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How-To Tutorials

7018 Articles
article-image-creating-video-streaming-site
Packt
16 Sep 2015
16 min read
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Creating a Video Streaming Site

Packt
16 Sep 2015
16 min read
 In this article by Rachel McCollin, the author of WordPress 4.0 Site Blueprints Second Edition, you'll learn how to stream video from YouTube to your own video sharing site, meaning that you can add more than just the videos to your site and have complete control over how your videos are shown. We'll create a channel on YouTube and then set up a WordPress site with a theme and plugin to help us stream video from that channel WordPress is the world's most popular Content Management System (CMS) and you can use it to create any kind of site you or your clients need. Using free plugins and themes for WordPress, you can create a store, a social media site, a review site, a video site, a network of sites or a community site, and more. WordPress makes it easy for you to create a site that you can update and add to over time, letting you add posts, pages, and more without having to write code. WordPress makes your job of creating your own website simple and hassle-free! (For more resources related to this topic, see here.) Planning your video streaming site The first step is to plan how you want to use your video site. Ask yourself a few questions: Will I be streaming all my video from YouTube? Will I be uploading any video manually? Will I be streaming from multiple sources? What kind of design do I want? Will I include any other types of content on my site? How will I record and upload my videos? Who is my target audience and how will I reach them? Do I want to make money from my videos? How often will I create videos and what will my recording and editing process be? What software and hardware will I need for recording and editing videos? It's beyond the scope of this article to answer all of these questions, but it's worth taking some time before you start to consider how you're going to be using your video site, what you'll be adding to it, and what your objectives are. Streaming from YouTube or uploading videos direct? WordPress lets you upload your videos directly to your site using the Add Media button, the same button you use to insert images. This can seem like the simplest way of doing things as you only need to work in one place. However, I would strongly recommend using a third-party video service instead, for the following reasons: It saves on storage space in your site. It ensures your videos will play on any device people choose to view your site from. It keeps the formats your video is played in up to date so that you don't have to re-upload them when things change. It can have massive SEO benefits socially if you use YouTube. YouTube is owned by Google and has excellent search engine rankings. You'll find that videos streamed via YouTube get better Google rankings than any videos you upload directly to your site. In this article, the focus will be on creating a YouTube channel and streaming video from it to your website. We'll set things up so that when you add new videos to your channel, they'll be automatically streamed to your site. To do that, we'll use a plugin. Understanding copyright considerations Before you start uploading video to YouTube, you need to understand what you're allowed to add, and how copyright affects your videos. You can find plenty of information on YouTube's copyright rules and processes at https://www.youtube.com/yt/copyright/, but it can quite easily be summarized as this: if you created the video, or it was created by someone who has given you explicit permission to use it and publish it online, then you can upload it. If you've recorded a video from the TV or the Web that you didn't make and don't have permission to reproduce (or if you've added copyrighted music to your own videos without permission), then you can't upload it. It may seem tempting to ignore copyright and upload anything you're able to find and record (and you'll find plenty of examples of people who've done just that), but you are running a risk of being prosecuted for copyright infringement and being forced to pay a huge fine. I'd also suggest that if you can create and publish original video content rather than copying someone else's, you'll find an audience of fans for that content, and it will be a much more enjoyable process. If your videos involve screen capture of you using software or playing games, you'll need to check the license for that software or game to be sure that you're entitled to publish video of you interacting with it. Most software and games developers have no problem with this as it provides free advertising for them, but you should check with the software provider and the YouTube copyright advice. Movies and music have stricter rules than games generally do however. If you upload videos containing someone else's video or music content that's copyrighted and you haven't got permission to reproduce, then you will find yourself in violation of YouTube's rules and possibly in legal trouble too. Creating a YouTube channel and uploading videos So, you've planned your channel and you have some videos you want to share with the world. You'll need a YouTube channel so you can upload your videos. Creating your YouTube channel You'll need a YouTube channel in order to do this. Let's create a YouTube channel by following these steps: If you don't already have one, create a Google account for yourself at https://accounts.google.com/SignUp. Head over to YouTube at https://www.youtube.com and sign in. You'll have an account with YouTube because it's part of Google, but you won't have a channel yet. Go to https://www.youtube.com/channel_switcher. Click on the Create a new channel button. Follow the instructions onscreen to create your channel. Customize your channel, uploading images to your profile photo or channel art and adding a description using the About tab. Here's my channel: It can take a while for artwork from Google+ to show up on your channel, so don't worry if you don't see it straight away. Uploading videos The next step is to upload some videos. YouTube accepts videos in the following formats: .MOV .MPEG4 .AVI .WMV .MPEGPS .FLV 3GPP WebM Depending on the video software you've used to record, your video may already be in one of these formats or you may need to export it to one of these and save it before you can upload it. If you're not sure how to convert your file to one of the supported formats, you'll find advice at https://support.google.com/youtube/troubleshooter/2888402 to help you do it. You can also upload videos to YouTube directly from your phone or tablet. On an Android device, you'll need to use the YouTube app, while on an iOS device you can log in to YouTube on the device and upload from the camera app. For detailed instructions and advice for other devices, refer to https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/57407. If you're uploading directly to the YouTube website, simply click on the Upload a video button when viewing your channel and follow the onscreen instructions. Make sure you add your video to a playlist by clicking on the +Add to playlist button on the right-hand side while you're setting up the video as this will help you categorize the videos in your site later. Now when you open your channel page and click on the Videos tab, you'll see all the videos you uploaded: When you click on the Playlists tab, you'll see your new playlist: So you now have some videos and a playlist set up in YouTube. It's time to set up your WordPress site for streaming those videos. Installing and configuring the YouTube plugin Now that you have your videos and playlists set up, it's time to add a plugin to your site that will automatically add new videos to your site when you upload them to YouTube. Because I've created a playlist, I'm going to use a category in my site for the playlist and automatically add new videos to that category as posts. If you prefer you can use different channels for each category or you can just use one video category and link your channel to that. The latter is useful if your site will contain other content as well, such as photos or blog posts. Note that you don't need a plugin to stream YouTube videos to your site. You can simply paste the URL for a video into the editing pane when you're creating a post or page in your site, and WordPress will automatically stream the video. You don't even need to add an embed code, just add the YRL. But if you don't want to automate the process of streaming all of the videos in your channel to your site, this plugin will make that process easy. Installing the Automatic YouTube Video Posts plugin The Automatic YouTube Video Posts plugin lets you link your site to any YouTube channel or playlist and automatically adds each new video to your site as a post. Let's start by installing it. I'm working with a fresh WordPress installation but you can also do this on your existing site if that's what you're working with. Follow these steps: In the WordPress admin, go to Plugins | Add New. In the Search box, type Automatic Youtube. The plugins that meet the search criteria will be displayed. Select the Automatic YouTube Video Posts plugin and then install and activate it. For the plugin to work, you'll need to configure its settings and add one or more channels or playlists. Configuring the plugin settings Let's start with the plugin settings screen. You do this via the Youtube Posts menu, which the plugin has added to your admin menu: Go to Youtube Posts | Settings. Edit the settings as follows:     Automatically publish posts: Set this to Yes     Display YouTube video meta: Set this to Yes     Number of words and Video dimensions: Leave these at the default values     Display related videos: Set this to No     Display videos in post lists: Set this to Yes    Import the latest videos every: Set this to 1 hours (note that the updates will happen every hour if someone visits the site, but not if the site isn't visited) Click on the Save changes button. The settings screen will look similar to the following screenshot: Adding a YouTube channel or playlist The next step is to add a YouTube channel and/or playlist so that the plugin will create posts from your videos. I'm going to add the "Dizzy" playlist I created earlier on. But first, I'll create a category for all my videos from that playlist. Creating a category for a playlist Create a category for your playlist in the normal way: In the WordPress admin, go to Posts | Categories. Add the category name and slug or description if you want to (if you don't, WordPress will automatically create a slug). Click on the Add New Category button. Adding your channel or playlist to the plugin Now you need to configure the plugin so that it creates posts in the category you've just created. In the WordPress admin, go to Youtube Posts | Channels/Playlists. Click on the Add New button. Add the details of your channel or playlist, as shown in the next screenshot. In my case, the details are as follows:     Name: Dizzy     Channel/playlist: This is the ID of my playlist. To find this, open the playlist in YouTube and then copy the last part of its URL from your browser. The URL for my playlist is   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vd128vVQc6Y&list=PLG9W2ELAaa-Wh6sVbQAIB9RtN_1UV49Uv and the playlist ID is after the &list= text, so it's PLG9W2ELAaa-Wh6sVbQAIB9RtN_1UV49Uv. If you want to add a channel, add its unique name.      Type: Select Channel or Playlist; I'm selecting Playlist.      Add videos from this channel/playlist to the following categories: Select the category you just created.      Attribute videos from this channel to what author: Select the author you want to attribute videos to, if your site has more than one author. Finally, click on the Add Channel button. Adding a YouTube playlist Once you click on the Add Channel button, you'll be taken back to the Channels/Playlists screen, where you'll see your playlist or channel added: The newly added playlist If you like, you can add more channels or playlists and more categories. Now go to the Posts listing screen in your WordPress admin, and you'll see that the plugin has created posts for each of the videos in your playlist: Automatically added posts Installing and configuring a suitable theme You'll need a suitable theme in your site to make your videos stand out. I'm going to use the Keratin theme which is grid-based with a right-hand sidebar. A grid-based theme works well as people can see your videos on your home page and category pages. Installing the theme Let's install the theme: Go to Appearance | Themes. Click on the Add New button. In the search box, type Keratin. The theme will be listed. Click on the Install button. When prompted, click on the Activate button. The theme will now be displayed in your admin screen as active: The installed and activated theme Creating a navigation menu Now that you've activated a new theme, you'll need to make sure your navigation menu is configured so that it's in the theme's primary menu slot, or if you haven't created a menu yet, you'll need to create one. Follow these steps: Go to Appearance | Menus. If you don't already have a menu, click on the Create Menu button and name your new menu. Add your home page to the menu along with any category pages you've created by clicking on the Categories metabox on the left-hand side. Once everything is in the right place in your menu, click on the Save Menu button. Your Menus screen will look something similar to this: Now that you have a menu, let's take a look at the site: The live site That's looking good, but I'd like to add some text in the sidebar instead of the default content. Adding a text widget to the sidebar Let's add a text widget with some information about the site: In the WordPress admin, go to Appearance | Widgets. Find the text widget on the left-hand side and drag it into the widget area for the main sidebar. Give the widget a title. Type the following text into the widget's contents: Welcome to this video site. To see my videos on YouTube, visit <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5NPnKZOjCxhPBLZn_DHOMw">my channel</a>. Replace the link I've added here with a link to your own channel: The Widgets screen with a text widget added Text widgets accept text and HTML. Here we've used HTML to create a link. For more on HTML links, visit http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_links.asp. Alternatively if you'd rather create a widget that gives you an editing pane like the one you use for creating posts, you can install the TinyMCE Widget plugin from https://wordpress.org/plugins/black-studio-tinymce-widget/screenshots/. This gives you a widget that lets you create links and format your text just as you would when creating a post. Now go back to your live site to see how things are looking:The live site with a text widget added It's looking much better! If you click on one of these videos, you're taken to the post for that video: A single post with a video automatically added Your site is now ready. Managing and updating your videos The great thing about using this plugin is that once you've set it up you'll never have to do anything in your website to add new videos. All you need to do is upload them to YouTube and add them to the playlist you've linked to, and they'll automatically be added to your site. If you want to add extra content to the posts holding your videos you can do so. Just edit the posts in the normal way, adding text, images, and anything you want. These will be displayed as well as the videos. If you want to create new playlists in future, you just do this in YouTube and then create a new category on your site and add the playlist in the settings for the plugin, assigning the new channel to the relevant category. You can upload your videos to YouTube in a variety of ways—via the YouTube website or directly from the device or software you use to record and/or edit them. Most phones allow you to sign in to your YouTube account via the video or YouTube app and directly upload videos, and video editing software will often let you do the same. Good luck with your video site, I hope it gets you lots of views! Summary In this article, you learned how to create a WordPress site for streaming video from YouTube. You created a YouTube channel and added videos and playlists to it and then you set up your site to automatically create a new post each time you add a new video, using a plugin. Finally, you installed a suitable theme and configured it, creating categories for your channels and adding these to your navigation menu. Resources for Article: Further resources on this subject: Adding Geographic Capabilities via the GeoPlaces Theme[article] Adding Flash to your WordPress Theme[article] Adding Geographic Capabilities via the GeoPlaces Theme [article]
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article-image-straight-blender
Packt
16 Sep 2015
18 min read
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Straight into Blender!

Packt
16 Sep 2015
18 min read
 In this article by Romain Caudron and Pierre-Armand Nicq, the authors of Blender 3D By Example, you will start getting familiar with Blender. (For more resources related to this topic, see here.) Here, navigation within the interface will be presented. Its approach is atypical in comparison to other 3D software, such as Autodesk Maya® or Autodesk 3DS Max®, but once you get used to this, it will be extremely effective. If you have had the opportunity to use Blender before, it is important to note that the interface went through changes during the evolution of the software (especially since version 2.5). We will give you an idea of the possibilities that this wonderful free and open source software gives by presenting different workflows. You will learn some vocabulary and key concepts of 3D creation so that you will not to get lost during your learning. Finally, you will have a brief introduction to the projects that we will carry out throughout this book. Let's dive into the third dimension! The following topics will be covered in this article: Learning some theory and vocabulary Navigating the 3D viewport How to set up preferences Using keyboard shortcuts to save time An overview of the 3D workflow Before learning how to navigate the Blender interface, we will give you a short introduction to the 3D workflow. An anatomy of a 3D scene To start learning about Blender, you need to understand some basic concepts. Don't worry, there is no need to have special knowledge in mathematics or programming to create beautiful 3D objects; it only requires curiosity. Some artistic notions are a plus. All 3D elements, which you will handle, will evolve in to a scene. There is a three-dimensional space with a coordinate system composed of three axes. In Blender, the x axis shows the width, y axis shows the depth, and the z axis shows the height. Some softwares use a different approach and reverses the y and z axes. These axes are color-coded, we advise you to remember them: the x axis in red, the y axis in green and the z axis in blue. A scene may have the scale you want and you can adjust it according to your needs. This looks like a film set for a movie. A scene can be populated by one or more cameras, lights, models, rigs, and many other elements. You will have the control of their placement and their setup. A 3D scene looks like a film set. A mesh is made of vertices, edges, and faces. The vertices are some points in the scene space that are placed at the end of the edges. They could be thought of as 3D points in space and the edges connect them. Connected together, the edges and the vertices form a face, also called a polygon. It is a geometric plane, which has several sides as its name suggests. In 3D software, a polygon is constituted of at least three sides. It is often essential to favor four-sided polygons during modeling for a better result. You will have an opportunity to see this in more detail later. Your actors and environments will be made of polygonal objects, or more commonly called as meshes. If you have played old 3D games, you've probably noticed the very angular outline of the characters; it was, in fact, due to a low count of polygons. We must clarify that the orientation of the faces is important for your polygon object to be illuminated. Each face has a normal. This is a perpendicular vector that indicates the direction of the polygon. In order for the surface to be seen, it is necessary that the normals point to the outside of the model. Except in special cases where the interior of a polygonal object is empty and invisible. You will be able to create your actors and environment as if you were handling virtual clay to give them the desired shape. Anatomy of a 3D Mesh To make your characters presentable, you will have to create their textures, which are 2D images that will be mapped to the 3D object. UV coordinates will be necessary in order to project the texture onto the mesh. Imagine an origami paper cube that you are going to unfold. This is roughly the same. These details are contained in a square space with the representation of the mesh laid flat. You can paint the texture of your model in your favorite software, even in Blender. This is the representation of the UV mapping process. The texture on the left is projected to the 3D model on the right. After this, you can give the illusion of life to your virtual actors by animating them. For this, you will need to place animation keys spaced on the timeline. If you change the state of the object between two keyframes, you will get the illusion of movement—animation. To move the characters, there is a very interesting process that uses a bone system, mimicking the mechanism of a real skeleton. Your polygon object will be then attached to the skeleton with a weight assigned to the vertices on each bone, so if you animate the bones, the mesh components will follow them. Once your characters, props, or environment are ready, you will be able to choose a focal length and an adequate framework for your camera. In order to light your scene, the choice of the render engine will be important for the kind of lamps to use, but usually there are three types of lamps as used in cinema productions. You will have to place them carefully. There are directional lights, which behave like the sun and produce hard shadows. There are omnidirectional lights, which will allow you to simulate diffuse light, illuminating everything around it and casting soft shadows. There are also spots that will simulate a conical shape. As in the film industry or other imaging creation fields, good lighting is a must-have in order to sell the final picture. Lighting is an expressive and narrative element that can magnify your models, or make them irrelevant. Once everything is in place, you are going to make a render. You will have a choice between a still image and an animated sequence. All the given parameters with the lights and materials will be calculated by the render engine. Some render engines offer an approach based on physics with rays that are launched from the camera. Cycles is a good example of this kind of engine and succeeds in producing very realistic renders. Others will have a much simpler approach, but none less technically based on visible elements from the camera. All of this is an overview of what you will be able to achieve while reading this book and following along with Blender. What can you do with Blender? In addition to being completely free and open source, Blender is a powerful tool that is stable and with an integral workflow that will allow you to understand your learning of 3D creation with ease. Software updates are very frequent; they fix bugs and, more importantly, add new features. You will not feel alone as Blender has an active and passionate community around it. There are many sites providing tutorials, and an official documentation detailing the features of Blender. You will be able to carry out everything you need in Blender, including things that are unusual for a 3D package such as concept art creation, sculpting, or digital postproduction, which we have not yet discussed, including compositing and video editing. This is particularly interesting in order to push the aesthetics of your future images and movies to another level. It is also possible to make video games. Also, note that the Blender game engine is still largely unknown and underestimated. Although this aspect of the software is not as developed as other specialized game engines, it is possible to make good quality games without switching to another software. You will realize that the possibilities are enormous, and you will be able to adjust your workflow to suit your needs and desires. Software of this type could scare you by its unusual handling and its complexity, but you'll realize that once you have learned its basics, it is really intuitive in many ways. Getting used to the navigation in Blender Now that you have been introduced to the 3D workflow, you will learn how to navigate the Blender interface, starting with the 3D viewport. An introduction to the navigation of the 3D Viewport It is time to learn how to navigate in the Blender viewport. The viewport represents the 3D space, in which you will spend most of your time. As we previously said, it is defined by three axes (x, y, and z). Its main goal is to display the 3D scene from a certain point of view while you're working on it. The Blender 3D Viewport When you are navigating through this, it will be as if you were a movie director but with special powers that allow you to film from any point of view. The navigation is defined by three main actions: pan, orbit, and zoom. The pan action means that you will move horizontally or vertically according to your current point of view. If we connect that to our cameraman metaphor, it's like if you were moving laterally to the left, or to the right, or moving up or down with a camera crane. By default, in Blender the shortcut to pan around is to press the Shift button and the Middle Mouse Button (MMB), and drag the mouse. The orbit action means that you will rotate around the point that you are focusing on. For instance, imagine that you are filming a romantic scene of two actors and that you rotate around them in a circular manner. In this case, the couple will be the main focus. In a 3D scene, your main focus would be a 3D character, a light, or any other 3D object. To orbit around in the Blender viewport, the default shortcut is to press the MMB and then drag the mouse. The last action that we mentioned is zoom. The zoom action is straightforward. It is the action of moving our point of view closer to an element or further away from an element. In Blender, you can zoom in by scrolling your mouse wheel up and zoom out by scrolling your mouse wheel down. To gain time and precision, Blender proposes some predefined points of view. For instance, you can quickly go in a top view by pressing the numpad 7, you can also go in a front view by pressing the numpad 1, you can go in a side view by pressing the numpad 3, and last but not least, the numpad 0 allows you to go in Camera view, which represents the final render point of the view of your scene. You can also press the numpad 5 in order to activate or deactivate the orthographic mode. The orthographic mode removes perspective. It is very useful if you want to be precise. It feels as if you were manipulating a blueprint of the 3D scene. The difference between Perspective (left) and Orthographic (right) If you are lost, you can always look at the top left corner of the viewport in order to see in which view you are, and whether the orthographic mode is on or off. Try to learn by heart all these shortcuts; you will use them a lot. With repetition, this will become a habit. What are editors? In Blender, the interface is divided into subpanels that we call editors; even the menu bar where you save your file is an editor. Each editor gives you access to tools categorized by their functionality. You have already used an editor, the 3D view. Now it's time to learn more about the editor's anatomy. In this picture, you can see how Blender is divided into editors The anatomy of an editor There are 17 different editors in Blender and they all have the same base. An editor is composed of a Header, which is a menu that groups different options related to the editor. The first button of the header is to switch between other editors. For instance, you can replace the 3D view by the UV Image Editor by clicking on it. You can easily change its place by right-clicking on it in an empty space and by choosing the Flip to Top/Bottom option. The header can be hidden by selecting its top edge and by pulling it down. If you want to bring it back, press the little plus sign at the far right. The header of the 3D viewport. The first button is for switching between editors, and also, we can choose between different options in the menu In some editors, you can get access to hidden panels that give you other options. For instance, in the 3D view you can press the T key or the N key to toggle them on or off. As in the header, if a sub panel of an editor is hidden, you can click on the little plus sign to display it again. Split, Join, and Detach Blender offers you the possibility of creating editors where you want. To do this, you need to right-click on the border of an editor and select Split Area in order to choose where to separate them. Right-click on the border of an editor to split it into two editors The current editor will then be split in two editors. Now you can switch to any other editor that you desire by clicking on the first button of the header bar. If you want to merge two editors into one, you can right-click on the border that separates them and select the Join Area button. You will then have to click on the editor that you want to erase by pointing the arrow on it. Use the Join Area option to join two editors together You then have to choose which editor you want to remove by pointing and clicking on it. We are going to see another method of splitting editors that is nice. You can drag the top right corner of an editor and another editor will magically appear! If you want to join back two editors together, you will have to drag the top right corner in the direction of the editor that you want to remove. The last manipulation can be tricky at first, but with a little bit of practice, you will also be able to do it with closed eyes! The top right corner of an editor If you have multiple monitors, it could be a great idea to detach some editors in a separated window. With this, you could gain space and won't be overwhelmed by a condensed interface. In order to do this, you will need to press the Shift key and drag the top right corner of the editor with the Left Mouse Button (LMB). Some useful layout presets Blender offers you many predefined layouts that depend on the context of your creation. For instance, you can select the Animation preset in order to have all the major animation tools, or you can use the UV Editing preset in order to prepare your texturing. To switch between the presets, go to the top of the interface (in the Info editor, near the Help menu) and click on the drop-down menu. If you want, you can add new presets by clicking on the plus sign or delete presets by clicking on the X button. If you want to rename a preset, simply enter a new name in the corresponding text field. The following screenshot shows the Layout presets drop-down menu: The layout presets drop-down menu Setting up your preferences When we start learning new software, it's good to know how to set up your preferences. Blender has a large number of options, but we will show you just the basic ones in order to change the default navigation style or to add new tools that we call add-ons in Blender. An introduction to the Preferences window The preferences window can be opened by navigating to the File menu and selecting the User Preferences option. If you want, you can use the Ctrl + Alt + U shortcut or the Cmd key and comma key on a Mac system. There are seven tabs in this window as shown here: The different tabs that compose the Preferences window A nice thing that Blender offers is the ability to change its default theme. For this, you can go to the Themes tab and choose between different presets or even change the aspect of each interface elements. Another useful setting to change is the number of undo that is 32 steps, by default. To change this number, go to the Editing tab and under the Undo label, slide the Steps to the desired value. Customizing the default navigation style We will now show you how to use a different style of navigation in the viewport. In many other 3D programs, such as Autodesk Maya®, you can use the Alt key in order to navigate in the 3D view. In order to activate this in Blender, navigate to the Input tab, and under the Mouse section, check the Emulate 3 Button Mouse option. Now if you want to use this navigation style in the viewport, you can press Alt and LMB to orbit around, Ctrl + Alt and the LMB to zoom, and Alt + Shift and the LMB to pan. Remember these shortcuts as they will be very useful when we enter the sculpting mode while using a pen tablet. The Emulate 3 Button Mouse checkbox is shown as follows: The Emulate 3 Button Mouse will be very useful when sculpting using a pen tablet Another useful setting is the Emulate Numpad. It allows you to use the numeric keys that are above the QWERTY keys in addition to the numpad keys. This is very useful for changing the views if you have a laptop without a numpad, or if you want to improve your workflow speed. The Emulate Numpad allows you to use the numeric keys above the QWERTY keys in order to switch views or toggle the perspective on or off Improving Blender with add-ons If you want even more tools, you can install what is called as add-ons on your copy of Blender. Add-ons, also called Plugins or Scripts, are Python files with the .py extension. By default, Blender comes with many disabled add-ons ordered by category. We will now activate two very useful add-ons that will improve our speed while modeling. First, go to the Add-ons tab, and click on the Mesh button in the category list at the left. Here, you will see all the default mesh add-ons available. Click on the check-boxes at the left of the Mesh: F2 and Mesh: LoopTools subpanels in order to activate these add-ons. If you know the name of the add-on you want to activate, you can try to find it by typing its name in the search bar. There are many websites where you can download free add-ons, starting from the official Blender website. If you want to install a script, you can click on the Install from File button and you will be asked to select the corresponding Python file. The official Blender Add-ons Catalog You can find it at http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.6/Py/Scripts. The following screenshot shows the steps for activating the add-ons: Steps for Add-ons activation Where are the add-ons on the hard-disk? All the scripts are placed in the add-ons folder that is located wherever you have installed Blender on your hard disk. This folder will usually be at Your Installation PathBlender FoundationBlender2.VersionNumberscriptsaddons. If you find it easier, you can drop the Python files here instead of at the standard installation. Don't forget to click on the Save User Settings button in order to save all your changes! Summary In this article, you have learned the steps behind 3D creations. You know what a mesh is and what it is composed of. Then you have been introduced to navigation in Blender by manipulating the 3D viewport and going through the user preference menu. In the later sections, you configured some preferences and extended Blender by activating some add-ons. Resources for Article: Further resources on this subject: Editing the UV islands[article] Working with Blender[article] Designing Objects for 3D Printing [article]
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Packt
16 Sep 2015
6 min read
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Implementing Microsoft Dynamics AX

