Web Forms :: Managing Web Buckets On Semi-CMS Website?
Dec 20, 2010
Now i am developing web application, i wanted to be like a CMS but not with all the bells and whistles of a fully blown CMS system. To explain the idea, it is a classifieds ads site were users can log on and add their own ads or browse other users' ads. What i want to be able to do is to have full control on the application without having to write any line of code. I mean, after the application is launched, i want to be able to add / delete ad categories, change dynamic content on the site (like banners, polls and so on).
I managed to create a control panel for myself where i can edit and manage the ad categories (after all it's a data repeater bound to a database and rendering to an ul list containing the categories). My question now is: i am using Master / child pages design, I have some content that's on the Master page and other on the child pages (by content i mean those plugins that are frequently found on websites like polls, news tickers, stocks...etc). Using the Master / Chile paradigm: how can i control the visibilty of those controls through my control panel?
add labels for those controls and control their content from the backend database together with a boolen indicating their visibility. But the problem is that: how can i determine which page is serving this content currently. Like for example, a news ticker on the addad.aspx child page but not on viewads.aspx child page.
My lecturer insists that a web site should NOT have a static SQL connection as its not good practice (didn't explain why) but then I thought that if one makes instances of an SQL connection everytime I want to save, delete or edit then surely thats a bottleneck as I would need to everytime establish a connection and then do the save process. From what I have read online, the process of establishing a connection to the server is the longest (about 5 to 10ms)...
How would one manage their SQL connection. At the moment I do something like:
I want to fetch a web page from a ASP.NET site that is only accessible from within a session. I'm using Apache HttpClient. I first open the main page of the site, then I search for the link to the "goal" page, and then I fire up a GET request for the "goal" page. The problem is that when I get the response for the second GET request, I always get the same (first) page. If I open the site with Firefox or Google Chrome I get the "goal" page.
From the first response from the server I get the following headers:
I inspected the traffic with WireShark and all headers look OK. I send the correct cookie back to the server on the second GET request.
I'm using Apache HttpClient. I have only one instance of DefaultHttpClient and I reuse that for the second request. I have BROWSER_COMPATIBILITY Cookie Policy.
Before my time at the company they paid for a very expensive website written in asp.net and dotnetnuke. Absolutely terrible but there's very little that can be done about that now. They won't give us access to the SQL Server for some bizarre reason but they've given us FTP access.
Is there some way I can install a database manager (like phpMyAdmin) using FTP? I think I've found the username and password but I'm not familiar with asp so it's quite a confusing system.
I have one main project for the cms we are using for our website. I have also created usercontrols to include in the site, but I think I would like to keep these in a separate project and just reference them in the main project. Is this a best practice and how would I do this?
The basic idea is we have a test enviroment which mimics Production so customErrors="RemoteOnly". We just built a test harness that runs against the Test enviroment and detects breaks. We would like it to be able to pull back the detailed error. But we don't want to turn customErrors="On" because then it doesn't mimic Production.
I've looked around and thought a lot, and everything I've come up with isn't possible. Am I wrong about any of these points?
We can't turn customErrors on at runtime because when you call configuration.Save() - it writes the web.config to disk and now it's Off for every request.We can't symlink the files into a new top level directory with it's own web.config because we're on windows and subversion on windows doesn't do symlinks. We can't use URL-Mapping to make an empty folder dir2 with its own web.config and make the files in dir1 appear to be in dir2 - the web.config doesn't apply. We can't copy all the aspx files into dir2 with it's own web.config because none of the links would be consistent and it's a horrible hacky solution. We can't change customErrors in web.config based on hostname (e.g. add another dns entry to the test server) because it's not possible/supported. We can't do any virtual directory shenanigans to make it work.
If I'm not, is there a way to accomplish what I'm trying to do? Turn on customErrors site-wide under certain circumstances (dns name or even a querystring value)?
I have just completed my first mobile website. It works beautifully with an iPhone, and ALMOST does likewise on a Droid. That "almost" is an ultra-frustrating bug that I'm afraid is hardware-based and will not permit a software solution. Allow me to state my hypothesis: "When you perform a software redirect to another page on your website, you cannot return to a functional version of the page you were on when the redirect was launched via Droid's hardware backbutton. You'll have the graphics, but the code behind the form will be gone and it will be nonfunctional. The ONLY functional route back from a redirect to the originating page on a Droid is via software switching.
I've experimented endlessly with redirect option parameters, page cache settings and the pagestatepersister class in Visual Studio. Nothing works. And I HAVE to use the redirect method to open the second page, because I have to derive some complex information before I'm ready for it to open -- onclientclick and navigateURL aren't options. This is NOT an issue with an iPhone ... its backbutton always returns from a redirect to a still-functioning originating page. Is my hypothesis correct, or does somebody know some workaround that will enable me to offer iPhone functionality to Droid users? If I could open a new window after processing data, that would solve my problem (Droid does return properly from a new window), but there's no way that you can call Java's window.open command from VB code, and no VB equivalent.
