How-To Tutorials

Adding the tank model For tank battles, we will be using a 3D model available for download from the App Hub website (http://create.msdn.com) in the Simple Animation CODE SAMPLE available at http://xbox.create.msdn.com/en-US/education/catalog/sample/simple_animation. Our first step will be to add the model to our content project in order to bring it into the game. Time for action – adding the tank model We can add the tank model to our project by following these steps: Download the 7089_06_GRAPHICSPACK.ZIP file from the book's website and extract the contents to a temporary folder. Select the .fbx file and the two .tga files from the archive and copy them to the Windows clipboard. Switch to Visual Studio and expand the Tank BattlesContent (Content) project. Right-click on the Models folder and select Paste to copy the files on the clipboard into the folder. Right-click on engine_diff_tex.tga inside the Models folder and select Exclude From Project. Right click on turret_alt_diff_tex.tga inside the Models folder and select Exclude From Project. What just happened? Adding a model to our game is like adding any other type of content, though there are a couple of pitfalls to watch out for. Our model includes two image files (the .tga files&emdash;an image format commonly associated with 3D graphics files because the format is not encumbered by patents) that will provide texture maps for the tank's surfaces. Unlike the other textures we have used, we do not want to include them as part of our content project. Why not? The content processor for models will parse the .fbx file (an Autodesk file format used by several 3D modeling packages) at compile time and look for the textures it references in the directory the model is in. It will automatically process these into .xnb files that are placed in the output folder &endash; Models, for our game. If we were to also include these textures in our content project, the standard texture processor would convert the image just like it does with the textures we normally use. When the model processor comes along and tries to convert the texture, an .xnb file with the same name will already exist in the Models folder, causing compile time errors. Incidentally, even though the images associated with our model are not included in our content project directly, they still get built by the content pipeline and stored in the output directory as .xnb files. They can be loaded just like any other Texture2D object with the Content.Load() method. Free 3D modeling software There are a number of freely available 3D modeling packages downloadable on the Web that you can use to create your own 3D content. Some of these include:   Blender: A free, open source 3D modeling and animation package. Feature rich, and very powerful. Blender can be found at http://www.blender.org. Wings 3D: Free, open source 3D modeling package. Does not support animation, but includes many useful modeling features. Wings 3D can be found at http://wings3d.com. Softimage Mod Tool: A modeling and animation package from Autodesk. The Softimage Mod Tool is available freely for non-commercial use. A version with a commercial-friendly license is also available to XNA Creator's Club members at http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/pc/item?id=13571257&siteID=123112.         Building tanks Now that the model is part of our project, we need to create a class that will manage everything about a tank. While we could simply load the model in our TankBattlesGame class, we need more than one tank, and duplicating all of the items necessary to handle both tanks does not make sense. Time for action – building the Tank class We can build the Tank class using the following steps: Add a new class file called Tank.cs to the Tank Battles project. Add the following using directives to the top of the Tank.cs class file: using Microsoft.Xna.Framework; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Graphics; Add the following fields to the Tank class: #region Fields private Model model; private GraphicsDevice device; private Vector3 position; private float tankRotation; private float turretRotation; private float gunElevation; private Matrix baseTurretTransform; private Matrix baseGunTransform; private Matrix[] boneTransforms; #endregion Add the following properties to the Tank class: #region Properties public Vector3 Position { get { return position; } set { position = value; } } public float TankRotation { get { return tankRotation; } set { tankRotation = MathHelper.WrapAngle(value); } } public float TurretRotation { get { return turretRotation; } set { turretRotation = MathHelper.WrapAngle(value); } } public float GunElevation { get { return gunElevation; } set { gunElevation = MathHelper.Clamp( value, MathHelper.ToRadians(-90), MathHelper.ToRadians(0)); } } #endregion Add the Draw() method to the Tank class, as follows: #region Draw public void Draw(ArcBallCamera camera) { model.Root.Transform = Matrix.Identity * Matrix.CreateScale(0.005f) * Matrix.CreateRotationY(TankRotation) * Matrix.CreateTranslation(Position); model.CopyAbsoluteBoneTransformsTo(boneTransforms); foreach (ModelMesh mesh in model.Meshes) { foreach (BasicEffect basicEffect in mesh.Effects) { basicEffect.World = boneTransforms[mesh.ParentBone. Index]; basicEffect.View = camera.View; basicEffect.Projection = camera.Projection; basicEffect.EnableDefaultLighting(); } mesh.Draw(); } } #endregion In the declarations area of the TankBattlesGame class, add a new List object to hold a list of Tank objects, as follows: List tanks = new List(); Create a temporary tank so we can see it in action by adding the following to the end of the LoadContent() method of the TankBattlesGame class: tanks.Add( new Tank( GraphicsDevice, Content.Load(@"Modelstank"), new Vector3(61, 40, 61))); In the Draw() method of the TankBattlesGame class, add a loop to draw all of the Tank objects in the tank's list after the terrain has been drawn, as follows: foreach (Tank tank in tanks) { tank.Draw(camera); } Execute the game. Use your mouse to rotate and zoom in on the tank floating above the top of the central mountain in the scene, as shown in the following screenshot: What just happened? The Tank class stores the model that will be used to draw the tank in the model field. Just as with our terrain, we need a reference to the game's GraphicsDevice in order to draw our model when necessary. In addition to this information, we have fields (and corresponding properties) to represent the position of the tank, and the rotation angle of three components of the model. The first, TankRotation, determines the angle at which the entire tank is rotated. As the turret of the tank can rotate independently of the direction in which the tank itself is facing, we store the rotation angle of the turret in TurretRotation. Both TankRotation and TurretRotation contain code in their property setters to wrap their angles around if we go past a full circle in either direction. The last angle we want to track is the elevation angle of the gun attached to the turret. This angle can range from 0 degrees (pointing straight out from the side of the turret) to -90 degrees (pointing straight up). This angle is stored in the GunElevation property. The last field added in step 3 is called boneTransforms, and is an array of matrices. We further define this array while defining the Tank class' constructor by creating an empty array with a number of elements equal to the number of bones in the model. But what exactly are bones? When a 3D artist creates a model, they can define joints that determine how the various pieces of the model are connected. This process is referred to as "rigging" the model, and a model that has been set up this way is sometimes referred to as "rigged for animation". The bones in the model are defined with relationships to each other, so that when a bone higher up in the hierarchy moves, all of the lower bones are moved in relation to it. Think for a moment of one of your fingers. It is composed of three distinct bones separated by joints. If you move the bone nearest to your palm, the other two bones move as well – they have to if your finger bones are going to stay connected! The same is true of the components in our tank. When the tank rotates, all of its pieces rotate as well. Rotating the turret moves the cannon, but has no effect on the body or the wheels. Moving the cannon has no effect on any other parts of the model, but it is hinged at its base, so that rotating the cannon joint makes the cannon appear to elevate up and down around one end instead of spinning around its center. We will come back to these bones in just a moment, but let's first look at the current Draw() method before we expand it to account for bone-based animation. Model.Root refers to the highest level bone in the model's hierarchy. Transforming this bone will transform the entire model, so our basic scaling, rotation, and positioning happen here. Notice that we are drastically scaling down the model of the tank, to a scale of 0.005f. The tank model is quite large in raw units, so we need to scale it to a size that is in line with the scale we used for our terrain. Next, we use the boneTransforms array we created earlier by calling the model's CopyAbsoluteBoneTransformsTo() method. This method calculates the resultant transforms for each of the bones in the model, taking into account all of the parent bones above it, and copies these values into the specified array. We then loop through each mesh in the model. A mesh is an independent piece of the model, representing a movable part. Each of these meshes can have multiple effects tied to it, so we loop through those as well, using an instance of BasicEffect created on the spot to render the meshes. In order to render each mesh, we establish the mesh's world location by looking up the mesh's parent bone transformation and storing it in the World matrix. We apply our View and Projection matrices just like before, and enable default lighting on the effect. Finally, we draw the mesh, which sends the triangles making up this portion of the model out to the graphics card. The tank model The tank model we are using is from the Simple Animation sample for XNA 4.0, available on Microsoft's MSDN website at http://xbox.create.msdn.com/en-US/education/catalog/sample/simple_animation. Bringing things down to earth You might have noticed that our tank is not actually sitting on the ground. In fact, we have set our terrain scaling so that the highest point in the terrain is at 30 units, while the tank is positioned at 40 units above the X-Z plane. Given a (X,Z) coordinate pair, we need to come up with a way to determine what height we should place our tank at, based on the terrain. Time for action – terrain heights To place our tank appropriately on the terrain, we first need to calculate, then place our tank there. This is done in the following steps: Add a helper method to the Terrain class to calculate the height based on a given coordinate as follows: #region Helper Methods public float GetHeight(float x, float z) { int xmin = (int)Math.Floor(x); int xmax = xmin + 1; int zmin = (int)Math.Floor(z); int zmax = zmin + 1; if ( (xmin < 0) || (zmin < 0) || (xmax > heights.GetUpperBound(0)) || (zmax > heights.GetUpperBound(1))) { return 0; } Vector3 p1 = new Vector3(xmin, heights[xmin, zmax], zmax); Vector3 p2 = new Vector3(xmax, heights[xmax, zmin], zmin); Vector3 p3; if ((x - xmin) + (z - zmin) <= 1) { p3 = new Vector3(xmin, heights[xmin, zmin], zmin); } else { p3 = new Vector3(xmax, heights[xmax, zmax], zmax); } Plane plane = new Plane(p1, p2, p3); Ray ray = new Ray(new Vector3(x, 0, z), Vector3.Up); float? height = ray.Intersects(plane); return height.HasValue ? height.Value : 0f; } #endregion In the LoadContent() method of the TankBattlesGame class, modify the statement that adds a tank to the battlefield to utilize the GetHeight() method as follows: tanks.Add( new Tank( GraphicsDevice, Content.Load(@"Modelstank"), new Vector3(61, terrain.GetHeight(61,61), 61))); Execute the game and view the tank, now placed on the terrain as shown in the following screenshot: What just happened? You might be tempted to simply grab the nearest (X, Z) coordinate from the heights[] array in the Terrain class and use that as the height for the tank. In fact, in many cases that might work. You could also average the four surrounding points and use that height, which would account for very steep slopes. The drawbacks with those approaches will not be entirely evident in Tank Battles, as our tanks are stationary. If the tanks were mobile, you would see the elevation of the tank jump between heights jarringly as the tank moved across the terrain because each virtual square of terrain that the tank entered would have only one height. In the GetHeight() method that we just saw, we take a different approach. Recall that the way our terrain is laid out, it grows along the positive X and Z axes. If we imagine looking down from a positive Y height onto our terrain with an orientation where the X axis grows to the right and the Z axis grows downward, we would have something like the following: As we discussed when we created our index buffer, our terrain is divided up into squares whose corners are exactly 1 unit apart. Unfortunately, these squares do not help us in determining the exact height of any given point, because each of the four points of the square can theoretically have any height from 0 to 30 in the case of our terrain scale. Remember though, that each square is divided into two triangles. The triangle is the basic unit of drawing for our 3D graphics. Each triangle is composed of three points, and we know that three points can be used to define a plane. We can use XNA's Plane class to represent the plane defined by an individual triangle on our terrain mesh. To do so, we just need to know which triangle we want to use to create the plane. In order to determine this, we first get the (X, Z) coordinates (relative to the view in the preceding figure) of the upper-left corner of the square our point is located in. We determine this point by dropping any fractional part of the x and z coordinates and storing the values in xmin and zmin for later use. We check to make sure that the values we will be looking up in the heights[] array are valid (greater than zero and less than or equal to the highest element in each direction in the array). This could happen if we ask for the height of a position that is outside the bounds of our map's height. Instead of crashing the game, we will simply return a zero. It should not happen in our code, but it is better to account for the possibility than be surprised later. We define three points, represented as Vector3 values p1, p2, and p3. We can see right away that no matter which of the two triangles we pick, the (xmax, zmin) and (xmin, zmax) points will be included in our plane, so their values are set right away. To decide which of the final two points to use, we need to determine which side of the central dividing line the point we are looking for lies in. This actually turns out to be fairly simple to do for the squares we are using. In the case of our triangle, if we eliminate the integer portion of our X and Z coordinates (leaving only the fractional part that tells us how far into the square we are), the sum of both of these values will be less than or equal to the size of one grid square (1 in our case) if we are in the upper left triangle. Otherwise our point is in the right triangle. The code if ((x - xmin) + (z - zmin) <= 1) performs this check, and sets the value of p3 to either (xmin, zmin) or (xmax, zmax) depending on the result. Once we have our three points, we ask XNA to construct a Plane using them, and then we construct another new type of object we have not yet used – an object of the Ray class. A Ray has a base point, represented by a Vector3, and a direction – also represented by a Vector3. Think of a Ray as an infinitely long arrow that starts somewhere in our world and heads off in a given direction forever. In the case of the Ray we are using, the starting point is at the zero point on the Y axis, and the coordinates we passed into the method for X and Z. We specify Vector3.Up as the direction the Ray is pointing in. Remember from the FPS camera that Vector3.Up has an actual value of (0, 1, 0), or pointing up along the positive Y axis. The Ray class has an Intersects() method that returns the distance from the origin point along the Ray where the Ray intersects a given Plane. We must assign the return value of this method to a float? instead of a normal float. You may not be familiar with this notation, but the question mark at the end of the type specifies that the value is nullable—that is, it might contain a value, but it could also just contain a null value. In the case of the Ray.Intersects() method, the method will return null if the object of Ray class does not intersect the object of the Plane class at any point. This should never happen with our terrain height code, but we need to account for the possibility. When using a nullable float, we need to check to make sure that the variable actually has a value before trying to use it. In this case, we use the HasValue property of the variable. If it does have one, we return it. Otherwise we return a default value of zero.

