I'm not sure why this is happening, but the last activity date for all my users is showing the same. I thought it was the way I was pulling the data from the database, but I checked my data, and it shows the same for all users.
Is there something I need to be doing to get this field updated? I'm not doing anything special with this field other than reporting it.
I found the answer here in this article. Apparently, when I pull up the list of users and I pull the profile for each, it calls a stored procedure that in turn, updates the LastActivityDate of each user to the current date and time.
Related
What would be considered best practice for implementing a persistent shopping cart in an ASP.net Web Forms(*) based application? The only built-in way seems to be involving the Session state, which is not ideal because once you close the browser... it's gone. One way seems to be involving the localStorage via Javascript, but that creates awkward client/server mixups, as the data processing is meant to be done server side.
(* please pay attention to that part - MVC or Blazor based solutions will not work for this particular case)
Well, I can't imagine any practical application that involves database operations having ANY kind of suggesting that some kind of session, or view state will have ANY kind of relevance to database operations?
Be it a person filling out an invoice, or making orders or anything?
Not at all different then if you were writing a desktop application.
If a user is building up a list of items or "things" for/in an order?
Then as they build up such an order, then a database "order" record and structure will be built up. No different than say even building an invoice system say for the desktop with ms-access.
The only "use" of say session in most cases allows you to pass information from one page to another. (In place of say using parameters in the URL).
So, person might have a shopping basket of items (in your database, right!!!!).
They browse/search for more things to add to that shopping cart.
So say while on some items page, they choose to buy/select. When they make that choice, then you might say shove the ProductID into session, and then jump back into the current basket of items page, check session for a new product, and then insert/add that new item to the basket (which was being saved in the database).
If they log off, then fine. When they log back on, then you can load the current basket of items for display, and then allow them to continue shopping.
the only thing you going to use session for (or viewstate) is to allow the person to jump around looking at items, and then upon selection, you get/grab that particular product ID into session, jump back to the basket page, and add this new item from session, and then display their list of selected items.
So, in your database you have their current active order/basket, and thus when the user logs on, you can jump to that most recent or only "active order" page, and pull that order from the database. And then display all the details etc.
No session or viewstate would be required nor used at that point in time.
Not really any different than building up a invoice in a accounting package, then closing the program, and then next day, you launch the accounting package, load up the invoice, and thus can continue working on that invoice until you are done.
So, they look at the order, and go, "hum", I want to browse some more. So, they go look at/buy/choose/select another product. When they do, then you can now jump back to the current orders/basket page, and check session for the value just passed, add to order/basket, and now display the items in the basket, and that one "product id" in session can be pulled out, and is no longer required.
so session is not some kind of "magic" database system but is really only a feature to allow you to persist some values for a very short time, and only a simple "id" or simple variable in code for a rather short time. So session is ideal for passing a few values for use in code behind variables from one page to another.
Thus things like an address, name, products selected? That goes in the database, and not session.
For the most part, such software really not much different then desktop software.
You save and build up the list of items attached to a given order, and that order going to exist in the database.
So no real development approach here suggests saving their name, billing address, their past orders, the current new basket/order they have? That all going to be saved in a database.
So, session() is only relevant in most cases to "pass" some values, or "hold" some values for code behind.
So, if they select some product from a grid, you would shove productID into session, jump to the basket, add the new item in code behind to that order, and then let the page pull the information from the database to display items in that order.
So "session" persisting of data? That really only for a few variables that your code might need for some data operations, but your data for that order is not persisted in session - it goes into the database.
Session has VERY little to do with using a database system to "manage" and "hold" and "have" the order saved in the database system.
Session is not some kind of database - only a "active" storage of some variables you might need during program operation.
Easy, store it in database for logged in user.
use local storage or cookies for guess.
Can anyone help or provide me with some suggestions for the below query.
I have a web form (Minutes of Meeting) and 8 users that need to access this web page and update their area. A user may have more than one area to update and essentially i would like to some how lock down the web page if possible when a user is using it so that no other user can update this web page till joe bloggs has finished with it.
I have a Active Directory security group set up to restrict the site to that group of users only, but i need to think of a solution to the above?
Is there a way i can do this via a web control or via SQL?
There must be better ways to do it. However, Is it possible for you to introduce a sql table column similar to "UpdateInProgress" (bit). Any update process sees that column, If 0 then It updates to 1 and after It saves the changes and updates back to 0 so that the form is available for other to update. If update process sees 1, It can't update the web form because update is in progress.
I also suggest to introduce another column named "UpdateInProgressBy" to check who has opened it for editing.
First of all we must note that there is a big time from the moment the user reads the data, get it in a page, change them and then try to write them back. So we are not talking for the lock command on SQL, nether any other lock that happens in milliseconds and help to synchronize threads, but here we must synchronize people and what they write.
There is also a problem if the user leave the page for any reason and this can make the data lock for ever.
This problem can solve with two approaches.
the easy one, when a user try to save data you must check if the same data have been change in the middle, and warn him, or show a merge dialog, or merge programmaticall, or something similar - I do not know what you won.
the difficult way is to constantly monitor the page that read and change the data, and keep this monitor results on a common table in the data base, and there if a user have been and stay on page, the rest users get a warning and read only data, until the user go.
This monitor must be made with javasript and must know even if a user abandon the page.
