Viewing several classes reference info using document organizer - xcode4

Is there a way to get multiple organizer windows open so I can view reference info about several classes at the same time? It's very tedious to keep doing searches and re-opening the same window. For example I want to have one window showing the NSString class ref, another showing NSCoding, another showing NSCopying, etc., so I can view them at the same time and switch quickly between them (without losing my place on each one's page). OR is there some other equivalent way of browsing multiple classes / info?

After more digging around I have not found any way to do what I was hoping with Organizer. The best suggestions all range around using alternatives such as open web browser on docs, etc. The latter is probably a good solution for most but less convenient for our group because by policy our devel systems are not allowed onto a general network. (So we are copying info to systems on the devel local network.)

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android ListView not getting updated after a modification to it's cursorLoader

I am new to android and java and working on an app that has a few remaining problems that I haven't resolved yet.
I have a main activity that is a viewPager, with each page being a fragment. If the 4 fragments 3 are extended from ListFragments and one from PreferencesFragment.
The ListFragments have CursorAdapters to get data to and from SQLite databases through providers.
I am able to get data into the database, insert, modify and query the data correctly and fill the list views ok.
My preference setting are to choose different ways of viewing the data in the database.
Not knowing how to do this, I have implemented a process where I modify the cursorLoader query to the provider with a number of different choices of the "WHERE" clause. I have worked out the logic for the preferences as they exist now, implemented the code but had some difficulty finding what to try to trigger the refresh of the ListView.
Since the "dataset" hasn't really changed, no trigger can come from there, plus that would just use the same cursor as it currently exists to run the query again and return the same results (or be smart enough to know that it doesn't need to run).
On Stack Overflow I did find a couple of references to a similar implementation that suggested reStarting the cursor loader, which would then on the reStart read the current values in the stored Preferences file, create a now modified WHERE clause that will show the sub-set of data as specified in the preference settings.
In testing the app now, even with the reStart of the cursorLoader, the ListView isn't getting refreshed.
The only time I can get it to work right is restarting the app. If I stop the app and restart it, the new values are used and the ListView presents as the preferences dictate.
In looking through Stack Overflow and the Android site, I did find another set of APIs that might have been a more natural fit for what I am trying to do, namely the Filter APIs.
First question then would be, did I go in the wrong direction on how to control the "filtered" view of the datbase. Is filtering a better approach and a recommended way of
doing what I am trying to do?
Second question would be related to the fragment lifecycle of my ListFragments to achieve this CursorLoader update.
Thanks for any input on the topic.
-Dan
Found my problem here.
Two things, the way I am trying filtering is working and from what I have seen in the
Android development site, a reference there indicated that the filtering capability is
already implemented in the CursorAdapter, CursorLoader classes I am using.
When my preference settings changed, I did a reStart of the cursorLoader, but had restarted the wrong one.
Problem solved. Any input on is there a better way would be appreciated.
Regards, Dan

Is there built-in alternative to google analytics in Liferay

I'm looking for a portlet like-solution that would collect and report usage analytics in Liferay... but google analytics is not an option, unfortunately.
Stats by community, group, session tracking, apart from the usual bounce and exit rates, referrals, origin, etc. I know I'm kind of asking the reinvention of the wheel, but there are plenty of usage data that can be collected by Liferay that google can't. I've already checked PiWik, and it looks very impressive.
Any suggestions? TIA,
As of 2015 there is Audience Targeting plugin, which (at least for Liferay 6.2) comes bundled with analytics-api / analytics-hook modules, which collect some useful analytics data. Mind now:
So far it doesn't look like there is any standalone use for them as they were introduced, I believe, to enable the content visited, page visited and other such rules in the Audience Targeting itself; you can't see the raw events in any of the provided portlets
The events are stored as rows in a SQL database, so I would be concerned about it's performance in the long run (with thousands of clicks every minute etc.), although I say this purely theoretically as I haven't done any tests myself nor checked if there are some performance enhancing measures implemented
What you can do, however, is to put together your own portlet which would create some graphs etc. based on the data stored in CT_Analytics_AnalyticsEvent table.
Right now, I dont think there is any out of the box feature available for this, you might need to create this. There can be 2 things
1) You need to create a javascript library if you need realtime/web analysis (this is same like creating google analytics lib)
2) This option is quite easy. Liferay stores everything in db, you can have a report portlet which will show the report based on the data. We did this for one project where we were tracking the session ids/ip and logged in user details for portlets.
To achieve point 2) you can create new Liferay service, which will be used to store these data and retrieve.
Hope this helps
You already mention Piwik, which is similar to google analytics. You probably have your own theme (almost everybody changes the appearance to look like their own site) and it's quite appropriate to place the relevant piwik-stats-snippet in there.
You can also, as Felix suggests, mine your log files. Liferay stores some data, your webserver access logs also are quite worth to mine. And, of course, you can change your theme to log even more for every page access, just take care that you don't create a performance bottleneck by writing too much during one page request.
So, coming back to your question: Built-in like google analytics: No. Easily integrateable (like Piwik): Yes, of course. Completely customizeable: Yes, of course.
Edit: It just happens that David has created and documented an integration that makes using Piwik even easier

