Background
We have an existing webapp, built with Struts 2 and Freemarker, of which I’ve created a variation by copying some of the code and templates. Kludgy, but manageable. We will however soon be making quite a few other variants (which need to be individual WARs), making copying untenable. My thought is to instead put all the shared stuff into a jar included with each webapp: the common files could be maintained in one place, and even better a given webapp could override files from the classpath. So far I've been able to do this with the code, but the Convention plugin is making it difficult to do the same for the Freemarker templates.
Problem
Thus far our webapp has relied on Convention to find the Freemarker “action results” (i.e. templates) for actions at application start-up, saving us from having to tediously annotate each of them. If I've traced things correctly, the class DefaultResultMapBuilder is responsible for finding the actions results; in particular, the method createFromResources looks in the webapp and then on the classpath for template files matching our actions.
This is exactly what I want – except that we put our templates under /WEB-INF to protect them from outside access (using the struts.convention.result.path constant in our Struts configuration). This has worked fine until now, with ALL template files located under /WEB-INF, but it’s not working with files also on the classpath. DefaultResultMapBuilder can certainly find files on the classpath, but only when webapp templates are under the context root directly, as any classpath templates have to be in a package structure equivalent to the directory structure of templates under the context root. For action results to be found when “struts.convention.result.path" starts with “/WEB-INF/” would require a root package called “web-inf” – but of course hyphens are not allowed in package names.
(Note that this issue is independent of the TemplateLoader classes that are later used to actually grab the template files. The loading process is readily configurable to look in many places – but the app never gets that far if the ‘action results’ are not found at startup. It would be nice if both processes used the same configuration...)
Solutions?
So… I could move all our templates outside of /WEB-INF but really I’d rather not. Or I could provide specific annotations for each action class, and again I’d rather not (and indeed it might suffer from the same issue).
Or I could make my own implementation of ResultMapBuilder by copying and very slightly changing DefaultResultMapBuilder (every member in the latter is private, so I can't extend the class and change just the relevant parts – alas!), and then figure out how to override the "struts-plugin.xml" Struts config file (to change the org.apache.struts2.convention.ResultMapBuilder bean), and thus I could get Convention to ignore "/WEB-INF" when looking on the classpath. Or perhaps better, to always prefix the path with "/WEB-INF/" when looking in the ServletContext.
But maybe there's an easier way? Some undocumented bit of configuration magic?
Related
change a config.properties file in a jar / war file in runtime and hotdeploy the changes ?
my requirement is something as follows, we have a "config.properties" in a jar/war file , i have to open the file through a webpage and after the user has made necessary changes to it, i have to update the "config.properties" in jar/war file and hot deploy it. can we achieve this feat ? if so can you please point me to relevant sites/documents so that i can jumpstart on this.
I will strongly recommend your architecht rethink this solution. What you describe should be done through JNDI or a similar technique, not through reloading properties.
Deployments should be considered static - that any given web container allows for magic trickery should not be depended on, and WILL break some day (most likely at the most inconvenient time).
You've got a couple of problems off the top of my head:
ensuring that nothing is holding static references to a java.util.Properties that has previously loaded your config.properties file.
most servlet engines will unpack your war to a working directory so the properties file you load won't be the one in the war, it will be the unpacked one. This means your changes
will be overwritten when you restart the servlet engine because this is typically one of the points the war is unpacked.
While these problems aren't insurmountable I've always found it much easier to implement this sort of behavior by storing the properties in JNDI (as Thorbjørn suggests) or a database (while being careful about the static references I mentioned in point 1).
The JNDI/database solution has the nice side effect of easing deployment into multiple environments because each typically has it's own registry/database.
Even that I agree with the comments explained before, I could suggest one solution:
Apache Commons Configuration extension gives you the posibility to do something like:
config.setReloadingStrategy(new FileChangedReloadingStrategy());
That could make the trick to change the configuration file on a runtime basis with no code at all.
However, like JNDI and other methods of web application configuration, the security is a concern. Be careful on which parameters you can/must be able to configure.
After about a week of tinkering, I have managed to introduce webpack and Vue.js single file components into my existing Orchard (ASP.NET) module.
Now I've unexpectedly hit a snag, and for the life of me, I'm stumped. I have several image resources that are part of my custom Orchard theme, which is a separate module (*.csproj) within my Orchard solution.
