Need an idea on best practise in finding a solution.
We are looking at developing Silverlight controls for CRM forms that will need to reference a common configuration file for data. It is a file that will need to be maintained periodically every once in a while. We don't want to be hardcoding values into the Silverlight control.
My question is... Where/What/How do we provide a config file for a Silverlight control?
I tried uploading a JS web resource that simply was a JSON array full of settings that I tried to access from the Silverlight control. All I got were permission errors when I used both the admin account and my domain account to do a Http get of the file and parse it. Can someone confirm that this could work if I manage to work through these annoying permission errors?
My next thought was having a CRM entity full of settings that the Silverlight control could make ODATA calls to in order to get its config data. I'm not 100% sold on the idea though.
Perhaps there is another way people have been using - if so - I'd love to see what you are doing. This could really prevent us from coming to a Silverlight enriched solution that we are after.
Thanks in advance
We go about this in two ways.
We have a configuration entity for settings that might be changed on a customer site by their administrator.
For other configuration data that is unlikely to be changed, we install an XML web resource. This method means we can store a lot of data without having to create and manage complex entities (or relationships if required). If set as an unmanaged/customizable web resource, then the text editor can be used to make changes, although remember that these changes must not break the XML schema/syntax.
This xml web resource can be retrieved in Silverlight using WebClient.DownloadStringAsync() as shown below.
private void GetXmlConfiguration(string resourceName)
{
var webClient = new WebClient();
webClient.DownloadStringCompleted += OnGetConfigurationXmlCompleted;
webClient.DownloadStringAsync(new Uri("../Data/" + resourceName, UriKind.Relative));
}
private void OnGetConfigurationXmlCompleted(object sender, DownloadStringCompletedEventArgs e)
{
if (e.Error == null && !string.IsNullOrEmpty(e.Result))
{
//use xml string here
}
}
We use the configuration entity method quite often and I think it works well.
You should be able to use your initial method as well... I know in a few places we've done some XML configuration in a web resource that we've retrieved in Silverlight, parsed, and done something with.
Related
I would like to accesss the sitecore DB and items from console application like
Sitecore.Data.Database db = Sitecore.Context.Database
or
Sitecore.Data.Database db = Sitecore.Data.Database.GetDatabase("master")
how do I configure and setup my console application to access the DB as above?
Thanks Everyone for the suggestion, I am really interested in config changes, I used webservice, but it has very limited methods. For example, if I would like create an Item with the template and insert the item with prepopulated value, there is no such option. The reason I am looking for the console apporach is I would like to import the contents from XML or excel sheet and push those to the sitecore tree, eventually use the scheduled task to run the console app periodically. I do not want to copy the entire web.config and app_config. If anyone has already done this, could you please post your steps and necessary config changes?
You have two options I think:
1) Import the Sitecore bits of a website's web.config into your console application's app.config, so that the Sitecore API "just works"
I'm sure I read a blog post about this, but I can't find the reference right now. (I will have another look) But I think the simple but long winded approach is to copy all of the <sitecore/> element and all the separate files it references. I'm fairly sure you can whittle this down to a subset of the config required for data access with a bit of thinking.
2) Don't use the Sitecore API directly, connect to a web service that exposes access to it remotely.
There are a few of these that already exist. Sitecore itself exposes one, Sitecore Rocks has one, and Hedgehog TDS has one too. And you can always write your own (since any web service running inside the Sitecore ASP.Net app can make database calls and report values back and forth - just remember to consider security if this web service might end up exposed externally for any reason)
John West links to some relevant stuff here:
http://www.sitecore.net/Learn/Blogs/Technical-Blogs/John-West-Sitecore-Blog/Posts/2013/09/Getting-Data-Out-of-the-Sitecore-ASPNET-CMS.aspx
-- Edited to add --
I've not found the blog post I remember. But I came across this SO thread:
Accessing Sitecore API from a CLI tool
which refers to this blog post:
http://www.experimentsincode.com/?p=232
which I think gives the info you'll need for option 1.
(And it reminds me that, of course, when you copy the config stuff you have to copy the Sitecore binaries into your app's folder as well)
I would just like to expand on #JermDavis' post and note that Sitecore isn't a big fan of being accessed when not in a web application. However, if you still want to do this, you will need to make sure that you have all of the necessary configuration settings from the web.config and App_Config of your site in your console application's app.config file.
Moreover, you will never be able to call Sitecore.Context in a console application, as the Sitecore Context sits on top of the HttpContext which means that it must be an application and have a valid request for you to use it. What you are looking for is something more along the lines of Sitecore.Configuration.Factory.GetDatabase("master").
