We have a CRM 2011 managed solution that includes some changes to a standard entity (account) - i.e. new form and some extra fields. In most cases, we can install without a problem as the changes are merged. However we have encountered some instances where a client has renamed the Account entity to something else (Company) as an unmanaged chage (including view names) and our solution changes the entity name and view changes back to 'Account' when installed, based on the 'last one wins' rule.
My question is, is it possible to protect un-managed changes, so that we do not overwrite un-merged changes? i.e. similar to Managed Properties?
Any suggestions would be most appreciated.
Unfortunately, I don't think this is possible although maybe I don't fully understand what you are aiming to do. When you export a solution it will save a snapshot of all the included components. When you reimport, it should set all of the included components as they were when you exported them. If you exported the account entity with a customized name, what sort of logic would you want in place to disallow that change to be imported?
If anyone else has a solution to this, I'd be glad to see it but I haven't come across one yet.
Related
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
We have a requirement to allow customising our core product and adding additional fields on a per client basis e.g. People entity some client wants to record their favourite colour etc. As far as I know we can't add properties to EF at runtime as it needs classes defined at startup. Each customer has their own database but we are deploying the same solution to all customers with all additional code. We are then detecting which customer they are and running customer specific services etc.
Now the last thing I want is to be forking my project or alternatively adding all fields for all clients. This would seem likely to become a nightmare. Also more often than not the extra fields would only be required in a very limited amount of place. Maybe some reports, couple of screens etc.
I found this article from Jermey Miller http://codebetter.com/jeremymiller/2010/02/16/our-extension-properties-story/ describing how they are adding extension properties and having them go from domain to the web front end.
Has anyone else implemented anything similar using EF? How did it work out? Are there any blogs/samples that anyone has seen? I am not sure if I am searching for the right thing even if someone could tell me the generic name for what we want to do that would help. I'm guessing it is a problem that comes up for other people.
Linked question still requires some forking or implementing all possible extensions in single solution because you are still creating strongly typed extensions upfront (= you know upfront what extensions customer wants). It is not generally extensible solution. If you want generic extensible solution you must leave strongly typed world and describe extensions as data.
You will need to use some metamodel. Your entity classes will contain only properties used by all customers and navigation property to special extension entity (additional table per every extensible entity) where you will be able to put additional properties as name / value pair (you can add other columns like type, validation, etc. if needed).
This will in general moves part of your model from hardcoded scenario to configuration based scenario and your customers will even be allowed to define extensions at runtime (if you implement such feature).
I have been trying to get culture specific resources to work on an asp.net mvc 3 application.
If I have a LanguageResources.resx and a LanguageResources.en-UK.resx in my App_GlobalResources folder then I get an error "The namespace 'Resources' already contains a definition for 'LanguageResources'"
This is the end of a long line of issues that I have had with trying to get culture specific resources to work. I must say, I'm not impressed with the documentation Microsoft provide for using this feature.
I'm considering using a database table to store my culture specific strings instead, then I can just build a dictionary of all the values that will be available to my controller and views.
Has anyone else made such a decision, or have any direct knowledge on performance issues related to using a database for culture specific strings?
Has anyone else given up on resources too?
I must admit, I tried to reproduce your defect and I was successful. It looks like, Visual Studio generates additional class when you add something.en-UK.resx. Strange. It should not allow you to add anything like this in the first place for there is no such culture.
How to resolve the problem? Just add LanguageResources.en-GB.resx and delete
LanguageResources.en-GB.resx. That helps.
I would not use database for storing language-related resources, unless they are changing very frequently or must be entered by end users (i.e. there are some kind of templates).
Using the database hurts Localizability and requires much effort. It is hard to design correctly (I have seen a lot of mistakes in that area). Don't go that road unless you really have to.
We have a content-type built using CCK. One of the fields is a node reference. The node picker is using a view to build the options.
A few days ago, everything was working well.
Today, it looks like all node reference fields using views to populate the selection options are displaying the wrong label. Every single label in the option is ``A'', but the actual node number is correct. The form actually works, just the labels are incorrect.
We have tried just about every combination of edit/save, disable/enable, reboot, clear cache, clone the view, rebuild the view, new view, etc, but we still have a big list of As.
If we create a brand new content type with a brand new node reference field, we get the problem.
Through some backup/restore exercises, we have determined that the problem is actually in the database and not in the code.
We can restore our last good backup, but we will lose a decent amount of work we have put into other parts of the database.
