET operation. You can have multiple methods that match each HTTP Verb as long as the parameter signatures are different and can be matched by Web API. In Listing 3, I create an AlbumApiController with two methods to retrieve a list of albums and a single album by its title .public class AlbumApiController : ApiController { public IEnumerable<Album> GetAlbums() { var albums = AlbumData.Current.OrderBy(alb => alb.Artist); return albums; } public Album GetAlbum(string title) { var album = AlbumData.Current .SingleOrDefault(alb => alb.AlbumName.Contains(title)); return album; }} To access the first two requests, you can use the following URLs in your browser: http://localhost/aspnetWebApi/albumshttp://localhost/aspnetWebApi/albums/Dirty%20Deeds Note that you’re not specifying the actions of GetAlbum or GetAlbums in these URLs. Instead Web API’s routing uses HTTP GET verb to route to these methods that start with Getxxx() with the first mapping to the parameterless GetAlbums() method and the latter to the GetAlbum(title) method that receives the title parameter mapped as optional in the route. Content Negotiation When you access any of the URLs above from a browser, you get either an XML or JSON result returned back. The album list result for Chrome 17 and Internet Explorer 9 is shown Figure 3. Figure 3: Web API responses can vary depending on the browser used, demonstrating Content Negotiation in action as these two browsers send different HTTP Accept headers.   Notice that the results are not the same: Chrome returns an XML response and IE9 returns a JSON response. Whoa, what’s going on here? Shouldn’t we see the same result in both browsers? Actually, no. Web API determines what type of content to return based on Accept headers. HTTP clients, like browsers, use Accept headers to specify what kind of content they’d like to see returned. Browsers generally ask for HTML first, followed by a few additional content types. Chrome (and most other major browsers) ask for: Accept: text/html, application/xhtml+xml,application/xml; q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8 IE9 asks for: Accept: text/html, application/xhtml+xml, */* Note that Chrome’s Accept header includes application/xml, which Web API finds in its list of supported media types and returns an XML response. IE9 does not include an Accept header type that works on Web API by default, and so it returns the default format, which is JSON. This is an important and very useful feature that was missing from any previous Microsoft REST tools: Web API automatically switches output formats based on HTTP Accept headers. Nowhere in the server code above do you have to explicitly specify the output format. Rather, Web API determines what format the client is requesting based on the Accept headers and automatically returns the result based on the available formatters. This means that a single method can handle both XML and JSON results.. Using this simple approach makes it very easy to create a single controller method that can return JSON, XML, ATOM or even OData feeds by providing the appropriate Accept header from the client. By default you don’t have to worry about the output format in your code. Note that you can still specify an explicit output format if you choose, either globally by overriding the installed formatters, or individually by returning a lower level HttpResponseMessage instance and setting the formatter explicitly. More on that in a minute. Along the same lines, any content sent to the server via POST/PUT is parsed by Web API based on the HTTP Content-type of the data sent. The same formats allowed for output are also allowed on input. Again, you don’t have to do anything in your code – Web API automatically performs the deserialization from the content. Accessing Web API JSON Data with jQuery A very common scenario for Web API endpoints is to retrieve data for AJAX calls from the Web browser. Because JSON is the default format for Web API, it’s easy to access data from the server using jQuery and its getJSON() method. This example receives the albums array from GetAlbums() and databinds it into the page using knockout.js.$.getJSON("albums/", function (albums) { // make knockout template visible $(".album").show(); // create view object and attach array var view = { albums: albums }; ko.applyBindings(view); }); Figure 4 shows this and the next example’s HTML output. You can check out the complete HTML and script code at http://goo.gl/Ix33C (.html) and http://goo.gl/tETlg (.js). Figu Figure 4: The Album Display sample uses JSON data loaded from Web API.   The result from the getJSON() call is a JavaScript object of the server result, which comes back as a JavaScript array. In the code, I use knockout.js to bind this array into the UI, which as you can see, requires very little code, instead using knockout’s data-bind attributes to bind server data to the UI. Of course, this is just one way to use the data – it’s entirely up to you to decide what to do with the data in your client code. Along the same lines, I can retrieve a single album to display when the user clicks on an album. The response returns the album information and a child array with all the songs. The code to do this is very similar to the last example where we pulled the albums array:$(".albumlink").live("click", function () { var id = $(this).data("id"); // title $.getJSON("albums/" + id, function (album) { ko.applyBindings(album, $("#divAlbumDialog")[0]); $("#divAlbumDialog").show(); }); }); Here the URL looks like this: /albums/Dirty%20Deeds, where the title is the ID captured from the clicked element’s data ID attribute. Explicitly Overriding Output Format When Web API automatically converts output using content negotiation, it does so by matching Accept header media types to the GlobalConfiguration.Configuration.Formatters and the SupportedMediaTypes of each individual formatter. You can add and remove formatters to globally affect what formats are available and it’s easy to create and plug in custom formatters.The example project includes a JSONP formatter that can be plugged in to provide JSONP support for requests that have a callback= querystring parameter. Adding, removing or replacing formatters is a global option you can use to manipulate content. It’s beyond the scope of this introduction to show how it works, but you can review the sample code or check out my blog entry on the subject (http://goo.gl/UAzaR). If automatic processing is not desirable in a particular Controller method, you can override the response output explicitly by returning an HttpResponseMessage instance. HttpResponseMessage is similar to ActionResult in ASP.NET MVC in that it’s a common way to return an abstract result message that contains content. HttpResponseMessage s parsed by the Web API framework using standard interfaces to retrieve the response data, status code, headers and so on[MS2] . Web API turns every response – including those Controller methods that return static results – into HttpResponseMessage instances. Explicitly returning an HttpResponseMessage instance gives you full control over the output and lets you mostly bypass WebAPI’s post-processing of the HTTP response on your behalf. HttpResponseMessage allows you to customize the response in great detail. Web API’s attention to detail in the HTTP spec really shows; many HTTP options are exposed as properties and enumerations with detailed IntelliSense comments. Even if you’re new to building REST-based interfaces, the API guides you in the right direction for returning valid responses and response codes. For example, assume that I always want to return JSON from the GetAlbums() controller method and ignore the default media type content negotiation. To do this, I can adjust the output format and headers as shown in Listing 4.public HttpResponseMessage GetAlbums() { var albums = AlbumData.Current.OrderBy(alb => alb.Artist); // Create a new HttpResponse with Json Formatter explicitly var resp = new HttpResponseMessage(HttpStatusCode.OK); resp.Content = new ObjectContent<IEnumerable<Album>>( albums, new JsonMediaTypeFormatter()); // Get Default Formatter based on Content Negotiation //var resp = Request.CreateResponse<IEnumerable<Album>>(HttpStatusCode.OK, albums); resp.Headers.ConnectionClose = true; resp.Headers.CacheControl = new CacheControlHeaderValue(); resp.Headers.CacheControl.Public = true; return resp; } This example returns the same IEnumerable<Album> value, but it wraps the response into an HttpResponseMessage so you can control the entire HTTP message result including the headers, formatter and status code. In Listing 4, I explicitly specify the formatter using the JsonMediaTypeFormatter to always force the content to JSON.  