Let's suppose I have Posts and Comments collections. A Comment record contains the attributes comment and postId. A Post record has a title attribute.
Now I have a separate page for a single comment (very unlikely irl, but just for the sake of it) where I want to show the comment of course but also the Post title. How would I do this, or more in general: how do you reference an attribute from a "parent" (parent between quotes because Mongo is not a referential database)?
One option I often see is to denormalize and also add the Post title as attribute to the Comment record. Although I do see use cases for denormalization, I am worried about the maintenance nightmare. When the Post title gets update, you also need to update them in all other collections where it is used as denormalized attribute.
So, my solution would be to subscribe also to the Post on the Comment page. Then in commentDetails.html I have this:
{{post_title}}
And in commentDetails.js I would have this:
Template.commentDetails.helpers({
post_title: function() {
return Posts.findOne({_id: this.postId}).title;
}
});
Is this the way to do this?
Edit: clarified the question and updated the example.
After being pointed on Reddit to a detailed article about this subject, I have implemented as the "naive approach" for now. I am looking into option 4 to make it really reactive.
Related
I'm not sure if I'm using it correctly, but I can't get the updated_{$meta_type}_meta hook to work. There is a updated_post_meta hook which runs when you save a posts meta (and possibly other times, I haven't checked). I can't find much reference to updated_{$meta_type}_meta apart from here, so I don't really understand if I am even hooking it correctly, because I didn't read it properly at first and so thought it should be used like: updated_CPT_meta, but that didn't work, so I tried a meta key instead of the CPT.
My question is, what should $meta_type be ?
Of course I found this straight after I posted
As the page at https://core.trac.wordpress.org/browser/tags/3.8.1/src/wp-includes/meta.php#L0 states, $meta_type Type of object metadata is for (e.g., comment, post, or user).
So, you should just use it as updated_post_meta for any CPTs also.
duh.
I am trying to build a "Latest Comments" widget for Orchard CMS.
I know I could directly query the SQL, but is there an API I can use in Orchard to get the latest comments on the whole blog (and which blog post each comment belongs to, etc)? I've been looking at IContentManager::Query, but I'm not exactly clear how I can use this to get the information I want.
Check out the CommentsService in the Orchard.Comments module. Orchard.Comments.Services.CommentsService. It's really close to what you need. Since the service returns the query, you could just tack on some additional sorting like this...
var query = commentsService.GetCommentsForCommentedContent(blogId);
var comments = query.OrderByDescending(c => c.CommentDateUtc).Slice(10);
Something like that.
Are there any open source/free frameworks available that take some of the pain out of building HTML e-mails in C#?
I maintain a number of standalone ASP.NET web forms whose main function is to send an e-mail. Most of these are in plain text format right now, because doing a nice HTML presentation is just too tedious.
I'd also be interested in other approaches to tackling this same problem.
EDIT: To be clear, I'm interested in taking plain text form input (name, address, phone number) and dropping it into an HTML e-mail template. That way the receipient would see a nicely formatted message instead of the primitive text output we're currently giving them.
EDIT 2: As I'm thinking more about this and about the answers the question has generated so far, I'm getting a clearer picture of what I'm looking for. Ideally I'd like a new class that would allow me to go:
HtmlMessage body = new HtmlMessage();
body.Header(imageLink);
body.Title("Some Text That Will Display as a Header");
body.Rows.Add("First Name", FirstName.Text);
The HtmlMessage class builds out a table, drops the images in place and adds new rows for each field that I add. It doesn't seem like it would be that hard to write, so if there's nothing out there, maybe I'll go that route
Andrew Davey created Postal which lets you do templated emails using any of the ASP.NET MVC view engines. Here's a video where he talks about how to use it.
His examples:
public class HomeController : Controller {
public ActionResult Index() {
dynamic email = new Email("Example");
email.To = "webninja#example.com";
email.FunnyLink = DB.GetRandomLolcatLink();
email.Send();
return View();
}
}
And the template using Razor:
To: #ViewBag.To From: lolcats#website.com Subject: Important Message
Hello, You wanted important web links right? Check out this:
#ViewBag.FunnyLink
<3
The C# port of StringTemplate worked well for me. I highly recommend it. The template file can have a number of named tokens like this:
...
<b>
Your information to login is as follows:<br />
Username: $username$<br />
Password: $password$<br />
</b>
...
...and you can load this template and populate it like this:
notificationTemplate.SetAttribute("username", Username);
notificationTemplate.SetAttribute("password", Password);
At the end, you get the ToString() of the template and assign it to the MailMessage.Body property.
I recently implemented what you're describing using MarkDownSharp. It was pretty much painless.
It's the same framework (minus a few tweaks) that StackOverflow uses to take plain-text-formatted posts and make them look like nice HTML.
Another option would be to use something like TinyMCE to give your users a WYWIWYG HTML editor. This would give them more power over the look and feel of their emails, but it might just overcomplicate things.
Bear in mind that there are also some security issues with user-generated HTML. Regardless of which strategy you use, you need to make sure you sanitize the user's input so they can't include scary things like script tags in their input.
