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• Associating an Object with other Objects and Properties of those Objects

  - by alzoid

  I am looking for some help with designing some functionality in my application. I already have something similar designed but this problem is a little different. Background: In my application we have different Modules. Data in each module can be associated to other modules. Each Module is represented by an Object in our application. Module 1 can be associated with Module 2 and Module 3. Currently I use a factory to provide the proper DAO for getting and saving this data. It looks something like this: class Module1Factory { public static Module1BridgeDAO createModule1BridgeDAO(int moduleid) { switch (moduleId) { case Module.Module2Id: return new Module1_Module2DAO(); case Module.Module3Id: return new Module1_Module3DAO(); default: return null; } } } Module1_Module2 and Module1_Module3 implement the same BridgeModule interface. In the database I have a Table for every module (Module1, Module2, Module3). I also have a bridge table for each module (they are many to many) Module1_Module2, Module1_Module3 etc. The DAO basically handles all code needed to manage the association and retrieve its own instance data for the calling module. Now when we add new modules that associate with Module1 we simply implement the ModuleBridge interface and provide the common functionality. New Development We are adding a new module that will have the ability to be associated with other Modules as well as specific properties of that module. The module is basically providing the user the ability to add their custom forms to our other modules. That way they can collect additional information along with what we provide. I want to start associating my Form module with other modules and their properties. Ie if Module1 has a property Category, I want to associate an instance From data with that property. There are many Forms. If a users creates an instance of Module2, they may always want to also have certain form(s) attached to that Module2 instance. If they create an instance of Module2 and select Category 1, then I may want additional Form(s) created. I prototyped something like this: Form FormLayout (contains the labels and gui controls) FormModule (associates a form with all instances of a module) Form Instance (create an instance of a form to be filled out) As I thought about it I was thinking about making a new FormModule table/class/dao for each Module and Property that I add. So I might have: FormModule1 FormModule1Property1 FormModule1Property2 FormModule1Property3 FormModule1Property4 FormModule2 FormModule3 FormModule3Property1 Then as I did previously, I would use a factory to get the proper DAO for dealing with all of these. I would hand it an array of ids representing different modules and properties and it would return all of the DAOs that I need to call getForms(). Which in turn would return all of the forms for that particular bridge. Some points This will be for a new module so I dont need to expand on the factory code I provided. I just wanted to show an example of what I have done in the past. The new module can be associated with: Other Modules (ie globally for any instance of that module data), Other module properties (ie only if the Module instance has a certian value in one of its properties) I want to make it easy for developers to add associations with other modules and properties easily Can any one suggest any design patterns or strategy's for achieving this? If anything is unclear please let me know. Thank you, Al

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• std::basic_string full specialization (g++ conflict)

  - by SoapBox

  I am trying to define a full specialization of std::basic_string< char, char_traits<char>, allocator<char> > which is typedef'd (in g++) by the <string> header. The problem is, if I include <string> first, g++ sees the typedef as an instantiation of basic_string and gives me errors. If I do my specialization first then I have no issues. I should be able to define my specialization after <string> is included. What do I have to do to be able to do that? My Code: #include <bits/localefwd.h> //#include <string> // <- uncommenting this line causes compilation to fail namespace std { template<> class basic_string< char, char_traits<char>, allocator<char> > { public: int blah() { return 42; } size_t size() { return 0; } const char *c_str() { return ""; } void reserve(int) {} void clear() {} }; } #include <string> #include <iostream> int main() { std::cout << std::string().blah() << std::endl; } The above code works fine. But, if I uncomment the first #include <string> line, I get the following compiler errors: blah.cpp:7: error: specialization of ‘std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> >’ after instantiation blah.cpp:7: error: redefinition of ‘class std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> >’ /usr/include/c++/4.4/bits/stringfwd.h:52: error: previous definition of ‘class std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> >’ blah.cpp: In function ‘int main()’: blah.cpp:22: error: ‘class std::string’ has no member named ‘blah’ Line 52 of /usr/include/c++/4.4/bits/stringfwd.h: template<typename _CharT, typename _Traits = char_traits<_CharT>, typename _Alloc = allocator<_CharT> > class basic_string; As far as I know this is just a forward delcaration of the template, NOT an instantiation as g++ claims. Line 56 of /usr/include/c++/4.4/bits/stringfwd.h: typedef basic_string<char> string; As far as I know this is just a typedef, NOT an instantiation either. So why are these lines conflicting with my code? What can I do to fix this other than ensuring that my code is always included before <string>?

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• Can anyone help me find why this C program work on VS2005 but not on DEV-C++

  - by user333771

  Hello to everybody..and greetings from Greece I have a C program for an exercise and it has a strange issue The program runs just fine on VS 2005 but it crashes on DEV-C++ and the problem that the problem is that the exercise is always evaluated against DEV-C++ The program is about inserting nodes to a BST and this is where the problem lies... Well i would really appreciate some help. enter code here #include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> #include <malloc.h> typedef struct tree_node { int value; int weight; struct tree_node *left; struct tree_node *right; } TREE_NODE; /* The Following function creates a Binary Search Treed */ TREE_NODE *create_tree(int list[], int size); TREE_NODE *search_pos_to_insert(TREE_NODE *root, int value, int *left_or_right); /* this is the problematic function */ void inorder(TREE_NODE *root); /* Inorder Traversing */ TREE_NODE *temp; int main() { TREE_NODE *root; /* Pointer to the root of the BST */ int values[] = {10, 5, 3, 4, 1, 9, 6, 7, 8, 2}; /* Values for BST */ int size = 10, tree_weight; root = create_tree(values, 10); printf("\n"); inorder(root); /* Inorder BST*/ system("PAUSE"); } TREE_NODE *search_pos_to_insert(TREE_NODE *root, int value, int *left_or_right) { if(root !=NULL) { temp = root; if(value >root->value) { *left_or_right=1; *search_pos_to_insert(root->right, value, left_or_right); } else { *left_or_right=0; *search_pos_to_insert(root->left, value, left_or_right); } } else return temp;/* THIS IS THE PROBLEM (1) */ } TREE_NODE *create_tree(int list[], int size) { TREE_NODE *new_node_pntr, *insert_point, *root = NULL; int i, left_or_right; /* First Value of the Array is the root of the BST */ new_node_pntr = (TREE_NODE *) malloc(sizeof(TREE_NODE)); new_node_pntr->value = list[0]; /* ¸íèåóå ôçí ðñþôç ôéìÞ ôïõ ðßíáêá. */ new_node_pntr->weight = 0; new_node_pntr->left = NULL; new_node_pntr->right = NULL; root = new_node_pntr; /* Now the rest of the arrat. */ for (i = 1; i < size; i++) { insert_point = search_pos_to_insert(root, list[i], &left_or_right); /* THIS IS THE PROBLEM (2) */ /* insert_point just won't get the return from temp */ new_node_pntr = (TREE_NODE *) malloc(sizeof(TREE_NODE)); new_node_pntr->value = list[i]; new_node_pntr->weight = 0; new_node_pntr->left = NULL; new_node_pntr->right = NULL; if (left_or_right == 0) insert_point->left = new_node_pntr; else insert_point->right = new_node_pntr; } return(root); } void inorder(TREE_NODE *root) { if (root == NULL) return; inorder(root->left); printf("Value: %d, Weight: %d.\n", root->value, root->weight); inorder(root->right); }

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• nil object in view when building objects on two different associations

  - by Shako

  Hello all. I'm relatively new to Ruby on Rails so please don't mind my newbie level! I have following models: class Paintingdescription < ActiveRecord::Base belongs_to :paintings belongs_to :languages end class Paintingtitle < ActiveRecord::Base belongs_to :paintings belongs_to :languages end class Painting < ActiveRecord::Base has_many :paintingtitles, :dependent => :destroy has_many :paintingdescriptions, :dependent => :destroy has_many :languages, :through => :paintingdescriptions has_many :languages, :through => :paintingtitles end class Language < ActiveRecord::Base has_many :paintingtitles, :dependent => :nullify has_many :paintingdescriptions, :dependent => :nullify has_many :paintings, :through => :paintingtitles has_many :paintings, :through => :paintingdescriptions end In my painting new/edit view, I would like to show the painting details, together with its title and description in each of the languages, so I can store the translation of those field. In order to build the languagetitle and languagedescription records for my painting and each of the languages, I wrote following code in the new method of my Paintings_controller.rb: @temp_languages = @languages @languages.size.times{@painting.paintingtitles.build} @painting.paintingtitles.each do |paintingtitle| paintingtitle.language_id = @temp_languages[0].id @temp_languages.slice!(0) end @temp_languages = @languages @languages.size.times{@painting.paintingdescriptions.build} @painting.paintingdescriptions.each do |paintingdescription| paintingdescription.language_id = @temp_languages[0].id @temp_languages.slice!(0) end In form partial which I call in the new/edit view, I have <% form_for @painting, :html => { :multipart => true} do |f| %> ... <% languages.each do |language| %> <p> <%= label language, language.name %> <% paintingtitle = @painting.paintingtitles[counter] %> <% new_or_existing = paintingtitle.new_record? ? 'new' : 'new' %> <% prefix = "painting[#{new_or_existing}_title_attributes][]" %> <% fields_for prefix, paintingtitle do |paintingtitle_form| %> <%= paintingtitle_form.hidden_field :language_id%> <%= f.label :title %><br /> <%= paintingtitle_form.text_field :title%> <% end %> <% paintingdescription = @painting.paintingdescriptions[counter] %> <% new_or_existing = paintingdescription.new_record? ? 'new' : 'new' %> <% prefix = "painting[#{new_or_existing}_title_attributes][]" %> <% fields_for prefix, paintingdescription do |paintingdescription_form| %> <%= paintingdescription_form.hidden_field :language_id%> <%= f.label :description %><br /> <%= paintingdescription_form.text_field :description %> <% end %> </p> <% counter += 1 %> <% end %> ... <% end %> But, when running the code, ruby encounters a nil object when evaluating paintingdescription.new_record?: You have a nil object when you didn't expect it! You might have expected an instance of ActiveRecord::Base. The error occurred while evaluating nil.new_record? However, if I change the order in which I a) build the paintingtitles and painting descriptions in the paintings_controller new method and b) show the paintingtitles and painting descriptions in the form partial then I get the nil on the paintingtitles.new_record? call. I always get the nil for the objects I build in second place. The ones I build first aren't nil in my view. Is it possible that I cannot build objects for 2 different associations at the same time? Or am I missing something else? Thanks in advance!

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• Dynamic form in PHP not processing correctly

  - by user1497265

  My last question regarding this suggested I incorporate AJAX with PHP. However, I really wanted to try PHP exclusively for this project, and I seem to have made it about 95% there. I just need help on this one issue. Here's a quick background. My project requires a dynamic form to be populated with a max limit of 10 questions. Each form contains one question, one question number, and a text field. Students would go on and answer the questions. This is all driven by a database table (obviously), and when a question gets answered correctly, it will close and the next question in line will appear. There will always be 10 questions on the page. Here's how the coding looks, and it works perfectly. <? $rt = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM The_Questions WHERE Status='Open' ORDER BY 'Number' LIMIT 10"); while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($rt)) { $number=$row[0]; $category = $row[1]; $question=$row[2]; $points=$row[4]; $_SESSION['number'] = $number; ?> <form action="processor.php" method="post" class="qForm"> <div class="questionCell"> <div class="question"><? echo $number; echo $question ?></div> <div class="answer">Answer: <input class="inputField" name="q1" type="text" size="40" maxlength="40" /> <input name="HHQuestion" value="Submit" type="submit" /></div> </div> </form> <? } ?> The questions appear as they should, in the correct order, and the correct limit. Everything seems to be looking fine until a question gets answered and gets processed through the processor.php action. First here's the code to the processor.php file: <?php session_start(); if(isset($_POST["HHQuestion"])){ $dbhost = 'localhost'; $dbname = 'localhost'; $dbuser = 'localhost'; $dbpass = 'localhost'; $conn = mysql_connect($dbhost, $dbuser, $dbpass); mysql_select_db($dbname, $conn); { $number1 = $_SESSION['number']; $answer=$_POST['q1']; $sql="SELECT * FROM The_Questions WHERE Number='$number1'"; $result=mysql_query($sql); $row=mysql_fetch_array($result); $question = $row[2]; echo $question .'<br>'; echo $number1.'<br>'; echo $answer; } } ?> This is NOT live yet, and for testing purposes I'm echoing the question, question number, and answer (as you can see). What's happening is that the $question and $number1 displays the last question in the array (the $answer displays correctly, meaning it displays whatever was written in the dynamic form). Can anyone tell me why that is? If I change the LIMIT number to 20, the processor.php action will display the 20th question and number, even if I was answering question 8, for example, in the dynamic form. Again, the dynamic forms are being displayed correctly, and are numbered correctly. For some unknown reason to me, the action - processor.php - is grabbing the last question in the array. Any ideas on what I'm doing wrong? I'm hoping it's a simple code change that I'm overlooking. Thanks in advance guys!

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• XMLNodes being appended to an XMLNode are "undefined"? Actionscript 2.0 is being unkind

  - by DigitalMercenary

  If anyone can offer an explanation for this one, I'd LOVE to see it! I was required to append a legacy application to display 20 random questions from an XML data source, as opposed to the total of 70 questions that are part of the original XML. No big deal, right? WRONG! I got it to work just fine in the end, but it's a total HACK! For some reason, some of the nodes that I am appending to a dynamically generated XML document are being returned as "undefined". I kept getting between 16 and 20 questions to render until I modified my iteration from a 'for' loop to a 'do while' loop with the appropriate number of XMLNodes as the condition of the 'do while' loop. Can anyone offer an explanation? Below is the code, with some notes for the reader : function editXML(xml:XML):XML { var node:XMLNode = xml.firstChild; var newNode:XMLNode = new XMLNode(); var nodeArray:Array = new Array(); var usedNodes:Array = new Array(); var totalNodes:Number = node.lastChild.childNodes.length - 1; var nextNode:Number; var returnNode:XMLNode = new XMLNode(); var tempNode:XMLNode; var buildNode:XMLNode; var addNode:Boolean = true; var tempXML:XML = new XML(); var pagesNode:XMLNode = tempXML.createElement("pages"); tempXML.appendChild(pagesNode); tempXML.appendChild(node.childNodes[0]); tempXML.appendChild(node.childNodes[1]); tempXML.appendChild(node.childNodes[2]); var questionsNode:XMLNode = tempXML.createElement("pages"); tempXML.firstChild.appendChild(questionsNode); do { nextNode = Math.floor(Math.random()*totalNodes); **//random number to represent random node** //trace(nextNode + " nextNode"); **//check usedNodes Array to look for node.childNodes[nextNode]. If it already exists, skip and reloop.** trace(node.childNodes[1].childNodes[nextNode] + " : pre building Node " + totalNodes); if(usedNodes.length == 0) { buildNode = new XMLNode(); buildNode.nodeName = node.childNodes[1].childNodes[nextNode].nodeName; buildNode.nodeValue = node.childNodes[1].childNodes[nextNode].nodeValue; tempXML.firstChild.lastChild.appendChild(node.childNodes[1].childNodes[nextNode]) usedNodes.push(node.childNodes[1].childNodes[nextNode]); nodeArray.push(node.childNodes[1].childNodes[nextNode]); trace("adding first node : " + nodeArray.length); addNode = false; } else { for(var j:Number = 0; j < usedNodes.length; j++) { if(usedNodes[j] == node.childNodes[1].childNodes[nextNode]) { addNode = false; trace("skipping node : " + nodeArray.length); } } } **//if node not in usedNodes, add node to XML** if(addNode) { trace(node.childNodes[1].childNodes[nextNode] + " : building Node"); **//This trace statement produced a valid node** tempXML.firstChild.lastChild.appendChild(node.childNodes[1].childNodes[nextNode]); **//Before modifying the code from adding nodes to the xml from an Array called 'nodeArray' in a for loop to adding nodes directly to the xml in a do while loop with the length of the xml node used to retrieve data for the questions as the condition, I was not always getting 20 questions. Some of the nodes were being rendered as 'undefined' and not appended to the xml, even though they were traced and proven valid before the attemp to append them to the xml was made** usedNodes.push(node.childNodes[1].childNodes[nextNode]); } addNode = true; } while(tempXML.firstChild.lastChild.childNodes.length <= 19); trace(tempXML.firstChild.lastChild.childNodes.length + " final nodes Length"); courseXML = tempXML; //removes the old question list of 70 and replaces it with the new question list of 20. Question list is the last node. return tempXML; } If I had my choice, I would have rebuilt the whole application in Flex with AS3. I didn't have that choice. If anyone can explain this mystery, PLEASE DO! Thank you in advance!

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• If I use a facade class with generic methods to access the JPA API, how should I provide additional processing for specific types?