If you prefer to use the default content negotiation with HttpResponseMessage results, you can create the Response instance using the Request.CreateResponse method:var resp = Request.CreateResponse<IEnumerable<Album>>(HttpStatusCode.OK, albums); This provides you an HttpResponse object that's pre-configured with the default formatter based on Content Negotiation. Once you have an HttpResponse object you can easily control most HTTP aspects on this object. What's sweet here is that there are many more detailed properties on HttpResponse than the core ASP.NET Response object, with most options being explicitly configurable with enumerations that make it easy to pick the right headers and response codes from a list of valid codes. It makes HTTP features available much more discoverable even for non-hardcore REST/HTTP geeks. Non-Serialized Results The output returned doesn’t have to be a serialized value but can also be raw data, like strings, binary data or streams. You can use the HttpResponseMessage.Content object to set a number of common Content classes. Listing 5 shows how to return a binary image using the ByteArrayContent class from a Controller method. [HttpGet] public HttpResponseMessage AlbumArt(string title) { var album = AlbumData.Current.FirstOrDefault(abl => abl.AlbumName.StartsWith(title)); if (album == null) { var resp = Request.CreateResponse<ApiMessageError>( HttpStatusCode.NotFound, new ApiMessageError("Album not found")); return resp; } // kinda silly - we would normally serve this directly // but hey - it's a demo. var http = new WebClient(); var imageData = http.DownloadData(album.AlbumImageUrl); // create response and return var result = new HttpResponseMessage(HttpStatusCode.OK); result.Content = new ByteArrayContent(imageData); result.Content.Headers.ContentType = new MediaTypeHeaderValue("image/jpeg"); return result; } The image retrieval from Amazon is contrived, but it shows how to return binary data using ByteArrayContent. It also demonstrates that you can easily return multiple types of content from a single controller method, which is actually quite common. If an error occurs - such as a resource can’t be found or a validation error – you can return an error response to the client that’s very specific to the error. In GetAlbumArt(), if the album can’t be found, we want to return a 404 Not Found status (and realistically no error, as it’s an image). Note that if you are not using HTTP Verb-based routing or not accessing a method that starts with Get/Post etc., you have to specify one or more HTTP Verb attributes on the method explicitly. Here, I used the [HttpGet] attribute to serve the image. Another option to handle the error could be to return a fixed placeholder image if no album could be matched or the album doesn’t have an image. When returning an error code, you can also return a strongly typed response to the client. For example, you can set the 404 status code and also return a custom error object (ApiMessageError is a class I defined) like this:return Request.CreateResponse<ApiMessageError>( HttpStatusCode.NotFound, new ApiMessageError("Album not found") );   If the album can be found, the image will be returned. The image is downloaded into a byte[] array, and then assigned to the result’s Content property. I created a new ByteArrayContent instance and assigned the image’s bytes and the content type so that it displays properly in the browser. There are other content classes available: StringContent, StreamContent, ByteArrayContent, MultipartContent, and ObjectContent are at your disposal to return just about any kind of content. You can create your own Content classes if you frequently return custom types and handle the default formatter assignments that should be used to send the data out . Although HttpResponseMessage results require more code than returning a plain .NET value from a method, it allows much more control over the actual HTTP processing than automatic processing. It also makes it much easier to test your controller methods as you get a response object that you can check for specific status codes and output messages rather than just a result value. Routing Again Ok, let’s get back to the image example. Using the original routing we have setup using HTTP Verb routing there's no good way to serve the image. In order to return my album art image I’d like to use a URL like this: http://localhost/aspnetWebApi/albums/Dirty%20Deeds/image In order to create a URL like this, I have to create a new Controller because my earlier routes pointed to the AlbumApiController using HTTP Verb routing. HTTP Verb based routing is great for representing a single set of resources such as albums. You can map operations like add, delete, update and read easily using HTTP Verbs. But you cannot mix action based routing into a an HTTP Verb routing controller - you can only map HTTP Verbs and each method has to be unique based on parameter signature. You can't have multiple GET operations to methods with the same signature. So GetImage(string id) and GetAlbum(string title) are in conflict in an HTTP GET routing scenario. In fact, I was unable to make the above Image URL work with any combination of HTTP Verb plus Custom routing using the single Albums controller. There are number of ways around this, but all involve additional controllers.  Personally, I think it’s easier to use explicit Action routing and then add custom routes if you need to simplify your URLs further. So in order to accommodate some of the other examples, I created another controller – AlbumRpcApiController – to handle all requests that are explicitly routed via actions (/albums/rpc/AlbumArt) or are custom routed with explicit routes defined in the HttpConfiguration. I added the AlbumArt() method to this new AlbumRpcApiController class. For the image URL to work with the new AlbumRpcApiController, you need a custom route placed before the default route from Listing 1.RouteTable.Routes.MapHttpRoute( name: "AlbumRpcApiAction", routeTemplate: "albums/rpc/{action}/{title}", defaults: new { title = RouteParameter.Optional, controller = "AlbumRpcApi", action = "GetAblums" } ); Now I can use either of the following URLs to access the image: Custom route: (/albums/rpc/{title}/image)http://localhost/aspnetWebApi/albums/PowerAge/image Action route: (/albums/rpc/action/{title})http://localhost/aspnetWebAPI/albums/rpc/albumart/PowerAge Sending Data to the Server To send data to the server and add a new album, you can use an HTTP POST operation. Since I’m using HTTP Verb-based routing in the original AlbumApiController, I can implement a method called PostAlbum()to accept a new album from the client. Listing 6 shows the Web API code to add a new album.public HttpResponseMessage PostAlbum(Album album) { if (!this.ModelState.IsValid) { // my custom error class var error = new ApiMessageError() { message = "Model is invalid" }; // add errors into our client error model for client foreach (var prop in ModelState.Values) { var modelError = prop.Errors.FirstOrDefault(); if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(modelError.ErrorMessage)) error.errors.Add(modelError.ErrorMessage); else error.errors.Add(modelError.Exception.Message); } return Request.CreateResponse<ApiMessageError>(HttpStatusCode.Conflict, error); } // update song id which isn't provided foreach (var song in album.Songs) song.AlbumId = album.Id; // see if album exists already var matchedAlbum = AlbumData.Current .SingleOrDefault(alb => alb.Id == album.Id || alb.AlbumName == album.AlbumName); if (matchedAlbum == null) AlbumData.Current.Add(album); else matchedAlbum = album; // return a string to show that the value got here var resp = Request.CreateResponse(HttpStatusCode.OK, string.Empty); resp.Content = new StringContent(album.AlbumName + " " + album.Entered.ToString(), Encoding.UTF8, "text/plain"); return resp; } The PostAlbum() method receives an album parameter, which is automatically deserialized from the POST buffer the client sent. The data passed from the client can be either XML or JSON. Web API automatically figures out what format it needs to deserialize based