I'm looking for a robust module that will monitor an email account (ideally POP) and load each new email into a database (or cloud-based storage solution) as it arrives. This can either be an open source module, a commercial module or even SaaS. Ideally, would be easy to use from .NET.
Simply put, trying to avoid re-inventing the wheel.
Do you know of any such modules or services? Did you have a positive experience with them?
I've used Email2DB with some success.
http://www.email2db.com/
You can set up your own parsing rules for incoming e-mails and place data wherever you see fit as a result.
How about OpenPop.net? That won't automatically save it to a db, but you should be able to consume it from the POP3Client object.
Related
I would like to know if this scenario would be possible in any programming language combined with any database technology.
I would like to automatically save received pdf files that are attached in emails into a database. Is this possible? Is there any library or framework available to do so?
Yes, I would recommend using Google Apps Script for this. The approach you should follow is to use the GmailApp class (Documentation here) to get the messages you need, you can use methods like getInboxThreads() (Documentation), to retrieve the messages.
After you've found the message and retrieved the attachment (which you can do withgetAttachments() (Documentation)), you can use the JDBC Service to connect with external databases. The specifics here depend a lot on what database you want to connect with, but the documentation will lead you in the right direction.
Anybody here has actually implemented any logging strategy when application is running as XBAP ? Any suggestion (as code) as to how to implement a simple strategy base on your experience.
My app in desktop mode actually logs to a log file (rolling log) using integrated asop log4net implementation but in xbap I can't log cause it stores the file in cache (app2.0 or something folder) so I check if browser hosted and dont log since i dont even know if it ever logs...(why same codebase)....if there was a way to push this log to a service like a web service or post error to some endpoint...
My xbap is full trust intranet mode.
I would log to isolated storage and provide a way for users to submit the log back to the server using either a simple PUT/POST with HttpWebRequest or, if you're feeling frisky, via a WCF service.
Keep in mind an XBAP only gets 512k of isolated storage so you may actually want to push those event logs back to the server automatically. Also remember that the XBAP can only speak back to it's origin server, so the service that accepts the log files must run under the same domain.
Here's some quick sample code that shows how to setup a TextWriterTraceListener on top of an IsolatedStorageFileStream at which point you can can just use the standard Trace.Write[XXX] methods to do your logging.
IsolatedStorageFileStream traceFileStream = new IsolatedStorageFileStream("Trace.log", FileMode.OpenOrCreate, FileAccess.Write);
TraceListener traceListener = new TextWriterTraceListener(traceFileStream);
Trace.Listeners.Add(traceListener);
UPDATE
Here is a revised answer due to the revision you've made to your question with more details.
Since you mention you're using log4net in your desktop app we can build upon that dependency you are already comfortable working with as it is entirely possible to continue to use log4net in the XBAP version as well. Log4net does not come with an implementation that will solve this problem out of the box, but it is possible to write an implementation of a log4net IAppender which communicates with WCF.
I took a look at the implementation the other answerer linked to by Joachim Kerschbaumer (all credit due) and it looks like a solid implementation. My first concern was that, in a sample, someone might be logging back to the service on every event and perhaps synchronously, but the implementation actually has support for queuing up a certain number of events and sending them back to the server in batch form. Also, when it does send to the service, it does so using an async invocation of an Action delegate which means it will execute on a thread pool thread and not block the UI. Therefore I would say that implementation is quite solid.
Here's the steps I would take from here:
Download Joachim's WCF appender implementation
Add his project's to your solution.
Reference the WCFAppender project from your XBAP
Configure log4net to use the WCF appender. Now, there are several settings for this logger so I suggest checking out his sample app's config. The most important ones however are QueueSize and FlushLevel. You should set QueueSize high enough so that, based on how much you actually are logging, you won't be chattering with the WCF service too much. If you're just configuring warnings/errors then you can probably set this to something low. If you're configuring with informational then you want to set this a little higher. As far as FlushLevel you should probably just set this to ERROR as this will just guarantee that no matter how big the queue is at the time an error occurs everything will be flushed at the moment an error is logged.
The sample appears to use LINQ2SQL to log to a custom DB inside of the WCF service. You will need to replace this implementation to log to whatever data source best suits your needs.
Now, Joachim's sample is written in a way that's intended to be very easy for someone to download, run and understand very quickly. I would definitely change a couple things about it if I were putting it into a production solution:
Separate the WCF contracts into a separate library which you can share between the client and the server. This would allow you to stop using a Visual Studio service reference in the WCFAppender library and just reference the same contract library for the data types. Likewise, since the contracts would no longer be in the service itself, you would reference the contract library from the service.
I don't know that wsHttpBinding is really necessary here. It comes with a couple more knobs and switches than one probably needs for something as simple as this. I would probably go with the simpler basicHttpBinding and if you wanted to make sure the log data was encrypted over the wire I would just make sure to use HTTPS.
My approach has been to log to a remote service, keyed by a unique user ID or GUID. The overhead isn't very high with the usual async calls.
You can cache messages locally, too, either in RAM or in isolated storage -- perhaps as a backup in case the network isn't accessible.
Be sure to watch for duplicate events within a certain time window. You don't want to log 1,000 copies of the same Exception over a period of a few seconds.