  - by Shaun

  Let's say I'm making a fairly simple web application using JAVA EE specs (I've heard this is possible). In this app, I only have about 10 domain/data objects, and these are represented by JPA Entities. Architecturally, I would consider the JPA API to perform the role of a DAO. Of course, I don't want to use the EntityManager directly in my UI (JSF) and I need to manage transactions, so I delegate these tasks to the so-called service layer. More specifically, I would like to be able to handle these tasks in a single DataService class (often also called CrudService) with generic methods. See this article by Adam Bien for an example interface: http://www.adam-bien.com/roller/abien/entry/generic_crud_service_aka_dao My project differs from that article in that I can't use EJBs, so my service classes are essentially just named beans and I handle transactions manually. Regardless, what I want is a single interface for simple CRUD operations on my data objects because having a different class for each data type would lead to a lot of duplicate and/or unnecessary code. Ideally, my views would be able to use a method such as public <T> List<T> findAll(Class<T> type) { ... } to retrieve data. Using JSF, it might look something like this: <h:dataTable value="#{dataService.findAll(data.class)}" var="d"> ... </h:dataTable> Similarly, after validating forms, my controller could submit the data with a method such as: public <T> void add(T entity) { ... } Granted, you'd probably actually want to return something useful to the caller. In any case, this works well if your data can be treated as homogenous in this manner. Alas, it breaks down when you need to perform additional processing on certain objects before passing them on to JPA. For example, let's say I'm dealing with Books and Authors which have a many-to-many relationship. Each Book has a set of IDs referring to its authors, and each Author has a set of IDs referring to their books. Normally, JPA can manage this kind of relationship for you, but in some cases it can't (for example, the google app engine JPA provider doesn't support this). Thus, when I persist a new book for example, I may need to update the corresponding author entities. My question, then, is if there's an elegant way to handle this or if I should reconsider the sanity of my whole design. Here's a couple ways I see of dealing with it: The instanceof operator. I could use this to target certain classes when special processing is needed. Perhaps maintainability suffers and it isn't beautiful code, but if there's only 10 or so domain objects it can't be all that bad... could it? Make a different service for each entity type (ie, BookService and AuthorService). All services would inherit from a generic DataService base class and override methods if special processing is needed. At this point, you could probably also just call them DAOs instead. As always, I appreciate the help. Let me know if any clarifications are needed, as I left out many smaller details.

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• Opening a file with a variable as name and checking for undefined values

  - by Harm De Weirdt

  I'm having some problems writing data into a file using Perl. sub startNewOrder{ my $name = makeUniqueFileName(); open (ORDER, ">$name.txt") or die "can't open file: $!\n"; format ORDER_TOP = PRODUCT<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<CODE<<<<<<<<AANTAL<<<<EENHEIDSPRIJS<<<<<<TOTAAL<<<<<<< . format ORDER = @<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< @<<<<<<<< @<<<< @<<<<<< @<<<<< $title, $code, $amount, $price, $total . close (ORDER); } This is the sub I use to make the file. (I translated most of it.) The makeUniqueFileName method makes a fileName based upon current time("minuteshoursdayOrder"). The problem now is that I have to write to this file in another sub. sub addToOrder{ print "give productcode:"; $code = <STDIN>; chop $code; print "Give amount:"; $amount = <STDIN>; chop $amount; if($inventory{$code} eq undef){ #Does the product exist? print "This product does not exist"; }elsif($inventory{$code}[2] < $amount && !defined($inventaris{$code}[2]) ){ #Is there enough in the inventory? print "There is not enough in stock" }else{ $inventory{$code}[2] -= $amount; #write in order file open (ORDER ">>$naam.txt") or die "can't open file: $!\n"; $title = $inventory{$code}[0]; $code = $code; $amount = $inventory{$code}[2]; $price = $inventory{$code}[1]; $total = $inventory{$code}[1]; write; close(ORDER); } %inventory is a hashtable that has the productcode as key and an array with the title, price and amount as value. There are two problems here: when I enter an invalid product number, I still have to enter an amount even while my code says it should print the error directly after checking if there is a product with the given code. The second problem is that the writing doesn't seem to work. It always give's a "No such file or directory" error. Is there a way to open the ORDER file I made in the first sub without having to make $name not local? Or just a way to write in this file? I really don't know how to start here. I can't really find much info on writing a file that has been closed before, and in a different sub. Any help is appreciated, Harm

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• Can't save my picture

  - by mamii

  I want to save the image that I draw, but I always failure is reported. I have tested and tried but I can correct any errors. Therefore, I appeal to you. This store is for me as a "cancer sore". And what is the drawing application without the possibility shranjevnja? sucks: D Question: What is wrong with my code for storage? or anything else? Posts: 09-12 07:30:34.346: E / Panel (8003): IOEception 09-12 07:30:34.346: E / Panel (8003): java.io.IOException: Parent directory of file does not exist: / sdcard/anppp/2012Sep1273034.png 09-12 07:30:34.346: E / Panel (8003): at java.io.File.createNewFile (File.java: 1263) 09-12 07:30:34.346: E / Panel (8003): at aa.bb.cc.Panel.saveapp (Panel.java: 67) 09-12 07:30:34.346: E / Panel (8003): at aa.bb.cc.AndroidPaint.onOptionsItemSelected (AndroidPaint.java: 94) 09-12 07:30:34.346: E / Panel (8003): at android.app.Activity.onMenuItemSelected (Activity.java: 2170) 09-12 07:30:34.346: E / Panel (8003): at com.android.internal.policy.impl.PhoneWindow.onMenuItemSelected (PhoneWindow.java: 730) 09-12 07:30:34.346: E / Panel (8003): at com.android.internal.view.menu.MenuItemImpl.invoke (MenuItemImpl.java: 139) 09-12 07:30:34.346: E / Panel (8003): at com.android.internal.view.menu.MenuBuilder.performItemAction (MenuBuilder.java: 855) 09-12 07:30:34.346: E / Panel (8003): at com.android.internal.view.menu.ExpandedMenuView.invokeItem (ExpandedMenuView.java: 89) 09-12 07:30:34.346: E / Panel (8003): at com.android.internal.view.menu.ExpandedMenuView.onItemClick (ExpandedMenuView.java: 93) 09-12 07:30:34.346: E / Panel (8003): at android.widget.AdapterView.performItemClick (AdapterView.java: 284) 09-12 07:30:34.346: E / Panel (8003): at android.widget.ListView.performItemClick (ListView.java: 3285) 09-12 07:30:34.346: E / Panel (8003): at android.widget.AbsListView $ PerformClick.run (AbsListView.java: 1640) 09-12 07:30:34.346: E / Panel (8003): at android.os.Handler.handleCallback (Handler.java: 587) 09-12 07:30:34.346: E / Panel (8003): at android.os.Handler.dispatchMessage (Handler.java: 92) 09-12 07:30:34.346: E / Panel (8003): at android.os.Looper.loop (Looper.java: 123) 09-12 07:30:34.346: E / Panel (8003): at android.app.ActivityThread.main (ActivityThread.java: 4363) 09-12 07:30:34.346: E / Panel (8003): at java.lang.reflect.Method.invokeNative (Native Method) 09-12 07:30:34.346: E / Panel (8003): at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke (Method.java: 521) 09-12 07:30:34.346: E / Panel (8003): at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit $ MethodAndArgsCaller.run (ZygoteInit.java: 860) 09-12 07:30:34.346: E / Panel (8003): at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit.main (ZygoteInit.java: 618) 09-12 07:30:34.346: E / Panel (8003): at dalvik.system.NativeStart.main (Native Method) There is code: private Bitmap mBitmap; private Canvas mCanvas; private Bitmap tmpBitmap; private Canvas tmpCanvas; private DrawHandler mDrawHandler; private Canvas tCanvas; private String mImagePath = Environment.getExternalStorageDirectory() + "/anppp"; private File file; public void saveapp() { Calendar currentDate = Calendar.getInstance(); SimpleDateFormat formatter= new SimpleDateFormat("yyyyMMMddHmmss"); String dateNow = formatter.format(currentDate.getTime()); file = new File(mImagePath + "/" + dateNow +".png"); FileOutputStream fos; try { file.createNewFile(); fos = new FileOutputStream(file); tmpBitmap.compress(Bitmap.CompressFormat.PNG, 100, fos); fos.close(); } catch (FileNotFoundException e) { Log.e("Panel", "FileNotFoundException", e); } catch (IOException e) { Log.e("Panel", "IOEception", e); } } That's it .. I do not know what could be wrong ;(

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• New line (in the code) after <li> element breaking layout

  - by BT643

  Weirdly, I've never come across this issue before, but I've just started making a site and the top navigation isn't playing nicely. I want a small amount of white space between each menu item, but when I have new lines between my <li> elements and my <a> elements in my IDE (Netbeans), the white space disappears, yet it looks fine if I have <li><a></a></li> all on the same line. I was always under the impression html ignored white space in the code. I've checked for any weird characters causing problems in other text editors and can't find anything. Here's the code... Like this the menu looks correct but code looks ugly (I know it looks fine when it's this simple, but I'm going be adding more complexity in which makes it look awful all on one line): <ul id="menu"> <li><a href="#">About</a></li> <li class="active"><a href="<?php echo site_url("tracklist"); ?>">Track List</a></li> <li><a href="<?php echo site_url("stats"); ?>">Stats</a></li> <li><a href="#">Stats</a></li> </ul> Like this the menu looks wrong but code looks fine: <ul id="menu"> <li> <a href="#">About</a> </li> <li class="active"> <a href="<?php echo site_url("tracklist"); ?>">Track List</a> </li> <li> <a href="<?php echo site_url("stats"); ?>">Stats</a> </li> <li> <a href="#">Stats</a> </li> </ul> Here's the css: #menu { float: right; } #menu li { display: inline-block; padding: 5px; background-color: #932996; border-bottom: solid 1px #932996; } #menu li:hover { border-bottom: solid 3px #FF0000; } #menu li.active { background-color: #58065e; } I'm sure it's something simple I'm doing wrong... but can someone shed some light on this for me? Sorry for the lengthy post (my first on stackoverflow).

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• Opening a file with a variable as name & checking for undefined values

  - by Harm De Weirdt

  Hello everyone. I'm having some problems writing data into a file using perl. sub startNewOrder{ my $name = makeUniqueFileName(); open (ORDER, ">$name.txt") or die "can't open file: $!\n"; format ORDER_TOP = PRODUCT<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<CODE<<<<<<<<AANTAL<<<<EENHEIDSPRIJS<<<<<<TOTAAL<<<<<<< . format ORDER = @<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< @<<<<<<<< @<<<< @<<<<<< @<<<<< $title, $code, $amount, $price, $total . close (ORDER); } This is the sub I use to make the file. (I translated most of it) The makeUniqueFileName method makes a fileName based upon current time("minuteshoursdayOrder"). The problem now is that I have to write in this file in another sub. sub addToOrder{ print "give productcode:"; $code = <STDIN>; chop $code; print "Give amount:"; $amount = <STDIN>; chop $amount; if($inventory{$code} eq undef){ #Does the product exist? print "This product does not exist"; }elsif($inventory{$code}[2] < $amount && !defined($inventaris{$code}[2]) ){ #Is there enough in the inventory? print "There is not enough in stock" }else{ $inventory{$code}[2] -= $amount; #write in order file open (ORDER ">>$naam.txt") or die "can't open file: $!\n"; $title = $inventory{$code}[0]; $code = $code; $amount = $inventory{$code}[2]; $price = $inventory{$code}[1]; $total = $inventory{$code}[1]; write; close(ORDER); } %inventory is a hashtable that has the productcode as key and an array with the title, price and amount as value. There are two problems here: when I enter an invalid product number, I still have to enter an amount even while my code says it should print the error directly after checking if there is a product with the given code. The second problem is that the writing doesn't seem to work. It always give's a "No such file or directory" error. Is there a way to open the ORDER file i made in the first sub without having to make $name not local? Or just a way to write in this file? I really don't know how to start here. I can't really find much info on writing a file that has been closed before, and in a different sub.. Any help is appreciated, Harm

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• jQuery .find() doesn't return data in IE but does in Firefox and Chrome

  - by Steve Hiner

  I helped a friend out by doing a little web work for him. Part of what he needed was an easy way to change a couple pieces of text on his site. Rather than having him edit the HTML I decided to provide an XML file with the messages in it and I used jQuery to pull them out of the file and insert them into the page. It works great... In Firefox and Chrome, not so great in IE7. I was hoping one of you could tell me why. I did a fair but of googling but couldn't find what I'm looking for. Here's the XML: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <messages> <message type="HeaderMessage"> This message is put up in the header area. </message> <message type="FooterMessage"> This message is put in the lower left cell. </message> </messages> And here's my jQuery call: <script type="text/javascript"> $(document).ready(function() { $.get('messages.xml', function(d) { //I have confirmed that it gets to here in IE //and it has the xml loaded. //alert(d); gives me a message box with the xml text in it //alert($(d).find('message')); gives me "[object Object]" //alert($(d).find('message')[0]); gives me "undefined" //alert($(d).find('message').Length); gives me "undefined" $(d).find('message').each(function() { //But it never gets to here in IE var $msg = $(this); var type = $msg.attr("type"); var message = $msg.text(); switch (type) { case "HeaderMessage": $("#HeaderMessageDiv").html(message); break; case "FooterMessage": $("#footermessagecell").html(message); break; default: } }); }); }); </script> Is there something I need to do differently in IE? Based on the message box with [object Object] I'm assumed that .find was working in IE but since I can't index into the array with [0] or check it's Length I'm guessing that means .find isn't returning any results. Any reason why that would work perfectly in Firefox and Chrome but fail in IE? I'm a total newbie with jQuery so I hope I haven't just done something stupid. That code above was scraped out of a forum and modified to suit my needs. Since jQuery is cross-platform I figured I wouldn't have to deal with this mess. Edit: I've found that if I load the page in Visual Studio 2008 and run it then it will work in IE. So it turns out it always works when run through the development web server. Now I'm thinking IE just doesn't like doing .find in XML loaded off of my local drive so maybe when this is on an actual web server it will work OK. I have confirmed that it works fine when browsed from a web server. Must be a peculiarity with IE. I'm guessing it's because the web server sets the mime type for the xml data file transfer and without that IE doesn't parse the xml correctly.

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• A view interface for large object/array dumps

  - by user685107

  I want to embed in a page a detailed structure report of my model objects, like print_r() or var_export() produce (now I’m doing this with running var_export() on get_object_vars()). But what I actually want to see is only some properties (in most cases), but at this moment I have to use Ctrl+F and seek the variable I want, instead of just staring at it right after the page completes loading. So I’m embedding buttons to show/hide large arrays etc. but thought: ‘What if there already is the thing I do right now?’ So is there? Update: What would your ideal interface look like? First of all, dumped models fit in the first screen. All the properties can be seen at the first look at the screen (there are not many of them, around 10 per each, three models total, so it is possible). Small arrays can be shown unrolled too. Let the size of the array to count it as ‘small’ be definable. Ideally, the user can see values of the properties without doing any click, scrolling the screen or typing something. There must be some improvements to representing the values, say, if an array is empty, show array ‘My_big_array’ is empty and if a boolean variable starting with is_, has_, had_ has a false as the value, make the variable (let us take is_available for example) shown as is_NOT_available in red, and if it has true as the value, show is_available in green. Without any value shown. The same goes for defined constants. That would be ideal. I want to make focus on this kind of switches. Krumo seems useful, but since it always closes up the variable without making difference of how large it is, I cannot use it as is, but there might appear something similar on github soon :) Second update starts here: Any programmer who sees is_available = false will know what it means, no need to do more Bringing in color indication I forgot about one thing: the ‘switches’ let’s call them so, may me important or not. So I have right now some of them that will show in green or red, this is for something global, like caching, which is shown as Caching is… ON with ‘ON’ written in green, (and ‘OFF’ in red when disabled) while the words about what it is, i.e. ‘Caching is… ’ are written in black. And some which are not so important, for example I haven’t defined REVEAL_TIES is… not set with ‘not set’ written in gray, while the words describing what it is stay in black. And if it would be set the whole phrase would be in black since there is nothing important: if this small utility for showing some undercover things is working, I will see some messages after it, if it isn’t — site will be working independently of its state. Dividing switches into important ones and not with corresponding color match should improve readability, especially for those users who are not programmers and just enabled debug mode because some guy from bugzilla said do that — for them it would help to understand what is important and what is not.

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• Testing shared memory ,strange thing happen

  - by barfatchen

  I have 2 program compiled in 4.1.2 running in RedHat 5.5 , It is a simple job to test shared memory , shmem1.c like following : #define STATE_FILE "/program.shared" #define NAMESIZE 1024 #define MAXNAMES 100 typedef struct { char name[MAXNAMES][NAMESIZE]; int heartbeat ; int iFlag ; } SHARED_VAR; int main (void) { int first = 0; int shm_fd; static SHARED_VAR *conf; if((shm_fd = shm_open(STATE_FILE, (O_CREAT | O_EXCL | O_RDWR), (S_IREAD | S_IWRITE))) > 0 ) { first = 1; /* We are the first instance */ } else if((shm_fd = shm_open(STATE_FILE, (O_CREAT | O_RDWR), (S_IREAD | S_IWRITE))) < 0) { printf("Could not create shm object. %s\n", strerror(errno)); return errno; } if((conf = mmap(0, sizeof(SHARED_VAR), (PROT_READ | PROT_WRITE), MAP_SHARED, shm_fd, 0)) == MAP_FAILED) { return errno; } if(first) { for(idx=0;idx< 1000000000;idx++) { conf->heartbeat = conf->heartbeat + 1 ; } } printf("conf->heartbeat=(%d)\n",conf->heartbeat) ; close(shm_fd); shm_unlink(STATE_FILE); exit(0); }//main And shmem2.c like following : #define STATE_FILE "/program.shared" #define NAMESIZE 1024 #define MAXNAMES 100 typedef struct { char name[MAXNAMES][NAMESIZE]; int heartbeat ; int iFlag ; } SHARED_VAR; int main (void) { int first = 0; int shm_fd; static SHARED_VAR *conf; if((shm_fd = shm_open(STATE_FILE, (O_RDWR), (S_IREAD | S_IWRITE))) < 0) { printf("Could not create shm object. %s\n", strerror(errno)); return errno; } ftruncate(shm_fd, sizeof(SHARED_VAR)); if((conf = mmap(0, sizeof(SHARED_VAR), (PROT_READ | PROT_WRITE), MAP_SHARED, shm_fd, 0)) == MAP_FAILED) { return errno; } int idx ; for(idx=0;idx< 1000000000;idx++) { conf->heartbeat = conf->heartbeat + 1 ; } printf("conf->heartbeat=(%d)\n",conf->heartbeat) ; close(shm_fd); exit(0); } After compiled : gcc shmem1.c -lpthread -lrt -o shmem1.exe gcc shmem2.c -lpthread -lrt -o shmem2.exe And Run both program almost at the same time with 2 terminal : [test]$ ./shmem1.exe First creation of the shm. Setting up default values conf->heartbeat=(840825951) [test]$ ./shmem2.exe conf->heartbeat=(1215083817) I feel confused !! since shmem1.c is a loop 1,000,000,000 times , how can it be possible to have a answer like 840,825,951 ? I run shmem1.exe and shmem2.exe this way,most of the results are conf-heartbeat will larger than 1,000,000,000 , but seldom and randomly , I will see result conf-heartbeat will lesser than 1,000,000,000 , either in shmem1.exe or shmem2.exe !! if run shmem1.exe only , it is always print 1,000,000,000 , my question is , what is the reason cause conf-heartbeat=(840825951) in shmem1.exe ? Update: Although not sure , but I think I figure it out what is going on , If shmem1.exe run 10 times for example , then conf-heartbeat = 10 , in this time shmem1.exe take a rest and then back , shmem1.exe read from shared memory and conf-heartbeat = 8 , so shmem1.exe will continue from 8 , why conf-heartbeat = 8 ? I think it is because shmem2.exe update the shared memory data to 8 , shmem1.exe did not write 10 back to shared memory before it took a rest ....that is just my theory... i don't know how to prove it !!

