I write a service using the .NET class ServiceBase. My service needs to be configured for proper operation. What is the usual way to add configuration information? I found that most services has some parameter is the registry.
e.g. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\Winsock\Parameters
Is the registry the best place to add five or six values? How do I retrieve this information? I assume that the service name might change and I want to avoid hard coded registry names in the code.
What about .exe.config files? Are these preferable for .NET based services?
Just add a normal app.config (Application Configuration item) to your project - it'll be renamed to YourService.exe.config in the build process, and it's the default and preferred way of configuring a .NET application (console app or Windows Service or whatever)
What about .exe.config files? Are these preferable for .NET based services?
Yes, they are. This way your service is self hosted - it contains everything that's necessary for its operation.
But if you wanted to manipulate the registry you could use the Registry class.
Related
I'm using SCDF and i was wondering if there was any way to configure default properties for one application?
I got a task application registered in SCDF and this application gets some JDBC properties to access business database :
app.foo.export.datasource.url=jdbc:db2://blablabla
app.foo.export.datasource.username=testuser
app.foo.export.datasource.password=**************
app.foo.export.datasource.driverClassName=com.ibm.db2.jcc.DB2Driver
Do i really need to put this prop in a property file like this : (it's bit weird to define them during the launch)
task launch fooTask --propertiesFile aaa.properties
Also, we cannot use the rest API, credentials would appear in the url.
Or is there another way/place to define default business props for an application ? These props will be only used by this task.
The purpose is to have one place where OPS team can configure url and credentials without playing with the launch command.
Thank you.
Yeah, SCDF feels a bit weird in the configuration area.
As you wrote, you can register an application and create tasks, but all the configuration is passed at the first launch of the task. Speaking other way round, you can't fully install/configure a task without running it.
As soon as a task has run once, you can relaunch it without any configuration and it uses the configuration from before. The whole config is saved in the SCDF database.
However, if you try to overwrite an existing configuration property with a new value, SCDF seems to ignore the new value and continue to use the old one. No idea if this is intended by design or a bug or if we are doing something wrong.
Because we run SCDF tasks on Kubernetes and we are used to configure all infrastructure in YAML files, the best option we found was to write our own Operator for SCDF.
This operator works against the REST interface of SCDF and also compensates the weird configuration issues mentioned above.
For example the overwrite issue is solved by first deleting the configuration and recreate it with the new values.
With this operator we have reached what you are looking for: all our SCDF configuration is in a git repository and all changes are done through merge requests. Thanks to CI/CD, on the next launch, the new configuration is used.
However, a Kubernetes operator should be part of the product. Without it, SCDF on Kubernetes feels quite "alien".
We use Jenkins and Active Directory plugin for authentication.
For some reason, I need to add a specific account in Jenkins but not in Active Directory.
Is it possible to use both Active Directory and internal user ?
If it's impossible, I think I can modify the plugin to add an account in it.
I know it's not a good idea, but we need this function.
I think it's in ActiveDirectoryAuthenticationProvider.java's retrieveUser() function.
If you have Jenkins deployed to an app server and the app server supports your use case, you can use the "Delegate to servlet container" option in the Security Realm.
You might be able to utilize the Script Security Realm Plugin
I have a sizable Grails application that has a small handful of controllers and views, and a very large number of Services.
I now need to build a "reskinned" version of the same site which has its own set of views and controllers (there are some smallish differences in how the controllers work), but the exact same set of Services. One option is to move all of the services into some kind of common place via custom Grails plugins, but I'm wondering if there's another way.
What I'd like to do is have two packages in the controllers folder, com.company.sitea and com.company.siteb, with an environment variable that effectively chooses which one of those is used. Similarly, two different sets of views, each one selected based on this environment variable, but with a shared taglib.
I was unable to find anything obvious that did this, is there a plugin or a standard way of doing this (or something similar)? The idea is, I'd have one codebase, I'd build one war, but the war would be deployed in two different places, and each one of those would specify a value for a special environment variable.
We have been successfully using a pattern where we make the first application a plugin. It will be run as an application for the first use case and included as a plugin to the second use case.
If you do this (a grails application is a application and plugin at the same time), you have to exclude the plugin from starting up when it's run as an application. Otherwise the application will start it self twice: as an application and as a plugin. The "grails.plugin.excludes" configuration setting (explained here) prevents this from happening.
I have documented this special use case in this jira issue:
http://jira.grails.org/browse/GRAILS-6751
"Allow a Grails application to be used as a Grails plugin besides using it as an application"
This has turned out to be a killer feature for us in many cases. We have been able to reuse applications as plugins in other use cases and combine several separate applications to one with this feature. Of course there are some restrictions (like name conflicts) but that hasn't been a problem for us.
The most common use case is to reuse a full application and just override the views in another one. Since an existing application can be an application and plugin at the same time, there is no extra work in extracting "common parts" to a separate plugin.
To make an existing Grails application a plugin you just have to add a MyAppNameGrailsPlugin.groovy file to the root directory and add this configuration value to grails-app/conf/Config.groovy:
grails.plugin.excludes = ['myAppName'] (application name in camel case starting with lower case letter)
Mailing list discussion:
http://grails.1312388.n4.nabble.com/Dynamic-applications-extending-an-existing-application-with-Grails-tp4634094p4634202.html
Burt's detailed blog post:
http://burtbeckwith.com/blog/?p=1973
David Dawson's presentation:
http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/home/large-scale-grails-using-plugins-how-to-modularise-an-application/jd-8012
one important factor is whether both of these versions should operate on the same data? so they will be different front-ends over same database? or they will be completely separate, for example per-customer deployment?
if the first, I would go webservices way, so one app would contain business logic, and controllers working as webservices, and other app would just have different controller, "talking" to the first one
you could also combine everything in one project (both versions) and limit access to different controllers from different domains with apache unmounts
if the latter, I would also try to extract common part into a plugin
I have a Grails Application AppA. And I am planning to create a new Grails Application AppB, wherein AppB practically uses the same services and models of AppA.