Managing composite lifecycles Every composite has a state, mode, and associated metadata. The state can be up (started) or down (shut down). The mode can either be active or retired. Metadata is stored in the Metadata Store (MDS), which is a database-based repository used by Oracle SOA Suite 11g, and consists of information that includes default revision number, last modification date, deployment and redeployment times, and instance statistics. Before walking through how to manage the state and mode of composites, we will begin by describing composite revisions. Understanding revisions When a HelloWorld composite is deployed to the server, a revision is required during the deployment. Thus, the service's Web Services Description Language (WSDL) can be accessed via a URL similar to the following, clearly indicating a revision of "1.0" after the composite name: http://soahost1:8001/soa-infra/services/default/HelloWorld!1.0/HelloWorld.wsdl However, there may be a case where a new version of the service needs to be deployed and that this version has a different implementation from the existing one. Overwriting the existing version may not be the right option as it would break all client applications that are already utilizing the service. Thus, it makes sense to deploy the new service using a different revision, such as revision "2.0", and thus make both the versions available simultaneously. It would, therefore, be accessible at a different URL: http://soahost1:8001/soa-infra/services/default/HelloWorld!2.0/HelloWorld.wsdl Now, the old and new services are both available and accessible. Clients accessing revision 1.0 of the composite may transition to revision 2.0 at their own pace. If multiple revisions of the same service are deployed, one of them must be specified as the default revision. This can be specified during deployment time or changed at runtime. The default revision would thus be accessed at a revision-independent URL: http://soahost1:8001/soa-infra/services/default/HelloWorld/HelloWorld.wsdl Typically, client applications will access the default revision. Revisions are advantageous in environments where maintaining old and new versions of the same composite is required, particularly if it involves breaking changes. As shown in the following screenshot, default revisions are indicated by a green dot in the list of composites for a given partition. Changing the composite default revision at runtime If a composite is not the default revision, the Set As Default... button will appear in the composite page, as shown in the following screenshot. By clicking on this button, it is possible at this point to set the revision of this composite as the default revision if you choose to. If a default composite application is undeployed, the default revision is automatically changed to the last deployed revision. Deploying, redeploying, and undeploying composites Composites are deployed and redeployed as SOA Archives or SARs, which are similar to traditional JAR files. Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control provides the ability to deploy, redeploy, and undeploy a SAR from the convenience and simplicity of a web browser. Though deploying via the console is extremely easy, the following two important points should be considered: A SAR file is a special JAR file that requires a prefix of sca_ and may include environment-specific information bundled within the JAR file. For example, the composite may reference a web service on some external development server. The URL of this web service is hardcoded in the JAR file. Deploying the same JAR to a production server would not be valid. Deployment of multiple composites via the console is cumbersome and time consuming. Using ant is the preferred method for deploying multiple SARs and this will be covered in a subsequent section in this article. Deploying a composite To deploy a single composite from the console: On the navigator, expand Farm_[Domain] | SOA and right-click on soa-infra. Navigate to SOA Deployment | Deploy. In the field labeled Archive is on the machine where the web browser is running , click on the Browse... button and locate your SAR file (for example, C:\svn\SOA11g\HelloWorld\deploy\sca_HelloWorld_rev1.0.jar). Click on Next. From the drop-down list, select the partition to which you wish to deploy this composite. Click on Next. Choose the radio button Deploy as default revision or Do not change the default revision. Click on the Deploy button. When the HelloWorld composite is deployed as revision 1.0 and as the default version, an entry is logged in the soa_server1.out file (located under $MW_HOME/user_projects/domains/soa_domain/servers/soa_server1/logs/soa_server1.out) as follows: INFO: DeploymentEventPublisher.invoke Publishing deploy event for default/HelloWorld!1.0*soa_fe9ee226-4f29-4db7-b4be- d7410bbc13ffdefault/HelloWorld!1.0*soa_fe9ee226-4f29-4db7-b4be- d7410bbc13ff Once it is deployed, the service becomes available immediately. If the composite uses inbound resources (such as the JMS Adapter, which consumes from a JMS queue), the consumption begins immediately once the composite is deployed. The rest of the instructions in this chapter assume that the HelloWorld composite is deployed to the default partition. Redeploying a composite To redeploy a single composite from the console: On the navigator, expand Farm_[Domain] | SOA | soa-infra. Expand the partition (for example, default) and right-click on the composite name that you wish to redeploy (for example, HelloWorld). Navigate to SOA Deployment | Redeploy. In the field labeled Archive is on the machine where the web browser is running, click on the Browse button and locate your SAR file (for example, C:\svn\SOA11g\HelloWorld\deploy\sca_HelloWorld_rev1.0.jar). Click on Next. Choose the radio button Deploy as default revision or Do not change the default revision. Click on the Redeploy button. Redeploying a composite overwrites the existing revision. The state of the instances of the older revision are all changed to stale. Undeploying a composite To undeploy a single composite from the console: On the navigator, expand Farm_[Domain] | SOA | soa-infra. Expand the partition (for example, default) and right-click on the composite name that you wish to undeploy (for example, HelloWorld). Navigate to SOA Deployment | Undeploy. Click on the Undeploy button. In addition to the service no longer being available, undeploying a composite (or a composite revision) changes the state of all historical instances to stale, denoted by the icon . If the default revision of the composite is undeployed, the last deployed revision of the composite becomes the default. Starting up and shutting down composites Composites are automatically started up when they are deployed. If a composite is shut down, all requests to the composite are rejected, including callbacks. New requests are not served and new instances are not created. However, all running instances are allowed to complete. Though starting up and shutting down composites via the console is extremely easy, if you require to start up or shut down multiple composites, two approaches are available (discussed in detail later in this article): Composites deployed to the same partition can all be started up or all be shut down with a single operation. Ant can be used to automate the startup and shutdown of composites. Starting a composite To start up a single composite from the console: On the navigator, expand Farm_[Domain] | SOA | soa-infra. Expand the default partition, and click on the HelloWorld composite and the revision. Click on the Start Up button, which will only appear if the composite is already shut down. Shutting down a composite To shut down a single composite from the console: On the navigator, expand Farm_[Domain] | SOA | soa-infra. Expand the partition (for example, default), choose from among the deployed composites, and click on the composite name and the revision (for example, HelloWorld[1.0]). Click on the Shut Down button, which will only appear if the composite is already started up. Retiring and activating composites Composites have two modes—active and retired. These are often confused with composite states, which can be up (started) and down (shut down). Composites are automatically activated when they are deployed (in fact, they are also started up as well, so active and started composites are really identical in nature). However, when a composite is retired, new instances cannot be created. Existing instances, however, continue to completion. This includes instances that receive callbacks. The ability to receive callbacks and time based waits is the primary difference between a retired composite and a composite that has been shut down. The only difference between activating a composite and starting up a composite is that activating the composite affects the retired mode, while starting up a composite affects the shutdown state. Retiring a composite To retire a single composite from the console: On the navigator, expand Farm_[Domain] | SOA | soa-infra. Expand the partition (for example, default) and click on the composite name (for example, HelloWorld). Click on the Retire button, which will only appear if the composite is already active. Activating a composite To activate a single composite from the console: On the navigator, expand Farm_[Domain] | SOA | soa-infra. Expand the partition (for exampple, default) and click on the composite name (for exampple, HelloWorld). Click on the Activate button, which will only appear if the composite is already retired. Deleting instances When an SOA composite application is invoked, a new composite instance is created. Every instance has a unique ID and its details can be retrieved from Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control. Administrators are expected to delete completed instances and free up their data periodically to control growth. Too much instance-related data requires additional storage and it also impacts the performance of the console. Deleting instances is quite easy as demonstrated in the following steps: On the navigator, expand Farm_[Domain] | SOA | soa-infra. Expand the partition (for example, default) and click on the composite name (for example, HelloWorld). Click on the Instances tab. At this point, you can delete instances in one of the following two ways: Highlight the list of instances (press the Ctrl key and click on each composite one by one) and click on the Delete Selected button. Click on the Delete With Options button. From here you can delete instances older than a specific time or delete all instances within a time frame that have a certain state. We can also bulk delete/purge composite instances from the underlying database dehydration store through the use of SQL scripts. Structuring composite deployments with partitions Prior to Oracle SOA Suite11gPS2 (11.1.1.3), as hundreds of composites were deployed to the SOA server, they were all listed in alphabetical order on the console, which made it a burden to manage and was not very structured. Oracle recognized the lack of structure and, therefore, introduced the concept of partitions to help better organize where to deploy your composites. However, partitions are just logical separations to group your composites together. Domain libraries, extension modules, server Java Naming and Directory Interface (JNDI), and infrastructure properties are shared across all partitions. Partitions do not have their own configuration or logging. They serve no purpose other than grouping composites into separate categories. Thus, for example, code for your Human Resources integrations can reside in a partition separate from your EBS integrations, offering better structuring and organization. There are a few bulk lifecycle management tasks that can be performed on all SOA composite applications in a partition, as we will describe in this section. For example, all composites within a partition can be shut down with a single operation. The preceding screenshot shows a list of partitions in the navigator under soa-infra. Each partition may have one or more composite applications deployed to it. Partitions cannot be cascaded (that is, a partition cannot have a child partition). The default partition Oracle SOA Suite11gshould have, as a minimum, one partition. The default partition is created automatically when the product is installed, but it can be deleted afterwards if you choose to. You must always have at least one partition to allow you to deploy composites. Managing partitions You can perform several management tasks pertaining to partitions. These tasks include: Creating a partition Deleting a partition, including all composites within the partition Starting up and shutting down all composites in a partition Retiring and activating all composites in a partition Undeploying all composites in a partition The simplest method to manage partitions is via the Manage Partitions page. Simply navigate to this page to create, delete, or perform bulk lifecycle management operations on the partitions: Right-click on soa-infra, then click on Manage Partitions to access the Manage Partitions page. At this point, you can do one of the following four things: Click on the Create button to create a partition. Highlight an existing partition and click on the Delete button to delete the partition. Highlight an existing partition and click on the Composites Control button to start up, shut down, activate, or retire all composites within that partition. Highlight an existing partition and click on the Deployment button to undeploy all composites within this partition, or to deploy a single composite to this partition. The Manage Partitions page with each of its action buttons is shown in the following screenshot. The Composites Control and Deployment buttons are only activated when a partition is highlighted. Partitions do not have a state or a mode. Thus, for example, you are not shutting down the partition, you are actually shutting down all composites within the partition. Creating a partition When creating a partition, be mindful of the following naming conventions: Letters, numbers, underscores, and dashes are allowed (dashes are not allowed as the first character) Spaces are not allowed Also, be aware that partitions cannot be renamed once they are created. Deleting a partition When considering deleting partitions, remember that there always needs to be one partition in existence. If you delete all partitions, it will not be possible to deploy any code to the server. If you delete a partition, all composites within that partition are automatically undeployed. Grouping SOA composite applications into partitions Typically developers choose a partition to which a particular composite should be deployed, but as an administrator, you must understand its implications. When composites are deployed—whether through JDeveloper, the console, or ant—a partition name must be specified. Code deployed to the default partition will result in a different WSDL URL than that deployed to, for example, the HumanResources partition as shown here: http://soahost1:8001/soa-infra/services/default/HelloWorld/HelloWorld.wsdl http://soahost1:8001/soa-infra/services/HumanResources/HelloWorld/HelloWorld.wsdl Considerations for partition management There are some considerations regarding partitions that you should be aware of: Avoid creating partitions called Dev, Test, and Prod. Though possible, partitions are not designed to separate by environment. Domain libraries and SOA extensions (such as MQs and AQs) are shared by all partitions, so it is not possible to have different versions of these libraries or extensions for each partition. It is not possible to have the same JNDI address for outbound connection pools in Resource Adapters pointing to different queue manager or data sources for composites deployed in different partitions. Oracle SOA Suite 11 g parameters such as timeouts, threads, and recovery configurations are defined by WebLogic Server domain, not by partition. If composites that use inbound adapters (such as the inbound AQ Adapter, in which messages are automatically dequeued from an Oracle AQ) are deployed to multiple partitions, it is not guaranteed which composite will dequeue the inbound message (that is, they will compete with each other). Setting up ant for automated composite management All component management tasks that can be performed manually through the web-based Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control console can also be executed with a script through the command-line utility ant. In this section, we describe how to use ant to start up, shut down, activate, and retire composites, as well as package and deploy them. Oracle SOA Suite11gships all necessary ant scripts to perform these tasks, and they are quite easy to use. Setting the environment Here, we will describe how to set both Linux and Microsoft Windows based environments to allow you to run your ant commands through the command line. Your ant scripts do not have to be installed on the same machine running Oracle SOA Suite 11g. In fact, it is not unusual to dedicate a single machine or server, which would host your ant scripts, allowing you to centralize the startup, shutdown, and deployment of your SOA composites to multiple target environments. You will also see how ant enables automated build management for your environment in later sections of this artilce. Setting the environment path for ant In your environment, we assume that Oracle SOA Suite 11 g is installed, which is recommended, as it will include all the required binaries to run ant. The Middleware Home, the Oracle SOA Suite 11 g Home, the Java Home, WebLogic Server username and password, and SOA server host and port will need to be updated appropriately to reflect your environment. Directory locations and JDK versions may differ depending on the patchset of Oracle SOA Suite11ginstalled. These commands must be executed to set your environment paths before running any ant command. On Linux/Unix In this article, we will assume that your code will reside under $CODE under the same Unix account where the Middleware Home and other binaries are installed. This is because the ant scripts require access to specific product libraries. The scripts assume a bash-based shell, so some changes may be required if other shells are used. To set your environment, we recommend first creating a shell script setAntEnv.sh with the following content while keeping in mind to replace the highlighted values to suit your environment and installation: export USERNAME=weblogic export PASSWORD=welcome1 export SOAHOST=soahost1 export SOAPORT=8001 export SOAURL=http://${SOAHOST}:${SOAPORT}export CODE=/u01/svn/SOA11g export MW_HOME=/u01/app/oracle/Middleware export ORACLE_HOME=$MW_HOME/Oracle_SOA1 export JAVA_HOME=$MW_HOME/jdk160_24 export ANT_HOME=$MW_HOME/modules/org.apache.ant_1.7.1 export PATH=$JAVA_HOME/bin:$ANT_HOME/bin:$ANT_HOME/lib:$PATH:. Don't forget to change the permissions of the script to executable: chmod 750 setAntEnv.sh Prior to running any ant command in the remainder of the chapter, simply source this shell script once to set your environment for your session as follows: source setAntEnv.sh Finally, make sure to change to the $ORACLE_HOME/bin directory before running any of the ant commands: cd $ORACLE_HOME/bin On Windows We will assume that your code will reside under %CODE%. To set your environment, we recommend first creating a shell script setAntEnv.bat with the following content: set USERNAME=weblogic set PASSWORD=welcome1 set SOAHOST=soahost1 set SOAPORT=8001 set SOAURL=http://soaHost:soaPort set CODE=c:\svn\SOA11g set MW_HOME=C:\Oracle\Middleware set ORACLE_HOME=%MW_HOME%\Oracle_SOA1 set JAVA_HOME=%ORACLE_HOME%\jdk160_24 set ANT_HOME=%ORACLE_HOME%\modules\org.apache.ant_1.7.1 set PATH=%JAVA_HOME%\bin;%ANT_HOME%\bin;%ANT_HOME%\lib;%PATH% Make sure to update the highlighted text in the preceding script, to reflect your actual environment and installation. In your Windows environment, if you do not have Oracle SOA Suite11gand instead only have Oracle JDeveloper11ginstalled, only a few modifications are required, and you should use the following commands instead: set USERNAME=weblogic set PASSWORD=welcome1 set SOAHOST=soahost1 set SOAPORT=8001 set SOAURL=http://%SOAHOST%:%SOAPORT% set CODE=c:\svn\SOA11g set ORACLE_HOME=C:\Oracle\jdev\jdeveloper set JAVA_HOME=%ORACLE_HOME%\..\jdk160_24 set ANT_HOME=%ORACLE_HOME%\..\modules\org.apache.ant_1.7.1 set PATH=%JAVA_HOME%\bin;%ANT_HOME%\bin;%ANT_HOME%\lib;%PATH% But only for installations of Oracle JDeveloper 11g, you must also perform a one-time copy of ant-contrib-1.0b3.jar. The file can be downloaded from http://sourceforge.net/projects/ant-contrib/files/ant-contrib/. Simply copy the file to %ANT_HOME%\lib as follows: copy c:\temp\ant-contrib-1.0b3.jar %ANT_HOME%\lib Now that your batch script is created, simply run it once in the command prompt to set your environment for your session: setAntEnv.bat Finally, make sure to change to the %ORACLE_HOME%\bin directory before running any of the ant commands: cd %ORACLE_HOME%\bin All ant commands in the remainder of this chapter will be Linux based. For Windows, simply replace the Linux specific environment variables such as $USERNAME and $SOAHOST with their Windows equivalent of %USERNAME% and %SOAHOST%. Also ensure that the slashes are reversed in the code paths. For example, $CODE/HelloWorld/deploy/sca_HelloWorld_rev1.0.jar in Linux would be %CODE%\HelloWorld\deploy\sca_HelloWorld_rev1.0.jar in Windows.