I finally got a GridView to display MySQL Data. Now however I need:1) To edit the way the data is displayed. When my DateTime is grabbed from the MySQL Db, it is displayed like so { 22/01/2011 15:45 } but really I need it like so { 22 Jan 2001 - 15:45 }.2) To Enable Edit, Delete andUpdate of each row of the data. when I go in design view and click on the gridview, I don't get them options, where as on SQL Server 2008 I did.I did some google searching on editing the way a date time is presented, but all I got were results for the function DateTime.Now ..etc which is not what I'm after really.
have a question related to sitemap ........i have a pool of websites which are same in function but different in css and format ..every site in that pool different from each other in terms of information so each site in the pool would have different sitemap.xml but the problem is how would i know that the Google crawler or other search engine crawlers are picking the right sitemap ... ?is there any place where i can identify that sitemap-abc.xml belongs to abc site and sitemap-xyz.xml belongs to xyz site ? ll the xml are put in one folder only difference in between them is there names ..
I am creating a web page that will pretty much persist - no postbacks - using jQuery.
I'm going to talk to the page with web services.
So I was thinking that when the user first gets the webpage I give them a GUID that they have to pass back to me with every future call to web services.
I'll simply save the GUID in a table in my MS SQL database and by grabbing that record from the db I could potentially get all my user specific data - user id - permission levels - whatever.
I can make the session row expire after like 10 hours - or something like that - so that they don't get the same session tomorrow simply by forgetting to close the browser window at the end of the work day. ..
I've half written an app which has just one model for adding and editing a particular entity.I am trying to embrace modelmetadata and where possible reduce my form code to just calls for EditorForModel. One of the key issues I am having it managing the differences between a add and update scenario.
Take "User" editing for example, in an Add scenario I want "Password" to be a required field, in an update scenario I dont' want it to be a required field. The model-centric approach would have me create two models, one for adding and one for editing. My edit model wouldn't have the Required attribute on the Password field. My feeling is this is going to create a bit too much plumbing.
Besides having a rather massive amount of automapping going on there is another more irrititating issue. Strongly typed views. I could... maybe see my way to having a different model for create and edit, using inheritance i could.. maybe mitigate the amount of code required. What I can't abide is having to have two seperate views, as I have already coding myself into a wall with strongly typed views I couldn't share add and edit (based on my understanding) scenarios with one view.
So anyway I was wondering what other peoplle are doing to manage this? Working with an outsourced (Indian) developers it would be great to make use of EditorForModel as I want them writing as little code as possible.
I have to use cache multiple forms data that will be submitted on last form. I m not getting how to handle cache key as it should be unique. I want to use this key to get and put data in different forms. I considered to use GUID but it is very long to put in query string.
Currently we are using WebFormsMVP to allow better testability in our project. The framework does presenter binding in OnInitComplete and relies heavily on DataBind expressions e.g.
As i understand above article this would put Model.FirstName into ViewState. Because databinding happens late during page lifecycle when viewstate tracking is already enabled.
One option would be to disable ViewState altogether. Are there any other? Remeber, we can't use OnInit or OnInitComplete, because OnLoad is the first event presenters can handle.
There have been many question on managing EntityContext lifetime, e.g. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/813457/instantiating-a-context-in-linq-to-entitiesI've come to the conclusion that the entity context should be considered a unit-of-work and therefore not reused. But while doing some research for speeding up my database access, I ran into this blog post...Improving Entity Framework PerformanceThe post argues that EFs poor performance compared to other frameworks is often due to the EntityConnection object being created each time a new EntityContext object is needed.
To test this I manually created a static EntityConnection in Global.asax.cs Application_Start(). I then converted all my context using statements to using( MyObjContext currContext = new MyObjeContext(globalStaticEFConnection) { .... }
This seems to have sped things up a bit without any errors so far as far as I can tell.But is this safe?Does using a applicationwide static EntityConnection introduce race conditions?
I am part of a development team building a new ASP.NET 3.5 web application. Two of us are C# coders, and the other is a VB.NET coder.
I know that we can mix languages on a per-project basis, and one can build classes in one language that inherit from classes written in the other language in a different project (which we are already doing), but I can see us getting into a situation where we might well end up with cyclic dependencies between our various project DLLs.
Other than simply having a high number of projects (more seperation of concerns into more libraries), how have you managed this situation on your own projects?
Note - I believe this question to be different enough from the only similar match I could find (this one) on the basis that we are not wanting to use different languages in order to take advantage of their specific features per se, but rather to make use of what developer resource is available to us (i.e. one dev just happens to be VB.NET only).
With VS2010's mandate that web.config be included in the project, how do we allow everyone to keep their own custom config file without getting into source control problems?
Previously, we would simply leave web.config out of our project, allowing everyone to keep their own local version of web.config on their machine. We moved to VS2010, and it is now forcing me to add web.config to my project in order to run debug mode. Because our project is linked to TFS, it automatically adds web.config to source control and tries to maintain it that way.Is there a way to run in debug mode without including web.config in your project? Or is there a better way to manage config files?
I'm having an issue with my hosting provider (winhost.com). My app is built on ASP.NET 4 MVC 3. Up until a few days ago, everything was running fine. All of a sudden I've started getting 503 errors when trying to access my site (wikipediamaze.com). It doesn't happen all the time, just most of the time.
