I have a project and i want my ASP.Net to be able to have same capabilities like windows insider. For example i want to give some of the users the new features and functionality to test same like share point allows to deploy new feature to some of the users. Is there any platform available that i can use or i will have to modify my application to have this capability?
E.g. the Sharepoint today has this capability that we can select some users and then provide them access to have new feature and version or outlook allows you to see new features but user has capability to turn it of.
There is one strategy:
You can do something like request forwarding.
You can install another web application with new features.
Then when user comes to your site you can ask them whether they want to see old application / new application.
If they select new, then on server side, you can redirect user to new web setup.
Once you aware that most of the people are going to new web tier, you can then shutdown old servers.
Obviously there will be other factors, like
is this only UI level change or you have some data store and that is
also going to change.
If it requires change in underlying database, then how are you going
to make sure that new application gets data from old database
You will have to think through and decide strategy best applicable for your solution.
I know this does not provide direct solution to your question, but this should given enough information on your question so that you can get started with some approach.
One option is to use an Authorize Attribute on a new controller defined for the new feature and add users who you want to have access to a role.
For example you could put users A, B and C into the Role "CanUseNewFeature" and just put a conditional if on the view something like:
#if(User.IsInRole("CanUseNewFeature")
<a href="yourlink" /> Check out new feature! </a>
and the controller
[Authorise(Roles ="CanUseNewFeature")]
public class NewFeatureController : Controller
Related
Context/Background: I have an iOS app with a Firebase backend. Each user on the app has a couple of public stories or journals. I am working on the v2 of the app and one of the main features of v2 is to give users the ability to publish their stories as static webpages by a click of a button. The goal is to have a journal for a user with a username "johnhouse", for example, be available at www.the-app-domain.com/johnhouse.
Question: How do can I create web pages on the fly from an iOS app? Im not sure where to start. Which online services should I look at?
I thought of spinning up a server and hosting www.the-app-domain.com on it, getting the app to ssh into the server and creating a directory called "johnhouse" (from the example above) inside the website's root directory and then pasting an index.html file inside it, But this doesn't only sound like a bad idea, it also sounds complicated as hell If I were to generate the html files on the app, how would I get them to the server? how would I get them into the right location?
There are a great many ways you might implement this behavior but I'll suggest one.
Consider what this product might look like if the app had no knowledge of how these static pages were published. All the app needs to be able to do is allow users to set which of their stories are published or not and to inform those users of the url at which their published stories will be available.
There may be real advantages to removing the app from your page-creation process.
If you find that you need to make change to the formatting of your pages you can do so without requiring an app update and you can choose if you want to rebuild every page or just have changes apply to new pages. This might be important if you discover that your pages don't render well on some devices or are not indexed the way you would like by search engines.
If you need to change where your pages are hosted you can do so (and provide redirects from the old location) without needing everyone to update to a new app version.
If you need to add moderation or curation of the content you publish you can do so more easily than if clients (your app) have direct control of your site content. This may be important when someone starts publishing SEO spam links to your site, or registers the username admin or login, or publishes a story containing malicious javascript, or publishes content which gets you a copyright infringement notice.
You don't need to give clients direct access to your web server which could allow them to edit each other's content or overwrite your site with their own malicious content.
Since you're already using Firebase take a look at how you might run your own web server as another client of this backend. One which looks for "published" stories (however you identify those in your data model) and generates appropriate pages for them. Depending on the tools you elect to use these could be dynamically generated pages (client side js or a web app) or static pages build by some backend process periodically or whenever stories change and added to a web server. Without any idea what server side tools would be most appropriate for you it's hard to know what specifically to suggest here.
I'm new to iOS programming and am starting my first project. I'm wondering how clients manage the content (blogs, videos, etc) on their apps after you deliver the final product. Is their a content management system I should be implementing or do the developers usually handle that?
A developer would build it from scratch. An alternative to starting from the ground up would be to use CloudKit or some other NoSQL based web service to manage the content. Couchdb, Firebase, etc...
A client might add content in several ways. One could create a simple web form that allows a client to edit the content (empty form to add, a table with a link to edit or delete). If the client has a developer account you could add their Apple ID as a role to the CloudKit database with specific security rights to edit that database. Similar activities would apply to other platforms.
Is there a strategy/approach that can be built to bring an ASP.NET MVC application into "single user mode" gracefully? By "single user mode" I mean something that when activated will block all new user access/logins, but allow existing users to complete their sessions and log out.
SCENARIO: I need to republish an active MVC application during the day in order to patch errors. Since we are conducting a new release I need to be able to do these patches sometimes a few times a day to squash bugs. Our users are all over the world and I don't have the ability to contact them individually to tell them of the patch, especially if it is a quick fix that is needed. So far I've just been republishing which means for some users their sessions will be destroyed, they will get errors when trying to navigate from one screen or form to another, etc.