Managing composite lifecycles Every composite has a state, mode, and associated metadata. The state can be up (started) or down (shut down). The mode can either be active or retired. Metadata is stored in the Metadata Store (MDS), which is a database-based repository used by Oracle SOA Suite 11g, and consists of information that includes default revision number, last modification date, deployment and redeployment times, and instance statistics. Before walking through how to manage the state and mode of composites, we will begin by describing composite revisions. Understanding revisions When a HelloWorld composite is deployed to the server, a revision is required during the deployment. Thus, the service's Web Services Description Language (WSDL) can be accessed via a URL similar to the following, clearly indicating a revision of "1.0" after the composite name: http://soahost1:8001/soa-infra/services/default/HelloWorld!1.0/HelloWorld.wsdl However, there may be a case where a new version of the service needs to be deployed and that this version has a different implementation from the existing one. Overwriting the existing version may not be the right option as it would break all client applications that are already utilizing the service. Thus, it makes sense to deploy the new service using a different revision, such as revision "2.0", and thus make both the versions available simultaneously. It would, therefore, be accessible at a different URL: http://soahost1:8001/soa-infra/services/default/HelloWorld!2.0/HelloWorld.wsdl Now, the old and new services are both available and accessible. Clients accessing revision 1.0 of the composite may transition to revision 2.0 at their own pace. If multiple revisions of the same service are deployed, one of them must be specified as the default revision. This can be specified during deployment time or changed at runtime. The default revision would thus be accessed at a revision-independent URL: http://soahost1:8001/soa-infra/services/default/HelloWorld/HelloWorld.wsdl Typically, client applications will access the default revision. Revisions are advantageous in environments where maintaining old and new versions of the same composite is required, particularly if it involves breaking changes. As shown in the following screenshot, default revisions are indicated by a green dot in the list of composites for a given partition. Changing the composite default revision at runtime If a composite is not the default revision, the Set As Default... button will appear in the composite page, as shown in the following screenshot. By clicking on this button, it is possible at this point to set the revision of this composite as the default revision if you choose to. If a default composite application is undeployed, the default revision is automatically changed to the last deployed revision. Deploying, redeploying, and undeploying composites Composites are deployed and redeployed as SOA Archives or SARs, which are similar to traditional JAR files. Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control provides the ability to deploy, redeploy, and undeploy a SAR from the convenience and simplicity of a web browser. Though deploying via the console is extremely easy, the following two important points should be considered: A SAR file is a special JAR file that requires a prefix of sca_ and may include environment-specific information bundled within the JAR file. For example, the composite may reference a web service on some external development server. The URL of this web service is hardcoded in the JAR file. Deploying the same JAR to a production server would not be valid. Deployment of multiple composites via the console is cumbersome and time consuming. Using ant is the preferred method for deploying multiple SARs and this will be covered in a subsequent section in this article. Deploying a composite To deploy a single composite from the console: On the navigator, expand Farm_[Domain] | SOA and right-click on soa-infra. Navigate to SOA Deployment | Deploy. In the field labeled Archive is on the machine where the web browser is running , click on the Browse... button and locate your SAR file (for example, C:svnSOA11gHelloWorlddeploysca_HelloWorld_rev1.0.jar). Click on Next. From the drop-down list, select the partition to which you wish to deploy this composite. Click on Next. Choose the radio button Deploy as default revision or Do not change the default revision. Click on the Deploy button. When the HelloWorld composite is deployed as revision 1.0 and as the default version, an entry is logged in the soa_server1.out file (located under $MW_HOME/user_projects/domains/soa_domain/servers/soa_server1/logs/soa_server1.out) as follows: INFO: DeploymentEventPublisher.invoke Publishing deploy event for default/HelloWorld!1.0*soa_fe9ee226-4f29-4db7-b4be- d7410bbc13ffdefault/HelloWorld!1.0*soa_fe9ee226-4f29-4db7-b4be- d7410bbc13ff Once it is deployed, the service becomes available immediately. If the composite uses inbound resources (such as the JMS Adapter, which consumes from a JMS queue), the consumption begins immediately once the composite is deployed. The rest of the instructions in this chapter assume that the HelloWorld composite is deployed to the default partition. Redeploying a composite To redeploy a single composite from the console: On the navigator, expand Farm_[Domain] | SOA | soa-infra. Expand the partition (for example, default) and right-click on the composite name that you wish to redeploy (for example, HelloWorld). Navigate to SOA Deployment | Redeploy. In the field labeled Archive is on the machine where the web browser is running, click on the Browse button and locate your SAR file (for example, C:svnSOA11gHelloWorlddeploysca_HelloWorld_rev1.0.jar). Click on Next. Choose the radio button Deploy as default revision or Do not change the default revision. Click on the Redeploy button. Redeploying a composite overwrites the existing revision. The state of the instances of the older revision are all changed to stale. Undeploying a composite To undeploy a single composite from the console: On the navigator, expand Farm_[Domain] | SOA | soa-infra. Expand the partition (for example, default) and right-click on the composite name that you wish to undeploy (for example, HelloWorld). Navigate to SOA Deployment | Undeploy. Click on the Undeploy button. In addition to the service no longer being available, undeploying a composite (or a composite revision) changes the state of all historical instances to stale, denoted by the icon . If the default revision of the composite is undeployed, the last deployed revision of the composite becomes the default. Starting up and shutting down composites Composites are automatically started up when they are deployed. If a composite is shut down, all requests to the composite are rejected, including callbacks. New requests are not served and new instances are not created. However, all running instances are allowed to complete. Though starting up and shutting down composites via the console is extremely easy, if you require to start up or shut down multiple composites, two approaches are available (discussed in detail later in this article): Composites deployed to the same partition can all be started up or all be shut down with a single operation. Ant can be used to automate the startup and shutdown of composites. Starting a composite To start up a single composite from the console: On the navigator, expand Farm_[Domain] | SOA | soa-infra. Expand the default partition, and click on the HelloWorld composite and the revision. Click on the Start Up button, which will only appear if the composite is already shut down. Shutting down a composite To shut down a single composite from the console: On the navigator, expand Farm_[Domain] | SOA | soa-infra. Expand the partition (for example, default), choose from among the deployed composites, and click on the composite name and the revision (for example, HelloWorld[1.0]). Click on the Shut Down button, which will only appear if the composite is already started up. Retiring and activating composites Composites have two modes—active and retired. These are often confused with composite states, which can be up (started) and down (shut down). Composites are automatically activated when they are deployed (in fact, they are also started up as well, so active and started composites are really identical in nature). However, when a composite is retired, new instances cannot be created. Existing instances, however, continue to completion. This includes instances that receive callbacks. The ability to receive callbacks and time based waits is the primary difference between a retired composite and a composite that has been shut down. The only difference between activating a composite and starting up a composite is that activating the composite affects the retired mode, while starting up a composite affects the shutdown state. Retiring a composite To retire a single composite from the console: On the navigator, expand Farm_[Domain] | SOA | soa-infra. Expand the partition (for example, default) and click on the composite name (for example, HelloWorld). Click on the Retire button, which will only appear if the composite is already active. Activating a composite To activate a single composite from the console: On the navigator, expand Farm_[Domain] | SOA | soa-infra. Expand the partition (for exampple, default) and click on the composite name (for exampple, HelloWorld). Click on the Activate button, which will only appear if the composite is already retired. Deleting instances When an SOA composite application is invoked, a new composite instance is created. Every instance has a unique ID and its details can be retrieved from Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control. Administrators are expected to delete completed instances and free up their data periodically to control growth. Too much instance-related data requires additional storage and it also impacts the performance of the console. Deleting instances is quite easy as demonstrated in the following steps: On the navigator, expand Farm_[Domain] | SOA | soa-infra. Expand the partition (for example, default) and click on the composite name (for example, HelloWorld). Click on the Instances tab. At this point, you can delete instances in one of the following two ways: Highlight the list of instances (press the Ctrl key and click on each composite one by one) and click on the Delete Selected button. Click on the Delete With Options button. From here you can delete instances older than a specific time or delete all instances within a time frame that have a certain state. We can also bulk delete/purge composite instances from the underlying database dehydration store through the use of SQL scripts. Structuring composite deployments with partitions Prior to Oracle SOA Suite11gPS2 (11.1.1.3), as hundreds of composites were deployed to the SOA server, they were all listed in alphabetical order on the console, which made it a burden to manage and was not very structured. Oracle recognized the lack of structure and, therefore, introduced the concept of partitions to help better organize where to deploy your composites. However, partitions are just logical separations to group your composites together. Domain libraries, extension modules, server Java Naming and Directory Interface (JNDI), and infrastructure properties are shared across all partitions. Partitions do not have their own configuration or logging. They serve no purpose other than grouping composites into separate categories. Thus, for example, code for your Human Resources integrations can reside in a partition separate from your EBS integrations, offering better structuring and organization. There are a few bulk lifecycle management tasks that can be performed on all SOA composite applications in a partition, as we will describe in this section. For example, all composites within a partition can be shut down with a single operation. The preceding screenshot shows a list of partitions in the navigator under soa-infra. Each partition may have one or more composite applications deployed to it. Partitions cannot be cascaded (that is, a partition cannot have a child partition). The default partition Oracle SOA Suite11gshould have, as a minimum, one partition. The default partition is created automatically when the product is installed, but it can be deleted afterwards if you choose to. You must always have at least one partition to allow you to deploy composites. Managing partitions You can perform several management tasks pertaining to partitions. These tasks include: Creating a partition Deleting a partition, including all composites within the partition Starting up and shutting down all composites in a partition Retiring and activating all composites in a partition Undeploying all composites in a partition The simplest method to manage partitions is via the Manage Partitions page. Simply navigate to this page to create, delete, or perform bulk lifecycle management operations on the partitions: Right-click on soa-infra, then click on Manage Partitions to access the Manage Partitions page. At this point, you can do one of the following four things: Click on the Create button to create a partition. Highlight an existing partition and click on the Delete button to delete the partition. Highlight an existing partition and click on the Composites Control button to start up, shut down, activate, or retire all composites within that partition. Highlight an existing partition and click on the Deployment button to undeploy all composites within this partition, or to deploy a single composite to this partition. The Manage Partitions page with each of its action buttons is shown in the following screenshot. The Composites Control and Deployment buttons are only activated when a partition is highlighted. Partitions do not have a state or a mode. Thus, for example, you are not shutting down the partition, you are actually shutting down all composites within the partition. Creating a partition When creating a partition, be mindful of the following naming conventions: Letters, numbers, underscores, and dashes are allowed (dashes are not allowed as the first character) Spaces are not allowed Also, be aware that partitions cannot be renamed once they are created. Deleting a partition When considering deleting partitions, remember that there always needs to be one partition in existence. If you delete all partitions, it will not be possible to deploy any code to the server. If you delete a partition, all composites within that partition are automatically undeployed. Grouping SOA composite applications into partitions Typically developers choose a partition to which a particular composite should be deployed, but as an administrator, you must understand its implications. When composites are deployed—whether through JDeveloper, the console, or ant—a partition name must be specified. Code deployed to the default partition will result in a different WSDL URL than that deployed to, for example, the HumanResources partition as shown here: http://soahost1:8001/soa-infra/services/default/HelloWorld/HelloWorld.wsdl http://soahost1:8001/soa-infra/services/HumanResources/HelloWorld/HelloWorld.wsdl Considerations for partition management There are some considerations regarding partitions that you should be aware of: Avoid creating partitions called Dev, Test, and Prod. Though possible, partitions are not designed to separate by environment. Domain libraries and SOA extensions (such as MQs and AQs) are shared by all partitions, so it is not possible to have different versions of these libraries or extensions for each partition. It is not possible to have the same JNDI address for outbound connection pools in Resource Adapters pointing to different queue manager or data sources for composites deployed in different partitions. Oracle SOA Suite 11 g parameters such as timeouts, threads, and recovery configurations are defined by WebLogic Server domain, not by partition. If composites that use inbound adapters (such as the inbound AQ Adapter, in which messages are automatically dequeued from an Oracle AQ) are deployed to multiple partitions, it is not guaranteed which composite will dequeue the inbound message (that is, they will compete with each other). Setting up ant for automated composite management All component management tasks that can be performed manually through the web-based Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control console can also be executed with a script through the command-line utility ant. In this section, we describe how to use ant to start up, shut down, activate, and retire composites, as well as package and deploy them. Oracle SOA Suite11gships all necessary ant scripts to perform these tasks, and they are quite easy to use. Setting the environment Here, we will describe how to set both Linux and Microsoft Windows based environments to allow you to run your ant commands through the command line. Your ant scripts do not have to be installed on the same machine running Oracle SOA Suite 11g. In fact, it is not unusual to dedicate a single machine or server, which would host your ant scripts, allowing you to centralize the startup, shutdown, and deployment of your SOA composites to multiple target environments. You will also see how ant enables automated build management for your environment in later sections of this artilce. Setting the environment path for ant In your environment, we assume that Oracle SOA Suite 11 g is installed, which is recommended, as it will include all the required binaries to run ant. The Middleware Home, the Oracle SOA Suite 11 g Home, the Java Home, WebLogic Server username and password, and SOA server host and port will need to be updated appropriately to reflect your environment. Directory locations and JDK versions may differ depending on the patchset of Oracle SOA Suite11ginstalled. These commands must be executed to set your environment paths before running any ant command. On Linux/Unix In this article, we will assume that your code will reside under $CODE under the same Unix account where the Middleware Home and other binaries are installed. This is because the ant scripts require access to specific product libraries. The scripts assume a bash-based shell, so some changes may be required if other shells are used. To set your environment, we recommend first creating a shell script setAntEnv.sh with the following content while keeping in mind to replace the highlighted values to suit your environment and installation: export USERNAME=weblogic export PASSWORD=welcome1 export SOAHOST=soahost1 export SOAPORT=8001 export SOAURL=http://${SOAHOST}:${SOAPORT}export CODE=/u01/svn/SOA11g export MW_HOME=/u01/app/oracle/Middleware export ORACLE_HOME=$MW_HOME/Oracle_SOA1 export JAVA_HOME=$MW_HOME/jdk160_24 export ANT_HOME=$MW_HOME/modules/org.apache.ant_1.7.1 export PATH=$JAVA_HOME/bin:$ANT_HOME/bin:$ANT_HOME/lib:$PATH:. Don't forget to change the permissions of the script to executable: chmod 750 setAntEnv.sh Prior to running any ant command in the remainder of the chapter, simply source this shell script once to set your environment for your session as follows: source setAntEnv.sh Finally, make sure to change to the $ORACLE_HOME/bin directory before running any of the ant commands: cd $ORACLE_HOME/bin On Windows We will assume that your code will reside under %CODE%. To set your environment, we recommend first creating a shell script setAntEnv.bat with the following content: set USERNAME=weblogic set PASSWORD=welcome1 set SOAHOST=soahost1 set SOAPORT=8001 set SOAURL=http://soaHost:soaPort set CODE=c:svnSOA11g set MW_HOME=C:OracleMiddleware set ORACLE_HOME=%MW_HOME%Oracle_SOA1 set JAVA_HOME=%ORACLE_HOME%jdk160_24 set ANT_HOME=%ORACLE_HOME%modulesorg.apache.ant_1.7.1 set PATH=%JAVA_HOME%bin;%ANT_HOME%bin;%ANT_HOME%lib;%PATH% Make sure to update the highlighted text in the preceding script, to reflect your actual environment and installation. In your Windows environment, if you do not have Oracle SOA Suite11gand instead only have Oracle JDeveloper11ginstalled, only a few modifications are required, and you should use the following commands instead: set USERNAME=weblogic set PASSWORD=welcome1 set SOAHOST=soahost1 set SOAPORT=8001 set SOAURL=http://%SOAHOST%:%SOAPORT% set CODE=c:svnSOA11g set ORACLE_HOME=C:Oraclejdevjdeveloper set JAVA_HOME=%ORACLE_HOME%..jdk160_24 set ANT_HOME=%ORACLE_HOME%..modulesorg.apache.ant_1.7.1 set PATH=%JAVA_HOME%bin;%ANT_HOME%bin;%ANT_HOME%lib;%PATH% But only for installations of Oracle JDeveloper 11g, you must also perform a one-time copy of ant-contrib-1.0b3.jar. The file can be downloaded from http://sourceforge.net/projects/ant-contrib/files/ant-contrib/. Simply copy the file to %ANT_HOME%lib as follows: copy c:tempant-contrib-1.0b3.jar %ANT_HOME%lib Now that your batch script is created, simply run it once in the command prompt to set your environment for your session: setAntEnv.bat Finally, make sure to change to the %ORACLE_HOME%bin directory before running any of the ant commands: cd %ORACLE_HOME%bin All ant commands in the remainder of this chapter will be Linux based. For Windows, simply replace the Linux specific environment variables such as $USERNAME and $SOAHOST with their Windows equivalent of %USERNAME% and %SOAHOST%. Also ensure that the slashes are reversed in the code paths. For example, $CODE/HelloWorld/deploy/sca_HelloWorld_rev1.0.jar in Linux would be %CODE%HelloWorlddeploysca_HelloWorld_rev1.0.jar in Windows.

(For more resources on Web Graphics and Videos, see here.) Introduction This article will help you get your preferences set up so that you can work in a way that is most intuitive and efficient for you. Whether you are a veteran or a newbie, it is always a good idea to establish a good workflow. It will speed up your production time, allowing you to get ideas out of your head before you forget them. This will also greatly aid you in meeting deadlines and producing more iterations of your work. Installing Mudbox 2013 documentation In addition to the recipes in this book, you may find yourself wanting to look through the Mudbox 2013 documentation for additional help. By default, when you navigate to Help through Mudbox 2013's interface, you will be sent to an online help page. If you have a slow Internet connection or lack a connection altogether, you may want to install a local copy of the documentation. After downloading and installing the local copy, it is a good idea to have Mudbox 2013 point you to the right location when you navigate to Helpfrom the menus. This will eliminate the need to navigate through your files in order to find the documentation. The following recipe will guide you through this process. How to do it... First thing you will want to do is download the documentation from Autodesk's website. You can find the documentation for this version as well as the previous versions from the following link: http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=17765502. Once you're on this page you can scroll down and click on 2013 for the language and operating system that you are using. The following screenshot is what you should see: Next you will navigate to the location that you downloaded the file to, and run it. Now follow the prompts by clicking Next until the installation is complete. This file will install the documentation into your AutodeskMudbox 2013 folder by default. You can change this location during the installation process if you like but I recommend leaving this as the default location. After the local version of the Help files are installed, we need to point Mudbox 2013's Help menu to the local copy of the documentation. To do this, open the Mudbox 2013 folder, click on Windows in the top menu bar, and click on Preferences. The following screenshot shows how it should look: Next, click on the small arrow next to Help so that more options open up. You will notice that next to Help Location it says Autodesk Web Site. We are going to change that to Installed Local Help by clicking on the small arrow next to (or directly on the text) Autodesk Web Site and choose Installed Local Help from the drop-down menu. Then click on OK. Take note that if you did install your documentation to a different directory, then you will need to choose Custom instead of Installed Local Help. Then you will need to copy and paste the directory location into the Help Path textbox. Setting up hotkeys The first thing you will want to do when you start using a new piece of software is, either set up your own hotkeys or familiarize yourself with the default hotkeys. This is very important for speeding up your workflow. If you do not use hotkeys, you will have to constantly go through menus and scroll through windows to find the tools that you need, which will undoubtedly slow you down. How to do it... First you will need to go into the Windows menu item on the top menu bar. Next, you will click on Hotkeys to bring up the hotkey window as shown in the next screenshot. You will notice a drop-down menu that reads Use keyboard shortcuts from with a Restore Mudbox Defaults button next to it. Within this menu you can set your default hotkeys to resemble a 3D software that you are accustomed to using. This will help you transition smoothly into using Mudbox. If you are new to all 3D software, or use a software package that is not on this list, then using Mudbox hotkeys should suffice. The following screenshot shows the options available in Mudbox 2013: After choosing a default set of keys, you can now go in and change any hotkeys that you would like to customize. Let's say, I would like Eyedropper to activate when I press the E key and the left mouse button together. What you will do is change the current letter that is in the box next to Eyedropper to E and you will make sure there is a check in the box next to LMB (Left Mouse Button). It should look like the following screenshot: How it works... Once all your hotkeys are set up as desired, you will be able to use quick keystrokes to access a large number of tools without ever taking your eyes off your project. The more you get comfortable with your hotkeys, the faster you will get at switching between tools. There's more... When you first start using a particular software, you probably won't know exactly which tools you will be using most often. With that in mind, you will want to revisit your hotkey customization after getting a feel for your workflow and which tools you use the most. Another thing you want to think about, when setting up your hotkeys, is how easy it is to use the hotkey. For example, I tend to make hotkeys that relate to the tool in some way in order to make it easier to remember. For example, the Create Curve tool has a good hotkey already set for it, Ctrl+ C, for the reasons mentioned as follows: One reason it is a good hotkey is that the first letter of the tool is also the letter of the key being used for the hotkey. I can relate Cto curve. Another reason this could be a good hotkey is because if creating curves is something that I find myself doing often, then all I have to do is use my pinky finger on the Ctrl key and my pointer finger on the C key. You may think "Yeah? So what?" but if I were to set the hotkey to Ctrl+ Alt+ U it's a bit more of a stretch on my fingers and I would not want to do that frequently. The point is, key location and frequency of use are things you want to think about to speed up your workflow and stay comfortable while using your hotkeys. Increasing the resolution on your model Before you can get any fine details, or details that you would see while viewing from close up, into the surface of your model you will need to subdivide your mesh to increase its resolution. In the same way that a computer monitor displays more pixels when its resolution is increased, a model will have more points on its surface when the resolution is increased. How to do it... The hotkey for subdividing your surface is Shift + D or you can alternatively go into the menus as shown in the following screenshot: How it works... What this does is it adds more polygons which can be manipulated to add more detail. You will not want to subdivide your model too many times, otherwise, your computer will begin to slow down. The extent to which your computer will slow down is exponential. For example, if you have a six-sided cube and you subdivide it once, it will become 24-sided. If you subdivide it one more time, it will become 96-sided and so on. The following screenshot from Maya shows you what the wireframe looks like from one level to the next: The reason this image was created in Maya is because Mudbox will only show the proper wireframe when your model reaches 1000 polygons or more. The more powerful your computer, the more smoothly Mudbox 2013 will run. More specifically, it's the RAM and the video memory that are important. The following are some explanations on how RAM and video memory will affect your machines performance. RAM is the most important of all. The more RAM you have, the more polygons Mudbox will be able to handle, without taking a performance hit. The video memory increases the performance of your video card and allows high resolution, high speed, and color graphics. Basically, it allows the Graphical User Interface (GUI) to have better performance. So, now that you know RAM is important, how do you decide how much will be needed to run Mudbox 2013 smoothly? Well, one thing to consider is your operating system and the version of Mudbox 2013 you are running. If you have a 32-bit operating system and you are running the 32-bit Mudbox 2013, then the maximum RAM you can get is 4 GB. But, in reality you are only getting about 3 GB of RAM as the operating system needs to use around 1 GB of that memory. On the other hand, if you are using a 64-bit operating system and the 64-bit Mudbox 2013 version then you are capped at about 8 TB (yes, I said TB not GB). You will not need anywhere near that amount of RAM to run Mudbox 2013 smoothly. My recommendation is to have a minimum of 8 GB of RAM and 1 GB of video memory. With this amount of RAM and video memory you should be able to work with around 10 million triangles on the top level of your sculpt . There's more... Notice the little white box next to Add New Subdivision Level in the following screenshot: By clicking on this box, you will be given a few options for how Mudbox will handle the subdivision, as shown in the following screenshot: The options shown in the previous screenshot are explained as follows: Smooth Positions: This option will smooth out the edges by averaging out the vertices that are added. The following screenshot shows the progression from Level 0 to Level 2 on a cube: Subdivide UVs: If this option is unchecked when you create a new subdivision level, then you will lose your UVs on the object. To get your UVs back you will need to recreate the UVs for that level. If the Subdivide UVs option is turned on then it will just add subdivisions to your existing UVs. Smooth UVs: If this option is turned on, the UVs will be smoothed within the UV Borders as shown in the next screenshot: If you want your borders to smooth along with the interior parts of the shell, as shown in the next screenshot, then you will need to take a few extra steps to allow this: This is the method Mudbox used in the 2009 and earlier versions. In Mudbox 2010, they switched the way they handle this operation so that the borders do not smooth. Here is an excerpt from the Service Pack notes from 2010: "A new environment variable now exists to alter how the Smooth UVs property works when subdividing a model: MUDBOX2009_SUBDIVIDE_SMOOTH_UV. When this environment variable is set, the Smooth UVs property works as it did in Mudbox 2009. That is, the entire UV shell, including its UV borders, are smoothed when subdividing a model whenever the Smooth UVs property is turned on. If this environment variable is not set, the default Mudbox 2010 UV smoothing behavior occurs. That is, smoothing only occurs for the interior UVs in a UV shell, leaving the UV shell border edges unsmoothed. Which UV smoothing method you choose to use is entirely dependent on your individual rendering pipeline requirements and render application used." This has not changed since Mudbox 2010. So, basically what you need to do on a PC is add an environment variable MUDBOX2009_SUBDIVIDE_SMOOTH_UV that has a value of 1. To do this you will need to right-click on My Computer and click on Properties. Then, choose Advanced system settings and under the Advanced tab click on Environment Variables.... Under System Variables click on New.... In the blank where it says Variable Name enter MUDBOX2009_SUBDIVIDE_SMOOTH_UV and under Variable Value input a 1. Hit OK and it's all ready to go. Moving up and down subdivision levels Once you create subdivision levels using Shift + D, or through the menus, you can move up and down the levels you have created by using the Page Up key to move up in levels, or the Page Down key to move down in levels. But keep in mind, you will not be able to go any higher than the highest level you created using Add New Subdivision Level and you will never be able to go below Level 0. Another thing to take into account is which model you are subdividing. If you have multiple objects in your scene, you need to make sure the correct mesh is active when subdividing. The following are a couple of ways to make sure you are subdividing the correct mesh: One way is to select the object in the Object List before hitting Shift + D. Another way is to hover your mouse cursor over the mesh that you want to subdivide and then hit Shift + D. This will subdivide the mesh that is directly underneath your cursor.