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• ASP.Net MVC 2 Auto Complete Textbox With Custom View Model Attribute & EditorTemplate

  - by SeanMcAlinden

  In this post I’m going to show how to create a generic, ajax driven Auto Complete text box using the new MVC 2 Templates and the jQuery UI library. The template will be automatically displayed when a property is decorated with a custom attribute within the view model. The AutoComplete text box in action will look like the following:   The first thing to do is to do is visit my previous blog post to put the custom model metadata provider in place, this is necessary when using custom attributes on the view model. http://weblogs.asp.net/seanmcalinden/archive/2010/06/11/custom-asp-net-mvc-2-modelmetadataprovider-for-using-custom-view-model-attributes.aspx Once this is in place, make sure you visit the jQuery UI and download the latest stable release – in this example I’m using version 1.8.2. You can download it here. Add the jQuery scripts and css theme to your project and add references to them in your master page. Should look something like the following: Site.Master <head runat="server">     <title><asp:ContentPlaceHolder ID="TitleContent" runat="server" /></title>     <link href="../../Content/Site.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />     <link href="../../css/ui-lightness/jquery-ui-1.8.2.custom.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />     <script src="../../Scripts/jquery-1.4.2.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>     <script src="../../Scripts/jquery-ui-1.8.2.custom.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> </head> Once this is place we can get started. Creating the AutoComplete Custom Attribute The auto complete attribute will derive from the abstract MetadataAttribute created in my previous post. It will look like the following: AutoCompleteAttribute using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Web.Mvc; using System.Web.Routing; namespace Mvc2Templates.Attributes {     public class AutoCompleteAttribute : MetadataAttribute     {         public RouteValueDictionary RouteValueDictionary;         public AutoCompleteAttribute(string controller, string action, string parameterName)         {             this.RouteValueDictionary = new RouteValueDictionary();             this.RouteValueDictionary.Add("Controller", controller);             this.RouteValueDictionary.Add("Action", action);             this.RouteValueDictionary.Add(parameterName, string.Empty);         }         public override void Process(ModelMetadata modelMetaData)         {             modelMetaData.AdditionalValues.Add("AutoCompleteUrlData", this.RouteValueDictionary);             modelMetaData.TemplateHint = "AutoComplete";         }     } } As you can see, the constructor takes in strings for the controller, action and parameter name. The parameter name will be used for passing the search text within the auto complete text box. The constructor then creates a new RouteValueDictionary which we will use later to construct the url for getting the auto complete results via ajax. The main interesting method is the method override called Process. With the process method, the route value dictionary is added to the modelMetaData AdditionalValues collection. The TemplateHint is also set to AutoComplete, this means that when the view model is parsed for display, the MVC 2 framework will look for a view user control template called AutoComplete, if it finds one, it uses that template to display the property. The View Model To show you how the attribute will look, this is the view model I have used in my example which can be downloaded at the end of this post. View Model using System.ComponentModel; using Mvc2Templates.Attributes; namespace Mvc2Templates.Models {     public class TemplateDemoViewModel     {         [AutoComplete("Home", "AutoCompleteResult", "searchText")]         [DisplayName("European Country Search")]         public string SearchText { get; set; }     } } As you can see, the auto complete attribute is called with the controller name, action name and the name of the action parameter that the search text will be passed into. The AutoComplete Template Now all of this is in place, it’s time to create the AutoComplete template. Create a ViewUserControl called AutoComplete.ascx at the following location within your application – Views/Shared/EditorTemplates/AutoComplete.ascx Add the following code: AutoComplete.ascx <%@ Control Language="C#" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewUserControl" %> <%     var propertyName = ViewData.ModelMetadata.PropertyName;     var propertyValue = ViewData.ModelMetadata.Model;     var id = Guid.NewGuid().ToString();     RouteValueDictionary urlData =         (RouteValueDictionary)ViewData.ModelMetadata.AdditionalValues.Where(x => x.Key == "AutoCompleteUrlData").Single().Value;     var url = Mvc2Templates.Views.Shared.Helpers.RouteHelper.GetUrl(this.ViewContext.RequestContext, urlData); %> <input type="text" name="<%= propertyName %>" value="<%= propertyValue %>" id="<%= id %>" class="autoComplete" /> <script type="text/javascript">     $(function () {         $("#<%= id %>").autocomplete({             source: function (request, response) {                 $.ajax({                     url: "<%= url %>" + request.term,                     dataType: "json",                     success: function (data) {                         response(data);                     }                 });             },             minLength: 2         });     }); </script> There is a lot going on in here but when you break it down it’s quite simple. Firstly, the property name and property value are retrieved through the model meta data. These are required to ensure that the text box input has the correct name and data to allow for model binding. If you look at line 14 you can see them being used in the text box input creation. The interesting bit is on line 8 and 9, this is the code to retrieve the route value dictionary we added into the model metada via the custom attribute. Line 11 is used to create the url, in order to do this I created a quick helper class which looks like the code below titled RouteHelper. The last bit of script is the code to initialise the jQuery UI AutoComplete control with the correct url for calling back to our controller action. RouteHelper using System.Web.Mvc; using System.Web.Routing; namespace Mvc2Templates.Views.Shared.Helpers {     public static class RouteHelper     {         const string Controller = "Controller";         const string Action = "Action";         const string ReplaceFormatString = "REPLACE{0}";         public static string GetUrl(RequestContext requestContext, RouteValueDictionary routeValueDictionary)         {             RouteValueDictionary urlData = new RouteValueDictionary();             UrlHelper urlHelper = new UrlHelper(requestContext);                          int i = 0;             foreach(var item in routeValueDictionary)             {                 if (item.Value == string.Empty)                 {                     i++;                     urlData.Add(item.Key, string.Format(ReplaceFormatString, i.ToString()));                 }                 else                 {                     urlData.Add(item.Key, item.Value);                 }             }             var url = urlHelper.RouteUrl(urlData);             for (int index = 1; index <= i; index++)             {                 url = url.Replace(string.Format(ReplaceFormatString, index.ToString()), string.Empty);             }             return url;         }     } } See it in action All you need to do to see it in action is pass a view model from your controller with the new AutoComplete attribute attached and call the following within your view: <%= this.Html.EditorForModel() %> NOTE: The jQuery UI auto complete control expects a JSON string returned from your controller action method… as you can’t use the JsonResult to perform GET requests, use a normal action result, convert your data into json and return it as a string via a ContentResult. If you download the solution it will be very clear how to handle the controller and action for this demo. The full source code for this post can be downloaded here. It has been developed using MVC 2 and Visual Studio 2010. As always, I hope this has been interesting/useful. Kind Regards, Sean McAlinden.

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• Using JSON.NET for dynamic JSON parsing

  - by Rick Strahl

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

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• HTG Reviews the CODE Keyboard: Old School Construction Meets Modern Amenities

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  There’s nothing quite as satisfying as the smooth and crisp action of a well built keyboard. If you’re tired of  mushy keys and cheap feeling keyboards, a well-constructed mechanical keyboard is a welcome respite from the $10 keyboard that came with your computer. Read on as we put the CODE mechanical keyboard through the paces. What is the CODE Keyboard? The CODE keyboard is a collaboration between manufacturer WASD Keyboards and Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror (the guy behind the Stack Exchange network and Discourse forum software). Atwood’s focus was incorporating the best of traditional mechanical keyboards and the best of modern keyboard usability improvements. In his own words: The world is awash in terrible, crappy, no name how-cheap-can-we-make-it keyboards. There are a few dozen better mechanical keyboard options out there. I’ve owned and used at least six different expensive mechanical keyboards, but I wasn’t satisfied with any of them, either: they didn’t have backlighting, were ugly, had terrible design, or were missing basic functions like media keys. That’s why I originally contacted Weyman Kwong of WASD Keyboards way back in early 2012. I told him that the state of keyboards was unacceptable to me as a geek, and I proposed a partnership wherein I was willing to work with him to do whatever it takes to produce a truly great mechanical keyboard. Even the ardent skeptic who questions whether Atwood has indeed created a truly great mechanical keyboard certainly can’t argue with the position he starts from: there are so many agonizingly crappy keyboards out there. Even worse, in our opinion, is that unless you’re a typist of a certain vintage there’s a good chance you’ve never actually typed on a really nice keyboard. Those that didn’t start using computers until the mid-to-late 1990s most likely have always typed on modern mushy-key keyboards and never known the joy of typing on a really responsive and crisp mechanical keyboard. Is our preference for and love of mechanical keyboards shining through here? Good. We’re not even going to try and hide it. So where does the CODE keyboard stack up in pantheon of keyboards? Read on as we walk you through the simple setup and our experience using the CODE. Setting Up the CODE Keyboard Although the setup of the CODE keyboard is essentially plug and play, there are two distinct setup steps that you likely haven’t had to perform on a previous keyboard. Both highlight the degree of care put into the keyboard and the amount of customization available. Inside the box you’ll find the keyboard, a micro USB cable, a USB-to-PS2 adapter, and a tool which you may be unfamiliar with: a key puller. We’ll return to the key puller in a moment. Unlike the majority of keyboards on the market, the cord isn’t permanently affixed to the keyboard. What does this mean for you? Aside from the obvious need to plug it in yourself, it makes it dead simple to repair your own keyboard cord if it gets attacked by a pet, mangled in a mechanism on your desk, or otherwise damaged. It also makes it easy to take advantage of the cable routing channels in on the underside of the keyboard to  route your cable exactly where you want it. While we’re staring at the underside of the keyboard, check out those beefy rubber feet. By peripherals standards they’re huge (and there is six instead of the usual four). Once you plunk the keyboard down where you want it, it might as well be glued down the rubber feet work so well. After you’ve secured the cable and adjusted it to your liking, there is one more task  before plug the keyboard into the computer. On the bottom left-hand side of the keyboard, you’ll find a small recess in the plastic with some dip switches inside: The dip switches are there to switch hardware functions for various operating systems, keyboard layouts, and to enable/disable function keys. By toggling the dip switches you can change the keyboard from QWERTY mode to Dvorak mode and Colemak mode, the two most popular alternative keyboard configurations. You can also use the switches to enable Mac-functionality (for Command/Option keys). One of our favorite little toggles is the SW3 dip switch: you can disable the Caps Lock key; goodbye accidentally pressing Caps when you mean to press Shift. You can review the entire dip switch configuration chart here. The quick-start for Windows users is simple: double check that all the switches are in the off position (as seen in the photo above) and then simply toggle SW6 on to enable the media and backlighting function keys (this turns the menu key on the keyboard into a function key as typically found on laptop keyboards). After adjusting the dip switches to your liking, plug the keyboard into an open USB port on your computer (or into your PS/2 port using the included adapter). Design, Layout, and Backlighting The CODE keyboard comes in two flavors, a traditional 87-key layout (no number pad) and a traditional 104-key layout (number pad on the right hand side). We identify the layout as traditional because, despite some modern trapping and sneaky shortcuts, the actual form factor of the keyboard from the shape of the keys to the spacing and position is as classic as it comes. You won’t have to learn a new keyboard layout and spend weeks conditioning yourself to a smaller than normal backspace key or a PgUp/PgDn pair in an unconventional location. Just because the keyboard is very conventional in layout, however, doesn’t mean you’ll be missing modern amenities like media-control keys. The following additional functions are hidden in the F11, F12, Pause button, and the 2×6 grid formed by the Insert and Delete rows: keyboard illumination brightness, keyboard illumination on/off, mute, and then the typical play/pause, forward/backward, stop, and volume +/- in Insert and Delete rows, respectively. While we weren’t sure what we’d think of the function-key system at first (especially after retiring a Microsoft Sidewinder keyboard with a huge and easily accessible volume knob on it), it took less than a day for us to adapt to using the Fn key, located next to the right Ctrl key, to adjust our media playback on the fly. Keyboard backlighting is a largely hit-or-miss undertaking but the CODE keyboard nails it. Not only does it have pleasant and easily adjustable through-the-keys lighting but the key switches the keys themselves are attached to are mounted to a steel plate with white paint. Enough of the light reflects off the interior cavity of the keys and then diffuses across the white plate to provide nice even illumination in between the keys. Highlighting the steel plate beneath the keys brings us to the actual construction of the keyboard. It’s rock solid. The 87-key model, the one we tested, is 2.0 pounds. The 104-key is nearly a half pound heavier at 2.42 pounds. Between the steel plate, the extra-thick PCB board beneath the steel plate, and the thick ABS plastic housing, the keyboard has very solid feel to it. Combine that heft with the previously mentioned thick rubber feet and you have a tank-like keyboard that won’t budge a millimeter during normal use. Examining The Keys This is the section of the review the hardcore typists and keyboard ninjas have been waiting for. We’ve looked at the layout of the keyboard, we’ve looked at the general construction of it, but what about the actual keys? There are a wide variety of keyboard construction techniques but the vast majority of modern keyboards use a rubber-dome construction. The key is floated in a plastic frame over a rubber membrane that has a little rubber dome for each key. The press of the physical key compresses the rubber dome downwards and a little bit of conductive material on the inside of the dome’s apex connects with the circuit board. Despite the near ubiquity of the design, many people dislike it. The principal complaint is that dome keyboards require a complete compression to register a keystroke; keyboard designers and enthusiasts refer to this as “bottoming out”. In other words, the register the “b” key, you need to completely press that key down. As such it slows you down and requires additional pressure and movement that, over the course of tens of thousands of keystrokes, adds up to a whole lot of wasted time and fatigue. The CODE keyboard features key switches manufactured by Cherry, a company that has manufactured key switches since the 1960s. Specifically the CODE features Cherry MX Clear switches. These switches feature the same classic design of the other Cherry switches (such as the MX Blue and Brown switch lineups) but they are significantly quieter (yes this is a mechanical keyboard, but no, your neighbors won’t think you’re firing off a machine gun) as they lack the audible click found in most Cherry switches. This isn’t to say that they keyboard doesn’t have a nice audible key press sound when the key is fully depressed, but that the key mechanism isn’t doesn’t create a loud click sound when triggered. One of the great features of the Cherry MX clear is a tactile “bump” that indicates the key has been compressed enough to register the stroke. For touch typists the very subtle tactile feedback is a great indicator that you can move on to the next stroke and provides a welcome speed boost. Even if you’re not trying to break any word-per-minute records, that little bump when pressing the key is satisfying. The Cherry key switches, in addition to providing a much more pleasant typing experience, are also significantly more durable than dome-style key switch. Rubber dome switch membrane keyboards are typically rated for 5-10 million contacts whereas the Cherry mechanical switches are rated for 50 million contacts. You’d have to write the next War and Peace  and follow that up with A Tale of Two Cities: Zombie Edition, and then turn around and transcribe them both into a dozen different languages to even begin putting a tiny dent in the lifecycle of this keyboard. So what do the switches look like under the classicly styled keys? You can take a look yourself with the included key puller. Slide the loop between the keys and then gently beneath the key you wish to remove: Wiggle the key puller gently back and forth while exerting a gentle upward pressure to pop the key off; You can repeat the process for every key, if you ever find yourself needing to extract piles of cat hair, Cheeto dust, or other foreign objects from your keyboard. There it is, the naked switch, the source of that wonderful crisp action with the tactile bump on each keystroke. The last feature worthy of a mention is the N-key rollover functionality of the keyboard. This is a feature you simply won’t find on non-mechanical keyboards and even gaming keyboards typically only have any sort of key roller on the high-frequency keys like WASD. So what is N-key rollover and why do you care? On a typical mass-produced rubber-dome keyboard you cannot simultaneously press more than two keys as the third one doesn’t register. PS/2 keyboards allow for unlimited rollover (in other words you can’t out type the keyboard as all of your keystrokes, no matter how fast, will register); if you use the CODE keyboard with the PS/2 adapter you gain this ability. If you don’t use the PS/2 adapter and use the native USB, you still get 6-key rollover (and the CTRL, ALT, and SHIFT don’t count towards the 6) so realistically you still won’t be able to out type the computer as even the more finger twisting keyboard combos and high speed typing will still fall well within the 6-key rollover. The rollover absolutely doesn’t matter if you’re a slow hunt-and-peck typist, but if you’ve read this far into a keyboard review there’s a good chance that you’re a serious typist and that kind of quality construction and high-number key rollover is a fantastic feature.  The Good, The Bad, and the Verdict We’ve put the CODE keyboard through the paces, we’ve played games with it, typed articles with it, left lengthy comments on Reddit, and otherwise used and abused it like we would any other keyboard. The Good: The construction is rock solid. In an emergency, we’re confident we could use the keyboard as a blunt weapon (and then resume using it later in the day with no ill effect on the keyboard). The Cherry switches are an absolute pleasure to type on; the Clear variety found in the CODE keyboard offer a really nice middle-ground between the gun-shot clack of a louder mechanical switch and the quietness of a lesser-quality dome keyboard without sacrificing quality. Touch typists will love the subtle tactile bump feedback. Dip switch system makes it very easy for users on different systems and with different keyboard layout needs to switch between operating system and keyboard layouts. If you’re investing a chunk of change in a keyboard it’s nice to know you can take it with you to a different operating system or “upgrade” it to a new layout if you decide to take up Dvorak-style typing. The backlighting is perfect. You can adjust it from a barely-visible glow to a blazing light-up-the-room brightness. Whatever your intesity preference, the white-coated steel backplate does a great job diffusing the light between the keys. You can easily remove the keys for cleaning (or to rearrange the letters to support a new keyboard layout). The weight of the unit combined with the extra thick rubber feet keep it planted exactly where you place it on the desk. The Bad: While you’re getting your money’s worth, the $150 price tag is a shock when compared to the $20-60 price tags you find on lower-end keyboards. People used to large dedicated media keys independent of the traditional key layout (such as the large buttons and volume controls found on many modern keyboards) might be off put by the Fn-key style media controls on the CODE. The Verdict: The keyboard is clearly and heavily influenced by the needs of serious typists. Whether you’re a programmer, transcriptionist, or just somebody that wants to leave the lengthiest article comments the Internet has ever seen, the CODE keyboard offers a rock solid typing experience. Yes, $150 isn’t pocket change, but the quality of the CODE keyboard is so high and the typing experience is so enjoyable, you’re easily getting ten times the value you’d get out of purchasing a lesser keyboard. Even compared to other mechanical keyboards on the market, like the Das Keyboard, you’re still getting more for your money as other mechanical keyboards don’t come with the lovely-to-type-on Cherry MX Clear switches, back lighting, and hardware-based operating system keyboard layout switching. If it’s in your budget to upgrade your keyboard (especially if you’ve been slogging along with a low-end rubber-dome keyboard) there’s no good reason to not pickup a CODE keyboard. Key animation courtesy of Geekhack.org user Lethal Squirrel.       

