Due to a lack of response to my original question, probably due to poor wording on my part. Since then, I have thought about my original question and decided to reword it, hopefully for the better! :)
We create custom business software for our customers, and quite often they want attachments to be added to certain business entities. For example, they want to attach a Word document to a customer, or an image to a job. I'm curious as to how other are handling the following:
How the user attaches documents? Single attachment? Batch attachment?
How you display the attached
documents? Simple list? Detailed list?
And the killer question, how the
user then edits attached documents? Is this even possible in a web environment? Granted the user can just view the attachment.
Is there a good control library to help manage this process?
Our current development environment is ASP.NET and C#, but I don't think this is a pretty agnostic question when it comes to development tools, save for the fact I need to work in a web environment.
It seems we always run into problems with the customer and working with attachments in a web environment so I am looking for some successes that other programmers have had with their user base on how best to interact with attachments.
Start with one file upload control ("Browse button"), and use JavaScript to dynamically add more upload controls if they want to attach multiple files in a single batch.
Display them in a simple list format (Filename, type, size, date), but provide full details somewhere else if they want them.
If they want to edit the files, they have to download them, then re-upload them. Hence, you need a way that they can say "this attachment overrides that old attachment".
I'm not familiar with C# and ASP.NET, so I can't recommend any libraries that will help.
http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/uploader/
Related
Currently i have not a code-problem, but i dont know which way would be better for me.
For our project, we have two kind of data which would be translatet for the view.
The part, which be coded in the source code like system messages (e.g. You are logged in, log out, etc.)
The second part is the database content like services, there can be added or deleted rows. And not for every entity would be a translation available.
Now i need to know, if i should save and get the translation from a translation table or is it better to transfer (via script) the translation into a services.xliff file
I would suggest to use XLIFF or GetText for the application (source: php, js).
Especially http://jmsyst.com/bundles/JMSTranslationBundle might be helpful.
The storage mechanism is less important, because of caching. So feel free to use either a DB or files as backend.
User created content is often managed via database. So you might use a common DoctrineExtension, like translateable. http://symfony.com/doc/current/cookbook/doctrine/common_extensions.html
https://github.com/stof/StofDoctrineExtensionsBundle/blob/master/Resources/doc/index.rst
This is more of an advise / best practice question that I'm hoping someone has come across before and can give me a steer.
I need to build a web application (the client would like webforms because that's what their developers know for when i hand it over)
Essentially when the client logs in, they will pick a language then I need to replace the text for menus, input boxes etc. The client wants to add their translations and update them at any time.
Ideas I have looked at are:
Holding the translations in resource files, building an editor in to the web application and then adding attributes on the fly to my viewmodels.
Holding the translations in sql server so i have the name, language and translation as a lookup e.g. Home | French | Maison. Then on pre-render I'll scrape the screen for any controls needing translation in the menu, labels, text areas.
Does anyone know of any good examples or had the experience of doing this themselves.
I've a similar situation, and chose to store data in SQL.
Translation mistakes happen often, and you don't want to recompile or disassemble every time.
It is possible to avoid the need to republish, but I've found it just more intuitive and straightforward to maintain SQL.
Bottom line, it depends on the amount of data you have. If it's more than just a couple of keywords, it sounds like a job for SQL to me.
Edit:
In a similar question, users recommend using resources, claiming it is the standard method.
However, if your users are going to make changes to values on regular basis (not because of mistake correction, but because data actually changes), then SQL seems best fit for the job.
So I have our MVC web application up and running and we'd like to introduce printing into the solution. We have an interface (using SharePoint Service 3.0) that displays many files (all Word files) for a particular product. What we'd like to have happen is for the user to checkbox all the files they want to print, select a printer, and go at it.
The checkbox implementation is easy, I'm trying to think of a good print solution (if there is any). I'm looking for "out of the box" type solutions. One thing I was thinking about was creating a web service on SharePoint that takes all the files selected, merges them (somehow), and temporarily posts one big doc that, when finished, the client will print, and then the document gets purged. Not exactly the fastest operation but seems like it could work.
What's your thoughts on an implementation?
What kind of Doc Files do you have?
Are they already in the DocX format?
If so you can merge them quite easy with the documentAPI
I'm looking for the best solution to allow our users to upload XLS spreadsheet so that they can be used to populate tables in our data warehouse (DW).
Our users are heavy Business Object (BO) users, and BO lets you export to XLS. When they have data in a spreadsheet that needs to be loaded to the DW, they need a process to upload the data in the XLS to the DW's db. As a result, we end up with many of these "interfaces" when I think that what we really need is a programmatic automated feed. Using Excel as a data source for inter-system feeds, in my gut, just seems like a bad idea to me.
