When I try to create some entities I don't see the option to input fields. I just see the SaveEntity button.
However I can view all the existing entities.
What is very strange is - there is another entity called VideoEntity for which the create did not work yesterday but works today.
Can somebody help me with this seemingly unpredictable tool ?
Regards,
Sathya
i think the console knows what properties each entity has based on existing data, rather then your models. and the data is only updated periodically. when did you upload your app? maybe waiting a few hours will give the console time to update.
alternatively, you could use the remote api to add your entities, or write a small snippet and upload such as ...
VideoStatsEntity(app='home', ip='116.89.52.67', params='tag=20130210').put()
Writing a simple interface to the data-store to allow you to edit/create models is probably the best thing to do in this case. You know what they contain so you can adjust your interface accordingly, rather then waiting for the admin interface to "catch up" as Gwyn notes.
I believe that there are some property types that are impossible to add via the admin interface that you are using so you'll probably get to the point sooner rather then later of creating a custom interface.
The admin datastore view is good for quickly checking out the contents of the datastore, but ever tried paging through 100's of entries? Not fun.
Related
I am unsure if this is a bug, by design (though I can't see the benefit), or if I am just being dimwitted.
Using Google App Engine development server, v1.9.8, I can only add a datastore entity if another of the same kind already exists. Otherwise the drop-down physically does not show the entity kind.
Further, even on an entity kind that does exist, I can only change attributes (or create them if it's new) if that attribute is not null on at least one of the other existing entities of that kind.
This is annoying, since in order to test things I have to first do:
entityKind(every=Possible, attribute=Set, to=Something, even=If,
i=Dont, yet=Need).put()
Refresh, and then remember to delete this line before refreshing again to avoid duplicating the entry in datastore.
Note though, that if I happen to be testing with only entities that do not use every attribute, I have to keep this dummy one just in case I want the others later.
I must, surely, be missing something here? I can't believe there isn't a way to just create datastore entities without hacking around it like this?
You are talking about creating entities manually using a Dev server. Over the past 4 years of using GAE I wished once or twice that this would be possible, but I never needed this feature. You create entities in your code, and you debug your code if something does not work.
You can (and should) write unit tests to test your code. A proper unit test creates an entity, saves it, reads it, verifies that all the properties are correct, deletes it, verifies that it was deleted. There is no code to cut and paste (or comment/uncomment), and there are no test entities left after testing is completed.
Your mistake is in thinking of the web console as a part of your workflow. It is absolutely not, and not intended to be. It is a vaguely hacked-together tool that allows you to do some basic operations on your data, and nothing else.
Interact with the datastore via code, and leave the web console for simple verifications.
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!
I'm stumped and need some ideas on how to do this or even whether it can be done at all.
I have a client who would like to build a website tailored to English-speaking travelers in a specific country (Thailand, in this case). The different modes of transportation (bus & train) have good web sites for providing their respective information. And both are very static in terms of the data they present (the schedules rarely change). Here's one of the sites I would need to get info from: train schedules The client wants to provide users the ability to search for a beginning and end location and determine, using the external website's information, how they can best get there, being provided a route with schedule times for the different modes of chosen transport.
Now, in my limited experience, I would think the way to do that would be to retrieve the original schedule info from the external site's server (via API or some other means) and retain the info in a database, which can be queried as needed. Our first thought was to contact the respective authorities to determine how/if this can be done, but this has proven to be problematic due to the language barrier, mainly.
My client suggested what is basically "screen scraping", but that sounds like it would be complicated at best, downloading the web page(s) and filtering through the HTML for relevant/necessary data to put into the database. My worry is that the info on these mainly static sites is so static, that the data isn't even kept in a database to build the page and the web page itself is updated (hard-coded) when something changes.
I could really use some help and suggestions here. Thanks!
Screen scraping is always problematic IMO as you are at the mercy of the person who wrote the page. If the content is static, then I think it would be easier to copy the data manually to your database. If you wanted to keep up to date with changes, you could then snapshot the page when you transcribe the info and run a job to periodically check whether the page has changed from the snapshot. When it does, it sends an email for you to update it.
The above method could also be used in conjunction with some sort of screen scaper which could fall back to a manual process if the page changes too drastically.
Ultimately, it is a case of how much effort (cost) is your client willing to bear for accuracy
I have done this for the following site: http://www.buscatchers.com/ so it's definitely more than doable! A key feature of a web scraping solution for travel sites is that it must send you emails if anything went wrong during the scraping process. On the site, I use a two day window so that I have two days to fix the code if the design changes. Only once or twice have I had to change my code, and it's very easy to do.
As for some examples. There is some simplified source code here: http://www.buscatchers.com/about/guide. The full source code for the project is here: https://github.com/nicodjimenez/bus_catchers. This should give you some ideas on how to get started.
I can tell that the data is dynamic, it's to well structured. It's not hard for someone who is familiar with xpath to scrape this site.
I am building an application in Qt/QML.
I have a table view of the database (PostgreSQL).
Is there a way to dynamically refresh my table if there is any change in the database.
One no-so-efficient way to do it is to keep sending periodic SQL queries.
Is there any automatic way to keep my view refreshed?
I am open to use any other Database also if required.
Qt seems to support the NOTIFY mechanism of PostgreSQL databases. Googling for it it found some bug reports, so not sure of well implemented that is. Since I've never used it, I'll have to refer you to google.
If you use QSqlTableModel (or an editable subclass of QSqlQueryModel) with QTableView, any edits made will immediately be visible.