I want to use XML instead of SQLServer for a simple website.
Are their any good tutorials, code examples, and/or tools available to make a (prefer VB.NET) wrapper class to handle the basic list, insert, edit, and delete (CRUD) code?
The closest one I found was on a Telerik Trainer video/code for their Scheduler component where they used XML to handle the scheduling data in the demo. They created an ObjectDataSource class. Here is a LINK to that demo if anyone is interested.
[Reply to Esteban]
it would make deployment easier for clients that use godaddy where the database isn't in the app_data folder. also backing up those websites would be as simple as FTP the entire thing.
i have concerns about possible collisions on saving. especially if I add something as simple as a click counter to say a list of mp3 files visitors to the site can access.
In these days of SQL Server Express, I'd say there's really no reason for you not to use a database.
I know this doesn't really answer your question, but I'd hate to see you roll out code that will be a nightmare to maintain and scale.
Maybe you could tell us why you want to use XML files instead of a proper database.
It would make deployment easier for clients that use go-daddy where the database isn't in the app_data folder. also backing up those websites would be as simple as FTP the entire thing.
I have concerns about possible collisions on saving. especially if I add something as simple as a click counter to say a list of mp3 files visitors to the site can access.
Related
Here is what I think my website should be able to provide to user.
Ability to upload file to the system. It should not blocking, user should be able to surf other pages of the website while upload is ongoing. Once upload is done user will get notified about upload.
User should be able to view of his/her uploaded files in website.
Ability to edit files in web browsers using third party APIs
Number of user are going to be around 5000, and all of them might upload files at the same time so performance should not decrease.
Where should I store this files? How to make sure that read and write of files on this directory should handle concurrent user request?
Considering above points. What should be the best way to architect this website?
Are there any existing web framework that play along with this type of architecture like rails, express?
If you want to have the ability to browse the site while a file is uploading, you'll want to use something on the front end that overrides anchor tags and asynchronously fetches the next page - there might be a library or something to accomplish this but it should be easy to implement yourself with jQuery.
To make this easier (and for many other reasons), you'll almost definitely want to structure your site with an MVC (Model View Controller) architecture. Rails is structured this way, as is almost any web framework. It doesn't sound like what you're describing is better suited to Rails over PHP or Python etc so just use whatever language or framework you (or your developers) feel most comfortable with. You might want to do some research into available plugins for editing files (it really depends on what type of files you want to edit and how) and using those to influence your decision on which language to choose as well.
With regards to storing files on your server, any logical system should suffice. Perhaps:
/username/year/month/day/myFile.txt
You'll want to do something to ensure filenames don't clash as well. And obviously you'd want a database storing the information linking files to users.
I need to store the application settings somewhere, but can't find a satisfying solution. Read only settings are pretty easy to store in web.config, but what about settings for application administration that would should be accessible through web-page? Writing to web.config doesn't seem to be a good idea. I have considered storing the settings in custom xml file, but then if there is sensitive information involved in the settings, that seems to be problem, also if there are multiple users modifying the settings at the same time some kind of file locking has to be involved. Now I am inclined to store the app settings the MS-SQL database, it seems like a secure and well scale-able solution, however it feels wrong to have a table to store just one row - the setting. What's your opinion? How would you design that?
Are there any ready to go .NET solutions for storing dynamic web app settings?
Your question is so subjective that I don't even know why I am answering it instead of voting to close. But anyway, a database is a good place. And if you are bored and tired of relational data there are great NoSQL databases out there such as MongoDB and RavenDB that will make this very easy. And if you want a very fast database Redis could be worth checking out.
Storing things in files in a web application is far more difficult than it might look at the first place. If it is for readonly then web.config could indeed be a good place. But once you start writing you will have to take into account that a web application is a multithreaded environment where you will have to synchronize the access to this file. And what looked in the first place as an easy solution, could quickly turn into a nightmare if you want to design it properly. That's why I think that a database is a good solution as it gives you concurrency, security, atomicity, data integrity, ...
I absolutely think that storing settings of dynamic nature in database is the right way. Don't feel bad about having one simple table. This table can save you a lot of headaches. If you'll code it smart you can really benefit from it (but that depends on the type of values you want to store). The only problem with db is that someone might actually modify values directly in database. But it can be easily solved. For example I have a "configuration-values" class that I feed from database upon start and put it to cache with some timeout. Then after a while I can lazily feed it again, catching situations like I mentioned above. I hope it makes some sense.
I'm thinking of developing the following but wondering if it already exists out there:
I need a SQL based solution for assigning and managing localization text values for an asp.net site instead of using RESX files. This helps maintain text on the site without having to take it down for deployment whenever an update is required.
Thanks.
We actually went down that path, and ended up with a really really slow web site - ripping out the SQL-based translation mechanism and using the ASP.NET resources gave us a significant performance boost. So I can't really recommend you do that same thing.... (and yes - we were caching and optimizing for throughput and everything - and the SQL based stuff was still significantly slower).
