I have a component that acts as a middle man between 2 web services. Both of them communicate using JSON.
The data that goes back and forth from the web services is very similar. However, it does need to be massaged a little.
I currently have this working by deserializing the JSON, build a new JObject and serialize it. It seems like there should be better way.
I'm looking at JsonConvert, JsonConverter, JsonSerializer, JsonReader, etc. trying to see if there's a better way to do this.
Any guidance on what classes to use/override to make this process more efficent?
Thanks!
You can write a custom JsonConverter using the approach described in the documentation, so you'll only have one concrete class, but this class can translate to a slightly different JSON representation of your object.
Another, more verbose, blog post about writing custom JsonConverters can be found here: http://blog.maskalik.com/asp-net/json-net-implement-custom-serialization/
Related
I used the following - https://developer.xamarin.com/guides/xamarin-forms/application-fundamentals/custom-renderer/hybridwebview/ to implement a hybrid webview. All works fine expect the part where I need to call the C# function from Javascript. The C# handler gets called but from the article, it seems like I can only get a single parameter passed to C#. So message.Body.ToString() gives me the arguments passed from Javascript. I however want to pass atleast to arguments. Can anybody please show me how I can achieve this.
It looks like you can only pass one parameter through. Hence you just need to develop your own way to pass more information through. You could for example create a class and serialize it in JSON, then deserialize it at the other end. JSON serializers and deserializers are widely available in .NET and JS, this shouldn't be much of a problem at all.
Or if the data is really simple, e.g. 2 numbers, you could do 1#4, and split via the hash at the other end.
I'm not an ASP.NET programmer, but, as it happens in life, I had to do some minor projects using it. Now came another one in which I have to implement some custom solutions and I haven't figured it out yet - I need some tip or maybe a piece of advice like "don't go that way" ;)
Previously it was simple - there was a table in DB, there was an adequate model and a view that worked with it - worked like charm. Now it's a little bit more complicated.
The "site" is going to contain, shortly and generally speaking, a survey - but a fully configurable one, unfortunately. In another product there's gonna be a configuration manager that will allow user to define pages, block types, questions, steps and so on and will generate an XML.
For the time being, in accordance with the specification, in the site's database I'm going to have only one table which will contain just a key and the XML generated by the configurator (and maybe some additional, not important information). Now - I need to parse this XML and build the site containing pages and other elements corresponding to it.
And that WOULD not be a problem, but I don't really know how to work that way using asp.net + mvc and can't find any piece of advice that would help me anyhow. Should I create an object that would somehow fake being a model and allow me to work for example on a dataset generated from XML? Or just create a model of the mentioned table and work with the XML directly on the view (I don't like even such an idea itself)? Or - having to do something like that - just give up on MVC and use only "clear" ASP.NET? Or maybe something else?
I'll be very grateful for any help.
And I hope I described what I need understandably ;)
If the XML documents have a schema defined then you can easily generate a class that matches the document using the xsd.exe tool. The document can then be deserialized into an instance of that class using existing functionality in the .Net framework. Just google .Net Xml serialization :-)
Now, if you don't have a schema you could create one if you are sure that you know the format of the Xml. Alternatively you could create a class that matches the format you expect to get and then parse the Xml manually. This last option is much more work, so I wouldn't recommend it.
In any case, the class you end up with should contain all the data you need from the Xml document and can then be used as the Model in your MVC page. As long as you can use the standard Xml deserialization technique then this should be quite easy and painless.
I am a little confused on how to go about using the RESTful server API in SilverStripe 3. I have just starting learning and the following has confused me.
All content on our site is stored in a database. Each class that is a child of the DataObject class will have its own table in our database.
Every object of such a class will correspond to a row in that table - this is our "data object", the "model" of Model-View-Controller. A page type has a data object that represents all the data for our page. Rather than inheriting directly from DataObject, it inherits from SiteTree. We generally create a "Page" data object, and subclass this for all other page types. This allows us to define behavior that is consistent across all pages in our site.
I have done this to set up pages but now I am learning about the RESTful server API and it says to create an object that extends DataObject.
Forgive my ignorance but would extending SiteTree not be the same thing?
Very confused so would appreciate some enlightenment.
As commented above, if you extend SiteTree, then you are extending DataObject, but getting a lot of overhead. Some of this overhead may be useful to you, as SiteTree provides Versioning, Hierarchies and other nice tricks which make it a good class for Pages in your site.
However, if you are wanting to manage a lot of objects, or if you aren't using the Hierarchy or Versioning models, or if you just want to customize how the objects are presented or managed in the CMS, then it is better to extend DataObject directly. There are various tutorials on this on the SilverStripe documentation site, and on SSBits
This may also be useful to you.
