Background
I have a (glorified) CRUD application that I'd like to enable HTML5 offline support with. The cache-manifest system looks simple yet powerful, but I'm curious about how I can allow users to access data while offline.
For example, suppose I have these pages for the entity "Case" (i.e. this is CRM case-management software):
http://myapplication.com/Case
http://myapplication.com/Case/{id}
http://myapplication.com/Case/Create
The first URI contains a paged listing of all cases, using the querystring parameters pageIndex and pageSize, e.g. /Case?pageIndex=2&pageSize=20.
The second URI is the template for editing individual cases, e.g. /Case/1 or /Case/56.
Finally, /Case/Create is the form used to create cases.
The Problem
I would like all three to be available offline.
/Case
The simple way would be to add /Case to the cache-manifest, however that would break paging (as the links wouldn't work).
I think I could instead add something like /Case/AllData which is an XML resource, which is cached and if offline then a script on /Case would use this XML data to populate the list and provide for pagination.
If I go for the latter, how can I have this XML data stored in the in-browser SQL database instead of as a cached resource? I think using the SQL database would be more resilient.
/Case/{id}
This is more complicated. There is the simple solution of manually adding /Case/1, /Case/2, /Case/3 etc... to /Case/1234, but there can be hundreds or even thousands of cases so this isn't very practical.
I think the system should provide access to the 30 most recent cases, for example. As above, how can I store this data in the database?
Also, how would this work? If I don't explicitly add /Case/34 to the manifest and the user clicks on to /Case/34 how can I get the browser to load a page that my JavaScript will populate based on the browser's SQL database data and not display the offline message?
/Case/Create
This one is more simple - as it's just an empty page and on the <form>'s submit action my script would detect if it's offline, and if it is offline then it would add it to the browser's SQL database. Does this sound okay?
Thanks!
I think you need to be looking at a LocalStorage database (though it does have some downsides), but there are other alternatives such as WebSQL and IndexedDB.
Also I don't think you should be using numeric Id's if you are allowing people to create as you will get Primary Key conflicts, it is probably best to use something like a GUID.
Another thing you need is the ability to push those new cases onto the server. there could be multiple...
Can they be edited? If they can I think you really need to be thinking about synchronization and conflict resolution hard very hard if that is the case.
Shameless self promotion, I have a project that is designed to handle these very issues, though it's not done, it's close. You can see it (with an ugly but very functional) demo at https://github.com/forbesmyester/SyncIt
Related
Good Morning,
as from the title, i'd like to create a proprietary database to be integrate in a Typo3 website.
I'd like to receive some advise on which is the best solution:
- is it possible to create tables directly from Typo3?
- is it better creating a database, for example with MySQL and then integrate
it?
In the second case, how coud that be done?
are there other options?
I hope this is not an already answered topic, in case, please send me to it ( i could not find so much information.
Thanks in advance.
If I understand your question correctly, you want to add a custom Extension to TYPO3, containing custom tables. From a content side, this is perceived as a "database", right?
TYPO3 has a framework for that called Extbase. You can "kickstart" a TYPO3 extension with the "Extension Builder" https://typo3.org/extensions/repository/view/extension_builder by entering the "Model" (the data structure) via GUI and then you get all tables etc. automatically set up.
After that (aside from general TYPO3 knowledge), there is some coding involved. In theory, it's possible to make a "round trip" back to the extension builder from the code, but I've never done that.
You need to know / learn the specificities of extbase / php, which is is based on some "convention over configuration" rules and has some additional tweaks to plain PHP (functional comments). Here's a great resource: http://www.extbase-book.org/.
With that, you have great flexibility and powerful tooling to build almost anything inside TYPO3.
From a TYPO3 view it is best if you are able to hold your data in the TYPO3 database. You need to create an extension to handle your data. In TYPO3 an extension can define it's own tables and with updates of the extension updates in the datastructure are handled automatically.