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• Quick guide to Oracle IRM 11g: Configuring SSL

  - by Simon Thorpe

  Quick guide to Oracle IRM 11g index So far in this guide we have an IRM Server up and running, however I skipped over SSL configuration in the previous article because I wanted to focus in more detail now. You can, if you wish, not bother with setting up SSL, but considering this is a security technology it is worthwhile doing. Contents Setting up a one way, self signed SSL certificate in WebLogic Setting up an official SSL certificate in Apache 2.x Configuring Apache to proxy traffic to the IRM server There are two common scenarios in which an Oracle IRM server is configured. For a development or evaluation system, people usually communicate directly to the WebLogic Server running the IRM service. However in a production environment and for some proof of concept evaluations that require a setup reflecting a production system, the traffic to the IRM server travels via a web server proxy, commonly Apache. In this guide we are building an Oracle Enterprise Linux based IRM service and this article will go over the configuration of SSL in WebLogic and also in Apache. Like in the past articles, we are going to use two host names in the configuration below,irm.company.com will refer to the public Apache server irm.company.internal will refer to the internal WebLogic IRM server Setting up a one way, self signed SSL certificate in WebLogic First lets look at creating just a simple self signed SSL certificate to be used in WebLogic. This is a quick and easy way to get SSL working in your environment, however the downside is that no browsers are going to trust this certificate you create and you'll need to manually install the certificate onto any machine's communicating with the server. This is fine for development or when you have only a few users evaluating the system, but for any significant use it's usually better to have a fully trusted certificate in use and I explain that in the next section. But for now lets go through creating, installing and testing a self signed certificate. We use a library in Java to create the certificates, open a console and running the following commands. Note you should choose your own secure passwords whenever you see password below. [oracle@irm /] source /oracle/middleware/wlserver_10.3/server/bin/setWLSEnv.sh [oracle@irm /] cd /oracle/middleware/user_projects/domains/irm_domain/config/fmwconfig/ [oracle@irm /] java utils.CertGen -selfsigned -certfile MyOwnSelfCA.cer -keyfile MyOwnSelfKey.key -keyfilepass password -cn "irm.oracle.demo" [oracle@irm /] java utils.ImportPrivateKey -keystore MyOwnIdentityStore.jks -storepass password -keypass password -alias trustself -certfile MyOwnSelfCA.cer.pem -keyfile MyOwnSelfKey.key.pem -keyfilepass password [oracle@irm /] keytool -import -trustcacerts -alias trustself -keystore TrustMyOwnSelf.jks -file MyOwnSelfCA.cer.der -keyalg RSA We now have two Java Key Stores, MyOwnIdentityStore.jks and TrustMyOwnSelf.jks. These contain keys and certificates which we will use in WebLogic Server. Now we need to tell the IRM server to use these stores when setting up SSL connections for incoming requests. Make sure the Admin server is running and login into the WebLogic Console at http://irm.company.intranet:7001/console and do the following; In the menu on the left, select the + next to Environment to expose the submenu, then click on Servers. You will see two servers in the list, AdminServer(admin) and IRM_server1. If the IRM server is running, shut it down either by hitting CONTROL + C in the console window it was started from, or you can switch to the CONTROL tab, select IRM_server1 and then select the Shutdown menu and then Force Shutdown Now. In the Configuration tab select IRM_server1 and switch to the Keystores tab. By default WebLogic Server uses it's own demo identity and trust. We are now going to switch to the self signed one's we've just created. So select the Change button and switch to Custom Identity and Custom Trust and hit save. Now we have to complete the resulting fields, the setting's i've used in my evaluation server are below. IdentityCustom Identity Keystore: /oracle/middleware/user_projects/domains/irm_domain/config/fmwconfig/MyOwnIdentityStore.jks Custom Identity Keystore Type: JKS Custom Identity Keystore Passphrase: password Confirm Custom Identity Keystore Passphrase: password TrustCustom Trust Keystore: /oracle/middleware/user_projects/domains/irm_domain/config/fmwconfig/TrustMyOwnSelf.jks Custom Trust Keystore Type: JKS Custom Trust Keystore Passphrase: password Confirm Custom Trust Keystore Passphrase: password Now click on the SSL tab for the IRM_server1 and enter in the alias and passphrase, in my demo here the details are; IdentityPrivate Key Alias: trustself Private Key Passphrase: password Confirm Private Key Passphrase: password And hit save. Now lets test a connection to the IRM server over HTTPS using SSL. Go back to a console window and start the IRM server, a quick reminder on how to do this is... [oracle@irm /] cd /oracle/middleware/user_projects/domains/irm_domain/bin [oracle@irm /] ./startManagedWeblogic IRM_server1 Once running, open a browser and head to the SSL port of the server. By default the IRM server will be listening on the URL https://irm.company.intranet:16101/irm_rights. Note in the example image on the right the port is 7002 because it's a system that has the IRM services installed on the Admin server, this isn't typical (or advisable). Your system is going to have a separate managed server which will be listening on port 16101. Once you open this address you will notice that your browser is going to complain that the server certificate is untrusted. The images on the right show how Firefox displays this error. You are going to be prompted every time you create a new SSL session with the server, both from the browser and more annoyingly from the IRM Desktop. If you plan on always using a self signed certificate, it is worth adding it to the Windows certificate store so that when you are accessing sealed content you do not keep being informed this certificate is not trusted. Follow these instructions (which are for Internet Explorer 8, they may vary for your version of IE.) Start Internet Explorer and open the URL to your IRM server over SSL, e.g. https://irm.company.intranet:16101/irm_rights. IE will complain that about the certificate, click on Continue to this website (not recommended). From the IE Tools menu select Internet Options and from the resulting dialog select Security and then click on Trusted Sites and then the Sites button. Add to the list of trusted sites a URL which mates the server you are accessing, e.g. https://irm.company.intranet/ and select OK. Now refresh the page you were accessing and next to the URL you should see a red cross and the words Certificate Error. Click on this button and select View Certificates. You will now see a dialog with the details of the self signed certificate and the Install Certificate... button should be enabled. Click on this to start the wizard. Click next and you'll be asked where you should install the certificate. Change the option to Place all certificates in the following store. Select browse and choose the Trusted Root Certification Authorities location and hit OK. You'll then be prompted to install the certificate and answer yes. You also need to import the root signed certificate into the same location, so once again select the red Certificate Error option and this time when viewing the certificate, switch to the Certification Path tab and you should see a CertGenCAB certificate. Select this and then click on View Certificate and go through the same process as above to import the certificate into the store. Finally close all instances of the IE browser and re-access the IRM server URL again, this time you should not receive any errors. Setting up an official SSL certificate in Apache 2.x At this point we now have an IRM server that you can communicate with over SSL. However this certificate isn't trusted by any browser because it's path of trust doesn't end in a recognized certificate authority (CA). Also you are communicating directly to the WebLogic Server over a non standard SSL port, 16101. In a production environment it is common to have another device handle the initial public internet traffic and then proxy this to the WebLogic server. The diagram below shows a very simplified view of this type of deployment. What i'm going to walk through next is configuring Apache to proxy traffic to a WebLogic server and also to use a real SSL certificate from an official CA. First step is to configure Apache to handle incoming requests over SSL. In this guide I am configuring the IRM service in Oracle Enterprise Linux 5 update 3 and Apache 2.2.3 which came with OpenSSL and mod_ssl components. Before I purchase an SSL certificate, I need to generate a certificate request from the server. Oracle.com uses Verisign and for my own personal needs I use cheaper certificates from GoDaddy. The following instructions are specific to Apache, but there are many references out there for other web servers. For Apache I have OpenSSL and the commands are; [oracle@irm /] cd /usr/bin [oracle@irm bin] openssl genrsa -des3 -out irm-apache-server.key 2048 Generating RSA private key, 2048 bit long modulus ............................+++ .........+++ e is 65537 (0x10001) Enter pass phrase for irm-apache-server.key: Verifying - Enter pass phrase for irm-apache-server.key: [oracle@irm bin] openssl req -new -key irm-apache-server.key -out irm-apache-server.csr Enter pass phrase for irm-apache-server.key: You are about to be asked to enter information that will be incorporated into your certificate request. What you are about to enter is what is called a Distinguished Name or a DN. There are quite a few fields but you can leave some blank For some fields there will be a default value, If you enter '.', the field will be left blank. ----- Country Name (2 letter code) [GB]:US State or Province Name (full name) [Berkshire]:CA Locality Name (eg, city) [Newbury]:San Francisco Organization Name (eg, company) [My Company Ltd]:Oracle Organizational Unit Name (eg, section) []:Security Common Name (eg, your name or your server's hostname) []:irm.company.com Email Address []:[email protected] Please enter the following 'extra' attributes to be sent with your certificate request A challenge password []:testing An optional company name []: You must make sure to remember the pass phrase you used in the initial key generation, you will need this when later configuring Apache. In the /usr/bin directory there are now two new files. The irm-apache-server.csr contains our certificate request and is what you cut and paste, or upload, to your certificate authority when you purchase and validate your SSL certificate. In response you will typically get two files. Your server certificate and another certificate file that will likely contain a set of certificates from your CA which validate your certificate's trust. Next we need to configure Apache to use these files. Typically there is an ssl.conf file which is where all the SSL configuration is done. On my Oracle Enterprise Linux server this file is located in /etc/httpd/conf.d/ssl.conf and i've added the following lines. <VirtualHost irm.company.com> # Setup SSL for irm.company.com ServerName irm.company.com SSLEngine On SSLCertificateFile /oracle/secure/irm.company.com.crt SSLCertificateKeyFile /oracle/secure/irm.company.com.key SSLCertificateChainFile /oracle/secure/gd_bundle.crt </VirtualHost> Restarting Apache (apachectl restart) and I can now attempt to connect to the Apache server in a web browser, https://irm.company.com/. If all is configured correctly I should now see an Apache test page delivered to me over HTTPS. Configuring Apache to proxy traffic to the IRM server Final piece in setting up SSL is to have Apache proxy requests for the IRM server but do so securely. So the requests to Apache will be over HTTPS using a legitimate certificate, but we can also configure Apache to proxy these requests internally across to the IRM server using SSL with the self signed certificate we generated at the start of this article. To do this proxying we use the WebLogic Web Server plugin for Apache which you can download here from Oracle. Download the zip file and extract onto the server. The file extraction reveals a set of zip files, each one specific to a supported web server. In my instance I am using Apache 2.2 32bit on an Oracle Enterprise Linux, 64 bit server. If you are not sure what version your Apache server is, run the command /usr/sbin/httpd -V and you'll see version and it its 32 or 64 bit. Mine is a 32bit server so I need to extract the file WLSPlugin1.1-Apache2.2-linux32-x86.zip. The from the resulting lib folder copy the file mod_wl.so into /usr/lib/httpd/modules/. First we want to test that the plug in will work for regular HTTP traffic. Edit the httpd.conf for Apache and add the following section at the bottom. LoadModule weblogic_module modules/mod_wl.so <IfModule mod_weblogic.c>    WebLogicHost irm.company.internal    WebLogicPort 16100    WLLogFile /tmp/wl-proxy.log </IfModule> <Location /irm_rights>    SetHandler weblogic-handler </Location> <Location /irm_desktop>    SetHandler weblogic-handler </Location> <Location /irm_sealing>    SetHandler weblogic-handler </Location> <Location /irm_services>    SetHandler weblogic-handler </Location> Now restart Apache again (apachectl restart) and now open a browser to http://irm.company.com/irm_rights. Apache will proxy the HTTP traffic from the port 80 of your Apache server to the IRM service listening on port 16100 of the WebLogic Managed server. Note above I have included all four of the Locations you might wish to proxy. http://irm.company.internalirm_rights is the URL to the management website, /irm_desktop is the URL used for the IRM Desktop to communicate. irm_sealing is for web services based document sealing and irm_services is for IRM server web services. The last two are typically only used when you have the IRM server integrated with another application and it is unlikely you'd be accessing these resources from the public facing Apache server. However, just in case, i've mentioned them above. Now let's enable SSL communication from Apache to WebLogic. In the ZIP file we extracted were some more modules we need to copy into the Apache folder. Looking back in the lib that we extracted, there are some more files. Copy the following into the /usr/lib/httpd/modules/ folder. libwlssl.so libnnz11.so libclntsh.so.11.1 Now the documentation states that should only need to do this, but I found that I also needed to create an environment variable called LD_LIBRARY_PATH and point this to the folder /usr/lib/httpd/modules/. If I didn't do this, starting Apache with the WebLogic module configured to SSL would throw the error. [crit] (20014)Internal error: WL SSL Init failed for server: (null) on 0 So I had to edit the file /etc/profile and add the following lines at the bottom. You may already have the LD_LIBRARY_PATH variable defined, therefore simply add this path to it. LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/httpd/modules/ export LD_LIBRARY_PATH Now the WebLogic plug in uses an Oracle Wallet to store the required certificates.You'll need to copy the self signed certificate from the IRM server over to the Apache server. Copy over the MyOwnSelfCA.cer.der into the same folder where you are storing your public certificates, in my example this is /oracle/secure. It's worth mentioning these files should ONLY be readable by root (the user Apache runs as). Now lets create an Oracle Wallet and import the self signed certificate from the IRM server. The file orapki was included in the bin folder of the Apache 1.1 plugin zip you extracted. orapki wallet create -wallet /oracle/secure/my-wallet -auto_login_only orapki wallet add -wallet /oracle/secure/my-wallet -trusted_cert -cert MyOwnSelfCA.cer.der -auto_login_only Finally change the httpd.conf to reflect that we want the WebLogic Apache plug-in to use HTTPS/SSL and not just plain HTTP. <IfModule mod_weblogic.c>    WebLogicHost irm.company.internal    WebLogicPort 16101    SecureProxy ON    WLSSLWallet /oracle/secure/my-wallet    WLLogFile /tmp/wl-proxy.log </IfModule> Then restart Apache once more and you can go back to the browser to test the communication. Opening the URL https://irm.company.com/irm_rights will proxy your request to the WebLogic server at https://irm.company.internal:16101/irm_rights. At this point you have a fully functional Oracle IRM service, the next step is to create a sealed document and test the entire system.

