First, I don't know if this is the right place to discuss idea related to Sense/Net SN evolution & learning process about it!
Anyway, this is my story:
I have tried & tested some SN functionality especially content type definition CTD; It is really elegant!
Sense/Net wiki documentation gives us "Know How" and we may write 200 wiki pages about SN. All included information are true. However, we don't have the complete model in which we can see the whole system model and how all cases derived from it.
I searched SN codeplex.com pages but didn't find how SN evolved to be mature ECM platform.
Also, searched google using the following KWs:
"Document Management System Modeling"
"Role-based access control (RBAC) model"
.....
Please collaborate & help.
It's curious that no one from SenseNet has answered, but I'll give it a shot even though I don't know a lot of the history. I've been working with SenseNet for the last 4+ years, developed the pysensenet extension, communicate with the developers, and am familiar with the source code, so I know a bit about the framework.
The framework has evolved over that last 15+ years and is pretty remarkable. Here are a few facts and highlights:
The data model is at it's core an XML Tree where each tree node has an internal representation as a C# class and can hold any number of properties/Fields. This is referred to as Content, and the database as the Content Repository.
The XML Tree is persisted in a SQL Database and uses Lucene.NET for indexing.
Content / data queries are made in Lucene and not SQL.
At one time the database was arbitrary (SQL), then stored procedures in MS SQL Server locked it into MS SQL, although recently (SenseNet 7) supports blob storage in MongoDB.
Fields can be one of 9 built-in field types, or a custom type that you define.
A node in the XML Tree, aka "Content", can hold a field that references another node somewhere else in the tree, like a linked list inside a tree! OK, a doubly linked list since both nodes can refer to each other. Very cool.
There is no "external model", or as SenseNet says, "Everything is Content".
The permission system is node based and is incredibly granular. For example, you can define permissions such that one role, group or person, can only see the Content at a particular node. And it integrates with Active Directory.
All Content can be versioned and tracked. For example, a Content Type of "Contact" (person) could have versioning on for the person's name. This way if someone changed their name, the Content Repository would have a history of the all name changes.
Hopefully this doesn't come off as a SenseNet marketing piece -- I don't work for them and don't benefit if you purchase a license -- but may help you compare it to other technologies such as SharePoint and Alfresco.
Related
I work on Labware LIMS, which has both configuration, and customization via its own programming language and internal code editor, and stores this customization code in database records. (Note, not the source code of the actual application itself, just the customization code a.k.a. LIMS Basic.) Almost everything in LIMS is stored in the database.
We want to investigate the possibility of using source control to protect this code but we don't know much more than the theory of using something like Git. (I have worked as a junior QA and used git but not as a dev and my knowledge is limited!)
Of particular use would be the merging tools, as currently we have to manually merge code in a text editor, if we even notice there is a conflict (checking content between dev and live is time consuming and involves using multiple tools, some of which are 3rd party tools we have developed ourselves, which are hit and miss. I personally find it easiest to cut and paste into a text file and then use Beyond Compare.
There is no notification that the code is different when moving it from dev to live (no deployment as such, you just import an xml file) so we often have things going live that someone was working on unbeknownst to each other. I.e. dev 1 is working on the code in object 1, dev 2 gets a ticket to make a change to object 1, does so and puts their change Live, whatever dev 1 was doing is now also Live in whatever state it was in. (Because we don't always have time to thoroughly check what state each object is in between up to 3 different databases.)
Is it possible to use source control just on the code within the database, but not necessarily the database itself? (We have backups and such for that but its easy for some aspects of the system to get overwritten by multiple devs working on overlapping areas at the same time.)
If anyone reading this has any specific knowledge of LW LIMS, we are referring to the Subroutines mostly, we have versioned Analyses which stands in for source control for the moment and is somewhat effective but no way to control who is doing what on the subroutines other than a comment log at the top. I have tried to find any information on how other teams source control their code in LIMS but to no avail.
The structure of one of these tables can range from as simple as the code just existing in one field as a straight text dump with a few other fields such as changed_on, changed_by and name (Subroutines), or more complex with code relating to one record being sprinkled around in multiple rows on another table entirely (Analyses) but even if it could just deal with the simple scenario to start with that would be great!