on the content type and binds the content to the album object. Web API uses model binding to bind the request content to the parameter(s) of controller methods. Like MVC you can check the model by looking at ModelState.IsValid. If it’s not valid, you can run through the ModelState.Values collection and check each binding for errors. Here I collect the error messages into a string array that gets passed back to the client via the result ApiErrorMessage object. When a binding error occurs, you’ll want to return an HTTP error response and it’s best to do that with an HttpResponseMessage result. In Listing 6, I used a custom error class that holds a message and an array of detailed error messages for each binding error. I used this object as the content to return to the client along with my Conflict HTTP Status Code response. If binding succeeds, the example returns a string with the name and date entered to demonstrate that you captured the data. Normally, a method like this should return a Boolean or no response at all (HttpStatusCode.NoConent). The sample uses a simple static list to hold albums, so once you’ve added the album using the Post operation, you can hit the /albums/ URL to see that the new album was added. The client jQuery code to call the POST operation from the client with jQuery is shown in Listing 7. var id = new Date().getTime().toString(); var album = { "Id": id, "AlbumName": "Power Age", "Artist": "AC/DC", "YearReleased": 1977, "Entered": "2002-03-11T18:24:43.5580794-10:00", "AlbumImageUrl": http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/…, "AmazonUrl": http://www.amazon.com/…, "Songs": [ { "SongName": "Rock 'n Roll Damnation", "SongLength": 3.12}, { "SongName": "Downpayment Blues", "SongLength": 4.22 }, { "SongName": "Riff Raff", "SongLength": 2.42 } ] } $.ajax( { url: "albums/", type: "POST", contentType: "application/json", data: JSON.stringify(album), processData: false, beforeSend: function (xhr) { // not required since JSON is default output xhr.setRequestHeader("Accept", "application/json"); }, success: function (result) { // reload list of albums page.loadAlbums(); }, error: function (xhr, status, p3, p4) { var err = "Error"; if (xhr.responseText && xhr.responseText[0] == "{") err = JSON.parse(xhr.responseText).message; alert(err); } }); The code in Listing 7 creates an album object in JavaScript to match the structure of the .NET Album class. This object is passed to the $.ajax() function to send to the server as POST. The data is turned into JSON and the content type set to application/json so that the server knows what to convert when deserializing in the Album instance. The jQuery code hooks up success and failure events. Success returns the result data, which is a string that’s echoed back with an alert box. If an error occurs, jQuery returns the XHR instance and status code. You can check the XHR to see if a JSON object is embedded and if it is, you can extract it by de-serializing it and accessing the .message property. REST standards suggest that updates to existing resources should use PUT operations. REST standards aside, I’m not a big fan of separating out inserts and updates so I tend to have a single method that handles both. But if you want to follow REST suggestions, you can create a PUT method that handles updates by forwarding the PUT operation to the POST method:public HttpResponseMessage PutAlbum(Album album) { return PostAlbum(album); } To make the corresponding $.ajax() call, all you have to change from Listing 7 is the type: from POST to PUT. Model Binding with UrlEncoded POST Variables In the example in Listing 7 I used JSON objects to post a serialized object to a server method that accepted an strongly typed object with the same structure, which is a common way to send data to the server. However, Web API supports a number of different ways that data can be received by server methods. For example, another common way is to use plain UrlEncoded POST  values to send to the server. Web API supports Model Binding that works similar (but not the same) as MVC's model binding where POST variables are mapped to properties of object parameters of the target method. This is actually quite common for AJAX calls that want to avoid serialization and the potential requirement of a JSON parser on older browsers. For example, using jQUery you might use the $.post() method to send a new album to the server (albeit one without songs) using code like the following:$.post("albums/",{AlbumName: "Dirty Deeds", YearReleased: 1976 … },albumPostCallback); Although the code looks very similar to the client code we used before passing JSON, here the data passed is URL encoded values (AlbumName=Dirty+Deeds&YearReleased=1976 etc.). Web API then takes this POST data and maps each of the POST values to the properties of the Album object in the method's parameter. Although the client code is different the server can both handle the JSON object, or the UrlEncoded POST values. Dynamic Access to POST Data There are also a few options available to dynamically access POST data, if you know what type of data you're dealing with. If you have POST UrlEncoded values, you can dynamically using a FormsDataCollection:[HttpPost] public string PostAlbum(FormDataCollection form) { return string.Format("{0} - released {1}", form.Get("AlbumName"),form.Get("RearReleased")); } The FormDataCollection is a very simple object, that essentially provides the same functionality as Request.Form[] in ASP.NET. Request.Form[] still works if you're running hosted in an ASP.NET application. However as a general rule, while ASP.NET's functionality is always available when running Web API hosted inside of an  ASP.NET application, using the built in classes specific to Web API makes it possible to run Web API applications in a self hosted environment outside of ASP.NET. If your client is sending JSON to your server, and you don't want to map the JSON to a strongly typed object because you only want to retrieve a few simple values, you can also accept a JObject parameter in your API methods:[HttpPost] public string PostAlbum(JObject jsonData) { dynamic json = jsonData; JObject jalbum = json.Album; JObject juser = json.User; string token = json.UserToken; var album = jalbum.ToObject<Album>(); var user = juser.ToObject<User>(); return String.Format("{0} {1} {2}", album.AlbumName, user.Name, token); } There quite a few options available to you to receive data with Web API, which gives you more choices for the right tool for the job. Unfortunately one shortcoming of Web API is that POST data is always mapped to a single parameter. This means you can't pass multiple POST parameters to methods that receive POST data. It's possible to accept multiple parameters, but only one can map to the POST content - the others have to come from the query string or route values. I have a couple of Blog POSTs that explain what works and what doesn't here: Passing multiple POST parameters to Web API Controller Methods Mapping UrlEncoded POST Values in ASP.NET Web API   Handling Delete Operations Finally, to round out the server API code of the album example we've been discussin, here’s the DELETE verb controller method that allows removal of an album by its title:public HttpResponseMessage DeleteAlbum(string title) { var matchedAlbum = AlbumData.Current.Where(alb => alb.AlbumName == title) .SingleOrDefault(); if (matchedAlbum == null) return new HttpResponseMessage(HttpStatusCode.NotFound); AlbumData.Current.Remove(matchedAlbum); return new HttpResponseMessage(HttpStatusCode.NoContent); } To call this action method using jQuery, you can use:$(".removeimage").live("click", function () { var $el = $(this).parent(".album"); var txt = $el.find("a").text(); $.ajax({ url: "albums/" + encodeURIComponent(txt), type: "Delete", success: function (result) { $el.fadeOut().remove(); }, error: jqError }); }   Note the use of the DELETE verb in the $.ajax() call, which routes to DeleteAlbum on the server. DELETE is a non-content operation, so you supply a resource ID (the title) via route value or the querystring. Routing Conflicts In all requests with the exception of the AlbumArt image example shown so far, I used HTTP Verb routing that I set up in Listing 1. HTTP Verb Routing is a recommendation that is in line with typical REST access to HTTP resources. However, it takes quite a bit of effort to create REST-compliant API implementations based only on HTTP Verb