What is a typical scenario for and end-user reports design?

I'm wondering what would be the typical scenario for using an end-user report designer.
What I'm thinking of is to have a base report with all the columns that I can have, also with a basic view of the report (formatting, order of columns, etc.) and then let the user to change that format and order, take out or add (from the available columns) data to it, etc.
Is that a common way to address what is called end-user designer for reports or I'm off track?
I know it depends on the user (if it's someone that can handle SQL or not for example), but is it common to have a scenario where the user can build everthing from the sql query to the formatting?
Thanks!
Sebastian
The first thing I would think about is to put them in a very tightly controlled sandbox, both for security and also to prevent monstrous, server-eating queries. Beyond that, I think giving them a "menu" of limited options is a good path. I would not give them direct access to SQL.
First question is do you want users creating SQL that could become a run away query (think Cartesian join gone wild).
Depending upon your tooling you might want to publish your report as Excel. Creating a pivot table or a simple spreadsheet may provide the flexibility you are looking for but in a safe environment. Most users can handle removing columns, formatting, etc, in Excel and there are lots of self-help references that you might not find in a report writer tool.

Categorized Document Management System

At the company I work for, we have an intranet that provides employees with access to a wide variety of documents. These documents fall into several categories and subcategories, and each of these categories have their own web page. Below is one such page (each of the links shown will link to a similar view for that category):
http://img16.imageshack.us/img16/9800/dmss.jpg
We currently store each document as a file on the web server and hand-code links to these documents whenever we need to add a new document. This is tedious and error-prone, and it also means we lack any sort of security for accessing these documents. I began looking into document management systems (like KnowledgeTree and OpenKM), however, none of these systems seem to provide a categorized view like in the preview above.
My question is ... does anyone know of any Document Management System that allow for the type of flexibility we currently have with hand-coding links to our documents into various webpages (major and minor , while also providing security, ease of use, and (less important) version control? Or do you think I'd be better off developing such a system from scratch?
If you are trying to categorize the files or folders in the document management system, That's not a difficult task. You only need to access to admin panel to maintain the folders or categorize the folders
In Laserfiche, You can easily categorize your folders regarding the departments and can also be subcategorized them
You should look into Alfresco. It's extremely extensible and provides a lot of ways of accessing the repository.
Note: click the "Developers" tab for the community edition.
My question is ... does anyone know of
any Document Management System that
allow for the type of flexibility we
currently have with hand-coding links
to our documents into various webpages
(major and minor , while also
providing security, ease of use, and
(less important) version control?
Or do you think I'd be better off developing such a system from scratch?
Well there are companies that make a living selling doc management software. Anything you can get off the shelf is going to be a huge time saver, and its going to be better than anything you could reasonably develop by hand.
I've used a few systems:
Sharepoint: although I hear some people don't like it, I didn't either ;)
HyperOffice worked really well for my company of around 150 employees and has all the features you describe.
Current company uses Confluence, I like it :) But its probably one of those tools whose pricetag isn't worth it, especially if you're only using a subset of its features like doc management.
I haven't used it, but one guy I know raves about Alfresco, a free and open source doc management system. I looked at its website, seems simple enough to use.
We also faced a similar problem. However version control was more on our priority and we did look into many solutions in and around. We found Globodox extremely easy to install and use and more important the support team was absolutely fantastic
Try Mayan EDMS, it's Django based, and open source, used it as a base and build the custom features you wish on top of it.
Code location: https://gitlab.com/mayan-edms/mayan-edms
Homepage at: http://www.mayan-edms.com
The project is also available via PyPI at: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/mayan-edms/

How do you use Excel server-side?

