Can anybody give me any hints on that? I'm able to display xml content on my swf file but how can I send the changed xml file back to my rails Server?
Thanks in advance!
Markus
RestfulX is by far the best way to do this with Rails :).
Check out their cool examples to get running, it takes 5 minutes. You can generate an application based on models (like Page/Post/Comment/Category...) that'll look like this:
(source: github.com)
You basically run 3 commands and you have a full CMS. And, by default, everything happens via XML, but that's converted (serialized and deserialized) to and from xml, so you can use class objects in ActionScript. You can easily change that to AMF/JSON if you needed to, which is very powerful. Then you can customize everything from there: create a class (MyVideo), add properties (title, url, description, comments), manipulate them in ActionScript, then just do create/update/destroy/save/show, and it handles all the xml requests to/from Rails.
They've solved hardcore things like authentication and session management, file uploading, nested sets and list, etc, which you've probably already run into or will. It's very cool.
Everything works via REST (and CRUD operations), which Rails takes full advantage of. If you just want to use ruby (and not Rails), you can do that no problem. Or if you just wanted to use Flex and no backend, but still wanted to read/write XML without having to create a whole library to handle that, same thing; they handle it all.
You just do:
Rx.models.index(Project) (if you had a my.package.Project class), and it'd return:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<projects type="array">
<project>
<completed type="boolean">false</completed>
<created_at type="datetime">2008/07/09 20:08:28</created_at>
<end_date type="date">2008/07/09</end_date>
<id type="integer">490909803</id>
<name>Project4NameString</name>
<notes>Project4NotesText</notes>
<start_date type="date">2008/07/09</start_date>
<updated_at type="datetime">2008/07/09 20:08:28</updated_at>
<user_id type="integer">276171944</user_id>
</project>
</projects>
Then if you wanted to save it (or delete it), you'd just do something like:
var projects:IList = Rx.models.index(Project);
var project:Project = projects.getItemAt(0); // first item in IList;
project.title = "My New Title!";
project.save();
// then later, maybe onClick for a Button with label "Delete Project"...
project.delete();
This is by far the best library for XML processing. And they have a very active group which is a plus.
I saw you asked this question about writing xml via Flex. You'll run into lots of edge cases. Try out RestfulX, it's super sick.
Hope that helps.
Related
I'm currently struggling with the problem of multilingualism in an SPA.
I've come up with several solutions, like building a wrapper for the resources resx files, or saving all labels in the database, but I am wondering if any of you have found some solution which automates these steps.
Are there any practices which are specific for this problem?
For a reasonable amount of literals, I suggest to save the resources in the DB or in a .RESX file in the server. When the user logs in or you detect the language that will be used, the literals are requested by the application and saved either in a collection of your translation module or in the LocalStorage of the browser (this could be a good approach for large data).
Then this module could have some methods to retrieve the messages, probably passing a key.
Using this solution you could inject this module in the viewmodels that need to show translated literals and acces them through the view:
<p data-bind="text: resourceManager.get('M01')"></a>
For large applications that would require huge localization data to be transfered, maybe some kind of modularity could be applied and only load the resources really needed for each module/section.
I don't think making recurrent requests to the server to get the translated literals is a good practise. SPA's should provide a good user experience and loading the translated literals from the server could be a blocking issue. Text is not like an image, you can render a page without all the images loaded, imagine rendering a page without the text :o
Anyway, I think the best solution would be to keep the server as repository and create a custom JS module that takes care to get data in one or multiple loads and is able to store it somewhere in the client.
I've solved my own problem, using a custom binding and i18next.
First, I've implemented i18next for translation of my labels/buttons and other resources.
Secondly, I've added a custom Knockout bindingHandler:
ko.bindingHandlers.i18n = {
init: function (element, valueAccessor) {
var translateKey = valueAccessor();
ko.utils.setTextContent(element, $.t(translateKey));
}
};
Finally you can add the following code to your views:
<span data-bind="i18n : 'buttons.cancel'"></span>
This will automatically get the correct resource, and Knockout will handle the bindings.
Hopefully this will help others struggling with the same problem.
Just wondering what the shorthand would be in Rails to do this (if any):
I have views/pages/ containing 5 html.erb files and they all use the same default layout.html.erb, with one yield statement in the middle of it (the standard setup).
Now I want one view that incorporates all 5 of those erb files above contiguously, one after the other, in place of the one existing yield statement in that same layout.html.erb.