How should I approach that?
Extract a Grails Application AppC which would have the common services and expose that service as a remote/web/rest service?
Extract a Groovy project ModC that will be a jar containing the common services and models and have AppA & AppB depend on ModC?
Just git clone and cherry-pick every now & then?
Other suggestions?
Note that AppA have some lazy-loaded relationship invocations (i.e. entity1.entity2.entity3.propName) & GORM invocations (i.e. Entity1.get(1L)) from the presentation layer (controllers & views) as well. Although I can probably push some of them back to the services, I'm concerned about the refactoring effort to have the relationship invocations from the view remain intact (i.e. I would need to eager loaded some associations, or create Data Transfer Objects)
The Grails way to share common functionalities, utilities and whatnot is to make a plugin that encapsulates those and install it to both projects.
A plugin can contain anything you can put in a regular Grails app -- i.e. Models, Service, Views, Controllers, config files, resources under web-app etc.
You can then either release it to an internal svn repository or just use it with package-plugin
Edit:
One way to do it while you are constantly updating the code is to have it as an inline plugin. So remove the plugin from your application.properties and add:
grails.plugin.location."name-of-plugin" = "/path/to/plugin/dir" // or "../plugin/"
This removes the necessity of reinstalling the plugin all the time. But this is for development time only.
Have you considered the option of separating your models and services (the ones used by both apps) into a plugin. I think that is the prefered way at least from what I have been following within the community.
You can take a look at this link. It is not exactly equivalent to your case, but should give you a good idea for the plugin approach.
I had this situation on a previous project and we used a plugin project to hold our common functionality and it worked really well. I don't think a jar file would work well since as far as I know you wouldn't be able to take advantage of things like auto-wiring dependency injection of services, the domain/GORM/dynamic finders on domain objects, etc.
I think I would put the functionality into a separate jar and use it in the two applications (so your suggestion no 2). I wouldn't make a new application (suggestion 1) because you just need some services not a whole web application, and I wouldn't do suggestion 3 because the services wouldn't be as reusable as with suggestion 2.
How does ASP.NET MVC, if at all, deal with or provide ways to create your application using multiple environments? For example:
Development environment (local machine, probably run via the built-in web server and talking to a local database)
Testing (runs against a preloaded databse with example data, although this part could be skipped and mocks could be used)
Production database on a real server with real data
Ruby on Rails has the concept of environments and "automagically" can deduce if you're in development or production, so you can specify your connection information (connection string) in a config file and the framework dynamically pulls the appropriate one. Is there a similar way of doing things with .NET MVC? If not then how are professional developers using .NET MVC handling different environments?
The only way I can think of is to manually add an "environment" global method (or use an enum, or something like that, maybe this is a use for something like the State pattern?) and store the different connection strings in the web.config file, and then create a base class which all data access classes derive from which provides a way to obtain the connection string for the current environment; this would then have to be set to production when the time comes to put the application live.
Is there another way? Most of the .NET MVC videos and articles I've seen don't even bother with separate environments but only use a development database and don't indicate how you do it in production.
I'd say this is really a question of your company's internal processes. Since every company is a little bit different it's hard to have a "right" generic way to support dev/test/alpha/production and/or other environments.
One way: Create a setup program that supplies the correct connection string based on the environment chosen during the setup process.
Another way: System Admin edits web.config file to supply correct connection string during install.
Yet ANother Way: Connection strings are stored in the system registry.
Even Another Odd Way: You have all your connection strings for all environments in web.config, then a setting in appSettings the tells you which one to use.
Depending on the client, I've done all of these. There are more but these are the more popular.
(One client wanted to store the connecting string in the data base itself. Really.)
You can use alias for your database. You just point these aliases to different servers in the different environments. Stored in the registry under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MSSQLServer\Client\Connect if i remember right. Then you use the alias in the connectionstring.
In response to Jason's response:
We use Enterprise Library Environments to configure the different environment paramters and via msbuild invoke the Merge Configuration Tool that generates the different configs for each environment. The deploy process picks the right config file depending on which environment to install.
I was able to solve a similar situation following these steps:
In your Visual Studio, access Build > Configuration Manager
Click in "new"
Choose a name for your configuration, and then copy settings from an existing config. After the configuration creation, it will be available for you to target as build configuration
Create a Web.{env-name-you-chose}.config in your application folder, along with the original Web.config file.
Open your .csproj file with Visual Studio or any text editor
Search for a section that looks like the following and add the highlighted lines, with the config file name you gave previously:
Open your Visual Studio, reload projects if it's required, and now you are able to choose your configuration via CLI or manual publish using Visual Studio.
There is a Publishing Wizard (in Visual Studio) wich let's you change parts of web.config for release build automaticaly. Wich happens to be the feature you are asking about. No magic thou.
What we have done is during our automated build process (Hudson), we alter values in web.config depending on which environment the build is for. Unfortunately there isn't a magical way to do this.
For deployment, which I assume that is what the op was asking about, one creates multiple configurations and in the publish, picks a different configuration. These are called transforms and they operate on the web.config. One would have at least three publish profiles, one for dev, test and prod. One can change more than just the connection string in this way. One can turn on custom errors, turn off debugging and change values of configuration variables. I highly recommend it.
I have a similar question. I have a log table reader. I want it to read log tables in the development, test and production databases. The major difficulty lies in my user account doesn't have permission to look at test and production. It's some silly security thing. The user that I'm impersonating in the application does have permission. I'm struggling trying to tell MVC to build the test and production models using the impersonated user.