How-To Tutorials

E-mail, Calendar, and Contacts SBS 2008 includes Exchange 2007, which provides E-mail, Calendar, and Contact functionality. This is available through Outlook, over the Web via Outlook Web Access and on mobile devices. If the user makes a change to one, it will be replicated to Exchange and then to the other locations. How to access from the other locations will be covered later in this article. I'm going to presume that you understand how to send and read email and create and use contacts, but I will share some useful scenarios that many small businesses benefit from, but don't always understand are present in SBS 2008. Some of these will rely on Office 2007 with Outlook, while others can be seen via the web-based interface too. The scenarios are: Viewing your calendar and other people's calendars Scheduling a meeting for multiple people and ensuring their diaries are all free for the time period Telling people when you are going to be away or unavailable Finding emails that have been filed Recovering emails that have been deleted and removed from the deleted items folder All of the actions in this section are carried out on a user's computer, logged in as that user. Only where SBS 2008 is explicitly mentioned, is there an action that is carried out on the server. Outlook 2003 and 2007 connection configuration To configure Microsoft Outlook 2007, you should simply have to open Outlook as it should auto-configure itself. Outlook 2003 will require configuring, but I'm only going cover the important sections here. For full instructions, click on the link How do I use Outlook Anywhere, on the Remote Web Workplace main screen. The links on Remote Web Workplace point to addresses that begin with https://sites/..., which is not accessible from outside the SBS 2008 network. This should be changed to https://remote.yourdomain.co.uk/... as described later in this article. If this has not been done and a user needs access to the information, then they can edit the address in their browser replacing the first part of the URL as described above. If you need to manually configure Outlook, you will need to select the server as an Exchange server. The name of the Microsoft Exchange Server is the name of your SBS 2008 server. In the following screenshot, the name of my SBS 2008 server is davidoverserver and this is entered into the Microsoft Exchange Server section, along with the User Name of the user I am logged in as on their computer. You can either click on Next to finish the settings, or if this is a laptop or a machine that may access SBS 2008 from a remote location, click on More Settings. Click on the Connection tab and then put a check mark in the Connect to my Exchange mailbox using HTTP check box. Finally, click the button Exchange Proxy Settings. Once the proxy settings are open, you will need to type in the remote access URL for your server and also check the Mutually authenticate the session when connecting with SSL, and then enter the name of your remote access server, preceded by msstd:. Clicking on OK will enable you to finish the configuration. Once these changes have been enabled, Outlook will connect to the network without any further action—provided you have an Internet connection, and should work offline until it gets an Internet connection. Calendar management SBS 2008 provides each user a calendar that they can use to manage their diary and which they can choose to share with colleagues if they desire. The level of details shared can be from very basic free and busy time slots through to enabling someone else to have the ability to see and change the diary. This availability of information does concern some users, which is why they can also mark any appointment as private and no details will be shared with others, even if the calendar has been fully shared. Outlook on the desktop enables access to both your and other's calendars, while Outlook and Windows Mobile devices offer much less, if any, access to other people's calendars. I will only describe each task from Outlook in this section, and will provide more information on using Outlook Web Access later in this article. Viewing Calendars Start Outlook from the Start menu. Once Outlook has loaded, click on the Calendar button or go to the Go menu and select Calendar from the menu. You will see your calendar displayed, normally in the Day format with today showing. In the example below, you can see the padlock for the private appointment that others can't see, two normal appointments, and the tentative appointment that is not confirmed at 17:00. To open another person's calendar, click the Open a Shared Calendar link on the lefthand side and then type in the name of the person whose calendar you want to see. If you have permission to view their calendar, you will see both calendars side by side as follows: If you do not have permission and you are running Outlook 2007, you will be prompted to send an email requesting permission. The email will look like this: If the person receiving this email has Outlook 2007, they simply click on Accept to enable you to view the calendar. If you or they have an earlier version of Outlook, then the person whose calendar you want to view will need to carry this task out by hand. To do this, get that individual to open Outlook and then their Calendar and right-click on Calendar under My Calendars and then select Properties from the menu. When the properties appear, go to the Permissions tab and either add the user and assign specific permission, or to make life easier, simply set the default access to reviewer. You can now view both your and other's calendars to identify opportunities to meet. You can open more than one other person's calendar, but things can get confusing with so many open. With Office 2007, you can overlay the calendars by clicking the arrow next to someone's name. For all versions of Outlook, you close a calendar by removing the check mark next to their name in the lefthand navigation pane.

Capabilities and Permissions So far, we have given users existing roles in different Moodle contexts. In the following few pages, we want to have a look at the inside of a role that is called capabilities and permissions. Once we have understood them, we will be able to modify existing roles and create entirely new custom ones. Role Definitions Existing roles are accessed via Users | Permissions | Define Roles in the Site Administration block. The screen that will be shown is similar to the familiar roles assignment screen, but has a very different purpose: When you click on a role name, its composition is shown. Each role contains a unique Name, a unique Short name (used when uploading users), and an optional Description. The Legacy role type has been introduced for backward compatibility, to allow old legacy code that has not been fully ported to work with the new system comprising new roles and capabilities. It is expected that this facility will disappear in the future (this might be for some time since a lot of core code depends on it), and should be ignored in due course unless you are working with legacy code or third-party add-ons. In addition to these four fields, each role consists of a large number of capabilities. Currently, Moodle's roles system contains approximately 200 capabilities. A capability is a description of a particular Moodle feature (for example) to grade assignments or to edit a Wiki page. Each capability represents a permissible Moodle action: Permission is a capability and its value, taken together. So each row of the table in the screen shot represents permission. The left column is the capability name and the radio buttons specify the value. So now permission has a description, a unique name, a value, and up to four associated risks. The description, for example, Approve course creation provides a short explanation of the capability. On clicking, the description or the online Moodle documentation is opened in a separate browser. The name, for instance moodle /site: approvecourse, follows a strict naming convention that identifies the capability in the overall role system: level/type: function. The level states to which part of Moodle the capability belongs (such as moodle, mod, block, gradereport, or enroll). The type is the class of the capability and the function identifies the actual functionality. The permission of each capability has to have one of the four values: Permission Description Not Set By default, all permissions for a new role are set to this value. The value in the context where it