I have an application that needs a configuration file with several inputs which depend on the project that is going to be delivered. Things that are included in this conf file are IP's of databases, activating certain functions depending on the customer's needs, changing the values of some title screens, etc... A short example of a file could be something like:
postgresdb=192.156.98.98
transactions.enabled=true
application.name="client-1-logistics"
historicaldb=196.125.125.16
....
This files can become large and it might be difficult to find which parameters must be changed, specially if the configuration process has to be done by an external department.
I was looking into some kind of tool or framework that allows you to create some sort of questionnaire by which the user answers yes or no questions and fills out boxes with specific IP's or messages and get as a result the configuration file needed. This would be much tidier as you could group the questions into sections and has the potential of customising the configuration process with more context on the different parameters.
Does anyone know of such a framework?. How do you handle this kind of complex configuration processes?
The approach I outline below is not exactly what you are looking for, but it might provide some food for thought.
Use a template engine (example, Velocity, or any of the
several dozen listed in Wikipedia) to create a templated
version of your configuration file, containing lots of boilerplate
configuration that won't change, with the occasional
${variable_name} placeholder (the syntax for a placeholder will
vary from one template engine to another).
Write a small metadata file containing variable_name=value
settings.
Write a trivial program that: (a) parses the metadata file and loads
the variable_name=value settings into a Map (the template engine
might refer to the Map as, say, a context object); (b) uses the
template engine to parse the template file; (c)
merges/evaluates/instantiates the parsed template file with the settings in
the Map; and (d) writes the result to the target
configuration file.
You might be able to use steps 1 and 3 above without change. It is only step 2 that you need to adapt to your questionnaire requirements. Instead of a questionnaire, perhaps you could give users a document that explains how to write the metadata file.
Related
The issue that I consider is how to write code that can easily know the location of a required config file and yet is portable, without any edit, from an environment to another. We don't want to edit the location of the configuration file to adapt the code to each new environment, say each time we move the code from a development environment to production. The method should not rely on resources that are not universally available, such as an access to user-defined environment variables or an access to a specific directory. For example, it may seem that using the DOCUMENT_ROOT as a base location for the config file is the way to go, but that is not universal. First, in a command line environment the DOCUMENT_ROOT makes no sense. Second, a programmer might be given access to a sub-folder of the DOCUMENT_ROOT only. Another requirement is that the configuration file could depend on values known at run time, say the user who call the application, as in this question How to load a config file based on user selection from "unknown" location .
The question is not what is the best location of the configuration file in specific environments, such as Location to put user configuration files in windows . The programmers would still have to figure out the best location so that end users could easily find the configuration file. The question is how this location, whatever it is, even if it depends on values known at run time, can be passed to the code in a portable manner.
One approach is to design any script file with in mind that it is to be included in another file and so on until we get to a wrapper script that only defines the directory of the config file to the benefit of the included file and other included files therein. Once this directory path is known, other configuration values can be obtained from a named configuration file within it. This works because the wrapper scripts are not updated when we update the code from a repository or testing environment. This approach seems universally applicable : no special support of any kind such as an access to user defined environment variables or to some specific directory in the server is needed. As long as you have access to the code, which is a strict minimum to expect, it works. Also, scripts are often naturally designed to be included in another file - so it is natural.
The approach only requires that we agree on a convention for the name of the constant, say CONFIG_DIRECTORY. If every programmer would agree to search at the location specified by this constant for the config file, then any user of the code could put the config file anywhere and just define this constant accordingly.
In Linux, they have the folder /etc for config files. So, the notion of an universally agreed standard in a very large context is already there. This is the same idea than the one proposed here, except that it is the same constant for all machines and someone might not have access to that level of the server. Moreover, we lose the possibility to have different configuration directories for different wrapper scripts. Allowing the universal standard to be a constant name, say 'CONFIG_DIRECTORY', instead of being the fixed constant '/etc', seems just an extra flexibility with no additional inconvenient. It does require that we define this constant in some wrapper script, but we could fall back to the old approach if it is not defined. The outcome, if the approach is strictly applied, would be that all the scripts required in the server document root would only be simple wrappers that define a configuration directory. That seems cool. Often people say that it is safer to have important code outside the document root.
This question has been troubling me for the past week. Below, I will list my issue, and the research I have put into it.
The scenario: I was given a .csv file with 5000 rows and three columns. The three columns are defined as:
Site ID|Site Name|Site URL
My task: To create an HTML interface for the designers of the company to rate each site on a scale of 1-5.
My plan of action: I am a new hire. I am getting accustomed to the language I was hired for, which was Objective-C.
My algorithm for the project was to:
Parse the .csv
Remove the "Site Name" variable
Create a new .csv that contains the below variables: Site ID|Site URL|Rating|Image
Display the new .csv (with all aforementioned items) as an HTML page where there are toggles for "Ratings", which when pressed, will log the rating into the .csv which it was imported (or loaded) from.
