Feature tracking WinForms - winforms

I would like to extend my WinForms app, which a feature that allows me to monitor which functions are used by the users.
The idea is to count how many times e.g. a button has been clicked, or a popup was opened.
I want to know which features are used more or less often by the users.
Any ideas how this can be done? (Or even if somebody solved this problem already)
tia,
Martin

The only mechanism I can think on to do what your looking for is to use a logger like log4net / Log4PostSharp to log details to a log file on the machine, this would give you details on usage for that particular client. You would have to create a custom attribute that you could decorate your methods with that would result in something being written out to the log file, otherwise your code would end up littered with code to implement the logging!
Have a look at this article too, it uses Log4PostSharp with AOP (Aspect Oriented Programming) which would make the implementation of the logging much more cleaner (uses attributes).
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/dotnet/log4postsharp-intro.aspx

You can find some if you google for the term "application analytics" instead of "feature tracking".
I have found the following products:
includeapp.com
Software Statistics Service
Dotfuscator for .NET, DashO for Java
FusionAnalytics
Flurry Analytics
OpenSpan Desktop Analytics
DeskMetrics
EQATEC Analytics
Rapidengines
I might say that I also plan to create such a product. When it will be Beta I will add it to the list.

Related

2SXC/DNN - Delete ADAM Files in Entity

We're designing a system for a client where they are allowing authenticated users to upload images. We've created an API to upload the files but the client only wants the latest file and delete all previous ones so that there would only ever be one.
We've looked through the docs and can't come across a way for ADAM to handle this in both 2SXC and DNN's file system.
Internally when deleting images we see API calls like the following to the internal 2SXC API, but we're wondering if this is exposed somewhere within the public API?
https://somedomain.com/api/2sxc/app/auto/data/61393528-b401-411f-a001-f423ea46700a/b7d04e2c-c565-496c-8efb-aa133cf90d33/Photo/delete?subfolder=&isFolder=false&id=189&usePortalRoot=false&appId=3
We could probably use the same endpoint above, but we'd likely run into permission issues or changes to the APIs that could be problematic.
Thank you for any advice you can give! Perhaps #iJungleBoy can provide some thoughts on this.
As a solution from a completely different direction, if you are on the later release of 2sxc (v12.8+, v13+), and comfortable programming in C#, you might consider doing this as a "cleanup" from a Dnn Scheduled Task. This can be done with a relatively easy setup. We have a Gist in place that we use as a starter. You simply put the code in the /App_Code folder then setup a normal Dnn Scheduled Task. NOTE that you can scroll down to the first comment on the Gist to see a screenshot of a complete working setup.
Accuraty's AccuTasks template on GitHub Gists
There are two more key things to note:
You need to install Dnn's CodeDom 3.6 because the example uses the later versions C#'s string interpolation - OR remove the few $"ASL2021 - {this.GetType().Name}, Task Scheduled Email", bits or convert to string.Format() or something.
Since your task's code is NOT running in a (2sxc) module, if needed, you'll do stuff like this: 2sxc Docs - Use 2sxc Instance or App Data from External C# Code
So, if you are comfortable writing code that "finds and deletes stuff older than NN days" - this might be the way to go.

Access questions programmatically? [duplicate]

I would like to (programmatically) convert a text file with questions to a Google form. I want to specify the questions and the questiontypes and their options. Example: the questiontype scale should go from 1 to 7 and should have the label 'not important' for 1 and 'very important' for 7.
I was looking into the Google Spreadsheet API but did not see a solution.
(The Google form API at http://code.lancepollard.com/introducing-the-google-form-api is not an answer to this question)
Google released API for this: https://developers.google.com/apps-script/reference/forms/
This service allows scripts to create, access, and modify Google Forms.
Until Google satisfies this feature request (star the feature on Google's site if you want to vote for it), you could try a non-API approach.
iMacros allows you to record, modify and play back macros that control your web browser. My experiments with Google Drive showed that the basic version (without DirectScreen technology) doesn't record macros properly. I tried it with both the plugin for IE (basic and advanced click mode) and Chrome (the latter has limited iMacro support). FYI, I was able to get iMacros IE plug-in to create questions on mentimeter.com, but the macro recorder gets some input fields wrong (which requires hacking of the macro, double-checking the ATTR= of the TAG commands with the 'Inspect element' feature of Chrome, for example).
Assuming that you can get the TAG commands to produce clicks in the right places in Google Drive, the approach is that you basically write (ideally record) a macro, going through the steps you need to create the form as you would using a browser. Then the macro can be edited (you can use variables in iMacros, get the question/questiontype data from a CSV or user-input dialogs, etc.). Looping in iMacros is crude, however. There's no EOF for a CSV (you basically have to know how many lines are in the file and hard-code the loop in your macro).
There's a way to integrate iMacro calls with VB, etc., but I'm not sure if it's possible with the free versions. There's another angle where you generate code (Javascript) from a macro, and then modify it from there.
Of course, all of these things are more fragile than an API approach long-term. Google could change its presentation layer and it will break your macros.
Seems like Apps Script now has a REST API and SDK's for it. Through Apps Script you can generate Google Forms. This API was really hard to find by trying to google for it and I haven't yet tested it myself, but I am going to build something with it today (hopefully). So far everything looks good.
EDIT: Seems like the REST API I am using works very well for fully automated usage.
In March(2022) google released REST API for google form. API allows basic crud operation & also added support for registering watches on the form to notify whenever either form is updated or a new response is received.
As of now (March 2016), Google Forms APIs allow us to create forms and store them in Google Drive. However, Forms APIs do not allow one programmatically modify the form (such as modify content, add or delete questions, pre-filled data, etc). In other words, the form is static. In order to serve custom, external APIs are needed.