Packt
16 Sep 2015
6 min read
 In this article by Yogesh Kasat and JJ Yadav, authors of the book Microsoft Dynamics AX Implementation Guide, you will learn one of the important topic in Microsoft Dynamics AX implementation process—configuration data management. (For more resources related to this topic, see here.) The configuration of an ERP system is one of the most important parts of the process. Configuration means setting up the base data and parameters to enable your product features such as financial, shipping, sales tax, and so on. Microsoft Dynamics AX has been developed based on the generic requirements of various organizations and contains the business processes belonging to diverse business segments. It is a very configurable product that allows the implementation team to configure features based on specific business needs. During the project, the implementation team identifies the relevant components of the system and sets up and aligns these components to meet the specific business requirements. This process starts in the analysis phase of the project carrying on through the design, development, and deployment phases. Configuration management is different from data migration. Data migration broadly covers the transactional data of the legacy system and core data such as Opening balances, Open AR, Open AP, customers, vendors, and so on. When we talk about configuration management, we are referring to items like fiscal years and periods, chart of accounts, segments, and defining applicable rules, journal types, customer groups, terms of payments, module-based parameters, workflows, number sequences, and the like. In a broader sense, configuration covers the basic parameters, setup data, and reference data which you configure for the different modules in Dynamics AX. The following diagram shows the different phases of configuration management: In any ERP implementation project, you deal with multiple environments. For example, you start with CRP, after the development you move to the test environment, and then training, UAT, and production, as shown in the following diagram: One of the biggest challenges that an implementation team faces is moving the configuration from one environment to another. If configurations keep changing in every environment, it becomes more difficult to manage them. Similar to code promotion and release management across environments, configuration changes need to be tracked through a change-control process across environments to ensure that you are testing with a consistent set of configurations. The objective is to keep track of all the configuration changes and make sure that they make it to the final cut in the production environment. The following sections outline some approaches used for configuration data management in the Dynamics AX project. The golden environment An environment that is pristine without any transactions—the golden environment—is sometimes referred to as a stage or pre-prod environment. Create the configurations from scratch and/or use various tools to create and update the configuration data. Develop a process to update the configuration in the golden environment once it has been changed and approved in the test environments. The golden environment can be turned into a production environment or the data can be copied over to the production environment using database restore. The golden environment database can be used as a starting point for every run of data migration. For example, if you are preparing for UAT, use the golden environment database as a starting point. Copy to UAT and perform data migration in your UAT environment. This would ensure time you are testing with the golden configurations (If the configuration is missing in the golden environment, you would be able to catch it during testing and fix your UAT and the golden environment too). The pros of the golden environment are given as follows: The golden environment is a single environment for controlling the configuration data It uses all the tools available for the initial configuration There are less number of chances for corruption of the configuration data The cons of the golden environment are given as follows: There is a risk of missing configuration updates due to not following the processes (as the configuration updates are made directly in the testing and UAT environments). There are chances of migrating the revision data into the production environment like workflow history, address revisions, and policies versions. There is a risk of migrating environment-specific data from the golden environment to the production environment. This is not useful for a project going live in multiple phases, as you will not be able to transfer the incremental configuration data using database restore. You must keep the environment in sync with the latest code. Copying the template company In this approach, the implementation team typically defines a template legal entity and configures the template company from scratch. Once completed, the template company's configuration data is copied over to the actual legal entity using the data export/import process. This approach is useful for projects going live in multiple phases, where a global template is created and used across different legal entities. Whereas, in AX 2012, a lot configuration data is shared and it makes it almost impossible to copy the company data. Building configuration templates In this approach, the implementation team typically builds a repository of all the configurations done in a file, imports them in each subsequent environment, and finally, in the production environment. The pros of building configuration templates are as follows: It is a clean approach. You can version-control the configuration file. This approach is very useful for projects going live in multiple phases, as you can import the incremental configuration data in the subsequent releases. This approach may need significant development efforts to create the X+ scripts or DIXF custom entities to import all the required configurations. Summary Clearly there are several options to choose from for configuration data management but they have their own pros and cons. While building configuration template is ideal solution for configuration data management it could be costly as it may need significant development effort to build custom entity to export and import data across environments. The golden environment process is widely used on the implementation projects as it’s easy to manage and require minimal development team involvement. Resources for Article: Further resources on this subject: Web Services and Forms[article] Setting Up and Managing E-mails and Batch Processing[article] Integrating Microsoft Dynamics GP Business Application fundamentals[article]
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Liz Tom
16 Sep 2015
6 min read
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How to Deploy a Simple Django App Using AWS

Liz Tom
16 Sep 2015
6 min read
So you've written your first Django app and now you want to show the world your awesome To Do List. If you like me, your first Django app was from the awesome Django tutorial on their site. You may have heard of AWS. What exactly does this mean, and how does it pertain to getting your app out there. AWS is Amazon Web Services. They have many different products, but we're just going to focus on using one today: Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) - Scalable virtual private servers. So you have your Django app and it runs beautifully locally. The goal is to reproduce everything but on Amazon's servers. Note: There are many different ways to set up your servers, this is just one way. You can and should experiment to see what works best for you. Application Server First up we're going to need to spin up a server to host your application. Let's go back, since the very first step would actually be to sign up for an AWS account. Please make sure to do that first. Now that we're back on track, you'll want to log into your account and go to your management dashboard. Click on EC2 under compute. Then click "Launch Instance". Now choose your operating system. I use Ubuntu because that's what we use at work. Basically, you should choose an operating system that is as close to the operating system that you use to develop in. Step 2 has you choosing an instance type. Since this is a small app and I want to be in the free tier the t2.micro will do. When you have a production ready app to go, you can read up more on EC2 instance types here. Basically you can add more power to your EC2 instance as you move up. Step 3: Click Next: Configure Instance Details For a simple app we don't need to change anything on this page. One thing to note is the Purchasing option. There are three different types of EC2 Purchasing Options, Spot Instances, Reserved Instances and Dedicated Instances. See them but since we're still on the free tier, let's not worry about this for now. Step 4: Click Next: Add Storage You don't need to change anything here, but this is where you'd click Next: Tag Instance (Step 5). You also don't need to change anything here, but if you're managing a lot of EC2 instances it's probably a good idea to to tag your instances. Step 6: Click Next: Configure Security Group. Under Type select HTTP and the rest should autofill. Otherwise you will spend hours wondering why Nginx hates you and doesn't want to work. Finally, Click Launch. A modal should have popped up prompting you to select an existing key pair or create a new key pair. Unless you already have an exisiting key pair, select Create a new key pair and give it name. You have to download this file and make sure to keep it somewhere safe and somewhere you will remember. You won't be able to download this file again, but you can always spin up another EC2 instance, and create a new key again. Click Launch Instances! You did it! You launched an EC2 instance! Configuring your EC2 Instance But I'm sorry to tell you that your journey is not over. You'll still need to configure your server with everything it needs to run your Django app. Click View Instances. This should bring you to a panel that shows you if your instance is running or not. You'll need to grab your Public IP address from here. So do you remember that private key you downloaded? You'll be needing that for this step. Open your terminal: cd path/to/your/secret/key chmod 400 your_key-pair_name.pem chmod 400 your_key-pair_name.pem is to set the permissions on the key so only you can read it. Now let's SSH to your instance. ssh -i path/to/your/secret/key/your_key-pair_name.pem ubuntu@IP-ADDRESS Since we're running Ubuntu and will be using apt, we need to make sure that apt is up to date: sudo apt-get update Then you need your webserver (nginx): sudo apt-get install nginx Since we installed Ubuntu 14.04, Nginx starts up automatically. You should be able to visit your public IP address and see a screen that says Welcome to nginx! Great, nginx was downloaded correctly and is all booted up. Let's get your app on there! Since this is a Django project, you'll need to install Django on your server. sudo apt-get install python-pip sudo pip install virtualenv sudo pip install git Pull your project down from github: git clone my-git-hub-url In your project's root directory make sure you have at a minimum a requirements.txt file with the following: django gunicorn Side note: gunicorn is a Python WSGI HTTP Server for UNIX. You can find out more here. Make a virtualenv and install your pip requirements using: pip install -r requirements.txt Now you should have django and gunicorn installed. Since nginx starts automatically you'll want to shut it down. sudo service nginx stop Now you'll turn on gunicorn by running: gunicorn app-name.wsgi Now that gunicorn is up and running it's time to turn on nginx: cd ~/etc/nginx sudo vi nginx.conf Within the http block either at the top or the bottom, you'll want to insert this block: server { listen 80; server_name public-ip-address; access_log /var/log/nginx-access.log; error_log /var/log/nginx-error.log; root /home/ubuntu/project-root; location / { proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8000; proxy_set_header Host $host; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for; } } Now start up nginx again: sudo service nginx start Go to your public IP address and you should see your lovely app on the Internet. The End Congratulations! You did it. You just deployed your awesome Django app using AWS. Do a little dance, pat yourself on back and feel good about what you just accomplished! But, one note, as soon as you close your connection and terminate gunicorn, your app will no longer be running. You'll need to set up something like Upstart to keep your app running all the time. Hope you had fun!   About the author Liz Tom is a Creative Technologist at iStrategyLabs in Washington D.C. Liz’s passion for full stack development and digital media makes her a natural fit at ISL. Before joining iStrategyLabs, she worked in the film industry doing everything from mopping blood off of floors to managing budgets. When she’s not in the office, you can find Liz attempting parkour and going to check out interactive displays at museums.
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Packt
16 Sep 2015
9 min read
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Groovy Closures