(For more resources on ExtGwt, see here.) Introduction Layouts are a fundamental part of the GXT library. They provide the ability to create flexible and beautiful application UIs easily. However, with this power comes a level of complexity. A solid understanding of layouts is the key to using the library effectively. With GWT Panels, the panel itself is responsible for creating the panel's markup and inserting its children at the appropriate location, and creating appropriate markup as changes are made. Unlike GWT Panels, LayoutContainer (a concrete GXT container with support for layouts) does not physically connect its child components to the container's DOM. The Document Object Model is used to represent an HTML document in a tree-like structure in the browser's memory. We can dynamically change the content of the HTML page by manipulating the DOM. Rather, it is the job of the layout to both build the internal structure of the container, and to connect its child widgets. In order for a GXT container's HTML to be rendered, the container's layout() method must execute. This is different from GWT panels, in which the HTML is rendered when the components are attached to the panel. There are several ways in which the layout can execute. For now, let's go with the simplest case in which the layout executes when the container is attached. Attached is a GWT term that indicates that the widget is part of the browser's DOM. Attaching and detaching could be a subject on its own, so let's just assume it means when the widget is added to and removed from the page. When we add a container to RootPanel (for example, RootPanel.get(). add(container)), the container will be attached, and the container's layout will execute, generating the needed HTML markup. If we add another component to the now rendered container, (container.add(new Label("New Item"))) we will have to manually execute/ refresh the container (container.layout()) for the additions (as well as removals) to be effected. This sort of Lazy-Rendering is the default behavior of GXT as of 2.2.3 with GXT 3 planning to use the same approach as GWT itself. Many GXT layouts can be used in conjunction with LayoutData, which are configuration objects assigned to each child widget within a container, and provides the layout object with additional information to be used when executing the layout. Aside from a layout being executed when the container is attached, or when layout() is called manually on the container, there are two other ways in which a layout will be executed. After a container executes its layout, it looks and sees if any of its children are containers. When it finds a child container, it then executes its layout. So as long as there is a chain of containers, the execution of layouts will cascade to the child containers. This is a very important concept as you can lay out a top-level container, and the child containers will have a chance to adjust their layouts as well. A container's layout will also execute when its size is adjusted. This is default behavior, and can be disabled. This is another important concept as it means that if a container's size is changed, the layout has a chance to update based on the container's new size.

(For more resources on Open source Content Management, see here.) The administrative user interface The administrative user interface has five tabs across the top that provide access to key areas of the system. They are as follows: Batch Class Management Batch Instance Management Workflow Management Folder Management Reports   Batch Class Management The Batch Class Management interface allows administrators to create, modify, edit, and delete batch classes. The batch class configuration is broken down into sections for workflow modules and plugins, document types and fields, e-mail configuration, batch class fields, scanner profiles, and CMIS import. Administrators can configure six aspects of a batch class. They are as follows: Modules and Plugins: Modules are the major steps in the workflow. Each module is implemented by a series of plugins. An administrator can configure the plugins that comprise a module by selecting the module and pressing the Edit button. Documents and Fields: The Document Types tab is where the documents that will be processed in the batch class are specified. Fields can be specified per document. Extraction rules for automatic indexing of field values can be created as well. Email Configuration: Ephesoft can process e-mail messages and attachments. Ephesoft is configured with authentication information to check mail on an account, and it will process any e-mail sent to that account. Batch Class Fields: This prompts users for batch-level information from the Web Scanner. They can also be used in scripting to persist information at the batch level. Scanner Profiles: This is where administrators can configure Web scanners associated with each batch class. CMIS Import: Ephesoft can monitor documents in an existing document repository to import into Ephesoft for classification and extraction.   Batch Instance Management Batch Instance Management within the administrative interface allows administrators to see the status of batches and restart in-flight workflows starting at a previous step in the workflow.   Workflow Management The Workflow Management interface allows users to add new custom plugins and create dependencies. The following screenshot shows the Workflow Management interface: Ephesoft is designed to accommodate customizations to fit any customer's needs. For this reason, Ephesoft incorporates the jBPM workflow engine. This gives Ephesoft the ability to adapt to specific customer requirements from the capture workflow perspective. Ephesoft's capture workflow can be thought of as workflow within a workflow. The workflow for each batch class consists of major steps called modules. The main modules that come with Ephesoft are the following: Import Page Processing Document Assembly Document Review Extraction Document Validation Export Each module above is composed of a series of substeps called plugins. It is worth noting that some plugins may depend on other plugins. For example, the CMIS export plugin requires the CreateMultiPage Files plugin so that it can upload documents instead of individual pages. Ephesoft allows developers to add custom modules and plugins to the Ephesoft capture workflow. The ability to add custom modules allows Ephesoft to extend to meet any document capture need. The ability to remove unused modules allows Ephesoft to run as efficiently as possible, maximizing the use of expensive server hardware. Folder Management The Folder Management interface allows the administrator to upload new and updated files for batch class creation. Reports Reporting can be enabled to provide administrators with statistics on the average time batches, documents, and pages that are processed on each module or plugin. The administrator can filter by batch class, start and end date, and type of report. To access reporting, click on the Reports tab in the administrative user interface. (For more resources on Open source Content Management, see here.)  

In this article by Joe Workman, the author of RapidWeaver Beginner's Guide, we will learn the basics of RapidWeaver. Mainly, we will cover the following topics: What is RapidWeaver? Installing RapidWeaver Creating our first web page Publishing our website on the Internet So strap your seat belts on and let's have some fun! What is RapidWeaver? RapidWeaver is a web development and design application for Mac that was developed by Realmac Software. It allows you to build stunning, professional websites very easily. RapidWeaver has both the novice and professional web designer covered. If you don't know (or don't want to know) how to code, RapidWeaver supports full code-free creation of your website; from blogs to site maps, photo albums to contact forms, you can build your entire website without a single line of code! Without a doubt, RapidWeaver appeals to the aspiring novice web designer. However, it does not forget about the geeky, code loving, power users! And in case you were wondering…yeah, that includes me! RapidWeaver gives us geeks full access to peek under the hood. You can effortlessly add your own HTML or PHP file to any page. You can customize the look and feel with your own CSS file. For example, maybe you would like to add your own JavaScript for the latest and greatest animations out there; not a problem, RapidWeaver has got you covered. We even have full access to the amazing WebKit Developer Tools from directly inside the application. As RapidWeaver has all of these advanced features, it really serves as a catalyst to help an aspiring, novice web designer become a geeky, code loving, power user. RapidWeaver's theme engine is a godsend for those users who are design challenged. However, it's also for those who don't want to spend time developing a site theme as they can leverage the work that some amazing theme developers have already done. Yeah, this includes me too! RapidWeaver ships with over 45 stunning themes built-in. This means that you can have a website that was designed by some world-class web designers. Each theme can be customized to your liking with just a few clicks. If you ever get tired of how your website looks, you can change your theme as often as you like. And your website content will remain 100 percent intact. Once you have your website fully constructed, RapidWeaver makes it very simple to publish your website online. It will be able to publish to pretty much every web host around through its native support for both FTP and SFTP. You will be able to publish your website for the world to see with a single click. iWeb versus RapidWeaver versus Dreamweaver RapidWeaver is most commonly compared with both iWeb and Dreamweaver. While there are definitely direct feature comparisons, we are trying to compare apples with oranges. RapidWeaver is a great tool that falls somewhere between iWeb at one end of the scale and Dreamweaver at the other end. Apple's iWeb was their first foray into personal web development software. In true Apple fashion, the application was extremely user friendly and developed beautiful websites. However, the application was really geared towards users who wanted to create a small website to share family photos and maybe have a blog. iWeb was not very extensible at all. If you ever wanted to try to steer outside the bounds of the default templates, you had to drive directly into full custom HTML. One of the biggest downsides that I came across was that once you choose the look and feel of your site, there was no going back. If you wanted to change the theme of your website, you had to redo every single page manually! For those of you who love the drag-and-drop abilities of iWeb, look no further than the RapidWeaver Stacks plugin from YourHead Software. Apple has acknowledged iWeb's shortcomings by pretty much removing iWeb from its lineup. You cannot purchase iWeb from Apple's Mac App Store. Furthermore, if you look at Apple's iLife page on their website, all traces of iWeb have been removed—if this is not a clear sign of iWeb's future, I don't know what is. Now, let's jump to the opposite end of the spectrum with Adobe Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver has a much steeper learning curve than RapidWeaver (not to mention a much steeper price tag). Dreamweaver has a lot of capability for site management and can be used collaboratively on projects, and is designed to play well with Adobe's other design software. The Adobe Creative Suite with Dreamweaver is the package of choice for very large organizational websites being developed and managed by a team, or for complex dynamic sites. I am talking about websites such as http://www.apple.com or http://www.nytimes.com. For individual and small to mid-sized business websites, I can't think of a reason why one would prefer Dreamweaver to RapidWeaver. So as I stated at the beginning, RapidWeaver provides a perfect middle ground for novice web designers and geeky code lovers! It's more than an app So far, I have talked about the RapidWeaver application itself. However, RapidWeaver is so much more than just an application. The user community that has been built around the RapidWeaver product is like nothing I have seen with any other application. The RapidWeaver forums hosted by Realmac are by far the most active and useful forums that I have seen. Users and developers spend countless hours helping each other with tips and tricks on design, code, and product support. It's a worldwide community that is truly active 24/7. You can find the forums at http://forums.realmacsoftware.com. A part of the success of the strong RapidWeaver community is the strong third-party developers that exist. RapidWeaver provides a strong and flexible platform for developers to extend the application beyond its default feature set. There are currently three primary ways to extend your RapidWeaver application: Themes, Plugins, and Stacks. As you may guess, third-party theme developers design custom themes that go above and beyond the themes that ship out of the box with RapidWeaver. With the number of amazing theme developers out there, it would be impossible not to develop a site that fits your style and looks amazing. RapidWeaver ships with 11 page styles out of the box. Blog Contact Form File Sharing HTML Code iFrame Movie Album Offsite Page Photo Album QuickTime Sitemap Styled Text However, RapidWeaver plugins can create even more page styles for you. There are a plethora of different page plugins from calendars to file uploads, and shopping carts to image galleries. To illustrate the power of RapidWeaver's platform, YourHead Software developed the Stacks plugin for fluid page layout. The Stacks plugin created an entire new class of third-party RapidWeaver developer: the stack developer! A stack is simply a widget that can be used as a building block to construct your web page. There are stacks for just about anything: animated banners, menu systems, photo galleries, or even full-blown blog integrations. If you can dream it up, there is probably a stack for it! If you have visited my website, then you should know that my origins in the RapidWeaver community are as a Stacks Developer. I think that Stacks is amazing and should probably be the first plugin that you should consider acquiring. Realmac Software has added a section on their website in order to make it easier for users to explore and locate useful third-party add-ons. So make sure that you go check it out and peruse through all the great themes, plugins, and stacks! You can browse the add-ons at http://www.realmacsoftware.com/addons.

In this article by Joe Workman, the author of RapidWeaver Beginner's Guide, we will learn the basics of RapidWeaver. Mainly, we will cover the following topics: What is RapidWeaver? Installing RapidWeaver Creating our first web page Publishing our website on the Internet So strap your seat belts on and let's have some fun! What is RapidWeaver? RapidWeaver is a web development and design application for Mac that was developed by Realmac Software. It allows you to build stunning, professional websites very easily. RapidWeaver has both the novice and professional web designer covered. If you don't know (or don't want to know) how to code, RapidWeaver supports full code-free creation of your website; from blogs to site maps, photo albums to contact forms, you can build your entire website without a single line of code! Without a doubt, RapidWeaver appeals to the aspiring novice web designer. However, it does not forget about the geeky, code loving, power users! And in case you were wondering…yeah, that includes me! RapidWeaver gives us geeks full access to peek under the hood. You can effortlessly add your own HTML or PHP file to any page. You can customize the look and feel with your own CSS file. For example, maybe you would like to add your own JavaScript for the latest and greatest animations out there; not a problem, RapidWeaver has got you covered. We even have full access to the amazing WebKit Developer Tools from directly inside the application. As RapidWeaver has all of these advanced features, it really serves as a catalyst to help an aspiring, novice web designer become a geeky, code loving, power user. RapidWeaver's theme engine is a godsend for those users who are design challenged. However, it's also for those who don't want to spend time developing a site theme as they can leverage the work that some amazing theme developers have already done. Yeah, this includes me too! RapidWeaver ships with over 45 stunning themes built-in. This means that you can have a website that was designed by some world-class web designers. Each theme can be customized to your liking with just a few clicks. If you ever get tired of how your website looks, you can change your theme as often as you like. And your website content will remain 100 percent intact. Once you have your website fully constructed, RapidWeaver makes it very simple to publish your website online. It will be able to publish to pretty much every web host around through its native support for both FTP and SFTP. You will be able to publish your website for the world to see with a single click. iWeb versus RapidWeaver versus Dreamweaver RapidWeaver is most commonly compared with both iWeb and Dreamweaver. While there are definitely direct feature comparisons, we are trying to compare apples with oranges. RapidWeaver is a great tool that falls somewhere between iWeb at one end of the scale and Dreamweaver at the other end. Apple's iWeb was their first foray into personal web development software. In true Apple fashion, the application was extremely user friendly and developed beautiful websites. However, the application was really geared towards users who wanted to create a small website to share family photos and maybe have a blog. iWeb was not very extensible at all. If you ever wanted to try to steer outside the bounds of the default templates, you had to drive directly into full custom HTML. One of the biggest downsides that I came across was that once you choose the look and feel of your site, there was no going back. If you wanted to change the theme of your website, you had to redo every single page manually! For those of you who love the drag-and-drop abilities of iWeb, look no further than the RapidWeaver Stacks plugin from YourHead Software. Apple has acknowledged iWeb's shortcomings by pretty much removing iWeb from its lineup. You cannot purchase iWeb from Apple's Mac App Store. Furthermore, if you look at Apple's iLife page on their website, all traces of iWeb have been removed—if this is not a clear sign of iWeb's future, I don't know what is. Now, let's jump to the opposite end of the spectrum with Adobe Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver has a much steeper learning curve than RapidWeaver (not to mention a much steeper price tag). Dreamweaver has a lot of capability for site management and can be used collaboratively on projects, and is designed to play well with Adobe's other design software. The Adobe Creative Suite with Dreamweaver is the package of choice for very large organizational websites being developed and managed by a team, or for complex dynamic sites. I am talking about websites such as http://www.apple.com or http://www.nytimes.com. For individual and small to mid-sized business websites, I can't think of a reason why one would prefer Dreamweaver to RapidWeaver. So as I stated at the beginning, RapidWeaver provides a perfect middle ground for novice web designers and geeky code lovers! It's more than an app So far, I have talked about the RapidWeaver application itself. However, RapidWeaver is so much more than just an application. The user community that has been built around the RapidWeaver product is like nothing I have seen with any other application. The RapidWeaver forums hosted by Realmac are by far the most active and useful forums that I have seen. Users and developers spend countless hours helping each other with tips and tricks on design, code, and product support. It's a worldwide community that is truly active 24/7. You can find the forums at http://forums.realmacsoftware.com. A part of the success of the strong RapidWeaver community is the strong third-party developers that exist. RapidWeaver provides a strong and flexible platform for developers to extend the application beyond its default feature set. There are currently three primary ways to extend your RapidWeaver application: Themes, Plugins, and Stacks. As you may guess, third-party theme developers design custom themes that go above and beyond the themes that ship out of the box with RapidWeaver. With the number of amazing theme developers out there, it would be impossible not to develop a site that fits your style and looks amazing. RapidWeaver ships with 11 page styles out of the box. Blog Contact Form File Sharing HTML Code iFrame Movie Album Offsite Page Photo Album QuickTime Sitemap Styled Text However, RapidWeaver plugins can create even more page styles for you. There are a plethora of different page plugins from calendars to file uploads, and shopping carts to image galleries. To illustrate the power of RapidWeaver's platform, YourHead Software developed the Stacks plugin for fluid page layout. The Stacks plugin created an entire new class of third-party RapidWeaver developer: the stack developer! A stack is simply a widget that can be used as a building block to construct your web page. There are stacks for just about anything: animated banners, menu systems, photo galleries, or even full-blown blog integrations. If you can dream it up, there is probably a stack for it! If you have visited my website, then you should know that my origins in the RapidWeaver community are as a Stacks Developer. I think that Stacks is amazing and should probably be the first plugin that you should consider acquiring. Realmac Software has added a section on their website in order to make it easier for users to explore and locate useful third-party add-ons. So make sure that you go check it out and peruse through all the great themes, plugins, and stacks! You can browse the add-ons at http://www.realmacsoftware.com/addons.