TL;DR: Could the contents of the Code field in a database record be treated like a regular code object in other dev environments somehow and source controlled using Git? (And is anyone willing to explain it simply for me to follow?)
As you need to version control table fields of subroutine, but LW LIMS doesn’t have the IDE for version control (such as git, svn etc). So the direct answer is no.
If you really want to do version control for the codes in database, you can create a git repository and only put the codes in git repository. when a file has updated, you can commit & push the changes. And it’s easy to compare the difference between versions.
More detail about git, you can refer git book.
LabWare LIMS has a number of options for version control. You COULD version the Subroutine table by adding a SUBROUTINE.VERSION field to the table, this works the same way as other versioned tables in LabWare where it asks you if you would like to create a new version of the object before saving. There are a few customers I work with that have done this.
Alternatively, (and possibly our more recommended method prior to LEM) there is the Snapshot capability where the system automatically takes a "snapshot" of objects as they are saved - when viewing these you have the ability to view them side by side in a comparison dialogue - it will show < or > for lines which are different.
Another approach is, if you have auditing turned on you are able to view the audit history for changes to specific objects - this includes subroutines.
One other approach is to use configuration packages - this has the ability to record version AND build numbers. Though individual subroutines is probably a bit too granular for it's intended design.
Lastly, since this question was originally posted we have developed a product called LabWare Environment Manager (LEM) which has some good change control functionality built-in.
For more information on the suggestions above, please have a look at the LabWare Technical manual for the version you are on. We also have a mailing list for questions like this to be posted. You might find an answer there. If you have access to our Support webpage you're able to search previous questions that have been asked. I'd also suggest that you get in touch with your Account Manager at LabWare who can help you answer some of your questions.
HTH
I am trying to formulate a proposal for an application that allows a user to print a batch of documents based on data stored in a SQL table. The SQL table indicates which documents are due and also contains all demographic information. This is outside of what I normally do and am trying to see if these is a platform/application that already exists to do such a task
For example
List of all documents: Document #1 - Document #10
Person 1 is due for document #: 1,5,7,8
Person 2 is due for document #: 2.6
Person 3 is due for document #: 7,8,10
etc
Ideally, what I would like is for the user to be able to push a button and get a printed stack of documents that have been customized for each user including basic demographic info like name, DOB, etc
Like i said at the top, I already have all of the needed information in a database, I am just trying to figure out the best approach to move that information onto a document
I have done some research and found some people have used mail merge in Word or using Access as a front end but I don't know if this is the best way. I've also found this document. Any advice would be greatly appreciated
If I understand your problem correctly, your problem is two-fold: Firstly, you need to find a way to generated documents based on data (mail-merge) and secondly, you might need to print them two.
For document generation you have two basic approaches: template-based and programmatically from scratch. I suppose that you will opt for a template based approach which basically means that you design (in MS Word) a template document (Word, RTF, ...) that acts as a template and contains placeholders and other tags that designate »dynamic« parts of the document. Then, at document generation time, you need a .NET library/processor that you will pass this template document and the data, where the processor will populate the template with the data and return the resulting document.
One way to achieve this functionality would be employing MS Words' native mail-merge, but you should know that this would involve using Office COM and Word Application Automation which should be avoided almost always.
Another option is to build such a system on top of Open XML SDK. This is velid option, but it will be a pretty demanding task and will most probably cost you much more than buying a commercial .NET library that does mail-merge out-of-the-box – been there, done that. But of course, the good side here is that you will be able to tailer the solution to your needs. If you go down this road I recoment that you use Content Controls for tagging documents/templates. The solution with CCs will be much easier to implement than the solution with bookmarks.
I'm not very familliar with the open source solutions and I'm not sury how many there are that can do mail-merge. One I know is FlexDoc (on CodePlex) but its problem is that uses a construct (XmlControl) for tagging that is depricated in Word 2010+.
Then there are commercial solutions. Again I don't know them in detail but I know that the majority of them are a general purpose document processing libraries. Our company has been using this document generation toolkit for some time now and I can say it covers all our »template-based document generation« needs. It doesn't require MS Word at doc generation time, and has really helpful add-in for MS word and you only need several lines of code to integrate it in your project. Templating is very powerful and you can set-up a template in a very short time. While templates are Word documents, you can generate PDF or XPS docs as well. XPS is useful because you can use .NET/WPF prining framework that works with XPS docs to print documents. This is a very high-end solution, but of course, the downside here is that it is not a free solution.