Once you have your DataObject subclass working well for you, you can start to add the RestfulServer capabilities to it. The most basic way to do this is to add a static property to your class:
static $api_access = true;
More information about using RestfulServer is available here
Have you had a look at the following URL : http://doc.silverstripe.org/framework/en/reference/restfulservice
This example allows you to make data available in the RSS format. I'm not sure if there is an easy way to output the data as JSON, but there are plenty of examples on the web of converting rss to json, so you could simply update your app to work with this format and convert if need be.
I was just writing a small asp.net web page to display a collection of objects by binding to a repeater, when this came to mind.
Basically the class I've created, let's call it 'Test', has a price property that's an integer data type (ignore the limitations of using this type, I'm just using it as an example). However I want to format this property so it displays a currency and the correct decimal places etc.
Is it best practice to have a function within the class that returns the formatted string for the object, or would it be better to have a function in the back end of my web form that operations on the object and returns the formatted string?
I've heard before that a class should contain all it's relative functions but I've also heard that presentation should be kept in the 'presentation layer' in my N-tier app.
What would be the best approach in my situation? (and apologies if I haven't explained this clearly enough!)
Thanks!
In my opinion, both options are valid from an OO point of view.
Since the value is a price (that just happens to have the wrong data type), it makes sense to put the formatting into the data class. It's not something that's specific to the web interface, and, if you develop a different kind of user interface, you are very likely to require this formatting again.
On the other hand, it's a presentation issue, so it also makes sense to put it into the presentation layer.
For general OOP stuff, the object should not be exposing implementation details. I choose to interpret this as "avoid setters and getters when possible".
In the context of your question, I suggest that you have a getPriceDisplay() method that returns a string containing the formatted price.
The actual implementation of the formatting is hidden in the implementation details. You could provide a generic function for formatting, use some backend call, or something else. Those details should make no difference to the consumer of the 'Test' object.
Though it's not an OOP approach, in my opinion, this is a good time for an extension method. Call it .ToCurrency() which has the format of the currency...this could be taken from the Web.Config file if you wanted.
Edit
To elaborate, I would simply call .ToString("your-format") (of course this could be as simple as .ToString("C") for your specific question) in the extension method. This allows you change the format throughout the UI in one place. I have found this to be very useful when dealing with DateTime formats in web applications.
Wouldn't .ToString("C"); do the job? This would be in the presentation layer I would imagine.
Our Flex app would like to work with requests and responses as object graphs (nothing unusual there) e.g. response becomes the model of some view, and would be a structure with several layers of nesting.
** Now, ideally we would like to use the same client (and server) side objects for different message formats e.g. XML and AMF, and have a pluggable serialization/de-serialization layer (!)
AMF has serialization and matching of client to server using
[RemoteClass(alias="samples.contact.Contact")]
but it seems there is no equivalent for XML.
I am (somewhat optimistically) looking for a neat way of serializing the object graph to XML, to send through a HTTPService from the client.
For responses, the default 'object' and 'E4X' provide some de-serialization. This is handy, but of course we don't have the niceties of unpacking the XML back into specific AS classes like we do with AMF.
Any suggestions?
(did have one idea come through about wrapping/casting object as XML or XMLList - this does not seem to work, however)
Update:
Both these libraries look useful, and I will very likely use them at some point.
For now, I really need the simplicity of re-using the metadata set for the AMF3 serialization which we are using in any case ([RemoteClass],[Transient])
.. so the best option at the moment is AMFX - used Flex Data Services for AMF transfer using XML - classes in mx.messaging.channels.amfx package - only drawback at the moment is any Externalizable class is transformed into a Hex byte stream - and ArrayCollection is Externalizable! (hoping to workaround by serializing the internal Array in a subclass ..)
Hope that's useful to someone ..
Regarding the Xml serialization I can give you a starting point (as biased as it may be, though :D).
I am working on a project that allows for automatic conversion of AS3 objects to and from xml. It basically uses annotations on the model objects you use for communication in order to construct the xml structure or populating an object from xml.
It is called FlexXB and you can check it out at http://code.google.com/p/flexxb/.
I started this project cos I got into the same issues at work (namely I have a server that communicates through xml) and I hoped it be of use to someone else.
Cheers,
Alex
Yet another project: FleXMLer (http://code.google.com/p/flexmler/).
It has both the straightforward attitude of asx3m where you can just call:
new FleXMLer().serialize(obj);
Or you can customize XML element names, skip elements and tweak the way arrays and hash tables are serialized.
Would appreciate your input.
checkout asx3m project at http://code.google.com/p/asx3m
It's an AS3 port of Java XStream serialization library and works pretty well.
I made it because I had to connect to a server platform that used XStream for exchanging data objects and put a lot of work in it.
It can be extended to serialize AS3 objects to any format (JSON for example) and could leverage power of user defined metatags.
Cheers,
Tomislav
There's a library including JSON available from Adobe, too. And since ActionScript is a superset of JavaScript ... and JSON is increasingly supported cross-framework ...