We enabled mysql query logging, and the view is actually being called properly, but we cannot track down where the problem is creeping in after that (unraveling the CCK / Views / Drupal plumbing is a challenge).
The install was build with latest stable versions as of April.
The problems referred to in http://drupal.org/node/624422 is similar, but our code versions include the patches mentioned.
Any ideas would be appreciated. Thanks.
I had a similar problem with using views for node reference, after quite a lot of hair pulling it turned out to be that my caching layer was buggy. I was using memcached, but memcached wasn't truned on on the server. It may be worth checking.
Thanks for the responses. We finally got to the bottom of this.
There was a module that was doing a custom hook_views_post_render() that did a prep_replace to rewrite some output. Unknown to us, there are instances where the $output parameter isn't a string, but an array, and this was causing the problem. One of those instances happens to be when you attach a view to a build a select in CCK.
I am developing a site that is saving non visible user data upon login (e.g. external ID on another site). We are going to create/save this data as soon as the account is created.
I could see us saving data using
the content profile module (already in use on our side)
the profile module
the data column in the user table
creating our own table
I feel like #1 is probably the most logical place, however creating a node within a module does not seem to be a trivial thing.
#3 feels like a typical way to solve this, but just having a bunch of serialized data in a catchall field does not feel like the best design.
Any suggestions?
IMO, each option has its pro's and con's, and you should be the one to make the final call, given that you are the only one to know what your project is about, what are the critical points of the project, what is the expected typical user pattern, what are the resources available, etc...
If I was totally free to chose, my personal favourites would be option #4, #1 and #5 (wait! #5? Yes: see below!). My guiding principles in making the choice would be:
Keep it clean
Keep it simple
Make it extensible
#1 - The content profile module
This would be a clean solution in that you would make easier for developer to maintain your code, as all the alteration to the user would pass through the same channel, and it would be easier to track down problems or add new functionality.
I do not find it particularly simple as it requires you to interact with the custom API of that module.
As for extensibility that depends from how well the content profile module API is designed. The temptation could be to simply use the tables done by said module for your purpose, bypassing the API's but that exposes you to the possibility that on a critical security update one day in which you are in a hurry the entire system will break down because the schema has changed...
#4 - Creating your own table
This would be a clean solution because you could design your table (and your module to do exactly what you need to), and you could create your own API to be used by other modules. On the other hand you would introduce yet another piece of code altering the registration process, and this might make it more difficult for devs to track problems and expand the system in a consistent way.
This would be very simple to implement code-wise. Also the DB design would benefit though: another thing to consider is that the tables would be very easy to inspect and query. Creating a new handler for views is dead easy in most of the cases: 4 out of 5 you simply use one of the prototype objects shipping with views.
This would be extremely easy to extend, of course. Once you created the module for one field, you could manage as many as you want by mostly copy/pasting the code for one field to another (or to inherit from the same ancestor if you go OOP).
I understand you are already knowledgeable about drupal, but if you need a pointer on how to do that, I gave some direction in this other answer.
#5 - Creating your own table and porting already existing fields there
That would essentailly be #4 minus the drawback of scattering functionality across various modules... Of course if you are already managing 200 fields the other way this is not a viable option, but if you are early into your design, you could consider this.
In my experience nearly every project that requires system integration (meaning: synchronising data for the same user in multiple systems) has custom needs for user registration, and I found this solution the one that suits my need best for two reasons:
I found I reuse a lot of the custom code I wrote from project to project.
It's the most flexible way to integrate data with the other system (in some case I even split data for the user in two custom tables managed by the same module: one that contains custom fields used by drupal only and one that contains the "non visible fields", as you call them. I find this very handy in a lot of scenarios, as it makes very easy to inspect and manipulate the data of the two systems separately.
HTH!
If you're already using the Content Profile module, then I'd really suggest continuing to use it and attach the field to it. You're saving the data when the account is created, and creating a node for the user at the same time isn't that hard. Really.
$node = new stdClass();
$node->title = $user->name; // what I'd use, or you can have node auto title handle the title for you. Up to you!
$node->field_hidden_field[0]['value'] = '$*#$f82hff';
$node->uid = $user->uid;
node_save($node);
Bob's your uncle!
I would go for option 3. Eventually even other modules will store the data in the database against a user. So you could directly save it yourself probably in a more efficient way than those modules.
Of course depending on the size of the data, you can take a call whether to add a new column in the users table or to create a new table for your data with the user's id as the foreign key.