Good luck and happy coding :)
This sounds like a job for the Sitecore Item Web API. I use the Sitecore Item Web API whenever I need to access Sitecore data from the master database outside the context of the Content Management server or outside of the context of the Sitecore application. The Web API definitely does not allow you to do everything that the standard Sitecore API does but it can act as a good base and I now extend upon the Web API instead of writing my own custom web services whenever possible.
Thanks to JemDavis's advise.
After I copied the configuration and made changes to config section to get rid of conflicts. I copied almost all of Sitrecore, analytics and lucene dlls, it worked great.
Only thing you have to remember is, copy the app_config folder to the same location where your dlls are.
Thanks again JemDavis....
I'm attempting to consume a SOAP service in a Silverlight 5 application and I'm completely lost. This is my first Silverlight app and only my second time using web services in a .NET application.
In a separate .NET application, the only way I was able to get it to work was by adding the WSDL as a Web Reference; the application would not build when I added it as a Service Reference. In talking to the WSDL provider, I discovered that the WSDL was compiled using the .NET 2.0 framework...hence the need to add it as a Web Reference.
From the research I've done thus far, I see that Silverlight doesn't support adding a Web Reference. So I tried adding it to the hosting ASP.NET application as a Web Reference then started the server.
Back in my Silverlight app, I selected the option to add a Service Reference and pointed to the WSDL file now at http://localhost:55265/Web%20References/THINKWebService/SLWebSvc_734_Upgrade.wsdl. Visual Studio seemed to pick it up just fine and generate the proxies.
Here's where I start to get stuck. If my research is correct, a WCF reference was created and should be used in that manner. I've never used WCF so I did some reading on how to send/receive requests and this is the best code I've come up with, based on examples in the MSDN library (I inserted it into a button click event so I would know exactly when the code was executing):
private void Button1Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{
var client = new ThinkSoapClient();
var userLoginData = new user_login_data {login = "foo", password = "bar"};
var customerIdentifier = new customer_identifier {customer_id = 6677070};
// the debugger halts on this next line and
// references the "dsn"...it's the 4th argument
client.CustomerLoginInfoSelectAsync(userLoginData, customerIdentifier, "", "myDSN");
// I'm not sure if this next line is even needed
client.CustomerLoginInfoSelectCompleted += CustomerLoginInfoSelectCallback;
MessageBox.Show(string.Format("CustomerLoginInfoSelectAsync({0},{1})", userLoginData, customerIdentifier));
}
// here's the callback method
static void CustomerLoginInfoSelectCallback(object sender, CustomerLoginInfoSelectCompletedEventArgs e)
{
MessageBox.Show(string.Format("CustomerLoginInfoSelect Result: {0}", e.Result));
}
As I mentioned in the code above, the debugger halts when executing the client.CustomerLoginInfoSelectAsync method. Here's the error message: XmlSerializer attribute System.Xml.Serialization.XmlAttributeAttribute is not valid in dsn. Only XmlElement, XmlArray, XmlArrayItem and XmlAnyElement attributes are supported when IsWrapped is true.
From the research I've done, I think this error is being caused because the the SOAP action element contains an attribute dsn (not sure, though, if I would be getting this error if the sub-elements also had attributes).
I did a find/replace for IsWrapped=true to IsWrapped=false in Reference.cs but I got the same error but the last word was false instead of true.
I'm not sure if I'm making any sense as to what I'm after, so here's what the generated XML should look like in case it helps:
...
<customer_login_info_select_request dsn="myDSN">
<user_login_data>
<login>foo</login>
<password>bar</password>
</user_login_data>
<customer_identifier>
<customer_id>6677070</customer_id>
</customer_identifier>
<login/> <!--corresponds to the empty string in the call to CustomerLoginInfoSelectAsync-->
</customer_login_info_select_request>
...
So at this point, I'm completely lost. Any insights would be greatly appreciated. If there's any other info I can provide, please let me know.
While possible the normal solution would be to assume it is "just another data source" and use the Web reference on your Server side instead to provide data (and to provide insulation against future changes).
Silverlight App <=> Silverlight Web Services <= External/Legacy Web Service
Keep your Silverlight app slim and let the server do any heavy lifting for you.
We need to get certain information from PortletRequest in our Portal application. We do that using a utility method inside our Portlet Application. In this Utility method we access FacesContext.getCurrentInstance().getRequest() to get the PortletRequest. We access this Utility method in our DAO layer. We do not have access to request parameter here.
It works sometimes, but at times it gives me NullPointerException. I found a similar thread which explains about this. They have mentioned, if it is part of the same request, then you should get the Context. For me, it is part of the same request, but I'm not getting the context. Can you please help me.
If you are getting a null FaceContext from FacesContext.getCurrentInstance() then no FacesContext has been constructed for this Thread/Request.