will be assigned will be inherited from the parent-context. To determine what this value is, Moodle searches upward through each context, until it 'finds' an explicit value (Allow, Prevent or Prohibit) for this capability, i.e. the search terminates when an explicit permission is found. For example, if a role is assigned to a user in a Course context, and a capability has a value of 'Not set,' then the actual permission will be whatever the user has at the category level, or, failing to find an explicit permission at the category level, at the site level. If no explicit permission is found, then the value in the current context becomes Prevent. Allow To grant permission for a capability choose Allow. It applies in the context in which the role will be assigned and all contexts which are below it (children, grand-children, etc). For example, when assigned in the course context, students will be able to start new discussions in all forums in that course, unless some forum contains an override or a new assignment with a Prevent or Prohibit value for this capability. Prevent To remove permission for a capability choose Prevent. If it has been granted in a higher context (no matter at what level), it will be overridden. The value can be overridden again in a lower context. Prohibit This is the same as Prevent, but the value cannot be overridden again in a lower context. The value is rarely needed, but useful when an admin wants to prohibit a user from certain functionality throughout the entire site, in which case the capability is set to Prohibit and then assigned in the site context.   Principally, permissions at lower contexts override permissions at higher contexts. The exception is "Prohibit", which by definition cannot be overridden at lower levels. Resolving Permission Conflicts There is a possibility of conflict if two users are assigned the same role in the same context, where one role allows a capability and the other prevents it. In this case, Moodle will look upwards in higher contexts for a decider. This does not apply to Guest accounts, where "Prevent" will be used by default. For example, a user has two roles in the Course context, one that allows functionality and one that prevents it. In this case, Moodle checks the Category and the System contexts respectively, looking for another defined permission. If none is found, then the permission is set to "Prevent". Permission Risks Additionally, Moodle displays the risks associated with each capability, that is, the risks that each capability can potentially raise. They can be any combination of the following four risk types: Risk Icon Description Configuration Users can change site configuration and behavior. XSS Users can add files and texts that allow cross-site scripting (potentially malicious scripts which are embedded in web pages and executed on the user's computer). Privacy Users can gain access to private information of other users. Spam Users can send spam to site users or others. Risks are only displayed. It is not possible to change these settings, since they only act as warnings. When you click on a risk icon, the "Risks" documentation page is opened in a separate browser window. Moodle's default roles have been designed with the following capability risks in mind:

Zen Gift of Education Many distributions have special releases around Christmas and New Year. I was planning to look at some of these this month like last year's Ubuntu Christmas Edition. But instead I found a release that's useful enough to maintain all year around. ZenEdu is a Live distribution that packs a whole bunch of educational tools on top of the Slackware-based light-weight and zippy Zenwalk Linux. As per Zenwalk's Wiki, ZenEdu was initiated by a user on the distro's French forum last year in December. That time the distro contained mostly French-only educational programs. This year, several members of the Zenwalk Linux community decided to release an international edition of ZenEdu. The distro is a goldmine of open source educational software and also packs a detailed user manual, which shows the developers' serious approach to do things properly. The educational apps included in the distro cover a broad range of subjects. The ZenEdu ISO is about 700 MB and includes apps that'll help users with subjects like Astronomy, Mathematics, and Chemistry. Since learning is the core idea behind the distro, it goes beyond traditional curriculum subjects and also packs tools that'll teach students the basics of programming and music. Some of the tools I particularly like are Stellarium - the popular 3D planetarium, Stardict - a multi-language dictionary, ghemical - a comprehensive computational chemistry package, Little Wizard that introduces the basics of programming to young students, and Maxima, for the manipulation of symbolic and numerical expressions, including differentiation, integration, ordinary differential equations, systems of linear equations, etc. If you want to learn music, train your ears with Solfege, and use TuxGuitar to edit and play guitar tablatures. What sets ZenEdu apart from other educational distros is that it bundles other productivity tools as well. This includes general-purpose applications like the IceWeasel web browser, IceDove email client, Pidgin for instant messaging, Kompozer for authoring web pages, and OpenOffice.org for word processing. Furthermore, the distro packs several other apps, which according to the developers, were chosen based on their usefulness to students while keeping in mind the things that might interest them. This includes a simple program to manage personal tasks and todo lists, a drawing program, a comic book viewer, a video editor, and a program to create a wide array of 3D content. However, there are dozens of free software educational tools that aren't included in this CD due to size considerations. But that's no problem. Since ZenEdu is based on Zenwalk, it too can be expanded with drag-and-drop modules. To create a new customize ZenEdu Live CD, browse and download the modules of educational apps you want and use the remastering application, isomaster to add them to your customized ZenEdu Live CD! The highlight of this distro though is the iTALC tool for teachers. iTALC, which stands for Intelligent Teaching And Learning with Computers, is a powerful cross-platform didactical tool that lets teachers view and control other computers in their network. Using iTALC teachers can see what's going on in computer labs and take snapshots, remote-control computers to support and help students, run a demo on all students' computers in real-time, send text-messages to students, cycle power and rebooting computers remotely, etc. ZenEdu has a special 'teacher' account pre-configured to run iTALC. Once logged in from that user, you can start iTALC and navigate through its interface, first adding student computers, and then controlling or monitoring them. ZenEdu's wiki page advices that if you'll be using the program regularly, you should save the 'teacher' account's iTALC directory (/home/teacher/.italc/) inside zenlive/rootcopy of the Live CD via isomaster. This will load the iTALC configuration the next time you boot the remastered Live CD. If you'll be using iTALC regularly you'd be well off installing ZenEdu on to your hard disk. Unfortunately, ZenEdu isn't installable. It's only a Live CD, and at best can be installed onto a USB Flash stick for portability. Most of the specialized distros I've played with, tend to be too specialized. They do what they are supposed to, but nothing more. ZenEdu is different in that, in a single CD, the developers have managed to squeeze a good number of educational apps as well as everyday tools. I hope members of the Zenwalk community, actively develop and maintain ZenEdu.   Some more articles by Mayank Sharma: Meet the Distro guy Making a Complete yet Small Linux Distribution