Packt
16 Sep 2015
9 min read
In this article by Fergal Dearle, the author of the book Groovy for Domain-Specific Languages - Second Edition, we will focus exclusively on closures. We will take a close look at them from every angle. Closures are the single most important feature of the Groovy language. Closures are the special seasoning that helps Groovy stand out from Java. They are also the single most powerful feature that we will use when implementing DSLs. In the article, we will discuss the following topics: We will start by explaining just what a closure is and how we can define some simple closures in our Groovy code We will look at how many of the built-in collection methods make use of closures for applying iteration logic, and see how this is implemented by passing a closure as a method parameter We will look at the various mechanisms for calling closures A handy reference that you might want to consider having at hand while you read this article is GDK Javadocs, which will give you full class descriptions of all of the Groovy built-in classes, but of particular interest here is groovy.lang.Closure. (For more resources related to this topic, see here.) What is a closure Closures are such an unfamiliar concept to begin with that it can be hard to grasp initially. Closures have characteristics that make them look like a method in so far as we can pass parameters to them and they can return a value. However, unlike methods, closures are anonymous. A closure is just a snippet of code that can be assigned to a variable and executed later: def flintstones = ["Fred","Barney"] def greeter = { println "Hello, ${it}" } flintstones.each( greeter ) greeter "Wilma" greeter = { } flintstones.each( greeter ) greeter "Wilma" Because closures are anonymous, they can easily be lost or overwritten. In the preceding example, we defined a variable greeter to contain a closure that prints a greeting. After greeter is overwritten with an empty closure, any reference to the original closure is lost. It's important to remember that greeter is not the closure. It is a variable that contains a closure, so it can be supplanted at any time. Because greeter has a dynamic type, we could have assigned any other object to it. All closures are a subclass of the type groovy.lang.Closure. Because groovy.lang is automatically imported, we can refer to Closure as a type within our code. By declaring our closures explicitly as Closure, we cannot accidentally assign a non-closure to them: Closure greeter = { println it } For each closure that is declared in our code, Groovy generates a Closure class for us, which is a subclass of groovy.lang.Closure. Our closure object is an instance of this class. Although we cannot predict what exact type of closure is generated, we can rely on it being a subtype of groovy.lang.Closure. Closures and collection methods We will encounter Groovy lists and see some of the iteration functions, such as the each method: def flintstones = ["Fred","Barney"] flintstones.each { println "Hello, ${it}" } This looks like it could be a specialized control loop similar to a while loop. In fact, it is a call to the each method of Object. The each method takes a closure as one of its parameters, and everything between the curly braces {} defines another anonymous closure. Closures defined in this way can look quite similar to code blocks, but they are not the same. Code defined in a regular Java or Groovy style code block is executed as soon as it is encountered. With closures, the block of code defined in the curly braces is not executed until the call() method of the closure is made: println "one" def two = { println "two" } println "three" two.call() println "four" Will print the following: one three two four Let's dig a bit deeper into the structure of the each of the calls shown in the preceding code. I refer to each as a call because that's what it is—a method call. Groovy augments the standard JDK with numerous helper methods. This new and improved JDK is referred to as the Groovy JDK, or GDK for short. In the GDK, Groovy adds the each method to the java.lang.Object class. The signature of the each method is as follows: Object each(Closure closure) The java.lang.Object class has a number of similar methods such as each, find, every, any, and so on. Because these methods are defined as part of Object, you can call them on any Groovy or Java object. They make little sense on most objects, but they do something sensible if not very useful: given: "an Integer" def number = 1 when: "we call the each method on it" number.each { println it } then: "just the object itself gets passed into the Closure" "1" == output() These methods all have specific implementations for all of the collection types, including arrays, lists, ranges, and maps. So, what is actually happening when we see the call to flintstones.each is that we are calling the list's implementation of the each method. Because each takes a Closure as its last and only parameter, the following code block is interpreted by Groovy as an anonymous Closure object to be passed to the method. The actual call to the closure passed to each is deferred until the body of the each method itself is called. The closure may be called multiple times—once for every element in the collection. Closures as method parameters We already know that parentheses around method parameters are optional, so the previous call to each can also be considered equivalent to: flintstones.each ({ println "Hello, ${it}") Groovy has a special handling for methods whose last parameter is a closure. When invoking these methods, the closure can be defined anonymously after the method call parenthesis. So, yet another legitimate way to call the preceding line is: flintstones.each() { println "hello, ${it}" } The general convention is not to use parentheses unless there are parameters in addition to the closure: given: def flintstones = ["Fred", "Barney", "Wilma"] when: "we call findIndexOf passing int and a Closure" def result = flintstones.findIndexOf(0) { it == 'Wilma'} then: result == 2 The signature of the GDK findIndexOf method is: int findIndexOf(int, Closure) We can define our own methods that accept closures as parameters. The simplest case is a method that accepts only a single closure as a parameter: def closureMethod(Closure c) { c.call() } when: "we invoke a method that accepts a closure" closureMethod { println "Closure called" } then: "the Closure passed in was executed" "Closure called" == output() Method parameters as DSL This is an extremely useful construct when we want to wrap a closure in some other code. Suppose we have some locking and unlocking that needs to occur around the execution of a closure. Rather than the writer of the code to locking via a locking API call, we can implement the locking within a locker method that accepts the closure: def locked(Closure c) { callToLockingMethod() c.call() callToUnLockingMethod() } The effect of this is that whenever we need to execute a locked segment of code, we simply wrap the segment in a locked closure block, as follows: locked { println "Closure called" } In a small way, we are already writing a mini DSL when we use these types on constructs. This call to the locked method looks, to all intents and purposes, like a new language construct, that is, a block of code defining the scope of a locking operation. When writing methods that take other parameters in addition to a closure, we generally leave the Closure argument to last. As already mentioned in the previous section, Groovy has a special syntax handling for these methods, and allows the closure to be defined as a block after the parameter list when calling the method: def closureMethodInteger(Integer i, Closure c) { println "Line $i" c.call() } when: "we invoke a method that accepts an Integer and a Closure" closureMethodInteger(1) { println "Line 2" } then: "the Closure passed in was executed with the parameter" """Line 1 Line 2""" == output() Forwarding parameters Parameters passed to the method may have no impact on the closure itself, or they may be passed to the closure as a parameter. Methods can accept multiple parameters in addition to the closure. Some may be passed to the closure, while others may not: def closureMethodString(String s, Closure c) { println "Greet someone" c.call(s) } when: "we invoke a method that accepts a String and a Closure" closureMethodString("Dolly") { name -> println "Hello, $name" } then: "the Closure passed in was executed with the parameter" """Greet someone Hello, Dolly""" == output() This construct can be used in circumstances where we have a look-up code that needs to be executed before we have access to an object. Say we have customer records that need to be retrieved from a database before we can use them: def withCustomer (id, Closure c) { def cust = getCustomerRecord(id) c.call(cust) } withCustomer(12345) { customer -> println "Found customer ${customer.name}" } We can write an updateCustomer method that saves the customer record after the closure is invoked, and amend our locked method to implement transaction isolation on the database, as follows: class Customer { String name } def locked (Closure c) { println "Transaction lock" c.call() println "Transaction release" } def update (customer, Closure c) { println "Customer name was ${customer.name}" c.call(customer) println "Customer name is now ${customer.name}" } def customer = new Customer(name: "Fred") At this point, we can write code that nests the two method calls by calling update as follows: locked { update(customer) { cust -> cust.name = "Barney" } } This outputs the following result, showing how the update code is wrapped by updateCustomer, which retrieves the customer object and subsequently saves it. The whole operation is wrapped by locked, which includes everything within a transaction: Transaction lock Customer name was Fred Customer name is now Barney Transaction release Summary In this article, we covered closures in some depth. We explored the various ways to call a closure and the means of passing parameters. We saw how we can pass closures as parameters to methods, and how this construct can allow us to appear to add mini DSL syntax to our code. Closures are the real "power" feature of Groovy, and they form the basis of most of the DSLs. Resources for Article: Further resources on this subject: Using Groovy Closures Instead of Template Method [article] Metaprogramming and the Groovy MOP [article] Clojure for Domain-specific Languages - Design Concepts with Clojure [article]
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Packt
16 Sep 2015
7 min read
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Configuring and Securing a Virtual Private Cloud

Packt
16 Sep 2015
7 min read
In this article by Aurobindo Sarkar and Sekhar Reddy, author of the book Amazon EC2 Cookbook, we will cover recipes for: Configuring VPC DHCP options Configuring networking connections between two VPCs (VPC peering) (For more resources related to this topic, see here.) In this article, we will focus on recipes to configure AWS VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) against typical network infrastructure requirements. VPCs help you isolate AWS EC2 resources, and this feature is available in all AWS regions. A VPC can span multiple availability zones in a region. AWS VPC also helps you run hybrid applications on AWS by extending your existing data center into the public cloud. Disaster recovery is another common use case for using AWS VPC. You can create subnets, routing tables, and internet gateways in VPC. By creating public and private subnets, you can put your web and frontend services in public subnet, your application databases and backed services in a private subnet. Using VPN, you can extend your on-premise data center. Another option to extend your on-premise data center is AWS Direct Connect, which is a private network connection between AWS and you're on-premise data center. In VPC, EC2 resources get static private IP addresses that persist across reboots, which works in the same way as DHCP reservation. You can also assign multiple IP addresses and Elastic Network Interfaces. You can have a private ELB accessible only within your VPC. You can use CloudFormation to automate the VPC creation process. Defining appropriate tags can help you manage your VPC resources more efficiently. Configuring VPC DHCP options DHCP options sets are associated with your AWS account, so they can be used across all your VPCs. You can assign your own domain name to your instances by specifying a set of DHCP options for your VPC. However, only one DHCP Option set can be associated with a VPC. Also, you can't modify the DHCP option set after it is created. In case your want to use a different set of DHCP options, then you will need to create a new DHCP option set and associate it with your VPC. There is no need to restart or relaunch the instances in the VPC after associating the new DHCP option set as they can automatically pick up the changes. How to Do It… In this section, we will create a DHCP option set and then associate it with your VPC. Create a DHCP option set with a specific domain name and domain name servers. In our example, we execute commands to create a DHCP options set and associate it with our VPC. We specify domain name testdomain.com and DNS servers (10.2.5.1 and 10.2.5.2) as our DHCP options. $ aws ec2 create-dhcp-options --dhcp-configuration Key=domain-name,Values=testdomain.com Key=domain-name-servers,Values=10.2.5.1,10.2.5.2 Associate the DHCP option and set your VPC (vpc-bb936ede). $ aws ec2 associate-dhcp-options --dhcp-options-id dopt-dc7d65be --vpc-id vpc-bb936ede How it works… DHCP provides a standard for passing configuration information to hosts in a network. The DHCP message contains an options field in which parameters such as the domain name and the domain name servers can be specified. By default, instances in AWS are assigned an unresolvable host name, hence we need to assign our own domain name and use our own DNS servers. The DHCP options sets are associated with the AWS account and can be used across our VPCs. First, we create a DHCP option set. In this step, we specify the DHCP configuration parameters as key value pairs where commas separate the values and multiple pairs are separated by spaces. In our example, we specify two domain name servers and a domain name. We can use up to four DNS servers. Next, we associate the DHCP option set with our VPC to ensure that all existing and new instances launched in our VPC will use this DHCP options set. Note that if you want to use a different set of DHCP options, then you will need to create a new set and again associate them with your VPC as modifications to a set of DHCP options is not allowed. In addition, you can let the instances pick up the changes automatically or explicitly renew the DHCP lease. However, in all cases, only one set of DHCP options can be associated with a VPC at any given time. As a practice, delete the DHCP options set when none of your VPCs are using it and you don't need it any longer. Configuring networking connections between two VPCs (VPC peering) In this recipe, we will configure VPC peering. VPC peering helps you connect instances in two different VPCs using their private IP addresses. VPC peering is limited to within a region. However, you can create VPC peering connection between VPCs that belong to different AWS accounts. The two VPCs that participate in VPC peering must not have matching or overlapping CIDR addresses. To create a VPC connection, the owner of the local VPC has to send the request to the owner of the peer VPC located in the same account or a different account. Once the owner of peer VPC accepts the request, the VPC peering connection is activated. You will need to update the routes in your route table to send traffic to the peer VPC and vice versa. You will also need to update your instance security groups to allow traffic from–to the peer VPC. How to Do It… Here, we present the commands to creating a VPC peering connection, accepting a peering request, and adding the appropriate route in your routing table. Create a VPC peering connection between two VPCs with IDs vpc-9c19a3f4 and vpc-0214e967. Record VpcPeeringConnectionId for further use $ aws ec2 create-vpc-peering-connection --vpc-id vpc-9c19a3f4 --peer-vpc-id vpc-0214e967 Accept VPC peering connection. Here, we will accept the VPC peering connection request with ID pcx-cf6aa4a6. $ aws ec2 accept-vpc-peering-connection --vpc-peering-connection-id pcx-cf6aa4a6 Add a route in the route table for the VPC peering connection. The following command create route with destination CIDR (172.31.16.0/20) and VPC peer connection ID (pcx-0e6ba567) in route table rtb-7f1bda1a. $ aws ec2 create-route --route-table-id rtb-7f1bda1a --destination-cidr-block 172.31.16.0/20 --vpc-peering-connection-id pcx-0e6ba567 How it works… First, we request a VPC peering connection between two VPCs: a requester VPC that we own (i.e., vpc-9c19a3f4) and a peer VPC with that we want to create a connection (vpc-0214e967). Note that the peering connection request expires after 7 days. In order tot activate the VPC peering connection, the owner of the peer VPC must accept the request. In our recipe, as the owner of the peer VPC, we accept the VPC peering connection request. However, note that the owner of the peer VPC may be a person other than you. You can use the describe-vpc-peering-connections to view your outstanding peering connection requests. The VPC peering connection should be in the pending-acceptance state for you to accept the request. After creating the VPC peering connection, we created a route in our local VPC subnet's route table to direct traffic to the peer VPC. You can also create peering connections between two or more VPCs to provide full access to resources or peer one VPC to access centralized resources. In addition, peering can be implemented between a VPC and specific subnets or instances in one VPC with instances in another VPC. Refer to Amazon VPC documentation to set up the most appropriate peering connections for your specific requirements. Summary In this article, you learned configuring VPC DHCP options as well as configuring networking connections between two VPCs. The book Amazon EC2 Cookbook will cover recipes that relate to designing, developing, and deploying scalable, highly available, and secure applications on the AWS platform. By following the steps in our recipes, you will be able to effectively and systematically resolve issues related to development, deployment, and infrastructure for enterprise-grade cloud applications or products. Resources for Article: Further resources on this subject: Hands-on Tutorial for Getting Started with Amazon SimpleDB [article] Amazon SimpleDB versus RDBMS [article] Amazon DynamoDB - Modelling relationships, Error handling [article]
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article-image-identifying-best-places
Packt
16 Sep 2015
9 min read
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Identifying the Best Places

Packt
16 Sep 2015
9 min read
In this article by Ben Mearns, author of the book QGIS Blueprints, we will take a look at how the raster data can be analyzed, enhanced, and used for map production. Specifically, you will learn to produce a grid of the suitable locations based on the criteria values in other grids using raster analysis and map algebra. Then, using the grid, we will produce a simple click-based map. The end result will be a site suitability web application with click-based discovery capabilities. We'll be looking at the suitability for the farmland preservation selection. In this article, we will cover the following topics: Vector data ETL for raster analysis Batch processing Leaflet map application publication with QGIS2Leaf (For more resources related to this topic, see here.) Vector data Extract, Transform, and Load Our suitability analysis uses map algebra and criteria grids to give us a single value for the suitability for some activity in every place. This requires that the data be expressed in the raster (grid) format. So, let's perform the other necessary ETL steps and then convert our vector data to raster. We will perform the following actions: Ensure that our data has identical spatial reference systems. For example, we may be using a layer of the roads maintained by the state department of transportation and a layer of land use maintained by the department of natural resources. These layers must have identical spatial reference systems or be transformed to have identical systems. Extract geographic objects according to their classes as defined in some attribute table field if we want to operate on them while they're still in the vector form. If no further analysis is necessary, convert to raster. Loading data and establishing the CRS conformity It is important for the layers in this project to be transformed or projected into the same geographic or projected coordinate system. This is necessary for an accurate analysis and for publication to the web formats. Perform the following steps for this: Disable 'on the fly' projection if it is turned on. Otherwise, 'on the fly' will automatically project your data again to display it with the layers that are already in the Canvas. Navigate to Setting | Options and perform the settings shown in the following screenshot: Add the project layers: Navigate to Layer | Add Layer | Vector Layer. Add the following layers from within c2/data. ApplicantsCountyEasementsLanduseRoads You can select multiple layers to add by pressing Shift and clicking on the contiguous files or pressing Ctrl and clicking on the noncontiguous files. Import the Digital Elevation Model from c2/data/dem/dem.tif. Navigate to Layer | Add Layer | Raster Layer. From the dem directory, select dem.tif and then click on Open. Even though the layers are in a different CRS, QGIS does not warn us in this case. You must discover the issue by checking each layer individually. Check the CRS of the county layer and one other layer: Highlight the county layer in the Layers panel. Navigate to Layer | Properties. The CRS is displayed under the General tab in the Coordinate reference system section: Note that the county layer is in EPSG: 26957, while the others are in EPSG: 2776. We will transform the county layer from EPSG:26957 to EPSG:2776. Navigate to Layer | Save As | Select CRS. We will save all the output from this article in c2/output. To prepare the layers for conversion to raster, we will add a new generic column to all the layers populated with the number 1. This will be translated to a Boolean type raster, where the presence of the object that the raster represents (for example, roads) is indicated by a cell of 1 and all others with a zero. Follow these steps for the applicants, easements, and roads: Navigate to Layer | Toggle Editing. Then, navigate to Layer | Open Attribute Table. Add a column with the button at the top of the Attribute table dialog. Use value as the name for the new column and the following data format options: Select the new column from the dropdown in the Attribute table and enter 1 into the value box: Click on Update All. Navigate to Layer | Toggle Editing. Finally, save. The extracting (filtering) features Let's suppose that our criteria includes only a subset of the features in our roads layer—major unlimited access roads (but not freeways), a subset of the features as determined by a classification code (CFCC). To temporarily extract this subset, we will do a layer query by performing the following steps: Filter the major roads from the roads layer. Highlight the roads layer. Navigate to Layer | Query. Double-click on CFCC to add it to the expression. Click on the = operator to add to the expression Under the Values section, click on All to view all the unique values in the CFCC field. Double-click on A21 to add this to the expression. Do this for all the codes less than A36. Include A63 for highway on-ramps. You selection code will look similar to this: "CFCC" = 'A21' OR "CFCC" = 'A25' OR "CFCC" = 'A31' OR "CFCC" = 'A35' OR "CFCC" = 'A63' Click on OK, as shown in the following screenshot: Create a new c2/output directory. Save the roads layer as a new layer with only the selected features (major_roads) in this directory. To clear a layer filter, return to the query dialog on the applied layer (highlight it in the Layers pane; navigate to Layer | Query and click on Clear). Repeat these steps for the developed (LULC1 = 1) and agriculture (LULC1 = 2) landuses (separately) from the landuse layer. Converting to raster In this section, we will convert all the needed vector layers to raster. We will be doing this in batch, which will allow us to repeat the same operation many times over multiple layers. Doing more at once—working in batch The QGIS Processing Framework provides capabilities to run the same operation many times on different data. This is called batch processing. A batch process is invoked from an operation's context menu in the Processing Toolbox. The batch dialog requires that the parameters for each layer be populated for every iteration. Convert the vector layers to raster. Navigate to Processing Toolbox. Select Advanced Interface from the dropdown at the bottom of Processing Toolbox (if it is not selected, it will show as Simple Interface). Type rasterize to search for the Rasterize tool. Right-click on the Rasterize tool and select Execute as batch process: Fill in the Batch Processing dialog, making sure to specify the parameters as follows: Parameter Value Input layer (For example, roads) Attribute field value Output raster size Output resolution in map units per pixel Horizontal 30 Vertical 30 Raster type Int16 Output layer (For example, roads) The following images show how this will look in QGIS: Scroll to the right to complete the entry of parameter values.   Organize the new layers (optional step).    Batch sometimes gives unfriendly names based on some bug in the dialog box.    Change the layer names by doing the following for each layer created by batch:    Highlight the layer.    Navigate to Layer | Properties.    Change the layer name to the name of the vector layer from which this was created (for example, applicants). You should be able to find a hint for this value in the layer properties in the layer source (name of the .tif file).    Group the layers.    Press Shift + click on all the layers created by batch and the previous roads raster.    Navigate to Right click | Group selected. Publishing the results as a web application Now that we have completed our modeling for the site selection of a farmland for conservation, let's take steps to publish this for the Web. QGIS2leaf QGIS2leaf allows us to export our QGIS map to web map formats (JavaScript, HTML, and CSS) using the Leaflet map API. Leaflet is a very lightweight, extensible, and responsive (and trendy) web mapping interface. QGIS2Leaf converts all our vector layers to GeoJSON, which is the most common textual way to express the geographic JavaScript objects. As our operational layer is in GeoJSON, Leaflet's click interaction is supported, and we can access the information in the layers by clicking. It is a fully editable HTML and JavaScript file. You can customize and upload it to an accessible web location. QGIS2leaf is very simple to use as long as the layers are prepared properly (for example, with respect to CRS) up to this point. It is also very powerful in creating a good starting application including GeoJSON, HTML, and JavaScript for our Leaflet web map. Make sure to install the QGIS2Leaf plugin if you haven't already. Navigate to Web | QGIS2leaf | Exports a QGIS Project to a working Leaflet webmap. Click on the Get Layers button to add the currently displayed layers to the set that QGIS2leaf will export. Choose a basemap and enter the additional details if so desired. Select Encode to JSON. These steps will produce a map application similar to the following one. We'll take a look at how to restore the labels: Summary In this article, using the site selection example, we covered basic vector data ETL, raster analysis, and web map creation. We started with vector data, and after unifying CRS, we prepared the attribute tables. We then filtered and converted it to raster grids using batch processing. Finally, we published the prepared vector output with QGIS2Leaf as a simple Leaflet web map application with a strong foundation for extension. Resources for Article:   Further resources on this subject: Style Management in QGIS [article] Preparing to Build Your Own GIS Application [article] Geocoding Address-based Data [article]
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Packt
16 Sep 2015
16 min read
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Virtualization