The following picture shows a high-level overview of the FIM family and the components relevant to an FIM 2010 R2 implementation:     Within the FIM family, there are some parts that can live by themselves and others that depend on other parts. But, in order to fully utilize the power of FIM 2010 R2, you should have all parts in place. At the center, we have FIM Service and FIM Synchronization Service (FIM Sync). The key to a successful implementation of FIM 2010 R2 is to understand how these two components work—by themselves as well as together.   The history of FIM 2010 R2 Let us go through a short summary of the versions preceding FIM 2010 R2. In 1999, Microsoft bought a company called Zoomit. They had a product called VIA —a directory synchronization product. Microsoft incorporated Zoomit VIA into Microsoft Metadirectory Services (MMS). MMS was only available as a Microsoft Consulting Services solution. In 2003, Microsoft released Microsoft Identity Integration Server (MIIS), and this was the first publicly available version of the synchronization engine today known as FIM 2010 R2 Synchronization Service. In 2005, Microsoft bought a company called Alacris. They had a product called IdNexus, which was used to manage certificates and smart cards. Microsoft renamed it Certificate Lifecycle Manager (CLM). In 2007, Microsoft took MIIS (now with Service Pack 2) and CLM and slammed them together into a new product called Identity Lifecycle Manager 2007 (ILM 2007). Despite the name, ILM 2007 was basically a directory synchronization tool with a certificate management side-kicker. Finally, in 2010, Microsoft released Forefront Identity Manager 2010 (FIM 2010). FIM 2010 was a whole new thing, but as we will see, the old parts from MIIS and CLM are still there. The most fundamental change in FIM 2010 was the addition of the FIM Service component. The most important news was that FIM Service added workflow capability to the synchronization engine. Many identity management operations that used to require a lot of coding were suddenly available without a single line of code. In FIM 2010 R2, Microsoft added the FIM Reporting component and also made significant improvements to the other components.   FIM Synchronization Service (FIM Sync) FIM Synchronization Service is the oldest member of the FIM family. Anyone who has worked with MIIS back in 2003 will feel quite at home with it. Visually, the management tools look the same. FIM Synchronization Service can actually work by itself, without any other component of FIM 2010 R2 being present. We will then basically get the same functionality as MIIS had, back in 2003. FIM Synchronization Service is the heart of FIM, which pumps the data around, causing information about identities to flow from one system to another. Let's look at the pieces that make up the FIM Synchronization Service:     As we can see, there are lots of acronyms and concepts that need a little explaining. On the right-hand side of FIM Synchronization Service, we have Metaverse (MV). Metaverse is used to collect all the information about all the identities managed by FIM. On the other side, we have Connected Data Source (CDS). Connected Data Source is the database, directory, and file, among others, that the synchronization service imports information regarding the managed identities from, and/or exports this information to. To talk to different kinds of Connected Data Sources, FIM Synchronization Service uses adapters that are called Management Agents (MA). In FIM 2010 R2, we will start to use the term Connectors, instead. But, as the user interface in FIM Synchronization Manager still uses the term Management Agent The Management Agent stores a representation of the objects in the CDS, in its Connector Space (CS). When stored in the Connector Space, we refer to the objects as holograms. If we were to look into this a little deeper, we would find that the holograms (objects) are actually stored in multiple instances so that the Management Agent can keep a track of the changes to the objects in the Connector Space. In order to synchronize information from/to different Connected Data Sources, we connect the objects in the Connector Space with the corresponding object in the Metaverse. By collecting information from all Connected Data Sources, the synchronization engine aggregates the information about the object from all the Connected Data Sources into the Metaverse object. This way, the Metaverse will only contain one representation of the object (for example, a user). To describe the data flow within the synchronization service, let's look at the previous diagram and follow a typical scenario. The scenario is this—we want information in our Human Resource (HR) system to govern how users appear in Active Directory (AD) and in our e-mail system. Import users from HR: The bottom CDS could be our HR system. We configure a Management Agent to import users from HR to the corresponding CS. Projection to Metaverse: As there is no corresponding user in the MV that we can connect to, we tell the MA to create a new object in the MV. The process of creating new objects in the MV is called Projection. To transfer information from the HR CS to the MV, we configure Inbound Synchronization Rules. Import and join users from AD: The middle CDS could be Active Directory (AD). We configure a Management Agent to import users from AD. Because there are objects in the MV, we can now tell the Management Agent to try to match the user objects from AD to the objects in the MV. Connecting existing objects in a Connector Space, to an existing object in the Metaverse, is called Joining. In order for the synchronization service to know which objects to connect, some kind of unique information must be present, to get a one-to-one mapping between the object in the CS and the object in the Metaverse. Synchronize information from HR to AD: Once the Metaverse object has a connector to both the HR CS and the AD CS, we can move information from the HR CS to the AD CS. We can, for example, use the employee status information in the HR system to modify the userAccountControl attribute of the AD account. In order to modify the AD CS object, we configure an Outbound Synchronization rule that will tell the synchronization service how to update the CS object based on the information in the MV object. Synchronizing, however, does not modify the user object in AD; it only modifies the hologram representation of the user in the AD Connector Space. Export information to AD: In order to actually change any information in a Connected Data Source, we need to tell the MA to export the changes. During export, the MA updates the objects in the CDS with the changes it has made to the hologram in the Connector Space. Provision users to the e-mail system: The top CDS could be our e-mail system. As users are not present in this system, we would like the synchronization service to create new objects in the CS for the e-mail system. The process of creating new objects in a Connector Space is called Provisioning. Projection, Joining, and Provisioning all create a connector between the Metaverse object and the Connector Space object, making it possible to synchronize identity information between different Connected Data Sources. A key concept to understand here, is that we do not configure synchronization between Connected Data Sources or between Connector Spaces. We synchronize between each Connector Space and Metaverse. Looking at the previous example, we can see that when information flows from HR to AD, we configure the following: HR MA to Import data to the HR CS Inbound synchronization from the HR CS to the MV Outbound synchronization from the MV to the AD CS AD MA to Export the data to AD   Management Agents Management Agents, or Connectors as some people call them, are the entities that enable FIM to talk to different kinds of data sources. Basically, we can say that FIM can talk to any type of data source, but it only has built-in Management Agents for some. If the data source is really old, we might even have to use the extensibility platform and write our own Management Agent or buy a Management Agent from a third-party supplier. At http://aka.ms/FIMPartnerMA, we can find a list of Management Agents supplied by Microsoft Partners. For a complete list of Management Agents built in and available from Microsoft, please look at http://aka.ms/FIMMA. With R2, a new Management Agent for Extensible Connectivity 2.0 (ECMA 2.0) is released, introducing new ways of making custom Management Agents. We will see updated versions of most third party Management Agents as soon as they are migrated to the new ECMA 2.0 platform. Microsoft will also ship new Management Agents using the new ECMA 2.0 platform. Writing our own MA is one way of solving problems communicating with odd data sources. But there might be other solutions to the problem that will require less coding.   Non-declarative vs. declarative synchronization If you are using FIM Synchronization Service the old way, like we did in MIIS or ILM 2007, it is called non-declarative synchronization. We usually call that classic synchronization and will also use that term in this article. If we use the FIM Service logic to control it all, it is called declarative synchronization. As classic synchronization usually involves writing code, and declarative does not; we will also find references calling declarative synchronization codeless. In fact, it was quite possible, in some scenarios, to have codeless synchronization— even in the old MIIS or ILM 2007—using classic synchronization. The fact also remains that there are very few FIM 2010 R2 implementations that are indeed code free. In some cases you might even mix the two. This could be due either to migration from MIIS/ILM 2007 to FIM 2010 R2 or to the decision that it is cheaper/ quicker/easier to solve a particular problem using classic synchronization.   Password synchronization This should be the last resort to achieve some kind of Single Sign On (SSO). Instead of implementing password synchronization, we try to make our customers look at other ways, such as Kerberos or Federation, to get SSO. There are, however, many cases where password synchronization is the best option to maintain passwords in different systems. Not all environments can utilize Kerberos or Federation and therefore need the FIM password synchronization feature to maintain passwords in different Connected Data Sources. The use of this feature is to have Active Directory by either installing and configuring Password Change Notification Service (PCNS) on Domain Controllers or using FIM Service as a source for the password change. FIM Synchronization Service then updates the password on the connected object in Connected Data Sources, which are configured as password synchronization targets. In order for FIM to set the password in a target system, the Management Agent used to connect to that specific CDS needs to support this. Most Management Agents available today support password management or can be configured to do so.   FIM Service Management Agent A very special Management Agent is the one connecting FIM Synchronization Service to FIM Service. Many of the rules we apply to other types of Management Agents do not apply to this one. If you have experience working with classic synchronization in MIIS or ILM 2007, you will find that this Management Agent does not work as the others.   FIM Service If FIM Synchronization Service is the heart pumping information, FIM Service is the brain (sorry FIM CM, but your brain is not as impressive) FIM Service plays many roles in FIM, and during the design phase the capabilities of FIM Service is often on focus. FIM Service allows you to enforce the Identity Management policy within your organization and also make sure you are compliant at all times. FIM Service has its own database, where it stores the information about the identities it manages.   Request pipeline In order to make any changes to objects in the FIM Service database, we need to work our way through the FIM Service request pipeline. So, let's look at the following diagram and walk through the request pipeline:     Every request is made to the web service interface, and follows the ensuing flow: The Request Processor workflow receives the request and evaluates the token (who?) and the request type (what?). Permission is checked to see if the request is allowed. Management Policy Rules are evaluated. If Authenticate workflow is required, serialize and run interactive workflow. If Authorize workflow is required, parallelize and run asynchronous workflow. Modify the object in FIM Service Database according to the request. If Action workflow is required, run follow-up workflows. As we can see, a request to FIM Service may trigger three types of workflows. With the installation of FIM 2001 R2, we will get a few workflows that will cover many basic requirements, but this is one of the situations where custom coding or thirdparty workflows might be required in order to fulfill the identity management policy within the organization. Authentication workflow (AuthN) is used when the request requires additional authentication. An example of this is when a user tries to reset his password—the AuthN workflow will ask the anonymous user to authenticate using the QA gateway. Authorization workflow (AuthZ) is used when the request requires authorization from someone else. An example of this is when a user is added to a group, but the policy states that the owner of the group needs to approve the request. Action workflow is used for many types of follow-up actions—it could be sending a notification email or modifying attributes, among many other things.   FIM Service Management Agent FIM Service Management Agent , as we discussed earlier, is responsible for synchronizing data between FIM Service and FIM Synchronization Service. We said then that this MA is a bit special, and even from the FIM Service perspective it works a little differently. A couple of examples of the special relationship between the FIM Service MA and FIM Service are as follows: Any request made by the FIM Service MA will bypass any AuthN and AuthZ workflows As a performance enhancer, the FIM Service MA is allowed to make changes directly to the FIM Service DB in FIM 2010 R2, without using the request pipeline described earlier   Management Policy Rules (MPRs) The way we control what can be done, or what should happen, is by defining Management Policy Rules (MPRs) within FIM Service. MPR is our tool to enforce the Identity Management policies within our organization. There are two types of MPRs—Request and Set Transition. A Request MPR is used to define how the request pipeline should behave on a particular request. If a request comes in and there is no Request MPR matching the request, it will fail. A Set Transition MPR is used to detect changes in objects and react upon that change. For example, if my EmployeeStatus is changed to Fired, my Active Directory (AD) account should be disabled. A Set is used within FIM Service to group objects. We define rules that govern the criteria for an object to be part of a Set. For example, we can create a Set, which contains all users with Fired as EmployeeStatus. As objects satisfy this criteria and transition in to the Set, we can define a Set Transition MPR to make things such as disabling the AD account happen. We can also define an MPR that applies to the transition out from a Set. The Sets are also used to configure permissions within FIM Service. Using Sets allows us to configure very granular permissions in scenarios where FIM Service is used for user self service.   FIM Portal FIM Portal is usually the starting point for administrators who will configure FIM Service. The configuration of FIM Service is usually done using FIM Portal, but it may also be configured using Power Shell or even your own custom interface. FIM Portal can also be used for self-service scenarios, allowing users to manage some aspect of the Identity Management process. FIM Portal is actually an ASP.NET application using Microsoft Sharepoint as a foundation, and can be modified in many ways.   Self Service Password Reset (SSPR) The Self Service Password Reset (SSPR) feature of FIM is a special case, where most components used to implement it are built-in. The default method is using what is called a QA Gate. FIM 2010 R2 also has built-in methods for using a One Time Password (OTP) that can be sent using either SMS, or e-mail services. In short, the QA Gate works in the following way: The administrator defines a number of questions. Users register for SSPR and provide answers to the questions. Users are presented with the same questions, when a password reset is needed. Giving the correct answers identifies the user and allows them to reset their password.     Once the FIM administrator has used FIM Portal to configure the password reset feature, the end user can register his answers to QA Gate. If the organization has deployed FIM Password Reset Extension to the end user's Windows client, the process of registration and reset can be made directly from the Windows client. If not, the user can register and reset his password using the password registration and reset portals.   FIM Reporting The Reporting component is brand new in FIM 2010 R2. In earlier versions of FIM, as well as the older MIIS and ILM, reporting was typically achieved by either buying third-party add-ons or developing their own solutions based on SQL Reporting Services. The purpose of Reporting is to give you a chance to view historical data. There are a few reports built in to FIM 2010 R2, but many organizations will develop their own reports that comply with their Identity Management policies. The implementation of FIM 2010 R2 will however be a little more complex, if you want the Reporting component. This is because the engine used to generate the reports is the Data Warehouse component of Microsoft System Center Service Manager (SCSM). There are a number of reasons for using the existing reporting capabilities in SCSM; the main one is that it is easy to extend.   FIM Certificate Management (FIM CM) Certificate Management is the outcast member of the FIM family. FIM CM can be, and often is, used by itself, without any other parts of FIM being present. It is also the component with the poorest integration with the other components. If we look at it, we will find that it hasn't changed much since its predecessor, Certificate Lifecycle Management (CLM), was released. FIM CM is mainly focused on managing smart cards, but it can also be used to manage and trace any type of certificate requests.     The basic concept of FIM CM is that a smart card is requested using the FIM CM portal. Information regarding all requests is stored in the FIM CM database. The Certification authority, which handles the issuing of the certificates, is configured to report the status back to the FIM CM database. FIM CM portal also contains a workflow engine, so that the FIM CM admin can configure features such as e-mail notifications as a part of the policies.   Certificate Management portal FIM Certificate Management uses a portal to interact with users and administrators. The FIM CM portal is an ASP.Net 2.0 website where, for example: Administrators can configure the policies that govern the processes around certificate management End users can manage their smart cards for purposes such as renewing and changing PIN codes Help desks can use the portal to, for example, request temporary smart cards or reset PINs:     Licensing We put this part in here, not to tell you how FIM 2010 R2 is licensed, but rather to tell you that it is complex. Since Microsoft has a habit of changing the way they license their products, we will not put any license details into writing. Depending on what parts you are using and, in some cases, how you are using them, you need to buy different licenses. FIM 2010 R2 (at the time of my writing) uses both Server licenses as well as Client Access Licenses (CALs). In almost every FIM project the licensing cost is negligible compared to the gain retrieved by implementing it. But even so, please make sure to contact your Microsoft licensing partner, or your Microsoft contact, to clear any questions you might have around licensing. If you do not have Microsoft System Center Service Manager (SCSM), it is stated (at the time of my writing) that you can install and use SCSM for FIM Reporting usage without having to buying SCSM licenses. Read more about FIM Licensing at o http://aka.ms/FIMLicense.   Summary As it can be seen, Microsoft Forefront Identity Manager 2010 R2 is not just one product, but a family of products. In this article, we have given you a short overview of the different components, and we saw how together they can mitigate the challenges that The Company has identified about their identity management.

