I am creating a web application that will need to send a variety of emails out to users. Instead of hard-coding the contents of the email in the app, I want to use a template stored on disk and replace tokens in it (ex. "Hello, %%FirstName%%!") with the actual data. I have some experience with creating XSLT templates, but since the data isn't naturally in XML format this may not be the best fit. Is there a better template tool in .NET?
Note that I prefer one built in to the language but I'd consider add-ons too.
Thanks,
Graham
I have personally use Spark. Its an easy to use text templating library (below is an example of Spark syntax)
<var names="new [] {'alpha', 'beta', 'gamma'}"/>
<for each="var name in names">
<test if="name == 'beta'">
<p>beta is my favorite.</p>
<else/>
<p>${name} is okay too I suppose.
</test>
</for>
It even comes with a sample code for email text templating which you could look at on github.
You may want to take a look at MVCContrib. They have an e-mail template system IEmailTemplateService that uses Views to render the actual e-mail message which gives you access to a lot of features, including different view engines. If you are not in an MVC environment, you could possibly still extract some useful tricks out there.
I am using NVelocity for that, and I find it's very flexible and easy to use. It not only allows you to replace tokes, but it also includes sort of a programming language, e.g. for conditionals (if) and loops (for, foreach).
The original project seems to be dead, but there is a fork maintained by the Castle project.
Of course there are lots of other, alternative template libraries (stringtemplate seems to be popular), as you can see in this question I asked some time ago.
Related
We have a couple of relatively simple websites running on Adobe CQ 5.5 that were developed by a third party. I'm pretty familiar with how CQ works, but I'm working with somebody else's code here and I need to be able to search through all components in the system for a particular string.
The issue is that I can't seem to find a way to search across all of the various .jsp files stored with the various system components. I would have figured that the query tool in CRXDE Lite would have done the trick with something like this:
/jcr:root//*[jcr:contains(., 'Find this exact string in a JSP')] order by #jcr:score
But I've had no luck.
What I am looking for is some sort of global search that includes JSP files. Is that possible? Were I using a regular Java system, any IDE worth the download would be able to do this.
Thanks.
Might not be easiest way, but you can use the VLT tool to checkout the repository into your filesystem. Then you can lookup using whatever tool you prefer. It might even be faster in the long run
I don't have the actual answer but I suppose the JSPs are indexed via a filter that strips out some of their content.
It should be possible to configure the repository to index them as is instead, based on the info at http://wiki.apache.org/jackrabbit/IndexingConfiguration and http://jackrabbit.apache.org/jackrabbit-text-extractors.html
Sorry about the vagueness of this answer - I know the basic principles but to provide the details I would need more time than I can afford now ;-)
As we know that we can assign the variables to Adobe illustrator file. Is it possible to access these variables by using Drupal 7 variables feature?
Short answer: no.
Longer answer: This is theoretically possible, but.
What you're referring to really amounts to rewriting some of the fundamental underpinnings of the internet. This would require, at minimum, extremely innovative development and entirely recreating several major software components. For example:
1) Users' browsers read and render hypertext. They would need to be rewritten to understand AI equivalents of links, pages, and other internet standards.
2) Javacript, Jquery, and other client-side components would need to be rebuilt from scratch. You would also need to invent a new CSS and DOM that their replacements can understand.
3) Apache .... would be mostly okay with some minor tweaks. One or two new extensions at most.
4) PHP (which stands for "PHP hypertext preprocessor" and not "PHP advanced graphical tool") would need to be entirely redone, along with all of it's extensions, integrations, and fundamental concepts.
5) Drupal and all its modules (which are build on the assumption that the output will be hypertext) would need to be substantially retooled. In particular, you would need a replacement for PHPTemplate that accesses AI objects.
So: There's a lot to do. I would say "let's get started," except that 6) AI is a proprietary product and we don't have licenses to develop and extend it.