routing only. You saw one example that didn’t really fit – the return of an image where I created a custom route albums/{title}/image that required creation of a second controller and a custom route to work. HTTP Verb routing to a controller does not mix with custom or action routing to the same controller because of the limited mapping of HTTP verbs imposed by HTTP Verb routing. To understand some of the problems with verb routing, let’s look at another example. Let’s say you create a GetSortableAlbums() method like this and add it to the original AlbumApiController accessed via HTTP Verb routing:[HttpGet] public IQueryable<Album> SortableAlbums() { var albums = AlbumData.Current; // generally should be done only on actual queryable results (EF etc.) // Done here because we're running with a static list but otherwise might be slow return albums.AsQueryable(); } If you compile this code and try to now access the /albums/ link, you get an error: Multiple Actions were found that match the request. HTTP Verb routing only allows access to one GET operation per parameter/route value match. If more than one method exists with the same parameter signature, it doesn’t work. As I mentioned earlier for the image display, the only solution to get this method to work is to throw it into another controller. Because I already set up the AlbumRpcApiController I can add the method there. First, I should rename the method to SortableAlbums() so I’m not using a Get prefix for the method. This also makes the action parameter look cleaner in the URL - it looks less like a method and more like a noun. I can then create a new route that handles direct-action mapping:RouteTable.Routes.MapHttpRoute( name: "AlbumRpcApiAction", routeTemplate: "albums/rpc/{action}/{title}", defaults: new { title = RouteParameter.Optional, controller = "AlbumRpcApi", action = "GetAblums" } ); As I am explicitly adding a route segment – rpc – into the route template, I can now reference explicit methods in the Web API controller using URLs like this: http://localhost/AspNetWebApi/rpc/SortableAlbums Error Handling I’ve already done some minimal error handling in the examples. For example in Listing 6, I detected some known-error scenarios like model validation failing or a resource not being found and returning an appropriate HttpResponseMessage result. But what happens if your code just blows up or causes an exception? If you have a controller method, like this:[HttpGet] public void ThrowException() { throw new UnauthorizedAccessException("Unauthorized Access Sucka"); } You can call it with this: http://localhost/AspNetWebApi/albums/rpc/ThrowException The default exception handling displays a 500-status response with the serialized exception on the local computer only. When you connect from a remote computer, Web API throws back a 500  HTTP Error with no data returned (IIS then adds its HTML error page). The behavior is configurable in the GlobalConfiguration:GlobalConfiguration .Configuration .IncludeErrorDetailPolicy = IncludeErrorDetailPolicy.Never; If you want more control over your error responses sent from code, you can throw explicit error responses yourself using HttpResponseException. When you throw an HttpResponseException the response parameter is used to generate the output for the Controller action. [HttpGet] public void ThrowError() { var resp = Request.CreateResponse<ApiMessageError>( HttpStatusCode.BadRequest, new ApiMessageError("Your code stinks!")); throw new HttpResponseException(resp); } Throwing an HttpResponseException stops the processing of the controller method and immediately returns the response you passed to the exception. Unlike other Exceptions fired inside of WebAPI, HttpResponseException bypasses the Exception Filters installed and instead just outputs the response you provide. In this case, the serialized ApiMessageError result string is returned in the default serialization format – XML or JSON. You can pass any content to HttpResponseMessage, which includes creating your own exception objects and consistently returning error messages to the client. Here’s a small helper method on the controller that you might use to send exception info back to the client consistently:private void ThrowSafeException(string message, HttpStatusCode statusCode = HttpStatusCode.BadRequest) { var errResponse = Request.CreateResponse<ApiMessageError>(statusCode, new ApiMessageError() { message = message }); throw new HttpResponseException(errResponse); } You can then use it to output any captured errors from code:[HttpGet] public void ThrowErrorSafe() { try { List<string> list = null; list.Add("Rick"); } catch (Exception ex) { ThrowSafeException(ex.Message); } }   Exception Filters Another more global solution is to create an Exception Filter. Filters in Web API provide the ability to pre- and post-process controller method operations. An exception filter looks at all exceptions fired and then optionally creates an HttpResponseMessage result. Listing 8 shows an example of a basic Exception filter implementation.public class UnhandledExceptionFilter : ExceptionFilterAttribute { public override void OnException(HttpActionExecutedContext context) { HttpStatusCode status = HttpStatusCode.InternalServerError; var exType = context.Exception.GetType(); if (exType == typeof(UnauthorizedAccessException)) status = HttpStatusCode.Unauthorized; else if (exType == typeof(ArgumentException)) status = HttpStatusCode.NotFound; var apiError = new ApiMessageError() { message = context.Exception.Message }; // create a new response and attach our ApiError object // which now gets returned on ANY exception result var errorResponse = context.Request.CreateResponse<ApiMessageError>(status, apiError); context.Response = errorResponse; base.OnException(context); } } Exception Filter Attributes can be assigned to an ApiController class like this:[UnhandledExceptionFilter] public class AlbumRpcApiController : ApiController or you can globally assign it to all controllers by adding it to the HTTP Configuration's Filters collection:GlobalConfiguration.Configuration.Filters.Add(new UnhandledExceptionFilter()); The latter is a great way to get global error trapping so that all errors (short of hard IIS errors and explicit HttpResponseException errors) return a valid error response that includes error information in the form of a known-error object. Using a filter like this allows you to throw an exception as you normally would and have your filter create a response in the appropriate output format that the client expects. For example, an AJAX application can on failure expect to see a JSON error result that corresponds to the real error that occurred rather than a 500 error along with HTML error page that IIS throws up. You can even create some custom exceptions so you can differentiate your own exceptions from unhandled system exceptions - you often don't want to display error information from 'unknown' exceptions as they may contain sensitive system information or info that's not generally useful to users of your application/site. This is just one example of how ASP.NET Web API is configurable and extensible. Exception filters are just one example of how you can plug-in into the Web API request flow to modify output. Many more hooks exist and I’ll take a closer look at extensibility in Part 2 of this article in the future. Summary Web API is a big improvement over previous Microsoft REST and AJAX toolkits. The key features to its usefulness are its ease of use with simple controller based logic, familiar MVC-style routing, low configuration impact, extensibility at all levels and tight attention to exposing and making HTTP semantics easily discoverable and easy to use. Although none of the concepts used in Web API are new or radical, Web API combines the best of previous platforms into a single framework that’s highly functional, easy to work with, and extensible to boot. I think that Microsoft has hit a home run with Web API. Related Resources Where does ASP.NET Web API fit? Sample Source Code on GitHub Passing multiple POST parameters to Web API Controller Methods Mapping UrlEncoded POST Values in ASP.NET Web API Creating a JSONP Formatter for ASP.NET Web API Removing the XML Formatter from ASP.NET Web API Applications© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in Web Api   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• A Few of My Favorite HTML5 and CSS3 Online Tools