Packt
16 Sep 2015
16 min read
This article by Skanda Bhargav, the author of Troubleshooting Ubuntu Server, deals with virtualization techniques—why virtualization is important and how administrators can install and serve users with services via virtualization. We will learn about KVM, Xen, and Qemu. So sit back and let's take a spin into the virtual world of Ubuntu. (For more resources related to this topic, see here.) What is virtualization? Virtualization is a technique by which you can convert a set of files into a live running machine with an OS. It is easy to set up one machine and much easier to clone and replicate the same machine across hardware. Also, each of the clones can be customized based on requirements. We will look at setting up a virtual machine using Kernel-based Virtual Machine, Xen, and Qemu in the sections that follow. Today, people are using the power of virtualization in different situations and environments. Developers use virtualization in order to have an independent environment in which to safely test and develop applications without affecting other working environments. Administrators are using virtualization to separate services and also commission or decommission services as and when required or requested. By default, Ubuntu supports the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM), which has built-in extensions for AMD and Intel-based processors. Xen and Qemu are the options suggested where you have hardware that does not have extensions for virtualization. libvirt The libvirt library is an open source library that is helpful for interfacing with different virtualization technologies. One small task before starting with libvirt is to check your hardware support extensions for KVM. The command to do so is as follows: kvm-ok You will see a message stating whether or not your CPU supports hardware virtualization. An additional task would be to verify the BIOS settings for virtualization and activate it. Installation Use the following command to install the package for libvirt: sudo apt-get install kvm libvirt-bin Next, you will need to add the user to the group libvirt. This will ensure that user gets additional options for networking. The command is as follows: sudo adduser $USER libvirtd We are now ready to install a guest OS. Its installation is very similar to that of installing a normal OS on the hardware. If your virtual machine needs a graphical user interface (GUI), you can make use of an application virt-viewer and connect using VNC to the virtual machine's console. We will be discussing the virt-viewer and its uses in the later sections of this article. virt-install virt-install is a part of the python-virtinst package. The command to install this package is as follows: sudo apt-get install python-virtinst One of the ways of using virt-install is as follows: sudo virt-install -n new_my_vm -r 256 -f new_my_vm.img -s 4 -c jeos.iso --accelerate --connect=qemu:///system --vnc --noautoconsole -v Let's understand the preceding command part by part: -n: This specifies the name of virtual machine that will be created -r: This specifies the RAM amount in MBs -f: This is the path for the virtual disk -s: This specifies the size of the virtual disk -c: This is the file to be used as virtual CD, but it can be an .iso file as well --accelerate: This is used to make use of kernel acceleration technologies --vnc: This exports the guest console via vnc --noautoconsole: This disables autoconnect for the virtual machine console -v: This creates a fully virtualized guest Once virt-install is launched, you may connect to console with virt-viewer utility from remote connections or locally using GUI. Use to wrap long text to next line. virt-clone One of the applications to clone a virtual machine to another is virt-clone. Cloning is a process of creating an exact replica of the virtual machine that you currently have. Cloning is helpful when you need a lot of virtual machines with same configuration. Here is an example of cloning a virtual machine: sudo virt-clone -o my_vm -n new_vm_clone -f /path/to/ new_vm_clone.img --connect=qemu:///sys Let's understand the preceding command part by part: -o: This is the original virtual machine that you want to clone -n: This is the new virtual machine name -f: This is the new virtual machine's file path --connect: This specifies the hypervisor to be used Managing the virtual machine Let's see how to manage the virtual machine we installed using virt. virsh Numerous utilities are available for managing virtual machines and libvirt; virsh is one such utility that can be used via command line. Here are a few examples: The following command lists the running virtual machines: virsh -c qemu:///system list The following command starts a virtual machine: virsh -c qemu:///system start my_new_vm The following command starts a virtual machine at boot: virsh -c qemu:///system autostart my_new_vm The following command restarts a virtual machine: virsh -c qemu:///system reboot my_new_vm You can save the state of virtual machine in a file. It can be restored later. Note that once you save the virtual machine, it will not be running anymore. The following command saves the state of the virtual machine: virsh -c qemu://system save my_new_vm my_new_vm-290615.state The following command restores a virtual machine from saved state: virsh -c qemu:///system restore my_new_vm-290615.state The following command shuts down a virtual machine: virsh -c qemu:///system shutdown my_new_vm The following command mounts a CD-ROM in the virtual machine: virsh -c qemu:///system attach-disk my_new_vm /dev/cdrom /media/cdrom The virtual machine manager A GUI-type utility for managing virtual machines is virt-manager. You can manage both local and remote virtual machines. The command to install the package is as follows: sudo apt-get install virt-manager The virt-manager works on a GUI environment. Hence, it is advisable to install it on a remote machine other than the production cluster, as production cluster should be used for doing the main tasks. The command to connect the virt-manager to a local server running libvirt is as follows: virt-manager -c qemu:///system If you want to connect the virt-manager from a different machine, then first you need to have SSH connectivity. This is required as libvirt will ask for a password on the machine. Once you have set up passwordless authentication, use the following command to connect manager to server: virt-manager -c qemu+ssh://virtnode1.ubuntuserver.com/system Here, the virtualization server is identified with the hostname ubuntuserver.com. The virtual machine viewer A utility for connecting to your virtual machine's console is virt-viewer. This requires a GUI to work with the virtual machine. Use the following command to install virt-viewer: sudo apt-get install virt-viewer Now, connect to your virtual machine console from your workstation using the following command: virt-viewer -c qemu:///system my_new_vm You may also connect to a remote host using SSH passwordless authentication by using the following command: virt-viewer -c qemu+ssh://virtnode4.ubuntuserver.com/system my_new_vm JeOS JeOS, short for Just Enough Operation System, is pronounced as "Juice" and is an operating system in the Ubuntu flavor. It is specially built for running virtual applications. JeOS is no longer available as a downloadable ISO CD-ROM. However, you can pick up any of the following approaches: Get a server ISO of the Ubuntu OS. While installing, hit F4 on your keyboard. You will see a list of items and select the one that reads Minimal installation. This will install the JeOS variant. Build your own copy with vmbuilder from Ubuntu. The kernel of JeOS is specifically tuned to run in virtual environments. It is stripped off of the unwanted packages and has only the base ones. JeOS takes advantage of the technological advancement in VMware products. A powerful combination of limited size with performance optimization is what makes JeOS a preferred OS over a full server OS in a large virtual installation. Also, with this OS being so light, the updates and security patches will be small and only limited to this variant. So, the users who are running their virtual applications on the JeOS will have less maintenance to worry about compared to a full server OS installation. vmbuilder The second way of getting the JeOS is by building your own copy of Ubuntu; you need not download any ISO from the Internet. The beauty of vmbuilder is that it will get the packages and tools based on your requirements. Then, build a virtual machine with these and the whole process is quick and easy. Essentially, vmbuilder is a script that will automate the process of creating a virtual machine, which can be easily deployed. Currently, the virtual machines built with vmbuilder are supported on KVM and Xen hypervisors. Using command-line arguments, you can specify what additional packages you require, remove the ones that you feel aren't necessary for your needs, select the Ubuntu version, and do much more. Some developers and admins contributed to the vmbuilder and changed the design specifics, but kept the commands same. Some of the goals were as follows: Reusability by other distributions Plugin feature added for interactions, so people can add logic for other environments A web interface along with CLI for easy access and maintenance Setup Firstly, we will need to set up libvirt and KVM before we use vmbuilder. libvirt was covered in the previous section. Let's now look at setting up KVM on your server. We will install some additional packages along with the KVM package, and one of them is for enabling X server on the machine. The command that you will need to run on your Ubuntu server is as follows: sudo apt-get install qemu-kvm libvirt-bin ubuntu-vm-builder bridge-utils The output of this command will be as follows: Let's look at what each of the packages mean: libvirt-bin: This is used by libvirtd for administration of KVM and Qemu qemu-kvm: This runs in the background ubuntu-vm-builder: This is a tool for building virtual machines from the command line bridge-utils: This enables networking for various virtual machines Adding users to groups You will have to add the user to the libvirtd command; this will enable them to run virtual machines. The command to add the current user is as follows: sudo adduser `id -un` libvirtd The output is as follows:   Installing vmbuilder Download the latest vmbuilder called python-vm-builder. You may also use the older ubuntu-vm-builder, but there are slight differences in the syntax. The command to install python-vm-builder is as follows: sudo apt-get install python-vm-builder The output will be as follows:   Defining the virtual machine While defining the virtual machine that you want to build, you need to take care of the following two important points: Do not assume that the enduser will know the technicalities of extending the disk size of virtual machine if the need arises. Either have a large virtual disk so that the application can grow or document the process to do so. However, it would be better to have your data stored in an external storage device. Allocating RAM is fairly simple. But remember that you should allocate your virtual machine an amount of RAM that is safe to run your application. To check the list of parameters that vmbuilder provides, use the following command: vmbuilder ––help   The two main parameters are virtualization technology, also known as hypervisor, and targeted distribution. The distribution we are using is Ubuntu 14.04, which is also known as trusty because of its codename. The command to check the release version is as follows: lsb_release -a The output is as follows:   Let's build a virtual machine on the same version of Ubuntu. Here's an example of building a virtual machine with vmbuilder: sudo vmbuilder kvm ubuntu --suite trusty --flavour virtual --arch amd64 -o --libvirt qemu:///system Now, we will discuss what the parameters mean: --suite: This specifies which Ubuntu release we want the virtual machine built on --flavour: This specifies which virtual kernel to use to build the JeOS image --arch: This specifies the processor architecture (64 bit or 32 bit) -o: This overwrites the previous version of the virtual machine image --libvirt: This adds the virtual machine to the list of available virtual machines Now that we have created a virtual machine, let's look at the next steps. JeOS installation We will examine the settings that are required to get our virtual machine up and running. IP address A good practice for assigning IP address to the virtual machines is to set a fixed IP address, usually from the private pool. Then, include this info as part of the documentation. We will define an IP address with following parameters: --ip (address): This is the IP address in dotted form --mask (value): This is the IP mask in dotted form (default is 255.255.255.0) --net (value): This is the IP net address (default is X.X.X.0) --bcast (value): This is the IP broadcast (default is X.X.X.255) --gw (address): This is the gateway address (default is X.X.X.1) --dns (address): This is the name server address (default is X.X.X.1) Our command looks like this now: sudo vmbuilder kvm ubuntu --suite trusty --flavour virtual --arch amd64 -o --libvirt qemu:///system --ip 192.168.0.10 You may have noticed that we have assigned only the IP, and all others will take the default value. Enabling the bridge We will have to enable the bridge for our virtual machines, as various remote hosts will have to access the applications. We will configure libvirt and modify the vmbuilder template to do so. First, create the template hierarchy and copy the default template into this folder: mkdir -p VMBuilder/plugins/libvirt/templates cp /etc/vmbuilder/libvirt/* VMBuilder/plugins/libvirt/templates/ Use your favorite editor and modify the following lines in the VMBuilder/plugins/libvirt/templates/libvirtxml.tmpl file: <interface type='network'> <source network='default'/> </interface> Replace these lines with the following lines: <interface type='bridge'> <source bridge='br0'/> </interface>   Partitions You have to allocate partitions to applications for their data storage and working. It is normal to have a separate storage space for each application in /var. The command provided by vmbuilder for this is --part: --part PATH vmbuilder will read the file from the PATH parameter and consider each line as a separate partition. Each line has two entries, mountpoint and size, where size is defined in MBs and is the maximum limit defined for that mountpoint. For this particular exercise, we will create a new file with name vmbuilder.partition and enter the following lines for creating partitions: root 6000 swap 4000 --- /var 16000 Also, please note that different disks are identified by the delimiter ---. Now, the command should be like this: sudo vmbuilder kvm ubuntu --suite trusty --flavour virtual --arch amd64 -o --libvirt qemu:///system --ip 192.168.0.10 --part vmbuilder.partition Use to wrap long text to the next line. Setting the user and password We have to define a user and a password in order for the user to log in to the virtual machine after startup. For now, let's use a generic user identified as user and the password password. We can ask user to change the password after first login. The following parameters are used to set the username and password: --user (username): This sets the username (default is ubuntu) --name (fullname): This sets a name for the user (default is ubuntu) --pass (password): This sets the password for the user (default is ubuntu) So, now our command will be as follows: sudo vmbuilder kvm ubuntu --suite trusty --flavour virtual --arch amd64 -o --libvirt qemu:///system --ip 192.168.0.10 --part vmbuilder.partition --user user --name user --pass password Final steps in the installation – first boot There are certain things that will need to be done at the first boot of a machine. We will install openssh-server at first boot. This will ensure that each virtual machine has a key, which is unique. If we had done this earlier in the setup phase, all virtual machines would have been given the same key; this might have posed a security issue. Let's create a script called first_boot.sh and run it at the first boot of every new virtual machine: # This script will run the first time the virtual machine boots # It is run as root apt-get update apt-get install -qqy --force-yes openssh-server Then, add the following line to the command line: --firstboot first_boot.sh Final steps in the installation – first login Remember we had specified a default password for the virtual machine. This means all the machines where this image will be used for installation will have the same password. We will prompt the user to change the password at first login. For this, we will use a shell script named first_login.sh. Add the following lines to the file: # This script is run the first time a user logs in. echo "Almost at the end of setting up your machine" echo "As a security precaution, please change your password" passwd Then, add the parameter to your command line: --firstlogin first_login.sh Auto updates You can make your virtual machine update itself at regular intervals. To enable this feature, add a package named unattended-upgrades to the command line: --addpkg unattended-upgrades ACPI handling ACPI handling will enable your virtual machine to take care of shutdown and restart events that are received from a remote machine. We will install the acipd package for the same: --addpkg acipd The complete command So, the final command with the parameters that we discussed previously would look like this: sudo vmbuilder kvm ubuntu --suite trusty --flavour virtual --arch amd64 -o --libvirt qemu:///system --ip 192.168.0.10 --part vmbuilder.partition --user user --name user --pass password --firstboot first_boot.sh --firstlogin first_login.sh --addpkg unattended-upgrades --addpkg acipd   Summary In this article, we discussed various virtualization techniques. We discussed virtualization as well as the tools and packages that help in creating and running a virtual machine. Also, you learned about the ways we can view, manage, connect to, and make use of the applications running on the virtual machine. Then, we saw the lightweight version of Ubuntu that is fine-tuned to run virtualization and applications on a virtual platform. At the later stages of this article, we covered how to build a virtual machine from a command line, how to add packages, how to set up user profiles, and the steps for first boot and first login. Resources for Article: Further resources on this subject: Introduction to OpenVPN [article] Speeding up Gradle builds for Android [article] Installing Red Hat CloudForms on Red Hat OpenStack [article]
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Packt
16 Sep 2015
11 min read
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CRUD Operations in REST

Packt
16 Sep 2015
11 min read
In this article by Ludovic Dewailly, the author of Building a RESTful Web Service with Spring, we will learn how requests to retrieve data from a RESTful endpoint, created to access the rooms in a sample property management system, are typically mapped to the HTTP GET method in RESTful web services. We will expand on this by implementing some of the endpoints to support all the CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) operations. In this article, we will cover the following topics: Mapping the CRUD operations to the HTTP methods Creating resources Updating resources Deleting resources Testing the RESTful operations Emulating the PUT and DELETE methods (For more resources related to this topic, see here.) Mapping the CRUD operations[km1]  to HTTP [km2] [km3] methods The HTTP 1.1 specification defines the following methods: OPTIONS: This method represents a request for information about the communication options available for the requested URI. This is, typically, not directly leveraged with REST. However, this method can be used as a part of the underlying communication. For example, this method may be used when consuming web services from a web page (as a part of the C[km4] ross-origin resource sharing mechanism). GET: This method retrieves the information identified by the request URI. In the context of the RESTful web services, this method is used to retrieve resources. This is the method used for read operations (the R in CRUD). HEAD: The HEAD requests are semantically identical to the GET requests except the body of the response is not transmitted. This method is useful for obtaining meta-information about resources. Similar to the OPTIONS method, this method is not typically used directly in REST web services. POST: This method is used to instruct the server to accept the entity enclosed in the request as a new resource. The create operations are typically mapped to this HTTP method. PUT: This method requests the server to store the enclosed entity under the request URI. To support the updating of REST resources, this method can be leveraged. As per the HTTP specification, the server can create the resource if the entity does not exist. It is up to the web service designer to decide whether this behavior should be implemented or resource creation should only be handled by POST requests. DELETE: The last operation not yet mapped is for the deletion of resources. The HTTP specification defines a DELETE method that is semantically aligned with the deletion of RESTful resources. TRACE: This method is used to perform actions on web servers. These actions are often aimed to aid development and the testing of HTTP applications. The TRACE requests aren't usually mapped to any particular RESTful operations. CONNECT: This HTTP method is defined to support HTTP tunneling through a proxy server. Since it deals with transport layer concerns, this method has no natural semantic mapping to the RESTful operations. The RESTful architecture does not mandate the use of HTTP as a communication protocol. Furthermore, even if HTTP is selected as the underlying transport, no provisions are made regarding the mapping of the RESTful operations to the HTTP method. Developers could feasibly support all operations through POST requests. This being said, the following CRUD to HTTP method mapping is commonly used in REST web services: Operation HTTP method Create POST Read GET Update PUT Delete DELETE Our sample web service will use these HTTP methods to support CRUD operations. The rest of this article will illustrate how to build such operations. Creating r[km5] esources The inventory component of our sample property management system deals with rooms. If we have already built an endpoint to access the rooms. Let's take a look at how to define an endpoint to create new resources: @RestController @RequestMapping("/rooms") public class RoomsResource { @RequestMapping(method = RequestMethod.POST) public ApiResponse addRoom(@RequestBody RoomDTO room) { Room newRoom = createRoom(room); return new ApiResponse(Status.OK, new RoomDTO(newRoom)); } } We've added a new method to our RoomsResource class to handle the creation of new rooms. @RequestMapping is used to map requests to the Java method. Here we map the POST requests to addRoom(). Not specifying a value (that is, path) in @RequestMapping is equivalent to using "/". We pass the new room as @RequestBody. This annotation instructs Spring to map the body of the incoming web request to the method parameter. Jackson is used here to convert the JSON request body to a Java object. With this new method, the POSTing requests to http://localhost:8080/rooms with the following JSON body will result in the creation of a new room: { name: "Cool Room", description: "A room that is very cool indeed", room_category_id: 1 } Our new method will return the newly created room: { "status":"OK", "data":{ "id":2, "name":"Cool Room", "room_category_id":1, "description":"A room that is very cool indeed" } } We can decide to return only the ID of the new resource in response to the resource creation. However, since we may sanitize or otherwise manipulate the data that was sent over, it is a good practice to return the full resource. Quickly testing endpoints[km6]  For the purpose of quickly testing our newly created endpoint, let's look at testing the new rooms created using Postman. Postman (https://www.getpostman.com) is a Google Chrome plugin extension that provides tools to build and test web APIs. This following screenshot illustrates how Postman can be used to test this endpoint: In Postman, we specify the URL to send the POST request to http://localhost:8080/rooms, with the "[km7] application/json" content type header and the body of the request. Sending this requesting will result in a new room being created and returned as shown in the following: We have successfully added a room to our inventory service using Postman. It is equally easy to create incomplete requests to ensure our endpoint performs any necessary sanity checks before persisting data into the database. JSON versus[km8]  form data Posting forms is the traditional way of creating new entities on the web and could easily be used to create new RESTful resources. We can change our method to the following: @RequestMapping(method = RequestMethod.POST, consumes = MediaType.APPLICATION_FORM_URLENCODED_VALUE) public ApiResponse addRoom(String name, String description, long roomCategoryId) { Room room = createRoom(name, description, roomCategoryId); return new ApiResponse(Status.OK, new RoomDTO(room)); } The main difference with the previous method is that we tell Spring to map form requests (that is, with application/x-www-form-urlencoded the content type) instead of JSON requests. In addition, rather than expecting an object as a parameter, we receive each field individually. By default, Spring will use the Java method attribute names to map incoming form inputs. Developers can change this behavior by annotating attribute with @RequestParam("…") to specify the input name. In situations where the main web service consumer is a web application, using form requests may be more applicable. In most cases, however, the former approach is more in line with RESTful principles and should be favored. Besides, when complex resources are handled, form requests will prove cumbersome to use. From a developer standpoint, it is easier to delegate object mapping to a third-party library such as Jackson. Now that we have created a new resource, let's see how we can update it. Updating r[km9] esources Choosing URI formats is an important part of designing RESTful APIs. As seen previously, rooms are accessed using the /rooms/{roomId} path and created under /rooms. You may recall that as per the HTTP specification, PUT requests can result in creation of entities, if they do not exist. The decision to create new resources on update requests is up to the service designer. It does, however, affect the choice of path to be used for such requests. Semantically, PUT requests update entities stored under the supplied request URI. This means the update requests should use the same URI as the GET requests: /rooms/{roomId}. However, this approach hinders the ability to support resource creation on update since no room identifier will be available. The alternative path we can use is /rooms with the room identifier passed in the body of the request. With this approach, the PUT requests can be treated as POST requests when the resource does not contain an identifier. Given the first approach is semantically more accurate, we will choose not to support resource create on update, and we will use the following path for the PUT requests: /rooms/{roomId} Update endpoint[km10]  The following method provides the necessary endpoint to modify the rooms: @RequestMapping(value = "/{roomId}", method = RequestMethod.PUT) public ApiResponse updateRoom(@PathVariable long roomId, @RequestBody RoomDTO updatedRoom) { try { Room room = updateRoom(updatedRoom); return new ApiResponse(Status.OK, new RoomDTO(room)); } catch (RecordNotFoundException e) { return new ApiResponse(Status.ERROR, null, new ApiError(999, "No room with ID " + roomId)); } } As discussed in the beginning of this article, we map update requests to the HTTP PUT verb. Annotating this method with @RequestMapping(value = "/{roomId}", method = RequestMethod.PUT) instructs Spring to direct the PUT requests here. The room identifier is part of the path and mapped to the first method parameter. In fashion similar to the resource creation requests, we map the body to our second parameter with the use of @RequestBody. Testing update requests[km11]  With Postman, we can quickly create a test case to update the room we created. To do so, we send a PUT request with the following body: { id: 2, name: "Cool Room", description: "A room that is really very cool indeed", room_category_id: 1 } The resulting response will be the updated room, as shown here: { "status": "OK", "data": { "id": 2, "name": "Cool Room", "room_category_id": 1, "description": "A room that is really very cool indeed." } } Should we attempt to update a nonexistent room, the server will generate the following response: { "status": "ERROR", "error": { "error_code": 999, "description": "No room with ID 3" } } Since we do not support resource creation on update, the server returns an error indicating that the resource cannot be found. Deleting resources[km12]  It will come as no surprise that we will use the DELETE verb to delete REST resources. Similarly, the reader will have already figured out that the path to delete requests will be /rooms/{roomId}. The Java method that deals with room deletion is as follows: @RequestMapping(value = "/{roomId}", method = RequestMethod.DELETE) public ApiResponse deleteRoom(@PathVariable long roomId) { try { Room room = inventoryService.getRoom(roomId); inventoryService.deleteRoom(room.getId()); return new ApiResponse(Status.OK, null); } catch (RecordNotFoundException e) { return new ApiResponse(Status.ERROR, null, new ApiError( 999, "No room with ID " + roomId)); } } By declaring the request mapping method to be RequestMethod.DELETE, Spring will make this method handle the DELETE requests. Since the resource is deleted, returning it in the response would not make a lot of sense. Service designers may choose to return a boolean flag to indicate the resource was successfully deleted. In our case, we leverage the status element of our response to carry this information back to the consumer. The response to deleting a room will be as follows: { "status": "OK" } With this operation, we have now a full-fledged CRUD API for our Inventory Service. Before we conclude this article, let's discuss how REST developers can deal with situations where not all HTTP verbs can be utilized. HTTP method override In certain situations (for example, when the service or its consumers are behind an overzealous corporate firewall, or if the main consumer is a web page), only the GET and POST HTTP methods might be available. In such cases, it is possible to emulate the missing verbs by passing a customer header in the requests. For example, resource updates can be handle using POST requests by setting a customer header (for example, X-HTTP-Method-Override) to PUT to indicate that we are emulating a PUT request via a POST request. The following method will handle this scenario: @RequestMapping(value = "/{roomId}", method = RequestMethod.POST, headers = {"X-HTTP-Method-Override=PUT"}) public ApiResponse updateRoomAsPost(@PathVariable("roomId") long id, @RequestBody RoomDTO updatedRoom) { return updateRoom(id, updatedRoom); } By setting the headers attribute on the mapping annotation, Spring request routing will intercept the POST requests with our custom header and invoke this method. Normal POST requests will still map to the Java method we had put together to create new rooms. Summary In this article, we've performed the implementation of our sample RESTful web service by adding all the CRUD operations necessary to manage the room resources. We've discussed how to organize URIs to best embody the REST principles and looked at how to quickly test endpoints using Postman. Now that we have a fully working component of our system, we can take some time to discuss performance. Resources for Article: Further resources on this subject: Introduction to Spring Web Application in No Time[article] Aggregators, File exchange Over FTP/FTPS, Social Integration, and Enterprise Messaging[article] Time Travelling with Spring[article]
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16 Sep 2015
8 min read
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Building a WPF .NET Client