I think it depends on what you want to do with the resulting file. Are you thinking of a variable data Illustrator document that would be generated from the values in Drupal? If so, I think that is very possible. The Illustrator file format specification is somewhat available, you would just need to process the file without the help of Illustrator (which may present some challenges).
If you want to generate something that would be viewable in a browser you're better off using SVG with some sort of placeholder that you could replace with regular expressions or maybe some XPath queries to get the nodes you want to manipulate and then adding your values there.
As Dominic said, the end use isn't very clear here so the answers are really dependent on what you need to accomplish.
As the question is a bit self explanatory, I want to achieve the goal of a multi-language website. I am using an Entity Data Model with MS SQL 2005. I came up with an idea of making a seperate database for each language with exactly the same model and relations. So I can use the Entities constructor that takes a connectionString and switch the site to the selected language.
I am using an ascx as the language control that fires an event, and the parent aspx gets the selected language as an integer (from event args) and call the method containing the same linq queries but Entity context will be created with the connection string of that db (of language)
I could only came up with this solution, because I think adding a new language will require a replication of the english one, imported to Access and sent to the translator. Then will be exported back, and the model will fit (HOPEFULLY).
My question is if this is really a good approach or am I missing anything that will create greater hassle to me. Thanks in advance
multi-database is not a good solution as soon as entities within the different databases have relations to each other. Generally a good approach is to work with labels in one default language. These labels can either be in a well defined format (e.g. 'LABEL.TEXT_HELLO') or just in the base language (e.g. 'Hello World').
So all you have to do is building a table for translations where the base language is the key and hopefully there is for each key a value containing the translation. As soon as you have the translations, you can write a method ont he frontend which writes the labels in the language used by the user.
In Zend Framework for example, you have to write <h1><?= $this->translate('Hello World'); ?></h1> instead of just <h1>Hello World</h1>
The good thing about that is, that if ya translation is missing, you can still use the fallback (in this case english) to show the user at least something.
That way, you can manage your app in one database and users who speak several languages do not have to switch between applications and content.
cheers
My approach: create a table Language that lists all the available languages. Relate each table that should be localized to Language. Now, you can easily access the localized content e.g.
Content[content_ID].HeadLine.Where(hl => hl.Language.id == "en-US")
I look forward to see what other people as I myself is still learning DB design and EDM.
OK, if you want to be able to easily implement a new language, then reinventing the internationalization features already built in to ASP.NET is not the way to go, because it isn't "easy".
At least, not as easy as using a satellite resource DLL. Your translators will use off-the-shelf tooling to translate your resources, and ASP.NET will automatically select the correct DLL based on the user's current culture.
Read up on ASP.NET internationalization/globalization features; there's no need to invent your own.
Is it possible to programmatically generate an info path 2007 form template (xsn file=form definition) ?
I know that there is no object model for the infopath 2007 form designer, but does anyone know of any third party libraries?
The form view itself is a xsl file so it should be possible. I would have thought that its a common use case also.
It is possible to generate the manifest.xsf, xsl and xml files from a structured source (let's say an xml) and then pack this (as .cab) with the extension .xsn
(The .xsn file is nothing but a renemed .cab!)
This is only a raw concept - it could be refined if the purpose was a bit more explicit. Why generate? Are you going to create a bunch of different files? What for?
There are no libraries or API's to do this. While generating a template is possible you will need to write it all yourself. Obviously this will not be an easy task and will be prone to errors. I would recommend reviewing your requirements to ensure this is truly necessary. InfoPath is quite flexible, without knowing the details of your project, there is a good chance you can get the functionality you need with a single template.
How should I store (and present) the text on a website intended for worldwide use, with several languages? The content is mostly in the form of 500+ word articles, although I will need to translate tiny snippets of text on each page too (such as "print this article" or "back to menu").
I know there are several CMS packages that handle multiple languages, but I have to integrate with our existing ASP systems too, so I am ignoring such solutions.
One concern I have is that Google should be able to find the pages, even for foreign users. I am less concerned about issues with processing dates and currencies.