Since version 8 there is a new layer (doctrine) and so it is possible to define further databases for individual tables. With some restrictions you are able to even use different database (-systems) for different tables.
Anyway you could program your own database interface to get and store your data independent from any TYPO3 restrictions, but then you need to handle everything on your own.
Using the TYPO3 core API will help you in multiple ways to handle your data without programming everything anew.
Especially if you use extbase (and the EXT:extensionbuilder) you will get a complete BE data handling, FE-Plugins with Fluid templates to present your data, even data management from the FE could be generated for you just by defining the datastructure. Of course versioning, workspace and timed visibility support are also available if you use TYPO3 structures which includes some (mostly invisible) fields aside from uid, hidden, deleted.
I'm looking to use SSRS for multi-tenant reporting and I'd like the ability to have runtime-chosen Shared Data Sources for my reports. What do I mean by this? Well, I could be flexible but I think the two most likely possibilities are (however, I'm also open to other possibilities):
The Shared Data Source is dictated by the client's authentication. In my case, the "client" is a .NET application and not the user, so if this is a viable path then I'd like to somehow have the MainDB (that's what I'm calling it) Shared Data Source selected by the Service Account that the client logs in as.
Pass the name of the Shared Data Source as a parameter and let that dictate which one to use. Given that all of my clients are "trusted players", I am comfortable with this approach. While each client will have its own representative Service Account, it's just for good measure and should not be important. So instead of just calling the data source MainDB, we could instead have Client1DB and Client2DB, etc. It's okay if a new data source means a new deployment but I need this to scale easily enough as well to ~50 different data sources over time.
Why? Because we have multiple/duplicate copies of our production application for multiple customers but we don't want to duplicate everything, just the web apps and databases. We're fine with some common "back-end" things. And for SSRS, because of how expensive licenses are (and how rarely reports are ran by our users), we really want to have just a single back-end for all of our customers (I actually have a second one on standby for manual disaster recovery situations - we don't need to be too fancy here as reports are the least important DR concern we have).
I have seen this question which points to this post but I was really hoping there was a better way than this. Because of all of those additional steps/efforts/limitations/etc, I'd rather just use PowerShell to script duplicate deployments of the reports with tweaked hardcoded data sources instead of standardizing on the steps in that post. That solution feels WAY too hacky to me and doesn't seem to scale very well at all.
I've done this a bunch of terrible ways (usually hardcoded in a dynamic script), and then I discovered its actually quite simple.
Instead of using Shared Connection, use the Embedded Connection and create your Connection string based on params (or any string manipulation code)....
I'm building a Phonegap application and i'm planning to set it to work in both Offline and Online mode, the idea is to get JSON Data from a PHP server side script and show it in the application, these data contains text, images so my question is is there anyway to set a dynamic cache manifest or any other way in a way that the user can see the already loaded data when he's offline, like caching the json result itself or anything else you can help me with
thanks
What do you mean by "work in both Offline and Online mode"? Are the users able to only see the user created data or can they modify it too? Is it correct to use a Manifest to control caching of user created data? I would have thought you should only really use it for caching the application templates and code. In any case I think you'll probably need something that you can exert more control over, something based perhaps using WebSQL, IndexedDb or LocalStorage.
I have been working on the modify-it-too question for many months and have a solution in the form of javascript(phonegap) <-> server synchronization that works somewhat like a version control system, with version numbers and conflict resolution. There's some pretty great docs and demo on the GitHub page and you can even see a presentation courtesy of SkillsMatter / LondonAJAX.. Currently there is only a JS/Node based server but I will probably do PHP based server because that's my day job If you look at the server code it's pretty easy to implement.
BTW I would use a different method to store the images, why not just download them and store them in a File, I don't know the storage limits, but I bet that is the way that Phonegap will let you get away with most.
I have a editable html5 page and I store new elements in localStorage.
I want to synchronize my page with the server.
I want to know if I can do it without a server side script or if there is some tips to do something like this in a good way.
