We've just recently bought and started using Orbeon.
When the user edits a form, and want to save it, he press the save button, and we defined it to send the Orbeon-style XML with all the controls values to my C# REST API. When the user wants to continue editing the form, I call the Orbeon form, and there is a trigger, what fires when page loads, and it starts a REST API call to my C# REST API, to get the control values. Now we have to define map EVERY value. Eg. ControlSurname -> ControlSurname, ControlLastname -> ControlLastname ... etc.
Is there a way, that my C# API gives back the same Orbeon-style XML (maybe some values changed due to the business logic, but not the structure), and Orbeon parses it and put all the control values to its place? (Without mapping all the 87 control?) (It works in the save methon, you dont give a mapping when save...)
You can configure Orbeon Forms to load the initial data from a service. See the section Initial data from service for more on this.
The benefit of this approach is that you won't have to do any the mapping work you were referring to, and the drawback is that you have to make sure that the structure returned by your service corresponds to what the form expects, or your form might end up with missing fields or other problems.
Related
I have created an Orbeon form with 5 fields:
First name
Second name
e-mail
Phone
Case description
I want to call an external REST API (Nuxeo: Updating a Document) when the form is validated.
Reading Orbeon documentation I don't find the right way to do this.
Based on the documentation found in Orbeon Http Services it looks like it doesn't provide a way to customize the JSON that I must send in the API call with the form fields values.
Here is the general idea:
You can setup what button you want to have at the bottom of your form (doc).
Each button, run a "process". A process is composed of a sequence of actions (doc).
One possible action is send(), which allows you to send the XML containing the data entered by users ("form data") to a service you provide (doc).
With this, you can setup your form to have a "Send" button, which upon activation runs validation, saves the data, and sends it to your service.
I am porting an application from wpf to asp.net mvc.
In the wpf I have a view in which the user selects from a combobox the name of a client and then in some textboxes, next to the combobox, some specific information about the client will show up (email, address, etc). In wpf I fill all this information in an observablecollection that resides in memory and when the client changes, I retrieve the other ones from the collection so it won't fo through the database.
Is there any way in asp.net mvc I can do this ? Or every time the client changes i will fetch from the database the extra information ? (will be slow)
This controls is just to select the client (and the extra information to help the user) so it should be fast.
How would you do it ?
If you don't want to make a call back to the server for every selection, then you should look at a solution whereby you pre-fetch all the data that you need and hold it in a javascript object. Then you could write a javascript method that would fire on the selection DOM event.
Sounds like what you are looking for is Session. You can pull the list from the database once, store it in session, and then reference session as needed for each client's data. This recommendation is based on presumption that the list is not being modified elsewhere, and therefore, invalidating the version of the list you have stored in Session.
Using Session in ASP.NET - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms178581.aspx
what design approach would you take for security and scalability (and perhaps level of effort) when posting an ASP.NET MVC HTML form that also has a Flash component, as described in the scenario below?
I have a scenario where there's an ASP.NET MVC site, and a page that requires user authentication & authorization to access (using ASP.NET forms authentication). On that page there's an HTML form. The form also has a Flash component. The form has a few text fields, and the Flash component has binary data that needs to get submitted to the server in tandem with the HTML form fields. When the user hits the submit button on the HTML form, the form contents and binary data from the Flash need to get submitted as part of one atomic unit, so to speak.
I know that I can use HTML / Flash JavaScript bridging to post the form either through JavaScript, or through the Flash component. I could even do both, perhaps posting the binary data from the Flash component when the user clicks submit, and then posting the HTML form content following that.
From your experience, what approach would be the path of least resistance to post the form with? Considering the user authentication and authorization part, I imagine that Flash would higher effort than HTML. What about the user authentication aspect? If the page posted from Flash to the server, would Flash also have to authenticate the user, in addition to the standard HTML authentication form?
My Flash binary data should not typically be greater than 300KB, often less...any opinions / insights are greatly appreciated!
EDIT:
I also vaguely remember that with Flash 10.1, ExternalInterface seemed to not work right when transferring binary data to JavaScript, am I mistaken with that, and that you can easily transfer 300KB or more of binary data from Flash to a JavaScript variable that is then posted to the server?