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• Iphone SDK - adding UITableView to UIView

  - by Shashi

  Hi, I am trying to learn how to use different views, for this sample test app, i have a login page, upon successful logon, the user is redirected to a table view and then upon selection of an item in the table view, the user is directed to a third page showing details of the item. the first page works just fine, but the problem occurs when i go to the second page, the table shown doesn't have title and i cannot add title or toolbar or anything other than the content of the tables themselves. and when i click on the item, needless to say nothing happens. no errors as well. i am fairly new to programming and have always worked on Java but never on C(although i have some basic knowledge of C) and Objective C is new to me. Here is the code. import @interface NavigationTestAppDelegate : NSObject { UIWindow *window; UIViewController *viewController; IBOutlet UITextField *username; IBOutlet UITextField *password; IBOutlet UILabel *loginError; //UINavigationController *navigationController; } @property (nonatomic, retain) IBOutlet UIViewController *viewController; @property (nonatomic, retain) IBOutlet UIWindow *window; @property (nonatomic, retain) IBOutlet UITextField *username; @property (nonatomic, retain) IBOutlet UITextField *password; @property (nonatomic, retain) IBOutlet UILabel *loginError; -(IBAction) login; -(IBAction) hideKeyboard: (id) sender; @end import "NavigationTestAppDelegate.h" import "RootViewController.h" @implementation NavigationTestAppDelegate @synthesize window; @synthesize viewController; @synthesize username; @synthesize password; @synthesize loginError; pragma mark - pragma mark Application lifecycle -(IBAction) hideKeyboard: (id) sender{ [sender resignFirstResponder]; } (BOOL)application:(UIApplication *)application didFinishLaunchingWithOptions:(NSDictionary *)launchOptions { // Override point for customization after app launch //RootViewController *rootViewController = [[RootViewController alloc] init]; //[window addSubview:[navigationController view]]; [window addSubview:[viewController view]]; [window makeKeyAndVisible]; return YES; } -(IBAction) login { RootViewController *rootViewController = [[RootViewController alloc] init]; //NSString *user = [[NSString alloc] username. if([username.text isEqualToString:@"test"]&&[password.text isEqualToString:@"test"]){ [window addSubview:[rootViewController view]]; //[window addSubview:[navigationController view]]; [window makeKeyAndVisible]; //rootViewController.awakeFromNib; } else { loginError.text = @"LOGIN ERROR"; [window addSubview:[viewController view]]; [window makeKeyAndVisible]; } } (void)applicationWillTerminate:(UIApplication *)application { // Save data if appropriate } pragma mark - pragma mark Memory management (void)dealloc { //[navigationController release]; [viewController release]; [window release]; [super dealloc]; } @end import @interface RootViewController : UITableViewController { IBOutlet NSMutableArray *views; } @property (nonatomic, retain) IBOutlet NSMutableArray * views; @end // // RootViewController.m // NavigationTest // // Created by guest on 4/23/10. // Copyright MyCompanyName 2010. All rights reserved. // import "RootViewController.h" import "OpportunityOne.h" @implementation RootViewController @synthesize views; //@synthesize navigationViewController; pragma mark - pragma mark View lifecycle (void)viewDidLoad { views = [ [NSMutableArray alloc] init]; OpportunityOne *opportunityOneController; for (int i=1; i<=20; i++) { opportunityOneController = [[OpportunityOne alloc] init]; opportunityOneController.title = [[NSString alloc] initWithFormat:@"Opportunity %i",i]; [views addObject:[NSDictionary dictionaryWithObjectsAndKeys: [[NSString alloc] initWithFormat:@"Opportunity %i",i], @ "title", opportunityOneController, @"controller", nil]]; self.title=@"GPS"; } /*UIBarButtonItem *temporaryBarButtonItem = [[UIBarButtonItem alloc] init]; temporaryBarButtonItem.title = @"Back"; self.navigationItem.backBarButtonItem = temporaryBarButtonItem; [temporaryBarButtonItem release]; */ //self.title =@"Global Platform for Sales"; [super viewDidLoad]; //[temporaryBarButtonItem release]; //[opportunityOneController release]; // Uncomment the following line to display an Edit button in the navigation bar for this view controller. // self.navigationItem.rightBarButtonItem = self.editButtonItem; } pragma mark - pragma mark Table view data source // Customize the number of sections in the table view. - (NSInteger)numberOfSectionsInTableView:(UITableView *)tableView { return 1; } // Customize the number of rows in the table view. - (NSInteger)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView numberOfRowsInSection:(NSInteger)section { return [views count]; } // Customize the appearance of table view cells. - (UITableViewCell *)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView cellForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath { static NSString *CellIdentifier = @"Cell"; UITableViewCell *cell = [tableView dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier:CellIdentifier]; if (cell == nil) { cell = [[[UITableViewCell alloc] initWithStyle:UITableViewCellStyleDefault reuseIdentifier:CellIdentifier] autorelease]; } // Configure the cell. cell.textLabel.text = [[views objectAtIndex:indexPath.row] objectForKey:@"title"]; return cell; } pragma mark - pragma mark Table view delegate (void)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView didSelectRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath { //UIViewController *targetViewController = [[views objectAtIndex:indexPath.row] objectForKey:@"controller"]; UIViewController *targetViewController = [[views objectAtIndex:indexPath.row] objectForKey:@"controller"]; [[self navigationController] pushViewController:targetViewController animated:YES]; } pragma mark - pragma mark Memory management (void)didReceiveMemoryWarning { // Releases the view if it doesn't have a superview. [super didReceiveMemoryWarning]; // Relinquish ownership any cached data, images, etc that aren't in use. } (void)viewDidUnload { // Relinquish ownership of anything that can be recreated in viewDidLoad or on demand. // For example: self.myOutlet = nil; } (void)dealloc { [views release]; [super dealloc]; } @end Wow, i was finding it real hard to post the code. i apologize for the bad formatting, but i just couldn't get past the formatting rules for this text editor. Thanks, Shashi

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• SQL SERVER – Securing TRUNCATE Permissions in SQL Server

  - by pinaldave

  Download the Script of this article from here. On December 11, 2010, Vinod Kumar, a Databases & BI technology evangelist from Microsoft Corporation, graced Ahmedabad by spending some time with the Community during the Community Tech Days (CTD) event. As he was running through a few demos, Vinod asked the audience one of the most fundamental and common interview questions – “What is the difference between a DELETE and TRUNCATE?“ Ahmedabad SQL Server User Group Expert Nakul Vachhrajani has come up with excellent solutions of the same. I must congratulate Nakul for this excellent solution and as a encouragement to User Group member, I am publishing the same article over here. Nakul Vachhrajani is a Software Specialist and systems development professional with Patni Computer Systems Limited. He has functional experience spanning legacy code deprecation, system design, documentation, development, implementation, testing, maintenance and support of complex systems, providing business intelligence solutions, database administration, performance tuning, optimization, product management, release engineering, process definition and implementation. He has comprehensive grasp on Database Administration, Development and Implementation with MS SQL Server and C, C++, Visual C++/C#. He has about 6 years of total experience in information technology. Nakul is an member of the Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar SQL Server User Groups, and actively contributes to the community by actively participating in multiple forums and websites like SQLAuthority.com, BeyondRelational.com, SQLServerCentral.com and many others. Please note: The opinions expressed herein are Nakul own personal opinions and do not represent his employer’s view in anyway. All data from everywhere here on Earth go through a series of  four distinct operations, identified by the words: CREATE, READ, UPDATE and DELETE, or simply, CRUD. Putting in Microsoft SQL Server terms, is the process goes like this: INSERT, SELECT, UPDATE and DELETE/TRUNCATE. Quite a few interesting responses were received and evaluated live during the session. To summarize them, the most important similarity that came out was that both DELETE and TRUNCATE participate in transactions. The major differences (not all) that came out of the exercise were: DELETE: DELETE supports a WHERE clause DELETE removes rows from a table, row-by-row Because DELETE moves row-by-row, it acquires a row-level lock Depending upon the recovery model of the database, DELETE is a fully-logged operation. Because DELETE moves row-by-row, it can fire off triggers TRUNCATE: TRUNCATE does not support a WHERE clause TRUNCATE works by directly removing the individual data pages of a table TRUNCATE directly occupies a table-level lock. (Because a lock is acquired, and because TRUNCATE can also participate in a transaction, it has to be a logged operation) TRUNCATE is, therefore, a minimally-logged operation; again, this depends upon the recovery model of the database Triggers are not fired when TRUNCATE is used (because individual row deletions are not logged) Finally, Vinod popped the big homework question that must be critically analyzed: “We know that we can restrict a DELETE operation to a particular user, but how can we restrict the TRUNCATE operation to a particular user?” After returning home and having a nice cup of coffee, I noticed that my gray cells immediately started to work. Below was the result of my research. As what is always said, the devil is in the details. Upon looking at the Permissions section for the TRUNCATE statement in Books On Line, the following jumps right out: “The minimum permission required is ALTER on table_name. TRUNCATE TABLE permissions default to the table owner, members of the sysadmin fixed server role, and the db_owner and db_ddladmin fixed database roles, and are not transferable. However, you can incorporate the TRUNCATE TABLE statement within a module, such as a stored procedure, and grant appropriate permissions to the module using the EXECUTE AS clause.“ Now, what does this mean? Unlike DELETE, one cannot directly assign permissions to a user/set of users allowing or revoking TRUNCATE rights. However, there is a way to circumvent this. It is important to recall that in Microsoft SQL Server, database engine security surrounds the concept of a “securable”, which is any object like a table, stored procedure, trigger, etc. Rights are assigned to a principal on a securable. Refer to the image below (taken from the SQL Server Books On Line). urable”, which is any object like a table, stored procedure, trigger, etc. Rights are assigned to a principal on a securable. Refer to the image below (taken from the SQL Server Books On Line). SETTING UP THE ENVIRONMENT – (01A_Truncate Table Permissions.sql) Script Provided at the end of the article. By the end of this demo, one will be able to do all the CRUD operations, except the TRUNCATE, and the other will only be able to execute the TRUNCATE. All you will need for this test is any edition of SQL Server 2008. (With minor changes, these scripts can be made to work with SQL 2005.) We begin by creating the following: 1.       A test database 2.        Two database roles: associated logins and users 3.       Switch over to the test database and create a test table. Then, add some data into it. I am using row constructors, which is new to SQL 2008. Creating the modules that will be used to enforce permissions 1.       We have already created one of the modules that we will be assigning permissions to. That module is the table: TruncatePermissionsTest 2.       We will now create two stored procedures; one is for the DELETE operation and the other for the TRUNCATE operation. Please note that for all practical purposes, the end result is the same – all data from the table TruncatePermissionsTest is removed Assigning the permissions Now comes the most important part of the demonstration – assigning permissions. A permissions matrix can be worked out as under: To apply the security rights, we use the GRANT and DENY clauses, as under: That’s it! We are now ready for our big test! THE TEST (01B_Truncate Table Test Queries.sql) Script Provided at the end of the article. I will now need two separate SSMS connections, one with the login AllowedTruncate and the other with the login RestrictedTruncate. Running the test is simple; all that’s required is to run through the script – 01B_Truncate Table Test Queries.sql. What I will demonstrate here via screen-shots is the behavior of SQL Server when logged in as the AllowedTruncate user. There are a few other combinations than what are highlighted here. I will leave the reader the right to explore the behavior of the RestrictedTruncate user and these additional scenarios, as a form of self-study. 1.       Testing SELECT permissions 2.       Testing TRUNCATE permissions (Remember, “deny by default”?) 3.       Trying to circumvent security by trying to TRUNCATE the table using the stored procedure Hence, we have now proved that a user can indeed be assigned permissions to specifically assign TRUNCATE permissions. I also hope that the above has sparked curiosity towards putting some security around the probably “destructive” operations of DELETE and TRUNCATE. I would like to wish each and every one of the readers a very happy and secure time with Microsoft SQL Server. (Please find the scripts – 01A_Truncate Table Permissions.sql and 01B_Truncate Table Test Queries.sql that have been used in this demonstration. Please note that these scripts contain purely test-level code only. These scripts must not, at any cost, be used in the reader’s production environments). 01A_Truncate Table Permissions.sql /* ***************************************************************************************************************** Developed By          : Nakul Vachhrajani Functionality         : This demo is focused on how to allow only TRUNCATE permissions to a particular user How to Use            : 1. Run through, step-by-step through the sequence till Step 08 to create a test database 2. Switch over to the "Truncate Table Test Queries.sql" and execute it step-by-step in two different SSMS windows, one where you have logged in as 'RestrictedTruncate', and the other as 'AllowedTruncate' 3. Come back to "Truncate Table Permissions.sql" 4. Execute Step 10 to cleanup! Modifications         : December 13, 2010 - NAV - Updated to add a security matrix and improve code readability when applying security December 12, 2010 - NAV - Created ***************************************************************************************************************** */ -- Step 01: Create a new test database CREATE DATABASE TruncateTestDB GO USE TruncateTestDB GO -- Step 02: Add roles and users to demonstrate the security of the Truncate operation -- 2a. Create the new roles CREATE ROLE AllowedTruncateRole; GO CREATE ROLE RestrictedTruncateRole; GO -- 2b. Create new logins CREATE LOGIN AllowedTruncate WITH PASSWORD = 'truncate@2010', CHECK_POLICY = ON GO CREATE LOGIN RestrictedTruncate WITH PASSWORD = 'truncate@2010', CHECK_POLICY = ON GO -- 2c. Create new Users using the roles and logins created aboave CREATE USER TruncateUser FOR LOGIN AllowedTruncate WITH DEFAULT_SCHEMA = dbo GO CREATE USER NoTruncateUser FOR LOGIN RestrictedTruncate WITH DEFAULT_SCHEMA = dbo GO -- 2d. Add the newly created login to the newly created role sp_addrolemember 'AllowedTruncateRole','TruncateUser' GO sp_addrolemember 'RestrictedTruncateRole','NoTruncateUser' GO -- Step 03: Change over to the test database USE TruncateTestDB GO -- Step 04: Create a test table within the test databse CREATE TABLE TruncatePermissionsTest (Id INT IDENTITY(1,1), Name NVARCHAR(50)) GO -- Step 05: Populate the required data INSERT INTO TruncatePermissionsTest VALUES (N'Delhi'), (N'Mumbai'), (N'Ahmedabad') GO -- Step 06: Encapsulate the DELETE within another module CREATE PROCEDURE proc_DeleteMyTable WITH EXECUTE AS SELF AS DELETE FROM TruncateTestDB..TruncatePermissionsTest GO -- Step 07: Encapsulate the TRUNCATE within another module CREATE PROCEDURE proc_TruncateMyTable WITH EXECUTE AS SELF AS TRUNCATE TABLE TruncateTestDB..TruncatePermissionsTest GO -- Step 08: Apply Security /* *****************************SECURITY MATRIX*************************************** =================================================================================== Object                   | Permissions |                 Login |             | AllowedTruncate   |   RestrictedTruncate |             |User:NoTruncateUser|   User:TruncateUser =================================================================================== TruncatePermissionsTest  | SELECT,     |      GRANT        |      (Default) | INSERT,     |                   | | UPDATE,     |                   | | DELETE      |                   | -------------------------+-------------+-------------------+----------------------- TruncatePermissionsTest  | ALTER       |      DENY         |      (Default) -------------------------+-------------+----*/----------------+----------------------- proc_DeleteMyTable | EXECUTE | GRANT | DENY -------------------------+-------------+-------------------+----------------------- proc_TruncateMyTable | EXECUTE | DENY | GRANT -------------------------+-------------+-------------------+----------------------- *****************************SECURITY MATRIX*************************************** */ /* Table: TruncatePermissionsTest*/ GRANT SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE ON TruncateTestDB..TruncatePermissionsTest TO NoTruncateUser GO DENY ALTER ON TruncateTestDB..TruncatePermissionsTest TO NoTruncateUser GO /* Procedure: proc_DeleteMyTable*/ GRANT EXECUTE ON TruncateTestDB..proc_DeleteMyTable TO NoTruncateUser GO DENY EXECUTE ON TruncateTestDB..proc_DeleteMyTable TO TruncateUser GO /* Procedure: proc_TruncateMyTable*/ DENY EXECUTE ON TruncateTestDB..proc_TruncateMyTable TO NoTruncateUser GO GRANT EXECUTE ON TruncateTestDB..proc_TruncateMyTable TO TruncateUser GO -- Step 09: Test --Switch over to the "Truncate Table Test Queries.sql" and execute it step-by-step in two different SSMS windows: --    1. one where you have logged in as 'RestrictedTruncate', and --    2. the other as 'AllowedTruncate' -- Step 10: Cleanup sp_droprolemember 'AllowedTruncateRole','TruncateUser' GO sp_droprolemember 'RestrictedTruncateRole','NoTruncateUser' GO DROP USER TruncateUser GO DROP USER NoTruncateUser GO DROP LOGIN AllowedTruncate GO DROP LOGIN RestrictedTruncate GO DROP ROLE AllowedTruncateRole GO DROP ROLE RestrictedTruncateRole GO USE MASTER GO DROP DATABASE TruncateTestDB GO 01B_Truncate Table Test Queries.sql /* ***************************************************************************************************************** Developed By          : Nakul Vachhrajani Functionality         : This demo is focused on how to allow only TRUNCATE permissions to a particular user How to Use            : 1. Switch over to this from "Truncate Table Permissions.sql", Step #09 2. Execute this step-by-step in two different SSMS windows a. One where you have logged in as 'RestrictedTruncate', and b. The other as 'AllowedTruncate' 3. Return back to "Truncate Table Permissions.sql" 4. Execute Step 10 to cleanup! Modifications         : December 12, 2010 - NAV - Created ***************************************************************************************************************** */ -- Step 09A: Switch to the test database USE TruncateTestDB GO -- Step 09B: Ensure that we have valid data SELECT * FROM TruncatePermissionsTest GO -- (Expected: Following error will occur if logged in as "AllowedTruncate") -- Msg 229, Level 14, State 5, Line 1 -- The SELECT permission was denied on the object 'TruncatePermissionsTest', database 'TruncateTestDB', schema 'dbo'. --Step 09C: Attempt to Truncate Data from the table without using the stored procedure TRUNCATE TABLE TruncatePermissionsTest GO -- (Expected: Following error will occur) --  Msg 1088, Level 16, State 7, Line 2 --  Cannot find the object "TruncatePermissionsTest" because it does not exist or you do not have permissions. -- Step 09D:Regenerate Test Data INSERT INTO TruncatePermissionsTest VALUES (N'London'), (N'Paris'), (N'Berlin') GO -- (Expected: Following error will occur if logged in as "AllowedTruncate") -- Msg 229, Level 14, State 5, Line 1 -- The INSERT permission was denied on the object 'TruncatePermissionsTest', database 'TruncateTestDB', schema 'dbo'. --Step 09E: Attempt to Truncate Data from the table using the stored procedure EXEC proc_TruncateMyTable GO -- (Expected: Will execute successfully with 'AllowedTruncate' user, will error out as under with 'RestrictedTruncate') -- Msg 229, Level 14, State 5, Procedure proc_TruncateMyTable, Line 1 -- The EXECUTE permission was denied on the object 'proc_TruncateMyTable', database 'TruncateTestDB', schema 'dbo'. -- Step 09F:Regenerate Test Data INSERT INTO TruncatePermissionsTest VALUES (N'Madrid'), (N'Rome'), (N'Athens') GO --Step 09G: Attempt to Delete Data from the table without using the stored procedure DELETE FROM TruncatePermissionsTest GO -- (Expected: Following error will occur if logged in as "AllowedTruncate") -- Msg 229, Level 14, State 5, Line 2 -- The DELETE permission was denied on the object 'TruncatePermissionsTest', database 'TruncateTestDB', schema 'dbo'. -- Step 09H:Regenerate Test Data INSERT INTO TruncatePermissionsTest VALUES (N'Spain'), (N'Italy'), (N'Greece') GO --Step 09I: Attempt to Delete Data from the table using the stored procedure EXEC proc_DeleteMyTable GO -- (Expected: Following error will occur if logged in as "AllowedTruncate") -- Msg 229, Level 14, State 5, Procedure proc_DeleteMyTable, Line 1 -- The EXECUTE permission was denied on the object 'proc_DeleteMyTable', database 'TruncateTestDB', schema 'dbo'. --Step 09J: Close this SSMS window and return back to "Truncate Table Permissions.sql" Thank you Nakul to take up the challenge and prove that Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar SQL Server User Group has talent to solve difficult problems. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Best Practices, Pinal Dave, Readers Contribution, Readers Question, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Security, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• [OpenGL ES - Android] Better way to generate tiles

