I've to list, in specific folders or collections, objects expired also to anonymous users.
You know, portal_catalog returns only brains not expired. It's a useful behavior but not in this case...
To force the Catalog to return also expired contents, we've to pass a specific parameter: show_inactive.
Browsing the folder_listing (&family) code I noticed that it's possible to pass, via request, optionals parameters (contentFilter) to the query/getFolderContents. It's a nice feature to customize the query avoiding the creation of very similar listing templates.
I suppose it's necessary to create a marker interface to mark context (folders or collection) where I want to list also expired contents. For ex. IListExpired.
I imagine to ways:
1) to make a subscriber that intercepts before_traverse and , in the handler, a test to verify if the context implements the IListExpired. In positive case I made a
request.set('folderListing', {'show_inactive':True})
2) to make a viewlet for the IListExpired that in the call set
request.set('folderListing', {'show_inactive':True})
What's the best way? I suppose the first one could be an unnecessary overhead.
Vito
AFAIK, these are two separate thing: folderListing uses a method available to all CMF-based Folderish content types; show_inactive is an option of the Plone catalog, so you're not going to make it work as you're planning.
I think you should override these views and rewrite the listing using a catalog call.
you better use a browser layer for you package to do so or, a marker interface as you're planning.
Related
this is one of the few moments I couldn't find the same question that I have at this place so I'm trying to describe my problem and hope to get some help an ideas!
Let's say...
I want to design a RESTful API for a domain model, that might have entities/resources like the following:
class Product
{
String id;
String name;
Price price;
Set<Tag> tags;
}
class Price
{
String id;
String currency;
float amount;
}
class Tag
{
String id;
String name;
}
The API might look like:
GET /products
GET /products/<product-id>
PUT /prices/<price-id>?currency=EUR&amount=12.34
PATCH /products/<product-id>?name=updateOnlyName
When it comes to updating references:
PATCH /products/<product-id>?price=<price-id>
PATCH /products/<product-id>?price=
may set the Products' Price-reference to another existing Price, or delete this reference.
But how can I add a new reference of an existing Tag to a Product?
If I wanted to store that reference in a relational database, I needed a relationship table 'products_tags' for that many-to-many-relationship, which brings us to a clear solution:
POST /product_tags [product: <product-id>, tag: <tag-id>]
But a document-based NoSQL database (like MongoDB) could store this as a one-to-many-relationship for each Product, so I don't need to model a 'new resource' that has to be created to save a relationship.
But
POST /products/<product-id>/tags/ [name: ...]
creates a new Tag (in a Product),
PUT /products/<product-id>/tags/<tag-id>?name=
creates a new Tag with <tag-id> or replaces an existing
Tag with the same id (in a Product),
PATCH /products/<product-id>?tags=<tag-id>
sets the Tag-list and doesn't add a new Tag, and
PATCH /products/<product-id>/tags/<tag-id>?name=...
sets a certain attribute of a Tag.
So I might want to say something link this:
ATTACH /products/<product-id>?tags=<tag-id>
ATTACH /products/<product-id>/tags?tag=<tag-id>
So the point is:
I don't want to create a new resource,
I don't want to set the attribute of a resource, but
I want to ADD a resource to another resources attribute, which is a set. ^^
Since everything is about resources, one could say:
I want to ATTACH a resource to another.
My question: Which Method is the right one and how should the URL look like?
Your REST is an application state driver, not aimed to be reflection of your entity relationships.
As such, there's no 'if this was the case in the db' in REST. That said, you have pretty good URIs.
You talk about IDs. What is a tag? Isn't a tag a simple string? Why does it have an id? Why isn't its id its namestring?
Why not have PUT /products/<product-id>/tags/tag_name=?
PUT is idempotent, so you are basically asserting the existance of a tag for the product referred to by product-id. If you send this request multiple times, you'd get 201 Created the first time and 200 OK the next time.
If you are building a simple system with a single concurrent user running on a single web server with no concurrency in requests, you may stop reading now
If someone in between goes and deletes that tag, your next put request would re-create the tag. Is this what you want?