I worry that, left to my own devices, I will invent a way of doing this which work, but eventually lead to disaster! I want to know what professional solutions you have actually used on real projects, not untried ideas! Thanks very much.
I looked at RESX files, but felt they were unsuitable for all but the most trivial translation solutions (I will elaborate if anyone wants to know).
Google will help me with translating the text, but not storing/presenting it.
Has anyone worked on a multi-language project that relied on their own code for presentation?
Any thoughts on serving up content in the following ways, and which is best?
http://www.website.com/text/view.asp?id=12345&lang=fr
http://www.website.com/text/12345/bonjour_mes_amis.htm
http://fr.website.com/text/12345
(these are not real URLs, i was just showing examples)
Firstly put all code for all languages under one domain - it will help your google-rank.
We have a fully multi-lingual system, with localisations stored in a database but cached with the web application.
Wherever we want a localisation to appear we use:
<%$ Resources: LanguageProvider, Path/To/Localisation %>
Then in our web.config:
<globalization resourceProviderFactoryType="FactoryClassName, AssemblyName"/>
FactoryClassName then implements ResourceProviderFactory to provide the actual dynamic functionality. Localisations are stored in the DB with a string key "Path/To/Localisation"
It is important to cache the localised values - you don't want to have lots of DB lookups on each page, and we cache thousands of localised strings with no performance issues.
Use the user's current browser localisation to choose what language to serve up.
You might want to check GNU Gettext project out - at least something to start with.
Edited to add info about projects:
I've worked on several multilingual projects using Gettext technology in different technologies, including C++/MFC and J2EE/JSP, and it worked all fine. However, you need to write/find your own code to display the localized data of course.
If you are using .Net, I would recommend going with one or more resource files (.resx). There is plenty of documentation on this on MSDN.
As with most general programming questions, it depends on your needs.
For static text, I would use RESX files. For me, as .Net programmer, they are easy to use and the .Net Framework has good support for them.
For any dynamic text, I tend to store such information in the database, especially if the site maintainer is going to be a non-developer. In the past I've used two approaches, adding a language column and creating different entries for the different languages or creating a separate table to store the language specific text.
The table for the first approach might look something like this:
Article Id | Language Id | Language Specific Article Text | Created By | Created Date
This works for situations where you can create different entries for a given article and you don't need to keep any data associated with these different entries in sync (such as an Updated timestamp).
The other approach is to have two separate tables, one for non-language specific text (id, created date, created user, updated date, etc) and another table containing the language specific text. So the tables might look something like this:
First Table: Article Id | Created By | Created Date | Updated By | Updated Date
Second Table: Article Id | Language Id | Language Specific Article Text
For me, the question comes down to updating the non-language dependent data. If you are updating that data then I would lean towards the second approach, otherwise I would go with the first approach as I view that as simpler (can't forget the KISS principle).
If you're just worried about the article content being translated, and do not need a fully integrated option, I have used google translation in the past and it works great on a smaller scale.
Wonderful question.
I solved this problem for the website I made (link in my profile) with a homemade Python 3 script that translates the general template on the fly and inserts a specific content page from a language requested (or guessed by Apache from Accept-Language).
It was fun since I got to learn Python and write my own mini-library for creating content pages. One downside was that our hosting didn't have Python 3, but I made my script generate static HTML (the original one was examining User-agent) and then upload it to server. That works so far and making a new language version of the site is now a breeze :)
The biggest downside of this method is that it is time-consuming to write things from scratch. So if you want, drop me line and I'll help you use my script :)
As for the URL format, I use site.com/content/example.fr since this allows Apache to perform language negotiation in case somebody asks for /content/example and has a browser tell that it likes French language. When you do this Apache also adds .html or whatever as a bonus.
So when a request is for example and I have files
example.fr
example.en
example.vi
Apache will automatically proceed with example.vi for a person with Vietnamese-configured browser or example.en for a person with German-configured browser. Pretty useful.