Question #1: I'd like to see if you agree and why or why not.
OK, there is no swimming against that tide, so I now take as a given that XLS uploads are here to stay for us. Now I need to find the best solution. First, I'll explain what we do now and then what I don't like about it:
Via web pages, we provide empty XLS files (no rows) with a defined set of columns. Each file is intended to be used to update a different target dest table. In each spreadsheet is an "upload" button. Pushing the Upload button results in the macro in the spreadsheet serializing the contents of the file to CSV and FTPing the data to server folder. Periodically, a scheduler fires off an Informatica ETL job that uses the CSV file as input and loads the data into a custom XLS-specific staging table and then, if the records pass edits, into the appropriate target table. Any errors encountered are logged to an error table. For each XLS file uploaded, the data ends up in a separate staging and error table that is specific for the file.
Some of the things I don't like include about our process are:
1) The macro code in the XLS is too exposed, includes passwords for example, can be tampered with and there are issues ensuring that the users are using the latest XLS templates.
2) Business Rule edits are placed in the ETL program, where they should probably be, but because we would like to catch the errors ASAP, i.e, in the spreadsheet, edits are also added to the macro code. This results in duplication of business edits. I want these rules in one place and centrally controlled. IMHO, I think putting any macro code in the XLS introduces a maintenance issue, even calls to stored procedures (some of which we have) or calls to web services (we haven't yet tried to call .NET Web Services from XLS macros.)
3) Every XLS file upload template has its own process with distinct set of staging and error tables and a custom screen for reporting errors encountered. It seems like we need a more generalized re-usable solution.
Besides often getting data exported to XLS from BO, the users like also Excel because it is easier to edit a large number of records and less clunkier than editing individual records via a web interface.
This is the general direction that I am thinking:
First, I want the users to have the ease of editing of Excel with editing, but without including embedded macros in the spreadsheet. I experimented with Farpoint's Grid with Excel compatibility...
http://www.fpoint.com/netproducts/spreadweb/tour/excel.aspx
...and I found that it was quite easy to allow a user the ability to open up an XLS file that resides on their PC and have it open up in a browser and be able to easily access the data read from server-side .NET web code. Excel isn't running locally in their browser, but the functionality of Excel is reproduced, presumably through a lot of client sided scripting that I expect would be a real pain to duplicate myself. You can even cut and paste from a local spreadsheet into the web's spreadsheet. This sounds great, by biggest problem is cost. Our company is near death and won't allow us to purchase any new software.
Next, I want to identify the common components across all spreadsheet upload processing and come up with generic processing code. For example, I imagine a table which defines each of our spreadsheets and the format of each including the column names and data type definitions, perhaps in terms of their destination columns instead of hard coding. Based on this table template definition, I can generate XLS templates for download from this table definition. I can also perform simple generic edits to ensure that the data entered matches the table definition. And one common web page can be used to present the data and allow report data type mismatch errors and allow for the user to correct them. I would also define a common table for storing the data in a "staging" table, using a table with two columns, submission #, row num, name and value, perhaps. No more "custom everything" is the goal.
Next I need to decide where to put the business rules. My dept's mgt firmly believes that all loading of data should be done by Informatica ETL batch processes and therefore the rules/edits belong "in Informatica". I have zero experience with Informatica tools, I am more of a .NET guy. I am therefore unsure as to how these rules are implemented but I suspect that they are not reusable in the sense that they can be used by a .NET web page to validate a particular record against. You see, in some cases, when the user is not performing a bulk upload, they do have the ability to edit a specific record and I would like the same edits that were applied by the ETL bulk insert process to be applied to an individual update attempt to a single record via a web page. If the solution to write a single web service or stored procedure that can be called from either the web page doing an update of a single record or called thousands of times for each record in a bulk upload? The latter sounds inefficient.
Your thoughts on anything above would be very much welcomed.
From a cost perspective, the efforts you'll need to go through to re-create spreadsheet functionality on the web will exceed the cost of Farpoint or other controls. Even if you made $20 an hour, do you think you could complete a working product in under 2 weeks? I think you have the facts on your side when you discussed maintenance issues if you allow ETL functionality to exist in Excel - you have twice the amount of work to maintain the transformation rules. I think you need to convince management that in order to create a maintainable, robust solution you need some flexible utilities.
Farpoint is a good choice. There is also SpreadsheetGear that is a .Net engine that interprets Excel macros and can run on a web server. It has a Win32 control that allows you to create a WinForms solution with very Excel interface functionality. Last time I checked there was no web control for the product. It does an excellent job of providing Excel capability for processing large amounts of data.
Good luck. I think you will find a good solution since you seem to have a good grasp of the pro's and con's of all the different potential solutions.