With optimistic concurrency control, you would pass along the ETag a of the document everytime, and return 409 Conflict if you have a newer version b on the server and the diff, a..b cannot be reconciled. In the case of tags, you are just using PUT and DELETE verbs; so you wouldn't have to diff/look at reconciliation.
If you are building a moderately advanced concurrent system, with first-writer-wins semantics, running on a single sever, you can stop reading now
That said, I don't think you have considered your transactional boundaries. What are you modifying? A resource? No, you are modifying value objects of the product resource; its tags. So then, according to your model of resources, you should be using PATCH. Do you care about concurrency? Well, then you have much more to think about with regards to PATCH:
How do you represent the diff of a hierarchial JSON object?
How do you know what PATCH requests that conflict in a semantic way - i.e. we may not care about DELETEs on Tags, but two other properties might interact semantically.
The RFC for HTTP PATCH says this:
With PATCH, however, the enclosed entity contains a set of
instructions describing how a resource currently residing on the
origin server should be modified to produce a new version. The PATCH
method affects the resource identified by the Request-URI, and it also
MAY have side effects on other resources; i.e., new resources may be
created, or existing ones modified, by the application of a PATCH.
PATCH is neither safe nor idempotent as defined by [RFC2616], Section
9.1.
I'm probably going to stop putting strange ideas in your head now. Comment if you want me to continue down this path a bit longer ;). Suffice to say that there are many more considerations that can be done.
I would like to use collective.easytemplate to generate templated emails (for content rules). However, I am not sure if it can output an objects workflow state. Anybody know if it is possible and how it is done?
Thanks.
You can, it is possible, and one way is to use the portal_workflow tool e.g. from parts/omelette/plone/app/contentrules/tests/test_action_workflow.py:
self.assertEquals('published',
self.portal.portal_workflow.getInfoFor(self.folder.d1, 'review_state'))
More generally, something like:
context.portal_workflow.getInfoFor(context, 'review_state')
in a page template should work. Or use the portal_catalog as Spanky suggests e.g. if "obj" is a catalog "brain" (i.e. part of a result set from a catalog search) then:
obj.review_state
should work.
The portal_catalog also has an index of the workflow's Review State, so if you don't already have the object you're working on (e.g. context ≠ the object) you could use the catalog, look up the object and get the review state from the resulting "brains" object.
Apparently there are ALSO browser view methods available to you as well, and I notice that one of them is workflow_state. See:
http://plone.org/documentation/manual/theme-reference/page/otherinfo
The Nlog has some ASP.NET logging features (see the list of layout renderers), for example
${aspnet-request}
For log form item, I need to know name of item.
${aspnet-request:form=myVariable}
But how to log all from items, which hames in unknown?
For example
${aspnet-request:form}
I'd write my own LayoutRenderer, myself (in fact, just did something nearly identical, recently) - one of the best parts about NLog is how extensible the framework is. Depending on how you're doing configuration will determine how you reference/load your custom layoutrenderer, but the sky is really the limit in terms of what you can do.
Off the top of my head, you could take one of two approaches with a custom renderer: wrap/extend the existing asp request renderer and just proxy all calls, or get a hook to the request object the same way the nlog one does (which is tricky; it calls out to grab the COM instance, if memory serves).
The approach I took was to embed the NameValueCollection in the outgoing LogEventInfo object itself (in the properties dictionary), then use a custom layout renderer to extract that collection and render it.
I am building a site in which we are making moderate use of email templates. As in, HTML templates which we pass tokens into like {UserName}, {Email}, {NameFirst}, etc.
I am struggling with where to store these, as far as best practice goes. I'll first show the approach I took, and I'd be really excited to hear some expert perspective as a far as alternate approaches.
I created HTML templates in a folder called /Templates/.
I call a static method in my service layer, which takes in the following arguments:
UserName
UserID
Email
TemplatePath ("~/Templates")
Email Subject
Within the service layer I have my static method SendUserEmail() which makes use of a Template class - which takes a path, loads it as a string, and has a AddToken() Method.