  - by dwahlin

  I really enjoy coding up HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript applications but there are some things that I’m better off writing with the help of a development tool. For example, CSS3 gradients aren’t exactly the most fun thing to write by hand and the same could be said for animations, transforms, or styles that require various vendor extensions. There are a lot of online tools that can simplify building HTML5/CSS3 sites and increase productivity in the process so I thought I’d put together a post on a few of my favorites tools. HTML5 Boilerplate HTML5 Boilerplate provides a great way to get started building HTML5 sites. It includes many best practices out of the box and even includes a few tricks that many people don’t even know about. The custom download option allows you to pick the features that you want to include in the files that’s generated. You can read more about it here.   Initializr Although HTML5 Boilerplate provides a great foundation for starting HTML5 sites, it focuses on providing a starting shell structure (namely an html page, JavaScript files, and a CSS stylesheet) and doesn’t include much in the way of page content to get started with. Initializer builds on HTML5 Boilerplate and provides an initial test page that can be tweaked to meet your needs. It also provides several different customization options to include/exclude features. CSS3 Maker CSS3 provides a lot of great features ranging from gradient support to rounded corners. Although many of the features are fairly straightforward there are some that are pretty involved such as gradients, animations, and really any styles that require custom vendor extensions to use across browsers. Sure, you can type everything by hand, but sites such as CSS3 Maker provide a visual way to generate CSS3 styles. CSS3, Please! CSS3, Please! is a code generation tool that can be used to generate cross-browser CSS3 styles quickly and easily. All of the main things you can do with CSS3 are available including a clever way to visually generate CSS3 transform styles.       Ultimate CSS Gradient Generator CSS3 Maker (above) has a gradient generator built-in but my favorite tool for creating CSS3 gradients is the Ultimate CSS Gradient Generator. If you’ve created gradients in tools like Photoshop then you’ll love what this tool has to offer especially since it makes it extremely straightforward to work with different gradient stops. @font-face Fonts Although @font-face has been available for awhile, I think fonts are cool and wanted to mention a site that provides a lot of font choices. When used correctly fonts can really enhance a page and when used incorrectly (think Comic Sans) they can absolutely ruin a page. Several sites exist that provide fonts that can be used with @font-face definitions in CSS style sheets. One of my favorites is Font Squirrel.   HTML5 & CSS3 Support and Tests Interested in knowing what HTML5 and CSS3 features a given browser supports? Want to know how various browsers stack up with each other as far as HTML5/CSS3 support. Look no further than the HTML5 & CSS3 Support page or the HTML5 Test page.   CSS3 Easing Animation Tool CSS3 animations aren’t widely supported across browsers right now (I’m not really using them at this point) but they do offer a lot of promise. Creating easings for animations can definitely be a challenge but they’re something that are critical for adding that “professional touch” to your animations. Fortunately you can use the Ceaser CSS Easing Animation Tool to simplify the process and handle animation easing with…...ease.   There are several other online tools that I like but these are some of the ones I find myself using the most. If you have any favorite online tools that simplify working with HTML5 or CSS3 let me know.     For more information about onsite or online training, mentoring and consulting solutions for HTML5, jQuery, .NET, SharePoint or Silverlight please visit http://www.thewahlingroup.com.