A client wants to "Web-enable" a spreadsheet calculation -- the user to specify the values of certain cells, then show them the resulting values in other cells.
(They do NOT want to show the user a "spreadsheet-like" interface. This is not a UI question.)
They have a huge spreadsheet with lots of calculations over many, many sheets. But, in the end, only two things matter -- (1) you put numbers in a couple cells on one sheet, and (2) you get corresponding numbers off a couple cells in another sheet. The rest of it is a black box.
I want to present a UI to the user to enter the numbers they want, then I'd like to programatically open the Excel file, set the numbers, tell it to re-calc, and read the result out.
Is this possible/advisable? Is there a commercial component that makes this easier? Are their pitfalls I'm not considering?
(I know I can use Office Automation to do this, but I know it's not recommended to do that server-side, since it tries to run in the context of a user, etc.)
A lot of people are saying I need to recreate the formulas in code. However, this would be staggeringly complex.
It is possible, but not advisable (and officially unsupported).
You can interact with Excel through COM or the .NET Primary Interop Assemblies, but this is meant to be a client-side process.
On the server side, no display or desktop is available and any unexpected dialog boxes (for example) will make your web app hang – your app will behave flaky.
Also, attaching an Excel process to each request isn't exactly a low-resource approach.
Working out the black box and re-implementing it in a proper programming language is clearly the better (as in "more reliable and faster") option.
Related reading: KB257757: Considerations for server-side Automation of Office
You definitely don't want to be using interop on the server side, it's bad enough using it as a kludge on the client side.
I can see two options:
Figure out the spreadsheet logic. This may benefit you in the long term by making the business logic a known quantity, and in the short term you may find that there are actually bugs in the spreadsheet (I have encountered tons of monster spreadsheets used for years that turn out to have simple bugs in them - everyone just assumed the answers must be right)
Evaluate SpreadSheetGear.NET, which is basically a replacement for interop that does it all without Excel (it replicates a huge chunk of Excel's non-visual logic and IO in .NET)
Although this is certainly possible using ASP.NET, it's very inadvisable. It's un-scalable and prone to concurrency errors.
Your best bet is to analyze the spreadsheet calculations and duplicate them. Now, granted, your business is not going to like the time it takes to do this, but it will (presumably) give them a more usable system.
Alternatively, you can simply serve up the spreadsheet to users from your website, in which case you do almost nothing.
Edit: If your stakeholders really insist on using Excel server-side, I suggest you take a good hard look at Excel Services as #John Saunders suggests. It may not get you everything you want, but it'll get you quite a bit, and should solve some of the issues you'll end up with trying to do it server-side with ASP.NET.
That's not to say that it's a panacea; your mileage will certainly vary. And Sharepoint isn't exactly cheap to buy or maintain. In fact, short-term costs could easily be dwarfed by long-term costs if you go the Sharepoint route--but it might the best option to fit a requirement.
I still suggest you push back in favor of coding all of your logic in a separate .NET module. That way you can use it both server-side and client-side. Excel can easily pass calculations to a COM object, and you can very easily publish your .NET library as COM objects. In the end, you'd have a much more maintainable and usable architecture.
Neglecting the discussion whether it makes sense to manipulate an excel sheet on the server-side, one way to perform this would probably look like adopting the
Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel.dll
Using this library, you can tell Excel to open a Spreadsheet, change and read the contents from .NET. I have used the library in a WinForm application, and I guess that it can also be used from ASP.NET.
Still, consider the concurrency problems already mentioned... However, if the sheet is accessed unfrequently, why not...
The simplest way to do this might be to:
Upload the Excel workbook to Google Docs -- this is very clean, in my experience
Use the Google Spreadsheets Data API to update the data and return the numbers.
Here's a link to get you started on this, if you want to go that direction:
http://code.google.com/apis/spreadsheets/overview.html
Let me be more adamant than others have been: do not use Excel server-side. It is intended to be used as a desktop application, meaning it is not intended to be used from random different threads, possibly multiple threads at a time. You're better off writing your own spreadsheet than trying to use Excel (or any other Office desktop product) form a server.
This is one of the reasons that Excel Services exists. A quick search on MSDN turned up this link: http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/archive/category/11361.aspx. That's a category list, so contains a list of blog posts on the subject. See also Microsoft.Office.Excel.Server.WebServices Namespace.
It sounds like you're talking that the user has the spreadsheet open on their local system, and you want a web site to manipulate that local spreadsheet?
If that's the case, you can't really do that. Even Office automation won't help, unless you want to require them to upload the sheet to the server and download a new altered version.
What you can do is create a web service to do the calculations and add some vba or vsto code to the Excel sheet to talk to that service.