Ext JS 4 is Sencha’s latest JavaScript framework for developing cross-platform web applications. Built upon web standards, Ext JS provides a comprehensive library of user interface widgets and data manipulation classes to turbo-charge your application’s development. In this article, written by Stuart Ashworth and Andrew Duncan, the authors of Ext JS 4 Web Application Development Cookbook, we will cover: Constructing a complex form layout Populating your form with data Submitting your form's data Validating form fields with VTypes Creating custom VTypes Uploading files to the server Handling exceptions and callbacks This article introduces forms in Ext JS 4. We begin by creating a support ticket form in the first recipe. To get the most out of this article you should be aware that this form is used by a number of recipes throughout the article. Instead of focusing on how to configure specific fields, we demonstrate more generic tasks for working with forms. Specifically, these are populating forms, submitting forms, performing client-side validation, and handling callbacks/exceptions. Constructing a complex form layout In the previous releases of Ext JS, complicated form layouts were quite difficult to achieve. This was due to the nature of the FormLayout, which was required to display labels and error messages correctly, and how it had to be combined with other nested layouts. Ext JS 4 takes a different approach and utilizes the Ext.form.Labelable mixin, which allows form fields to be decorated with labels and error messages without requiring a specific layout to be applied to the container. This means we can combine all of the layout types the framework has to offer without having to overnest components in order to satisfy the form field's layout requirements. We will describe how to create a complex form using multiple nested layouts and demonstrate how easy it is to get a form to look exactly as we want. Our example will take the structure of a Support Ticket Request form and, once we are finished, it will look like the following screenshot: (Move the mouse over the image to enlarge.) How to do it... We start this recipe by creating a simple form panel that will contain all of the layout containers and their fields: var formPanel = Ext.create('Ext.form.Panel', { title: 'Support Ticket Request', width: 650, height: 500, renderTo: Ext.getBody(), style: 'margin: 50px', items: [] }); Now, we will create our first set of fields— the FirstName and LastName fields. These will be wrapped in an Ext.container.Container component, which is given an hbox layout so our fields appear next to each other on one line: var formPanel = Ext.create('Ext.form.Panel', { title: 'Support Ticket Request', width: 650, height: 500, renderTo: Ext.getBody(), style: 'margin: 50px', items: [{ xtype: 'container', layout: 'hbox', items: [{ xtype: 'textfield', fieldLabel: 'First Name', name: 'FirstName', labelAlign: 'top', cls: 'field-margin', flex: 1 }, { xtype: 'textfield', fieldLabel: 'Last Name', name: 'LastName', labelAlign: 'top', cls: 'field-margin', flex: 1 }] }] }); We have added a CSS class (field-margin) to each field, to provide some spacing between them. We can now add this style inside <style> tags in the head of our document: <style type="text/css"> .field-margin { margin: 10px; }</style> Next, we create a container with a column layout to position our e-mail address and telephone number fields. We nest our telephone number fields in an Ext.form.FieldContainer class , which we will discuss later in the recipe: items: [ ... { xtype: 'container', layout: 'column', items: [{ xtype: 'textfield', fieldLabel: 'Email Address', name: 'EmailAddress', labelAlign: 'top', cls: 'field-margin', columnWidth: 0.6 }, { xtype: 'fieldcontainer', layout: 'hbox', fieldLabel: 'Tel. Number', labelAlign: 'top', cls: 'field-margin', columnWidth: 0.4, items: [{ xtype: 'textfield', name: 'TelNumberCode', style: 'margin-right: 5px;', flex: 2 }, { xtype: 'textfield', name: 'TelNumber', flex: 4 }] }] } ... ] The text area and checkbox group are created and laid out in a similar way to the previous sets, by using an hbox layout: items: [ ... { xtype: 'container', layout: 'hbox', items: [{ xtype: 'textarea', fieldLabel: 'Request Details', name: 'RequestDetails', labelAlign: 'top', cls: 'field-margin', height: 250, flex: 2 }, { xtype: 'checkboxgroup', name: 'RequestType', fieldLabel: 'Request Type', labelAlign: 'top', columns: 1, cls: 'field-margin', vertical: true, items: [{ boxLabel: 'Type 1', name: 'type1', inputValue: '1' }, { boxLabel: 'Type 2', name: 'type2', inputValue: '2' }, { boxLabel: 'Type 3', name: 'type3', inputValue: '3' }, { boxLabel: 'Type 4', name: 'type4', inputValue: '4' }, { boxLabel: 'Type 5', name: 'type5', inputValue: '5' }, { boxLabel: 'Type 6', name: 'type6', inputValue: '6' }], flex: 1 }] } ... ] Finally, we add the last field, which is a file upload field, to allow users to provide attachments: items: [ ... { xtype: 'filefield', cls: 'field-margin', fieldLabel: 'Attachment', width: 300 } ... ] How it works... All Ext JS form fields inherit from the base Ext.Component class and so can be included in all of the framework's layouts. For this reason, we can include form fields as children of containers with layouts (such as hbox and column layouts) and their position and size will be calculated accordingly. Upgrade Tip: Ext JS 4 does not have a form layout meaning a level of nesting can be removed and the form fields' labels will still be displayed correctly by just specifying the fieldLabel config. The Ext.form.FieldContainer class used in step 4 is a special component that allows us to combine multiple fields into a single container, which also implements the Ext.form. Labelable mixin . This allows the container itself to display its own label that applies to all of its child fields while also giving us the opportunity to configure a layout for its child components. Populating your form with data After creating our beautifully crafted and user-friendly form we will inevitably need to populate it with some data so users can edit it. Ext JS makes this easy, and this recipe will demonstrate four simple ways of achieving it. We will start by explaining how to populate the form on a field-by-field basis, then move on to ways of populating the entire form at once. We will also cover populating it from a simple object, a Model instance, and a remote server call. Getting ready We will be using the form created in this article's first recipe as our base for this section, and many of the subsequent recipes in this article, so please look back if you are not familiar with it. All the code we will write in this recipe should be placed under the definition of this form panel. You will also require a working web server for the There's More example, which loads data from an external file. How to do it... We'll demonstrate how to populate an entire form's fields in bulk and also how to populate them individually. Populating individual fields We will start by grabbing a reference to the first name field using the items property's get method. The items property contains an instance of Ext.util. MixedCollection, which holds a reference to each of the container's child components. We use its get method to retrieve the component at the specified index: var firstNameField = formPanel.items.get(0).items.get(0); Next, we use the setValue method of the field to populate it: firstNameField.setValue('Joe'); Populating the entire form To populate the entire form, we must create a data object containing a value for each field. The property names of this object will be mapped to the corresponding form field by the field's name property. For example, the FirstName property of our requestData object will be mapped to a form field with a name property value of FirstName: var requestData = { FirstName: 'Joe', LastName: 'Bloggs', EmailAddress: 'info@swarmonline.com', TelNumberCode: '0777', TelNumber: '7777777', RequestDetails: 'This is some Request Detail body text', RequestType: { type1: true, type2: false, type3: false, type4: true, type5: true, type6: false } }; We then call the setValues method of the form panel's Ext.form.Basic instance, accessed through the getForm method, passing it our requestData variable: formPanel.getForm().setValues(requestData); How it works... Each field contains a method called setValue , which updates the field's value with the value that is passed in. We can see this in action in the first part of the How to do it section. A form panel contains an internal instance of the Ext.form.Basic class (accessible through the getForm method ), which provides all of the validation, submission, loading, and general field management that is required by a form. This class contains a setValues method , which can be used to populate all of the fields that are managed by the basic form class. This method works by simply iterating through all of the fields it contains and calling their respective setValue methods. This method accepts either a simple data object, as in our example, whose properties are mapped to fields based on the field's name property. Alternatively, an array of objects can be supplied, containing id and value properties, with the id mapping to the field's name property. The following code snippet demonstrates this usage: formPanel.getForm().setValues([{id: 'FirstName', value: 'Joe'}]);   There's more... Further to the two previously discussed methods there are two others that we will demonstrate here. Populating a form from a Model instance Being able to populate a form directly from a Model instance is extremely useful and is very simple to achieve. This allows us to easily translate our data structures into a form without having to manually map it to each field. We initially define a Model and create an instance of it (using the data object we used earlier in the recipe): Ext.define('Request', { extend: 'Ext.data.Model', fields: [ 'FirstName', 'LastName', 'EmailAddress', 'TelNumberCode', 'TelNumber', 'RequestDetails', 'RequestType' ] }); var requestModel = Ext.create('Request', requestData); Following this we call the loadRecord method of the Ext.form.Basic class and supply the Model instance as its only parameter. This will populate the form, mapping each Model field to its corresponding form field based on the name: formPanel.getForm().loadRecord(requestModel); Populating a form directly from the server It is also possible to load a form's data directly from the server through an AJAX call. Firstly, we define a JSON file, containing our request data, which will be loaded by the form: { "success": true, "data": { "FirstName": "Joe", "LastName": "Bloggs", "EmailAddress": "info@swarmonline.com", "TelNumberCode": "0777", "TelNumber": "7777777", "RequestDetails": "This is some Request Detail body text", "RequestType": { "type1": true, "type2": false, "type3": false, "type4": true, "type5": true, "type6": false } } } Notice the format of the data: we must provide a success property to indicate that the load was successful and put our form data inside a data property. Next we use the basic form's load method and provide it with a configuration object containing a url property pointing to our JSON file: formPanel.getForm().load({ url: 'requestDetails.json' }); This method automatically performs an AJAX request to the specified URL and populates the form's fields with the data that was retrieved. This is all that is required to successfully load the JSON data into the form. The basic form's load method accepts similar configuration options to a regular AJAX request Submitting your form's data Having taken care of populating the form it's now time to look at sending newly added or edited data back to the server. As with form population you'll learn just how easy this is with the Ext JS framework. There are two parts to this example. Firstly, we will submit data using the options of the basic form that wraps the form panel. The second example will demonstrate binding the form to a Model and saving our data. Getting ready We will be using the form created in the first recipe as our base for this section, so refer to the Constructing a complex form layout recipe, if you are not familiar with it. How to do it... Add a function to submit the form: var submitForm = function(){ formPanel.getForm().submit({ url: 'submit.php' }); }; Add a button to the form that calls the submitForm function: var formPanel = Ext.create('Ext.form.Panel', { ... buttons: [{ text: 'Submit Form', handler: submitForm }], items: [ ... ] }); How it works... As we learned in the previous recipe, a form panel contains an internal instance of the Ext.form.Basic class (accessible through the getForm method). The submit method in Ext.form.Basic is a shortcut to the Ext.form.action.Submit action. This class handles the form submission for us. All we are required to do is provide it with a URL and it will handle the rest. It's also possible to define the URL in the configuration for the Ext.form.Panel.. Before submitting, it must first gather the data from the form. The Ext.form.Basic class contains a getValues method, which is used to gather the data values for each form field. It does this by iterating through all fields in the form making a call to their respective getValue methods. There's more... The previous recipe demonstrated how to populate the form from a Model instance. Here we will take it a step further and use the same Model instance to submit the form as well. Submitting a form from a Model instance Extend the Model with a proxy and load the data into the form: xt.define('Request', { extend: 'Ext.data.Model', fields: ['FirstName', 'LastName', 'EmailAddress', 'TelNumberCode', 'TelNumber', 'RequestDetails', 'RequestType'], proxy: { type: 'ajax', api: { create: 'addTicketRequest.php', update: 'updateTicketRequest.php' }, reader: { type: 'json' } } }); var requestModel = Ext.create('Request', { FirstName: 'Joe', LastName: 'Bloggs', EmailAddress: 'info@swarmonline.com' }); formPanel.getForm().loadRecord(requestModel); Change the submitForm function to get the Model instance, update the record with the form data, and save the record to the server: var submitForm = function(){ var record = formPanel.getForm().getRecord(); formPanel.getForm().updateRecord(record); record.save(); }; Validating form fields with VTypes In addition to form fields' built-in validation (such as allowBlank and minLength), we can apply more advanced and more extensible validation by using VTypes. A VType (contained in the Ext.form.field.VTypes singleton) can be applied to a field and its validation logic will be executed as part of the field's periodic validation routine. A VType encapsulates a validation function, an error message (which will be displayed if the validation fails), and a regular expression mask to prevent any undesired characters from being entered into the field. This recipe will explain how to apply a VType to the e-mail address field in our example form, so that only properly formatted e-mail addresses are deemed valid and an error will be displayed if it doesn't conform to this pattern. How to do it... We will start by defining our form and its fields. We will be using our example form that was created in the first recipe of this article as our base. Now that we have a form we can add the vtype configuration option to our e-mail address field: { xtype: 'textfield', fieldLabel: 'Email Address', name: 'EmailAddress', labelAlign: 'top', cls: 'field-margin', columnWidth: 0.6, vtype: 'email' } That is all we have to do to add e-mail address validation to a field. We can see the results in the following screenshot, with an incorrectly formatted e-mail address on the left and a valid one on the right: How it works... When a field is validated it runs through various checks. When a VType is defined the associated validation routine is executed and will flag the field invalid or not . As previously mentioned, each VType has an error message coupled with it, which is displayed if it is found to be invalid, and a mask expression which prevents unwanted characters being entered. Unfortunately, only one VType can be applied to a field and so, if multiple checks are required, a custom hybrid may need to be created. See the next recipe for details on how to do this. There's more... Along with the e-mail VType, the framework provides three other VTypes that can be applied straight out of the box. These are: alpha: this restricts the field to only alphabetic characters alphnum: this VType allows only alphanumeric characters url: this ensures that the value is a valid URL Creating custom VTypes We have seen in the previous recipe how to use VTypes to apply more advanced validation to our form's fields. The built-in VTypes provided by the framework are excellent but we will often want to create custom implementations to impose more complex and domain specific validation to a field. We will walkthrough creating a custom VType to be applied to our telephone number field to ensure it is in the format that a telephone number should be. Although our telephone number field is split into two (the first field for the area code and the second for the rest of the number), for this example we will combine them so our VType is more comprehensive. For this example, we will be validating a very simple, strict telephone number format of "0777-777-7777". How to do it... We start by defining our VType's structure. This consists of a simple object literal with three properties. A function called telNumber and two strings called telNumberText (which will contain the error message text) and telNumberMask (which holds a regex to restrict the characters allowed to be entered into the field) respectively. var telNumberVType = { telNumber: function(val, field){ // function executed when field is validated // return true when field's value (val) is valid return true; }, telNumberText: 'Your Telephone Number must only include numbers and hyphens.', telNumberMask: /[d-]/ }; Next we define the regular expression that we will use to validate the field's value. We add this as a variable to the telNumber function: telNumber: function(val, field){ var telNumberRegex = /^d{4}-d{3}-d{4}$/; return true; } Once this has been done we can add the logic to this telNumber function that will decide whether the field's current value is valid. This is a simple call to the regular expression string's test method, which returns true if the value matches or false if it doesn't: telNumber: function(val, field){ var telNumberRegex = /^d{4}-d{3}-d{4}$/; return telNumberRegex.test(val); } The final step to defining our new VType is to apply it to the Ext.form.field. VTypes singleton, which is where all of the VTypes are located and where our field's validation routine will go to get its definition: Ext.apply(Ext.form.field.VTypes, telNumberVType); Now that our VType has been defined and registered with the framework, we can apply it to the field by using the vtype configuration option. The result can be seen in the following screenshot: { xtype: 'textfield', name: 'TelNumber', flex: 4, vtype: 'telNumber' } How it works... A VType consists of three parts: The validity checking function The validation error text A keystroke filtering mask (optional) VTypes rely heavily on naming conventions so they can be executed dynamically within a field's validation routine. This means that each of these three parts must follow the standard convention. The validation function's name will become the name used to reference the VType and form the prefix for the other two properties. In our example, this name was telNumber, which can be seen referencing the VType in Step 5. The error text property is then named with the VType's name prefixing the word Text (that is, telNumberText ). Similarly, the filtering mask is the VType's name followed by the word Mask (that is, telNumberMask ). The final step to create our VType is to merge it into the Ext.form.field.VTypes singleton allowing it to be accessed dynamically during validation. The Ext.apply function does this by merging the VType's three properties into the Ext.form.field.VTypes class instance. When the field is validated, and a vtype is defined, the VType's validation function is executed with the current value of the field and a reference to the field itself being passed in. If the function returns true then all is well and the routine moves on. However, if it evaluates to false the VType's Text property is retrieved and pushed onto the errors array. This message is then displayed to the user as our screenshot shown earlier. This process can be seen in the code snippet as follows, taken directly from the framework: if (vtype) { if(!vtypes[vtype](value, me)){ errors.push(me.vtypeText || vtypes[vtype +'Text']); } } There's more... It is often necessary to validate fields based on the values of other fields as well as their own. We will demonstrate this by creating a simple VType for validating that a confirm password field's value matches the value entered in an initial password field. We start by creating our VType structure as we did before: Ext.apply(Ext.form.field.VTypes, { password: function(val, field){ return false; }, passwordText: 'Your Passwords do not match.' }); We then complete the validation logic. We use the field's up method to get a reference to its parent form. Using that reference, we get the values for all of the form's fields by using the getValues method : password: function(val, field){ var parentForm = field.up('form'); // get parent form // get the form's values var formValues = parentForm.getValues(); return false; } The next step is to get the first password field's value. We do this by using an extra property ( firstPasswordFieldName) that we will specify when we add our VType to the confirm password field. This property will contain the name of the initial password field (in this example Password ). We can then compare the confirm password's value with the retrieved value and return the outcome: password: function(val, field){ var parentForm = field.up('form'); // get parent form // get the form's values var formValues = parentForm.getValues(); // get the value from the configured 'First Password' field var firstPasswordValue = formValues[field.firstPasswordFieldName]; // return true if they match return val === firstPasswordValue; } The VType is added to the confirm password field in exactly the same way as before but we must include the extra firstPasswordFieldName option to link the fields together: { xtype: 'textfield', fieldLabel: 'Confirm Password', name: 'ConfirmPassword', labelAlign: 'top', cls: 'field-margin', flex: 1, vtype: 'password', firstPasswordFieldName: 'Password' } Uploading files to the server Uploading files is very straightforward with Ext JS 4. This recipe will demonstrate how to create a basic file upload form and send the data to your server: Getting Ready This recipe requires the use of a web server for accepting the uploaded file. A PHP file is provided to handle the file upload; however, you can integrate this Ext JS code with any server-side technology you wish. How to do it... Create a simple form panel. Ext.create('Ext.form.Panel', { title: 'Document Upload', width: 400, bodyPadding: 10, renderTo: Ext.getBody(), style: 'margin: 50px', items: [], buttons: [] }); In the panel's items collection add a file field: Ext.create('Ext.form.Panel', { ... items: [{ xtype: 'filefield', name: 'document', fieldLabel: 'Document', msgTarget: 'side', allowBlank: false, anchor: '100%' }], buttons: [] }); Add a button to the panel's buttons collection to handle the form submission: Ext.create('Ext.form.Panel', { ... buttons: [{ text: 'Upload Document', handler: function(){ var form = this.up('form').getForm(); if (form.isValid()) { form.submit({ url: 'upload.php', waitMsg: 'Uploading...' }); } } }] }); How it works... Your server-side code should handle these form submissions in the same way they would handle a regular HTML file upload form. You should not have to do anything special to make your server-side code compatible with Ext JS. The example works by defining an Ext.form.field.File ( xtype: 'filefield' ), which takes care of the styling and the button for selecting local files. The form submission handler works the same way as any other form submission; however, behind the scenes the framework tweaks how the form is submitted to the server. A form with a file upload field is not submitted using an XMLHttpRequest object—instead the framework creates and submits a temporary hidden <form> element whose target is referenced to a temporary hidden <iframe>. The request header's Content-Type is set to multipart/form. When the upload is finished and the server has responded, the temporary form and <iframe> are removed. A fake XMLHttpRequest object is then created containing a responseText property (populated from the contents of the <iframe> ) to ensure that event handlers and callbacks work as if we were submitting the form using AJAX. If your server is responding to the client with JSON, you must ensure that the response Content-Type header is text/html. There's more... It's possible to customize your Ext.form.field.File. Some useful config options are highlighted as follows: buttonOnly: Boolean Setting buttonOnly: true removes the visible text field from the file field. buttonText: String If you wish to change the text in the button from the default of "Browse…" it's possible to do so by setting the buttonText config option. buttonConfig: Object Changing the entire configuration of the button is done by defining a standard Ext.button. Button config object in the buttonConfig option. Anything defined in the buttonText config option will be ignored if you use this. Handling exception and callbacks This recipe demonstrates how to handle callbacks when loading and submitting forms. This is particularly useful for two reasons: You may wish to carry our further processing once the form has been submitted (for example, display a thank you message to the user) In the unfortunate event when the submission fails, it's good to be ready and inform the user something has gone wrong and perhaps perform extra processing The recipe shows you what to do in the following circumstances: The server responds informing you the submission was successful The server responds with an unusual status code (for example, 404 , 500 , and so on) The server responds informing you the submission was unsuccessful (for example, there was a problem processing the data) The form is unable to load data because the server has sent an empty data property The form is unable to submit data because the framework has deemed the values in the form to be invalid Getting ready The following recipe requires you to submit values to a server. An example submit.php file has been provided. However, please ensure you have a web server for serving this file. How to do it... Start by creating a simple form panel: var formPanel = Ext.create('Ext.form.Panel', { title: 'Form', width: 300, bodyPadding: 10, renderTo: Ext.getBody(), style: 'margin: 50px', items: [], buttons: [] }); Add a field to the form and set allowBlank to false: var formPanel = Ext.create('Ext.form.Panel', { ... items: [{ xtype: 'textfield', fieldLabel: 'Text field', name: 'field', allowBlank: false }], buttons: [] }); Add a button to handle the forms submission and add success and failure handlers to the submit method's only parameter: var formPanel = Ext.create('Ext.form.Panel', { ... buttons: [{ text: 'Submit', handler: function(){ formPanel.getForm().submit({ url: 'submit.php', success: function(form, action){ Ext.Msg.alert('Success', action.result.message); }, failure: function(form, action){ if (action.failureType === Ext.form.action.Action. CLIENT_INVALID) { Ext.Msg.alert('CLIENT_INVALID', 'Something has been missed. Please check and try again.'); } if (action.failureType === Ext.form.action.Action. CONNECT_FAILURE) { Ext.Msg.alert('CONNECT_FAILURE', 'Status: ' + action.response.status + ': ' + action.response.statusText); } if (action.failureType === Ext.form.action.Action. SERVER_INVALID) { Ext.Msg.alert('SERVER_INVALID', action.result. message); } } }); } }] }); When you run the code, watch for the different failureTypes or the success callback: CLIENT_INVALID is fired when there is no value in the text field. The success callback is fired when the server returns true in the success property. Switch the response in submit.php file and watch for SERVER_INVALID failureType. This is fired when the success property is set to false. Finally, edit url: 'submit.php' to url: 'unknown.php' and CONNECT_FAILURE will be fired. How it works... The Ext.form.action.Submit and Ext.form.action.Load classes both have a failure and success function. One of these two functions will be called depending on the outcome of the action. The success callback is called when the action is successful and the success property is true. The failure callback , on the other hand, can be extended to look for specific reasons why the failure occurred (for example, there was an internal server error, the form did not pass client-side validation, and so on). This is done by looking at the failureType property of the action parameter. Ext.form.action.Action has four failureType static properties: CLIENT_INVALID, SERVER_INVALID, CONNECT_FAILURE, and LOAD_FAILURE, which can be used to compare with what has been returned by the server. There's more... A number of additional options are described as follows: Handling form population failures The Ext.form.action.Action.LOAD_FAILURE static property can be used in the failure callback when loading data into your form. The LOAD_FAILURE is returned as the action parameter's failureType when the success property is false or the data property contains no fields. The following code shows how this failure type can be caught inside the failure callback function: failure: function(form, action){ ... if(action.failureType == Ext.form.action.Action.LOAD_FAILURE){ Ext.Msg.alert('LOAD_FAILURE', action.result.message); } ... } An alternative to CLIENT_INVALID The isValid method in Ext.form.Basic is an alternative method for handling client-side validation before the form is submitted. isValid will return true when client-side validation passes: handler: function(){ if (formPanel.getForm().isValid()) { formPanel.getForm().submit({ url: 'submit.php' }); } }   Further resources on this subject: Ext JS 4: Working with the Grid Component [Article] Ext JS 4: Working with Tree and Form Components [Article] Infinispan Data Grid: Infinispan and JBoss AS 7 [Article]

