Is there some sort of configuration settings in FlashBuilder 4.5 where you can easily switch between webservice urls? Right now I have to delete and recreate the web service every time I switch from local to production and vice versa.
The need/requirement is this – Since I work in a startup, we keep changing servers, and their IP addresses. And being a service oriented application – I need to be able to edit the webservice endpoints in my Flex application in a easy manner every time this happens.
My Solution for this -
Assumption is that my webservice endpoint looks like this -
http:////ListAllServices/
1) Create a file config.xml in a folder named “settings” that sits in the root folder of your Flex application – outside the “src” folder. And the config.xml will be a simple xml file of the following format -
localhostTestFlexApp
At the end of this exercise the directory structure of your flex source code will look like this -
flex_src(root of the source code)
-com(some source folder)
–testapp
—view
—
-images
-settings
–config.xml
-appName.mxml
2) Now in your application code, setup a HTTPService object either in mxml or action script. Set the url of that object to this value- “settings/config.xml” – And the above xml fiel containing the current settings will be loaded into memory .
Now you can store these values in a singleton object and construct your Webservice call at runtime.
And whenever you want to move this to a new server in production, edit the tag of your config.xml and you should be good to go.
And this can be automated as well via the EnvGen ant task.
This is not the best way but yes it is very helpful while switching among servers.
Alrighty... The way I was doing it before in fact worked. The problem was browser caching.
For the benefit of others I modified the subsclass for the generated service and replace the wsdl variable with whatever endpoint I need.
Related
I have inhherited a vs2010 c# web project (asp.net). It has a web reference to a web service. There's been a slight change to the service - a new operation has been added. I'd like to update the proxy class so that i can call the new operation but i can't find the class. I seem to remember there used to be a "show all files" button in solution explorer that would reveal the proxy class but i can see no sign of that. Unfortunately, i'm not able to refresh the proxy by pointing it at the web service metadata wsdl because vs is no longer installed on any pc that can reach the web service. Anyone know where i can find the proxy class?
It doesn't matter you can't find it in Visual Studio - you can always locate a proper file in your filesystem, under the project directory.
Problem was, the app was running - doh!
Yes, you are right. There is a "Show all files" icon in the tool bar. It will only be available when you have a project selected, so you want to select the web service's parent project:
Expand the service reference and under it the file called Reference.cs is the proxy class.
You should NOT be hand editing this though. You should make the changes to the service and then regenerate the proxy using the Update Service Reference right click option. But then if you really can't do that as you say, then just hand edit the file. But beware that any changes you make will be lost if someone does regenerate it again in the future. Very Risky! (I prey you are using source control)
There is a WSDL.exe command line tool.
Copy and execute this command line tool in the PC where you can have access to the WebService, it will generates the proxy again and you can replace them with the files in your project.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/7h3ystb6(v=vs.80).aspx
Folks,
I have an ASP.NET project which is pretty n-tier, by namespace, but I need to separate into three projects: Data Layer, Middle Tier and Front End.
I am doing this because...
A) It seems the right thing to do, and
B) I am having all sorts of problems running unit tests for ASP.NET hosted assemblies.
Anyway, my question is, where do you keep your config info?
Right now, for example, my middle tier classes (which uses Linq to SQL) automatically pull their connection string information from the web.config when instantiating a new data context.
If my data layer is in another project can/should it be using the web.config for configuration info?
If so, how will a unit test, (typically in a separate assembly) provide soch configuration info?
Thank you for your time!
We keep them in a global "Settings" file which happens to be XML. This file contains all the GLOBAL settings, one of which is a connection string pointing to the appropriate server as well as username and password. Then, when my applications consume it, they put the specific catalog (database) they need in the connection string.
We have a version of the file for each operating environment (prod, dev, staging, etc). Then, with two settings -- file path (with a token representing the environment) and the environment -- I can pick up the correct settings files.
This also has the nice benefit of a 30 second failover. Simple change the server name in the settings file and restart the applications (web) and you have failed over (of course you have to restore your data if necessary).
Then when the application starts, we write the correct connection string to the web.config file (if it is different). With this, we can change a website from DEV to PROD by changing one appSettings value.
As long as there isn't too much, it's convenient to have it in the web.config. Of course, your DAL should have absolutely no clue that it comes from there.
A good option is for your data layer to be given its config information when it is called upon to do something, and it will be called upon to do something when a web call comes in. Go ahead and put the information in your web.config. In my current project, I have a static dictionary of connection strings in my data layer, which I fill out like so in a routine called from my global.asax:
CAPPData.ConnectionStrings(DatabaseName.Foo) =
ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings("FooConnStr").ConnectionString()
CAPPData.ConnectionStrings(DatabaseName.Bar) =
ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings("BarConnStr").ConnectionString()
etc.
"Injecting" it like this can be good for automated testing purposes, depending on how/if you test your DAL. For me, it's just because I didn't want to make a separate configuration file.
For testing purposes don't instantiate DataContext with default ctor. Pass connection string info to constructor.
I prefer to use IoC frameworks to inject connection to data context then inject context to other classes.
We have a series of web services that live in different environments (dev/qa/staging/production) that are accessed from a web application, a web site, and other services. There are a few different service areas as well. So for production, we have services on four different boxes.
We conquered the db connection string issue by checking the hostname in global.asax and setting some application wide settings based on that hostname. There is a config.xml that is in source control that list the various hostnames and what settings they should get.