Thank you :)
You can pull information from the server quite easily using jQuery and then just put it on Local Storage but, if you want to upload local information to the server there is no way around, you have to use some kind of script, tough it's not that difficult, there are many languages (PHP, C#, Python...) and tools you can use.
Keep in mind that when you upload information to the server you have to sanitize it very important security measure.
Basically, the way to go is:
Post the information to the server (using AJAX or a HTML form, either way will do)
Use some server-side script to capture the variables posted.
Sanitize your data (check format, discard non-valid characters, etc)
Store it on database (Do not, ever, concatenate your data with a SQL query ok? that can make you vulnerable to a SQL injection attack), compute something or do stuff.
Return some status to the client (some confirmation maybe?)
You may want to take that confirmation and show a message to the user ("Your info was saved properly" or something like that)
is a javascript timer not sufficient for this manner? or jQuery?
The question really should be more of a problem than a question. If you're updating based on a server's variables then you could use AJAX i believe but if its like increment said variable every X seconds I would focus on using a javascript timer.
I'd love to do this:
UPDATE table SET blobCol = HTTPGET(urlCol) WHERE whatever LIMIT n;
Is there code available to do this? I known this should be possible as the MySQL Docs include an example of adding a function that does a DNS lookup.
MySQL / windows / Preferably without having to compile stuff, but I can.
(If you haven't heard of anything like this but you would expect that you would have if it did exist, A "proly not" would be nice.)
EDIT: I known this would open a whole can-o-worms re security, however in my cases, the only access to the DB is via the mysql console app. Its is not a world accessible system. It is not a web back end. It is only a local data logging system
No, thank goodness — it would be a security horror. Every SQL injection hole in an application could be leveraged to start spamming connections to attack other sites.
You could, I suppose, write it in C and compile it as a UDF. But I don't think it really gets you anything in comparison to just SELECTing in your application layer and looping over the results doing HTTP GETs and UPDATEing. If we're talking about making HTTP connections, the extra efficiency of doing it in the database layer will be completely dwarfed by the network delays anyway.
I don't know of any function like that as part of MySQL.
Are you just trying to retreive HTML data from many URLs?
An alternative solution might be to use Google spreadsheet's importHtml function.
Google Spreadsheets Lets You Import Online Data
Proly not. Best practises in a web-enviroment is to have database-servers isolated from the outside, both ways, meaning that the db-server wouldn't be allowed to fetch stuff from the internet.
Proly not.
If you're absolutely determined to get web content from within an SQL environ, there are as far as I know two possibilities:
Write a custom MySQL UDF in C (as bobince mentioned). The could potentially be a huge job, depending on your experience of C, how much security you want, how complete you want the UDF to be: eg. Just GET requests? How about POST? HEAD? etc.
Use a different database which can do this. If you're happy with SQL you could probably do this with PostgreSQL and one of the snap-in languages such as Python or PHP.
If you're not too fussed about sticking with SQL you could use something like eXist. You can do this type of thing relatively easily with XQuery, and would benefit from being able to easily modify the results to fit your schema (rather than just lumping it into a blob field) or store the page "as is" as an xhtml doc in the DB.
Then you can run queries very quickly across all documents to, for instance, get all the links or quotes or whatever. You could even apply XSL to such a result with very little extra work. Great if you're storing the pages for reference and want to adapt the results into a personal "intranet"-style app.
Also since eXist is document-centric it has lots of great methods for fuzzy-text searching, near-word searching, and has a great full-text index (much better than MySQL's). Perfect if you're after doing some data-mining on the content, eg: find me all documents where a word like "burger" within 50 words of "hotdog" where the word isn't in a UL list. Try doing that native in MySQL!
As an aside, and with no malice intended; I often wonder why eXist is over-looked when people build CMSs. Its a database that can store content in its native format (XML, or its subset (x)HTML), query it with ease in its native format, and can translate it from its native format with a powerful templating language which looks and acts like its native format. Sometimes SQL is just plain wrong for the job!
Sorry. Didn't mean to waffle! :-$