Publishing to Flash In the history of Captivate, publishing to Flash has always been the primary publishing option. Even though HTML5 publishing is a game changer, publishing to Flash still is an important capability of Captivate. Remember that this publishing format is currently the only one that supports every single feature, animation, and object of Captivate. In the following exercise, we will publish our movie in Flash format using the default options: Return to the Chapter06/encoderDemo_800.cptx file. Click on the Publish icon situated right next to the Preview icon. Alternatively, you can also use the File | Publish menu. The Publish dialog box opens, as shown in the following screenshot:   The Publish dialog box is divided into four main areas: The Publish Format area (1) – This is where we choose the format in which we want to publish our movies. Basically, we can choose between three options: SWF/HTML5, Media, and Print. The other options (E-mail, FTP, and so on) are actually suboptions of the SWF/HTML5, Media, and Print formats. The Output Format Options area (2) – The content of this area depends on the format chosen in the Publish Format (1) area. The Project Information area (3) – This area is a summary of the main project preferences and metadata. Clicking on the links of this area will bring us back to the various project preferences boxes. The Advanced Options area (4) – This area provides some additional advanced publishing options. We will now move on to the actual publication of the project in Flash Format. In the Publish Format area, make sure the chosen format is SWF/HTML5. In the Flash(.swf) Options area, change the Project Title to encoderDemo_800_flash. Click on the Browse button situated just below the Folder field and choose to publish your movie in the Chapter06/Publish folder of your exercises folder. Make sure the Publish to Folder checkbox is selected. Take a quick look at the remaining options, but leave them all at their current settings. Click on the Publish button at the bottom-right corner of the Publish dialog box. When Captivate has finished publishing the movie, an information box appears on the screen asking if you want to view the output. Click on No to discard the information box and return to Captivate. We will now use the Finder (Mac) or the Windows Explorer (Windows) to take a look at the files Captivate has generated. Use the Finder (Mac) or the Windows Explorer (Window) to browse to the Chapter06/Publish folder of your exercises. Because we selected the Publish to Folder checkbox in the Publish dialog, Captivate has automatically created the encoderDemo_800_flash subfolder in the Chapter06/ Publish folder. Open the encoderDemo_800_flash subfolder to inspect its content. encoderDemo_800_flash.swf – This is the main Flash file containing the compiled version of the .cptx project encoderDemo_800_flash.html – This file is an HTML page used to embed the Flash file standard.js – is a JavaScript file used to make the Flash player work well within the HTML page demo_en.flv – is the video file used on slide 2 of the movie captivate.css – provides the necessary style rules to ensure the proper formatting of the HTML page If we want to embed the compiled Captivate movie in an existing HTML page, only the .swf file (plus, in this case, the .flv video) is needed. The HTML editor (such as Adobe Dreamweaver) will recreate the necessary HTML, JavaScript, and CSS files. Captivate and Dreamweaver Adobe Dreamweaver CS6 is the HTML editor of the Creative Suite and the industry leading solution for authoring professional web pages. Inserting a Captivate file in a Dreamweaver page is dead easy! First, move or copy the main Flash file (.swf) as well as the needed support files (in our case the .flv video file), if any, somewhere in the root folder of the Dreamweaver site. When done, use the Files panel of Dreamweaver to drag-and-drop the main swf file on the HTML page. That's it! We will now test the movie in a web browser. This is an important test as it recreates the conditions in which our students will experience our movie once in production. Double-click on the encoderDemo_800_flash.html file to open it in a web browser. Enjoy the fnal version of the demonstration that we have created together! Now that we have experienced the workfow of publishing our project to Flash with the default options, we will add some changes into the mix and create a scalable version of our project. Scalable HTML content One of the solutions about choosing the right size for our project is to use the new Scalable HTML content option of Captivate 6. Thanks to this new option, our eLearning content will be automatically resized to fit the screen on which it is viewed. Let's experiment with this option hands-on, using the following steps: If needed, return to the Chapter06/encoderDemo_800.cptx file. Click on the Publish icon situated right next to the Preview icon. Alternatively, you can also use the File | Publish menu. In the Publish Format area, make sure the chosen format is Flash(.swf) Options area. In the Flash(.swf) Options area, change the Project Title to encoderDemo_800_flashScalable. Click on the Browse button situated just below the Folder field and ensure that the publish folder still is the Chapter06/Publish folder of your exercises. Make sure the Publish to Folder checkbox is selected. In the Advanced Options section (lower-right corner of the Publish dialog), select the Scalable HTML content checkbox. Leave the remaining options at their current value and click on the Publish button at the bottom-right corner of the Publish dialog box. A message informs you that object refection is not supported in scalable content. We used object refection on slide 3 to enhance the AMELogo image. Click on Yes to discard the message and start the publishing process. When Captivate has fnished publishing the movie, an information box appears on the screen asking if you want to view the output. Click on Yes to discard the information box and open the published movie in the default web browser. During the playback, use your mouse to resize your browser window and notice how our movie is also resized in order to ft the browser window. Also notice that the refection effect we used on the AMELogo image has been discarded. Publishing to HTML5 Publishing to HTML5 is the killer new feature of Captivate 6. One of the main goals of HTML5 is to provide a plugin free paradigm. It means that the interactivity and strong visual experience brought to the Internet by the plugins should now be supported natively by the browsers and their underlying technologies (mainly HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) without the need for an extra third-party plugin. Because a plugin is no longer necessary to deliver rich interactive content, any modern browser should be capable of rendering our interactive eLearning courses. And that includes the browsers installed on mobile devices, such as Tablets and Smartphones. This is an enormous change, not only for the industry, but also for us, the Captivate users and eLearning developers. Thanks to HTML5, our students will be able to enjoy our eLearning content across all their devices. The door is open for the next revolution of our industry: the mLearning (for Mobile Learning) revolution. Blog posts To get a better idea of what's at stake with HTML5 in eLearning and mLearning, I recommend these two blog posts, available at http://blogs.adobe.com/captivate/2011/11/the-how-why-of-ipads-html5-mobile-devices-in-elearning-training-education.html by Allen Partridge on the official Adobe Captivate blog and http://rjacquez.com/the-m-in-mlearning-means-more/ by RJ Jacquez. Using the HTML5 Tracker At the time of this writing (June 2012), HTML5 is still under development. Some parts of the HTML5 specification are already final and well implemented in the browsers while other parts of the specification are still under discussion. Consequently, some features of Captivate that are supported in Flash are not yet supported in HTML5. In the following exercise, we will use the HTML5 tracker to better understand what features of our Encoder Demonstration are supported in HTML5: If needed, return to the encoderDemo_800.cptx file. Use the Window | HTML5 Tracker to open the HTML5 Tracker floating panel. The HTML5 Tracker informs us that some features that we used in this project are not (yet) supported in HTML5, as shown in the following screenshot: On slide 1 and slide 22, the Text Animations are not supported in HTML5. Same thing for the three orange arrow animations we inserted on slide 5. Close the HTML5 Tracker panel. A comprehensive list of all the objects and features that are not yet supported in the HTML5 output is available in the offcial Captivate Help at http://help.adobe.com/en_US/captivate/cp/using/WS16484b78be4e1542-74219321367c91074e-8000.html. Make sure you read that page before publishing your projects in HTML5. In the next exercise, we will publish a second version of our Encoder Demonstration using the new HTML5 publishing option. Publishing the project in HTML5 The process of publishing the project to HTML5 is very similar to the process of publishing the project to Flash. Perform the following steps to publish the project in HTML5: If needed, return to the encoderDemo_800.cptx file. Click on the Publish icon or use the File | Publish menu item to open the Publish dialog box. In the left-most column of the Publish dialog, make sure you are using the SWF/HTML5 option. Change the Project Title to encoderDemo_800_HTML5. Click on the Browse button and choose the Chapter06/publish folder of the exercises as the publish location. Make sure the Publish to Folder checkbox is selected. In the Output Format Option section, select the HTML5 checkbox. Once done, uncheck the SWF checkbox. This is the single most important setting of the entire procedure. Note that you can select both the SWF and the HTML5 options. In the Advanced Options area of the Publish dialog, deselect the Scalable HTML content checkbox. Leave the other options at their current settings and click on the Publish button. Captivate informs us that some features used in this project are not supported in HTML5. Click on Yes to discard the message and start the publication to HTML5. The process of publishing to HTML5 is much longer than the publication to Flash. One of the reasons is that Captivate needs to open the Adobe Media Encoder to convert the .flv video used in slide 2 and the Full Motion Recording of slide 13 to the .mp4 format. When the publish process is complete, a second message appears asking if you want to view the output. Click on No to discard the message and return to the standard Captivate interface. We will now use the Windows Explorer (Windows) or the Finder (Mac) to take a closer look at the generated files. Use the Windows Explorer (Windows) or the Finder (Mac) to go to the Chapter06/publish/encoderDemo_800_HTML5 folder of the exercises. You should find a bunch of files and folders in the publish/encoderDemo_800_ HTML5 folder, as follows: index.html – is the main HTML file. This is the file to load in the web browser to play the course. The /ar folder – contains all the needed sound clips in .mp3 format. The /dr folder – contains all the needed images. Notice that the mouse pointers, the slide backgrounds, as well as all the Text Captions are exported as .png images. The /vr folder – contains the needed video files in .mp4 format. The /assets folders – contains the needed CSS and JavaScript files. We will now test this version of the project in a web browser. Supported browsers and OS for HTML5 On the desktop, the HTML5 version of our eLearning project requires Internet Explorer 9 or later versions, Safari 5.1 or later versions, or Google Chrome 17 or later versions. For mobile devices, HTML5 is supported on iPads with iOS 5 or later versions. Make sure you use one of the browsers mentioned for the testing phase of this exercise. Open the .index.html. file in one of the supported browsers. When testing the HTML5 version of the project in a web browser, notice that the unsupported Text Animations of slide 1 and 22 have been replaced by a standard Text Caption with a Fade In effect. On slide 3, the effect we added on the AMELogo image is not reproduced in the HTML5 output. Surprisingly, this was not mentioned in the HTML5 tracker panel. On slide 5, the unsupported orange arrows Animations have been replaced by static images. On slide 16, the zooming animation is supported, but Text Captions that should be invisible are showing in the Zoom Destination area. Apart from the few problems mentioned in the previous list, Captivate 6 does a pretty good job in converting our demonstration to HTML5. That being said, HTML5 publishing is still an emerging technology. The room for improvement is enormous. In the coming years more parts of the HTML5 specifcation will be finalized and new techniques, tools, and framework will emerge. We will then be able to better implement HTML5 across devices, both in Captivate and throughout the entire Internet Publishing to PDF Another publishing option available in Captivate is to publish our project as an Adobe PDF document. This process is very close to the Flash publishing process we covered previously. When converting to PDF, Captivate first converts the project to Flash and then embeds the resulting .swf file in a PDF document. To read the Flash file embedded in the PDF document, the free Adobe Acrobat Reader simply contains a copy of the Flash player. Publishing the Captivate project to PDF is a great way to make the eLearning course available offline. The students can, for example, download the PDF file from a website and take the course in a train or in an airplane where no Internet connection is available. On the other hand, as the Captivate movie can be viewed offline, any Captivate feature that requires an Internet connection (such as reporting the scores to an LMS (Learning Management System)) will not work! In the following exercise, we will publish the Encoder Demonstration to PDF: Return to the Chapter06/encoderDemo_800.cptx file. Click on the Publish icon situated right next to the Preview icon. Alternatively, you can use the File | Publish menu item. In the Publish Format area, make sure the chosen format is SWF/HTML5. If needed, deselect the HTML5 checkbox and make sure the .SWF checkbox is the only one selected. In the Flash(.swf) Options area, change the Project Title to encoderDemo_800_pdf. Make sure the publish Folder still is the Chapter06/Publish folder of the exercises. Make sure the Publish to Folder checkbox is still selected. At the end of the Output Format Options area, select the Export PDF checkbox. Click on the Publish button situated in the lower-right corner of the Publish dialog. When the publishing process is complete, a message tells you that Acrobat 9 or higher is required to read the generated PDF file. Click on OK to acknowledge the message. A second information box opens. Click on No to discard the second message and close the Publish dialog. Use the Finder (Mac) or the Windows Explorer (Windows) to browse to the Chapter06/publish/encoderDemo_800_pdf folder. There should be six additional files in the Chapter06/publish/encoderDemo_800_ pdf folder. Actually, publishing to PDF is an extra option of the standard publishing to Flash feature. Delete all but the PDF file from the Chapter06/publish/encoderDemo_800_ pdf folder. Double-click on the encoderDemo_800_pdf.pdf file to open it in Adobe Acrobat. Notice that the file plays normally in Adobe Acrobat. This proves that all the necessary files and assets have been correctly embedded into the PDF file. In the next section, we will explore the third publishing option of Captivate: publishing as a standalone application. Publishing as a standalone application When publishing as a standalone application, Captivate generates an .exe file for playback on Windows or an .app file for playback on Macintosh. The .exe (Windows) or .app (Mac) file contains the compiled .swf file plus the Flash player. The advantages and disadvantages of a standalone application are similar to those of a PDF file. That is, the file can be viewed offline in a train, in an airplane, or elsewhere, but the features requiring an Internet connection will not work. In the following exercise, we will publish the Captivate file as a standalone application using the following steps: If needed, return to the Chapter06/encoderDemo_800.cptx file. Click on the Publish icon situated right next to the Preview icon. Alternatively, you can use the File | Publish menu item. Click on the Media icon situated on the left-most column of the Publish dialog box. The middle area is updated. Open the Select Type drop-down list. If you are on a Windows PC, choose Windows Executable (*.exe) and if you are using a Mac, choose MAC Executable (*.app). If needed, change the Project Title to encoderDemo_800. In the Folder field, make sure that the Chapter06/Publish folder still is the chosen value. Take some time to inspect the other options of the Publish dialog. One of them allows us to choose a custom icon for the generated .exe (Win) or .app (Mac) file. Leave the other options at their current value and click on the Publish button. When the publish process is complete, an information box will ask you if you want to see the generated output. Click on No to clear the information message and to close the Publish dialog. Now that the standalone application has been generated, we will use the Finder (Mac) or the Windows Explorer (Win) to take a look at the Chapter06/Publish folder. Use the Finder (Mac) or the Windows Explorer (Windows) to browse to the Chapter06/Publish folder of the exercises. Double-click on the encoderDemo_800.exe (Win) or on the encoderDemo_800.app (Mac) to open the generated application. Our Captivate movie opens as a standalone application in its own window. Notice that no browser is necessary to play the movie. This publish format is particularly useful when we want to burn the movie on a CD-ROM. When generating a Windows executable (.exe), Captivate can even generate an autorun.ini file so that the movie automatically plays when the CD-ROM is inserted in the computer.

The new modular application server JBoss AS has changed a lot with the latest distribution. The new application server has improved in many areas, including lower memory footprint, lightning fast startup, true classloading isolation (between built-in modules and modules delivered by developers), and excellent management of resources with the addition of domain controllers. How Infinispan platform fits into this new picture will be illustrated shortly. Should you need to know all the core details of the AS 7 architecture, you might consider looking for a copy of JBoss AS 7 Configuration, Deployment and Administration, which has been authored by Francesco Marchioni and was published in December, 2011. In a nutshell, JBoss AS 7 is composed of a set of modules that provide the basic server functionalities. The configuration of modules is not spread in a set of single XML files anymore, but it is centralized into a single file. Thus, every configuration file holds a single server configuration. A server configuration can be in turn based on a set of standalone servers or domain servers. The main difference between standalone servers and domain servers encompasses the management area; as a matter of fact, domain-based servers can be managed from a centralized point (the domain controller) while, on the other hand, standalone servers are independent server units, each one managing its own configuration.