What minimal changes would I make to the layout.html.erb to accomplish this.
(Rails Newbie - like it more than Django now).
Ah,
I see what you're saying. Try this. Have your file structure such that all the views for said controller are in one folder...
#controllers_views = Dir.glob("your/controllers/views/*.erb")
#controllers_views.each { |cv| puts cv }
Seems like that would work, I'm away from my dev box or I'd test it for you.
Hope that helps.
Good luck!
You could always have a javascript that requests the sequential yields at a time interval as an ajax request. Then just your target element change to reflect the updated information.
Alternatively load all 5 into different divisions, and have them revolve visibility, like a picture gallery. CSS3 could pull this off.
http://speckyboy.com/2010/06/09/10-pure-css3-image-galleries-and-sliders/
I'm using Rails 3 to create a project that will need a model called Sketch. I've already created a model, controller, and migration to handle Sketch - so far it just creates a 'sketch' object with a name for each sketch.
My problem is that I need to be able to attach an html5 canvas to each sketch object when it is created (or remove it when it is destroyed).
Since 'canvas' is not a datatype that will be stored in the database (like 'string', 'integer', or 'datetime'), how do I go about creating custom html components such as this that need to be treated like any other datatype in a Rails app?
I'm assuming that you would need to add the html components to a Model method and use a callback - like after_save - to initiate the component. But I'm not sure at all how to do this.
Not sure if I'm describing this well enough, so here is a very simple mockup:
I have the Raphael Javascript library in mind for the component that will do the sketching - if that helps.
If you can point me to any tutorials on this subject that would be great.
HTML5 canvases are rendered in the browser, not on the server where your ruby code is actually executed. Therefore I think it's safe to say that what you're asking isn't possible (at least in the way the question is phrased).
Instead you'll need to work with HTML, CSS and Javascript in your view to get the canvas working.
Canvas Tutorial / Reference
Hope this helps.
(On a related note, it's also considered a bad practice to mix view-related concepts in with your models.)
When creating tests for .Net applications, I can use the White library to find all elements of a given type. I can then write these elements to an Xml file, so they can be referenced and used for GUI tests. This is much faster than manually recording each individual element's info, so I would like to do the same for web applications using Selenium. I haven't been able to find any info on this yet.
I would like to be able to search for every element of a given type and save its information (location/XPath, value, and label) so I can write it to a text file later.
Here is the ideal workflow I'm trying to get to:
navigate_to_page(http://loginscreen.com)
log_in
open_account
button_elements = grab_elements_of_type(button) # this will return an array of XPaths and Names/IDs/whatever - some way of identifying each grabbed element
That code can run once, and I can then re-run it should any elements get changed, added, or removed.
I can then have another custom function iterate through the array, saving the info in a format I can use later easily; in this case, a Ruby class containing a list of constants:
LOGIN_BUTTON = "//div[1]/loginbutton"
EXIT_BUTTON = "//div[2]/exitbutton"
I can then write tests that look like this:
log_in # this will use the info that was automatically grabbed beforehand
current_screen.should == "Profile page"
Right now, every time I want to interact with a new element, I have to manually go to the page, select it, open it with XPather, and copy the XPath to whatever file I want my code to look at. This takes up a lot of time that could otherwise be spent writing code.
Ultimately what you're looking for is extracting the information you've recorded in your test into a reusable component.
Record your tests in Firefox using the Selenium IDE plugin.
Export your recorded test into a .cs file (assuming .NET as you mentioned White, but Ruby export options are also available)
Extract the XPath / CSS Ids and encapsulate them into a reusable classes and use the PageObject pattern to represent each page.
Using the above technique, you only need to update your PageObject with updated locators instead of re-recording your tests.
Update:
You want to automate the record portion? Sounds awkward. Maybe you want to extract all the hyperlinks off a particular page and perform the same action on them?
You should use Selenium's object model to script against the DOM.
[Test]
public void GetAllHyperLinks()
{
IWebDriver driver = new FireFoxDriver();
driver.Navigate().GoToUrl("http://youwebsite");
ReadOnlyCollection<IWebElement> query
= driver.FindElements( By.XPath("//yourxpath") );
// iterate through collection and access whatever you want
// save it to a file, update a database, etc...
}
Update 2:
Ok, so I understand your concerns now. You're looking to get the locators out of a web page for future reference. The challenge is in constructing the locator!
There are going to be some challenges with constructing your locators, especially if there are more than one instance, but you should be able to get far enough using CSS based locators which Selenium supports.
