I'm thinking of a architectural way of displaying messages in our application (Flex-Asp.NET-SqlServer), mostly messages that announce for instance a downtime.
Currently I was thinking of creating a table FlexMessage that holds the name of a message (based on that name I now where to put in Flex) and the value (the message itself). As a result however, someone will have to create these messages and also delete them when they are no longer valid. So, thinking further, I thought of creating messages having a startdate and enddate, so an interval in which they need to be displayed. Like this, someone could login to the management part and create a message that needs to be displayed from a certain date until a certain date.
I could also hardcode it in the Flex Application, but that would mean putting a new build online (of the swf) each time something changes with a certain message. No good idea I guess.
Is there a better way for this that I haven't thought about?
One way to do this is to place your messages in an RSS feed, then read that feed from the Flex application.
There is an example of how to do this here: http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=23819
Related
I'm currently working through my A Level computer science controlled assessment, and am making an application designed to help Scout Leaders manage their group. This is my first time working in Java, SQLite, Android Studio and XML so I've run into a few problems along the way. At this point in time, I'm in the process of creating a login system, part of which involves editing login details. I was wondering if there's a way of loading multiple values from one record into different EditTexts at once, so the user only needs to edit the already-existing username and password, rather than type it in again with a slight edit? Thanks in advance. I didn't think it necessary to include any code in this question, as I'm only looking for an example, however if it would help please don't hesitate to ask - I just couldn't find a guide on this anywhere else.
You retrieve the data into a Cursor via a query that selects the required columns.
You then move to the appropriate row (record) in the Cursor (probably the first and only row).
For each EditText you set the text, using the setText method with the data from the respective column using an appropriate get???? method passing the column offset to the method (e.g. your_cursor.getString(<the_column_offset>)).
Rather than calculating and hard coding an offset, it is more reliable and flexible to use the getColumnIndex(<the_column_name_as_string>) method.
After all have been set you then close the Cursor
Note and would be replaced with respective values specific to the App.
Recently, I've add the user agent string when the guests submit the form to the database. There is a report that is generated weekly containing various statistics. I want to add the device and maybe the browser information to the report.
I was pondering that I would create a new database table that would hold all the know user agent strings and have two extra fields, one for the device info, and maybe the browser in the other one. However, I cannot find a site that you can download the strings. Would any one know of a place?
If that can not be done, I was thinking of a .net alternative. How would I go into doing that in .net?
2 ways to do it:
If you are using ASPNET MVC, you could use the default this.Request.Browser within the controller method call (contains quite a lot of info, example here),
You can also use 51Degrees, which has a light and a complete device db to match devices capabilities
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
Looking for guidance on how to achieve something in ASP.NET Web Form - the behaviour is a bit like that seen in ASP.NET AutocompleteExtender, but I can't find anything that gives the flexibility I need. Here is what I am trying to do:
2 TextBox fields on the form,
CompanyName and CompanyRef
(CompanyRef an abbreviated unique
Company identifier)
User types in the CompanyName
As soon as there are 3 characters in the
CompanyName an internal webservice is
called (AJAX?)
Webservice checks what has been entered so far and
evaluates a 3 character representation of it - for instance
"Stack" would be returned as STA0001.
If there is already an STA0001 in the db it would return STA0002 and so on
The value returned would be targetted at the
CompanyRef TextBox
User needs to be able to edit the CompanyRef if they so wish
I'm not looking for code per se, more high level guidance on how this can be done, or if there are any components available that I am missing that you may be able to point me in the direction of. Googling and searching on SO has returned nothing - not sure if I'm looking for the right thing though.
Generating the CompanyRef is easy enough. There are lots of articles etc which cover combining say an autonumber or counter with a string. The difficulty I have with your approach is that you intend to let users fiddle with the ref, and make their own up. What for?
[EDIT - Follow up to comment]
The comment box didn't allow for enough characters to answer your comment fully (and I'm still getting used to the conventions in place here....)