Advice on layered architecture (Win Forms + WinService; WCF; LINQ to SQL)

I'll try to explain as briefly as possible:
C#.Windows application for categories and descriptions of files.
Windows Forms - for the user
A library I want to be saved for future usage - I got nice algorithms for tasks with XML,Files,strings. In this case they are to serve the WF, but i don't want to keep them in the Form classes. I want to have them as a separate library with namespaces and classes in it. But I don't know what type of project or addition to the whole VS "Solution" that has to be.
Windows Service - get notifications on file changes and updates the same db the WF is using.
LINQ to SQL - for the data access
WCF - I am just throwing that here, because it seems that I need to use it(answer from a previous related topic) : https://stackoverflow.com/a/15998122/1356685
SO...yeah...architecture, architecture. Any guideline for a good architecture in my case is welcomed. Now I know in these conversations people start throwing terms like: "business logic","persistence layer","model layer" and what not. However I don't quite understand them, so please be specific.
Thanks in advance for the help !
Microsoft has a pretty extensive application architecture guide and their patterns and practices website has a lot of information and code samples showing you how to structure applications.
As for your 'library to be saved for future usage'... you can create a C# Class Library project and add it as a Reference in whatever applications you'd like to use it in.

Automating Salesforce Security Checks

I need to create some automated method for checking certain security settings within a given Salesforce org(s). The four big ones are:
IP Restrictions within each profile
Mobile User setting disabled
Mobile Lite disabled
Chatter Disabled
I think the first two can be accomplished through the API (SOQL to get all profiles and check loginIpRanges[] length >0 and SOQL to get all users and check isMobileUser property for each one), but I can't find anything in the API for the other two and wonder if I would have to screen scrape it.
Any suggestions on the best approach to accomplish this? A local Python or other script that connects remotely via the API and a screen scraper or Selenium script for the non-API items? An Apex or VisualForce page that is installed within each org?
I am new to Salesforce and Apex, so before I start down one road and doing it within Salesforce vs via the API I would really appreciate any guidance.
Thank you!
I think you'll have to take a mixed approach to solving this, perhaps wrapped up in some larger python script.
Use the metadata API to get all of the Profile objects and parse for loginIPRanges. You can use Apache ANT and the Force.com migration tool commands to do this. You can also get the SecuritySettings from the same API and method and get a lot of the things in the Security Health Check, if you need them. The results will be returned in XML, which you can easily parse in your python script.
Use the API and a SOQL query to check for the isMobileUser permission, use python to parse/output results. Beatbox is a good library for connecting to the standard API.
For the last two, I think you'll need to go with some screen scraping/browser automation and parsing. Hopefully someone has a better answer for this, as I'm not familiar enough to help with how to accomplish this aspect. The screens are in standard locations so it should be repeatable as long as future updates don't move things.
Ideally you'll be able to combine these into one large script that fires off beatbox, then fires off ant/migration tool, and some browser automation script.

Web application for managing elections campaign

I’m trying to help a friend in his election campaign.
We mainly need a tool to manage a list of possible voters. We need to be able to:
1. Easily update details about the voters, and
2. Query for voters according to various parameters, and show and print the resulting lists
To enable campaigners to work from multiple workstations, we would like the system to be distributed, probably web based.
We would also like that to be in Hebrew, if possible.
Is there any existing tool that easily enables it?
If not, can you recommend on an easy way to implement such a tool?
(I have a solid programming knowledge, but not much time to devote to that)
You can achieve this easily with iFreeTools Creator. Just create the entities and attributes for Voters and add campaigners as users providing their Google email-id.
Regarding your requirements..
* This app is web-based. It runs on Google App Engine.
* The interface is English only, but data can be in unicode. Entity name and attribute names are also "data", so they can be in unicode too.
Other related features which might be useful in this context..
* You can import voter list using CSV files.
* Campaigners can search for voters near their workstation by filtering out records based on nearness to a geo-location.
// Disclosure : I wrote code for this web-app. Hope you like it. Feedback welcome.
Some possible answers might be found in the same question I asked in the web apps forum

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