Packt
16 Sep 2015
8 min read
In this article by Einar Ingebrigtsen, author of the book SignalR: Real-time Application Development - Second Edition we will bring the full feature set of what we've built so far for the web onto the desktop through a WPF .NET client. There are quite a few ways of developing Windows client solutions, and WPF was introduced back in 2005 and has become one of the most popular ways of developing software for Windows. In WPF, we have something called XAML, which is what Windows Phone development supports and is also the latest programming model in Windows 10. In this chapter, the following topics will be covered: MVVM Brief introduction to the SOLID principles XAML WPF (For more resources related to this topic, see here.) Decoupling it all So you might be asking yourself, what is MVVM? It stands for Model View ViewModel: a pattern for client development that became very popular in the XAML stack, enabled by Microsoft based on Martin Fowlers presentation model (http://martinfowler.com/eaaDev/PresentationModel.html). Its principle is that you have a ViewModel that holds the state and exposes behavior that can be utilized from a view. The view observes any changes of the state the ViewModel exposes, making the ViewModel totally unaware that there is a View. The ViewModel is decoupled and can be put in isolation and is perfect for automated testing. As part of the state that the ViewModel typically holds is the model part, which is something it usually gets from the server, and a SignalR hub is the perfect transport to get this. It boils down to recognizing the different concerns that make up the frontend and separating it all. This gives us the following diagram: Decoupling – the next level In this chapter, one of the things we will brush up is the usage of the Dependency Inversion Principle, the D of SOLID. Let's start with the first principle: the S in SOLID of Single Responsibility Principle, which states that a method or a class should only have one reason to change and only have one responsibility. With this, we can't have our units take on more than one responsibility and need help from collaborators to do the entire job. These collaborators are things we now depend on and we should represent these dependencies clearly to our units so that anyone or anything instantiating it knows what we are depending on. We have now flipped around the way in which we get dependencies. Instead of the unit trying to instantiate everything itself, we now clearly state what we need as collaborators, opening up for the calling code to decide what implementations of these dependencies you want to pass on. Also, this is an important aspect; typically, you'd want the dependencies expressed in the form of interfaces, yielding flexibility for the calling code. Basically, what this all means is that instead of a unit or system instantiating and managing its dependencies, we decouple and let something called as the Inversion of Control container deal with this. In the sample, we will use an IoC (Inversion of Control) container called Ninject that will deal with this for us. What it basically does is manage what implementations to give to the dependency specified on the constructor. Often, you'll find that the dependencies are interfaces in C#. This means one is not coupled to a specific implementation and has the flexibility of changing things at runtime based on configuration. Another role of the IOC container is to govern the life cycle of the dependencies. It is responsible for knowing when to create new instances and when to reuse an instance. For instance, in a web application, there are some systems that you want to have a life cycle of per request, meaning that we will get the same instance for the lifetime of a web request. The life cycle is configurable in what is known as a binding. When you explicitly set up the relationship between a contract (interface) and its implementation, you can choose to set up the life cycle behavior as well. Building for the desktop The first thing we will need is a separate project in our solution: Let's add it by right-clicking on the solution in Solution Explorer and navigating to Add | New Project: In the Add New Project dialog box, we want to make sure the .NET Framework 4.5.1 is selected. We could have gone with 4.5, but some of the dependencies that we're going to use have switched to 4.5.1. This is the latest version of the .NET Framework at the time of writing, so if you can, use it. Make sure to select Windows Desktop and then select WPF Application. Give the project the name SignalRChat.WPF and then click on the OK button: Setting up the packages We will need some packages to get started properly. This process is described in detail in Chapter 1, The Primer. Let's start off by adding SignalR, which is our primary framework that we will be working with to move on. We will be pulling this using NuGet, as described in Chapter 1, The Primer: Right-click on the References in Solution Explorer and select Manage NuGet Packages, and type Microsoft.AspNet.SignalR.Client in the Search dialog box. Select it and click on Install. Next, we're going to pull down something called as Bifrost. Bifrost is a library that helps us build MVVM-based solutions on WPF; there are a few other solutions out there, but we'll focus on Bifrost. Add a package called Bifrost.Client. Then, we need the package that gives us the IOC container called Ninject, working together with Bifrost. Add a package called Bifrost.Ninject. Observables One of the things that is part of WPF and all other XAML-based platforms is the notion of observables; be it in properties or collections that will notify when they change. The notification is done through well-known interfaces for this, such as INotifyPropertyChanged or INotifyCollectionChanged. Implementing these interfaces quickly becomes tedious all over the place where you want to notify everything when there are changes. Luckily, there are ways to make this pretty much go away. We can generate the code for this instead, either at runtime or at build time. For our project, we will go for a build-time solution. To accomplish this, we will use something called as Fody and a plugin for it called PropertyChanged. Add another NuGet package called PropertyChanged.Fody. If you happen to get problems during compiling, it could be the result of the dependency to a package called Fody not being installed. This happens for some versions of the package in combination with the latest Roslyn compiler. To fix this, install the NuGet package called Fody explicitly. Now that we have all the packages, we will need some configuration in code: Open the App.xam.cs file and add the following statement: using Bifrost.Configuration; The next thing we will need is a constructor for the App class: public App() { Configure.DiscoverAndConfigure(); } This will tell Bifrost to discover the implementations of the well-known interfaces to do the configuration. Bifrost uses the IoC container internally all the time, so the next thing we will need to do is give it an implementation. Add a class called ContainerCreator at the root of the project. Make it look as follows: using Bifrost.Configuration; using Bifrost.Execution; using Bifrost.Ninject; using Ninject; namespace SignalRChat.WPF { public class ContainerCreator : ICanCreateContainer { public IContainer CreateContainer() { var kernel = new StandardKernel(); var container = new Container(kernel); return container; } } } We've chosen Ninject among others that Bifrost supports, mainly because of familiarity and habit. If you happen to have another favorite, Bifrost supports a few. It's also fairly easy to implement your own support; just go to the source at http://github.com/dolittle/bifrost to find reference implementations. In order for Bifrost to be targeting the desktop, we need to tell it through configuration. Add a class called Configurator at the root of the project. Make it look as follows: using Bifrost.Configuration; namespace SignalRChat.WPF { public class Configurator : ICanConfigure { public void Configure(IConfigure configure) { configure.Frontend.Desktop(); } } } Summary Although there are differences between creating a web solution and a desktop client, the differences have faded over time. We can apply the same principles across the different environments; it's just different programming languages. The SignalR API adds the same type of consistency in thinking, although not as matured as the JavaScript API with proxy generation and so on; still the same ideas and concepts are found in the underlying API. Resources for Article: Further resources on this subject: The Importance of Securing Web Services [article] Working with WebStart and the Browser Plugin [article] Microsoft Azure – Developing Web API for Mobile Apps [article]
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15 Sep 2015
12 min read
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Formatting Report Items and Placeholders

Packt
15 Sep 2015
12 min read
 In this article by Steven Renders, author of the book Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2015 Professional Reporting, we will see how you can format report items and use placeholders, when you design the layout of a report in RDLC. As you will noticed, when you create a new report layout, by default, amounts or quantities in the report are not formatted in the way we are used to in Dynamics NAV. This is because the dataset that is generated by Dynamics NAV contains the numerical values without formatting. It sends a separate field with a format code that can be used in the format properties of a textbox in the layout. (For more resources related to this topic, see here.) Formatting report items Numerical fields have a Format property. This Format property is populated by Dynamics NAV and contains, at runtime, an RDL format code that you can use in the Format property of a textbox in Visual Studio. To get started with formatting, perform the following steps: When you right-click on a textbox, a menu appears, in which you can select the properties of the textbox, as shown in the following screenshot: In the Textbox Properties window, go to Number and then select Custom. Click on the Fx button to open Expression Designer and type an expression. The result of the expression will be the value of the property. In this case, our expression should fetch the value from the format field from the Quantity field. The expression will be: =Fields!Quantity_ItemLedgerEntryFormat.Value This means that the format of the textbox is fetched from the dataset field: Quantity_Item. Instead of using Expression Designer, you can also just type this expression directly into the Formatcode textbox or in the Format property in the properties window of the textbox, as shown in the following screenshot: Reporting Services and RDLC use .NET Framework formatting strings for the Format property of a textbox. The following is a list of possible format strings: C: CurrencyD: DecimalE: ScientificF: Fixed pointG: GeneralN: NumberP: PercentageR: Round tripX: Hexadecimal After the format string, you can provide a number representing the amount of digits that have to be shown to the right of the decimal point. For example: F2 means a fixed point with 2 digits: 1.234,00 or 1,234.00F0 means a fixed point with no digits: 1.234 or 1,234 The thousand and comma separators (.and,) that are applied, and the currency symbol, depend on the Language property of the report. More information about .NET Framework formatting strings can be found here: Custom Numeric Format Strings: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/0c899ak8.aspx. Standard Date and Time Format Strings: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/az4se3k1.aspx. As an alternative, you can use custom format strings to define the format value. This is actually how Dynamics NAV populates the Format fields in the dataset. The syntax is: #,##0.00 You can use this to define the precision of a numeric field. The following image provides an example: Why does the Format property sometimes have no effect? To apply formatting to a textbox, the textbox must contain an expression, for example, =Fields!LineTotal.Value or =1000. When the text in the textbox does not begin with the = sign, then the text is interpreted as a string and formatting does not apply. You can also set the format in the report dataset designer, instead of in the layout. You can do this by using the Format function. You can do this directly in the dataset in the SourceExpression of any field, or you can do it in the data item triggers, for example the OnAfterGetRecord() trigger. But, if you use an expression in the SourceExpression, you lose the option to use the IncludeCaption property. A good example of a textbox format property is available here: http://thinkaboutit.be/2015/06/how-do-i-implement-blankzero-or-replacezero-in-a-report. Using placeholders If you select a textbox and right-click on it, you open the textbox properties. But, inside the textbox, there's the placeholder. A placeholder is the text, or expression, that becomes the information displayed in the textbox at runtime. And the placeholder also has a set of properties that you can set. So you can consider a placeholder as an entity inside a textbox, with its own set of properties, which are, by default, inherited from its parent, the textbox. The following screenshot shows that, when you right-click on the text in a textbox, you can then select its placeholder properties: A textbox can contain one or more placeholders. By using multiple placeholders in one textbox, you can display multiple fields in one textbox, and give them different properties. In the following example, I will add a header to the report, and in the header, I will display the company information. To add a header (and/or footer) to a report, go to the Report menu and select: Add Page Header Add Page Footer The following screenshot shows an example of this: A report can contain a maximum of one header and one footer. As an alternative you can right-click anywhere in the body of the report, in the empty space to the left or right of the body, and add a page header or footer. The page header and page footer are always shown on every page, except if you decide not to show it for the first and/or last page by using the properties: PrintOnFirstPage PrintOnLastPage Dynamically hiding a page header/footer A page header and footer cannot be hidden dynamically. A workaround would be to put a rectangle in the page header and/or footer and use the Hidden property of the rectangle to show or hide the content of the header/footer dynamically. You need to be aware that, even when you hide the content of the page header/footer, the report viewer will preserve the space. This means that the header/footer is still displayed, but will be empty. A page header or footer cannot contain a data region. The only controls you can add to a page header or footer are: Textbox Line Rectangle Image So, in the page header, I will add a textbox with a placeholder, as in the following screenshot: To do this, add a textbox in the page header. Then, drag a field from the dataset into the textbox. Then, add one or more spaces and drag another field into the same textbox. You will notice the two fields can be selected inside the textbox and, when they are, they become gray. If you right-click on the placeholder, you can see its properties. This is how you can see that it is a placeholder. It is interesting that the mark-up type for a placeholder can be changed to HTML. This means that, if the placeholder contains HTML, it will be recognized by the report viewer and rendered, as it would be by a browser. The HTML tags that are recognized are the following: <A href> <FONT> <H{n}>, <DIV>, <SPAN>,<P>, <DIV>, <LI>, <HN> <B>, <I>, <U>, <S> <OL>, <UL>, <LI> If you use these HTML tags in a badly organized way then they will be interpreted as text and rendered as such. The possibility of using HTML in placeholders creates an opportunity for Dynamics NAV developers. What you can do, for example, is generate the HTML tags in C/AL code and send them to the dataset. By using this approach, you can format text and manage it dynamically via C/AL. You could even use a special setup table in which you let users decide how certain fields should be formatted. In our example report, I will format the company e-mail address in two ways. First, I will use the placeholder expression to underline the text: Then, I will go to the C/AL code and create a function that will format the e-mail address using a mailto hyperlink: When you run the report, the result is this: The e-mail address is underlined and there is also a hyperlink and, when you click on it, your e-mail client opens. As you can see, the formatting in the placeholder and the formatting in the C/AL code are combined. Use a code unit or buffer table In this example I used a custom function in the report (FormatAsMailto). In real life, it is better to create these types of functions in a separate code unit, or buffer table, so you can reuse them in other reports. Important properties – CanGrow and CanShrink A textbox has many properties, as you can see in the following screenshot. If you right-click a textbox and select the textbox properties, they will open in a separate popup window. In this window, some of the textbox properties are available and they are divided into categories. To see all of the textbox properties you can use the properties window, which is usually on the right in Visual Studio. Here you can sort the properties or group them using the buttons on top: The first button groups the properties. The second button sorts the properties and the third button opens the properties popup window. I am not going to discuss all of the properties, but I would like to draw your attention to CanGrow and CanShrink. These two properties can be set to True or False. If you set CanGrow to True then the height of the textbox will increase if the text, at runtime, is bigger than the width of the textbox. With CanShrink, the height of the textbox may shrink. I do not recommend these properties, except when really necessary. When a textbox grows, the height increases and it pushes the content down below. This makes it difficult to predict if the content of the report will still fit on the page. Also, the effects of CanGrow and CanShrink are different if you run the report in Preview and export it to PDF, Word, Excel, or if you print the report. Example – create an item dashboard report In this example, I am going to create an item dashboard report. Actually, I will create a first version of the dashboard and enhance it. The result of the report looks like the following screenshot: What we need to do is to show the inventory of a list of items by location. The report also includes totals and subtotals of the inventory by location, by item and a grand total. To start, you define a dataset, as follows: In this dataset, I will start with the item table and, per item, fetch the item ledger entries. The inventory is the sum of the quantities of the item in the item ledger entry table. I have also included a filter, using the PrintOnlyIfDetail property of the item data item. This means that, if an item does not have any ledger entries, it will not be shown in the report. Also, I'm using the item ledger entry table to get the location code and quantity fields. In the report layout, I will create a group and calculate the inventory via an aggregate function. In real life, there might be many items and ledger entries, so this approach is not the best one. It would be better to use a buffer table or query object, and calculate the inventory and filter in the dataset, instead of in the layout. At this point, my objective is to demonstrate how you can use a Matrix-Tablix to create a layout that has a dynamic number of rows and columns. Once you have defined the dataset, open the layout and add a matrix control to the report body. In the data cell, use the Quantity field, on the row, use the Item No and, on the column, use the Location Code. This will create the following matrix and groups: Next, modify the expression of the textbox that contains the item number, to the following expression: =Fields!Description_Item.Value & " (" & Fields!No_Item.Value & ")" This will display the item description and, between brackets, the item number. Next, change the sorting of the group by item number to sort on the description: Next, add totals for the two groups: This will add an extra column and row to the matrix. Select the Quantity and then select the Sum as an aggregate. Then, select the four textboxes and, in the properties, apply the formatting for the quantity field: Next, you can use different background colors for the textboxes in the total rows and resize the description column, to resemble the layout in the preceding screenshot. If you save and run the report, you have now created an item dashboard. Notice how easy it is to use the matrix control to create a dashboard. At runtime the number of columns depends on the number of locations. The matrix has a dynamic number of columns. There is no detail level, because the ledger entries are grouped on row and on column level. Colors and background colors When using colors in a report, pay attention to how the report is printed. Not all printers are color printers, so you need to make sure that your visualization has an effect. That's why I have used gray colors in this example. Colors are sometimes also used by developers as a trick to see at runtime, where which textbox is displayed and to test report rendering in different formats. If you do this, remember to remove the colors at the end of the development phase of your report. Summary Textboxes have a lot of properties and contain placeholders, so we can format information in many ways, including using HTML, which can be managed from C/AL, for example using a layout setup table. It’s important to understand how you can formatting report items in Dynamics NAV, so you can create a consistent look and feel in your reports as it’s done inside the Dynamics NAV application. Resources for Article: Further resources on this subject: Standard Functionality[article] Understanding and Creating Simple SSRS Reports[article] Understanding master data [article]
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15 Sep 2015
11 min read
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Smart Features to Improve Your Efficiency