What are layouts, regions, and viewports? Ext uses Panels, which are the basis of most layouts. We have used some of these, such as FormPanel and GridPanel, already. A viewport is a special panel-like component that encloses the entire layout, fitting it into the whole visible area of our browser. For our first example, we are going to use a viewport with a border layout that will encapsulate many panels. A viewport has regions that are laid out in the same way as a compass, with North,South, East and West regions—the Center region represents what's left over in the middle. These directions tell the panels where to align themselves within the viewport and, if you use them, where the resizable borders are to be placed: The example we're creating will look like the following image, and combines many of the previous examples we have created: This layout is what's called a 'border' layout, which means that each region is separated by a somewhat three dimensional border bar that can be dragged to resize the regions. This example contains four panel regions: North: The toolbar West: A form Center: Grid in a tab panel East: A plain panel containing text Note that there is no 'South' panel in this example—not every region needs to be used in every layout. Our first layout Before we create our layout that uses only four regions let's go ahead and create a layout that utilizes all the regions, and then remove the South panel. We are going to create all of the regions as 'panels', which can be thought of as blank canvases to which we will add text, HTML, images, or even Ext JS widgets. var viewport = new Ext.Viewport({ layout: 'border', renderTo: Ext.getBody(), items: [{ region: 'north', xtype: 'panel', html: 'North' },{ region: 'west', xtype: 'panel', split: true, width: 200, html: 'West' },{ region: 'center', xtype: 'panel', html: 'Center' },{ region: 'east', xtype: 'panel', split: true, width: 200, html: 'East' },{ region: 'south', xtype: 'panel', html: 'South' }]}); Each region is defined as one of the four compass directions—East, West, North, and South. The remainder in the middle is called the center region, which will expand to fill all of the remaining space. Just to take up some blank space in each region and to give a visual indicator as to where the panels are, we defined an 'HTML' config that has just text. (This could also contain complex HTML if needed, but there are better ways to set the contents of panels which we will learn about soon). Ext JS provides an easy, cross-browser compatible, speedy way to get a reference to the body element, by using Ext.getBody(). If everything works out ok, you should see a browser that looks like this: Now we have a layout with all five regions defined. These regions can have other text widgets added into them, seamlessly, by using the xtype config. Alternatively they can be divided up separately into more nested regions—for instance, the center could be split horizontally to have its own South section. A 'Center' region must always be defined. If one is not defined, the layout will produce errors and appear as a jumbled set of boxes in the browser. Splitting the regions The dividers are set up for each panel by setting the split flag—the positioning of the dividers is determined automatically based on the region the panel is in. split: true For this page, we have set the West and East regions as 'split' regions. This, by default, makes the border into a resizing element for the user to change the size of that panel. I want options Typically, when a split is used, it's combined with a few other options that make the section more useful, such as width, minSize, and collapseMode. Here are some of the more commonly-used options: Option Value Description split true/false Boolean value that places a resizable bar between the sections collapsible true/false Boolean value that adds a button to the title bar which lets the user collapse the region with a single click collapseMode Only option is mini mode, or undefined for normal mode When set to 'mini', this adds a smaller collapse button that's located on the divider bar, in addition to the larger collapse button on title bar; the panel also collapses into a smaller space title String Title string placed in the title bar bodyStyle CSS CSS styles applied to the body element of the panel. minSize Pixels, ie: 200 The smallest size that the user can drag this panel to maxSize Pixels, ie: 250 The largest size that the user can drag this panel to margins In pixels: top, right, bottom, left, i.e.,: 3 0 3 3 Can be used to space the panel away from the edges or away from other panels; spacing is applied outside of the body of the panel cmargins In pixels: top, right, bottom, left, i.e.,: 3 0 3 3 Same idea as margins, but applies only when the panel is collapsed   Let's add a couple of these options to our west panel: { region: 'west', xtype: 'panel', split: true, collapsible: true, collapseMode: 'mini', title: 'Some Info', bodyStyle:'padding:5px;', width: 200, minSize: 200, html: 'West'} Adding these config options to our west panel would give us the following look: Expanding and collapsing a panel that does not have a width specified can produce rendering problems. Therefore, it's best to specify a width for panels—of course this is not needed for the center, as this panel automatically fills the remaining space. Tab panels With Ext JS, tab panels are also referred to as a "card" layout because they work much like a deck of cards where each card is layered directly above or below the others and can be moved to the top of the deck, to be visible. We also get pretty much the same functionality in our tab panel as a regular panel, including a title, toolbars, and all the other usual suspects (excluding tools). Adding a tab panel If the Ext JS component is a panel type component, for instance GridPanel andFormPanel, then we can add it directly to the layout using its xtype. Let's start by creating a tabPanel: { region: 'center', xtype: 'tabpanel', items: [{ title: 'Movie Grid', html: 'Center' }]} The items config is an array of objects that defines each of the tabs contained in this tabpanel. The title is the only option that's actually needed to give us a tab, and right now html is just being used as a placeholder, to give our empty tab some content. We will also need to add an activeTab config that is set to zero to our tab panel. This is the index of the tabs in the panel left to right starting with zero and counting up for each tab. This tells the tab panel at position zero to make itself active by default, otherwise, we would have no tabs displayed, resulting in a blank section until the user clicked a tab. { region: 'center', xtype: 'tabpanel', activeTab: 0, items: [{ title: 'Movie Grid', html: 'Center' }]} If we take a look at this in a browser, we should see a tab panel in the center section of our layout. Adding more tabs is as easy as adding more items into the items array. Each tab item is basically its own panel, which is shown or hidden, based on the tab title that has been clicked on the tab panel. { region: 'center', xtype: 'tabpanel', activeTab: 0, items: [{ title: 'Movie Grid', html: 'Center' },{ title: 'Movie Descriptions', html: 'Movie Info' }]} Both the Movie Grid and Movie Descriptions tabs are just plain panels right now. So let's add some more configuration options and widgets to them. Widgets everywhere Earlier, I mentioned that any type of panel widget could be added directly to a layout, just as we had done with the tabs. Let's explore this by adding another widget to our layout—the grid. Adding a grid into the tabpanel As we now have these tabs as part of our layout, let's start by adding a grid panel to one of the tabs. Adding the xtype config option to the grid config code will produce a grid that fills one entire tab: { region: 'center', xtype: 'tabpanel', activeTab: 0, items: [{ title: 'Movie Grid', xtype: 'gridpanel', store: store, autoExpandColumn: 'title', columns: // add column model //, view: // add grid view spec // },{ title: 'Movie Descriptions', html: 'Movie Info' }]} xtypes offer a quick way to instantiate a new component with minimal typing. This is sometimes referred to as 'lazy rendering' because the components sit around waiting to be displayed before they actually execute any code. This method can help conserve memory in your web application. As we are adding this grid to a tab—which is essentially just a panel—there are some things that we no longer need (like the renderTo option, width, height, and a frame).The size, title, and border for the grid are now handled by our tab panel. Now we should have a layout that looks like this: Accordions The accordion is a very useful layout that works somewhat like a tab panel, where we have multiple sections occupying the same space, with only one showing at a time. This type of layout is commonly used when we're lacking the horizontal space needed for a tab panel, but instead have more vertical space available. When one of the accordion panels is expanded, the others will collapse. Expanding and collapsing the panels can be done either by clicking the panel's title bar or by clicking the plus/minus icons along the rightmost side of the panel.    