For example, you could find all hyperlinks using an xpath "//a", and then use Selenium to construct a CSS locator. You may have to customize the locator to suit your needs, but an example locator might be using the css class and text value of the hyperlink.
//a[contains(#class,'adminLink')][.='Edit']
// selenium 2.0 syntax
[Test]
public void GetAllHyperLinks()
{
IWebDriver driver = new FireFoxDriver();
driver.Navigate().GoToUrl("http://youwebsite");
ReadOnlyCollection<IWebElement> query
= driver.FindElements( By.XPath("//a") );
foreach(IWebElement hyperLink in query)
{
string locatorFormat = "//a[contains(#class,'{0}')][.='{1}']";
string locator = String.Format(locatorFormat,
hyperlink.GetAttribute("class"),
hyperlink.Value);
// spit out the locator for reference.
}
}
You're still going to need to associate the Locator to your code file, but this should at least get you started by extracting the locators for future use.
Here's an example of crawling links using Selenium 1.0 http://devio.wordpress.com/2008/10/24/crawling-all-links-with-selenium-and-nunit/
Selenium runs on browser side, even if you can grab all the elements, there is no way to save it in a file. As I know , Selenium is not design for that kinds of work.
You need to get the entire source of the page? if so, try the GetHtmlSource method
http://release.seleniumhq.org/selenium-remote-control/0.9.0/doc/dotnet/html/Selenium.DefaultSelenium.GetHtmlSource.html
Tagsoup is interfering with input and formatting it incorrectly. For instance when we have the following markup
Text outside anchor
It is formatted as follows
Text outside anchor
This is a simple example but we have other issues as well. So we made tagsoup cleanup/formatting optional by adding an extra attribute to textarea control.
Here is the diff(https://github.com/binnyg/orbeon-forms/commit/044c29e32ce36e5b391abfc782ee44f0354bddd3).
Textarea would now look like this
<textarea skip-cleanmarkup="true" mediatype="text/html" />
Two questions
Is this the right approach?
If I provide a patch can it make it to orbeon codebase?
Thanks
BinnyG
Erik, Alex, et al
I think there are two questions here:
The first Concern is a question of Tag Soup and the clean up that happens OOTB: Empty tags are converted to singleton tags which when consumed/sent to the client browser as markup gets "fixed" by browsers like firefox but because of the loss of precision they do the wrong thing.
Turning off this clean up helps in this case but for this issue alone is not really the right answer because we it takes away a security feature and a well-formed markup feature... so there may need to be some adjustment to the handling of at least certain empty tags (other than turning them in to invalid singleton tags.)
All this brings us to the second concern which is do we always want those features in play? Our use-case says no. We want the user to be able to spit out whatever markup they want, invalid or not. We're not putting the form in an app that needs to protect the user from cross script coding, we're building a tool that lets users edit web pages -- hence we have turned off the clean-up.
But turning off cleanup wholesale? Well it's important that we can do it if that's what our usecase calls for but the implementation we have is all or nothing. It would be nice to be able to define strategies for cleanup. Make that function plug-able. For example:
* In the XML Config of the system define a "map" of config names to class names which implement the a given strategy. In the XForm Def the author would specify the name from the map.
If TagSoup transforms:
Text outside anchor
Into:
Text outside anchor
Wouldn't that be bug in TagSoup? If that was the case, then I'd say that it is better to fix this issue rather than disable TagSoup. But, it isn't a bug in TagSoup; here is what seems to be happening. Say the browsers sends the following to the client:
<a shape="rect"></a>After<br clear="none">
This goes through TagSoup, the result goes through the XSLT clean-up code, and the following is sent to the browser:
<a shape="rect"/>After<br clear="none"/>
The issue is on the browser, which transforms this into:
<a shape="rect">After</a><br clear="none"/>
The problem is that we serialize this as XML with Dom4jUtils.domToString(cleanedDocument), while it would be more prudent to serialize it as HTML. Here we could use the Saxon serializer. It is also used from HTMLSerializer. Maybe you can try changing this code to use it instead of using Dom4jUtils.domToString(). You'll let us know what you find when a get a chance to do that.
Binesh and I agree, if there is a bug it would be a good idea to address the issue closer to the root. But I think the specific issue he is only part of the matter.
We're thinking it would be best to have some kind of name-to-strategy mapping so that RTEs can call in the server-side processing that is right for them or the default if it's not specified.