Packt
15 Sep 2015
11 min read
In this article by Denis Patin and Stefan Rosca authors of the book WebStorm Essentials, we are going to deal with a number of really smart features that will enable you to fundamentally change your approach to web development and learn how to gain maximum benefit from WebStorm. We are going to study the following in this article: On-the-fly code analysis Smart code features Multiselect feature Refactoring facility (For more resources related to this topic, see here.) On-the-fly code analysis WebStorm will preform static code analysis on your code on the fly. The editor will check the code based on the language used and the rules you specify and highlight warnings and errors as you type. This is a very powerful feature that means you don't need to have an external linter and will catch most errors quickly thus making a dynamic and complex language like JavaScript more predictable and easy to use. Runtime error and any other error, such as syntax or performance, are two things. To investigate the first one, you need tests or a debugger, and it is obvious that they have almost nothing in common with the IDE itself (although, when these facilities are integrated into the IDE, such a synergy is better, but that is not it). You can also examine the second type of errors the same way but is it convenient? Just imagine that you need to run tests after writing the next line of code. It is no go! Won't it be more efficient and helpful to use something that keeps an eye on and analyzes each word being typed in order to notify about probable performance issues and bugs, code style and workflow issues, various validation issues, warn of dead code and other likely execution issues before executing the code, to say nothing of reporting inadvertent misprints. WebStorm is the best fit for it. It performs a deep-level analysis of each line, each word in the code. Moreover, you needn't break off your developing process when WebStorm scans your code; it is performed on the fly and thus so called: WebStorm also enables you to get a full inspection report on demand. For getting it, go to the menu: Code | Inspect Code. It pops up the Specify Inspection Scope dialog where you can define what exactly you would like to inspect, and click OK. Depending on what is selected and of what size, you need to wait a little for the process to finish, and you will see the detailed results where the Terminal window is located: You can expand all the items, if needed. To the right of this inspection result list you can see an explanation window. To jump to the erroneous code lines, you can simply click on the necessary item, and you will flip into the corresponding line. Besides simple indicating where some issue is located, WebStorm also unequivocally suggests the ways to eliminate this issue. And you even needn't make any changes yourself—WebStorm already has quick solutions, which you need just to click on, and they will be instantly inserted into the code: Smart code features Being an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) and tending to be intelligent, WebStorm provides a really powerful pack of features by using which you can strongly improve your efficiency and save a lot of time. One of the most useful and hot features is code completion. WebStorm continually analyzes and processes the code of the whole project, and smartly suggests the pieces of code appropriate in the current context, and even more—alongside the method names you can find the usage of these methods. Of course, code completion itself is not a fresh innovation; however WebStorm performs it in a much smarter way than other IDEs do. WebStorm can auto-complete a lot things: Class and function names, keywords and parameters, types and properties, punctuation, and even file paths. By default, the code completion facility is on. To invoke it, simply start typing some code. For example, in the following image you can see how WebStorm suggests object methods: You can navigate through the list of suggestions using your mouse or the Up and Down arrow keys. However, the list can be very long, which makes it not very convenient to browse. To reduce it and retain only the things appropriate in the current context, keep on typing the next letters. Besides typing only initial consecutive letter of the method, you can either type something from the middle of the method name, or even use the CamelCase style, which is usually the quickest way of typing really long method names: It may turn out for some reason that the code completion isn't working automatically. To manually invoke it, press Control + Space on Mac or Ctrl + Space on Windows. To insert the suggested method, press Enter; to replace the string next to the current cursor position with the suggested method, press Tab. If you want the facility to also arrange correct syntactic surroundings for the method, press Shift + ⌘ + Enter on Mac or Ctrl + Shift + Enter on Windows, and missing brackets or/and new lines will be inserted, up to the styling standards of the current language of the code. Multiselect feature With the multiple selection (or simply multiselect) feature, you can place the cursor in several locations simultaneously, and when you will type the code it will be applied at all these positions. For example, you need to add different background colors for each table cell, and then make them of twenty-pixel width. In this case, what you need to not perform these identical tasks repeatedly and save a lot of time, is to place the cursor after the <td> tag, press Alt, and put the cursor in each <td> tag, which you are going to apply styling to: Now you can start typing the necessary attribute—it is bgcolor. Note that WebStorm performs smart code completion here too, independently of you typing something on a single line or not. You get empty values for bgcolor attributes, and you fill them out individually a bit later. You need also to change the width so you can continue typing. As cell widths are arranged to be fixed-sized, simply add the value for width attributes as well. What you get in the following image: Moreover, the multiselect feature can select identical values or just words independently, that is, you needn't place the cursor in multiple locations. Let us watch this feature by another example. Say, you changed your mind and decided to colorize not backgrounds but borders of several consecutive cells. You may instantly think of using a simple replace feature but you needn't replace all attribute occurrences, only several consecutive ones. For doing this, you can place the cursor on the first attribute, which you are going to perform changes from, and click Ctrl + G on Mac or Alt + J on Windows as many times as you need. One by one the same attributes will be selected, and you can replace the bgcolor attribute for the bordercolor one: You can also select all occurrences of any word by clicking Ctrl + command + G on Mac or Ctrl + Alt + Shift + J. To get out of the multiselect mode you have to click in a different position or use the Esc key. Refactoring facility Throughout the development process, it is almost unavoidable that you have to use refactoring. Also, the bigger code base you have, the more difficult it becomes to control the code, and when you need to refactor some code, you can most likely be up against some issues relating to, examples. naming omission or not taking into consideration function usage. You learned that WebStorm performs a thorough code analysis so it understands what is connected with what and if some changes occur it collates them and decide what is acceptable and what is not to perform in the rest of the code. Let us try a simple example. In a big HTML file you have the following line: <input id="search" type="search" placeholder="search" /> And in a big JavaScript file you have another one: var search = document.getElementById('search'); You decided to rename the id attribute's value of the input element to search_field because it is less confusing. You could simply rename it here but after that you would have to manually find all the occurrences of the word search in the code. It is evident that the word is rather frequent so you would spend a lot of time recognizing usage cases appropriate in the current context or not. And there is a high probability that you forget something important, and even more time will be spent on investigating an issue. Instead, you can entrust WebStorm with this task. Select the code unit to refactor (in our case, it is the search value of the id attribute), and click Shift + T on Mac or Ctrl + Alt + Shift + T on Windows (or simply click the Refactor menu item) to call the Refactor This dialog. There, choose the Rename… item and enter the new name for the selected code unit (search_field in our case). To get only a preview of what will happen during the refactoring process, click the Preview button, and all the changes to apply will be displayed in the bottom. You can walk through the hierarchical tree and either apply the change by clicking the Do Refactor button, or not. If you need a preview, you can simply click the Refactor button. What you will see is that the id attribute got the search_field value, not the type or placeholder values, even if they have the same value, and in the JavaScript file you got getElementById('search_field'). Note that even though WebStorm can perform various smart tasks, it still remains a program, and there can occur some issues caused by so-called artificial intelligence imperfection, so you should always be careful when performing the refactoring. In particular, manually check the var declarations because WebStorm sometimes can apply the changes to them as well but it is not always necessary because of the scope. Of course, it is just a little of what you are enabled to perform with refactoring. The basic things that the refactoring facility allows you to do are as follows: The elements in the preceding screenshot are explained as follows: Rename…: You have already got familiar with this refactoring. Once again, with it you can rename code units, and WebStorm automatically will fix all references of them in the code. The shortcut is Shift + F6. Change Signature…: This feature is used basically for changing function names, and adding/removing, reordering, or renaming function parameters, that is, changing the function signature. The shortcut is ⌘ + F6 for Mac and Ctrl + F6 for Windows. Move…: This feature enables you to move files or directories within a project, and it simultaneously repairs all references to these project elements in the code so you needn't manually repair them. The shortcut is F6. Copy…: With this feature, you can copy a file or directory or even a class, with its structure, from one place to another. The shortcut is F5. Safe Delete…: This feature is really helpful. It allows you to safely delete any code or entire files from the project. When performing this refactoring, you will be asked about whether it is needed to inspect comments and strings or all text files for the occurrence of the required piece of code or not. The shortcut is ⌘ + delete for Mac and Alt + Delete for Windows. Variable…: This refactoring feature declares a new variable whereto the result of the selected statement or expression is put. It can be useful when you realize there are too many occurrences of a certain expression so it can be turned into a variable, and the expression can just initialize it. The shortcut is Alt +⌘ + V for Mac and Ctrl + Alt + V for Windows. Parameter…: When you need to add a new parameter to some method and appropriately update its calls, use this feature. The shortcut is Alt + ⌘ + P for Mac and Ctrl + Alt + P for Windows. Method…: During this refactoring, the code block you selected undergoes analysis, through which the input and output variables get detected, and the extracted function receives the output variable as a return value. The shortcut is Alt + ⌘ + M for Mac and Ctrl + Alt + M for Windows. Inline…: The inline refactoring is working contrariwise to the extract method refactoring—it replaces surplus variables with their initializers making the code more compact and concise. The shortcut is Alt + ⌘ + N for Mac and Ctrl + Alt + N for Windows. Summary In this article, you have learned about the most distinctive features of WebStorm, which are the core constituents of improving your efficiency in building web applications. Resources for Article: Further resources on this subject: Introduction to Spring Web Application in No Time [article] Applications of WebRTC [article] Creating Java EE Applications [article]
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Packt
15 Sep 2015
24 min read
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Slideshow Presentations