  - by Inoe

  Hi ! I'll start by saying that i'm REALLY new to OpenGL ES (I started yesterday =), but I do have some Java and other languages experience. I've looked a lot of tutorials, of course Nehe's ones and my work is mainly based on that. As a test, I started creating a "tile generator" in order to create a small Zelda-like game (just moving a dude in a textured square would be awsome :p). So far, I have achieved a working tile generator, I define a char map[][] array to store wich tile is on : private char[][] map = { {0, 0, 20, 11, 11, 11, 11, 4, 0, 0}, {0, 20, 16, 12, 12, 12, 12, 7, 4, 0}, {20, 16, 17, 13, 13, 13, 13, 9, 7, 4}, {21, 24, 18, 14, 14, 14, 14, 8, 5, 1}, {21, 22, 25, 15, 15, 15, 15, 6, 2, 1}, {21, 22, 23, 0, 0, 0, 0, 3, 2, 1}, {21, 22, 23, 0, 0, 0, 0, 3, 2, 1}, {26, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 3, 2, 1}, {0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1}, {0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1} }; It's working but I'm no happy with it, I'm sure there is a beter way to do those things : 1) Loading Textures : I create an ugly looking array containing the tiles I want to use on that map : private int[] textures = { R.drawable.herbe, //0 R.drawable.murdroite_haut, //1 R.drawable.murdroite_milieu, //2 R.drawable.murdroite_bas, //3 R.drawable.angledroitehaut_haut, //4 R.drawable.angledroitehaut_milieu, //5 }; (I cutted this on purpose, I currently load 27 tiles) All of theses are stored in the drawable folder, each one is a 16*16 tile. I then use this array to generate the textures and store them in a HashMap for a later use : int[] tmp_tex = new int[textures.length]; gl.glGenTextures(textures.length, tmp_tex, 0); texturesgen = tmp_tex; //Store the generated names in texturesgen for(int i=0; i < textures.length; i++) { //Bitmap bmp = BitmapFactory.decodeResource(context.getResources(), textures[i]); InputStream is = context.getResources().openRawResource(textures[i]); Bitmap bitmap = null; try { //BitmapFactory is an Android graphics utility for images bitmap = BitmapFactory.decodeStream(is); } finally { //Always clear and close try { is.close(); is = null; } catch (IOException e) { } } // Get a new texture name // Load it up this.textureMap.put(new Integer(textures[i]),new Integer(i)); int tex = tmp_tex[i]; gl.glBindTexture(GL10.GL_TEXTURE_2D, tex); //Create Nearest Filtered Texture gl.glTexParameterf(GL10.GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL10.GL_TEXTURE_MIN_FILTER, GL10.GL_NEAREST); gl.glTexParameterf(GL10.GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL10.GL_TEXTURE_MAG_FILTER, GL10.GL_LINEAR); //Different possible texture parameters, e.g. GL10.GL_CLAMP_TO_EDGE gl.glTexParameterf(GL10.GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL10.GL_TEXTURE_WRAP_S, GL10.GL_REPEAT); gl.glTexParameterf(GL10.GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL10.GL_TEXTURE_WRAP_T, GL10.GL_REPEAT); //Use the Android GLUtils to specify a two-dimensional texture image from our bitmap GLUtils.texImage2D(GL10.GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0, bitmap, 0); bitmap.recycle(); } I'm quite sure there is a better way to handle that... I just was unable to figure it. If someone has an idea, i'm all ears. 2) Drawing the tiles What I did was create a single square and a single texture map : /** The initial vertex definition */ private float vertices[] = { -1.0f, -1.0f, 0.0f, //Bottom Left 1.0f, -1.0f, 0.0f, //Bottom Right -1.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f, //Top Left 1.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f //Top Right }; private float texture[] = { //Mapping coordinates for the vertices 0.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f }; Then, in my draw function, I loop through the map to define the texture to use (after pointing to and enabling the buffers) : for(int y = 0; y < Y; y++){ for(int x = 0; x < X; x++){ tile = map[y][x]; try { //Get the texture from the HashMap int textureid = ((Integer) this.textureMap.get(new Integer(textures[tile]))).intValue(); gl.glBindTexture(GL10.GL_TEXTURE_2D, this.texturesgen[textureid]); } catch(Exception e) { return; } //Draw the vertices as triangle strip gl.glDrawArrays(GL10.GL_TRIANGLE_STRIP, 0, vertices.length / 3); gl.glTranslatef(2.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f); //A square takes 2x so I move +2x before drawing the next tile } gl.glTranslatef(-(float)(2*X), -2.0f, 0.0f); //Go back to the begining of the map X-wise and move 2y down before drawing the next line } This works great by I really think that on a 1000*1000 or more map, it will be lagging as hell (as a reminder, this is a typical Zelda world map : http://vgmaps.com/Atlas/SuperNES/LegendOfZelda-ALinkToThePast-LightWorld.png ). I've read things about Vertex Buffer Object and DisplayList but I couldn't find a good tutorial and nodoby seems to be OK on wich one is the best / has the better support (T1 and Nexus One are ages away). I think that's it, I've putted a lot of code but I think it helps. Thanks in advance !

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• What’s new in ASP.NET 4.0: Core Features

  - by Rick Strahl

  Microsoft released the .NET Runtime 4.0 and with it comes a brand spanking new version of ASP.NET – version 4.0 – which provides an incremental set of improvements to an already powerful platform. .NET 4.0 is a full release of the .NET Framework, unlike version 3.5, which was merely a set of library updates on top of the .NET Framework version 2.0. Because of this full framework revision, there has been a welcome bit of consolidation of assemblies and configuration settings. The full runtime version change to 4.0 also means that you have to explicitly pick version 4.0 of the runtime when you create a new Application Pool in IIS, unlike .NET 3.5, which actually requires version 2.0 of the runtime. In this first of two parts I'll take a look at some of the changes in the core ASP.NET runtime. In the next edition I'll go over improvements in Web Forms and Visual Studio. Core Engine Features Most of the high profile improvements in ASP.NET have to do with Web Forms, but there are a few gems in the core runtime that should make life easier for ASP.NET developers. The following list describes some of the things I've found useful among the new features. Clean web.config Files Are Back! If you've been using ASP.NET 3.5, you probably have noticed that the web.config file has turned into quite a mess of configuration settings between all the custom handler and module mappings for the various web server versions. Part of the reason for this mess is that .NET 3.5 is a collection of add-on components running on top of the .NET Runtime 2.0 and so almost all of the new features of .NET 3.5 where essentially introduced as custom modules and handlers that had to be explicitly configured in the config file. Because the core runtime didn't rev with 3.5, all those configuration options couldn't be moved up to other configuration files in the system chain. With version 4.0 a consolidation was possible, and the result is a much simpler web.config file by default. A default empty ASP.NET 4.0 Web Forms project looks like this: <?xml version="1.0"?> <configuration> <system.web> <compilation debug="true" targetFramework="4.0" /> </system.web> </configuration> Need I say more? Configuration Transformation Files to Manage Configurations and Application Packaging ASP.NET 4.0 introduces the ability to create multi-target configuration files. This means it's possible to create a single configuration file that can be transformed based on relatively simple replacement rules using a Visual Studio and WebDeploy provided XSLT syntax. The idea is that you can create a 'master' configuration file and then create customized versions of this master configuration file by applying some relatively simplistic search and replace, add or remove logic to specific elements and attributes in the original file. To give you an idea, here's the example code that Visual Studio creates for a default web.Release.config file, which replaces a connection string, removes the debug attribute and replaces the CustomErrors section: <?xml version="1.0"?> <configuration xmlns:xdt="http://schemas.microsoft.com/XML-Document-Transform"> <connectionStrings> <add name="MyDB" connectionString="Data Source=ReleaseSQLServer;Initial Catalog=MyReleaseDB;Integrated Security=True" xdt:Transform="SetAttributes" xdt:Locator="Match(name)"/> </connectionStrings> <system.web> <compilation xdt:Transform="RemoveAttributes(debug)" /> <customErrors defaultRedirect="GenericError.htm" mode="RemoteOnly" xdt:Transform="Replace"> <error statusCode="500" redirect="InternalError.htm"/> </customErrors> </system.web> </configuration> You can see the XSL transform syntax that drives this functionality. Basically, only the elements listed in the override file are matched and updated – all the rest of the original web.config file stays intact. Visual Studio 2010 supports this functionality directly in the project system so it's easy to create and maintain these customized configurations in the project tree. Once you're ready to publish your application, you can then use the Publish <yourWebApplication> option on the Build menu which allows publishing to disk, via FTP or to a Web Server using Web Deploy. You can also create a deployment package as a .zip file which can be used by the WebDeploy tool to configure and install the application. You can manually run the Web Deploy tool or use the IIS Manager to install the package on the server or other machine. You can find out more about WebDeploy and Packaging here: http://tinyurl.com/2anxcje. Improved Routing Routing provides a relatively simple way to create clean URLs with ASP.NET by associating a template URL path and routing it to a specific ASP.NET HttpHandler. Microsoft first introduced routing with ASP.NET MVC and then they integrated routing with a basic implementation in the core ASP.NET engine via a separate ASP.NET routing assembly. In ASP.NET 4.0, the process of using routing functionality gets a bit easier. First, routing is now rolled directly into System.Web, so no extra assembly reference is required in your projects to use routing. The RouteCollection class now includes a MapPageRoute() method that makes it easy to route to any ASP.NET Page requests without first having to implement an IRouteHandler implementation. It would have been nice if this could have been extended to serve *any* handler implementation, but unfortunately for anything but a Page derived handlers you still will have to implement a custom IRouteHandler implementation. ASP.NET Pages now include a RouteData collection that will contain route information. Retrieving route data is now a lot easier by simply using this.RouteData.Values["routeKey"] where the routeKey is the value specified in the route template (i.e., "users/{userId}" would use Values["userId"]). The Page class also has a GetRouteUrl() method that you can use to create URLs with route data values rather than hardcoding the URL: <%= this.GetRouteUrl("users",new { userId="ricks" }) %> You can also use the new Expression syntax using <%$RouteUrl %> to accomplish something similar, which can be easier to embed into Page or MVC View code: <a runat="server" href='<%$RouteUrl:RouteName=user, id=ricks %>'>Visit User</a> Finally, the Response object also includes a new RedirectToRoute() method to build a route url for redirection without hardcoding the URL. Response.RedirectToRoute("users", new { userId = "ricks" }); All of these routines are helpers that have been integrated into the core ASP.NET engine to make it easier to create routes and retrieve route data, which hopefully will result in more people taking advantage of routing in ASP.NET. To find out more about the routing improvements you can check out Dan Maharry's blog which has a couple of nice blog entries on this subject: http://tinyurl.com/37trutj and http://tinyurl.com/39tt5w5. Session State Improvements Session state is an often used and abused feature in ASP.NET and version 4.0 introduces a few enhancements geared towards making session state more efficient and to minimize at least some of the ill effects of overuse. The first improvement affects out of process session state, which is typically used in web farm environments or for sites that store application sensitive data that must survive AppDomain restarts (which in my opinion is just about any application). When using OutOfProc session state, ASP.NET serializes all the data in the session statebag into a blob that gets carried over the network and stored either in the State server or SQL Server via the Session provider. Version 4.0 provides some improvement in this serialization of the session data by offering an enableCompression option on the web.Config <Session> section, which forces the serialized session state to be compressed. Depending on the type of data that is being serialized, this compression can reduce the size of the data travelling over the wire by as much as a third. It works best on string data, but can also reduce the size of binary data. In addition, ASP.NET 4.0 now offers a way to programmatically turn session state on or off as part of the request processing queue. In prior versions, the only way to specify whether session state is available is by implementing a marker interface on the HTTP handler implementation. In ASP.NET 4.0, you can now turn session state on and off programmatically via HttpContext.Current.SetSessionStateBehavior() as part of the ASP.NET module pipeline processing as long as it occurs before the AquireRequestState pipeline event. Output Cache Provider Output caching in ASP.NET has been a very useful but potentially memory intensive feature. The default OutputCache mechanism works through in-memory storage that persists generated output based on various lifetime related parameters. While this works well enough for many intended scenarios, it also can quickly cause runaway memory consumption as the cache fills up and serves many variations of pages on your site. ASP.NET 4.0 introduces a provider model for the OutputCache module so it becomes possible to plug-in custom storage strategies for cached pages. One of the goals also appears to be to consolidate some of the different cache storage mechanisms used in .NET in general to a generic Windows AppFabric framework in the future, so various different mechanisms like OutputCache, the non-Page specific ASP.NET cache and possibly even session state eventually can use the same caching engine for storage of persisted data both in memory and out of process scenarios. For developers, the OutputCache provider feature means that you can now extend caching on your own by implementing a custom Cache provider based on the System.Web.Caching.OutputCacheProvider class. You can find more info on creating an Output Cache provider in Gunnar Peipman's blog at: http://tinyurl.com/2vt6g7l. Response.RedirectPermanent ASP.NET 4.0 includes features to issue a permanent redirect that issues as an HTTP 301 Moved Permanently response rather than the standard 302 Redirect respond. In pre-4.0 versions you had to manually create your permanent redirect by setting the Status and Status code properties – Response.RedirectPermanent() makes this operation more obvious and discoverable. There's also a Response.RedirectToRoutePermanent() which provides permanent redirection of route Urls. Preloading of Applications ASP.NET 4.0 provides a new feature to preload ASP.NET applications on startup, which is meant to provide a more consistent startup experience. If your application has a lengthy startup cycle it can appear very slow to serve data to clients while the application is warming up and loading initial resources. So rather than serve these startup requests slowly in ASP.NET 4.0, you can force the application to initialize itself first before even accepting requests for processing. This feature works only on IIS 7.5 (Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2) and works in combination with IIS. You can set up a worker process in IIS 7.5 to always be running, which starts the Application Pool worker process immediately. ASP.NET 4.0 then allows you to specify site-specific settings by setting the serverAutoStartEnabled on a particular site along with an optional serviceAutoStartProvider class that can be used to receive "startup events" when the application starts up. This event in turn can be used to configure the application and optionally pre-load cache data and other information required by the app on startup.  The configuration settings need to be made in applicationhost.config: <sites> <site name="WebApplication2" id="1"> <application path="/" serviceAutoStartEnabled="true" serviceAutoStartProvider="PreWarmup" /> </site> </sites> <serviceAutoStartProviders> <add name="PreWarmup" type="PreWarmupProvider,MyAssembly" /> </serviceAutoStartProviders> Hooking up a warm up provider is optional so you can omit the provider definition and reference. If you do define it here's what it looks like: public class PreWarmupProvider System.Web.Hosting.IProcessHostPreloadClient { public void Preload(string[] parameters) { // initialization for app } } This code fires and while it's running, ASP.NET/IIS will hold requests from hitting the pipeline. So until this code completes the application will not start taking requests. The idea is that you can perform any pre-loading of resources and cache values so that the first request will be ready to perform at optimal performance level without lag. Runtime Performance Improvements According to Microsoft, there have also been a number of invisible performance improvements in the internals of the ASP.NET runtime that should make ASP.NET 4.0 applications run more efficiently and use less resources. These features come without any change requirements in applications and are virtually transparent, except that you get the benefits by updating to ASP.NET 4.0. Summary The core feature set changes are minimal which continues a tradition of small incremental changes to the ASP.NET runtime. ASP.NET has been proven as a solid platform and I'm actually rather happy to see that most of the effort in this release went into stability, performance and usability improvements rather than a massive amount of new features. The new functionality added in 4.0 is minimal but very useful. A lot of people are still running pure .NET 2.0 applications these days and have stayed off of .NET 3.5 for some time now. I think that version 4.0 with its full .NET runtime rev and assembly and configuration consolidation will make an attractive platform for developers to update to. If you're a Web Forms developer in particular, ASP.NET 4.0 includes a host of new features in the Web Forms engine that are significant enough to warrant a quick move to .NET 4.0. I'll cover those changes in my next column. Until then, I suggest you give ASP.NET 4.0 a spin and see for yourself how the new features can help you out. © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in ASP.NET  