Within my static SendUserEmail(), I build the token list off of the method signature, and send the email.
This makes for a quite long method call in my actual usage, especially since I am calling from the web.config the "TemplatePath", and "Email Subject". I could create a utility that has a shorter method call than the ConfigurationManager.AppSettings, but my concern is more that I don't usually see method signatures this long and I feel like it's because I'm doing something wrong.
This technique works great for the emails I have now, which at the most are using the first 3 tokens. However in the future I will have more tokens to pass in, and I'm just wondering what approach to take.
Do I create methods specific to the email needing to be sent? ie. SendNewUserRegistration(), SendMarketingMaterial(), and each has a different signature for the parameters?
I am using ASP.NET Membership, which contains probably the extend of all the fields I'll ever need. There are three main objects, aspnet_User, aspnet_Mebership and aspnet_profile. If it was all contained in one object, I would have just passed that in. Is there performance concerns with passing in all 3, to get all the fields I need? That is versus just passing in aspnet_User.UserID, aspnet_User.Email, etc?
I could see passing in a dictionary with the token entries, but I'm just wondering if that is too much to ask the calling page?
Is there a way to stick these in a config file of it's own called Templates.config, which has tags like -
<Templates>
<EmailTemplate Name="New User Registration">
<Tokens>
<UserName>
<UserID>
<Email>
</Tokens>
<Message Subject="Hi welcome...">
Hi {UserName}...
</Message>
</EmailTemplate>
</Templates>
I guess the main reason I'm asking, is because I'm having a hard time determining where the responsibility should be as far as determining what template to use, and how to pass in parameters. Is it OK if the calling page has to build the dictionary of TokenName, TokenValue? Or should the method take each in as a defined parameter? This looks out of place in the web.config, because I have 2 entries for and , and it feels like it should look more nested.
Thank you. Any techniques or suggestions of an objective approach I can use to ask whether my approach is OK.
First of all I would like to suggest you to use NVelocity as a template engine. As for main problem I think you can create an abstract class MailMessage and derive each one for every needed message (with unique template). So you will use this like following:
MailMessage message = new UserRegistrationMessage(tokens);
//some code that sends this message
Going this way you force each concrete XXXMessage class to be responsible for storing a template and filling it with the given tokens. How to deal with tokens? The simpliest way is to create a dictionary before passing it to the message, so each concrete message class will know how to deal with passed dictionary and what tokens it should contain, but you also need to remember what tokens it should contain. Another way (I like it more) is to create a general abstract type TokenSet and a derived one for every needed unique set of tokens. For example you can create a UserMessageTokenSet : TokenSet and several properties in it:
UserNameToken
SomeUserProfileDataToken
etc. So using this way you will always know, what data you should set for each token set and
UserRegistrationMessage will know what to take from this tokenSet.
There are a lot of ways to go. If you will describe you task better I think I will try suggest you something more concrete. But general idea is listed above. Hope it helps =)
How would you tackle this problem:
I have data in my data store. Each item has information about:
URL = an arbitrary number of first route segments that will be used with requests
some item type = display will be related to this type (read on)
title = used for example in navigation around my application
etc.
Since each item can have an arbitrary number of segments, I created a custom route, that allows me to handle these kind of requests without using the default route and having a single greedy route parameter.
Item type will actually define in what way should content of a particular item be displayed to the client. I was thinking of creating just as many controllers to not have too much code in a single controller action.
So how would you do this in ASP.NET MVC or what would you suggest would be the most feasible way of doing this?
Edit: A few more details
My items are stored in a database. Since they can have very different types (not inheritable) I thought of creating just as many controllers. But questions arise:
How should I create these controllers on each request since they are related to some dynamic data? I could create my own Controller factory or Route handler or possibly some other extension points as well, but which one would be best?