Thanks!
That's one way of doing it:
Make your flash component call a javascript function through ExternalInterface.call().
Make the called javascript function change a hidden field inside the form.
When the form is posted, the hidden field will send the desired value to the server.
I guess this is also the safest way - since the Flash component will not communicate with the server. Everything you need is a standard, non-AJAX form post.
Edit
Sorry, I guess I should have paid more attention... If there is too much data being sent from the flash component, maybe you should post it directly to the server.
Still, you could use ExternalInterface to synchronize the whole process. Make Flash call a server-side method (I would use FluorineFX for that, but your opinion may vary). Then .NET will return an ID, meaning it has received and saved the binary data for future use. Then call ExternalInterface to set that ID to a hidden field. After that, when the HTML is posted to the server, the server-side action method just need to retrieve the binary data using the posted ID...
The problem here is that you will end up with some binary data that will never be associated to any form post... But that's OK I guess, just run some "garbage-collector" script from time to time.
About the authentication issue: FluorineFX does implement .NET authentication, and it is able to retrieve the current logged in user. Of course, there are some issues.
My application (Asp.Net MVC) has great interaction with the user interface (jQuery/js). For example, setting various searches charts, moving the gadgets on the screen and more .. I of course want to keep all data for each user. So that data will be available from any page in the Dumaine and the user will accepts his preferences.
Now I keep all data in a cookie because it did not seem logical asynchronous access to the server each time the user changes something and thet happens a lot.When the user logout from the application I save the cookie to the database.
The Q is how to save the settings back to the db - from the client to the server.
because the are a lot of interactin that I want to record.
example scanrios: closing widget,moving widget,resizing menues, ordering columens..
I want to record that actions. if I will fire ajax saving rutine for each action
ןt will be too cumbersome. Maybe I have no choice..
Maybe I should run an asynchronous saving all of a certain interval seconds.
The problem is the cookie becomes very large. The thought that this huge cookie is attached to each server request makes me feel that my attitude is wrong.
Another problem cookies have size limit. It varies from your browser but I definitely have been close to the border - my cookie easily become 4kb
Is there another solution?
Without knowing your code, have you considered storing the users preferences in a/your database. A UserPreference table with columns for various settings is a possibility.
You could update it via AJAX/JSON if you had a 'Save Preferences' option, or just update it on postback.
EDIT 1: After thinking about it, I think having an explicit 'save preferences' button would be beneficial and practical.
Somewhere on your page, where the use edits the things that generate the cookie, put an button called save, then hook up a jQuery click handler. On click, build a CSV string or another method of storing the preferences for posting back to the server, then use $.post to send it back to an action method in a controller.
Once there, store it in the database somehow (up to you exactly how), then return a JSON array with a success attribute, to denote whether the preference storing was successful.
When the page is loading, get the preferences out of the database and perform you manipulation.
Another solution would be to store the user preferences into the session and write some server side logic (like action filter) that would write those preferences as JSON encoded string on each page (in a script tag towards the end of the markup) making them available to client scripts.
using asp.net mvc, I'm initializing a list in the server code, and allowing the end-user to add to the list on the form (using JQuery to add entries). I know how to obtain a list's selected items on a post back, but I don't need to do that here. I want the complete contents of the list accessible in the server code after a post back.
Is a posted list just not going to give me the full content? Should I use Ajax to send each item to the server as each items gets added to the list?
thanks
There are a couple of ways that I can think of doing this.
make an ajax call each time an item is added - as you suggested
when an item is added to the list, you also add a hidden field to the form that will be submitted. Then on post back (although that terminology is very Web Forms-y), in your action method, you'll have access to the contents of the list. If you name things correctly you should be able to model bind to a List.
The latter would be my preference, it depends on your particular situation though.
Some things to keep in mind:
Bandwidth from the user to the web server is very small compared to bandwidth from a database to the web server
The database most likely cached whatever query you just ran to populate that list
It sounds like you're asking for the entire list to be included with the postback data, and that means having the browser upload that data for the user.
With all that in mind, it should be obvious that you're better off rebuilding your base list from the database.