You get what you pay for - the SQL based approach was more flexible in terms of being able to "translate" on the fly, and fix typos and stuff. But in the end, in our app (Webforms, .NET 2.0 at that time), using resources proved to be the only viable way to go.
We did this (SQL-Based Translation) and we are really happy with the result! We developed an interface for translation-agencies to perform the updates to the page online. As a side effect, the solution started to serve as content-management system. If you cache your data, performance is not an issue. The downside is, that we invested multiple hundreds of hours into our solution. (I would guess sth. arround 600 hours, but I could check.).
We ended up with a hybrid solution where users could edit content into a database but the application then created a .resx which was deployed manually.
You could also bypass the server translation altogether and do translation in jQuery on the client which is an approach I have used successfully.
I'm not sure about the website restart, but at least using .NET MVC is very convenient and I haven't noticed that restart problem, and, if occurs, how often you need to update the resx files? For bigger projects I use to create a solution with multiple projects, one for the localization, something like this:
MyApp.Localization
Model
Page
File1.resx
MyApp.Core
MyApp.Web
Then in the Web project I add a reference to the Localization project, and use it like
#MyApp.Localization.Model.Customer.CustomerName
#MyApp.Localization.Page.About.PageTitle
#MyApp.Localization.File1.Paragraph1
Everytime I change the translated text, I either upload an updated .dll or copy the .resx files.
NOTE: You need to set your resx files to PUBLIC, so can be accessed as strongly typed.
I created a SQL based translation scheme. But I only load the needed translations for a given page when it is requested, and just the ones for that particular page.
Those get loaded into a dictionary object when the page reloads and cached during the session. Then is just does text replacement based off a lookup on that.
Pretty much all of it is dynamically generated, and includes user defined content that must be translated, so the flexibility is key.
Performance is quite fast, the SQL queries to retrieve all the data take much longer (relatively speaking).
We have a legacy ASP.net powered site running on a IIS server, the site was developed by a central team and is used by multiple customers. Each customer however has their own copy of the site's aspx files plus a web.config file. This is causing problems as changes made by well meaning support engineers to the copies of the source aspx files are not being folded back into the central source, so our code base is diverging. Our current folder structure looks something like:
OurApp/Source aspx & default web.config
Customer1/Source aspx & web.config
Customer2/Source aspx & web.config
Customer3/Source aspx & web.config
Customer4/Source aspx & web.config
...
This is something I'd like to change to each customer having just a customised web.config file and all the customers sharing a common set of source files. So something like:
OurApp/Source aspx & default web.config
Customer1/web.config
Customer2/web.config
Customer3/web.config
Customer4/web.config
...
So my question is, how do I set this up? I'm new to ASP.net and IIS as I usually use php and apache at home but we use ASP.net and ISS here at work.
Source control is used and I intend to retrain the support engineers but is there any way to avoid having multiple copies of the source aspx files? I hate that sort of duplication!
If you're dead-set on the single app instance, you can accomplish what you're after using a custom ConfigurationSection in your single web.config. For the basics, see:
http://haacked.com/archive/2007/03/12/custom-configuration-sections-in-3-easy-steps.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/2tw134k3.aspx
Example XML might be:
<YourCustomConfigSection>
<Customers>
<Customer Name="Customer1" SomeSetting="A" Another="1" />
<Customer Name="Customer2" SomeSetting="B" Another="2" />
<Customer Name="Customer3" SomeSetting="C" Another="3" />
</Customers>
</YourCustomConfigSection>
Now in your ConfigSection Properties, expose Name, SomeSetting, and Another. When the Property is accessed or set, use a condition (request domain or something else that uniquely identifies the Customer) to decide which to use.
With the proper implementation, the app developers don't need to be aware of what's going on behind the scenes. They just use CustomSettings.Settings.SomeSetting and don't worry about which Customer is accessing the app.
I know it might seem annoying, but the duplication is actually a good thing. The problem here is with your process, not with the way the systems are setup.
Keeping the sites separate is actually a good thing. Whilst it looks like "duplication" it's actually not. It's separation. Making changes in the production code by your support engineers should be actively discouraged.
You should be looking at changing your process to change once deploy everywhere. This will make everything a lot easier for you in the long run.
To actually answer your question, the answer is no, you can't do it. The reason is that web.config isn't designed to store user level settings, it's designed to store per application instance settings. In your case, you need an application instance per user which means separate config files.
For your system to work, you need to be able to preemptively tell the application which config file to use, which isn't possible without some sort of input from the user.
Use an external source control application and keep rolling out updates as required.
It isn't really a good idea to let your live site be updated by support engineers in real time anyway.
Depending on what is actually in the web config, and what settings differ between customers, you could opt to use a single web config, and store other customer specific configuration options in a database or some other custom xml/text file. As long as the specific customer settings in the web.config don't have to do anything with how IIS operates, and you are just using it to store values, then this solution might work out well for you.