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• Modernizr Rocks HTML5

  - by Laila

  HTML5 is a moving target.  At the moment, we don't know what will be in future versions.  In most circumstances, this really matters to the developer. When you're using Adobe Air, you can be reasonably sure what works, what is there, and what isn't, since you have a version of the browser built-in. With Metro, you can assume that you're going to be using at least IE 10.   If, however,  you are using HTML5 in a web application, then you are going to rely heavily on Feature Detection.  Feature-Detection is a collection of techniques that tell you, via JavaScript, whether the current browser has this feature natively implemented or not Feature Detection isn't just there for the esoteric stuff such as  Geo-location,  progress bars,  <canvas> support,  the new <input> types, Audio, Video, web workers or storage, but is required even for semantic markup, since old browsers make a pigs ear out of rendering this.  Feature detection can't rely just on reading the browser version and inferring from that what works. Instead, you must use JavaScript to check that an HTML5 feature is there before using it.  The problem with relying on the user-agent is that it takes a lot of historical data  to work out what version does what, and, anyway, the user-agent can be, and sometimes is, spoofed. The open-source library Modernizr  is just about the most essential  JavaScript library for anyone using HTML5, because it provides APIs to test for most of the CSS3 and HTML5 features before you use them, and is intelligent enough to alter semantic markup into 'legacy' 'markup  using shims  on page-load  for old browsers. It also allows you to check what video Codecs are installed for playing video. It also provides media queries  and conditional resource-loading (formerly YepNope.js.).  Generally, Modernizr gives you the choice of what you do about browsers that don't support the feature that you want. Often, the best choice is graceful degradation, but the resource-loading feature allows you to dynamically load JavaScript Shims to replace the standard API for missing or defective HTML5 functionality, called 'PolyFills'.  As the Modernizr site says 'Yes, not only can you use HTML5 today, but you can use it in the past, too!' The evolutionary progress of HTML5  requires a more defensive style of JavaScript programming where the programmer adopts a mindset of fearing the worst ( IE 6)  rather than assuming the best, whilst exploiting as many of the new HTML features as possible for the requirements of the site or HTML application.  Why would anyone want the distraction of developing their own techniques to do this when  Modernizr exists to do this for you? Laila

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• Browser Specific Extensions of HttpClient

  - by imran_ku07

          Introduction:                     REpresentational State Transfer (REST) causing/leaving a great impact on service/API development because it offers a way to access a service without requiring any specific library by embracing HTTP and its features. ASP.NET Web API makes it very easy to quickly build RESTful HTTP services. These HTTP services can be consumed by a variety of clients including browsers, devices, machines, etc. With .NET Framework 4.5, we can use HttpClient class to consume/send/receive RESTful HTTP services(for .NET Framework 4.0, HttpClient class is shipped as part of ASP.NET Web API). The HttpClient class provides a bunch of helper methods(for example, DeleteAsync, PostAsync, GetStringAsync, etc.) to consume a HTTP service very easily. ASP.NET Web API added some more extension methods(for example, PutAsJsonAsync, PutAsXmlAsync, etc) into HttpClient class to further simplify the usage. In addition, HttpClient is also an ideal choice for writing integration test for a RESTful HTTP service. Since a browser is a main client of any RESTful API, it is also important to test the HTTP service on a variety of browsers. RESTful service embraces HTTP headers and different browsers send different HTTP headers. So, I have created a package that will add overloads(with an additional Browser parameter) for almost all the helper methods of HttpClient class. In this article, I will show you how to use this package.           Description:                     Create/open your test project and install ImranB.SystemNetHttp.HttpClientExtensions NuGet package. Then, add this using statement on your class, using ImranB.SystemNetHttp;                     Then, you can start using any HttpClient helper method which include the additional Browser parameter. For example,  var client = new HttpClient(myserver); var task = client.GetAsync("http://domain/myapi", Browser.Chrome); task.Wait(); var response = task.Result; .                     Here is the definition  of Browser, public enum Browser { Firefox = 0, Chrome = 1, IE10 = 2, IE9 = 3, IE8 = 4, IE7 = 5, IE6 = 6, Safari = 7, Opera = 8, Maxthon = 9, }                     These extension methods will make it very easy to write browser specific integration test. It will also help HTTP service consumer to mimic the request sending behavior of a browser. This package source is available on github. So, you can grab the source and add some additional behavior on the top of these extensions.         Summary:                     Testing a REST API is an important aspect of service development and today, testing with a browser is crucial. In this article, I showed how to write integration test that will mimic the browser request sending behavior. I also showed an example. Hopefully you will enjoy this article too.

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• Modernizr Rocks HTML5

  - by Laila

  HTML5 is a moving target.  At the moment, we don't know what will be in future versions.  In most circumstances, this really matters to the developer. When you're using Adobe Air, you can be reasonably sure what works, what is there, and what isn't, since you have a version of the browser built-in. With Metro, you can assume that you're going to be using at least IE 10.   If, however,  you are using HTML5 in a web application, then you are going to rely heavily on Feature Detection.  Feature-Detection is a collection of techniques that tell you, via JavaScript, whether the current browser has this feature natively implemented or not Feature Detection isn't just there for the esoteric stuff such as  Geo-location,  progress bars,  <canvas> support,  the new <input> types, Audio, Video, web workers or storage, but is required even for semantic markup, since old browsers make a pigs ear out of rendering this.  Feature detection can't rely just on reading the browser version and inferring from that what works. Instead, you must use JavaScript to check that an HTML5 feature is there before using it.  The problem with relying on the user-agent is that it takes a lot of historical data  to work out what version does what, and, anyway, the user-agent can be, and sometimes is, spoofed. The open-source library Modernizr  is just about the most essential  JavaScript library for anyone using HTML5, because it provides APIs to test for most of the CSS3 and HTML5 features before you use them, and is intelligent enough to alter semantic markup into 'legacy' 'markup  using shims  on page-load  for old browsers. It also allows you to check what video Codecs are installed for playing video. It also provides media queries  and conditional resource-loading (formerly YepNope.js.).  Generally, Modernizr gives you the choice of what you do about browsers that don't support the feature that you want. Often, the best choice is graceful degradation, but the resource-loading feature allows you to dynamically load JavaScript Shims to replace the standard API for missing or defective HTML5 functionality, called 'PolyFills'.  As the Modernizr site says 'Yes, not only can you use HTML5 today, but you can use it in the past, too!' The evolutionary progress of HTML5  requires a more defensive style of JavaScript programming where the programmer adopts a mindset of fearing the worst ( IE 6)  rather than assuming the best, whilst exploiting as many of the new HTML features as possible for the requirements of the site or HTML application.  Why would anyone want the distraction of developing their own techniques to do this when  Modernizr exists to do this for you? Laila

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• How do I develop browser plugins with cross-platform and cross-browser compatibility in mind?

