I recently created a website for a friend (asp.net/sql server), the website includes news of his company and he and his team update this frequently.
The question has been asked if i could now create a widget / api of some sort that visitors of the website could now include the news on there own website should they wish too. I feel this needs to be a one line of code intergration or something that is extremely easy to intergrate.
Any recommendations or articles are welcome.
EDIT: how is something like this created
http://img830.imageshack.us/img830/7769/codingabandwebsitecreat.png
Thanks
With jQuery's ajax and an asp.net handler that returns an injectable html chunk is my off hand guess at simple way. Other's will probably know of frameworks if you don't want to roll your own. Is RSS to primitive?
you could also write a REST service in WCF since you're using asp.net and have it return XML or JSON, depending on how you write your widget.
How something like that is created... Well, I've created a number of these and the process is fairly simple. Sorry I don't have an article to reference. Create a 'widget creation/builder' page with input parameters, when submitted either store those in the database and return an ID to associate with those settings, or generate a list of param's for those settings, or both. Simply output the <script> tag into a textbox. Like so (inside an AJAX callback):
$("#results").html("<script type='text/javascript' src='" + widget_path + params + "'></script>");
Where widget_path is the absolute path to the widget ASP script, and params is either something like key=454 or theme=sunny&source=34&count=50 etc. Either manually or using something like jQuery.param to serialize the form. An alternative would be two <script> tags with settings in the 2nd and calling a widget initialize function.
They can copy and paste that into their site, and that ASP script should output only JavaScript, which you can either document.write() or use a JS library (such as jQuery) to operate on the DOM (.click() etc). If using a database the ASP script would check the key param and grab the widget settings, if not then simply process the params. It's important to mention if you want to communicate back and forth with an API, you need cross-domain enabled or you could simply use JSON (in ASP script check for a 'callback' parameter, wrap JSON in that function name, and use jQuery.getJSON with &callback=? at the end); there are other methods of course.
If you use a database, make sure to take security into account (SQL injection, etc.)
WidgetBox looks like a good, mainline method as well.
Related
I have an Episerver site with a JobDetailsPageController with a Index method that takes a jobId parameter and creates a view with some details about that job. The urls looks something like this: https://hostname/<root-depending-on-site-tree>/jobs/?jobid=44.
What I would like is having urls on the form .../jobs/manager-position-telco-44, essentiallly creating a slug of the job title and appending the id. I have done this in the past using standard ASP.NET MVC Attribute Routing on a non-Episerver site, but EpiServer has a routing of its own that I don't know too well and can't figure out.
Also, adding non-query strings after the slash consistently sends me (no surprise) to a 404 page, so I would need to somehow customise this behaviour. I need to use EpiServers standard routing to end up at the right "parent", but ignore the latter part (the pretty bit).
Is it possible to create such urls on a normal page in page tree in EpiServer? I do understand it is possible to create static routes, but this node can be moved around like any other page so I cannot avoid EpiServer.
Please see this blog post. What you're looking for is partial routing.
#johan is right, partial routing is one way of doing this. Just wanted to add other possible solutions that might or might not match your needs.
Import data as content
Instead of serving content dynamically, you could consider importing your job ads from whatever source you have directly in content tree as separate pages below particular root page. That would give you a lot benefits - pages would be cached, it would support multiple languages, editors would see content directly in EPiServer CMS, data could be adjusted manually, etc.
This would be a good solution if your data does not change often and you need to provide a way for editor to create a new job ad manually as well.
Implement you own content provider
Another way to serve your dynamic data to EPiServer is to write your own custom content provider. You can find documentation here: http://world.episerver.com/documentation/Items/Developers-Guide/Episerver-CMS/7/Content-Providers/Content-Providers/
This solution requires more coding and is more complex, but it has some benefits as well. If one wanted, it would be possible to not just serve content from external data source, but also update that data by changing values directly in EPiServer UI.
With alfresco advanced search form I would like to perform search by ajax and display the list of search results in the same page (without reloading the page).
Is it possible?
Is there a recommended way to do it?
Thank you in advance
So if I understand you clearly you don't want the page to reload.
Sure that's possible!
Do you start by hacking into the advanced search form or do you create a new page just for this is maybe the first question.
You can do it either way. Probably the latter is easier to maintain and less hacking and you can use a client-site Library of your preference.
If you want to keep the default form you just need to change the following files
advsearch.js, the client-side YUI file which gets run on the form and does the submit
/alfresco/site-webscripts/org/alfresco/components/search/advsearch.get.html.ftl, the html file which has all the div's etc. defined.
So change the client-side library to do the search directly to the repo, take a look at search.js and use the method.
Then define in your template the search results area from search.get.html.ftl.
So basically you're merging these 2 components into 1 big one.
A very long title, sorry for that.