Packt
15 Sep 2015
24 min read
 In this article by David Mitchell, author of the book Dart By Example you will be introduced to the basics of how to build a presentation application using Dart. It usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech. Mark Twain Presentations make some people shudder with fear, yet they are an undeniably useful tool for information sharing when used properly. The content has to be great and some visual flourish can make it stand out from the crowd. Too many slides can make the most receptive audience yawn, so focusing the presenter on the content and automatically taking care of the visuals (saving the creator from fiddling with different animations and fonts sizes!) can help improve presentations. Compelling content still requires the human touch. (For more resources related to this topic, see here.) Building a presentation application Web browsers are already a type of multimedia presentation application so it is feasible to write a quality presentation program as we explore more of the Dart language. Hopefully it will help us pitch another Dart application to our next customer. Building on our first application, we will use a text based editor for creating the presentation content. I was very surprised how much faster a text based editor is for producing a presentation, and more enjoyable. I hope you experience such a productivity boost! Laying out the application The application will have two modes, editing and presentation. In the editing mode, the screen will be split into two panes. The top pane will display the slides and the lower will contain the editor, and other interface elements. This article will focus on the core creation side of the presentation. The application will be a single Dart project. Defining the presentation format The presentations will be written in a tiny subset of the Markdown format which is a powerful yet simple to read text file based format (much easier to read, type and understand than HTML). In 2004, John Gruber and the late Aaron Swartz created the Markdown language in 2004 with the goal of enabling people to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format. It is used on major websites, such as GitHub.com and StackOverflow.com. Being plain text, Markdown files can be kept and compared in version control. For more detail and background on Markdown see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown A simple titled slide with bullet points would be defined as: #Dart Language +Created By Google +Modern language with a familiar syntax +Structured Web Applications +It is Awesomely productive! I am positive you only had to read that once! This will translate into the following HTML. <h1>Dart Language</h1> <li>Created By Google</li>s <li>Modern language with a familiar syntax</li> <li>Structured Web Applications</li> <li>It is Awesomely productive!</li> Markdown is very easy and fast to parse, which probably explains its growing popularity on the web. It can be transformed into many other formats. Parsing the presentation The content of the TextAreaHtml element is split into a list of individual lines, and processed in a similar manner to some of the features in the Text Editor application using forEach to iterate over the list. Any lines that are blank once any whitespace has been removed via the trim method are ignored. #A New Slide Title +The first bullet point +The second bullet point #The Second Slide Title +More bullet points !http://localhost/img/logo.png #Final Slide +Any questions? For each line starting with a # symbol, a new Slide object is created. For each line starting with a + symbol, they are added to this slides bullet point list. For each line is discovered using a ! symbol the slide's image is set (a limit of one per slide). This continues until the end of the presentation source is reached. A sample presentation To get a new user going quickly, there will be an example presentation which can be used as a demonstration and testing the various areas of the application. I chose the last topic that came up round the family dinner table—the coconut! #Coconut +Member of Arecaceae family. +A drupe - not a nut. +Part of daily diets. #Tree +Fibrous root system. +Mostly surface level. +A few deep roots for stability. #Yield +75 fruits on fertile land +30 typically +Fibre has traditional uses #Finally !coconut.png #Any Questions? Presenter project structures The project is a standard Dart web application with index.html as the entry point. The application is kicked off by main.dart which is linked to in index.html, and the application functionality is stored in the lib folder. Source File Description sampleshows.dart    The text for the slideshow application.  lifecyclemixin.dart  The class for the mixin.  slideshow.dart  Data structures for storing the presentation.  slideshowapp.dart  The application object. Launching the application The main function has a very short implementation. void main() { new SlideShowApp(); } Note that the new class instance does not need to be stored in a variable and that the object does not disappear after that line is executed. As we will see later, the object will attach itself to events and streams, keeping the object alive for the lifetime that the page is loaded. Building bullet point slides The presentation is build up using two classes—Slide and SlideShow. The Slide object creates the DivElement used to display the content and the SlideShow contains a list of Slide objects. The SlideShow object is updated as the text source is updated. It also keeps track of which slide is currently being displayed in the preview pane. Once the number of Dart files grows in a project, the DartAnalyzer will recommend naming the library. It is good habit to name every .dart file in a regular project with its own library name. The slideshow.dart file has the keyword library and a name next to it. In Dart, every file is a library, whether it is explicitly declared or not. If you are looking at Dart code online you may stumble across projects with imports that look a bit strange. #import("dart:html"); This is the old syntax for Dart's import mechanism. If you see this it is a sign that other aspects of the code may be out of date too. If you are writing an application in a single project, source files can be arranged in a folder structure appropriate for the project, though keeping the relatives paths manageable is advisable. Creating too many folders is probably means it is time to create a package! Accessing private fields In Dart, as discussed when we covered packages, the privacy is at the library level but it is still possible to have private fields in a class even though Dart does not have the keywords public, protected, and private. A simple return of a private field's value can be performed with a one line function. String getFirstName() => _name; To retrieve this value, a function call is required, for example, Person.getFirstName() however it may be preferred to have a property syntax such as Person.firstName. Having private fields and retaining the property syntax in this manner, is possible using the get and set keywords. Using true getters and setters The syntax of Dart also supports get and set via keywords: int get score =>score + bonus; set score(int increase) =>score += increase * level; Using either get/set or simple fields is down to preference. It is perfectly possible to start with simple fields and scale up to getters and setters if more validation or processing is required. The advantage of the get and set keywords in a library, is the intended interface for consumers of the package is very clear. Further it clarifies which methods may change the state of the object and which merely report current values. Mixin it up In object oriented languages, it is useful to build on one class to create a more specialized related class. For example, in the text editor the base dialog class was extended to create alert and confirm pop ups. What if we want to share some functionality but do not want inheritance occurring between the classes? Aggregation can solve this problem to some extent: class A{ classb usefulObject; } The downside is that this requires a longer reference to use: new A().usefulObject.handyMethod(); This problem has been solved in Dart (and other languages) by a mixin class to do this job, allowing the sharing of functionality without forced inheritance or clunky aggregation. In Dart, a mixin must meet the requirements: No constructors in the class declaration. The base class of the mixin must be Object. No calls to a super class are made. mixins are really just classes that are malleable enough to fit into the class hierarchy at any point. A use case for a mixin may be serialization fields and methods that may be required on several classes in an application that are not part of any inheritance chain. abstract class Serialisation { void save() { //Implementation here. } void load(String filename) { //Implementation here. } } The with keyword is used to declare that a class is using a mixin. class ImageRecord extends Record with Serialisation If the class does not have an explicit base class, it is required to specify Object. class StorageReports extends Object with Serialization In Dart, everything is an object, even basic types such as num are objects and not primitive types. The classes int and double are subtypes of num. This is important to know, as other languages have different behaviors. Let's consider a real example of this. main() { int i; print("$i"); } In a language such as Java the expected output would be 0 however the output in Dart is null. If a value is expected from a variable, it is always good practice to initialize it! For the classes Slide and SlideShow, we will use a mixin from the source file lifecyclemixin.dart to record a creation and an editing timestamp. abstract class LifecycleTracker { DateTime _created; DateTime _edited; recordCreateTimestamp() => _created = new DateTime.now(); updateEditTimestamp() => _edited = new DateTime.now(); DateTime get created => _created; DateTime get lastEdited => _edited; } To use the mixin, the recordCreateTimestamp method can be called from the constructor and the updateEditTimestamp from the main edit method. For slides, it makes sense just to record the creation. For the SlideShow class, both the creation and update will be tracked. Defining the core classes The SlideShow class is largely a container objects for a list of Slide objects and uses the mixin LifecycleTracker. class SlideShow extends Object with LifecycleTracker { List<Slide> _slides; List<Slide> get slides => _slides; ... The Slide class stores the string for the title and a list of strings for the bullet points. The URL for any image is also stored as a string: class Slide extends Object with LifecycleTracker { String titleText = ""; List<String> bulletPoints; String imageUrl = ""; ... A simple constructor takes the titleText as a parameter and initializes the bulletPoints list. If you want to focus on just-the-code when in WebStorm , double-click on filename title of the tab to expand the source code to the entire window. Double-click again to return to the original layout. For even more focus on the code, go to the View menu and click on Enter Distraction Free Mode. Transforming data into HTML To add the Slide object instance into a HTML document, the strings need to be converted into instances of HTML elements to be added to the DOM (Document Object Model). The getSlideContents() method constructs and returns the entire slide as a single object. DivElement getSlideContents() { DivElement slide = new DivElement(); DivElement title = new DivElement(); DivElement bullets = new DivElement(); title.appendHtml("<h1>$titleText</h1>"); slide.append(title); if (imageUrl.length > 0) { slide.appendHtml("<img src="$imageUrl" /><br/>"); } bulletPoints.forEach((bp) { if (bp.trim().length > 0) { bullets.appendHtml("<li>$bp</li>"); } }); slide.append(bullets); return slide; } The Div elements are constructed as objects (instances of DivElement), while the content is added as literal HTML statements. The method appendHtml is used for this particular task as it renders HTML tags in the text. The regular method appendText puts the entire literal text string (including plain unformatted text of the HTML tags) into the element. So what exactly is the difference? The method appendHtml evaluates the supplied ,HTML, and adds the resultant object node to the nodes of the parent element which is rendered in the browser as usual. The method appendText is useful, for example, to prevent user supplied content affecting the format of the page and preventing malicious code being injected into a web page. Editing the presentation When the source is updated the presentation is updated via the onKeyUp event. This was used in the text editor project to trigger a save to local storage. This is carried out in the build method of the SlideShow class, and follows the pattern we discussed parsing the presentation. build(String src) { updateEditTimestamp(); _slides = new List<Slide>(); Slide nextSlide; src.split("n").forEach((String line) { if (line.trim().length > 0) { // Title - also marks start of the next slide. if (line.startsWith("#")) { nextSlide = new Slide(line.substring(1)); _slides.add(nextSlide); } if (nextSlide != null) { if (line.startsWith("+")) { nextSlide.bulletPoints.add(line.substring(1)); } else if (line.startsWith("!")) { nextSlide.imageUrl = line.substring(1); } } } }); } As an alternative to the startsWith method, the square bracket [] operator could be used for line [0] to retrieve the first character. The startsWith can also take a regular expression or a string to match and a starting index, refer to the dart:core documentation for more information. For the purposes of parsing the presentation, the startsWith method is more readable. Displaying the current slide The slide is displayed via the showSlide method in slideShowApp.dart. To preview the current slide, the current index, stored in the field currentSlideIndex, is used to retrieve the desired slide object and the Div rendering method called. showSlide(int slideNumber) { if (currentSlideShow.slides.length == 0) return; slideScreen.style.visibility = "hidden"; slideScreen ..nodes.clear() ..nodes.add(currentSlideShow.slides[slideNumber].getSlideContents ()); rangeSlidePos.value = slideNumber.toString(); slideScreen.style.visibility = "visible"; } The slideScreen is a DivElement which is then updated off screen by setting the visibility style property to hidden The existing content of the DivElement is emptied out by calling nodes.clear() and the slide content is added with nodes.add. The range slider position is set and finally the DivElement is set to visible again. Navigating the presentation A button set with familiar first, previous, next and last slide allow the user to jump around the preview of the presentation. This is carried out by having an index into the list of slides stored in the field slide in the SlideShowApp class. Handling the button key presses The navigation buttons require being set up in an identical pattern in the constructor of the SlideShowApp object. First get an object reference using id, which is the id attribute of the element, and then attaching a handler to the click event. Rather than repeat this code, a simple function can handle the process. setButton(String id, Function clickHandler) { ButtonInputElement btn = querySelector(id); btn.onClick.listen(clickHandler); } As function is a type in Dart, functions can be passed around easily as a parameter. Let us take a look at the button that takes us to the first slide. setButton("#btnFirst", startSlideShow); void startSlideShow(MouseEvent event) { showFirstSlide(); } void showFirstSlide() { showSlide(0); } The event handlers do not directly change the slide, these are carried out by other methods, which may be triggered by other inputs such as the keyboard. Using the function type The SlideShowApp constructor makes use of this feature. Function qs = querySelector; var controls = qs("#controls"); I find the querySelector method a little long to type (though it is a good descriptive of what it does). With Function being types, we can easily create a shorthand version. The constructor spends much of its time selecting and assigning the HTML elements to member fields of the class. One of the advantages of this approach is that the DOM of the page is queried only once, and the reference stored and reused. This is good for performance of the application as, once the application is running, querying the DOM may take much longer. Staying within the bounds Using min and max function from the dart:math package, the index can be kept in range of the current list. void showLastSlide() { currentSlideIndex = max(0, currentSlideShow.slides.length - 1); showSlide(currentSlideIndex); } void showNextSlide() { currentSlideIndex = min(currentSlideShow.slides.length - 1, ++currentSlideIndex); showSlide(currentSlideIndex); } These convenience functions can save a great deal if and else if comparisons and help make code a good degree more readable. Using the slider control The slider control is another new control in the HTML5 standard. This will allow the user to scroll though the slides in the presentation. This control is a personal favorite of mine, as it is so visual and can be used to give very interactive feedback to the user. It seemed to be a huge omission from the original form controls in the early generation of web browsers. Even with clear widely accepted features, HTML specifications can take a long time to clear committees and make it into everyday browsers! <input type="range" id="rngSlides" value="0"/> The control has an onChange event which is given a listener in the SlideShowApp constructor. rangeSlidepos.onChange.listen(moveToSlide);rangeSlidepos.onChange .listen(moveToSlide); The control provides its data via a simple string value, which can be converted to an integer via the int.parse method to be used as an index to the presentation's slide list. void moveToSlide(Event event) { currentSlideIndex = int.parse(rangeSlidePos.value); showSlide(currentSlideIndex); } The slider control must be kept in synchronization with any other change in slide display, use of navigation or change in number of slides. For example, the user may use the slider to reach the general area of the presentation, and then adjust with the previous and next buttons. void updateRangeControl() { rangeSlidepos ..min = "0" ..max = (currentSlideShow.slides.length - 1).toString(); } This method is called when the number of slides is changed, and as with working with most HTML elements, the values to be set need converted to strings. Responding to keyboard events Using the keyboard, particularly the arrow (cursor) keys, is a natural way to look through the slides in a presentation even in the preview mode. This is carried out in the SlideShowApp constructor. In Dart web applications, the dart:html package allows direct access to the globalwindow object from any class or function. The Textarea used to input the presentation source will also respond to the arrow keys so there will need to be a check to see if it is currently being used. The property activeElement on the document will give a reference to the control with focus. This reference can be compared to the Textarea, which is stored in the presEditor field, so a decision can be taken on whether to act on the keypress or not. Key Event Code Action Left Arrow  37  Go back a slide. Up Arrow  38  Go to first slide.   Right Arrow  39  Go to next slide.  Down Arrow  40  Go to last slide. Keyboard events, like other events, can be listened to by using a stream event listener. The listener function is an anonymous function (the definition omits a name) that takes the KeyboardEvent as its only parameter. window.onKeyUp.listen((KeyboardEvent e) { if (presEditor != document.activeElement){ if (e.keyCode == 39) showNextSlide(); else if (e.keyCode == 37) showPrevSlide(); else if (e.keyCode == 38) showFirstSlide(); else if (e.keyCode == 40) showLastSlide(); } }); It is a reasonable question to ask how to get the keyboard key codes required to write the switching code. One good tool is the W3C's Key and Character Codes page at http://www.w3.org/2002/09/tests/keys.html, to help with this but it can often be faster to write the handler and print out the event that is passed in! Showing the key help Rather than testing the user's memory, there will be a handy reference to the keyboard shortcuts. This is a simple Div element which is shown and then hidden when the key (remember to press Shift too!) is pressed again by toggling the visibility style from visible to hidden. Listening twice to event streams The event system in Dart is implemented as a stream. One of the advantages of this is that an event can easily have more than one entity listening to the class. This is useful, for example in a web application where some keyboard presses are valid in one context but not in another. The listen method is an add operation (accumulative) so the key press for help can be implemented separately. This allows a modular approach which helps reuse as the handlers can be specialized and added as required. window.onKeyUp.listen((KeyboardEvent e) { print(e); //Check the editor does not have focus. if (presEditor != document.activeElement) { DivElement helpBox = qs("#helpKeyboardShortcuts"); if (e.keyCode == 191) { if (helpBox.style.visibility == "visible") { helpBox.style.visibility = "hidden"; } else { helpBox.style.visibility = "visible"; } } } }); In, for example, a game, a common set of event handling may apply to title and introduction screen and the actual in game screen contains additional event handling as a superset. This could be implemented by adding and removing handlers to the relevant event stream. Changing the colors HTML5 provides browsers with full featured color picker (typically browsers use the native OS's color chooser). This will be used to allow the user to set the background color of the editor application itself. The color picker is added to the index.html page with the following HTML: <input id="pckBackColor" type="color"> The implementation is straightforward as the color picker control provides: InputElement cp = qs("#pckBackColor"); cp.onChange.listen( (e) => document.body.style.backgroundColor = cp.value); As the event and property (onChange and value) are common to the input controls the basic InputElement class can be used. Adding a date Most presentations are usually dated, or at least some of the jokes are! We will add a convenient button for the user to add a date to the presentation using the HTML5 input type date which provides a graphical date picker. <input type="date" id="selDate" value="2000-01-01"/> The default value is set in the index.html page as follows: The valueAsDate property of the DateInputElement class provides the Date object which can be added to the text area: void insertDate(Event event) { DateInputElement datePicker = querySelector("#selDate"); if (datePicker.valueAsDate != null) presEditor.value = presEditor.value + datePicker.valueAsDate.toLocal().toString(); } In this case, the toLocal method is used to obtain a string formatted to the month, day, year format. Timing the presentation The presenter will want to keep to their allotted time slot. We will include a timer in the editor to aid in rehearsal. Introducing the stopwatch class The Stopwatch class (from dart:core) provides much of the functionality needed for this feature, as shown in this small command line application: main() { Stopwatch sw = new Stopwatch(); sw.start(); print(sw.elapsed); sw.stop(); print(sw.elapsed); } The elapsed property can be checked at any time to give the current duration. This is very useful class, for example, it can be used to compare different functions to see which is the fastest. Implementing the presentation timer The clock will be stopped and started with a single button handled by the toggleTimer method. A recurring timer will update the duration text on the screen as follows: If the timer is running, the update Timer and the Stopwatch in field slidesTime is stopped. No update to the display is required as the user will need to see the final time: void toggleTimer(Event event) { if (slidesTime.isRunning) { slidesTime.stop(); updateTimer.cancel(); } else { updateTimer = new Timer.periodic(new Duration(seconds: 1), (timer) { String seconds = (slidesTime.elapsed.inSeconds % 60).toString(); seconds = seconds.padLeft(2, "0"); timerDisplay.text = "${slidesTime.elapsed.inMinutes}:$seconds"; }); slidesTime ..reset() ..start(); } } The Stopwatch class provides properties for retrieving the elapsed time in minutes and seconds. To format this to minutes and seconds, the seconds portion is determined with the modular division operator % and padded with the string function padLeft. Dart's string interpolation feature is used to build the final string, and as the elapsed and inMinutes properties are being accessed, the {} brackets are required so that the single value is returned. Overview of slides This provides the user with a visual overview of the slides as shown in the following screenshot: The presentation slides will be recreated in a new full screen Div element. This is styled using the fullScreen class in the CSS stylesheet in the SlideShowApp constructor: overviewScreen = new DivElement(); overviewScreen.classes.toggle("fullScreen"); overviewScreen.onClick.listen((e) => overviewScreen.remove()); The HTML for the slides will be identical. To shrink the slides, the list of slides is iterated over, the HTML element object obtained and the CSS class for the slide is set: currentSlideShow.slides.forEach((s) { aSlide = s.getSlideContents(); aSlide.classes.toggle("slideOverview"); aSlide.classes.toggle("shrink"); ... The CSS hover class is set to scale the slide when the mouse enters so a slide can be focused on for review. The classes are set with the toggle method which either adds if not present or removes if they are. The method has an optional parameter: aSlide.classes.toggle('className', condition); The second parameter is named shouldAdd is true if the class is always to be added and false if the class is always to be removed. Handout notes There is nothing like a tangible handout to give attendees to your presentation. This can be achieved with a variation of the overview display: Instead of duplicating the overview code, the function can be parameterized with an optional parameter in the method declaration. This is declared with square brackets [] around the declaration and a default value that is used if no parameter is specified. void buildOverview([bool addNotes = false]) This is called by the presentation overview display without requiring any parameters. buildOverview(); This is called by the handouts display without requiring any parameters. buildOverview(true); If this parameter is set, an additional Div element is added for the Notes area and the CSS is adjust for the benefit of the print layout. Comparing optional positional and named parameters The addNotes parameter is declared as an optional positional parameter, so an optional value can be specified without naming the parameter. The first parameter is matched to the supplied value. To give more flexibility, Dart allows optional parameters to be named. Consider two functions, the first will take named optional parameters and the second positional optional parameters. getRecords1(String query,{int limit: 25, int timeOut: 30}) { } getRecords2(String query,[int limit = 80, int timeOut = 99]) { } The first function can be called in more ways: getRecords1(""); getRecords1("", limit:50, timeOut:40); getRecords1("", timeOut:40, limit:65); getRecords1("", limit:50); getRecords1("", timeOut:40); getRecords2(""); getRecords2("", 90); getRecords2("", 90, 50); With named optional parameters, the order they are supplied is not important and has the advantage that the calling code is clearer as to the use that will be made of the parameters being passed. With positional optional parameters, we can omit the later parameters but it works in a strict left to right order so to set the timeOut parameter to a non-default value, limit must also be supplied. It is also easier to confuse which parameter is for which particular purpose. Summary The presentation editor is looking rather powerful with a range of advanced HTML controls moving far beyond text boxes to date pickers and color selectors. The preview and overview help the presenter visualize the entire presentation as they work, thanks to the strong class structure built using Dart mixins and data structures using generics. We have spent time looking at the object basis of Dart, how to pass parameters in different ways and, closer to the end user, how to handle keyboard input. This will assist in the creation of many different types of application and we have seen how optional parameters and true properties can help document code for ourselves and other developers. Hopefully you learned a little about coconuts too. The next step for this application is to improve the output with full screen display, animation and a little sound to capture the audiences' attention. The presentation editor could be improved as well—currently it is only in the English language. Dart's internationalization features can help with this. Resources for Article: Further resources on this subject: Practical Dart[article] Handling the DOM in Dart[article] Dart with JavaScript [article]
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Packt
15 Sep 2015
11 min read
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Using 3D Objects

Packt
15 Sep 2015
11 min read
In this article by Liz Staley, author of the book Manga Studio EX 5 Cookbook, you will learn the following topics: Adding existing 3D objects to a page Importing a 3D object from another program Manipulating 3D objects Adjusting the 3D camera (For more resources related to this topic, see here.) One of the features of Manga Studio 5 that people ask me about all the time is 3D objects. Manga Studio 5 comes with a set of 3D assets: characters, poses, and a few backgrounds and small objects. These can be added directly to your page, posed and positioned, and used in your artwork. While I usually use these 3D poses as a reference (much like the wooden drawing dolls that you can find in your local craft store), you can conceivably use 3D characters and imported 3D assets from programs such as Poser to create entire comics. Let's get into the third dimension now, and you will learn how to use these assets in Manga Studio 5. Adding existing 3D objects to a page Manga Studio 5 comes with many 3D objects present in the materials library. This is the fastest way to get started with using the 3D features. Getting ready You must have a page open in order to add a 3D object. Open a page of any size to start the recipes covered here. How to do it… The following steps will show us how to add an existing 3D material to a page: Open the materials library. This can be done by going to Window | Material | Material [3D]. Select a category of 3D material from the list on the left-hand side of the library, or scroll down the Material library preview window to browse all the available materials. Select a material to add to the page by clicking on it to highlight it. In this recipe, we are choosing the School girl B 02 character material. It is highlighted in the following screenshot: Hold the left mouse button down on the selected material and drag it onto the page, releasing the mouse button once the cursor is over the page, to display the material. Alternately, you can click on the Paste selected material to canvas icon at the bottom of the Material library menu. The selected 3D material will be added to the page. The School girl B 02 material is shown in this default character pose: Importing a 3D object from another program You don't have to use only the default 3D models included in Manga Studio 5. The process of importing a model is very easy. The types of files that can be imported into Manga Studio 5 are c2fc, c2fr, fbx, 1wo, 1ws, obj, 6kt, and 6kh. Getting ready You must have a page open in order to add a 3D object. Open a page of any size to start this recipe. For this recipe, you will also need a model to import into the program. These can be found on numerous websites, including my.smithmicro.com, under the Poser tab. How to do it… The following steps will walk us through the simple process of importing a 3D model into Manga Studio 5: Open the location where the 3D model you wish to import has been saved. If you have downloaded the 3D model from the Internet, it may be in the Downloads folder on your PC. Arrange the windows on your computer screen so that the location of the 3D model and Manga Studio 5 are both visible, as shown in the following screenshot: Click on the 3D model file and hold down the mouse button. While still holding down the mouse button, drag the 3D model file into the Manga Studio 5 window. Release the mouse button. The 3D model will be imported into the open page, as shown in this screenshot: Manipulating 3D objects You've learned how to add a 3D object to our project. But how can you pose it the way you want it to look for your scene? With a little time and patience, you'll be posing characters like a pro in no time! Getting ready Follow the directions in the Adding existing 3D objects to a page recipe before following the steps in this recipe. How to do it… This recipe will walk us through moving a character into a custom pose: Be sure that the Object tool under Operation is selected. Click on the 3D object to manipulate, if it is not already selected. To move the entire object up, down, left, or right, hover the mouse cursor over the fourth icon in the top-left corner of the box around the selected object. Click and hold the left mouse button; then, drag to move the object in the desired direction. The following screenshot shows the location of the icon used to move the object up, down, left, or right. It is highlighted in pink and also shown over the 3D character. If your models are moving very slowly, you may need to allocate more memory to Manga Studio EX 5. This can be done by going to File | Preferences | Performance. To rotate the object along the y axis (or the horizon line), hover the mouse cursor over the fifth icon in the top-left corner of the box around the selected object. Click on it, hold the left mouse button, and drag. The object will rotate along the y axis, as shown in this screenshot: To rotate the object along the x axis (straight up and down vertically), hover the mouse cursor over the sixth icon in the top-left corner of the box around the selected object. Click and drag. The object will rotate vertically around its center, , as shown in the following screenshot: To move the object back and forth in 3D space, hover the mouse cursor over the seventh icon in the top-left corner of the box around the selected object. Click and hold the left mouse button; then drag it. The icon is shown as follows, highlighted in pink, and the character has been moved back—away from the camera: To move one part of a character, click on the part to be moved. For this recipe, we'll move the character's arm down. To do this, we'll click on the upper arm portion of the character to select it. When a portion of the character is selected, a sphere with three lines circling it will appear. Each of these three lines represents one axis (x, y, and z) and controls the rotation of that portion of the character. This set of lines is shown here: Use the lines of the sphere to rotate the part of the character to the desired position. For a more precise movement, the scroll wheel on the mouse can be used as well. In the following screenshot, the arm has been rotated so that it is down at the character's side: Do you keep accidentally moving a part of the model that you don't want to move? Put the cursor over the part of the model that you'd like to keep in place, and then right-click. A blue box will appear on that part of the model, and the piece will be locked in to place. Right-click again to unlock the part. How it works… In this recipe, we covered how to move and rotate a 3D object and portions of 3D characters. This is the start of being able to create your own custom poses and saving them for reuse. It's also the way to pose the drawing doll models in Manga Studio to make pose references for your comic artwork. In the 3D-Body Type folder of the materials library, you will find Female and Male drawing dolls that can be posed just as the premade characters can. These generic dolls are great for getting that difficult pose down. Then use the next recipe, Adjusting the 3D camera, to get the angle you need, and draw away! The following screenshot shows a drawing doll 3D object that has been posed in a custom stance. The preceding pose was relatively easy to achieve. The figure was rotated along the x axis, and then the head and neck joints were both rotated individually so that the doll looked toward the camera. Both its arms were rotated down and then inward. The hands were posed. The ankle joints were selected and the feet were rotated so that the toes were pointed. Then the knee of the near leg was rotated to bend it. The hip of the near leg was also rotated so that the leg was lifted slightly, giving a "cutesy" look to the pose. Having trouble posing a character's hands exactly the way you want them? Then open the Sub Tool Detail palette and click on Pose in the left-hand-side menu. In this area, you will find a menu with a picture of a hand. This is a quick controller for the fingers. Select the hand that you wish to pose. Along the bottom of the menu are some preset hand poses for things such as closed fists. At the top of each finger on this menu is an icon that looks like chain links. Click on one of them to lock the finger that it is over and prevent it from moving. The triangle area over the large blue hand symbol controls how open and closed the fingers are. You will find this menu much easier than rotating each joint individually—I'm sure! Adjusting the 3D camera In addition to manipulating 3D objects or characters, you can also change the position of the 3D camera to get the composition that you desire for your work. Think of the 3D camera just like a camera on a movie set. It can be rotated or moved around to frame the actors (3D characters) and scenery just the way the director wants! Not sure whether you moved the character or the camera? Take a look at the ground plane, which is the "checkerboard" floor area underneath the characters and objects. If the character is standing straight up and down on the ground plane, it means that the camera was moved. If the character is floating above or below the ground plane, or part of the way through it, it means that the character or object was moved. Getting ready Follow the directions given in the Adding existing 3D objects to a page recipe before following the steps in this recipe. How to do it… To rotate the camera around an object (the object will remain stationary), hover the mouse cursor over the first icon in the top-left corner of the box around the selected object. Click and hold the left mouse button, and then drag. The icon and the camera rotation are shown in the following screenshot: To move the camera up, down, left, or right, hover the mouse cursor over the second icon in the top-left corner of the box around the selected object. Click and hold the left mouse button, and then drag. The icon and camera movement are shown in this screenshot: To move the camera back and forth in the 3D space, hover the mouse cursor over the third icon in the top-left corner of the box around the selected object. Again, click and hold the left mouse button, and then drag. The next screenshot shows the zoom icon in pink at the top and the overlay on top of the character. Note how the hand of the character and the top of the head are now out of the page, since the camera is closer to her and she appears larger on the canvas. Summary In this article, we have studied to add existing 3D objects to a page using Manga Studio 5 in detail. After adding the existing object, we saw steps to add the 3D object from another program. Then, there are steps to manipulate these 3D objects along the co-ordinate system by using tools available in Manga Studio 5. Finally, we learnt to position the 3D camera, by rotating it around an object. Resources for Article: Further resources on this subject: Ink Slingers [article] Getting Familiar with the Story Features [article] Animating capabilities of Cinema 4D [article]
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Packt
15 Sep 2015
16 min read
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Java Hibernate Collections, Associations, and Advanced Concepts

