I've been trying my very best not to ask any nosy question here in stackoverflow, but it has been almost one week since I got stuck in this problem and I couldn't find any solution.
I already have my working website built with CakePHP 3.2. What the website basically does is scrape Twitter for tweets containing a given search term, check if it's already in my database, and store it if it doesn't yet exist. Twitter's JSON response has this "tweet_id" property, and I've been using that value to check for whether I should ignore or append a specific tweet to my DB. While this might be okay while my database is small, I suspect it's going to slow things down considerably when my tables grow bigger. Thus my need for ElasticSearch.
My ElasticSearch server is running on my Arch Linux install, and I've configured my app to point to the said server. Also, I have my "Type" object named the same way as my "Tweets" table (I followed the documentation until the overview part http://book.cakephp.org/3.0/en/elasticsearch.html). This craps out an "Unknown method "alias" error, and following Google searches led me to creating an alternate pagination class since that was what some found to be the cause of the error (https://github.com/lorenzo/audit-stash/issues/4), which still doesn't fix things.
I'm not sure if I got this right. I installed the ElasticSearch plugin with the assumption that all I have to do is name the Types the same name as my tables, since to me the documentation "implies" that this should be done on top of the Blog Tutorial they did to "improve query performance".
TLDR, how is this supposed to work? Is my above assumption right? Do I name the Types differently and index everything myself? I'm not sure if there's just too much automagic, or I'm just poor at these sort of things. And yes, I'm new to frameworks (but not PHP, among other languages)
Thanks in advance!
Related
I'm working on the front end of an app that uses Solr for data storage. Currently I have an empty index, but it'd (understandably) be a lot easier for me if some dummy data was returned so I could make sure that it's output correctly on the front end.
If I was working with and RDBMS (let's say postgres) I'd open up a GUI (e.g. pgadmin) and type data manually into a few rows to achieve this goal. I have access to the Solr web interface, but I can't see any obvious call to action saying INSERT YOUR DATA HERE. The closest thing I can find to an answer on the web is this SO thread, but it's still not quite the droids easy GUI-based solution I'm looking for.
So, my question is: Is the a way to quickly and easily insert some data equivalent to the RDBMS method mentioned above?
Make sure you have defined a schema in schema.xml.
SOLR does indeed have a (limited) html GUI, which on a local installation is probably found at localhost:8983/solr (default). If you can get to the base admin page, then on the left there is a small combobox where you can select a core/collection. If you click on THAT, then you get a list of options that emerges, and you can pick 'documents' to get a similar GUI to what I think you expect from postgres/RDBMS/whatnot.
http://localhost:8983/solr/#/collection1/documents is the URL on a default SOLR installation that I have. This should work as long as you don't have default cores. (Replace collection1 with your collection name and localhost:8983 with wherever your solr is hosted/the port).
Thanks in advance for any help offered and patience for my current web-coding experience.
Background:
I'm currently attempting to develop an web based application for my family's business. There is a current version of this system I have developed in C#, however I want to get the system web-based and in the process learn cakephp and the MVC pattern.
Current problem:
I'm currently stuck in a controller that's supposed to take care of a PurchaseTicket. This ticket will have an associated customer, line items, totals etc. I've been trying to develop a basic 'add()' function to the controller however I'm having trouble with the following:
I'm creating a view with everything on it: a button for searching customer, a button to add line items, and a save button. Since I'm used to developing desktop applications, I'm thinking that I might be trying to transfer the same logic to web-based. Is this something that would be recommended or do'able?
I'm running into basic problems like 'searching customer'. From the New Ticket page I'm redirecting to the customer controller, searching and then putting result in session variable or posting it back, but as I continue my process with the rest of the required information, I'm ending up with a bit of "spaghetti" code. Should I do a multi part form? If I do I break the visual design of the application.
Right now I ended up instantiating my PurchaseTicket model and putting it in a session variable. I did this to save intermediate data however I'm not sure if instantiating a Model is conforming to cakephp standards or MVC pattern.
I apologize for the length, this is my first post as a member.
Thanks!
Welcome to Stack Overflow!
So it sounds like there's a few questions, all with pretty open-ended answers. I don't know if this will end up an answer as such, but it's more information than I could put in a comment, so here I go:
First and foremost, if you haven't already, I'd recommend doing the CakePHP Blog Tutorial to get familiar with Cake, before diving straight into a conversion of your existing desktop app.