So (at the risk of demonstrating my woefully inadequate understanding of URL concatenation in web projects) I innocently add this line to my Vue.js single file component:
<img src="~/Themes/MyOrchardTheme.Theme/Images/AnImage.png">
Now when webpack tries to process this and bundle my component I get this error:
Can't resolve 'Themes/MyOrchardTheme.Theme/Images/AnImage.png' in 'redacted' C:\Projects\Orchard\Modules\redacted\Module not found
This kind of makes sense, because the layout of my projects and resources locally and the layout after deployment to Azure obviously differ.
So what is the right way to specify the url for my image as it will exist at runtime on the server, without specifically testing for it's existence when transpiling with webpack?
I'm not going to accept this as the answer, in case someone can offer something better, but after some tinkering I was able to solve my problem by using this:
<img :src="theimage" />
and adding a computed property like this:
computed: {
theimage: function () {
return '/Themes/MyOrchardTheme.Theme/Images/AnImage.png';
}
This will bypass the Webpack transpiler (or vue-loader or whatever) check to make sure the resource can be located and has the added benefit that I can programmatically control the image displayed, which (although not mentioned) is ultimately what I wanted to do (code not shown). I was expecting to use v-if or v-show with multiple image tags, but using a computed property killed two birds with one stone.
Thanks to everyone who provided feedback. - I have a great deal to learn!
We have to maintain a lot of classic ASP and VB/ASP.Net applications that link to many different parts of a static website.
The master pages are littered with various
<!-- #include virtual="/site/footer.something" -->
and similar, where there are many many combinations of what /site/ can be.
The problem is, when you're debugging etc. when you try to run one of these sites locally, you're almost guaranteed to get a parser error.
What I want to do is come up with a generic handler so that I can just insert a blank file for any #include file that doesn't exist.
I tried to setup a URL Rewrite rule, which works in the browser (just redirects to an empty html file) but I'm guessing the ASP parser doesn't include as a webrequest as it still generates a parser error.
I don't want to have to copy the static content to my workstation everytime I open a new app and I don't want to edit the master pages to exclude the links as one day I'm just going to forget and deploy something broken.
So the question is, is there a way to serve a default file for these declarations, or some other method ?
Edit: To consider a different fix to this problem; is there some way to insert some kind of file-system handler that can pick up requests for missing files in specific locations and return predefined content ?
Yeah, I know that's a really offbeat direction and probably a very bad idea in practise, but this is quite a frustrating problem in the office now.
What's irritating is that even though IIS has SSI disabled, the ASP processer still honours #include directives. Is there a way to either disable that, or perhaps some way to override the behaviour in some kind of generated class ?
The problem you will encounter is that includes are processed before any of your code runs. The server gathers all of the resources referenced in the scripts then compiles and runs your code. By the time your code is running, the missing include has already thrown a compiler error.
Further, what you're asking could potentially run into other problems. Often times includes contain code (procedures, constants, variable declarations, etc.) that other scripts rely on. So, even if you were to replace the missing include with an empty file, you still may encounter other parser errors if the including script expects that include to contain specific code.
Probably your best bet is to make a console app or something similar that parses your files looking for the include statements, resolves the relative path based on your directory structure and does what you want - write an empty file if it doesn't exist. You could then run your projects through this parser and at least eliminate that issue.
Additionally, you mention the possibility of accidentally deploying something that you've edited to circumvent this problem. I would assume then, that if you were to write out these "dummy" includes, there is no possibility of you accidentally deploying them and overwriting good files?
I'm having some trouble merging the localization satellite assemblies into the plugin DLL for CRM2011.
Either that, or I don't know how to use the merged resources afterwards.
I create a few plugins and create a basic resource file (default - English) and one for a specific culture (at the time of writing it's for Polish localizations, but later I'll need to add French as well).
I make sure not to sign the assembly itself, as ILMerge will sign the finished assembly itself.
This is the command I use to merge the extra satellite assembly:
ilmerge /targetplatform:v4,C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319 /log:log.txt /keyfile:KeyFile.snk /out:Plugins.dll DynamicsCRM2011.Plugins.dll pl-PL\DynamicsCRM2011.Plugins.resources.dll
As you can see, the plugins are in .NET 4.0 and I've got the required .config file for ILMerge to use the required assemblies for merging.
The generated file appears fine, I can register it with CRM plugin-registrator, add new steps and so forth.
However, it will always use the default language. I've tried changing the System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.UICulture, but this didn't help. When I created a ResourceManager class and used GetString("ErrorMessage", new System.Globalization.CultureInfo("pl-PL")), I got an Exception that the specified ResourceManager doesn't know what to do with the specified culture.
I know of this question here. However, the posted solution seems to be an old one. The generated resource .cs files do not use a ComponentResourceManager. Also, parts of the code posted there have been marked as deprecated.