A client wants to "Web-enable" a spreadsheet calculation -- the user to specify the values of certain cells, then show them the resulting values in other cells.
(They do NOT want to show the user a "spreadsheet-like" interface. This is not a UI question.)
They have a huge spreadsheet with lots of calculations over many, many sheets. But, in the end, only two things matter -- (1) you put numbers in a couple cells on one sheet, and (2) you get corresponding numbers off a couple cells in another sheet. The rest of it is a black box.
I want to present a UI to the user to enter the numbers they want, then I'd like to programatically open the Excel file, set the numbers, tell it to re-calc, and read the result out.
Is this possible/advisable? Is there a commercial component that makes this easier? Are their pitfalls I'm not considering?
(I know I can use Office Automation to do this, but I know it's not recommended to do that server-side, since it tries to run in the context of a user, etc.)
A lot of people are saying I need to recreate the formulas in code. However, this would be staggeringly complex.
It is possible, but not advisable (and officially unsupported).
You can interact with Excel through COM or the .NET Primary Interop Assemblies, but this is meant to be a client-side process.
On the server side, no display or desktop is available and any unexpected dialog boxes (for example) will make your web app hang – your app will behave flaky.
Also, attaching an Excel process to each request isn't exactly a low-resource approach.
Working out the black box and re-implementing it in a proper programming language is clearly the better (as in "more reliable and faster") option.
Related reading: KB257757: Considerations for server-side Automation of Office
You definitely don't want to be using interop on the server side, it's bad enough using it as a kludge on the client side.
I can see two options:
Figure out the spreadsheet logic. This may benefit you in the long term by making the business logic a known quantity, and in the short term you may find that there are actually bugs in the spreadsheet (I have encountered tons of monster spreadsheets used for years that turn out to have simple bugs in them - everyone just assumed the answers must be right)
Evaluate SpreadSheetGear.NET, which is basically a replacement for interop that does it all without Excel (it replicates a huge chunk of Excel's non-visual logic and IO in .NET)
Although this is certainly possible using ASP.NET, it's very inadvisable. It's un-scalable and prone to concurrency errors.
Your best bet is to analyze the spreadsheet calculations and duplicate them. Now, granted, your business is not going to like the time it takes to do this, but it will (presumably) give them a more usable system.
Alternatively, you can simply serve up the spreadsheet to users from your website, in which case you do almost nothing.
Edit: If your stakeholders really insist on using Excel server-side, I suggest you take a good hard look at Excel Services as #John Saunders suggests. It may not get you everything you want, but it'll get you quite a bit, and should solve some of the issues you'll end up with trying to do it server-side with ASP.NET.
That's not to say that it's a panacea; your mileage will certainly vary. And Sharepoint isn't exactly cheap to buy or maintain. In fact, short-term costs could easily be dwarfed by long-term costs if you go the Sharepoint route--but it might the best option to fit a requirement.
I still suggest you push back in favor of coding all of your logic in a separate .NET module. That way you can use it both server-side and client-side. Excel can easily pass calculations to a COM object, and you can very easily publish your .NET library as COM objects. In the end, you'd have a much more maintainable and usable architecture.
Neglecting the discussion whether it makes sense to manipulate an excel sheet on the server-side, one way to perform this would probably look like adopting the
Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel.dll
Using this library, you can tell Excel to open a Spreadsheet, change and read the contents from .NET. I have used the library in a WinForm application, and I guess that it can also be used from ASP.NET.
Still, consider the concurrency problems already mentioned... However, if the sheet is accessed unfrequently, why not...
The simplest way to do this might be to:
Upload the Excel workbook to Google Docs -- this is very clean, in my experience
Use the Google Spreadsheets Data API to update the data and return the numbers.
Here's a link to get you started on this, if you want to go that direction:
http://code.google.com/apis/spreadsheets/overview.html
Let me be more adamant than others have been: do not use Excel server-side. It is intended to be used as a desktop application, meaning it is not intended to be used from random different threads, possibly multiple threads at a time. You're better off writing your own spreadsheet than trying to use Excel (or any other Office desktop product) form a server.
This is one of the reasons that Excel Services exists. A quick search on MSDN turned up this link: http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/archive/category/11361.aspx. That's a category list, so contains a list of blog posts on the subject. See also Microsoft.Office.Excel.Server.WebServices Namespace.
It sounds like you're talking that the user has the spreadsheet open on their local system, and you want a web site to manipulate that local spreadsheet?
If that's the case, you can't really do that. Even Office automation won't help, unless you want to require them to upload the sheet to the server and download a new altered version.
What you can do is create a web service to do the calculations and add some vba or vsto code to the Excel sheet to talk to that service.

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