However, we haven't found an elegant solution for web services. What we have done so far is add references to all the environments to the projects and add several using statements to the files that use the services. When we checkout the project, we uncomment the appropriate using statement for the environment we're in.
It looks something like this:
// Development
// using com.tracking-services.dev
// using com.upload-services.dev
// QA
// using com.tracking-services.qa
// using com.upload-services.qa
// Production
// using com.tracking-services.www
// using com.upload-services.www
Obviously as we use web services more and more this technique will get more and more burdensome.
I have considered putting the namespaces into web.config.dev, web.config.qa, etc and swapping them out on application start in global.asax. I don't think that will work because by the time global.asax is run the compilation is already done and the web.config changes won't have much effect.
Since the "best practices" include using web services for data access, I'm hoping this is not a unique problem and someone has already come up with a solution.
Or are we going about this whole thing wrong?
Edit:
These are asmx web services. There is no url referenced in the web.config that I can find.
Make one reference and use configuration to switch the target urls as appropriate. No reason to have separate proxies at all.
How can one specify the connection string in a config file of a class library and later modify this when used in a ASP.NET Web Application?
The Class library is a data access layer that has a Dataset connecting to a database based on a connection string specified in a config file (Settings.settings/app.config).
This class library is used in a web application where user inputs data and is written to the database using the DAL classes & methods exposed in the class library.
Now, I want to migrate this application from development environment to testing environment and later to production. The problem I'm facing is that after migrating to testing, the app in testing still connects to development database. I've changed the connection string mentioned in <class library>.dll.config file but this seems to have no impact.
Can someone explain the right way to achieve this? Thanks in advance for any help. Cheers.
With the .config files the name has to match the main executing assembly. For example I had a situation like yours, I needed a class library to have its settings in a .dll.config file. While it was able to reference it the actual application would not be able to read the config file because it was expecting .exe.config. Renaming the .dll.config to .exe.config fixed the problem.
In your case migrating your connection strings from .dll.config to web.config should fix your problem!
Good luck!
Joshua is partly right ... For posterity I would like to add a bit more to this answer as I have delt with the same problems on several occasions. First, one must consider their architecture. There are several issues you can run into with .config files in ASP.NET based on deployments.
Considering the architectural ramifications:
Single tier (one server):
A simple web application may be able to leverage a reference to the sites Web.config file and resolve your issues. This would be a fine solution for a single tier application. In the case of a windows application leveraged as a .exe file, the App.config will work too.
Multi-tier (more than one server):
Here is where things became a bit hairy for me the first time I was working with .config files across boundries. Remember the hierarchy of the config structure and keep this in mind (MSDN Article on .Config structure) - there is a machine.config at the root in the appropriate ASP.NET folder. These reside at each physical server. These are overridden by the site Web.config (or App.config) which are in turn overridden by subfolder .config files. If you have more than one .config file you may want to use one of the methods to pass the file path for the specific .config you want to use. More importantly, these files each may have connection information. ASP.NET's machine.config holds some for the framework ... so you should at least be senstive to the fact this is an "inheritance" chain. Second, any changes to the Web.config file once deployed will tell the application to restart. This will result in loss of state (bad if you have active users on the site). The way around this is to keep a separate .config file (e.g. connections.config) and put a reference to that file in the Web.config. This will allow you to change the connection information (e.g. password) without having to restart the application. Here is a link to more info: MSDN: Working with Configuration Files. This article lays out all the details you need to be aware of in a normal server / IIS deployed application. Keep in mind that the .config files are mainly intended for applications, not libraries. If you have several tiers, chances are you are using some communicaiton / messaging layer (e.g. WCF). This will have / allow its own Web.config. You can keep connection strings there (and encrypt them if needed), but better yet, put them in a second file referenced by the Web.config for manageability. One final point, if you are ever going to consider the cloud, .config files are wrapped for application deployments which in effect removes all of the benefits they offer in terms of "not having restart or redeploy". Azure deployments will want to consider this article to save themselves from nightmares of maintenance: Bill Lodin blog - Configuration files in Azul / Cloud. One other point on this article – great example on how to programmatically select configuration depending on deployment! Be sure to check that out if you want to add flexibility to deploy in or out of the cloud .
I hope these points saves all of you time and headaches. I know I lost a couple days of programming time dealing with these issues ... and it was hard to find all the reasons in one place why may app was not "implementing" its connection object. Hopefully this will save you all from the same fate I had.
In FlexBuilder 3, there are two items under the 'Data' menu to import and manage web services. After importing a webservice, I can update it with the manage option. However, the webservices seems to disappear after they are imported. The manager does however recognize that a certain WSDL URL was imported and refuses to do anything with it.
How does the manager know this, and how can I make it refresh a certain WSDL URL?
In your src folder of the flexbuilder project you should see the generated classes. For instance, if you use the manager to generate the proxy classes for www.example.com you should see the folders /com/example with the generated proxy classes inside.
To consume these webservices in ActionScript use the statement:
"import com.example.*;"
To consume the webservice in mxml include the .as file using:
<mx:Script source="yourscriptname.as"/>
To refresh the generated proxy classes, consuming the latest WSDL, simply open the manager and select "update".
Also, I found this article very useful for consuming web services.
I hope that helps, the question was kind of vague about the problem.