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• Inheritance Mapping Strategies with Entity Framework Code First CTP5: Part 3 – Table per Concrete Type (TPC) and Choosing Strategy Guidelines

  - by mortezam

  This is the third (and last) post in a series that explains different approaches to map an inheritance hierarchy with EF Code First. I've described these strategies in previous posts: Part 1 – Table per Hierarchy (TPH) Part 2 – Table per Type (TPT)In today’s blog post I am going to discuss Table per Concrete Type (TPC) which completes the inheritance mapping strategies supported by EF Code First. At the end of this post I will provide some guidelines to choose an inheritance strategy mainly based on what we've learned in this series. TPC and Entity Framework in the Past Table per Concrete type is somehow the simplest approach suggested, yet using TPC with EF is one of those concepts that has not been covered very well so far and I've seen in some resources that it was even discouraged. The reason for that is just because Entity Data Model Designer in VS2010 doesn't support TPC (even though the EF runtime does). That basically means if you are following EF's Database-First or Model-First approaches then configuring TPC requires manually writing XML in the EDMX file which is not considered to be a fun practice. Well, no more. You'll see that with Code First, creating TPC is perfectly possible with fluent API just like other strategies and you don't need to avoid TPC due to the lack of designer support as you would probably do in other EF approaches. Table per Concrete Type (TPC)In Table per Concrete type (aka Table per Concrete class) we use exactly one table for each (nonabstract) class. All properties of a class, including inherited properties, can be mapped to columns of this table, as shown in the following figure: As you can see, the SQL schema is not aware of the inheritance; effectively, we’ve mapped two unrelated tables to a more expressive class structure. If the base class was concrete, then an additional table would be needed to hold instances of that class. I have to emphasize that there is no relationship between the database tables, except for the fact that they share some similar columns. TPC Implementation in Code First Just like the TPT implementation, we need to specify a separate table for each of the subclasses. We also need to tell Code First that we want all of the inherited properties to be mapped as part of this table. In CTP5, there is a new helper method on EntityMappingConfiguration class called MapInheritedProperties that exactly does this for us. Here is the complete object model as well as the fluent API to create a TPC mapping: public abstract class BillingDetail {     public int BillingDetailId { get; set; }     public string Owner { get; set; }     public string Number { get; set; } }          public class BankAccount : BillingDetail {     public string BankName { get; set; }     public string Swift { get; set; } }          public class CreditCard : BillingDetail {     public int CardType { get; set; }     public string ExpiryMonth { get; set; }     public string ExpiryYear { get; set; } }      public class InheritanceMappingContext : DbContext {     public DbSet<BillingDetail> BillingDetails { get; set; }              protected override void OnModelCreating(ModelBuilder modelBuilder)     {         modelBuilder.Entity<BankAccount>().Map(m =>         {             m.MapInheritedProperties();             m.ToTable("BankAccounts");         });         modelBuilder.Entity<CreditCard>().Map(m =>         {             m.MapInheritedProperties();             m.ToTable("CreditCards");         });                 } } The Importance of EntityMappingConfiguration ClassAs a side note, it worth mentioning that EntityMappingConfiguration class turns out to be a key type for inheritance mapping in Code First. Here is an snapshot of this class: namespace System.Data.Entity.ModelConfiguration.Configuration.Mapping {     public class EntityMappingConfiguration<TEntityType> where TEntityType : class     {         public ValueConditionConfiguration Requires(string discriminator);         public void ToTable(string tableName);         public void MapInheritedProperties();     } } As you have seen so far, we used its Requires method to customize TPH. We also used its ToTable method to create a TPT and now we are using its MapInheritedProperties along with ToTable method to create our TPC mapping. TPC Configuration is Not Done Yet!We are not quite done with our TPC configuration and there is more into this story even though the fluent API we saw perfectly created a TPC mapping for us in the database. To see why, let's start working with our object model. For example, the following code creates two new objects of BankAccount and CreditCard types and tries to add them to the database: using (var context = new InheritanceMappingContext()) {     BankAccount bankAccount = new BankAccount();     CreditCard creditCard = new CreditCard() { CardType = 1 };                      context.BillingDetails.Add(bankAccount);     context.BillingDetails.Add(creditCard);     context.SaveChanges(); } Running this code throws an InvalidOperationException with this message: The changes to the database were committed successfully, but an error occurred while updating the object context. The ObjectContext might be in an inconsistent state. Inner exception message: AcceptChanges cannot continue because the object's key values conflict with another object in the ObjectStateManager. Make sure that the key values are unique before calling AcceptChanges. The reason we got this exception is because DbContext.SaveChanges() internally invokes SaveChanges method of its internal ObjectContext. ObjectContext's SaveChanges method on its turn by default calls AcceptAllChanges after it has performed the database modifications. AcceptAllChanges method merely iterates over all entries in ObjectStateManager and invokes AcceptChanges on each of them. Since the entities are in Added state, AcceptChanges method replaces their temporary EntityKey with a regular EntityKey based on the primary key values (i.e. BillingDetailId) that come back from the database and that's where the problem occurs since both the entities have been assigned the same value for their primary key by the database (i.e. on both BillingDetailId = 1) and the problem is that ObjectStateManager cannot track objects of the same type (i.e. BillingDetail) with the same EntityKey value hence it throws. If you take a closer look at the TPC's SQL schema above, you'll see why the database generated the same values for the primary keys: the BillingDetailId column in both BankAccounts and CreditCards table has been marked as identity. How to Solve The Identity Problem in TPC As you saw, using SQL Server’s int identity columns doesn't work very well together with TPC since there will be duplicate entity keys when inserting in subclasses tables with all having the same identity seed. Therefore, to solve this, either a spread seed (where each table has its own initial seed value) will be needed, or a mechanism other than SQL Server’s int identity should be used. Some other RDBMSes have other mechanisms allowing a sequence (identity) to be shared by multiple tables, and something similar can be achieved with GUID keys in SQL Server. While using GUID keys, or int identity keys with different starting seeds will solve the problem but yet another solution would be to completely switch off identity on the primary key property. As a result, we need to take the responsibility of providing unique keys when inserting records to the database. We will go with this solution since it works regardless of which database engine is used. Switching Off Identity in Code First We can switch off identity simply by placing DatabaseGenerated attribute on the primary key property and pass DatabaseGenerationOption.None to its constructor. DatabaseGenerated attribute is a new data annotation which has been added to System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations namespace in CTP5: public abstract class BillingDetail {     [DatabaseGenerated(DatabaseGenerationOption.None)]     public int BillingDetailId { get; set; }     public string Owner { get; set; }     public string Number { get; set; } } As always, we can achieve the same result by using fluent API, if you prefer that: modelBuilder.Entity<BillingDetail>()             .Property(p => p.BillingDetailId)             .HasDatabaseGenerationOption(DatabaseGenerationOption.None); Working With The Object Model Our TPC mapping is ready and we can try adding new records to the database. But, like I said, now we need to take care of providing unique keys when creating new objects: using (var context = new InheritanceMappingContext()) {     BankAccount bankAccount = new BankAccount()      {          BillingDetailId = 1                          };     CreditCard creditCard = new CreditCard()      {          BillingDetailId = 2,         CardType = 1     };                      context.BillingDetails.Add(bankAccount);     context.BillingDetails.Add(creditCard);     context.SaveChanges(); } Polymorphic Associations with TPC is Problematic The main problem with this approach is that it doesn’t support Polymorphic Associations very well. After all, in the database, associations are represented as foreign key relationships and in TPC, the subclasses are all mapped to different tables so a polymorphic association to their base class (abstract BillingDetail in our example) cannot be represented as a simple foreign key relationship. For example, consider the the domain model we introduced here where User has a polymorphic association with BillingDetail. This would be problematic in our TPC Schema, because if User has a many-to-one relationship with BillingDetail, the Users table would need a single foreign key column, which would have to refer both concrete subclass tables. This isn’t possible with regular foreign key constraints. Schema Evolution with TPC is Complex A further conceptual problem with this mapping strategy is that several different columns, of different tables, share exactly the same semantics. This makes schema evolution more complex. For example, a change to a base class property results in changes to multiple columns. It also makes it much more difficult to implement database integrity constraints that apply to all subclasses. Generated SQLLet's examine SQL output for polymorphic queries in TPC mapping. For example, consider this polymorphic query for all BillingDetails and the resulting SQL statements that being executed in the database: var query = from b in context.BillingDetails select b; Just like the SQL query generated by TPT mapping, the CASE statements that you see in the beginning of the query is merely to ensure columns that are irrelevant for a particular row have NULL values in the returning flattened table. (e.g. BankName for a row that represents a CreditCard type). TPC's SQL Queries are Union Based As you can see in the above screenshot, the first SELECT uses a FROM-clause subquery (which is selected with a red rectangle) to retrieve all instances of BillingDetails from all concrete class tables. The tables are combined with a UNION operator, and a literal (in this case, 0 and 1) is inserted into the intermediate result; (look at the lines highlighted in yellow.) EF reads this to instantiate the correct class given the data from a particular row. A union requires that the queries that are combined, project over the same columns; hence, EF has to pad and fill up nonexistent columns with NULL. This query will really perform well since here we can let the database optimizer find the best execution plan to combine rows from several tables. There is also no Joins involved so it has a better performance than the SQL queries generated by TPT where a Join is required between the base and subclasses tables. Choosing Strategy GuidelinesBefore we get into this discussion, I want to emphasize that there is no one single "best strategy fits all scenarios" exists. As you saw, each of the approaches have their own advantages and drawbacks. Here are some rules of thumb to identify the best strategy in a particular scenario: If you don’t require polymorphic associations or queries, lean toward TPC—in other words, if you never or rarely query for BillingDetails and you have no class that has an association to BillingDetail base class. I recommend TPC (only) for the top level of your class hierarchy, where polymorphism isn’t usually required, and when modification of the base class in the future is unlikely. If you do require polymorphic associations or queries, and subclasses declare relatively few properties (particularly if the main difference between subclasses is in their behavior), lean toward TPH. Your goal is to minimize the number of nullable columns and to convince yourself (and your DBA) that a denormalized schema won’t create problems in the long run. If you do require polymorphic associations or queries, and subclasses declare many properties (subclasses differ mainly by the data they hold), lean toward TPT. Or, depending on the width and depth of your inheritance hierarchy and the possible cost of joins versus unions, use TPC. By default, choose TPH only for simple problems. For more complex cases (or when you’re overruled by a data modeler insisting on the importance of nullability constraints and normalization), you should consider the TPT strategy. But at that point, ask yourself whether it may not be better to remodel inheritance as delegation in the object model (delegation is a way of making composition as powerful for reuse as inheritance). Complex inheritance is often best avoided for all sorts of reasons unrelated to persistence or ORM. EF acts as a buffer between the domain and relational models, but that doesn’t mean you can ignore persistence concerns when designing your classes. SummaryIn this series, we focused on one of the main structural aspect of the object/relational paradigm mismatch which is inheritance and discussed how EF solve this problem as an ORM solution. We learned about the three well-known inheritance mapping strategies and their implementations in EF Code First. Hopefully it gives you a better insight about the mapping of inheritance hierarchies as well as choosing the best strategy for your particular scenario. Happy New Year and Happy Code-Firsting! References ADO.NET team blog Java Persistence with Hibernate book a { color: #5A99FF; } a:visited { color: #5A99FF; } .title { padding-bottom: 5px; font-family: Segoe UI; font-size: 11pt; font-weight: bold; padding-top: 15px; } .code, .typeName { font-family: consolas; } .typeName { color: #2b91af; } .padTop5 { padding-top: 5px; } .padTop10 { padding-top: 10px; } .exception { background-color: #f0f0f0; font-style: italic; padding-bottom: 5px; padding-left: 5px; padding-top: 5px; padding-right: 5px; }

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• An easy way to create Side by Side registrationless COM Manifests with Visual Studio

