How to set BinaryType of SignalR - signalr

I make my signalrR connection in JavaScript like so:
$.connection.hub.start().done(function () {
//do something
});
In using WebSockets I can set the BinaryType property like so:
var wsUri = "ws://localhost:8080/whiteboard/websocket";
var websocket = new WebSocket(wsUri);
websocket.binaryType = "blob";
or
websocket.binaryType = "arraybuffer";
can i set this property for SignalR and if so how?

No you can't, at least up to the latest officially released version (2.x). SignalR is a set of layered abstactions over a physical connection, where all those abstractions must work with different transport strategies (WebSockets being just one of them), therefore they must represent a common subset of features.
Anything related to the required type of data transmission/serialization is handled by SignalR automatically, except for certain portions when using a PersistentConnection, where only strings can be used. There is some space for changing some behaviors by injecting custom implementations, but I think this one would be very hard to do and probably conflicting with SignalR's general goals.

Related

Generically forwarding a GRPC call

I have a GRPC API where, following a refactor, a few packages were renamed. This includes the package declaration in one of our proto files that defines the API. Something like this:
package foo;
service BazApi {
rpc FooEventStream(stream Ack) returns (stream FooEvent);
}
which was changed to
package bar;
service BazApi {
rpc FooEventStream(stream Ack) returns (stream FooEvent);
}
The server side is implemented using grpc-java with scala and monix on top.
This all works fine for clients that use the new proto files, but for old clients that were built on top of the old proto files, this causes problems: UNIMPLEMENTED: Method not found: foo.BazApi/FooEventStream.
The actual data format of the messages passed over the GRPC API has not changed, only the package.
Since we need to keep backwards compatibility, I've been looking into a way to make the old clients work while keeping the name change.
I was hoping to make this work with a generic ServerInterceptor which would be able to inspect an incoming call, see that it's from an old client (we have the client version in the headers) and redirect/forward it to the renamed service. (Since it's just the package name that changed, this is easy to figure out e.g. foo.BazApi/FooEventStream -> bar.BazApi/FooEventStream)
However, there doesn't seem to be an elegant way to do this. I think it's possible by starting a new ClientCall to the correct endpoint, and then handling the ServerCall within the interceptor by delegating to the ClientCall, but that will require a bunch of plumbing code to properly handle unary/clientStreaming/serverStreaming/bidiStreaming calls.
Is there a better way to do this?
If you can easily change the server, you can have it support both names simultaneously. You can consider a solution where you register your service twice, with two different descriptors.
Every service has a bindService() method that returns a ServerServiceDefinition. You can pass the definition to the server via the normal serverBuilder.addService().
So you could get the normal ServerServiceDefinition and then rewrite it to the new name and then register the new name.
BazApiImpl service = new BazApiImpl();
serverBuilder.addService(service); // register "bar"
ServerServiceDefinition barDef = service.bindService();
ServerServiceDefinition fooDefBuilder = ServerServiceDefinition.builder("foo.BazApi");
for (ServerMethodDefinition<?,?> barMethodDef : barDef.getMethods()) {
MethodDescriptor desc = barMethodDef.getMethodDescriptor();
String newName = desc.getFullMethodName().replace("foo.BazApi/", "bar.BazApi/");
desc = desc.toBuilder().setFullMethodName(newName).build();
foDefBuilder.addMethod(desc, barMethodDef.getServerCallHandler());
}
serverBuilder.addService(fooDefBuilder.build()); // register "foo"
Using the lower-level "channel" API you can make a proxy without too much work. You mainly just proxy events from a ServerCall.Listener to a ClientCall and the ClientCall.Listener to a ServerCall. You get to learn about the lower-level MethodDescriptor and the rarely-used HandlerRegistry. There's also some complexity to handle flow control (isReady() and request()).
I made an example a while back, but never spent the time to merge it to grpc-java itself. It is currently available on my random branch. You should be able to get it working just by changing localhost:8980 and by re-writing the MethodDescriptor passed to channel.newCall(...). Something akin to:
MethodDescriptor desc = serverCall.getMethodDescriptor();
if (desc.getFullMethodName().startsWith("foo.BazApi/")) {
String newName = desc.getFullMethodName().replace("foo.BazApi/", "bar.BazApi/");
desc = desc.toBuilder().setFullMethodName(newName).build();
}
ClientCall<ReqT, RespT> clientCall
= channel.newCall(desc, CallOptions.DEFAULT);