Product history The core concepts of project scheduling were laid down in the years following World War II, as construction projects in the United States became larger and more complex. By the 1960s, these concepts were being implemented in mainframe computers by such entities as DuPont, IBM, and the U.S. military. In 1983, Joel Koppelman and Dick Faris founded Primavera Systems in Philadelphia. Their vision was that these same principles of project management could be implemented on desktop PCs, which were then just making their way into common use. The first product went on sale in 1983, available on a set of 5¼-inch floppy disks that held a whopping 360 KB of data each. The application required 256 KB of RAM to run, which was quite a lot at the time. And so Primavera Project Planner (P3) was born. The company was quite successful and eventually P3 became the leading scheduling product in the engineering and construction industries. In fact, it soon became a requirement for certain government contracts that schedules could only be delivered in a P3-compatible format. In the late 1990s, with the rise of networks and the Internet, it became clear that the future of project scheduling software lay beyond a single product installed on one person's desktop. Instead, project scheduling was moving towards systems that could be accessed simultaneously by multiple people in different locations. In 1999, Primavera acquired Eagle Ray Software. This company had created a product in 1998 called Eagle Ray 1000 Project Management Suite. Primavera took ER1000 and released it as two products in 1999: P3 e/c, which was marketed for Engineering and Construction, and TeamPlay for IT and Financial services. Over the years, the products have appeared to merge and diverge, adding capabilities such as timesheet entry, integration, and portfolio analysis, eventually evolving into what is now called P6. In 2004, Primavera 5.0 was released, and in 2007, P6.0 was released, followed by P6.2 in 2008. In 2008, another major change occurred. Primavera, a privately held company, was bought by Oracle, a publicly held corporation. Enter Oracle In 2008, soon after P6.2 came out, it was announced that Oracle Corporation was buying Primavera. Starting as a database provider in 1979, Oracle had grown over the years into a large and influential company, focused not only on databases, but on providing an array of software products that are fundamental to managing modern businesses. This array included enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, content management systems, analytical and reporting systems, and application servers and technology, to describe just a few. In order to ensure that they also owned the best-of-breed in project scheduling software, Oracle acquired Primavera Systems in 2008. Since the acquisition, P6 has undergone a number of changes. First, the various names were consolidated into one: P6. Oracle also spent considerable resources improving and adding to the product. For example, P6 now supports a standards-compliant Web Services API; it can run from a cluster of WebLogic or WebSphere application servers; and the full capabilities of the system are now available through a web browser. P3 and SureTrak Some users may confuse P3 and SureTrak with P6. P3 is the heir to the original Primavera Project Planner product. It is a standalone desktop application. SureTrak was a lighter version of P3 designed for users with simpler requirements, and so had a limit on the number of activities it would support. Both products have reached the end of their life cycles, and sales of P3 and SureTrak officially ended on December 31st, 2010. Yet this is not the end of the standalone desktop client. With P6 version 8.1, a true standalone version of P6 was created, finally closing the gap that sprang open in 1999 when Primavera bought Eagle Ray, and set separate tracks for its desktop and enterprise solutions. Now users can have the power of P6 on their laptop with P6 Professional, or deploy P6 Enterprise and gain the additional benefits of enterprise-wide capabilities. P6 release 8.2 allows these two products to work even better together. What's in the name? The product that we all know as P6 is officially named Oracle Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management, which is quite a mouthful. But the name accurately reflects the scope and purpose of the software: Enterprise: Unlike P3, which was a standalone application designed to be used by a single user on a dedicated machine, P6 is designed to facilitate multiple users across a large organization. It is a true multi-tier system, with a database on the back end, an application server in the middle, and a web server to which users can connect through an internet browser client such as Microsoft Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox. This means that the system is very scalable, and can support hundreds of users working on thousands of projects with millions of activities. This also means that it can support companies with geographically diverse projects and a workforce spread across the globe. Project: At its heart, P6 supports projects. But what is a project? In the Project Management Body of Knowledge, a project is defined as a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product or service. (A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge, 4th Edition, The Project Management Institute, 2008). A project can mean different things in different industries, but projects comprise an amazingly large part of the commercial world. Traditionally we think of construction with respect to projects. But making entertainment is also a project. Think of all the people and equipment and coordination required to make a movie, television show, or album. Developing a new drug is a project as well, starting with basic research and moving to clinical trials, government approval, marketing, manufacturing, and distribution. Each of these is a project by itself. But what matters is this: A project has a scope of work to be done, a timeline for completing the work, and a set amount of resources to do the work. All of these can be measured within the boundaries of the project. P6 allows you to make these measurements, and it gives you the ability to react to these measurements (scope, schedule, and budget) to ensure that your project accomplishes its goals. Portfolio: With very few exceptions, a project does not stand alone. A studio creates many movies over the course of a year. A pharmaceutical company develops many different drugs. An energy company has facilities ranging from the frigid tar sands of northern Alberta to the tropical coastline of Brazil. When making strategic decisions about what projects to pursue, which ones to pour more resources into, and which ones to halt, you need to see the larger picture. This is the grouping of projects into a portfolio. P6 can handle thousands of projects and has analytical capabilities to roll up information across projects and perform analysis across the enterprise. This allows decision makers to understand their business from a broad perspective, and to take action on that information. Management: There is an old adage that says: only what can be measured can be controlled. P6 is about planning projects and measuring progress as the project moves forward. Although P6 is very flexible in how it can be used, it is also designed to help you manage projects well. And when used properly, you can maintain a reliable budget, anticipate cash flow and resource usage, and record and react to changes as they arise. What's more, you can bring the various members of the project team together, set standards, and define the right way to run projects at your specific company. In a nutshell, P6 is designed to help organizations manage their projects in a coherent manner, giving them the power to make better decisions and allowing them to focus on the best strategies.

Defining UDK Unreal Development Kit (UDK) is a freely available version of Epic Games, a very popular Unreal game development engine. First developed in 1998 to power the original Unreal game, the engine (which is C++ based) has gone from strength to strength, and has not only formed the backbone of household-name Epic Games titles, such as the very popular Gears Of War series, but has also been very successfully licensed out to third-party developers. Consequent titles range from Batman: Arkham City to Mass Effect 3, many of which are as equally successful as the games developed by its parent company. Currently, the Unreal engine itself is in its fourth iteration and is considered to be a top of the range visualization tool. It is not only used in the gaming industry, but has also been used for doing any kind of work that demands real-time computer graphics. UDK uses Unreal Engine 3, but it is still a powerhouse in itself and is quite capable of delivering amazing experiences on iOS software. The offering of UDK as a concept has evolved from Epic Games content generation tools very early on with Unreal titles; tools which proved to spawn a very healthy and thriving modification (modding) community. Originally, tools like these, such as UnrealEd (the editor tool with which a user can create their own in-game level), were available to anyone who bought the game. In 2009, however, Epic turned that logic on its head by making their tools available to anybody, whether they owned an Unreal game or not. This proved to be a very successful move which expanded the Unreal developer user base thoroughly. More recently Epic Games, as part of their constant and persistent updates of UDK, have added iOS functionality (in 2010), making sure that UDK can provide games for the ever-expanding mobile customer base that the iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch devices by Apple introduced. This was first demonstrated to the public by a live tech demo called Epic Citadel; a freely available download on the iTunes store which played like an interactive walkthrough of a medieval town. This attracted a record number of downloads as at that time it was truly groundbreaking to experience high quality real-time graphics on a mobile device. Take a look at the following screenshot: In fact, although it is not within the scope of this book, very recently certain demos have surfaced highlighting a potential UDK / Adobe Flash Player pipeline, showcasing the very impressive penetration this games development application has made to a number of different platforms. Of course, we are interested in iOS here, and we'll be covering that extensively in this book, starting from the bare basics and moving on to some more advanced concepts. So what is it that we need to know about UDK and its mobile iOS limitations? Does it have any? Don't expect to make Gears of War Let's start with a fairly realistic statement; we can't make an AAA gaming title as seen on a contemporary console or PC, such as Gears of War, on iOS using UDK! It is a general limitation of doing mobile development using UDK. The main reason for this is rather obvious; we just do not have access to the same hardware. The problem is not the software! UDK can deploy the same game on a PC or an iOS device, but it is the end-hardware specification that has the final say in what can be handled in real-time or not. Mobile devices (and this of course includes iOS devices) have progressed by leaps and bounds over the last few years, and after many false starts mobile gaming today is a force to be reckoned with, both commercially and technologically. That still, however, does not change the fact that as an iOS UDK developer, you will work with more restricted hardware as opposed to, for example, someone developing for an Xbox 360 platform. Let's look at this in more detail; these are some of the current iPhone 4S technical specifications: 960 x 640 pixel display 16 GB, 32 GB, or 64 GB Flash drive Dual-core 1 GHz Cortex-A9PowerVRSGX543MP2GPU 512 MB RAM The newest iPad released in early 2012 has the following specifications: 2048 x 1056 pixel display 16 GB, 32 GB, or 64 GB Flash drive Quad-core PowerVRSGX543MP4GPU 1 GB RAM While these specs are fairly impressive compared to both mobile devices of the past, and also the fact that we are talking about what is essentially a pocket gadget, they cannot really compare with the specification of a top-of-the-range gaming PC or even a current generation console. This, of course, does not mean we can only develop poor or second rate games with UDK. Indeed, some of its contemporary examples highlight the huge potential it has in delivering AAA gaming experiences, even with its current limitations, borne, as described previously, from the hardware limitations of a mobile device. The best example by far has got to be Chair Entertainment's and Epic Games' Infinity Blade, an epic third-person sword-fighting game which came out in late 2010 and is considered the ideal showcase for UDK's technical prowess on the Apple devices. Already spawning sequels and with huge commercial success behind it from its iTunes Store business model, Infinity Blade was, and is, a big eye-opener for all aspiring games developers who want to use Unreal engine technology for a successful iOS title with a very modern feel and visuals. To see just how powerful an iOS game can be, just look at the following screenshot for a fine example:

Setting up Hadoop to spread disk I/O Modern servers usually have multiple disk devices to provide large storage capacities. These disks are usually configured as RAID arrays, as their factory settings. This is good for many cases but not for Hadoop. The Hadoop slave node stores HDFS data blocks and MapReduce temporary files on its local disks. These local disk operations benefit from using multiple independent disks to spread disk I/O. In this recipe, we will describe how to set up Hadoop to use multiple disks to spread its disk I/O. Getting ready We assume you have multiple disks for each DataNode node. These disks are in a JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks) or RAID0 configuration. Assume that the disks are mounted at /mnt/d0, /mnt/d1, …, /mnt/dn, and the user who starts HDFS has write permission on each mount point. How to do it... In order to set up Hadoop to spread disk I/O, follow these instructions: On each DataNode node, create directories on each disk for HDFS to store its data blocks: hadoop$ mkdir -p /mnt/d0/dfs/datahadoop$ mkdir -p /mnt/d1/dfs/data…hadoop$ mkdir -p /mnt/dn/dfs/data Add the following code to the HDFS configuration file (hdfs-site.xml): hadoop@master1$ vi $HADOOP_HOME/conf/hdfs-site.xml <property> <name>dfs.data.dir</name> <value>/mnt/d0/dfs/data,/mnt/d1/dfs/data,...,/mnt/dn/dfs/data</value> </property> Sync the modified hdfs-site.xml file across the cluster: hadoop@master1$ for slave in `cat $HADOOP_HOME/conf/slaves`do rsync -avz $HADOOP_HOME/conf/ $slave:$HADOOP_HOME/conf/done Restart HDFS: hadoop@master1$ $HADOOP_HOME/bin/stop-dfs.shhadoop@master1$ $HADOOP_HOME/bin/start-dfs.sh How it works... We recommend JBOD or RAID0 for the DataNode disks, because you don't need the redundancy of RAID, as HDFS ensures its data redundancy using replication between nodes. So, there is no data loss when a single disk fails. Which one to choose, J BOD or RAID0? You will theoretically get better performance from a JBOD configuration than from a RAID configuration. This is because, in a RAID configuration, you have to wait for the slowest disk in the array to complete before the entire write operation can complete, which makes the average I/O time equivalent to the slowest disk's I/O time. In a JBOD configuration, operations on a faster disk will complete independently of the slower ones, which makes the average I/O time faster than the slowest one. However, enterprise-class RAID cards might make big differences. You might want to benchmark your JBOD and RAID0 configurations before deciding which one to go with. For both JBOD and RAID0 configurations, you will have the disks mounted at different paths. The key point here is to set the dfs.data.dirproperty to all the directories created on each disk. The dfs.data.dirproperty specifies where the DataNode should store its local blocks. By setting it to comma-separated multiple directories, DataNode stores its blocks across all the disks in round robin fashion. This causes Hadoop to efficiently spread disk I/O to all the disks. Warning Do not leave blanks between the directory paths in the dfs.data.dir property value, or it won't work as expected. You will need to sync the changes across the cluster and restart HDFS to apply them. There's more... If you run MapReduce, as MapReduce stores its temporary files on TaskTracker's local file system, you might also like to set up MapReduce to spread its disk I/O: On each TaskTracker node, create directories on each disk for MapReduce to store its intermediate data files: hadoop$ mkdir -p /mnt/d0/mapred/localhadoop$ mkdir -p /mnt/d1/mapred/local…hadoop$ mkdir -p /mnt/dn/mapred/local Add the following to MapReduce's configuration file (mapred-site.xml): hadoop@master1$ vi $HADOOP_HOME/conf/mapred-site.xml <property> <name>mapred.local.dir</name> <value>/mnt/d0/mapred/local,/mnt/d1/mapred/local,...,/mnt/dn/mapred/local</value> </property> Sync the modified mapred-site.xml file across the cluster and restart MapReduce. MapReduce generates a lot of temporary files on TaskTrackers' local disks during its execution. Like HDFS, setting up multiple directories on different disks helps spread MapReduce disk I/O significantly. Using network topology script to make Hadoop rack-aware Hadoop has the concept of "Rack Awareness ". Administrators are able to define the rack of each DataNode in the cluster. Making Hadoop rack-aware is extremely important because: Rack awareness prevents data loss Rack awareness improves network performance In this recipe, we will describe how to make Hadoop rack-aware and why it is important. Getting ready You will need to know the rack to which each of your slave nodes belongs. Log in to the master node as the user who started Hadoop. How to do it... The following steps describe how to make Hadoop rack-aware: Create a topology.sh script and store it under the Hadoop configuration directory. Change the path for topology.data, in line 3, to fit your environment: hadoop@master1$ vi $HADOOP_HOME/conf/topology.sh while [ $# -gt 0 ] ; do nodeArg=$1 exec< /usr/local/hadoop/current/conf/topology.data result="" while read line ; do ar=( $line ) if [ "${ar[0]}" = "$nodeArg" ] ; then result="${ar[1]}" fi done shift if [ -z "$result" ] ; then echo -n "/default/rack " else echo -n "$result " fi done Don't forget to set the execute permission on the script file: hadoop@master1$ chmod +x $HADOOP_HOME/conf/topology.sh Create a topology.data file, as shown in the following snippet; change the IP addresses and racks to fit your environment: hadoop@master1$ vi $HADOOP_HOME/conf/topology.data10.161.30.108 /dc1/rack110.166.221.198 /dc1/rack210.160.19.149 /dc1/rack3 Add the following to the Hadoop core configuration file (core-site.xml): hadoop@master1$ vi $HADOOP_HOME/conf/core-site.xml <property> <name>topology.script.file.name</name> <value>/usr/local/hadoop/current/conf/topology.sh</value> </property> Sync the modified files across the cluster and restart HDFS and MapReduce. Make sure HDFS is now rack-aware. If everything works well, you should be able to find something like the following snippet in your NameNode log file: 2012-03-10 13:43:17,284 INFO org.apache.hadoop.net.NetworkTopology: Adding a new node: /dc1/rack3/10.160.19.149:50010 2012-03-10 13:43:17,297 INFO org.apache.hadoop.net.NetworkTopology: Adding a new node: /dc1/rack1/10.161.30.108:50010 2012-03-10 13:43:17,429 INFO org.apache.hadoop.net.NetworkTopology: Adding a new node: /dc1/rack2/10.166.221.198:50010 Make sure MapReduce is now rack-aware. If everything works well, you should be able to find something like the following snippet in your JobTracker log file: 2012-03-10 13:50:38,341 INFO org.apache.hadoop.net.NetworkTopology: Adding a new node: /dc1/rack3/ip-10-160-19-149.us-west-1.compute.internal 2012-03-10 13:50:38,485 INFO org.apache.hadoop.net.NetworkTopology: Adding a new node: /dc1/rack1/ip-10-161-30-108.us-west-1.compute.internal 2012-03-10 13:50:38,569 INFO org.apache.hadoop.net.NetworkTopology: Adding a new node: /dc1/rack2/ip-10-166-221-198.us-west-1.compute.internal How it works... The following diagram shows the concept of Hadoop rack awareness: Each block of the HDFS files will be replicated to multiple DataNodes, to prevent loss of all the data copies due to failure of one machine. However, if all copies of data happen to be replicated on DataNodes in the same rack, and that rack fails, all the data copies will be lost. So to avoid this, the NameNode needs to know the network topology in order to use that information to make intelligent data replication. As shown in the previous diagram, with the default replication factor of three, two data copies will be placed on the machines in the same rack, and another one will be put on a machine in a different rack. This ensures that a single rack failure won't result in the loss of all data copies. Normally, two machines in the same rack have more bandwidth and lower latency between them than two machines in different racks. With the network topology information, Hadoop is able to maximize network performance by reading data from proper DataNodes. If data is available on the local machine, Hadoop will read data from it. If not, Hadoop will try reading data from a machine in the same rack, and if it is available on neither, data will be read from machines in different racks. In step 1, we create a topology.sh script. The script takes DNS names as arguments and returns network topology (rack) names as the output. The mapping of DNS names to network topology is provided by the topology.data file, which was created in step 2. If an entry is not found in the topology.data file, the script returns /default/rack as a default rack name. Note that we use IP addresses, and not hostnames in the topology. data file. There is a known bug that Hadoop does not correctly process hostnames that start with letters "a" to "f". Check HADOOP-6682 for more details. In step 3, we set the topology.script.file.name property in core-site.xml, telling Hadoop to invoke topology.sh to resolve DNS names to network topology names. After restarting Hadoop, as shown in the logs of steps 5 and 6, HDFS and MapReduce add the correct rack name as a prefix to the DNS name of slave nodes. This indicates that the HDFS and MapReduce rack awareness work well with the aforementioned settings.