Meeba Abraham: Hi Allan, thank you for talking to us today, why don’t you tell us a bit about yourself and your background; how did you start working with Blender? Allan Brito: Hi, and thanks for this opportunity to talk a bit about myself. Well, I’m a 29 year-old architect from Brazil. After my graduation, I started working on visualization projects, mostly on 3ds Max for a small studio here in Brazil. After two years I started teaching 3D modeling and animation and I fell in love with teaching. I still teach 3D animation and modeling at a College here. With the help of my teaching experience, I began writing manuals and tutorials about 3D animation. Eventually, I decided to write a book about Blender in Portuguese, and the book was a huge success in Brazil. Currently I`m working on the third edition of this book. With the book, I also needed a way to keep in touch with the readers and discuss about Blender and 3D related stuff. So I started a web site (www.allanbrito.com), where I regularly write short articles and tutorials about Blender and its comparison with other 3D packages. Today the web site has grown considerably, and I continue to update it with content on Blender and other 3D software tools. Meeba Abraham: How long have you been working with it? Allan Brito: My first contact with Blender 3D was in 2003. I was invited by a friend to check out a great open source software for 3D visualization. I was really impressed by Blender, its potential, and the lightweight of the software. Coming from a 3ds Max background, it was a bit hard to get used to the interface and the keyboard shortcuts, but after a few weeks I started getting used to it. After the learning process, I started to use Blender as the main tool for my projects. I can`t say that it was easy to use at first, but with time Blender simply grew on me and became my main tool for my projects. Meeba Abraham: Can you tell about some of the key features of Blender that makes it a viable option to other professional 3D software? Allan Brito: There are many features in Blender that other professional 3D suites do not have. For instance, the integrated Game Engine, which allows you to produce interactive animations, is just awesome! For 3D modeling, Blender has a sculpt module where artists can create 3D models only by sculpt geometry in a way similar to what sculpting tools such as ZBrush and MudBox provides. The node editor in Blender is also an incredible tool to create materials and for post-production. Post-production is a powerful tool in Blender. There is a sequencer editor that works like a video editor. You can cut, join, and post-process videos in the sequence editor. For instance, an animator can create a full animation without the need of any other software. Recently, the Big Buck Bunny project introduced some great tools for character animation in Blender, like better fur, a new and improved particle system, new and improved UV Mapping and much more. I strongly recommend a visit to www.blender.org to check out the full list of features, which is huge. Meeba Abraham: Why is Blender an important 3D application that an aspiring graphics artist should consider using? Allan Brito: I believe that Blender has a great set of features that can help a graphic artist create some impressive art work. Why Blender? I guess the best answer is; why not? All the features offered by other 3D animation software are also available in Blender, such as character animation, physics simulation, particle animation, and much more. And with Blender being a free software, you won’t have to get a single license and be bounded to only one workstation. Besides the features, I believe in the community nature of Blender. If you feel a tool or feature is missing, just make a suggestion to the community or make the feature yourself! Meeba Abraham: Over the years, Blender has grown in popularity. What, in your opinion, are some of the main reasons for this? Allan Brito: In the last few years Blender gained many features that only the so-called high-end and expansive 3D software had. This puts the spotlight right into Blender, and some old and experienced professionals are using Blender today, to take a look at these advanced features, and they like it. Besides the features, the Blender Foundation is doing a great job by supporting Blender and promoting it outside the community. They organize conferences and projects to show the potentials of Blender as a 3D animation package. The last open movie—Big Buck Bunny—supported by the community is a great example of that. Meeba Abraham: Since Blender is an open source 3D application, the Blender community plays an important role in its growth. Can you shed some light on the blender community? How have they helped to popularize Blender? Allan Brito: What can I say? The Blender community is great and has been supporting the development of Blender for a long time. The last open movie is a great example of what this community can do. Big Buck Bunny is a project mainly created by the Blender community. Artists could buy the DVD of the animation even before the project started. And when the animation was finished, all Blender users could buy a shiny DVD of the animation that contains tutorials and all source files of the animation. Now, what if Pixar gave away all the production files of their animations. And even of you don’t want to buy the DVD, you can still download all of the content for free from the project Web site, www.bigbuckbunny.org. This is a great example of the Blender community spirit and how much support Blender gets from around the world. Meeba Abraham: You have just authored a book on Blender; how did you find the experience? Is this the first book you’ve written? Allan Brito: Writing a book on Blender was quite a challenge for me. Even with the experience of writing tutorials and short articles about Blender, writing a book was not easy! But after a few weeks, I was able to write the chapters naturally and almost on schedule. The biggest challenge for me was to write about a subject that no one else had written about yet. In my first book “Blender 3D – Guia do Usuário” written in Brazilian Portuguese, the challenge was even bigger. When I started writing that book, there weren’t any updated documentation on Blender features. So I had to do a lot of research myself. With this book, the challenge again was to write about something that no one else has ever written. Even with a few short tutorials around, there weren`t any full set of procedures or tips for working with architectural visualization in Blender. The experience was great and I hope this is just the first book in a long series of books! I have a few ideas for writing more books about Blender and I’m already working on some of them. Meeba Abraham: How do you anticipate it will help the Blender community? Is it different to other Blender books? Allan Brito: I believe that a lot of users want to use Blender for architectural visualization but have only found tutorials and books on character modeling and animation. This book was written with architectural visualization in mind. So every example and Blender tool is described specifically with architectural examples. Meeba Abraham: You make regular contributions to www.BlenderNation.com, how did you get involved with the site and what does it offer to the community? Allan Brito: BlenderNation is the comprehensive Web site for Blender related news. So if anyone is curious about what`s going on in the Blender community, the first place to look after the Foundation Web site is BlenderNation. My involvement with BlenderNation began with my writing articles about Blender in Brazilian Portuguese for my own web site (www.allanbrito.com). A few months later, I was invited by Bart Veldhuizen to write a few tutorials and I guess they liked my work! After that I was writing articles for BlenderNation as a Contributor Editor. And I have to say that it`s really great to be a part of it, and keep the Blender community updated. The experience with BlenderNation and the books inspired me to start a new project called Blender 3D Architect (www.blender3darchitect.com) where I write articles on how to use Blender for architectural visualization along with tips and tutorials. Meeba Abraham: Thanks for your time and contributions!