Edit
Sorry, I didn't realize you were looking for an email templating solution. The simplest solution I've come up with is to enable text "macros" in user-generated content emails. So, for example, the user could input:
Dear {RecipientFirstName},
Thank you for your interest in {ClientCompanyName}. The position you applied for has the following minimum requirements:
- B.S. or greater in Computer Science or related field
- ...
And then we'd do some simple parsing to break this down to:
Dear {0},
Thank you for your interest in {1}. The position you applied for has the following minimum requirements:
- B.S. or greater in Computer Science or related field
- ...
... and ...
0 = "RecipientFirstName"
1 = "ClientCompanyName"
...
We store these two components in our database, and whenever we're ready to create a new instance from this template, we evaluate the values of the given property names, and use a standard format string call to generate the actual content.
string.Format(s, macroCodes.Select(c => EvaluateMacroCode(c, obj)).ToArray());
Then I use MarkdownSharp, along with some HTML sanitizing methods, to produce a nicely-formatted HTML email message:
Dear John,
Thank you for your interest in Microsoft. The position you applied for has the following minimum requirements:
B.S. or greater in Computer Science or related field
...
I'd be curious to know if there's something better out there, but I haven't found anything yet.
I currently have nodes setup on my site, and each node belongs to a particular menu (not primary or secondary prebuilt menues).
How can i find out which menu a node belongs to?
Maybe this is what you mean:
$trail = menu_get_active_trail();
$lastInTrail = end($trail);
$menu_name = $lastInTrail['menu_name'];
menu_get_active_trail() returns a breadcrumbs like array, the last breadcrumb represents the current node.
Cheers,
Laurens Meurs, Rotterdam
I'm a noob, so don't bash me if what I'm going to write is worthless babbling.
I think you can't do that directly, unless there's some smart module out there that would do all the nasty SQL queries necessary to check this.
Node info is stored in the SQL table "node", and is identified merely by NID (node ID, which is the node number that appears after /?q=node/ in the address). Their aliases, if any, are stored in "url_alias" table, where you can find columns "src" and "dst", identifying the original and the aliased path (for instance, src='node/123', dst='my/url/alias'). The menu links can be found in the table "menu_links", where you can find the columns "menu_name" (the machine-radable name of a menu) and "link_path" (either the node/... or the alias).
So, what you'd need to do is the following:
get the current node's NID
query "url_alias" if there's an alias for node/NID and retrieve it, otherwise leave node/NID
query the "menu_links" table for the path you've determined and retrieve "none" or the menu's machine-readable name
You could then also query the table "menu_custom" to check what's the human-readable name of the menu you've determined.
Anyway, that's a complicated query (several queries?) and I'm a MySQL ignorant, so I can't help you with the actual code you'll need to use to check all that :P.
This isn't a direct solution and I see from your reply to a previous answer that you didn't wanted the simplest solution possible, but I thought I'd mention this option. The Menu Node API module maintains a table which Drupal lacks, a node-menu relationship table.
The module does nothing on its own, but there seems to be contributed modules which build on this, so depending on how complex your problem is it might be a starting point.
http://drupal.org/node/584984
Updated: Sorry guys, didn't even realize I had posted this link. I think I intended it as a draft and simply posted it when closing tabs. That said, mingos (above) is right on.
My link is to a function menu_get_active_menu_name() that appears to provide you with an array containing the active menu for the current page. As I presume that is what you are using it for, it would be a nice way to abstract yourself away from the database calls that might cause problems down the line.
I myself have never tried it, which is probably why I didn't elaborate and post. well... at least didn't post on purpose.
...or, in other words, how to create a simple join as I would do in SQL?
Suppose I want the following information:
Just as an example:
a person's full name
a person's hobbies.
His full name is in a (content profile) node type 'name_and_address' and his hobbies are in 'hobbies'.
In SQL, I would link them together by node.uid.
I've seen a bit about using relationships, but that goes with user-node-refs.
I just want the same user from one content-type and the other.
Now how could I get his name and his hobbies in 1 view?
There is a how to here does this do the job?
If not...
Views can be extended with custom joins, filters etc. If you are lucky there will be a module for this already. Some modules even provide their own views plugins.
You can write your own views plugins, although the documentation is a little fragmented.
The other thing that should be noted is that views isn't always the answer. Sometimes writing a custom query and display handler will do what you want with much less hassle.
Look at the relationships section of the view. This allows you to relate (ie join) different types of content (ie tables). It's not especially intuitive to someone used to SQL, but this video explains much of it. http://www.drupalove.com/drupal-video/demonstration-how-use-views-2s-relationships
You could use views_embed_view() in your template files to manually specify where they appear (and by extension render one view right below another).
You could override this function in a custom module (modulename_embed_view($name, $display_id)) in order to selectively edit what data is allowed out to the page.
Ex):
function modulename_embed_view($name, $display_id) {
if (strcmp($_GET['q'], 'node/123') === 0) {
$view = views_get_view($name);
$view2 = views_get_view('second view');
$output = $view['some element'] . $view2['element'];
}
return $output;
}
I know that this is very much a hack - I just wanted to show how one might use php to manually render and modify views in your template files.