Register callback in Autofac and build container again in the callback

I have a dotnet core application.
My Startup.cs registers types/implementations in Autofac.
One of my registrations needs previous access to a service.
var containerBuilder = new ContainerBuilder();
containerBuilder.RegisterSettingsReaders(); // this makes available a ISettingsReader<string> that I can use to read my appsettings.json
containerBuilder.RegisterMyInfrastructureService(options =>
{
options.Username = "foo" //this should come from appsettings
});
containerBuilder.Populate(services);
var applicationContainer = containerBuilder.Build();
The dilemma is, by the time I have to .RegisterMyInfrastructureService I need to have available the ISettingsReader<string> that was registered just before (Autofac container hasn't been built yet).
I was reading about registering with callback to execute something after the autofac container has been built. So I could do something like this:
builder.RegisterBuildCallback(c =>
{
var stringReader = c.Resolve<ISettingsReader<string>>();
var usernameValue = stringReader.GetValue("Username");
//now I have my username "foo", but I want to continue registering things! Like the following:
containerBuilder.RegisterMyInfrastructureService(options =>
{
options.Username = usernameValue
});
//now what? again build?
});
but the problem is that after I want to use the service not to do something like starting a service or similar but to continue registering things that required the settings I am now able to provide.
Can I simply call again builder.Build() at the end of my callback so that the container is simply rebuilt without any issue? This seems a bit strange because the builder was already built (that's why the callback was executed).
What's the best way to deal with this dilemma with autofac?
UPDATE 1: I read that things like builder.Update() are now obsolete because containers should be immutable. Which confirms my suspicion that building a container, adding more registrations and building again is not a good practice.
In other words, I can understand that using a register build callback should not be used to register additional things. But then, the question remain: how to deal with these issues?
This discussion issue explains a lot including ways to work around having to update the container. I'll summarize here, but there is a lot of information in that issue that doesn't make sense to try and replicate all over.
Be familiar with all the ways you can register components and pass parameters. Don't forget about things like resolved parameters, modules that can dynamically put parameters in place, and so on.
Lambda registrations solve almost every one of these issues we've seen. If you need to register something that provides configuration and then, later, use that configuration as part of a different registration - lambdas will be huge.
Consider intermediate interfaces like creating an IUsernameProvider that is backed by ISettingsReader<string>. The IUsernameProvider could be the lambda (resolve some settings, read a particular one, etc.) and then the downstream components could take an IUsernameProvider directly.
These sorts of questions are hard to answer because there are a lot of ways to work around having to build/rebuild/re-rebuild the container if you take advantage of things like lambdas and parameters - there's no "best practice" because it always depends on your app and your needs.
Me, personally, I will usually start with the lambda approach.

Purely functional feedback suppression?

I have a problem that I can solve reasonably easy with classic imperative programming using state: I'm writing a co-browsing app that shares URL's between several nodes. The program has a module for communication that I call link and for browser handling that I call browser. Now when a URL arrives in link i use the browser module to tell the
actual web browser to start loading the URL.
The actual browser will trigger the navigation detection that the incoming URL has started to load, and hence will immediately be presented as a candidate for sending to the other side. That must be avoided, since it would create an infinite loop of link-following to the same URL, along the line of the following (very conceptualized) pseudo-code (it's Javascript, but please consider that a somewhat irrelevant implementation detail):
actualWebBrowser.urlListen.gotURL(function(url) {
// Browser delivered an URL
browser.process(url);
});
link.receivedAnURL(function(url) {
actualWebBrowser.loadURL(url); // will eventually trigger above listener
});
What I did first wast to store every incoming URL in browser and simply eat the URL immediately when it arrives, then remove it from a 'received' list in browser, along the lines of this:
browser.recents = {} // <--- mutable state
browser.recentsExpiry = 40000;
browser.doSend = function(url) {
now = (new Date).getTime();
link.sendURL(url); // <-- URL goes out on the network
// Side-effect, mutating module state, clumsy clean up mechanism :(
browser.recents[url] = now;
setTimeout(function() { delete browser.recents[url] }, browser.recentsExpiry);
return true;
}
browser.process = function(url) {
if(/* sanity checks on `url`*/) {
now = (new Date).getTime();
var duplicate = browser.recents[url];
if(! duplicate) return browser.doSend(url);
if((now - duplicate_t) > browser.recentsExpiry) {
return browser.doSend(url);
}
return false;
}
}
It works but I'm a bit disappointed by my solution because of my habitual use of mutable state in browser. Is there a "Better Way (tm)" using immutable data structures/functional programming or the like for a situation like this?
A more functional approach to handling long-lived state is to use it as a parameter to a recursive function, and have one execution of the function responsible for handling a single "action" of some kind, then calling itself again with the new state.
F#'s MailboxProcessor is one example of this kind of approach. However it does depend on having the processing happen on an independent thread which isn't the same as the event-driven style of your code.
As you identify, the setTimeout in your code complicates the state management. One way you could simplify this out is to instead have browser.process filter out any timed-out URLs before it does anything else. That would also eliminate the need for the extra timeout check on the specific URL it is processing.
Even if you can't eliminate mutable state from your code entirely, you should think carefully about the scope and lifetime of that state.
For example might you want multiple independent browsers? If so you should think about how the recents set can be encapsulated to just belong to a single browser, so that you don't get collisions. Even if you don't need multiple ones for your actual application, this might help testability.
There are various ways you might keep the state private to a specific browser, depending in part on what features the language has available. For example in a language with objects a natural way would be to make it a private member of a browser object.

