I am working on a custom SSIS component that has 4 asynchronous outputs. It works just fine but now I have a user request for an enhancement and I am not sure how to handle it. They want to use the component in another context where only 2 of the 4 outputs will be well defined. I foolishly said that this would be trivial for me to support, I planned to just look to see if the two "undefined" streams were even connected, if not then I would skip over that part of the processing.
My problem is that I cannot figure out if an output is connected at run time, I had hoped that the output pipeline or output buffer would be missing. It doesn't look like that is the case; even when they are not hooked up the output and buffer are present.
Does anyone know where I should be looking to see if an output has a downstream consumer or not?
Thanks!
Edit: I was never able to figure out how to do this reliably, so I ended up making this behaviour configurable by the user. It is not automatic like I would have hoped but the difference I found between the BIDS environment and the DTExec environment pushed me to the conclusion that a component probably should not be making assumptions about the component graph it is embedded in.
Related
Example: https://redditmetis.com/
Issue
I've been having trouble trying to structure a recent SPA I started. Like the above example, I need to accept an input, make a few API calls in the back-end, manipulate the data then render it the front-end. I'm currently going for a Django + React stack, since I'm pretty familiar with them. I can't really imagine how this would look like from a surface view, I've worked with API's before but I can't wrap my head around how the client and the server would interact with each other to make it all connect.
What I have so far
After looking into it, I think I need React Routers, similar to the example website provided. In my Django server, I plan on making separate API calls and running an algorithm to organize and sift through the received response, then pushing the product to the client. I'm still figuring out how to set that up, since most API calls are made on componentdidmount which only executes at the start of the DOM. This isn't much, but its a start.
If anyone has pointers on how to start, I'd appreciate it, thanks.
Each class object you make can have a componentdidmount method.
You can also use the fetch method within objects that update dynamically during state changes.
I have the following in my system:
4 File folders
5 Applications that do some processing on files in the folders and then move files to the next folder (processing: read files, update db..)
The process is defined by Stages: 1,2,3,4,5.
As the files are moved along, the Stage field within them is updated to the next Stage.
Sometimes there are exceptions in the system, not necessarily exception in code but exception in the process.
For instance, there is an error in transmitting the file to the next folder. In this case the stage is not updated and an record is written in the DB for this file.
What I want to do, what is the best approach?
I want to plug a utility of some sort or add code to the applications that will capture any exceptions in the process. Like if a file was not moved, I want to know what stage and why. This will help in figuring out the break down in the process.
I need something that will provide the overall health of the process.
Now sure how to go about doing this from an architectural point of view.
The scheduler? Well that might knock the idea out anyway.
Exit code is still up and running from dos days.
it's a property of the Application Class (0 the default) is success
So from your app you'd detect an error and set ApplicationExitCode to some meaning number like 1703 (boo hoo)
Application.ShutDown(1703);// is the .net4 way
However seeing as presumably the scheduler is just running the app, you'd have to script it all up. Might as well just write a common logging dll and add it to each app as mess about with that, especially if you want the same behaviour if it's run from outside the scheduler.
Another option would be delegating. ie you write an app that runs the app (passed in as a command line parameter) and logs the result (via exit code for instance) and then change scheduler items to call that with the requisite parameter.
I have an application that uses Remote SharedObjects and I am seeing some strange behaviour. I am writing an ActionScript application in AS3 using Flash Builder and connecting to Wowza Media Server 2.
My application is working just fine but I am now trying to write unit tests for it using FlexUnit. My unit tests involve creating multiple connections to the same remote SharedObject and making sure that I am getting updates correctly. Everything seems to be working well except that I am not getting any of the SyncEvent.SYNC events with an info.code of "delete". When I run my applications independently in separate tabs or even separate swfs embedded in the same page it works fine. For some reason though it does not work when inside a unit test. I have also found that if I load the swfs using a Loader inside the same SWF then I get the same behaviour. It seems to me to be something strange about the way multiples of the same SharedObject behave within the same SWF. I have had to work around other strange behaviour in the unit tests such as oldValues not being set properly in the onSync events too.
Anyone have any ideas how I can work around this? Is this a known issue? Am I crazy? :)
Would appreciate any help!
I also faced this problem before when I was working on some Flex application using some coding frameworks like Cairngorm, and connecting to AMFPHP with multi remote objects.
At that time what I come up with to resolve the issue is to make sure that those remote objects won't be fired at the same time. That is trying to make some so called "sequential chain" to fire those remote objects one after another.
In order to achieve this it may be difficult if you do it from scratch, you may consider making use of those modern ActionScript framework 2.0 to help you (e.g. SWIZ or Robotlegs). This may be too complex to handle in the very beginning. I suggest you can just place the remote object parts to be handled by the framework while keeping other things intact.
To get your sharedObject instance, you are using the static method SharedObject.getRemote(). I believe this method will always return the same instance for a given name (and if the persistence parameter has the same value).
You can have the same kind of issue when you remove a SharedObject from your app (mySO = null) and you reinstantiate it before the garbage collector did its job).
This kind of behavior makes sense to me, but it can sometimes be a problem I must admit. Anyway it should be easy to test in a debug session (Have a look at your objects instance number).
Now talking about unit tests, what are you testing? The SharedObjects behavior? If so, I believe there is some misconception here. It you really want to test this kind of behavior (and I would be interested in the reason behind), then I guess you will need some more complex tests that run two separate applications.
Hope it helps!
We had similar behavior with deletes in our project.
When we call so.close(). Then delete some key in shared object. Then connect SO again - it still see deleted key alive.
Workarounds: do not close SO or update deleted keys with some constants values (-2 for example) to mark them deleted.
Wowza 3 was used.
I am working on a custom data transformation component. I'm using NUnit and NMock2 to test as I code. Testing and getting the custom UI and other features right is a huge pain, in part because I can't find any documentation about the order in which SSIS invokes methods on the component at design time as well as runtime.
I can correct the issues readily enough, but it's tedious and time consuming to unregister the old version, register the new version, fire up the test ssis package, try to display the UI, get an obscure error message, backtrace it, modify the component and continue.
One of the big issues involves the UI component needing access to the componentmetadata and buffermanager properties of the component at design time, and what I need to provide for to support properties that won't be initialized until after the user enters them in the UI.
I can work through it; but if someone knows of some docs or tips that would speed me up, I'd greatly appreciate it. The samples I've found havn't been much use; they seem to be directed to showing off cool stuff (Twitter, weather.com) rather than actual work.
Thanks in advance.
Here's a timeline of the run-time execution sequence: Run-time Methods of a Data Flow Component
The design-time sequence isn't laid out in MSDN that nicely because there just isn't such a sequence, but here's what I think/know:
1. ProvideComponentProperties - called ONCE EVER when the component is dropped on the design surface.
2. PerformUpgrade - called ONLY if the metadata version is different than the version attribute on the class - called on package load.
3. Validate - called FREQUENTLY... during package load, input attachment, entry into editor, etc...
4. ReinitializeMetaData - called infrequently, and only because a VS_NEEDSNEWMETADATA value is returned from Validate.
Everything other override (OnInputAttached, etc.) is fairly straightforward as to when it gets called. Here's the not-so-descriptive article: Design-time Methods of a Data Flow Component.
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.