I'm looking for your input on the best way to support localization in an ASP.NET MVC 5 project in which i would like to pass the locale as part of the querystring. This way it would be easy for users to share a link to website and also pass the correct locale as part of the link.
If this would be done using, for example cookies, the user would pass a link but the page might be in a different language for the person who receives the link. I don't think that that is very nice.
The solution i currently use (http://afana.me/post/aspnet-mvc-internationalization.aspx) does not work nice with incorrect urls and just keeps loading the same page in loop. There is a lot of information on the web and i already went through a lot but i would like to know what is most commonly used and really works well.
As a bonus i would like the solution to work with attribute routing as my current solution doens't play nice :(
you can use resource files for that, the current culture is in the current thread of the web request, so no need to pass it in the querystring but it can be done;
have a look at this live demo: http://prodinner.aspnetawesome.com
you can download/read pdf about it here: http://prodinner.codeplex.com
you can see there that you can change the language using the dropdown;
in Global.asax.cs Application_BeginRequest, there's already code in there related to language, it reads a cookie now (or it's absence), you can make it read the querystring
why does twig's render function create a subrequest ? Why dont they just render the response and send it as part of the response ?
Also I can see that the rendered response appears in the browser just after the main template shows up. How does it happen ?
I created an answer on Stackoverflow which basically goes through the different alternatives of the render function.
It also explains why you should be using the render function over a regular include.
I'd advise you to read the chapter about embedding controllers in Twig. An interesting quote from the doc about when you should consider using the render function:
Whenever you find that you need a variable or a piece of information that you don't have access to in a template, consider rendering a controller.
TL;DR
By default, the render function only takes a URL (either absolute or relative).
By analogy it is like getting HTML through ajax and injecting it in the page: one request that queries a controller to get some HTML which get injected it into the page.
There are different render calls like render_esi (for support of the ESI tags) that have their own rendering strategies. If you start with the inline rendering (through the default render function) you will have the opportunity later on to use other rendering strategies without refactoring your code.
The render function is meant to scale your application.
For more details about its usefulness, let's look at the render_esi function.
With the render_esi function you can implement ESI tags to use with Varnish.
(There are other solutions than Varnish but it's among the most popular ones)
Varnish is a caching solution that is located between your web servers and the users. Varnish will filter the response from your web servers, cache the entire page then look for these ESI tags.
If Varnish cached your page for a day but the render_esi function are set to be cached for 2 hours, Varnish will only query (through a URL when the cache expired) for these specific render calls instead of the entire page (which is why render_esi do sub-requests) and replace parts of the template with the sub-requests' response.
Caching in general is very interesting and very broad so it's hard to go over every details in my answer but I hope my answer will help you.
Caching (or cache) according to Wikipedia:
In computer science, a cache (/ˈkæʃ/ kash)[1] is a component that transparently stores data so that future requests for that data can be served faster.
Render is used when you not just want to include another template snippet, but also want to execute specific businesslogic, that belongs to this template. Or in other words: When include just isn't enough, you use render.
Because render doesn't only include a template, but also executes controller logic, it is encapsuled as a subrequest.
Imagine you want to display the latest news in a box on every page of your website. If you want to solve this with an include, you would have to fetch the latest news in each of your actions and pass it to your template.
But if you use render, you just write one action for this, and put a render tag everywhere in your templates where you would like to have that news box. The render tag executes the associated controller action, renders the response, and injects it into your current template.
Because I suck at explaining, you might also want to read this part of the symfony doc: http://symfony.com/doc/current/book/templating.html#embedding-controllers
In my opinion, answer should sound like this:
Controller is pretty simple "unit" which receives request and sends response.
Creating sub request for rendering controller gives you more power (flexibility).
About flexibility. Look at your controller, just like it just receives request and sends response and for example, you want to somehow filter request or decorate response? Where will you put this logic? Of course, at event listeners which can use other services to solve this task.
For example, I often use parameter converters for my controllers (it's not about good design, just for example). So how can I use "render", with specifying just id of my entity, to render only controller without creating sub request?
If you really want just to render some data you can use "include" or create an extension. Or you can create extension to render controllers without sub request, but think about it carefully, because further you can add more logic to filtering response and so on.
I can be wrong, it's just my opinion ;)
Is there any way (like an undocumented magic word perhaps) to get the current query string (or full URL including query string) from within a Mediawiki template or Scribunto (Lua) module?
If this is an option, consider obtaining HTML content with API. This should be simpler than writing an extension. Of course this won't be a regular page, rather something composed client-side on blank article or server-side on non-wiki site. With Labeled Section Transclusion extension you mentioned this should work.
Alternatively, consider some server-side post processing on generated HTML. It should perform quite well as MediaWiki caches a lot.
AFAIK there is no magic word for checking query string and, IMO, this would be a very bad thing. Article source is like a model in MVC pattern — you shouldn't put presentation stuff there.