You could use AJAX to call the web service and return currently available values, and then use javascript to update the field. The problem with this is that once a user has decided he or she likes one, it may no longer be available when it is passed back to the database. That means you will have to do one final check, which may result in a message to the user that they can't now have the value they were told was available when they started the process. Only you know the likelihood of this happening. It will depend on the number of concurrent users you have.
I've done an article on calling web services etc using jQuery which should give you a starting point for the AJAX part: http://www.mikesdotnetting.com/Article/104/Many-ways-to-communicate-with-your-database-using-jQuery-AJAX-and-ASP.NET
I've been playing with RSS feeds this week, and for my next trick I want to build one for our internal application log. We have a centralized database table that our myriad batch and intranet apps use for posting log messages. I want to create an RSS feed off of this table, but I'm not sure how to handle the volume- there could be hundreds of entries per day even on a normal day. An exceptional make-you-want-to-quit kind of day might see a few thousand. Any thoughts?
I would make the feed a static file (you can easily serve thousands of these), regenerated periodically. Then you have a much broader choice, because it doesn't have to run below second, it can run even minutes. And users still get perfect download speed and reasonable update speed.
If you are building a system with notifications that must not be missed, then a pub-sub mechanism (using XMPP, one of the other protocols supported by ApacheMQ, or something similar) will be more suitable that a syndication mechanism. You need some measure of coupling between the system that is generating the notifications and ones that are consuming them, to ensure that consumers don't miss notifications.
(You can do this using RSS or Atom as a transport format, but it's probably not a common use case; you'd need to vary the notifications shown based on the consumer and which notifications it has previously seen.)
I'd split up the feeds as much as possible and let users recombine them as desired. If I were doing it I'd probably think about using Django and the syndication framework.
Django's models could probably handle representing the data structure of the tables you care about.
You could have a URL that catches everything, like: r'/rss/(?(\w*?)/)+' (I think that might work, but I can't test it now so it might not be perfect).
That way you could use URLs like (edited to cancel the auto-linking of example URLs):
http:// feedserver/rss/batch-file-output/
http:// feedserver/rss/support-tickets/
http:// feedserver/rss/batch-file-output/support-tickets/ (both of the first two combined into one)
Then in the view:
def get_batch_file_messages():
# Grab all the recent batch files messages here.
# Maybe cache the result and only regenerate every so often.
# Other feed functions here.
feed_mapping = { 'batch-file-output': get_batch_file_messages, }
def rss(request, *args):
items_to_display = []
for feed in args:
items_to_display += feed_mapping[feed]()
# Processing/returning the feed.
Having individual, chainable feeds means that users can subscribe to one feed at a time, or merge the ones they care about into one larger feed. Whatever's easier for them to read, they can do.
Without knowing your application, I can't offer specific advice.
That said, it's common in these sorts of systems to have a level of severity. You could have a query string parameter that you tack on to the end of the URL that specifies the severity. If set to "DEBUG" you would see every event, no matter how trivial. If you set it to "FATAL" you'd only see the events that that were "System Failure" in magnitude.
If there are still too many events, you may want to sub-divide your events in to some sort of category system. Again, I would have this as a query string parameter.
You can then have multiple RSS feeds for the various categories and severities. This should allow you to tune the level of alerts you get an acceptable level.
In this case, it's more of a manager's dashboard: how much work was put into support today, is there anything pressing in the log right now, and for when we first arrive in the morning as a measure of what went wrong with batch jobs overnight.
Okay, I decided how I'm gonna handle this. I'm using the timestamp field for each column and grouping by day. It takes a little bit of SQL-fu to make it happen since of course there's a full timestamp there and I need to be semi-intelligent about how I pick the log message to show from within the group, but it's not too bad. Further, I'm building it to let you select which application to monitor, and then showing every message (max 50) from a specific day.
That gets me down to something reasonable.
I'm still hoping for a good answer to the more generic question: "How do you syndicate many important messages, where missing a message could be a problem?"