Second, get familiar with CakePHP's bake console. It will save you a LOT of time if you use it to get started on the web version of your app.
I can't stress how important it is to get a decent grasp of MVC and CakePHP on a small project before trying to tackle something substantial.
Third, the UI for web apps is definitely different to desktop apps. In the case of CakePHP, nothing is 'running' permanently on the server. The entire CakePHP framework gets instantiated, and dies, with every single page request to the server. That can be a tricky concept when transitioning from desktop apps, where everything is stored in memory, and instances of objects can exist for as long as you want them to. With desktop apps, it's easier to have a user go and do another task (like searching for a customer), and then send the result back to the calling object, the instance of which will still exist. As you've found out, if you try and mimic this functionality in a web app by storing too much information in sessions, you'll quickly end up with spaghetti code.
You can use AJAX (google it if you don't already know about it) to update parts of a page only, and get a more streamlined UI, which it sounds like something you'll be needing to do. To get a general idea of the possibilities, you might want to take a look at Bamboo Invoice. It's not built with CakePHP, but it's built with CodeIgniter, which is another open source PHP MVC framework. It sounds like Bamboo Invoice has quite a few similar functionalities to what you're describing (an Invoice has line items, totals, a customer, etc), so it might help you to get an idea of how you should structure your interface - and if you want to dig into the source code, how you can achieve some of the things you want to do.
Bamboo Invoice uses Ajax to give the app a feel of 'one view with everything on it', which it sounds like you want.
Fourth, regarding the specific case of your Customer Search situation, storing stuff in a session variable probably isn't the way to go. You may well want to use an autocomplete field, which sends an Ajax request to server after each time a character is entered in the field, and displays the list list of suggestions / matching customers that the server sends back. See an example here: http://jqueryui.com/autocomplete/. Implementing an autocomplete isn't totally straight forward, but there should be plenty of examples and tutorials all over the web.
Lastly, I obviously don't know what your business does, but have you looked into existing software that might work for you, before building your own? There's a lot of great, flexible web-based solutions, at very reasonable prices, for a LOT of the common tasks that businesses have. There might be something that gives you great results for much less time and money than it costs to build your own solution.
Either way, good luck, and enjoy CakePHP!
Preface: I have a broad, college knowledge, of a handful of languages (C++, VB,C#,Java, many web languages), so go with which ever you like.
I want to make an android app that compares numbers, but in order to do that I need a database. I'm a one man team, and the numbers get updated biweekly so I want to grab those numbers off of a wiki that gets updated as well.
So my question is: how can I access information from a website using one of the languages above?
What I understand the problem to be: Some entity generates a data set (i.e. numbers) every other week and you have a need to download that data set for treatment (e.g. sorting).
Ideally, the web site maintaining the wiki would provide a Service, like a RESTful interface, to easily gather the data. If that were the case, I'd go with any language that provides easy manipulation of HTTP request & response, and makes your data manipulation easy. As a previous poster said, Java would work well.
If you are stuck with the wiki page, you have a couple of options. You can parse the HTML your browser receives (Perl comes to mind as a decent language for that). Or you can use tools built for that purpose such as the aforementioned Jsoup.
Your question also mentions some implementation details such as needing a database. Evidently, there isn't enough contextual information for me to know whether that's optimal, so I won't address this aspect of the problem.
http://jsoup.org/ is a great Java tool for accessing content on html pages
Consider https://scraperwiki.com/ - it's a site where users can contribute scrapers. It's free as long as you let your scraper be public. The results of your scraper are exposed as csv and JSON.
If you don't know what a "scraper" is, google "screen scraping" - it's a long and frustrating tradition for coders, who have dealt with the same problem you have since the beginning of networked computing.
You could check out :http://web-harvest.sourceforge.net/
For Python, BeautifulSoup is one of the most tolerant HTML parsers out there. The documentation also lists similar libraries in Ruby and Java, so you'll probably find something relevant there.
I am developing a basic yet highly customized CRM for a small training centre which has the ability to store student records and also send emails to them. I'm using SwiftMailer following this excellent tutorial in CakePHP to accomplish the sending part.
Of course, students are sometimes going to reply to emails and I'd like to retrieve them within my CRM and store them along with the student record.
