I'd like to be able to have a way of pulling in a URL prefix from a properties file or the like for references to static resources in Thymeleaf, so that I can, e.g., have a file url for development and a reference to, e.g., static.cdn.com Having a variable added to every page's context is too much repetition. Is there some approach short of creating a dialect so that I can have a configurable attribute?
Related
If someone goes to our website with a query string key of ref (for example mysite.com/AboutUs?ref=Test), is it possible to maintain that query string on all future links/form posts?
So for example, I may have a link on our website to go to mysite.com/Products. I would want this to be translated into mysite.com/Products?ref=Test.
Ideally I want to know if this is possible to do by inspecting the previous URL and adding it to the current URL when the request for the page is made, maybe by intercepting the route and appending the key (if it doesn't exist already).
The project is an MVC 4 application.
You could actually pass it along by adding it to every single URL, but that would require manually adding to each use of Html.ActionLink, etc. (or I suppose you could create a custom HTML Helper to do that for you, but then every developer who works on your project would need to remember to always use the custom helper), as well as all redirects and such in your controller actions. Long and short, this would be very time consuming and very fragile.
Your best bet is to simply intercept the initial request with the querystring parameter and then set a session var. Then, you can simply check for the presence of the session var instead of the querystring parameter.
To handle all this logic, your best bet is to create a global action filter. There's pretty extensive documentation on Filters at MSDN. Once you create your filter, you just have to register it in FilterConfig.cs (in App_Start) to make it global.
Set the URL parameter in a cookie, and later in your code do whatever you want to do based on presence of that value in either the cookie or URL.
if(parameter set in cookie OR URL)
// do stuff
if(parameter set in URL)
// set the cookie so that future actions are also tagged with that parameter
Alternatively if you want such tagging to happen only for the session, set a session variable.
To do it in the way you suggested - You could rewrite all links on your page based on this tag, but that would be a roundabout, and costly, way of doing this. Most languages allow a hook that allows your code to process the HTML output before it is sent out to browser; just run a appropriate regex search and replace to get what you want. e.g. PHP has ob buffering and associated functions. You could use the equivalent for .Net.
In my config.groovy i have set ..
emailTo="admin#xzyz.com"
emailForm="notification#oabc.com"
but i want some flexibility in this. Can I change this while my project is running form property file ? Please help
Yes, you can use .property file as well, by default Grails looks for properties at:
in calss path ${appName}-config.properties
and global config ~/.grails/${appName}-config.properties
path passed as a system vaiable named ${appName}.config.location
Just take a look at first few lines of your Config.groovy, you can put there any other path to your own .properties
See also http://grails.org/doc/2.1.0/guide/conf.html#configExternalized
I believe there is a plugin to support dynamic reloading of external config files whenever they change, but conceptually if this is data that is supposed to be modifiable at runtime then maybe it would be better to represent it as a domain object and store it in the database.
I use this method on a number of projects, defining a domain class
class AppConfiguration {
String adminEmail
String appTitle
// etc
}
and ensuring there is always exactly one instance in the database, creating an initial instance in BootStrap if it is not already present. Now anywhere in the app that requires this config data I just do AppConfiguration.list()[0]
I just use dynamic scaffolding for the edit pages, which are restricted to be accessible only to admin users through Spring Security.
I have a situation in an MVC3 app where I would like to be able to set the name attribute on some html being generated by a helper (DropDownList).
It appears this is not possible. Apparently the helpers silently override whatever value you may specify for the name attribute in the html attribute object that you pass to the helper.
I'd like to confirm that before I waste too much more time on trying to work with the existing helpers.
And, as an aside, if it is not possible by design...I think that's a foolish limitation in the MVC framework. Yes, I know that assigning the wrong name attribute can break the automatic model binding. But I should be able to do that when I need to. After all, I can always write the raw html using whatever name attribute I chose. The helpers should help, not be a straitjacket.
Edit to discuss whether editor templates maintain navigational context
Darin, I am using editor templates (I was using the term "partial" generically, since editor templates are a special kind of partial view).
Editor templates do modify the HtmlFieldPrefix -- that's how I noticed I had a problem :). I was using a call like this:
// call in higher level partial - context is 'eae'
#Html.EditorFor(m => m.Value)
...
// inside editor template for typeof(Value) context is 'eae:Value'
That context shift is needed to keep the default binding mechanism working properly. I'm using a different approach, where I want the context to stay fixed throughout a call chain of partials (i.e., as execution burrows down into deeper partials I want the context to stay the same).
This is by design. The HTML helpers do not allow you to override the name attribute. They generate the name based on your view model so that the default model binder is able to properly bind the values according to the well established conventions when the form is submitted.
And, as an aside, if it is not possible by design...I think that's a
foolish limitation in the MVC framework.
You could open a ticket on MS Connect and hope this could change in a future version of the framework. Until then you could also write your own custom helpers that will allow you to override the name attribute for the cases when you need such functionality. Personally I've never needed it so far but I am sure you have valid reasons. Another possibility is to write a custom model binder on the server.
I would like to create a checking tool/rake task, that would dynamically go through all the public methods that are possibly accessible from outside world and check our authorization rules.
For this I would need to collect all the controllers and all its public methods. How to do that? I would like to use Ruby reflection or metadata techniques rather than grepping files.
AFAICT this is impossible to do in the general case as you can't tell which params go where, e.g. /items/foo/id or /items/foo?bar=baz ? Also, which values of the params are ok ?
But you can get a decent value with
Rails.application.routes.routes.map(&:path)
which shall give you a list in the form used in rake routes (/klass/:id/action(.:format))
Since Rails is using Ruby (dynamic language), would it be possible to create a very flexible
'configuration' class that has properties that you use throughout the website, AND have the ability to add new class properties (in the db for web modification) and then just use it in the code.
Each property would be of a specific type like a string, integer, bool etc.
You can't do this in a strongly typed language, but it must be possible with Ruby!
So say my class is like:
globalConfig.is_active
globalConfig.admin_email
I guess to make this work, I would loop through all the properties in the db, create properties in the class and assign the value right?
I actually have a settings plugin on GitHub you can use:
http://github.com/bellmyer/settings
It makes this easier for you. Right now it's not rails3-ready, so let me know if you need that. I also need to put in the time to roll it into a gem, instead of a plugin.
If you end up using it, let me know and I'll get it up to date. Otherwise, you can look at the code to see how I did things, and use that to help build your own custom solution.