Also, I like to log more than just errors. You can also log performance data, such as how long certain functions take to execute (particularly out-of-process calls), or more detailed data in response to the user explicitly entering into a "debug and report" mode. Checking for calls that take longer than a certain threshold is also useful to help catch regressions and preempt user complaints.
If you are running your XBAP under partial trust, you are only allowed to write to the IsolatedStorage on the client machine. And it's just 512 KB, which you would probably want to use in a more valuable way (than for logging), like for storing user's preferences.
You are not allowed to do any Remoting stuff as well under partial trust, so you can't use log4net RemotingAppender.
Finally, under partial trust XBAP you have WebPermission to talk to the server of your app origin only. I would recommend using a WCF service, like described in this article. We use similar configuration in my current project and it works fine.
Then, basically, on the WCF server side you can do logging to any place appropriate: file, database, etc. You may also want to keep your log4net logging code and try to use one of the wcf log appenders available on the internets (this or this).
I'm asking for the advice. I'm working at the Silverlight 3 application and now I should select the mean how to save the information and get it. I could save the necessary info in files (from 1 to 300K size) or I could save them in database. If I would use WebClient for accessing to separate file there's very low loading of the server. If I get data from database the server would load much more I think and the code on the server too.
Please correct me if I'm not right.
I'm looking forward to hearing from you!
Thanks
there are additional considerations if you use a file that is localized to the users machine. If you wish to save data w/o any user intervention then you are limited to using Isolated Storage, which has constraints on the size of your data. Otherwise, you have to ask the user for information on where to save/load the file. This is due to the security model used by silverlight.
i am thinking that a Database and the RIA framework might be the way to go.
just my 2ยข
If you are saving and loading the entire file at a time, then it might be okay to use a WebClient. This might take a little coding to handle errors that may result in incomplete saves.
If you're serializing some objects or xml data and storing that in a file, then you should probably be using a database instead.
Edit: It can be a pain to get WebClient or HttpWebRequest working correctly with GET/POST, but WCF can also be a pain to configure if you haven't done it before. WCF is probably better style, and you'll want to use a binary binding and send the file across as a byte[].
I want to create a a application in actionscipt 3.0 that allows the user to listen to music and read descriptions of the music. For this to happen i suppose there should be a database where the textbits and music is located and then flash fetch the info when the correct buttons are pushed. The database will contain up to 100 tracks and textbits.
The application will function on a stand that won't have a connection to the internet.
What is the easiest way to do this in actionscript 3.0?
If any of you are familiar with UML and thinks this might help in understanding the problem, then here is use-case and flow-chart:
alt text http://img135.imageshack.us/img135/1498/flowchart2.jpg
alt text http://img27.imageshack.us/img27/1000/usercase.jpg
Thanks in advance.
The easiest way to do what you're asking is probably to store the files in a directory on the machine the application is going to be running on, and then design an XML structure for storing your data. The XML is easily loaded in to Flash at runtime and is easily edittable.
Your other option would be running a database server on the machine, creating web services that run locally and push/pull the data from the database, and then call those services from your Flash application.
The first option is most definitely the easiest and should be able to provide exactly what you need. The second would be more geared towards a distributed Flash application where you needed a central data repository for the clients.
If you're building an AIR application, you can use the integrated SQLITE database. But, i agree with Justin, the easiest way is to use a XML file.
You can probably consider using "Local Shared Objects" which is a kind of cookie, with bigger capacity (100Kb by default, but you can change it). Compared to other solutions already proposed, it has then advantage of not requiring any web server.
How would one create a REST web service to write a row into a databse table. Use the follwoing scenario:
The table is called Customer - the
data to be inserted into the row would
be the name, addresss, telephone
number, email.
I think its impossible to describe the whole thing end to end in Java or C#, and I would never expect that, but here are the questions I have popping into my head as I prepare for coding:
How the URI would look (eg. if you use this URL - http://www.example.com/)?
What info would go into the HTTP envelope?
Would I use POST when writing to the database in this way?
Do I use a resource to store the posted data from the client? Is this even necessary if the data is being written to a database anyway?
When the data to be writeen into the db is recieved by the server - how do I physically insert it into the database - do I call some method on the server to actually write the data (in Java)? - this doesn't seem to fit with truely REST architecture - shunning RPC calls.
Should I even be bothering writing to a DB - should I be storing my data as a resource?
As you can see I need a few issues clearing in my head. Any help much appreciated.
First of all, I'm not either java nor c# expert and I don't exactly know what means do these languages have to support REST design, but in general:
http://www.example.com/customers - customers is a collection of resources and you want to add a new resource to this collection
It depends on various things - you should probably set the content-type header (according to the data format in which you are sending the representation) and set some authentication headers if you need it.
Yes, you always use POST to create a new entry in a collection of resources.
I don't fully understand this question, to be honest. What do you mean by "inmediately writing data into the database"?
REST is primarily just a style of communication between server and a client. It doesn't say anything about how you should handle the data received by using it. The usual way how modern web approaches (MVC style frameworks) solve it, is by routing every REST action to a method of some class (usually a controller instance) where you handle the received parameters (eg. save them to the database) and generate a response to be sent back.
For a very brief and very clear introduction to REST have a look at this short video.
RESTful Web Services, published by O'Reilly and Associates, seems to fit the bill you're looking for.
As far as doing it in Java, Sun has a page on it.