  - by Schnapple

  My company currently has a product which relies on a custom, in-house ActiveX control. The technology it employs (TWAIN) is itself cross-platform by design, but our solution is obviously limited to Internet Explorer on Windows. Long term we would like to become cross-browser and cross-platform (i.e., support other browsers on Windows, support the Macintosh or Linux). Obviously if we wanted to support Firefox on Windows I would need to write a plugin for it. But if we wanted to support the Macintosh, how do I attack that? Is it possible to compile a version of the Firefox plugin that runs on the Mac? Would I be remiss to not also support Safari on the Mac? Are there any plugins which are cross-browser on a platform? (i.e., can any browsers run plugins for other browsers) Since TWAIN is so low-level to the operating system, I do not think Java would be a solution in any capacity, but I could be wrong. What do people generally do when they want to support multiple platforms with a process that will need to be cross-platform and cross-browser compatible?

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• Detect IE version in Javascript

  - by Chad Decker

  I want to bounce users of our web site to an error page if they're using a version of Internet Explorer prior to v9. It's just not worth our time and money to support IE pre-v9. Users of all other non-IE browsers are fine and shouldn't be bounced. Here's the proposed code: if(navigator.appName.indexOf("Internet Explorer")!=-1){ //yeah, he's using IE var badBrowser=( navigator.appVersion.indexOf("MSIE 9")==-1 && //v9 is ok navigator.appVersion.indexOf("MSIE 1")==-1 //v10, 11, 12, etc. is fine too ); if(badBrowser){ // navigate to error page } } Will this code do the trick? To head off a few comments that will probably be coming my way: [1] Yes, I know that users can forge their useragent string. I'm not concerned. [2] Yes, I know that programming pros prefer sniffing out feature-support instead of browser-type but I don't feel this approach makes sense in this case. I already know that all (relevant) non-IE browsers support the features that I need and that all pre-v9 IE browsers don't. Checking feature by feature throughout the site would be a waste. [3] Yes, I know that someone trying to access the site using IE v1 (or = 20) wouldn't get 'badBrowser' set to true and the warning page wouldn't be displayed properly. That's a risk we're willing to take. [4] Yes, I know that Microsoft has "conditional comments" that can be used for precise browser version detection. IE no longer supports conditional comments as of IE 10, rendering this approach absolutely useless. Any other obvious issues to be aware of? Thanks.

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• keyup bindings not working in Firefox

  - by Jarred

  Hi. You can see my project here - http://www.inluxphoto.com/custom/jsgallery/index.php I am attempting to make the left and right arrow keys move the slideshow. I was able to get it to work in all browsers by following exactly the instructions on the front page of jqueryfordesigners.com (sorry I am only allowed one link). However, it is necessary that the keyup be unbinded until the animation completes, so the user cannot do a quick double tap of the key, which breaks the show. This led me to the following function - function keyCommands() { //Bind Keys according to keyAssignments function keyCommandBind() { $(document.documentElement).bind('keyup', keyAssignments) } //Bind functions to specific keys function keyAssignments() { if (event.keyCode == 37) { leftArrow(); } if (event.keyCode == 39) { rightArrow(); } if (event.keyCode == 32) { spaceBar(); } } function leftArrow() { //unbind, do stuff, rebind } function rightArrow() { //unbind, do stuff, rebind } function spaceBar() { //unbind, do stuff, rebind } keyCommandBind(); } This works in all browsers except Firefox & Camino. Firebug tells me event (ie event.keyCode) is not defined. That's true, it's not defined, and I understand that. However I don't understand why, if it's not defined, does it work in all other browsers. How can I appropriately define this? Or, am I doing it wrong? Any help would be most appreciated, thanks for your time!

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• Handling file uploads with JavaScript and Google Gears, is there a better solution?

  - by gnarf

  So - I've been using this method of file uploading for a bit, but it seems that Google Gears has poor support for the newer browsers that implement the HTML5 specs. I've heard the word deprecated floating around a few channels, so I'm looking for a replacement that can accomplish the following tasks, and support the new browsers. I can always fall back to gears / standard file POST's but these following items make my process much simpler: Users MUST to be able to select multiple files for uploading in the dialog. I MUST be able to receive status updates on the transmission of a file. (progress bars) I would like to be able to use PUT requests instead of POST I would like to be able to easily attach these events to existing HTML elements using JavaScript. I.E. the File Selection should be triggered on a <button> click. I would like to be able to control response/request parameters easily using JavaScript. I'm not sure if the new HTML5 browsers have support for the desktop/request objects gears uses, or if there is a flash uploader that has these features that I am missing in my google searches. An example of uploading code using gears: // select some files: var desktop = google.gears.factory.create('beta.desktop'); desktop.openFiles(selectFilesCallback); function selectFilesCallback(files) { $.each(files,function(k,file) { // this code actually goes through a queue, and creates some status bars // but it is unimportant to show here... sendFile(file); }); } function sendFile(file) { google.gears.factory.create('beta.httprequest'); request.open('PUT', upl.url); request.setRequestHeader('filename', file.name); request.upload.onprogress = function(e) { // gives me % status updates... allows e.loaded/e.total }; request.onreadystatechange = function() { if (request.readyState == 4) { // completed the upload! } }; request.send(file.blob); return request; } Edit: apparently flash isn't capable of using PUT requests, so I have changed it to a "like" instead of a "must".