The "Image" section I will be using a piece of software by the name of Paparazzi (on the Mac OS X operating system) which takes a fully formatted screenshot of the main page and saves it as a PNG file. I plan on using the file extension URL (which is stored locally) and load it into the "Image" column, thus when the designer clicks on the image, he is able to load the image that is stored locally.
My issue: As Objective-C is not entirely a scripting language, I am confused with some of the libraries I may need and/or methods I can implement this. I have the algorithm, but I am wholy unsure with the implementation.
My questions: If you have done a project similar to this before with Objective-C, what tips can you provide for me? How does one load the .csv as a HTML interface where upon edit, it will save this edit into the .csv? Will I need any servers for this, or is everything executable from just a machine? How do you grab an image (stored locally), extract its file extension, and load it onto the .csv?
The most important question: Is this achievable through Objective-C? My reasoning behind it is, I want to advance my knowledge of OC through a task like this. Yes, using Python is easier, but is it possible to do this with Objective-C?
Thank you.
It certainly is achievable, but I doubt you'd really want to go this way. If I understand it correctly, you want to serve the HTML page to others via web browser - that would mean either writing a (simple) http daemon, that would run on the server or writing a CGI script that would communicate with a standard http daemon. Python/PHP/Ruby do this for you readily, so there is much less room for possible errors.
As for
As Objective-C is not entirely a scripting language
I would perhaps rephrase it as
As Objective-C is entirely not a scripting language
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I have some configuration files that I store the complex object values as serialized json. Currently there is a configuration file for each environment (localhost, dev, prod etc.) and for each installation by client. Most of the values are identically for the configurations between environments but not all. So for three environments and four clients I currently have 12 total files to manage.
If this were a web.config file there would be web.config transforms that would solve the problem. If this was c# I'd have compiler preprocessor directives that could be useed to substitute the different values based on the current build configuration.
Does anyone know of anything that works basically this way or have some good suggestion on tried and true ways to proceed? What I would like is to reduce the number of files down to a single instance for each installation that can suffice for each environment.
Configuration of configuration always seems a bit overdone to me, but you could use a properties file for the parts that change, and apache ant's <replace> task to do the substitutions. Something like this:
<replace
file="configure.json"
propertyFile="config-of-config.properties">
<replacefilter
token="#token1#"
property="property.key"/>
</replace>
Jsonnet from Google is a language that with with a super-set syntax based on JSON, adding high level language features that help to model data in JSON fromat. The compilation step produces JSON. I have used it in a project to describe complex deployment environments that inherit from one another at times and that share domain attributes albeit utilizing them differently from one instance to another.
As an example, an instance contains applications, tenant subscriptions for those applications, contracts, destinations and so forth. The values for all of these attributes are objects the recur throughout environments.
Their docs are very thorough and don't miss the std functions because they make for some very powerful data rendering capabilities.
I wrote a Squirrelistic JSON Preprocessor which uses Golang Text Templates syntax to generate JSON files based on parameters provided.
JSON template can include reference to other templates, use conditional logic, comments, variables and everything else which Golang Text templates package provides.
This really comes down to your full stack.
If you're talking about some application that runs solely client-side, with no server-side processing, whatsoever, then there's really no such thing as pre-processing.
You can process the data further before actually using it, but that won't mean that it will be processed prior to the page being served -- it means that people have to sit around, waiting for that to happen before the apps which need that data can be initialized.
The benefit of using JSON, to begin with is that it's just a data-store, and is quite language-agnostic, and quite widely supported, now. So if it's not 100% client-side, there's nothing stopping you from pre-processing in whatever language you're using on the server, and caching those versions of those files, to serve (and cache) to users, based on their need.
If you really, really need a system to do live processing of config-files, on the client-side, and you've gone through the work of creating app-views which load early, but show the user that they're deferring initialization (ie: "loading..."/spinners), then download a second JSON file, which holds all of the needed implementation-specific data (you'll have 12 of these tiny little files, which should be simple to manage), parse both JSON files into JS objects, and extend the large config object with the additional data in the secondary file.
Please note: Use localhost or some other storage facility to cache this, so that for html5-browsers, this longer load only happens one time.
There is one, https://www.npmjs.com/package/json-variables
Conceptually, it is a function which takes a string, JSON contents, sprinkled with specially marked variables and it produces a string with those variables resolved. Same like Sass or Less does for CSS - it's used to DRY up the source code.
Here's an example.
You'd put something like this in JSON file:
{
"firstName": "customer.firstName",
"message": "Hi %%_firstName_%%",
"preheader": "%%_firstName_%%, look what's inside"
}
Notice how it's DRY — single source of truth for the firstName value.
json-variables would process it into:
{
"firstName": "customer.firstName",
"message": "Hi customer.firstName",
"preheader": "customer.firstName, look what's inside"
}
that is, Hi %%_firstName_%% would look for firstName at the root level (but equally, it could be a deeper path, for example, data1.data2.firstName). Resolving also "bubbles up" to the root level, also you can use custom data structures and more.