I'm trying to make a custom column (for a custom list), where the users can upload files without overwriting the previous - this way they can keep past versions of the files and upload newer ones and the new ones append. There already exist "append only" comment columns and file upload columns that I can see.
I'm working with Sharepoint designer 2007 (2010 doesn't work with the site), and I'm referencing this code I found online somewhere (http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=0qN89meu), trying to research the Sharepoint documentation on MSDN. I can open the site in designer, but don't know where to go from there (it's already running on a web server, not opening it locally).
I'm just not clear on how to start, I thought there'd be a simple "right+click -> new column" feature but I can't find it. If someone could point me in the right direction to where I could start creating columns on the site, that would be great. Thanks!
An untested idea :
Create a document library with a lookup column to the custom list.
Create an event receiver (ItemAdded and ItemUpdated) than will take the attached files and move them to the other list (with the correct lookup value). --> Code with Visual Studio
Grant to this document library only read permissions.
Adapt the view to display the related documents in the dispform of the custom list.
Advantages:
this seems to answer to your need
you gain all the usability of a document library (nothing prevent you to grant edit rights to other users, force check out, etc.)
Disadvantages:
you have to play with lookup. Can be tricky sometimes, if you play with features
you split one business entity to two entities. You will have to deal with cascading delete (if you need it).
We have a table in our our database that stores XSL's and XSD's that are applied to XML documents created in our application. This table is versioned in the sense that each time a change is made, a new row is created.
I'm trying to propose that we store the XSL's and XSD's as files in our Source control system instead of relying on the database to track the history. Each time a file is updated, we would deploy the new version to the database.
I don't seem to be getting much agreement on the issue. can anyone help me out with pros and cons of this approach? Perhaps I'm missing something.
XSL and XSD files are part of the application and so ought to be kept under source control. That's just obvious. Even if somebody wanted to catgorise them as data they would be reference data and so - in my book at least - would need to be kept under source control. This is because reference data is part of the application and so part of its configuration. For instance, applications which use the database to store values for drop downs or to implement business rules need to be certain that it holds the right version of the data.
The only argument for keeping multiple versions of the files in the dtabase would be if you might need to process older versions of the XML files. This depends on the nature of your application. Certainly I have worked on systems where XML files / messages came from external (third party) systems, where we really had no control over the format of the messages sent. So for a variety of reasons we needed to be able to handle incoming XML regardless of whether its structure was current or historical. But is is in addition to storing the files in a source control repository, not instead of.
Are there tools that make the job easier? If command-line only tools exist, then can anyone speculate if there is a market for a GUI tool? For example, you can create a relational database by modeling visually. Should the same notion exist for LDAP?
Apache Directory Studio includes an ldif-Editor. It is still a text editor but with syntax highlighting, autocompletion and group collapsing for ldif files:
http://directory.apache.org/studio/
I don't know if there are any tools but it isn't that hard to create them by hand.
If you are using IPlanet LDAP then they had a nice interface for creating and modifying schemas though. :)
I don't know if you would consider that to be by hand otherwise that is one tool to use.
I've done some LDIF handling using Perl and the Net::LDAP::LDIF module and it made scripting custom LDAP conversions very easy.
Have you looked at the command-line tool, LDIFDE.exe? Should be on your domain controller.
Business people give me Excel spreadsheets with inconsistent formatting of user and group data and want it loaded right away (then they come back with a new version and tell me they've only added some new users, but some are missing, some data is now invalid, there's a missing column etc.) They want unique passwords assigned, group memberships set up based on department id fields, and so forth.
Then they come back two weeks later and want to know about the differences between that spreadsheet and one from six months ago. Sigh.
I generally just do it all with a few hand-crafted Python scripts.
A lot of times you may be copying objects from one tree to another. Or backing them up. In that case, most LDAP tools have some way of exporting as LDIF. Then you can easily modify the files as needed.
Or copy examples to reuse.
I have seen a number of tools that will do tasks and output the results as LDIF, which can be handy, but they are basically point usage tools.