Thank you all again for your answers. After reading through them and having a think what I think I will do is leave the multiple instances alone for now and I will try to improve our update process first. then I will develop a new version of the application that has the user configuration information in the database layer and then pick the user based on the request domain or URL as someone suggested. That way I can have a single application instance supporting multiple different client configurations cleanly.
As most of the client configuration data is really presentation or data source related, nothing complicated. I think we ended up with multiple application instances mostly because the original programmer hadn't been expecting multiple customers and didn't design for that so when someone came along later and added a second customer they just duplicated the application which is wasteful as each instance is about 99.99% identical to the original.
I am implementing this as we speak.
In the main web.config, I have 1 item per installation. It points me toward the custom config file I built for each client (and toward the custom masterpage, css, images, etc).
Using WebConfigurationManager.OpenWebConfiguration, I open the new webconfigs in their subdirectories. I determine which one to use by using System.Web.HttpContext.Current.Request.Url.OriginalString, and determining the uRL that called me. Based on that URL, I know which web.config to use.
From that point forward the clients all use the same codebase. They have their own databases too.
The idea of having to update 30-40 installations when we make an update scares the death out of me. We do not want to support 30-40 codebases, so there won't be customization beyond the master page, css, and images.
I wrote a custom class lib that knows how to switch to the proper webconfig, and read the custom section I built with all our settings.
The only issue I have now is the FormsAuthentication Cookie. I need to be able to switch that as well. Unfortunately, the property for the name is read only
If I understand correctly, it sounds like you have multiple deployments (one for each client) where the only difference is the web.config, right?
First off, although I don't know your unique situation, I would generally urge you to stay with separate installs. It usually allows much more flexibility. Off the top of my head: are you ever going to have customizations, or different clients running different versions? Are you sure? The easiest way to stay flexible here is to keep going with separate installs.
In my opinion, it isn't ugly at all if your practices are aligned properly. Based on some things you mentioned, you have trouble in that area - obviously, possible source control buy-in/training issues. But you are aware of that. I would also take a hard look at your deployment procedures and so on. I have a feeling you might have further issues in that area, and I mean absolutely no offense.
That said, let's say you want to move forward with this.
You didn't say whether all the clients share a single common database, but I'm thinking no, since designing that type of system is often not worth the extra complexity (which can be severe in systems of any size) so people often opt to keep them separate.
What that means is that you have store your connection string somewhere. Usually that would be web.config... So that seems to break our plan.
Really, the apparent elegance of this situation is almost always wildly offset by the challenges it introduces. If I thought about it hard enough, I could maybe find a way around this by introducing another database that intelligently manages connection strings or maybe delving into keeping all your login info directly in web.config (which is possible but... not ideal), however my gut says the work will be wasted because some day you will end up going back to how you're doing it now.
Also: changing code directly in production is obviously not the best practice here. But you if you are on a monolithic shared platform with any amount of traffic, that can never ever ever happen. Food for thought.
Let me know if I'm missing something!
I have some configuration values for an asp.net web app. They will be maintained by a system admin once the system goes live. Should I store these values in the database or in a config file? Is there a best practice for this sort of thing?
It's easy and convenient to create a robust interface to edit the values in the database.
It's less easy to create a good one for the config file.
So I would usually you want to store everything which you would like your users/administrators to be able to edit later in the database. Everything which only needs to be touched during serious changes like re-installation etc is better off in the config file.
I would always recommend database simply because you can build an Admin UI relatively easy and audit all changes with similar ease. Although you can accomplish the same with changes to a file, the database route with some sort of a Admin control area is always preferable. Especially when you want to know who changed what when.
Also in our environment, changing a config file if there was an error, involves the entire change management process approvals/etc., which is pretty painful. So if you take the time to incorporate configuration settings in a database I think it will work out better in the long run. Just my $0.02.
I prefer a text config file, .ini style or XML style for these two reasons:
1 - You can put comments in the text file.
2 - Text editors have an "undo" command.
Depending on the context of the config information, you could choose to leave it in the web.config or you could create maintenance tables for it in the database. I would typcially keep things more backend specific, like connection strings, ftp locations, usernames/passwords(for the application, not user permissions) in the web.config though.
I normally keep more relative information that relates to the information in the database rather than the application itself, in the database.
This is all loosely based though and not always the case.
I prefer to avoid databases if I can and I don't need the performance. If you need/have a database then I would say put as much as you can in one place. One thing to manage.
I think databases are a great place for configuration values for distributed applications where you want a users settings to be available to them no matter which computer they use.
Configuration values stored in files are very useful for computer specific configurations (such as if you use a mapped drive to identify a location and every user may have a different mapping, like a CD/DVD drive for instance).
If you don't already have a database for the application you're developing though, it might be overkill to have a database exclusively for application configuration.
I prefer a text .ini file. They are easy to edit, and easy to move around when your application moves around. Here's an example Setting class that you may find useful.