Missing pieces of a JSON-processing task puzzle are:
Means to merge multiple JSON files, various ways (object-merge-advanced)
Means to orchestrate actions — Gulp is good if you're preferred programming language is JS
Means to get/set values by path (object-path - its notation uses dots only, no brackets key1.key2.array.2 instead of key1.key2.array[2])
Means to maintain the same set of keys across set of JSON files - you add a key in one, it's added on all others (object-fill-missing-keys)
In described case, we can do at least two approaches: one-to-many, or many-to-many.
Former - Gulp could be "baking" many JSON files from one or more JSON-like source files, json-variables DRY-ing up the references.
Later - alternatively, it could be "managed" set of JSON files rendered into set of distribution files — Gulp watches src folder, runs object-fill-missing-keys to normalise schemas, maybe even sorting objects (yes, it's possible, sorted-object).
It all depends how similar is the desired set of JSON files and how values are customised and is it done manually or programmatically.
I am developing a "dumb" front-end, it's an AIR application that interacts with a "smart" LiveCycle server. There are currently about 20 request & response pairs for the application. For many reasons (testing, developing outside the corporate network, etc), we have several XML files of fake data, and if a certain configuration flag is set, the files are loaded, a specific file is parsed and used to create a mock response. Each XML file is a set of responses for different situation, all internally consistent. We currently have about 10 XML files, each corresponding to different situation we can run into. This is probably going to grow to 30-50 XML files.
The current system was developed by me during one of those 90-hour-week release cycles, when we were under duress because LiveCycle was down again and we had a deadline to meet. Most of the minor crap has been cleaned up.
The fake data is in an object called FakeData, with properties like customerType1:XML, customerType2:XML, overdueCustomer1:XML, etc. Then in the FakeData constructor, all of the properties are set like this:
customerType1:XML = FileUtil.loadXML(File.applicationDirectory.resolvePath("fakeData/customerType1.xml");
And whenever you need some fake data (this happens in special FakeDelegates that extend the real LiveCycle Delegates), you get it from an instance of FakeData.
This is awful, for many reasons, but it works. One embarrassing part is that every time you create an instance of FakeData, it reloads all the XML files.
I'm trying to figure out if there's a design pattern that is not Singleton that can handle this more elegantly. The constraints are:
No global instances can be required (currently, all the code dealing with the fake data, including the fake delegates, is pulled out of production builds without any side-effects, and it needs to stay that way). This puts the Factory pattern out of the running.
It can handle multiple objects using the XML data without performance issues.
The XML files are read centrally so that the other code doesn't have to know where the XML files are, and so some preprocessing can be done (like creating a map of certain tag values and the associated XML file).
Design patterns, or other architecture suggestions, would be greatly appreciated.
Take a look at ASMock which was developed by a good friend of mine (and a member here Richard Szalay) and is based on .nets Rhino mocks. We've used it in several production environments now so i can vouch for it's stability.
should be able to get rid of any fake tests (more like integration tests) by using the mock object instead.
Wouldn't it make more sense to do traditional mocking with a mocking framework? Depending on your implementation, it might be possible to set up the Expects by reading the fake-data XML files.
Here is a Google Code project that offers mocking for ActionScript.
MonoDevelop creates those for every project. Should I include them in source control?
From a MonoDevelop blog post:
There were several long time pending
bug reports, and I also wanted to
improve a bit the performance and
memory use. MonoDevelop creates a
Parser Information Database (pidb)
file for each assembly or project.
This file contains all the information
about classes implemented in an
assembly, together with documentation
pulled from Monodoc. A pidb file has
trhee sections: the first one is a
header which contains among other
things the version of the file format
(that version is checked when loading
the pidb, and the file will be
regenerated if it doesn't match the
current implementation version). The
second section is the index of the
pidb file. It contains an index of all
classes in the database. The index is
always fully loaded in memory to be
able to quickly locate classes. The
third section of the file contains all
the class information: list of
methods, fields, properties,
documentation for each of those, and
so on. Each entry in the index has a
file offset field, which can be used
to completely load all the information
of a class (the index only contains
the name).
So it sounds like it's really just an optimization. I would personally not include it in source control unless you find it makes a big difference to performance: my guess is it will only really stay valid if only one person is working on the project at a time. (If it's big and changes regularly, you could find it adds significant overhead to the repository too. I haven't checked to see what the size is actually like, but it's worth checking.)
They're just cached code completion data. As the post Jon linked explains, the main reason is to save memory, though they do also save you from waiting for MD to parse all the source files and referenced assemblies when you open a project.
The pidb files can be regenerated pretty quickly, so there's no advantage to keeping them in the VCS. Indeed, as well as the VCS repository overhead, it could also cause problem if people are using different versions of MD with different pidb formats, so I'd strongly recommend against keeping them in source control.