Why is Planning Important? Most open source developers see planning as a boring task. Why plan if one can just go and code? The answer is as simple as the question: The "Go and code" approach does not let us create truly optimal code. Portions of code have to be changed while other portions are written. They often lead to redundant code or uninitialized variables, partially covered conditions, and wrong return results. Code gets a "do not touch" reputation because changing anything renders the whole project unstable. Often the code works, but the project is more a failure than a success because it cannot be extended or re-used. Another reason for planning is the ease of bug fixing and the costs associated with it. Open source developers often do not think about it until they start selling their services or work to commercial companies. As shown by recent studies, the cost of problem fixing grows rapidly toward the end of the project. The cost is minimal when development has not started yet, and the person in charge just collects requirements. When requirements are collected and a programmer (or a team of programmers) starts to think how to implement these requirements, a change of requirements, or fixing a problem in the requirements still does not cost much. But it may already be difficult for developers if they came to a certain implementation approach after reviewing requirements. Things become worse at the development stage. Imagine that the selected approach was wrong and it was uncovered close to the end of development. Lots of time is lost, and work may have to start from the beginning. Now imagine what happens if the project is released to the customer and the customer says that the outcome of the project does not work as expected (something was implemented differently (as compared to expectations), or something was not implemented at all). The cost of fixing is likely to be high and overshoot the budget. Next, imagine what would happen if problems occurred when a project went live. After reading the previous paragraph, some developers may ask how the situation applies to non-commercial development, as there is a false perception that there are no costs associated with it (at least, no direct costs). But, the costs exist! And often they are much more sensitive than financial costs. The cost in non-commercial development is reputation. If a developer's product does not work well or does not work at all or it has obvious flaws, the general opinion about the developer may become bad ("cannot trust his code"). Developers will also have troubles improving because often they do not understand what has gone wrong. But the answer is near. Do not rush! Plan it well! You may even think of something about the future code, and then start coding only when the picture is clear. Planning is an important part of software development. While freelancers can usually divide their time freely between planning and implementation, many corporate developers often do not have such freedom. And even worse, many managers still do not see planning as a necessary step in software development. This situation is well explained in The parable of the two programmers, which readers of this book are encouraged to read in full. When it comes to TYPO3, planning is more important than an average application. TYPO3 is very complex, and its implementation is also complex. Without planning, programmers will most likely have to change their already written code to fix unforeseen problems therefore, good planning for TYPO3 extensions is extremely important. But let us move on and see how to plan an extension. How to Plan There are several stages in planning. Typically, each stage answers one or more important questions about development. TYPO3 developers should think about at least three stages: Gathering requirements Implementation planning Documentation planning Of course, each project is unique and has other stages. But these three stages generally exist in every project. Gathering Requirements The first thing that a developer needs to know is what his/her extension will do. While it sounds pretty obvious, not many extension authors know exactly what functionality the extension has in the end. It evolves over time, and often the initial idea is completely different from the final implementation. Predictably, neither the original nor the final is done well. In the other case, when extension features are collected, though planned and implemented according to plan, they usually fit well together. So, the very first thing to do when creating an extension is to find out what that extension should do. This is called gathering requirements. For non-commercial extensions, gathering requirements simply means writing down what each extension should do. For example, for a news extension, it may be: Show list of news sorted by date Show list of latest news Show news archive Show only a small amount of text in news list view As we have seen, gathering requirements looks easier than it actually is. The process, however, may become more complex when an extension is developed for an external customer. Alan Cooper, in his famous About Face book, shows how users, architects, and developers see the same product. From the user's perspective, it looks like a perfect circle. An architect sees something closer to an octagon. A developer creates something that looks like a polygon with many segments connected at different degrees. These differences always exist and each participating party is interested in minimizing them. A developer must not be afraid of asking questions. The cleaner picture he/she has, the better he/she will understand the customer's requirements. Implementation Planning When the requirements are gathered, it is necessary to think which blocks an extension will have. It may be blocks responsible for data fetching, presentation, conversion, and so on. In the case of TYPO3 extension implementation, planning should result in a list of Frontend (FE) plugins, Backend (BE) modules, and standalone classes. The purpose of each plug-in, module, and/or class must be clear. When thinking of FE plugins, caching issues must be taken into account. While most of the output can be cached to improve TYPO3 performance, forms processing should not be cached. Some extensions completely prevent caching of the page when processing forms. But there is a better approach, a separate FE plug-in from the non-cached output. BE modules must take into account the ease of use. Standard BE navigation is not very flexible, and this must be taken into account when planning BE modules. Certain functionalities can be moved to separate classes. This includes common functions and any public APIs that an extension provides to the other extensions. Hooks or "user functions" are usually placed in separate classes depending on the functional zone or hooked class. Documentation Planning A good extension always comes with documentation. Documentation should also be planned. Typically, manuals for extensions are created using standard templates, which have standard sections defined. While this simplifies documentation writing for extension developers, they still have to plan what they will put into these sections. TYPO3-Specific Planning There are several planning issues specific to TYPO3. Developers must take care of them before the actual development. Extension Keys Each extension must have a unique key. Extension keys can be alphanumeric and contain underscore characters. It may not start with a digit, the letter u, or the test_ prefix. However, not every combination of these symbols makes a good extension key. An extension key must be descriptive but not too long. Having personal or company prefixes is not forbidden but is not recommended. Underscores should be avoided. Abbreviations should be avoided as well, because they often do not make sense for other users. Examples of good extension keys are: news comments usertracker loginbox Examples of bad extension keys are: news_extension mycorp_ustr myverygoodextensionthatdoesalotofthings mvgetdalot john_ext div2007 Database Structure Most TYPO3 extensions use a database to load and/or store their own data. Changing the data structure during application development may seriously slow down development, or may even cause damage to data if some data is already entered into the system. Therefore, it is extremely important to think about an extension's data structure well in advance. Such thinking requires knowledge about how TYPO3 database tables are organized. Tables in TYPO3 database must have certain structures to be properly managed by TYPO3. If a table does not fulfill TYPO3 requirements, users may see error messages in the BE (especially in the Web | List module), and data may become corrupted. Every record in every TYPO3 table belongs to a certain page inside TYPO3. TYPO3 has a way to identify which page the record belongs to.