How to change the dart-sqlite code from synchronous style to asynchronous?

I'm trying to use Dart with sqlite, with this project dart-sqlite.
But I found a problem: the API it provides is synchronous style. The code will be looked like:
// Iterating over a result set
var count = c.execute("SELECT * FROM posts LIMIT 10", callback: (row) {
print("${row.title}: ${row.body}");
});
print("Showing ${count} posts.");
With such code, I can't use Dart's future support, and the code will be blocking at sql operations.
I wonder how to change the code to asynchronous style? You can see it defines some native functions here: https://github.com/sam-mccall/dart-sqlite/blob/master/lib/sqlite.dart#L238
_prepare(db, query, statementObject) native 'PrepareStatement';
_reset(statement) native 'Reset';
_bind(statement, params) native 'Bind';
_column_info(statement) native 'ColumnInfo';
_step(statement) native 'Step';
_closeStatement(statement) native 'CloseStatement';
_new(path) native 'New';
_close(handle) native 'Close';
_version() native 'Version';
The native functions are mapped to some c++ functions here: https://github.com/sam-mccall/dart-sqlite/blob/master/src/dart_sqlite.cc
Is it possible to change to asynchronous? If possible, what shall I do?
If not possible, that I have to rewrite it, do I have to rewrite all of:
The dart file
The c++ wrapper file
The actual sqlite driver
UPDATE:
Thanks for #GregLowe's comment, Dart's Completer can convert callback style to future style, which can let me to use Dart's doSomething().then(...) instead of passing a callback function.
But after reading the source of dart-sqlite, I realized that, in the implementation of dart-sqlite, the callback is not event-based:
int execute([params = const [], bool callback(Row)]) {
_checkOpen();
_reset(_statement);
if (params.length > 0) _bind(_statement, params);
var result;
int count = 0;
var info = null;
while ((result = _step(_statement)) is! int) {
count++;
if (info == null) info = new _ResultInfo(_column_info(_statement));
if (callback != null && callback(new Row._internal(count - 1, info, result)) == true) {
result = count;
break;
}
}
// If update affected no rows, count == result == 0
return (count == 0) ? result : count;
}
Even if I use Completer, it won't increase the performance. I think I may have to rewrite the c++ code to make it event-based first.
You should be able to write a wrapper without touching the C++. Have a look at how to use the Completer class in dart:async. Basically you need to create a Completer, return Completer.future immediately, and then call Completer.complete(row) from the existing callback.
Re: update. Have you seen this article, specifically the bit about asynchronous extensions? i.e. If the C++ API is synchronous you can run it in a separate thread, and use messaging to communicate with it. This could be a way to do it.
The big problem you've got is that SQLite is an embedded database; in order to process your query and provide your results, it must do computation (and I/O) in your process. What's more, in order for its transaction handling system to work, it either needs its connection to be in the thread that created it, or for you to run in serialized mode (with a performance hit).
Because these are fairly hard constraints, your plan of switching things to an asynchronous operation mode is unlikely to go well except by using multiple threads. Since using multiple connections complicates things a lot (as you can't share some things between them, such as TEMP TABLEs) let's consider going for a single serialized connection; all activity will be serialized at the DB level, but for an application that doesn't use the DB a lot it will be OK. At the C++ level, you'd be talking about calling that execute from another thread and then sending messages back to the caller thread to indicate each row and the completion.
But you'll take a real hit when you do this; in particular, you're committing to only doing one query at a time, as the technique runs into significant problems with semantic effects when you start using two connections at once and the DB forces serialization on you with one connection.
It might be simpler to do the above by putting the synchronous-asynchronous coupling at the Dart level by managing the worker thread and inter-thread communication there. That would let you avoid having to change the C++ code significantly. I don't know Dart well enough to be able to give much advice there.
Myself, I'd just stick with synchronous connection processing so that I can make my application use multi-threaded mode more usefully. I'd be taking the hit with the semantics and giving each thread its own connection (possibly allocated lazily) so that overall speed was better, but I do come from a programming community that regards threads as relatively heavyweight resources, so make of that what you will. (Heavy threads can do things that reduce the number of locks they need that it makes no sense to try to do with light threads; it's about overhead management.)