However, I cannot find a single reference to doing this. I've tried the following Google searches: "receiving email cakephp" , "retrieving email cakephp" and even "email client cakephp" but all of these queries give results relating to sending mail rather than receiving it -- very frustrating!
Finally, I broadened my search to non-cake solutions and found someone recommending a library called ezComponents. It doesn't seem to have had any active development for about a year, but it includes an email receiving class which is exactly what I want. Unfortunately, I have no idea how to add this to CakePHP and the only post I've been able to find on the entire web on the matter doesn't exactly go into much detail. It's certainly not a step-by-step tutorial on using ezComponents on CakePHP like the SwiftMailer tutorial I mentioned above.
I also found a class on Google Code called php-imap which looks like it would do the job but, again, I haven't the slightest clue how to get it working happily in Cake like SwiftMailer is.
I realize that I may have to learn how to package classes for use in Cake by myself but I'm asking this question first on the off-chance that there is already a Cake-friendly solution to this problem that I just haven't realized :-)
Joseph
Thanks to everyone for your answers, but I've been doing some more searching and it looks like the solution is actually incredibly simple.
Basically, with the help of a plugin, I can set up the mail server in databases.php as a datasource and then write a Model and Controller to interact with it.
Here's the example I found: https://github.com/kvz/cakephp-emails-plugin
Edit: the repo has been deprecated and is now available at https://github.com/kvz/deprecated/tree/cakephp-emails-plugin
You will want to pipe your email to PHP and use stdin:// to read the contents of the email and add the e-mail to your database.
I've done this with cake and the simplest way is to make a Cake console application to handle the parsing. Also using cpanel's account level filtering to generate the pipe is really simple.
http://forums.cpanel.net/f5/piping-mail-php-scripts-howto-checklist-50985.html
http://www.evolt.org/incoming_mail_and_php
Sounds like you want to include SwiftMailer as a Cake plugin, amirite?
http://book.cakephp.org/view/1111/Plugins
-- if you want to package it yourself. Otherwise, a cursory search of the Bakery yielded this result:
http://bakery.cakephp.org/articles/sky_l3ppard/2009/11/07/updated-swiftmailer-4-xx-component-with-attachments-and-plugins
Hopefully it will at least get you pointed in the right direction. HTH. :)
Background:
I'm building a poetry site with user submitted content. The relevant user actions for my questions are that users can:
a. Go to fancysitename.com/view to see all poems so far
b. Go to fancysitename.com/submit to submit your own poem.
c. Go to fancysitename.com/apoemid to view a particular poem you've bookmarked before.
d. Go to fancysitename.com/search to enter a word to search for in all the poems.
All the poems are stored as text fields in a database and referenced by a poem id. So the "apoemid" in step c will be the primary key of the tuple and I'll just pull up the text after getting the key from the url.
Question:
The poems exist nowhere except in a database. My webapp is literally 4 html files. Will this approach affect my search engine rankings?
Is there a more efficient way to do 'd' rather than do a Select * on the db and manually parsing the text on the server? Each poem will be at the most 10 lines long, so I would imagine using a full text search engine like Lucerne will probably be overkill.
Caveat
I'm running this on the google app engine for now, so my database customization options are pretty limited. So while I'd certainly be interested in hearing about the ideal way to do this, this is a pet side project so my budget is limited :(
Thanks!
Edit: Apparently I don't google so well at 7am. I've since found a solution for question 2 here so please disregard question 2.
AppEngine currently doesnt support full text indexing, they do have a better than nothing SearchableModel.
Some details of SearchableModel can be found here:
http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine/browse_thread/thread/f64eacbd31629668/8dac5499bd58a6b7?lnk=gst&q=searchablemodel
Regarding search engine ranking, yes having all your poems in the datastore can affect your ranking. This is generally overcome through the use of a sitemap. Here is an article about how StackOverflow uses a sitemap to help its search ranking.
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001174.html
In most database engines, you can accomplish this kind of searching. For example MysQL does have full text searching. I am not sure how app engine works but you can always have a stored procedure does this search.
Where you store your data will not affect your site's ranking, only how you serve it up (on what URLs, etc). There's absolutely no way for an arbitrary search spider to tell where you store your data, and no reason for it to care, either.
Regardless of the length of your text, you will need full-text searching if you want to search inside a string. As Sam points out, SearchableModel ought to work just fine for that.