XML Security Threats All the components in web services are described in XML. SOAP and all the WS -Security specifications are XML formats. Hence it just makes sense for expressing security data in XML format. Fortunately, there has been no need to invent new cryptography technologies for XML. The XML security standards have used existing cryptography directly. XML-based data transfer has emerged as the standard for organizations to exchange business data. As with all communications over the public Internet, XML-based transfers have their own set of vulnerabilities to confront. Like any other document exchange, XML document exchange must support the usual security measures which are Confidentiality, Integrity, Authenticity, and Non-Repudiation. The following list illustrates some specific XML security threats: Schema Altering — Manipulation of WS schema to alter the data processed by the application.      XML Parameter Tampering — Injection of malicious scripts or content into XML parameters      Coercive Parsing — Injection of malicious content into the XML      Oversized Payload — Sending oversized files to create an XDoS attack      Recursive Payload — Sending mass amounts of nested data to create an XDoS attack against an XML parser      XML Routing Detours — Redirecting sensitive data within the XML path      External Entity Attack — An attack on an application that parses XML input from suspicious sources using an incorrectly configured XML parser These threats pose potentially serious problems to developers creating applications, components, and systems that depend on XML data. The solution for the above problems is XML Encryption. XML Encryption XML Encryption provides end-to-end security for applications that require secure exchange of structured data. XML itself is the most popular technology for structuring data, and therefore XML-based encryption is the natural way to handle complex requirements for security in data interchange applications. XML Encryption is a process for encrypting and decrypting parts of XML documents. Most of today's encryption schemes use transport-level techniques that encrypt an entire request and response stream between a sender and receiver, offering zero visibility into contents of the interchange to intermediaries. Contentlevel encryption converts document fragments into illegible ciphertext, while other elements remain legible as plaintext. Some features of XML encryption are: The ability to encrypt a complete XML file The ability to encrypt a single element of an XML file The ability to encrypt only the contents of an XML element The ability to encrypt binary data within an XML file Encrypting an XML File Here's a short sample XML file that can serve to demonstrate XML encryption:     <?xml version='1.0'?>    <POInfo >        <Name>FJ</Name>        <Amount>125.00</Amount>        <CreditCardNumber>1234-5678-4564-4321</CreditCardNumber>    <Date>July 6, 2006</Date>    </POInfo> When you encrypt an entire XML file, the process simply replaces the root element (<POInfo> in the sample) with an <EncryptedData> element that contains the encryption details, including the encrypted content. Here is how the encrypted file will look:     <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>    <xenc:EncryptedData                Type="http://www.w3.org/2001/04/xmlenc#Element">        <xenc:EncryptionMethod            Algorithm="http://www.w3.org/2001/04/xmlenc#aes128-cbc"            />        <ds:KeyInfo >            <xenc:EncryptedKey                >                <xenc:EncryptionMethod                    Algorithm="http://www.w3.org/2001/04/xmlenc#kw-tripledes"                    />                <xenc:CipherData                    >                    <xenc:CipherValue                        >                        MKeT0ZmHFLwnZaSXO+oZSxlSJ5/BqvblqG76B3nOMU0=                    </xenc:CipherValue>                </xenc:CipherData>            </xenc:EncryptedKey>        </ds:KeyInfo>        <xenc:CipherData            >            <xenc:CipherValue                >                    +M/Tamk/62Lut4HqLpU/es9sdhnNTTpasbeszN8GN8EAJZsX0vvClcKEW                    UAgIdbvyJpprQ+jUIiWJKTz1X3L6VAefHqO963pU3bzmGMo                    pHLqS1Eg7iAPFhKV1PJclyswyyepEjyu+bOgqzgGnS1XA0/V                    NP7kLK70rB2Zb0DSbaCi+7HjTNGWF9YKtPIP5bvrs5xw+x                    HnKO++2EuqzK+deD7mCu8w6sG9vmRCrUR99Mx1QDZon9a2962ZD                    FSwoIJKg5I83GzOU+RObBBUme+yTf7UWybEiwtHp5ZgvuaQYJA=            </xenc:CipherValue>        </xenc:CipherData>    </xenc:EncryptedData> Encrypting a Single Element To encrypt a single element of an XML file, you specify the desired child element, rather than the root element of the input file as the element to encrypt. The following snippet shows the results of encrypting only the <CreditCardNumber> element of the sample file.     <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>    <POInfo >        <Name>John Doe</Name>        <Amount>125.00</Amount>        <xenc:EncryptedData                        Type="http://www.w3.org/2001/04/xmlenc#Element">            <xenc:EncryptionMethod                Algorithm="http://www.w3.org/2001/04/xmlenc#aes128-cbc"                />            <ds:KeyInfo >                <xenc:EncryptedKey                    >                    <xenc:EncryptionMethod                        Algorithm=                            "http://www.w3.org/2001/04/xmlenc#kw-tripledes"                        />                    <xenc:CipherData                        >                        <xenc:CipherValue                            >                                6zhAcEW7KIKrbSjEOkXDrVkmws5zhQQLDO4YYW+RfRY=                        </xenc:CipherValue>                    </xenc:CipherData>                </xenc:EncryptedKey>            </ds:KeyInfo>            <xenc:CipherData                >                <xenc:CipherValue                    >                    JqsRmdSoS+PXqCe80Y8zNiQ49sHTLNaAgHX1Ja7d+u9fv                    TFBrkBMK7C7EHsQTglZ3yT9yCZDuFnjBoQTLULKqOy71Qw                    EPRPObtYLPIJgy1vUdNrw47uDmJ/R5r/B0SH37HN8mfNv                    i50zPt1qPxxRwA==                </xenc:CipherValue>            </xenc:CipherData>        </xenc:EncryptedData>        <Date>July 6, 2005</Date>    </POInfo> Notice that the encryption process replaced the <CreditCardNumber> tag and its contents with an <EncryptedData> tag, while leaving the siblings of the <CreditCardNumber> element unaltered. This type of encryption can be performed using XML Signature and Encryption. The interested reader may look up the implementation at the Apache site (http://xml.apache.org/security/). Best practices for XML encryption, can be summarized as follows: It is good to have standard element tags for representing encrypted elements within the XML documents. This will enable parsers to better understand encrypted elements and data during the validation process.      It is necessary to provide means for encrypting only the desired elements within an XML document instead of encrypting the whole document. This will pave the way for incorporating several confidential data elements that are intended for different recipients within a single XML document.      There should be standard mechanisms for exchanging the secret keys used for encryption and decryption processes.      The standard should allow encryption of different parts of the document with different keys, so that multiple recipients can decrypt only those portions that are intended for them.      The standards should be adaptable to both ASCII and binary data.      The standards should be adaptable to different cryptographic algorithms.      The standards should work along with other XML security standards and specifications.