  - by Rick Strahl

  Here's something I didn't find out until today: You can use Visual Studio to easily create registrationless COM manifest files for you with just a couple of small steps. Registrationless COM lets you use COM component without them being registered in the registry. This means it's possible to deploy COM components along with another application using plain xcopy semantics. To be sure it's rarely quite that easy - you need to watch out for dependencies - but if you know you have COM components that are light weight and have no or known dependencies it's easy to get everything into a single folder and off you go. Registrationless COM works via manifest files which carry the same name as the executable plus a .manifest extension (ie. yourapp.exe.manifest) I'm going to use a Visual FoxPro COM object as an example and create a simple Windows Forms app that calls the component - without that component being registered. Let's take a walk down memory lane… Create a COM Component I start by creating a FoxPro COM component because that's what I know and am working with here in my legacy environment. You can use VB classic or C++ ATL object if that's more to your liking. Here's a real simple Fox one: DEFINE CLASS SimpleServer as Session OLEPUBLIC FUNCTION HelloWorld(lcName) RETURN "Hello " + lcName ENDDEFINE Compile it into a DLL COM component with: BUILD MTDLL simpleserver FROM simpleserver RECOMPILE And to make sure it works test it quickly from Visual FoxPro: server = CREATEOBJECT("simpleServer.simpleserver") MESSAGEBOX( server.HelloWorld("Rick") ) Using Visual Studio to create a Manifest File for a COM Component Next open Visual Studio and create a new executable project - a Console App or WinForms or WPF application will all do. Go to the References Node Select Add Reference Use the Browse tab and find your compiled DLL to import  Next you'll see your assembly in the project. Right click on the reference and select Properties Click on the Isolated DropDown and select True Compile and that's all there's to it. Visual Studio will create a App.exe.manifest file right alongside your application's EXE. The manifest file created looks like this: xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"? assembly xsi:schemaLocation="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1 assembly.adaptive.xsd" manifestVersion="1.0" xmlns:asmv1="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1" xmlns:asmv2="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v2" xmlns:asmv3="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v3" xmlns:dsig="http://www.w3.org/2000/09/xmldsig#" xmlns:co.v1="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:clickonce.v1" xmlns:co.v2="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:clickonce.v2" xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" assemblyIdentity name="App.exe" version="1.0.0.0" processorArchitecture="x86" type="win32" / file name="simpleserver.DLL" asmv2:size="27293" hash xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v2" dsig:Transforms dsig:Transform Algorithm="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:HashTransforms.Identity" / dsig:Transforms dsig:DigestMethod Algorithm="http://www.w3.org/2000/09/xmldsig#sha1" / dsig:DigestValuepuq+ua20bbidGOWhPOxfquztBCU=dsig:DigestValue hash typelib tlbid="{f10346e2-c9d9-47f7-81d1-74059cc15c3c}" version="1.0" helpdir="" resourceid="0" flags="HASDISKIMAGE" / comClass clsid="{af2c2811-0657-4264-a1f5-06d033a969ff}" threadingModel="Apartment" tlbid="{f10346e2-c9d9-47f7-81d1-74059cc15c3c}" progid="simpleserver.SimpleServer" description="simpleserver.SimpleServer" / file assembly Now let's finish our super complex console app to test with: using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Text; namespace ConsoleApplication1 {     class Program     {         static voidMain(string[] args)         { Type type = Type.GetTypeFromProgID("simpleserver.simpleserver",true); dynamic server = Activator.CreateInstance(type); Console.WriteLine(server.HelloWorld("rick")); Console.ReadLine(); } } } Now run the Console Application… As expected that should work. And why not? The COM component is still registered, right? :-) Nothing tricky about that. Let's unregister the COM component and then re-run and see what happens. Go to the Command Prompt Change to the folder where the DLL is installed Unregister with: RegSvr32 -u simpleserver.dll      To be sure that the COM component no longer works, check it out with the same test you used earlier (ie. o = CREATEOBJECT("SimpleServer.SimpleServer") in your development environment or VBScript etc.). Make sure you run the EXE and you don't re-compile the application or else Visual Studio will complain that it can't find the COM component in the registry while compiling. In fact now that we have our .manifest file you can remove the COM object from the project. When you run run the EXE from Windows Explorer or a command prompt to avoid the recompile. Watch out for embedded Manifest Files Now recompile your .NET project and run it… and it will most likely fail! The problem is that .NET applications by default embeds a manifest file into the compiled EXE application which results in the externally created manifest file being completely ignored. Only one manifest can be applied at a time and the compiled manifest takes precedency. Uh, thanks Visual Studio - not very helpful… Note that if you use another development tool like Visual FoxPro to create your EXE this won't be an issue as long as the tool doesn't automatically add a manifest file. Creating a Visual FoxPro EXE for example will work immediately with the generated manifest file as is. If you are using .NET and Visual Studio you have a couple of options of getting around this: Remove the embedded manifest file Copy the contents of the generated manifest file into a project manifest file and compile that in To remove an embedded manifest in a Visual Studio project: Open the Project Properties (Alt-Enter on project node) Go down to Resources | Manifest and select | Create Application without a Manifest   You can now add use the external manifest file and it will actually be respected when the app runs. The other option is to let Visual Studio create the manifest file on disk and then explicitly add the manifest file into the project. Notice on the dialog above I did this for app.exe.manifest and the manifest actually shows up in the list. If I select this file it will be compiled into the EXE and be used in lieu of any external files and that works as well. Remove the simpleserver.dll reference so you can compile your code and run the application. Now it should work without COM registration of the component. Personally I prefer external manifests because they can be modified after the fact - compiled manifests are evil in my mind because they are immutable - once they are there they can't be overriden or changed. So I prefer an external manifest. However, if you are absolutely sure nothing needs to change and you don't want anybody messing with your manifest, you can also embed it. The option to either is there. Watch for Manifest Caching While working trying to get this to work I ran into some problems at first. Specifically when it wasn't working at first (due to the embedded schema) I played with various different manifest layouts in different files etc.. There are a number of different ways to actually represent manifest files including offloading to separate folder (more on that later). A few times I made deliberate errors in the schema file and I found that regardless of what I did once the app failed or worked no amount of changing of the manifest file would make it behave differently. It appears that Windows is caching the manifest data for a given EXE or DLL. It takes a restart or a recompile of either the EXE or the DLL to clear the caching. Recompile your servers in order to see manifest changes unless there's an outright failure of an invalid manifest file. If the app starts the manifest is being read and caches immediately. This can be very confusing especially if you don't know that it's happening. I found myself always recompiling the exe after each run and before making any changes to the manifest file. Don't forget about Runtimes of COM Objects In the example I used above I used a Visual FoxPro COM component. Visual FoxPro is a runtime based environment so if I'm going to distribute an application that uses a FoxPro COM object the runtimes need to be distributed as well. The same is true of classic Visual Basic applications. Assuming that you don't know whether the runtimes are installed on the target machines make sure to install all the additional files in the EXE's directory alongside the COM DLL. In the case of Visual FoxPro the target folder should contain: The EXE  App.exe The Manifest file (unless it's compiled in) App.exe.manifest The COM object DLL (simpleserver.dll) Visual FoxPro Runtimes: VFP9t.dll (or VFP9r.dll for non-multithreaded dlls), vfp9rENU.dll, msvcr71.dll All these files should be in the same folder. Debugging Manifest load Errors If you for some reason get your manifest loading wrong there are a couple of useful tools available - SxSTrace and SxSParse. These two tools can be a huge help in debugging manifest loading errors. Put the following into a batch file (SxS_Trace.bat for example): sxstrace Trace -logfile:sxs.bin sxstrace Parse -logfile:sxs.bin -outfile:sxs.txt Then start the batch file before running your EXE. Make sure there's no caching happening as described in the previous section. For example, if I go into the manifest file and explicitly break the CLSID and/or ProgID I get a detailed report on where the EXE is looking for the manifest and what it's reading. Eventually the trace gives me an error like this: INFO: Parsing Manifest File C:\wwapps\Conf\SideBySide\Code\app.EXE.     INFO: Manifest Definition Identity is App.exe,processorArchitecture="x86",type="win32",version="1.0.0.0".     ERROR: Line 13: The value {AAaf2c2811-0657-4264-a1f5-06d033a969ff} of attribute clsid in element comClass is invalid. ERROR: Activation Context generation failed. End Activation Context Generation. pinpointing nicely where the error lies. Pay special attention to the various attributes - they have to match exactly in the different sections of the manifest file(s). Multiple COM Objects The manifest file that Visual Studio creates is actually quite more complex than is required for basic registrationless COM object invokation. The manifest file can be simplified a lot actually by stripping off various namespaces and removing the type library references altogether. Here's an example of a simplified manifest file that actually includes references to 2 COM servers: xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"? assembly xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1" manifestVersion="1.0" assemblyIdentity name="App.exe" version="1.0.0.0" processorArchitecture="x86" type="win32" / file name="simpleserver.DLL" comClass clsid="{af2c2811-0657-4264-a1f5-06d033a969ff}" threadingModel="Apartment" progid="simpleserver.SimpleServer" description="simpleserver.SimpleServer" / file file name = "sidebysidedeploy.dll" comClass clsid="{EF82B819-7963-4C36-9443-3978CD94F57C}" progid="sidebysidedeploy.SidebysidedeployServer" description="SidebySideDeploy Server" threadingModel="apartment" / file assembly Simple enough right? Routing to separate Manifest Files and Folders In the examples above all files ended up in the application's root folder - all the DLLs, support files and runtimes. Sometimes that's not so desirable and you can actually create separate manifest files. The easiest way to do this is to create a manifest file that 'routes' to another manifest file in a separate folder. Basically you create a new 'assembly identity' via a named id. You can then create a folder and another manifest with the id plus .manifest that points at the actual file. In this example I create: App.exe.manifest A folder called App.deploy A manifest file in App.deploy All DLLs and runtimes in App.deploy Let's start with that master manifest file. This file only holds a reference to another manifest file: App.exe.manifest xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"? assembly xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1" manifestVersion="1.0" assemblyIdentity name="App.exe" version="1.0.0.0" processorArchitecture="x86" type="win32" / dependency dependentAssembly assemblyIdentity name="App.deploy" version="1.0.0.0" type="win32" / dependentAssembly dependency assembly   Note this file only contains a dependency to App.deploy which is another manifest id. I can then create App.deploy.manifest in the current folder or in an App.deploy folder. In this case I'll create App.deploy and in it copy the DLLs and support runtimes. I then create App.deploy.manifest. App.deploy.manifest xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"? assembly xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1" manifestVersion="1.0" assemblyIdentity name="App.deploy" type="win32" version="1.0.0.0" / file name="simpleserver.DLL" comClass clsid="{af2c2811-0657-4264-a1f5-06d033a969ff}" threadingModel="Apartment" progid="simpleserver.SimpleServer" description="simpleserver.SimpleServer" / file file name="sidebysidedeploy.dll" comClass clsid="{EF82B819-7963-4C36-9443-3978CD94F57C}" threadingModel="Apartment" progid="sidebysidedeploy.SidebysidedeployServer" description="SidebySideDeploy Server" / file assembly   In this manifest file I then host my COM DLLs and any support runtimes. This is quite useful if you have lots of DLLs you are referencing or if you need to have separate configuration and application files that are associated with the COM object. This way the operation of your main application and the COM objects it interacts with is somewhat separated. You can see the two folders here:   Routing Manifests to different Folders In theory registrationless COM should be pretty easy in painless - you've seen the configuration manifest files and it certainly doesn't look very complicated, right? But the devil's in the details. The ActivationContext API (SxS - side by side activation) is very intolerant of small errors in the XML or formatting of the keys, so be really careful when setting up components, especially if you are manually editing these files. If you do run into trouble SxsTrace/SxsParse are a huge help to track down the problems. And remember that if you do have problems that you'll need to recompile your EXEs or DLLs for the SxS APIs to refresh themselves properly. All of this gets even more fun if you want to do registrationless COM inside of IIS :-) But I'll leave that for another blog post…© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in COM  .NET  FoxPro   Tweet (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• The Execute SQL Task

  In this article we are going to take you through the Execute SQL Task in SQL Server Integration Services for SQL Server 2005 (although it appies just as well to SQL Server 2008).  We will be covering all the essentials that you will need to know to effectively use this task and make it as flexible as possible. The things we will be looking at are as follows: A tour of the Task. The properties of the Task. After looking at these introductory topics we will then get into some examples. The examples will show different types of usage for the task: Returning a single value from a SQL query with two input parameters. Returning a rowset from a SQL query. Executing a stored procedure and retrieveing a rowset, a return value, an output parameter value and passing in an input parameter. Passing in the SQL Statement from a variable. Passing in the SQL Statement from a file. Tour Of The Task Before we can start to use the Execute SQL Task in our packages we are going to need to locate it in the toolbox. Let's do that now. Whilst in the Control Flow section of the package expand your toolbox and locate the Execute SQL Task. Below is how we found ours. Now drag the task onto the designer. As you can see from the following image we have a validation error appear telling us that no connection manager has been assigned to the task. This can be easily remedied by creating a connection manager. There are certain types of connection manager that are compatable with this task so we cannot just create any connection manager and these are detailed in a few graphics time. Double click on the task itself to take a look at the custom user interface provided to us for this task. The task will open on the general tab as shown below. Take a bit of time to have a look around here as throughout this article we will be revisting this page many times. Whilst on the general tab, drop down the combobox next to the ConnectionType property. In here you will see the types of connection manager which this task will accept. As with SQL Server 2000 DTS, SSIS allows you to output values from this task in a number of formats. Have a look at the combobox next to the Resultset property. The major difference here is the ability to output into XML. If you drop down the combobox next to the SQLSourceType property you will see the ways in which you can pass a SQL Statement into the task itself. We will have examples of each of these later on but certainly when we saw these for the first time we were very excited. Next to the SQLStatement property if you click in the empty box next to it you will see ellipses appear. Click on them and you will see the very basic query editor that becomes available to you. Alternatively after you have specified a connection manager for the task you can click on the Build Query button to bring up a completely different query editor. This is slightly inconsistent. Once you've finished looking around the general tab, move on to the next tab which is the parameter mapping tab. We shall, again, be visiting this tab throughout the article but to give you an initial heads up this is where you define the input, output and return values from your task. Note this is not where you specify the resultset. If however you now move on to the ResultSet tab this is where you define what variable will receive the output from your SQL Statement in whatever form that is. Property Expressions are one of the most amazing things to happen in SSIS and they will not be covered here as they deserve a whole article to themselves. Watch out for this as their usefulness will astound you. For a more detailed discussion of what should be the parameter markers in the SQL Statements on the General tab and how to map them to variables on the Parameter Mapping tab see Working with Parameters and Return Codes in the Execute SQL Task. Task Properties There are two places where you can specify the properties for your task. One is in the task UI itself and the other is in the property pane which will appear if you right click on your task and select Properties from the context menu. We will be doing plenty of property setting in the UI later so let's take a moment to have a look at the property pane. Below is a graphic showing our properties pane. Now we shall take you through all the properties and tell you exactly what they mean. A lot of these properties you will see across all tasks as well as the package because of everything's base structure The Container. BypassPrepare Should the statement be prepared before sending to the connection manager destination (True/False) Connection This is simply the name of the connection manager that the task will use. We can get this from the connection manager tray at the bottom of the package. DelayValidation Really interesting property and it tells the task to not validate until it actually executes. A usage for this may be that you are operating on table yet to be created but at runtime you know the table will be there. Description Very simply the description of your Task. Disable Should the task be enabled or not? You can also set this through a context menu by right clicking on the task itself. DisableEventHandlers As a result of events that happen in the task, should the event handlers for the container fire? ExecValueVariable The variable assigned here will get or set the execution value of the task. Expressions Expressions as we mentioned earlier are a really powerful tool in SSIS and this graphic below shows us a small peek of what you can do. We select a property on the left and assign an expression to the value of that property on the right causing the value to be dynamically changed at runtime. One of the most obvious uses of this is that the property value can be built dynamically from within the package allowing you a great deal of flexibility FailPackageOnFailure If this task fails does the package? FailParentOnFailure If this task fails does the parent container? A task can he hosted inside another container i.e. the For Each Loop Container and this would then be the parent. ForcedExecutionValue This property allows you to hard code an execution value for the task. ForcedExecutionValueType What is the datatype of the ForcedExecutionValue? ForceExecutionResult Force the task to return a certain execution result. This could then be used by the workflow constraints. Possible values are None, Success, Failure and Completion. ForceExecutionValue Should we force the execution result? IsolationLevel This is the transaction isolation level of the task. IsStoredProcedure Certain optimisations are made by the task if it knows that the query is a Stored Procedure invocation. The docs say this will always be false unless the connection is an ADO connection. LocaleID Gets or sets the LocaleID of the container. LoggingMode Should we log for this container and what settings should we use? The value choices are UseParentSetting, Enabled and Disabled. MaximumErrorCount How many times can the task fail before we call it a day? Name Very simply the name of the task. ResultSetType How do you want the results of your query returned? The choices are ResultSetType_None, ResultSetType_SingleRow, ResultSetType_Rowset and ResultSetType_XML. SqlStatementSource Your Query/SQL Statement. SqlStatementSourceType The method of specifying the query. Your choices here are DirectInput, FileConnection and Variables TimeOut How long should the task wait to receive results? TransactionOption How should the task handle being asked to join a transaction? Usage Examples As we move through the examples we will only cover in them what we think you must know and what we think you should see. This means that some of the more elementary steps like setting up variables will be covered in the early examples but skipped and simply referred to in later ones. All these examples used the AventureWorks database that comes with SQL Server 2005. Returning a Single Value, Passing in Two Input Parameters So the first thing we are going to do is add some variables to our package. The graphic below shows us those variables having been defined. Here the CountOfEmployees variable will be used as the output from the query and EndDate and StartDate will be used as input parameters. As you can see all these variables have been scoped to the package. Scoping allows us to have domains for variables. Each container has a scope and remember a package is a container as well. Variable values of the parent container can be seen in child containers but cannot be passed back up to the parent from a child. Our following graphic has had a number of changes made. The first of those changes is that we have created and assigned an OLEDB connection manager to this Task ExecuteSQL Task Connection. The next thing is we have made sure that the SQLSourceType property is set to Direct Input as we will be writing in our statement ourselves. We have also specified that only a single row will be returned from this query. The expressions we typed in was: SELECT COUNT(*) AS CountOfEmployees FROM HumanResources.Employee WHERE (HireDate BETWEEN ? AND ?) Moving on now to the Parameter Mapping tab this is where we are going to tell the task about our input paramaters. We Add them to the window specifying their direction and datatype. A quick word here about the structure of the variable name. As you can see SSIS has preceeded the variable with the word user. This is a default namespace for variables but you can create your own. When defining your variables if you look at the variables window title bar you will see some icons. If you hover over the last one on the right you will see it says "Choose Variable Columns". If you click the button you will see a list of checkbox options and one of them is namespace. after checking this you will see now where you can define your own namespace. The next tab, result set, is where we need to get back the value(s) returned from our statement and assign to a variable which in our case is CountOfEmployees so we can use it later perhaps. Because we are only returning a single value then if you remember from earlier we are allowed to assign a name to the resultset but it must be the name of the column (or alias) from the query. A really cool feature of Business Intelligence Studio being hosted by Visual Studio is that we get breakpoint support for free. In our package we set a Breakpoint so we can break the package and have a look in a watch window at the variable values as they appear to our task and what the variable value of our resultset is after the task has done the assignment. Here's that window now. As you can see the count of employess that matched the data range was 2. Returning a Rowset In this example we are going to return a resultset back to a variable after the task has executed not just a single row single value. There are no input parameters required so the variables window is nice and straight forward. One variable of type object. Here is the statement that will form the soure for our Resultset. select p.ProductNumber, p.name, pc.Name as ProductCategoryNameFROM Production.ProductCategory pcJOIN Production.ProductSubCategory pscON pc.ProductCategoryID = psc.ProductCategoryIDJOIN Production.Product pON psc.ProductSubCategoryID = p.ProductSubCategoryID We need to make sure that we have selected Full result set as the ResultSet as shown below on the task's General tab. Because there are no input parameters we can skip the parameter mapping tab and move straight to the Result Set tab. Here we need to Add our variable defined earlier and map it to the result name of 0 (remember we covered this earlier) Once we run the task we can again set a breakpoint and have a look at the values coming back from the task. In the following graphic you can see the result set returned to us as a COM object. We can do some pretty interesting things with this COM object and in later articles that is exactly what we shall be doing. Return Values, Input/Output Parameters and Returning a Rowset from a Stored Procedure This example is pretty much going to give us a taste of everything. We have already covered in the previous example how to specify the ResultSet to be a Full result set so we will not cover it again here. For this example we are going to need 4 variables. One for the return value, one for the input parameter, one for the output parameter and one for the result set. Here is the statement we want to execute. Note how much cleaner it is than if you wanted to do it using the current version of DTS. In the Parameter Mapping tab we are going to Add our variables and specify their direction and datatypes. In the Result Set tab we can now map our final variable to the rowset returned from the stored procedure. It really is as simple as that and we were amazed at how much easier it is than in DTS 2000. Passing in the SQL Statement from a Variable SSIS as we have mentioned is hugely more flexible than its predecessor and one of the things you will notice when moving around the tasks and the adapters is that a lot of them accept a variable as an input for something they need. The ExecuteSQL task is no different. It will allow us to pass in a string variable as the SQL Statement. This variable value could have been set earlier on from inside the package or it could have been populated from outside using a configuration. The ResultSet property is set to single row and we'll show you why in a second when we look at the variables. Note also the SQLSourceType property. Here's the General Tab again. Looking at the variable we have in this package you can see we have only two. One for the return value from the statement and one which is obviously for the statement itself. Again we need to map the Result name to our variable and this can be a named Result Name (The column name or alias returned by the query) and not 0. The expected result into our variable should be the amount of rows in the Person.Contact table and if we look in the watch window we see that it is.   Passing in the SQL Statement from a File The final example we are going to show is a really interesting one. We are going to pass in the SQL statement to the task by using a file connection manager. The file itself contains the statement to run. The first thing we are going to need to do is create our file connection mananger to point to our file. Click in the connections tray at the bottom of the designer, right click and choose "New File Connection" As you can see in the graphic below we have chosen to use an existing file and have passed in the name as well. Have a look around at the other "Usage Type" values available whilst you are here. Having set that up we can now see in the connection manager tray our file connection manager sitting alongside our OLE-DB connection we have been using for the rest of these examples. Now we can go back to the familiar General Tab to set up how the task will accept our file connection as the source. All the other properties in this task are set up exactly as we have been doing for other examples depending on the options chosen so we will not cover them again here.   We hope you will agree that the Execute SQL Task has changed considerably in this release from its DTS predecessor. It has a lot of options available but once you have configured it a few times you get to learn what needs to go where. We hope you have found this article useful.

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