Sending HTTP request with multiple parameters having same name

I need to send a HTTP request (and get XML response) from Flash that looks similar to following:
http://example.com/somepath?data=1&data=2&data=3
I.e. having several parameters that share same name, but have different values.
Until now I used following code to make HTTP requests:
var resp:XML = new XML();
resp.onLoad = function(success:Boolean) {/*...*/};
resp.ignoreWhite = true;
var req:LoadVars = new LoadVars();
req["someParam1"] = 3;
req["someParam2"] = 12;
req.sendAndLoad("http://example.com/somepath", resp, "GET");
In this case this will not do: there will be only one parameter having last value.
What are my options? I'm using actionscript 2.
Added
I guess, I can do something like that:
var url:String = myCustomFunctionForBuildingRequestString();
var resp:XML = new XML();
resp.onLoad = function(success:Boolean) {/*...*/};
resp.load(url);
But in that case I am loosing ability to do POST requests. Any alternatives?
Changing request is not appropriate.
The standard http way of sending array data is
http://example.com/?data[0]=1&data[1]=2
But this isn't wrong either (added from comment):
http://example.com/?data[]=1&data[]=2
Sending more parameters with the same name like you're doing, in practice means that all but the last item should be ignored. This is because when reading variables, the server overwrites (in memory) any item that has the same name as that one, because renaming a variable isn't good practice and never was.
I don't know much AS (none :p) but you'd access it as a list or array or whatever data structures it has.
Although POST may be having multiple values for the same key, I'd be cautious using it, since some servers can't even properly handle that, which is probably why this isn't supported ... if you convert "duplicate" parameters to a list, the whole thing might start to choke, if a parameter comes in only once, and suddendly you wind up having a string or something ... but i guess you know what you're doing ...
I am sorry to say so, but what you want to do, is not possible in pure AS2 ... the only 2 classes available for HTTP are LoadVars and XML ... technically there's also loadVariables, but it will simply copy properties from the passed object into the request, which doesn't change your problem, since properties are unique ...
if you want to stick to AS2, you need an intermediary tier:
a server to forward your calls. if you have access to the server, then you create a new endpoint for AS2 clients, which will decode the requests and pass them to the normal endpoint.
use javascript. with flash.external::ExternalInterface you can call JavaScript code. You need to define a callback for when the operation is done, as well as a JavaScript function that you can call (there are other ways but this should suffice). Build the request string inside flash, pump it to JavaScript and let JavaScript send it to the server in a POST request and get the response back to flash through the callback.
up to you to decide which one is more work ...
side note: in AS3, you'd use flash.net::URLLoader with dataFormat set to flash.net::URLLoaderDataFormat.TEXT, and then again encode parameters to a string, and send them.
Disclaimer; I've never used Actionscript and have no means for testing this.
Putting the same variable name with several values on the query string is the standard way of sending multi-value variables (for example form checkboxes) to web servers. If LoadVars is capable of sending multiple values then it seems plausible that the values should be stored in an array:
req["someParam1"] = ["foo","bar","bas"];
There also seems to be a decode function to LoadVars, what happens if you try to import the query string you want into the object?:
req.decode("someParam1=foo&someParam1=bar&someParam1=bas");
You cannot use loadvars like this - because data can be either 1 or 2 or 3, not all of them at the same time.
You can either pass it as a comma separated list:
var req:LoadVars = new LoadVars();
req["data"] = "1,2,3";
or as an xml string, and parse it at the server. I am not familiar with manipulating xml in AS2, but this is how you'd do it in AS3:
var xml:XML = <root/>;
xml.appendChild(<data>1</data>);
xml.appendChild(<data>2</data>);
xml.appendChild(<data>3</data>);
//now pass it to loadvars
req["data"] = xml.toXMLString();
The string you send is:
<root>
<data>1</data>
<data>2</data>
<data>3</data>
</root>

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