How to Integrate with CMS? While attempting integration of one CMS with another, some simple principles should be remembered. For all integration attempts, you have to consider the following aspects: Master-slave relationship: While integrating one CMS with the other, one of the applications act as the master and the other as the slave. If you integrate application A to application B, then application B will be considered as master. Master applications maintain authentication and sessions for both applications. While integrating Zen Cart with some other CMS, first consider whether Zen Cart will be the master or the slave. If you are integrating Zen Cart with an existing website, Zen Cart is going to be the slave. On the other hand, when you are adding blogging functionality to the Zen Cart shop by integrating WordPress with Zen Cart, Zen Cart is going to be the master. User and Group Management: One purpose of integrating two CMSs is to have a common user and group management system. Zen Cart integration may be tight, where both Zen Cart and an other CMS will use the same database for user and group management. On the other hand, loose integration will allow periodic or event-based synchronization of user or group databases. Tight integration becomes easier when both CMSs use the same type of user database. If the user databases are very different from each other, then tight integration may not be possible and some sort of fallback solution such as synchronizing the databases may be used. Visual integration: Users see the integration only through the visual integration. In fact, visual integration should be such that users will be unaware of integration attempt. While integrating the two CMSs, the visual template of the master should preferably be used for both CMSs. However, using a master's template system is difficult and a central template system should be developed which can be used for both applications. Now, we will see how to integrate Zen Cart with other CMSs. You will notice that at least one of the above-mentioned aspects is present in such integrations. Joomla!/Mambo If you are using Joomla!/Mambo and want e-commerce functionality, you have a number of choices. Among these, the best one is using the VirtueMart component. The VirtueMart component for Joomla!/Mambo is quite similar to Zen Cart or osCommerce. Only a few features of Zen Cart or osCommerce are missing in VirtueMart. However, if you still want to integrate Zen Cart into the existing Joomla!/Mambo website, you have two options-and neither is easier than the other: Use Zen Cart as a wrapper or, develop a component based on Zen Cart. Using Zen Cart as a wrapper is in its true sense not an integration. It runs separately and Joomla! provides a menu link. Clicking on this link will show Zen Cart in a wrapper window. If you are experienced with Joomla! or Mambo, you can figure out how a menu item can be added to show the application in a wrapper. However, adding a wrapper may appear to be an integration if you modify the Zen Cart template accordingly. As the Zen Cart shop appears in the wrapper, it would be wise not to use headers and sidebars in the Zen Cart template. Links to the categories and other menus can be provided in the headers. A separate login mechanism should also be provided in the Zen Cart template. Developing a bridge for Zen Cart and Joomla! is a hot topic in the Zen Cart forum. Users of both Joomla! and Zen Cart agree that integration or bridging of these two will be of great value. However, due to the framework of these two systems, developing such a bridge has some complexities and takes some time. Recently, a discussion on this topic has led to the development of such a bridge by the open-source enthusiasts. Please watch the following thread:http://tinyurl.com/65ypyu. Another possibility is JFusion plug-in for Joomla! (available at www.jfusion.org) which is a framework for integrating several forums to Joomla!. The developer of JFusion has proposed developing such a plug-in for Zen Cart as well. It is hoped that JFusion will be able to integrate Zen Cart to Joomla! soon. Drupal Drupal is a powerful CMS and is widely used. There are a wide range of modules available for Drupal and it is used for different types of websites. There are a great number of Drupal users who want to integrate Drupal and Zen Cart-as both are considered useful in their category. Until recently, there was no easy way to integrate Drupal and Zen Cart. Very recently, Zen Cart Integration module has been released as a development version. For now, it works on Drupal 5.x and Zen Cart 1.3.7. Once this module is installed and configured, you can create Zen Cart categories and products from Drupal. As other nodes, these products and categories will be displayed as nodes in Drupal. When visitors click on these products they see product details as a Drupal node, but when the product is added to cart, it redirects to the Zen Cart shop. This module also provides a single sign-on facility. For integrating Zen Cart into Drupal, download the module from http://drupal.org/project/zencart. Before we proceed with the integration of Drupal and Zen Cart, assume that you have installed Drupal and Zen Cart on the same server. Let us suppose, Drupal is installed in e:wwwdrupal57 directory and Zen Cart 1.3.7 is in e:wwwzc directory, and these two uses separate database on the same MySQL server. Follow these steps: Download and unzip Zen Cart integration module: For integrating Zen Cart into Drupal, download the module from http://drupal.org/project/zencart. On your computer, unzip the zencart-5.x-1.x-dev.tar.gz package. You will get a folder named zencart, under which there are some files and a subfolder named zencart. Copy files for Zen Cart: Inside the zencart subfolder you will find the includes folder. Copy this subfolder, that is /zencart/includes, to your Zen Cart installation directory, that is e:wwwzc. This will overwrite the e:wwwzcincludes directory, but will not overwrite any files. Once you have copied all the files in this folder, you are finished with Zen Cart. Install Zen Cart installation module in Drupal: Copy the zencart directory with all the files inside it, except the zencart subfolder, to Drupal's installation directory, that is e:wwwdrupal57. As an administrator in Drupal, you can install this module from Drupal's Administer | Site Building | Modules section. In the module list you will see the Zen Cart Integration module group. You will find the following modules in this group: Zencart-This is the main module for integrating Zen Cart shopping cart to Drupal. This is required by other modules in this group. Zencart Catalog-This module allows creation of Drupal nodes for Zen Cart products and categories. Zencart Category Node Hierarchy-This module depends on the Node Hierarchy module and organizes Zen Cart products and categories. Download the Node Hirarchy module from http://drupal.org/project/nodehierarchy and install it before enabling this module. To enable these modules, select checkboxes in Enabled column and click Save configuration button at the bottom of the list. Configure Zencart Integration module in Drupal: After enabling the modules, you can configure those from Administer | Site Configuration | Zencart Integration screen. The Zen Cart Status section will provide you information about your Zen Cart installation. The module will search and find the Zen Cart installation and show its version, path to Drupal installation and other information. The Zen Cart Settings section will give you the opportunity to mention the Zen Cart installation directory path. Type it into the Path to Zencart field. The Zen Cart Page Redirects section allows you to configure page redirects from the Zen Cart page to Drupal node. Zen Cart Catalog section allows you to configure redirect from the Zen Cart catalog items to Drupal. While using this integration module, you create Zen Cart catalog and products from Drupal. If you want to create these categories and products from inside Zen Cart and synchronize those with Drupal, then check Update product info on cron. This will synchronize product information both on Drupal and Zen Cart by running cron command on linux/unix. Checking Redirect Product Info Pages will automatically redirect visitors from the Zen Cart product info pages to equivalent Drupal nodes. Similarly, checking Redirect Category Listing Pages will automatically redirect visitors from the Zen Cart category pages to equivalent Drupal nodes. The Zen Cart Users section allows you to configure single sign-on options for Drupal and Zen Cart. If you want to allow Zen Cart existing customers to login to Drupal, then check the Allow Zen Cart Customers to login to Drupal checkbox. On the other hand, if you want to allow Drupal users to login to Zen Cart as customers, check Allow Drupal Users Customers to login to Zen Cart as Customers. Checking Allow Single Sign-On will allow users to login once and access both Drupal and Zen Cart.