When someone starts playing the game a request is made to wikipedia.org to get the contents of the page for the current step in the puzzle. Basically I'm screen scraping wikipedia.org, injecting some html and then displaying the results. All of my web requests are closed immediately after receiving the data.
What winhost is telling me is that there are connections remaining open and causing any additional requests to the site to get the 503 Service Unavailable Error. What I can see from my end is that only 1 request is ever allowed to be made to wikipediamaze.com at a time. If you keep refreshing the page you'll eventually get the HTML but all subsequent requests (css,images,js) all get the 503 error. Even pages that don't ever call out to wikipedia.org.
If it was an issue with connection throttling in IIS, do both incoming and outgoing (requests made internally) fall in to the same bucket? If I'm sure all of my connections are being closed (and I've never had this issue before) what else could cause this?
Say I have this entity with a lot of attributes. In the input form I have decided to implement a wizard control so I can collect information about this entity in several steps. The problem is that I need to collect information that has been modeled has many to many relationships. I am planning to use a telerik gridview to manage this (add/edit/delete), the problem is where do I store that data since the entity in a insert form is not created on the database yet. OK so I can store all that info in temporary lists residing in the viewstate, waiting for the final submit where I dump all that in the DB, but one of the steps I am collecting files...now storing files in the viewstate is out of the question, same as as storing them in the session...I have been thinking of implementing in a way that the user has to submit some info first (say first 3 steps), commit the data to the database creating the parent entity and then start inserting all the childs entities...but this will get weird as it's confusing since on the first steps you not saving the data to the DB and on the next ones you are commiting directly...
I've put my site online and I'm looking to add/change user membership. From Visual Studio, I can access the Website Administration Tool WSAT and it's great if you just want to add users manually. Is there a similar way to change users once the site is hosted on a remote server?For the moment, I change the user information through the WSAT and re-FTP the mdf file; it's pretty painful.
In this case I have a system where a user logs in, they get a dashboard and they can see all their related projects. The user can click on the project and open it. (ie /View/79) The problem the user can also just type /View/68 which they are not supposed to be able to view.
Obviously I am aware of how to filter my data, but this application has many many lists of data and it all needs to be scoped to data that user has been allowed to see. I can insert a plethora of joins and wheres in all my queries but.. it's a lot of work and a bit convoluted.So I was wondering what strategies other had used for filtering data based on the user scope.One approach I was thinking of was to extend my user-role-permission model so "permissions" could be assigned to various entitites (like projects). This way, rather than doing a series of joins etc to see confirm a user has been assigned to a project, my join is just onto the EntityPermission table to confirm the user has PermissionX (like: CanView) on that entity. I could either maintain a seperate M2M table for each entity i need to restrict or something a bit more general (but without referential integrity).
A friend and I manage a large website for a company. The site is build using Visual Studio 2005 and is a series of nested web applications run inside a master application employing nested master pages. Currently we have to manually move files around folders and FTP them to various servers and I am looking for a way to be able to manage the deployment end of the site in a more automated fashion. I'd like to be able to work on my local version of a project and once I'm done be able to hit one button and publish the site to our internal testing server and then when testing is complete hit another button to deploy it to the live web servers. Right now we have to manually navigate the windows folders and copy pages, css files, images, swfs, etc and FTP them manually. The driver for this is that we have a new junior develop starting and want to remove the manual aspect in advance of him starting.
When developing large application using ASP.NET (MVC or classic, doesn't matter), especially in large team, it is easy to produce a lot of messy, non-traceable CSS definitions. After some time we can end up not knowing why particular definition exists and what is its real effect considering style inheritance and cross-browser differences. Needless to say, changing anything in that mess is a risk and there are hundreds of ways how small change could affect the system.
I know some solutions to organize CSS stylesheets better, like predefined CSS "frameworks" or DotLessCss engine, but I still find it quite hard to cope with CSS as there is no such relationship between HTML markup and CSS styles like i.e. between interface and concrete class in C# code. I know this is by design to make presentation separate from the structure, but I believe it might be useful to have such a correspondence at development level.
Ideally, I need something that can enforce the team not to make messy CSS or be able to clean that mess up automatically. Do you know any resources that may help me, or any guidance how to manage my CSS definitions easily? Let me ask for something a bit different:Despite of my several years of web experience, I believe I would feel much more confident if some of my CSS could be moved into C# code, the same way as some of HTML generation is done by MVC HTML Helpers. It saves me writing a lot of unnecessary markup, still allowing to do so if needed. And it is more unit testable, easier to refactor using tools like ReSharper etc. I don't need mergers and compressors of my CSS, I would like to be able to manage my CSS at declaration level. Maybe there are some tools like that I'm not aware of, or maybe that idea is just wrong and wouldn't be useful?
What is a good approach to managing a debug and release connection string in a .NET / SQLServer application? I have two SQL Servers, a production and a build/debug and I need a method of switching between the two when my ASP.NET application is deployed. Currently I simply store them in the web.config and comment one or the other out, however that is error prone when deploying.