SET TRANSACTION ISOLATION LEVEL as SERIALIZABLE
for more information check this link:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms173763.aspx
I'm building a website that will be used by employees to log work that they've completed. The site contains a page to submit the information, a page to view the information and a page with the employees personal info like name, email, phone, etc. I'm using ASP.NET Membership for authentication. All code will be VB. My questions:
1) ASP.NET Membership only stores the username and email of members. I want to store additional information like first and last name, phone number, etc. Can I just update the tables in the membership database to include this information? Or should I store this information in a separate database? My goal is to populate text boxes on one of the pages with data specific to the user that is currently logged in.
2) The work completed will be stored in another database since it seems logical to keep it separate from membership data. What is the most efficient way to pull and display records from this separate "work" database that are specific to the user who has logged in and been authenticated against the member database?
3) I'm having trouble with the design of tables for the "work" database. Each record stored in the database will represent a days worth of work. However, a number of activities will occur during that day. Each activity will have a type of activity, location and amount of time worked. An employee can complete 1 activity or 100 activities. I assume I'm going to need a table just for the activities and then relate it to the work table. Does this sound correct?
For your first Point i will suggest you to create your own table of User and relate this table with membership user table with guid viz. keep on userid file in your table and relate it with membership table.
Second point will automatically get solved once you will create your own user table, all you need is to relate work and user table(created by you) to fetch the records from work
And at last if you are creating new table for activities how come you will relate it to your work table, again you will have multiple occurrence for record, instead i would suggest do not create another table for activities keep it in work table itself as if you are creating a new table, you will have to provide relationship with work which will result in redundancy.
Hope this helps.
I just set up user profiles using asp.net 3.5 using wvd.
For each user I would like to store data that they will be updating every day.
For example, every time they go for a run they will update time and distance. I intend to allow them to also look up their history of distance and time from any past date.
My question is, what does the database schema usually look like for such a set up? Currently asp.net set up a db for me when I made user profiles. Do I just add an extra table for every user? Should there be one big table with all users data? How do I relate a user I'd to their specific data? Etc....
I have never done this before so any ideas on how this is usually done would be very helpful. Thank you.
One easy way is to just add a (one) table to aspnetdb database, this table will be used to track your running session data for all the user profiles. Name it RunnerSessions or something similar, add the following columns to the table:
UserID (use this field to store the profile id from ASP.NET)
SessionDate (use this field to store the run session date)
SessionDistance (use this field to record the distance from that particular run session)
It is a good idea to make UserID + SessionDate fields as your primary key for the RunnerSessions table or create another field called SessionID and set it as autonumber.
To relate each profile to a particular record in the RunnerSessions table, you can store the HttpContext.Current.User.Identity.Name in the UserID field mentioned above.
You are asking for a relational database design. As relational database design is an art in itself and heavily depends on a lot of case specific conditions I will not be able to provide you with a ready-to-go schema.
As I never read any online tutorial about this I will also not post a link here. But you should be able to get started by searching for a relational database design (tutorial) in your favourite search engine.
Maybe someone knows about a good tutorial and can post a link?
I need to store IDs (Contact IDs, Claim IDs, etc.) between multiple .aspx pages.
At the moment I am storing the ID in the Session and have set the Session timeout to 300 minutes. However, I am still getting errors because users are attempting to perform operations after the Session has expired.
I think users are leaving their web broswers open, locking their computers, going home for the evening, coming in the next morning and attempting to pick up where they left off.
I don't want to use the Querystring. Cookies are more for User IDs than Contact IDs and Claim IDs. Viewstate is only maintained per page. Persisting Session to a database seems unnecessarily complicated. I don't want to extend the Session timeout too much.
I'd ideally like them to be able to pick up where they left off in the morning.
What are the best practices for dealing with storing IDs between pages? How can I do this without them receiving a message saying their session has expired? Am I overlooking something obvious?!
I would put all this information into a database. This is classic use of a database, a means to store information needed for the application.
Cookies are bad because you have to assume they will be at the same PC from session to session. You have seem the problem with sessions.
If you do not want to use a database then you can use a file on the server. And read from that file.
You might actually find it much easier than complicated to create a sort of "landing pad" database where a user's item history is stored, or MRU list. I wouldn't tie it to their immediate session or cookie though. Let the session maintain the user state, let the database handle where they were when they went home or took that 7 hour lunch break.
As #David said this is a classic use of databases.
If you are in need of doing this without using databases, you can fall back on some of the "tricks" (read hacks) that are used in non-dynamic languages:
Create a hidden field which exists on every page, name the field appropriately for the data you are storing.
When you render the page create an XML fragment containing your ids and other data, encrypt it for display purposes (using base64 etc), place the value into the hidden field you created.
When the page is posted back, reverse #2 and recover your data, then apply the page changes.
Rinse and repeat. :)
Really this is not a very scalable solution, as the XML and base64 encoding will add 50% or more to your data size, and if there is significant data (100's of KB) this process can get out of control.
The last time I was asked to use this solution it was for moving a list of well defined data around with an application that did not always have access to the DB. It worked ok for the purposes, but was definitely not ideal.
You could go ahead and store the IDs in viewstate on the page, then on each page that requires that ID have a settable property for that page. Before redirecting to the page instantiate it and set the ID property.
You're correct, storing this type of data in session isn't really what it's meant for. Viewstate is a better mechanism for this.