I want to use MVC basic functionality of using things like Html.ActionLink(action, controller, linkText) or make my own extension like Html.ActionLink(itemType, linkText) to make it even more flexible, so Action link should create correct routes based on Route data (because that's what's going on in the background - it goes through routes top down and see which one returns a resulting URL).
I was thinking of having a configuration of relation between itemType and route values (controller, action, defaults). Defaults setting may be tricky since defaults should be deserialized from a configuration string into an object (that may as well be complex). So I thought of maybe even having a configurable relation between itemType and class type that implements a certain interface like written in the example below.
My routes can be changed (or some new ones added) in the data store. But new types should not be added. Configuration would provide these scenarios, because they would link types with route defaults.
Example:
Interface definition:
public interface IRouteDefaults
{
object GetRouteDefaults();
}
Interface implementation example:
public class DefaultType : IRouteDefaults
{
public object GetRouteDefaults()
{
return new {
controller = "Default",
action = "Show",
itemComplex = new Person {
Name = "John Doe",
IsAdmin = true
}
}
}
Configuration example:
<customRoutes>
<route name="Cars" type="TypeEnum.Car" defaults="MyApp.Routing.Defaults.Car, MyApp.Routing" />
<route name="Fruits" type="TypeEnum.Fruit" defaults="MyApp.Routing.Defaults.Fruit, MyApp.Routing" />
<route name="Shoes" type="TypeEnum.Shoe" defaults="MyApp.Routing.Defaults.Shoe, MyApp.Routing" />
...
<route name="Others" type="TypeEnum.Other" defaults="MyApp.Routing.Defaults.DefaultType, MyApp.Routing" />
</customRoutes>
To address performance hit I can cache my items and work with in-memory data and avoid accessing the database on each request. These items tend to not change too often. I could cache them for like 60 minutes without degrading application experience.
There is no significant performance issue if you define a complex routing dictionary, or just have one generic routing entry and handle all the cases yourself. Code is code
Even if your data types are not inheritable, most likely you have common display patterns. e.g.
List of titles and summary text
item display, with title, image, description
etc
If you can breakdown your site into a finite number of display patterns, then you only need to make those finite controllers and views
You them provide a services layer which is selected by the routing parameter than uses a data transfer object (DTO) pattern to take the case data and move it into the standard data structure for the view
The general concept you mention is not at all uncommon and there are a few things to consider:
The moment I hear about URL routing taking a dependency on data coming from a database, the first thing I think about is performance. One way to alleviate potentialy performance concerns is to use the built in Route class and have a very generic pattern, such as "somethingStatic/{*everythingElse}". This way if the URL doesn't start with "somethingStatic" it will immediately fail to match and routing will continue to the next route. Then you'll get all the interesting data as the catch-all "everythingElse" parameter.
You can then associate this route with a custom route handler that derives from MvcRouteHandler and overrides GetHttpHandler to go to the database, make sense of the "everythingElse" value, and perhaps dynamically determine which controller and action should be used to handle this request. You can get/set the routing values by accessing requestContext.RouteData.Values.
Whether to use one controller and one action or many of one or many of each is a discussion unto itself. The question boils down to how many different types of data do you have? Are they mostly similar (they're all books, but some are hardcover and some are softcover)? Completely different (some are cars, some are books, and some are houses)? The answer to this should be the same answer you'd have if this were a computer programming class and you had to decide from an OOP perspective whether they all have a base class and their own derives types, or whether they could be easily represented by one common type. If they're all different types then I'd recommend different controllers - especially if each requires a distinct set of actions. For example, for a house you might want to see an inspection report. But for a book you might want to preview the first five pages and read a book review. These items have nothing in common: The actions for one would never be used for the other.
The problem described in #3 can also occur in reverse, though: What if you have 1,000 different object types? Do you want 1,000 different controllers? Without having any more information, I'd say for this scenario 1,000 controllers is a bit too much.
Hopefully these thoughts help guide you to the right solution. If you can provide more information about some of the specific scenarios you have (such as what kind of objects these are and what actions can apply to them) then the answer can be refined as well.