I'm not really sure what I'm am to do now, or how to further debug this, as I have very little experience when it comes to working with assemblies themselves. Please, help me get those satellite assemblies under control.
Update:
I've been working with sandbox plugins for a while now, and thus I no longer have access to things such as CurrentCulture (or at least I cannot change such things). I've tried tackling this problem once more: I've created a simple plugin which is fired when a new Account is saved. Nothing fancy. Here's the actual plugin code:
ResourceManager rm = new ResourceManager(typeof(Properties.Resources));
var s = rm.GetString("ErrorAlreadyPosted", new System.Globalization.CultureInfo("pl-PL"));
throw new InvalidPluginExecutionException(s);
The code no longer throws an exception about not being able to find the specified culture... also the code obviously throws an exception at the end, but the important thing is WHAT the exception message is. I'd expect it to be in Polish.
Alas, it is not. The string returned by GetString is still in English.
The command I used for ILmerge is the same as before, but with the /lib parameter specified so that I don't have to copy all the CRM SDK dlls...
Apparently it is not possible to read resources from with the context of a Plugin.
Read up on MSDN: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh670609.aspx#BKMK_UseXMLWebResourcesAsLanguageResources
Quote: When a plug-in requires localized text, you can use an XML web resource to store the localized strings so the plug-in can access them when needed. The structure of the XML is your option, but you may want to follow the structure used by ASP.NET Resource (.resx) files to create separate XML web resources for each language. For example, the following is an XML web resource named localizedString.en_US that follows the pattern used by .resx files.
This is all I know so far - have yet to build my own solution for localization of a crm plugin.
If you use a reflector tool to look at the generated assembly, do you see your resource(s) embedded correctly? You may be experiencing the bug as outlined in the link you posted.
Try setting Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture and\or Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture.
Also try hooking into the AppDomain.CurrentDomain.AssemblyLoad and\or AppDomain.CurrentDomain.AssemblyResolve to debug which assemblies are being attempted to load and from where. You might need to customize their behavior so that instead of loading an external assembly to load an internal resource instead.
You can try embedding project references as resources instead of using ilmerge as well.
See this: http://bartlomiej.net/dotnet/embeded-assembies-into-an-executable/
The way we eventually handled this is by adding the localization XML files (generated by Visual Studio) as CRM resources, and created a bit of custom code which seeks the appropriate resource and then seeks the localization text inside.
It's, obviously, not as simple as just using the generated C# localization class, and requires some prep work. However, with that prep-work in place and with using nameof it's now almost as simple as the aforementioned resource classes.
I needed some templates to render some code for users to paste. I put these into
/project-dir/grails-app/resources/templates/quickInstallCode.html
Then I tried accessing them using their relative path (grails-app/resources/templates/quickInstallCode.html), and it worked great.
When we then deployed the application to a Tomcat Server, using a .war file, the paths began pointing to a wrong location.
ERROR call, Template file /var/lib/tomcat6/grails-app/resources/templates/quickInstallCode.html not found.
I assumed, that Grails, giving good defaults for everything would handle this mess for me, but it seems like it does not.
I also tried this call, and it seemed to work great, but when deployed, the BuildSettingsHolder did not contain build Settings, which resulted in a fatal error.
BuildSettingsHolder.settings.baseDir.toString()
http://grails.org/doc/latest/api/grails/util/BuildSettingsHolder.html
http://grails.org/doc/latest/api/grails/util/BuildSettings.html
I am pretty frustrated that I cannot get this easy task to work, but the reason that this is so complicated seems to be that all Files are encapsuled in a WAR and not unpacked on the Server.
So the Questions are:
Where in your Project would you put
Files like this?
How to get a
reliable and stable way to access
this files? I just need a stable path to a base directory, without having to hardcode something in the configuration ... This cannot be so hard.
I have 2 solution to propose for this situation:
Save the template in the database, in a setting table. This way guarantees that nothing can go wrong.
You can consider using the resource folder like Sachin & Nirmal has proposed. About security, I think you can configure SpringSecurity Plugin to protect the specific resources, so that it can only be accessed by the site user.
Take a look at this link and try to use the getResource that spring provides. Its way more flexible and configurable.
def filePath = "resources/file.txt"
def appHolder=ApplicationHolder.application.parentContext.getResource("classpath:$filePath")
By the way Conf is on the root of the classpath, you can stick the files in src/java or src/groovy.
I keep my static resources in web-app folder and access them like this
ApplicationHolder.application.parentContext.servletContext.getRealPath("quickInstallCode.html")
// quickInstallCode.html should be in web-app folder.