Packt
15 Sep 2015
16 min read
In this article by Yogesh Prajapati and Vishal Ranapariya, the author of the book Java Hibernate Cookbook, he has provide a complete guide to the following recipes: Working with a first-level cache One-to-one mapping using a common join table Persisting Map (For more resources related to this topic, see here.) Working with a first-level cache Once we execute a particular query using hibernate, it always hits the database. As this process may be very expensive, hibernate provides the facility to cache objects within a certain boundary. The basic actions performed in each database transaction are as follows: The request reaches the database server via the network. The database server processes the query in the query plan. Now the database server executes the processed query. Again, the database server returns the result to the querying application through the network. At last, the application processes the results. This process is repeated every time we request a database operation, even if it is for a simple or small query. It is always a costly transaction to hit the database for the same records multiple times. Sometimes, we also face some delay in receiving the results because of network routing issues. There may be some other parameters that affect and contribute to the delay, but network routing issues play a major role in this cycle. To overcome this issue, the database uses a mechanism that stores the result of a query, which is executed repeatedly, and uses this result again when the data is requested using the same query. These operations are done on the database side. Hibernate provides an in-built caching mechanism known as the first-level cache (L1 cache). Following are some properties of the first-level cache: It is enabled by default. We cannot disable it even if we want to. The scope of the first-level cache is limited to a particular Session object only; the other Session objects cannot access it. All cached objects are destroyed once the session is closed. If we request for an object, hibernate returns the object from the cache only if the requested object is found in the cache; otherwise, a database call is initiated. We can use Session.evict(Object object) to remove single objects from the session cache. The Session.clear() method is used to clear all the cached objects from the session. Getting ready Let's take a look at how the L1 cache works. Creating the classes For this recipe, we will create an Employee class and also insert some records into the table: Source file: Employee.java @Entity @Table public class Employee { @Id @GeneratedValue private long id; @Column(name = "name") private String name; // getters and setters @Override public String toString() { return "Employee: " + "nt Id: " + this.id + "nt Name: " + this.name; } } Creating the tables Use the following table script if the hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto configuration property is not set to create: Use the following script to create the employee table: CREATE TABLE `employee` ( `id` bigint(20) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT, `name` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL, PRIMARY KEY (`id`) ); We will assume that two records are already inserted, as shown in the following employee table: id name 1 Yogesh 2 Aarush Now, let's take a look at some scenarios that show how the first-level cache works. How to do it… Here is the code to see how caching works. In the code, we will load employee#1 and employee#2 once; after that, we will try to load the same employees again and see what happens: Code System.out.println("nLoading employee#1..."); /* Line 2 */ Employee employee1 = (Employee) session.load(Employee.class, new Long(1)); System.out.println(employee1.toString()); System.out.println("nLoading employee#2..."); /* Line 6 */ Employee employee2 = (Employee) session.load(Employee.class, new Long(2)); System.out.println(employee2.toString()); System.out.println("nLoading employee#1 again..."); /* Line 10 */ Employee employee1_dummy = (Employee) session.load(Employee.class, new Long(1)); System.out.println(employee1_dummy.toString()); System.out.println("nLoading employee#2 again..."); /* Line 15 */ Employee employee2_dummy = (Employee) session.load(Employee.class, new Long(2)); System.out.println(employee2_dummy.toString()); Output Loading employee#1... Hibernate: select employee0_.id as id0_0_, employee0_.name as name0_0_ from Employee employee0_ where employee0_.id=? Employee: Id: 1 Name: Yogesh Loading employee#2... Hibernate: select employee0_.id as id0_0_, employee0_.name as name0_0_ from Employee employee0_ where employee0_.id=? Employee: Id: 2 Name: Aarush Loading employee#1 again... Employee: Id: 1 Name: Yogesh Loading employee#2 again... Employee: Id: 2 Name: Aarush How it works… Here, we loaded Employee#1 and Employee#2 as shown in Line 2 and 6 respectively and also the print output for both. It's clear from the output that hibernate will hit the database to load Employee#1 and Employee#2 because at startup, no object is cached in hibernate. Now, in Line 10, we tried to load Employee#1 again. At this time, hibernate did not hit the database but simply use the cached object because Employee#1 is already loaded and this object is still in the session. The same thing happened with Employee#2. Hibernate stores an object in the cache only if one of the following operations is completed: Save Update Get Load List There's more… In the previous section, we took a look at how caching works. Now, we will discuss some other methods used to remove a cached object from the session. There are two more methods that are used to remove a cached object: evict(Object object): This method removes a particular object from the session clear(): This method removes all the objects from the session evict (Object object) This method is used to remove a particular object from the session. It is very useful. The object is no longer available in the session once this method is invoked and the request for the object hits the database: Code System.out.println("nLoading employee#1..."); /* Line 2 */ Employee employee1 = (Employee) session.load(Employee.class, new Long(1)); System.out.println(employee1.toString()); /* Line 5 */ session.evict(employee1); System.out.println("nEmployee#1 removed using evict(…)..."); System.out.println("nLoading employee#1 again..."); /* Line 9*/ Employee employee1_dummy = (Employee) session.load(Employee.class, new Long(1)); System.out.println(employee1_dummy.toString()); Output Loading employee#1... Hibernate: select employee0_.id as id0_0_, employee0_.name as name0_0_ from Employee employee0_ where employee0_.id=? Employee: Id: 1 Name: Yogesh Employee#1 removed using evict(…)... Loading employee#1 again... Hibernate: select employee0_.id as id0_0_, employee0_.name as name0_0_ from Employee employee0_ where employee0_.id=? Employee: Id: 1 Name: Yogesh Here, we loaded an Employee#1, as shown in Line 2. This object was then cached in the session, but we explicitly removed it from the session cache in Line 5. So, the loading of Employee#1 will again hit the database. clear() This method is used to remove all the cached objects from the session cache. They will no longer be available in the session once this method is invoked and the request for the objects hits the database: Code System.out.println("nLoading employee#1..."); /* Line 2 */ Employee employee1 = (Employee) session.load(Employee.class, new Long(1)); System.out.println(employee1.toString()); System.out.println("nLoading employee#2..."); /* Line 6 */ Employee employee2 = (Employee) session.load(Employee.class, new Long(2)); System.out.println(employee2.toString()); /* Line 9 */ session.clear(); System.out.println("nAll objects removed from session cache using clear()..."); System.out.println("nLoading employee#1 again..."); /* Line 13 */ Employee employee1_dummy = (Employee) session.load(Employee.class, new Long(1)); System.out.println(employee1_dummy.toString()); System.out.println("nLoading employee#2 again..."); /* Line 17 */ Employee employee2_dummy = (Employee) session.load(Employee.class, new Long(2)); System.out.println(employee2_dummy.toString()); Output Loading employee#1... Hibernate: select employee0_.id as id0_0_, employee0_.name as name0_0_ from Employee employee0_ where employee0_.id=? Employee: Id: 1 Name: Yogesh Loading employee#2... Hibernate: select employee0_.id as id0_0_, employee0_.name as name0_0_ from Employee employee0_ where employee0_.id=? Employee: Id: 2 Name: Aarush All objects removed from session cache using clear()... Loading employee#1 again... Hibernate: select employee0_.id as id0_0_, employee0_.name as name0_0_ from Employee employee0_ where employee0_.id=? Employee: Id: 1 Name: Yogesh Loading employee#2 again... Hibernate: select employee0_.id as id0_0_, employee0_.name as name0_0_ from Employee employee0_ where employee0_.id=? Employee: Id: 2 Name: Aarush Here, Line 2 and 6 show how to load Employee#1 and Employee#2 respectively. Now, we removed all the objects from the session cache using the clear() method. As a result, the loading of both Employee#1 and Employee#2 will again result in a database hit, as shown in Line 13 and 17. One-to-one mapping using a common join table In this method, we will use a third table that contains the relationship between the employee and detail tables. In other words, the third table will hold a primary key value of both tables to represent a relationship between them. Getting ready Use the following script to create the tables and classes. Here, we use Employee and EmployeeDetail to show a one-to-one mapping using a common join table: Creating the tables Use the following script to create the tables if you are not using hbm2dll=create|update: Use the following script to create the detail table: CREATE TABLE `detail` ( `detail_id` bigint(20) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT, `city` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL, PRIMARY KEY (`detail_id`) ); Use the following script to create the employee table: CREATE TABLE `employee` ( `employee_id` BIGINT(20) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT, `name` VARCHAR(255) DEFAULT NULL, PRIMARY KEY (`employee_id`) ); Use the following script to create the employee_detail table: CREATE TABLE `employee_detail` ( `detail_id` BIGINT(20) DEFAULT NULL, `employee_id` BIGINT(20) NOT NULL, PRIMARY KEY (`employee_id`), KEY `FK_DETAIL_ID` (`detail_id`), KEY `FK_EMPLOYEE_ID` (`employee_id`), CONSTRAINT `FK_EMPLOYEE_ID` FOREIGN KEY (`employee_id`) REFERENCES `employee` (`employee_id`), CONSTRAINT `FK_DETAIL_ID` FOREIGN KEY (`detail_id`) REFERENCES `detail` (`detail_id`) ); Creating the classes Use the following code to create the classes: Source file: Employee.java @Entity @Table(name = "employee") public class Employee { @Id @GeneratedValue @Column(name = "employee_id") private long id; @Column(name = "name") private String name; @OneToOne(cascade = CascadeType.ALL) @JoinTable( name="employee_detail" , joinColumns=@JoinColumn(name="employee_id") , inverseJoinColumns=@JoinColumn(name="detail_id") ) private Detail employeeDetail; public long getId() { return id; } public void setId(long id) { this.id = id; } public String getName() { return name; } public void setName(String name) { this.name = name; } public Detail getEmployeeDetail() { return employeeDetail; } public void setEmployeeDetail(Detail employeeDetail) { this.employeeDetail = employeeDetail; } @Override public String toString() { return "Employee" +"n Id: " + this.id +"n Name: " + this.name +"n Employee Detail " + "nt Id: " + this.employeeDetail.getId() + "nt City: " + this.employeeDetail.getCity(); } } Source file: Detail.java @Entity @Table(name = "detail") public class Detail { @Id @GeneratedValue @Column(name = "detail_id") private long id; @Column(name = "city") private String city; @OneToOne(cascade = CascadeType.ALL) @JoinTable( name="employee_detail" , joinColumns=@JoinColumn(name="detail_id") , inverseJoinColumns=@JoinColumn(name="employee_id") ) private Employee employee; public Employee getEmployee() { return employee; } public void setEmployee(Employee employee) { this.employee = employee; } public String getCity() { return city; } public void setCity(String city) { this.city = city; } public long getId() { return id; } public void setId(long id) { this.id = id; } @Override public String toString() { return "Employee Detail" +"n Id: " + this.id +"n City: " + this.city +"n Employee " + "nt Id: " + this.employee.getId() + "nt Name: " + this.employee.getName(); } } How to do it… In this section, we will take a look at how to insert a record step by step. Inserting a record Using the following code, we will insert an Employee record with a Detail object: Code Detail detail = new Detail(); detail.setCity("AHM"); Employee employee = new Employee(); employee.setName("vishal"); employee.setEmployeeDetail(detail); Transaction transaction = session.getTransaction(); transaction.begin(); session.save(employee); transaction.commit(); Output Hibernate: insert into detail (city) values (?) Hibernate: insert into employee (name) values (?) Hibernate: insert into employee_detail (detail_id, employee_id) values (?,?) Hibernate saves one record in the detail table and one in the employee table and then inserts a record in to the third table, employee_detail, using the primary key column value of the detail and employee tables. How it works… From the output, it's clear how this method works. The code is the same as in the other methods of configuring a one-to-one relationship, but here, hibernate reacts differently. Here, the first two statements of output insert the records in to the detail and employee tables respectively, and the third statement inserts the mapping record in to the third table, employee_detail, using the primary key column value of both the tables. Let's take a look at an option used in the previous code in detail: @JoinTable: This annotation, written on the Employee class, contains the name="employee_detail" attribute and shows that a new intermediate table is created with the name "employee_detail" joinColumns=@JoinColumn(name="employee_id"): This shows that a reference column is created in employee_detail with the name "employee_id", which is the primary key of the employee table inverseJoinColumns=@JoinColumn(name="detail_id"): This shows that a reference column is created in the employee_detail table with the name "detail_id", which is the primary key of the detail table Ultimately, the third table, employee_detail, is created with two columns: one is "employee_id" and the other is "detail_id". Persisting Map Map is used when we want to persist a collection of key/value pairs where the key is always unique. Some common implementations of java.util.Map are java.util.HashMap, java.util.LinkedHashMap, and so on. For this recipe, we will use java.util.HashMap. Getting ready Now, let's assume that we have a scenario where we are going to implement Map<String, String>; here, the String key is the e-mail address label, and the value String is the e-mail address. For example, we will try to construct a data structure similar to <"Personal e-mail", "emailaddress2@provider2.com">, <"Business e-mail", "emailaddress1@provider1.com">. This means that we will create an alias of the actual e-mail address so that we can easily get the e-mail address using the alias and can document it in a more readable form. This type of implementation depends on the custom requirement; here, we can easily get a business e-mail using the Business email key. Use the following code to create the required tables and classes. Creating tables Use the following script to create the tables if you are not using hbm2dll=create|update. This script is for the tables that are generated by hibernate: Use the following code to create the email table: CREATE TABLE `email` ( `Employee_id` BIGINT(20) NOT NULL, `emails` VARCHAR(255) DEFAULT NULL, `emails_KEY` VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL DEFAULT '', PRIMARY KEY (`Employee_id`,`emails_KEY`), KEY `FK5C24B9C38F47B40` (`Employee_id`), CONSTRAINT `FK5C24B9C38F47B40` FOREIGN KEY (`Employee_id`) REFERENCES `employee` (`id`) ); Use the following code to create the employee table: CREATE TABLE `employee` ( `id` BIGINT(20) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT, `name` VARCHAR(255) DEFAULT NULL, PRIMARY KEY (`id`) ); Creating a class Source file: Employee.java @Entity @Table(name = "employee") public class Employee { @Id @GeneratedValue @Column(name = "id") private long id; @Column(name = "name") private String name; @ElementCollection @CollectionTable(name = "email") private Map<String, String> emails; public long getId() { return id; } public void setId(long id) { this.id = id; } public String getName() { return name; } public void setName(String name) { this.name = name; } public Map<String, String> getEmails() { return emails; } public void setEmails(Map<String, String> emails) { this.emails = emails; } @Override public String toString() { return "Employee" + "ntId: " + this.id + "ntName: " + this.name + "ntEmails: " + this.emails; } } How to do it… Here, we will consider how to work with Map and its manipulation operations, such as inserting, retrieving, deleting, and updating. Inserting a record Here, we will create one employee record with two e-mail addresses: Code Employee employee = new Employee(); employee.setName("yogesh"); Map<String, String> emails = new HashMap<String, String>(); emails.put("Business email", "emailaddress1@provider1.com"); emails.put("Personal email", "emailaddress2@provider2.com"); employee.setEmails(emails); session.getTransaction().begin(); session.save(employee); session.getTransaction().commit(); Output Hibernate: insert into employee (name) values (?) Hibernate: insert into email (Employee_id, emails_KEY, emails) values (?,?,?) Hibernate: insert into email (Employee_id, emails_KEY, emails) values (?,?,?) When the code is executed, it inserts one record into the employee table and two records into the email table and also sets a primary key value for the employee record in each record of the email table as a reference. Retrieving a record Here, we know that our record is inserted with id 1. So, we will try to get only that record and understand how Map works in our case. Code Employee employee = (Employee) session.get(Employee.class, 1l); System.out.println(employee.toString()); System.out.println("Business email: " + employee.getEmails().get("Business email")); Output Hibernate: select employee0_.id as id0_0_, employee0_.name as name0_0_ from employee employee0_ where employee0_.id=? Hibernate: select emails0_.Employee_id as Employee1_0_0_, emails0_.emails as emails0_, emails0_.emails_KEY as emails3_0_ from email emails0_ where emails0_.Employee_id=? Employee Id: 1 Name: yogesh Emails: {Personal email=emailaddress2@provider2.com, Business email=emailaddress1@provider1.com} Business email: emailaddress1@provider1.com Here, we can easily get a business e-mail address using the Business email key from the map of e-mail addresses. This is just a simple scenario created to demonstrate how to persist Map in hibernate. Updating a record Here, we will try to add one more e-mail address to Employee#1: Code Employee employee = (Employee) session.get(Employee.class, 1l); Map<String, String> emails = employee.getEmails(); emails.put("Personal email 1", "emailaddress3@provider3.com"); session.getTransaction().begin(); session.saveOrUpdate(employee); session.getTransaction().commit(); System.out.println(employee.toString()); Output Hibernate: select employee0_.id as id0_0_, employee0_.name as name0_0_ from employee employee0_ where employee0_.id=? Hibernate: select emails0_.Employee_id as Employee1_0_0_, emails0_.emails as emails0_, emails0_.emails_KEY as emails3_0_ from email emails0_ where emails0_.Employee_id=? Hibernate: insert into email (Employee_id, emails_KEY, emails) values (?, ?, ?) Employee Id: 2 Name: yogesh Emails: {Personal email 1= emailaddress3@provider3.com, Personal email=emailaddress2@provider2.com, Business email=emailaddress1@provider1.com} Here, we added a new e-mail address with the Personal email 1 key and the value is emailaddress3@provider3.com. Deleting a record Here again, we will try to delete the records of Employee#1 using the following code: Code Employee employee = new Employee(); employee.setId(1); session.getTransaction().begin(); session.delete(employee); session.getTransaction().commit(); Output Hibernate: delete from email where Employee_id=? Hibernate: delete from employee where id=? While deleting the object, hibernate will delete the child records (here, e-mail addresses) as well. How it works… Here again, we need to understand the table structures created by hibernate: Hibernate creates a composite primary key in the email table using two fields: employee_id and emails_KEY. Summary In this article you familiarized yourself with recipes such as working with a first-level cache, one-to-one mapping using a common join table, and persisting map. Resources for Article: Further resources on this subject: PostgreSQL in Action[article] OpenShift for Java Developers[article] Oracle 12c SQL and PL/SQL New Features [article]
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