Are the failing requests coming through a non-faces entry point? Such as an Event or Resource portlet request? If so there will be no FacesContext created.
Rather than relying on static methods and thread local storage to access data in you DAO you should consider extracting what you need from the PortletRequest, and passing it down your stack. It is bad practice to mix presentation layer artefacts such as the FaceContext or a PortletRequest with your DAO layer.
If your application is deployed in separate WAR/JAR files, it is likely that different classloaders are used. I had a similar problem, when I tried to access the FacesContext inside an hibernate HAR archive on JBOSS5. I came up with a successfull solution using reflection API. Take a look at this.
If you bundle your whole application into one EAR, you might be able to force the use of one classloader for the whole ear, but AFAIK that is application server specific.
Regards
I have a WPF app that will show youtube videos on my tv via a media center pc. This app will receive commands to PlayVideo(string VideoId), PauseVideo(), etc via a WCF service hosted inside the WPF app.
This is a newbie question, but why can my MainWindow not implement the service contract and then be used as the service using the new ServiceHost() constructor that takes an object singleton in?
When I try I get this exception:
System.InvalidOperationException: Service 'Desktop.MainWindow' has zero application (non-infrastructure) endpoints. This might be because no configuration file was found for your application, or because no service element matching the service name could be found in the configuration file, or because no endpoints were defined in the service element.
My reasoning for doing this is that the simple commands needs to end up at the window anyway, so why not just have the window receive the messages directly instead of indirectly via subscribing to events on the service or having the service have a reference to the MainWindow and call methods on it.
The error, System.InvalidOperationException: Service 'Desktop.MainWindow' has zero application , simply means your app.config (if you have one) does not have the endpoints or the A,B,C's setup correctly (address, binding, contract).
You can host a wcf service in a winform or wpf form, you would only want to do that maybe for a test project in some kind of proof of concept work but never in an application you plan to give to a client or a real user.
If you're new to WPF I strongly recommend reading up on the Model-view-view-Model design pattern. This will allow you to implement the WCF service abstracted away from the UI in your WPF app and will give you a better separation of concerns and responsibilities for the logic in your app.
If you were writing code that others were going to maintain then I'd say...
Why not? Because you're mixing areas of responsibility. The Main Window doesn't need to know anything about WCF, it's job is to present things on screen.
Given that it's your app for your own personal needs, nobody cares what structure you use (just don't ask someone else to maintain it!) :) Having said that, if you want to make it easy for yourself to modify, I'd suggest making an effort to keep the code clean. What you're aiming to do, in my view, doesn't fit that description.
Your mainwindow probably could implement that Service Contract, but I think it's a very bad idea.
I have one very weird question.
There are 2 Silverlight Client
1. Admin
2. User
Now, I want a scenario wherein the Admin Silverlight can initiate a function call on the User Silverlight.
Pretty much a newbie with SL so wonder if that would be possible.
I'd appreciate any help.
Thanks
I suppose the applications are not in the same browser / machine, and when you describe the usage pattern as admin and user, I take that there are probably more users than admins.
You might want to take a look at duplex bindings for WCF services - this is a web service binding that allows pushing notifications to clients from the server. When all clients establish such a channel, you can implement hub-and-spoke communication between clients.
This blog post gives a good receipt for getting started:
http://silverlightforbusiness.net/2009/06/23/pushing-data-from-the-server-to-silverlight-3-using-a-duplex-wcf-service/
If they are both in the same frame/browser, you could call JavaScript in the first using the HtmlPage API, which could interact with the second.
So:
Silverlight control -> injects JS into HtmlPage -> JS interacts with Silverlight control 2 (assuming this is possible, please correct me if wrong) -> Silverlight control responds.
If they are in separate windows or running "out of browser", I would expect it wouldn't work.
If the 2 instances are seperated (i.e., the admin is on one machine and the user is on another) there's no direct way to do it. However, you can rig it up with a publisher/subscriber style system.
Assumption: You have some sort of shared data store between the two, maybe a database or something.
Idea: You have the admin client write a request to this shared data store; an entry in a table, or a new file in a network share, or something. You have the user client app regularly scan this table/share for new entries, say every .5 seconds or so. When it sees the entry, it executes the requested operation, storing any return values back to the shared store. When the admin sees the return value, he knows the operation has been successfully executed.
There are a couple of options that I can think of.
You could implement some sort of remote procedure call via web services whereby one Silverlight app posts a request to call the method, and the other Silverlight regularly checks for method call requests.
If hosted on the same HTML page in a browser, you could use javascript to allow the two controls to interact.
However, direct communication between two Silverlight instances isn't supported, and while the suggestions may help to achieve something close to what you want, they don't provide a complete solution that will work in all scenarios.