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• Inconsistent height of text input elements between Firefox and WebKit

  - by Trevor Burnham

  OK, I realize that this is something of an eternal question, but here goes: I've got a single text input, <input type="text" name="whatever" /> and I've specified its font-family, font-size and padding. Yet, even on the same machine (my Mac, let's say), the input has a different height in Firefox (3.6) than it does in Chrome or Safari. Specifically, Firefox adds a little bit more padding below the text. And no, specifying height in pixels doesn't achieve consistency either. Is there any way to achieve text input height consistency across Gecko- and WebKit-based browsers (let alone IE and Opera) without resorting to JavaScript? And if I must use JavaScript, has someone already devised a jQuery plugin or something to easily do this? Update: Here's what not to do. The jqTransform plugin lets you skin form elements and promises that they'll look the same across browsers. Here's how the demo input looks in Chrome 5 on my Mac: and here's how the same input looks in Firefox 3.6.4: I haven't altered these screenshots in any way, just cropped them. Now, my first reaction is, "Ugh, I don't want to support Firefox." But there are currently more Firefox users than Safari and Chrome users combined, so that's not an option. Someone, please help! I just want my forms to look the same across modern, standards-compliant browsers! And by "look the same," I'm not talking about the outline on selection or anything like that; I'm just talking about having the same width, height, and text placement!

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• Assigning console.log to another object (Safari issue)

  - by Trevor Burnham

  I wanted to keep my logging statements as short as possible while preventing console from being accessed when it doesn't exist; I came up with the following solution: var _ = {}; if (console) { _.log = console.debug; } else { _.log = function() { } } To me, this seems quite elegant, and it works great in Firefox 3.6 (including preserving the line numbers that make console.debug more useful than console.log). But it doesn't work in Safari 4. (Haven't tested in other browsers yet.) If I follow the above with console.debug('A') _.log('B'); the first statement works fine in both browsers, but the second generates a "TypeError: Type Error" in Safari. Is this just a difference between how Firebug and the Safari Web Developer Tools implement console? If so, it is VERY annoying on Apple's part. (I get the same results in both browsers if I bind the console function to a prototype and then instantiate, rather than binding it directly to the object.) I could, of course, just call console.debug from an anonymous function assigned to _.log, but then I'd lose my line numbers. Any other ideas?

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• Why wouldn't the default Control Adapter mappings work on Chrome or Safari?

  - by Deane

  I have confirmed that my Control Adapters are not triggering in Chrome and Safari. I've debugged, and the breakpoints inside the adapters just don't get hit in Chrome/Safari, when they work perfectly find in Firefox/IE. So, for Chrome/Safari, IIS is just ignoring the mapping. My AdapterMappings.browser file looks like this: <browsers> <browser refID="Default"> <controlAdapters> [...adapters here....] </controlAdapters> </browser> </browsers> This should provide mappings for all browsers, correct? I used the Charles proxy to check what user agents were being sent. They are: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/4.1.249.1064 Safari/532.5 Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/531.22.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Safari/531.22.7 Any idea why this would be? Everything I've read tells me that my browser mappings are correct? And, as I said this works for IE/Firefox, so I know my configuration is technically correct.

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• Is it possible to redirect non-HTML files with HTTP? And chaining redirects?

  - by Earlz

  Hello, I have been thinking about a neat way of load balancing and one thing that would be required is to be capable of loading an image on an HTML page from multiple locations without rewriting the URL(on each load) So what I need to be able to do is have one URL which is the "static" URL. Such as http://example.com/myimage.png The image is not actually contained in example.com though. So example.com does a either a 302 or 301 or 307 HTTP response to cause a redirect to 2.example.com. How do browsers handle this with images like in this situation? Also, how do browsers handle multiple redirections for instance if 2.example.com also didn't contain it and it went to 3.example.com ? (Note, I am asking this because I've never seen a 301 redirect on anything but an HTML page) Also, which status code would be best to use. 301 means "moved permanently" which this "move" isn't permanent so I don't want it cached. Should I use 307? Is that supported by search engines and modern browsers?

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• How can I share an entity framework model across website users

  - by richardmoss

  Hello, Currently my website is based around MVC and the Entity Framework running against a SQL Server 2005 database. So far, it has all been running very smoothly, and I really enjoy MVC and its slimmer more concise code (and no huge viewstates or soul destroying postbacks ;)) Recently I was working on upgrading the site to use a simple forum system, and this is where I started running into problems. When I was testing the site using two different browsers, if I created or replied to a post in one browser, the other browser couldn't see the post. At the moment, each visitor to the site gets their own copy of the entity model, which I store in their session data. Obviously this is the problem as updates to one model aren't getting carried to the other. As a test, I tried storing a single copy of the model which all visitors would access by assigning the model to a static variable. This worked, and both browsers could see each others modifications. However, it had its side effects. For example, if I fired up both browsers at the same time and the model was initialized, one browser would crash, and the other would work fine, despite me using a locking object so in theory one of them should have been delayed until the model was ready (of course I could have implemented this wrong ;)). Also, originally this site did use one model for all visitors and when it was live, it frequently shut down - killing the IIS application pool while it did. Now I'm not sure if this was related, but I don't really want to reintroduce whatever bug I had that caused this shut down. So, my question is a simple one really - what is the best way of either using the same model for all website users so they all see updates, or if they do have separate copies (which I imagine will have a performance impact in time) how can the models detect changes in the database and update themselves according. Thanks in advance for any advice! Regards; Richard Moss

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• CSS: Why an input width:100% doesn't expand in an absolute box?

  - by Alessandro Vernet

  I have 2 inputs: they both have a width: 100%, and the second one is an absolute box: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en"> <head> <style type="text/css"> #box1 { position: absolute } #box1 { background: #666 } input { width: 100% } </style> </head> <body> <form> <input type="text"> <div id="box1"> <input type="text"> </div> </form> </body> </html> On standard-compliant browsers, the width: 100% seems to have no effect on the input inside the absolutely positioned box, but it does on the input which is not inside that absolutely absolute box. On IE7, both inputs take the whole width of the page. Two questions come to mind: Why does the width: 100% have no effect with standard-compliant browsers? I have to say that the way IE7 renders this feels more intuitive to me. How can I get IE7 to render things like the other browsers, if I can't remove the width: 100% and can't set a width on the absolutely positioned box?

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