What I would like is a feature that will let me log in as the site admin (custom Identity auth), flip a switch, and from that point forward (unless I flip the switch again) no new logins will be accepted. I would also need the ability to monitor sessions and ideally mark individual sessions for termination immediately if necessary, which I'm not sure is possible out of the box at all.
If there is no NuGet package or at least some code sample out there that can do it I'm considering rolling my own. One approach is giving the app admin a screen to set a boolean Application variable that is then checked during each user's login. If that Application variable is true then the authentication logic redirects the user to a friendly message that logins are disabled. Session management would be trickier, maybe have the base controller update an Application variable (dictionary?) on each page load, and then the admin can view a screen that shows a list of those sessions and can flag them for termination? And then the next time a flagged user loads a screen the base controller logs them out since they were flagged for termination. But I'm not sure if there will be threading/deadlock/etc issues with everyone accessing this Application variable repeatedly like that.
For reference, the application is used by about 3-5K different users per day, about 25-30k screen/page views per day. Backend is a combination of Oracle and SQL Server but that shouldn't matter, unless it would be better to track the session info in the DB.
This is not a hard requirement, but the impact on the users when the site goes down can be severe, so I want to make it as graceful as possible. Right now it is crude.
I currently work at a school and have an idea to create an app that allows students to contact a grown up (for example, the principle) anonymously through an app. The app would quite simply consist of a contact form. I am trying to find out the best, and easiest way to achieve this without setting up servers with a separate API. Does anyone have a suggestion on how to achieve it? Is there any way to set up an e-mail form with a pre set recipient and a built in sender-account? Please guide me in the right direction.
You would need to implement an SMTP client. You can use open source code like skpsmtpmessage
It's likely that their example app could be your solution.
Your biggest problem will be the deployment. You definitely need to pay an $99/y developer account and add all the students device ID's to your account (with a maximum of 100 devices/y) or register all of them as beta tester (I don't know the limitations).
Probably this isn't doable so easily, as it seems you don't have iOS developing experience so far. Maybe you can find something on the app store that works with self hosted databases. But you definitely need to host some kind of webApp/API.
You may want to give Appygram a try to handle the back-end if you are able to set up the contact form itself. While it's a separate hosted API, at least you don't have to build/manage it.
Appygram is a free web service that would allow you to configure all the details such as which adults could be contacted, their point(s) of contact (i.e. email address), and it would process and send all the submissions for you. All your app needs to do is send a form post request.
A nice thing about having this information outside of the iOS app itself is that you can change the contact details on the fly without requiring an update to the iOS app itself. Whether you use Appygram (which, since I contribute to it, I am slightly biased toward!) or something similar, I would say that since this is for students, I would recommend a solution that would allow you to update your configuration without requiring app updates.
Finally, I'd second what Julian said. The challenge here could be with deployment. One possible alternative would be to make this a mobile-friendly web page accessible only via student login or on the school network (or both). Would probably be easier development-wise and wouldn't require installs nor the hurdles that Julian described with device registration, etc. And, Appygram would still work with this setup as well.
Good luck!
I have an application which is centered around data per 'team'. A user belongs to a team and if they log in they only see that team's data.
However, I now have super users who essentially belong to more than one team. These users should be able to log in to the system and then immediately choose which team they are interested in. From then on they will essentially view/create data against that selected team. They should also have the option to go and change what team they are viewing at any time.
I've established that the user would like to be able to have multiple tabs open and be viewing a different team in each tab.
I'm struggling to work out the best way to accomplish this with .NET MVC while keeping it as stateless and testable as possible.
I've been reading up on the different ways to persist data - session state and cookies seem to get a bad rep in MVC. TempData, ViewBag seem to focus on just persisting data for one request.
I wouldn't have thought that this is an uncommon requirement in an application - are there known patterns for dealing with this in MVC which I have missed?
So far I'm trying to create a partial view which I can show on each page to let the user see what team they are viewing the site as, and change it from there.
Any advice is appreciated!
If you want to let your superuser view multiple teams data then you'll want to pass the team information in on the request, on the query string or as something that looks like a restful url:
/blueteam/members
In fact it would be extra work to track this in a stateful manner as you'd have track user, team, and ui element when a superuser can view multiple team data at once.
I'd say passing the information in on every request is a pretty standard approach to your situation.
The tricky part of the stateless approach is decorating all your internal application links with the team information without too much extra work. Relative links can be your friends here. So a link to the bug page for a team might be to simply "bugs", picking up the team name higher in the uri path. If you are creating something that looks like a one page application it's easy enough to store the team info on the client.
If you don't want team members to see data for other team members, you can set up guard functions that check for team membership for certain classes of users before rendering a view.