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         The Zencart Integration screen has the following sections: Once you have configured these options, click the Save configuration button, or revert to defaults by clicking the Reset to defaults button. Create Content Type in Drupal for Zen Cart categories and products: If you have ever used Drupal, you know how to create content types in Drupal. You can add new content type from Administer | Content Management | Content types | Add content type. Now you will get a Zen Cart Catalog group. From this section you can define whether this type will be used as a Zen Cart product or category. You can also configure node hierarchy-ability to be parent or child (default is parent). In the Identification section, type a human readable name, for example Zen Cart Product, in the Name field. Then type a machine readable name of this content type, for example zc_product, in the Type field. Provide a description of this content type in the Description field. In the Submission Form section, provide a label for the title and body field, minimum number of words, and explanation or submission guidelines. Configure default options in the Workflow section. Finally, click the Save content type button. Create two content types—one for the Zen Cart category and another for the Zen Cart product. Add Category and Product in Drupal: You can create categories and products from Create Content section. In the list, click on Zen Cart Category. This will open Submit Zen Cart Category form. In this form, type the category name in Title field, type a description of this category in Body field. In the Node Hierarchy section, you can select a parent category. Check Category is Active to make this category visible. Configure other options like Menu settings, URL path settings, Publishing options, and so on and click the Submit button to create the category Similarly, you can create Zen Cart products by clicking on the Zen Cart Product content type. This will display the Submit Zen Cart Product form. Fill in the Submit Zen Cart Product form with appropriate information, such as product name, model, quantity in stock, tax class, base price, and so on. You can select its parent category in the Node Hierarchy section. Check the Create Menu option to make a menu item for this product. Configure other options like Menu settings, URL path settings, Publishing options, and so on and click the Submit button to create the product. Test Zen Cart Integration to and from Drupal: Now it is time to test whether the Drupal-Zen Cart integration is working or not. First, go to your Zen Cart shop, for example, http://localhost/zc. There you will find the categories and products you have added. Click on any of these, and you will be redirected to the respective Drupal node. Again, in the Drupal, click on a product link, type a quantity and click the Add to Cart button. That will redirect you to the Zen Cart shop's Your Shopping Cart Contents page. Similarly you can test single sign-on features by signing in to either Drupal or Zen Cart and trying to purchase items from these two shops. Gallery2 Gallery2 is a web-based software product that lets you manage photos on your own website. It creates a catalog of photos which visitors can view as thumbnails as well as in its original size. It has an intuitive interface to create and maintain albums. It can create thumbnails automatically and can be used for image resizing, rotation, ordering, captioning, searching, and some other functions. You can use Gallery2 to build a community site for sharing photos. You can create the community using Gallery2 and registered users can share their photographs by uploading their own photos. You need to integrate Gallery2 with Zen Cart if you want to sell photos from your photo gallery. Gallery2 has a great mechanism to integrate with Zen Cart. The Gallery2/Zen Cart integration module is available at the Gallery2 download site http://dakanji.com/g2stuff/zcg2-3_2_1a-full.zip. Using it, users can organize their photos and other multimedia files into Gallery2, and offer them for sale through Zen Cart. In integrating Gallery2 with Zen Cart, you have to configure Zen Cart first. Follow these steps for Zen Cart: Download the Gallery2/Zen Cart Integration module and extract it. Copy the zencart/includes folder into your Zen Cart installation directory. This directory contains some templates for Zen Cart. Copying these files will not overwrite any existing file. Login to your Zen Cart administration panel and create a new product category, such as Photographs. Photo items from Gallery2 will go to this category. Select Tools | Template Selection and choose one of the Gallery2 Integration templates provided. You can take a copy of the template folder (../includes/templates/pgxxx) and modify stylesheet.css. You can also modify these templates. Edit ../includes/languages/pgxxx/english.php if you want to change language strings or date formats. Replace ../includes/templates/pgxxx/images/logo.gif with your site's logo. Remember that for Gallery2/Zen Cart integration, both Zen Cart and Gallery2 data tables need to be in one database. In Gallery2, you need to make the following changes: Upload the module files in the gallery2/ directory to your Gallery2 installation's modules directory. In Gallery2 Site Administration, click on Plugins and find Zen Cart under the Commerce heading. Then click Install. After Installation, click Configure. Enter the entire server path to your Zen Cart installation, for example, /home/your_name/public_html/zencart/. Select the category you created in Zen Cart earlier (for example Photographs) from the drop-down menu. Click activate next to the Zen Cart listing on the module page. Refresh the page and click on the Zen Cart link under Admin Options to edit product details. Edit permissions for the individual items as you wish. The module will have assigned permissions to non-album items on activation. If you do not want to sell an item, you will need to disable that item in Zen Cart as the module adds all data items in your gallery to Zen Cart. You can add photograph items from Gallery2. Adding any item to the Gallery2 album will simply show that item in Zen Cart. You can add product options from Gallery2 by clicking on the Zen Cart link in your Gallery2 site administration menu. When you have installed the Gallery2/Zen Cart bridge, you will find a product type in Zen cart named Product-Gallery. All the items from Gallery2 need to be of this type. If you edit any item from Zen Cart and change the product type of any Gallery2 item, the link with the Gallery2 will be broken. Also, note that the Gallery2 bridge will co-exist with Zen Cart image handler and lightbox add-on for Zen Cart. These will handle product images for Zen Cart, whereas Gallery2 add-on only handles images added in Gallery2. You cannot assign the Main category in Zen Cart as the root product category for Gallery2. The category you are selecting in the Gallery2 bridge configuration must be a sub-category product. Once the configurations are done, you can see the photographs from Zen Cart. Visitors can also order photographs from Zen Cart. While you are in Gallery2, you can also place an order by clicking the add to cart link, which is redirected to Zen Cart. WordPress WordPress is an extremely powerful and widely used open-source blogging platform. It has a wide community of developers and users, and almost all kinds of plugins are available for it. Although there are some shopping cart plugins for WordPress, they are not full-blown shopping carts like Zen Cart or osCommerce. E-commerce plug-ins available for WordPress have limited features. Those who are running blogs using WordPress may want to integrate it with Zen Cart to provide e-commerce functionality to their blogs. In fact, there is a Zen Cart module for integrating these two. You can download that module from www.zen-cart.com. After downloading the plug-in WordPress on Zen Cart, you have to install it on the webserver. You can install the plug-in in two ways: first, in an environment where you have a working WordPress installation, and second, when you have not installed WordPress. WordPress and Zen Cart Installed in Separate Directories When you have an existing installation of WordPress, generally it will be in a separate directory from that of the Zen Cart installation. If your web document root directory is public_html, then the installation directories may be: /public_html/blog and /public_html/shop. Follow these procedures to install WordPress on Zen Cart plug-in: Step1: Install WordPress If you have not installed WordPress yet, then download the WordPress files from www.wordpress.org and unzip the files. Then, upload the files to your webserver's /public_html/blog directory. Now, change the permission of this directory to 777 and point your browser to http://yourdomain.com/blog/wp-admin/setup-config.php. The installation wizard for WordPress will be displayed. Follow the instructions on the wizard and give the necessary information. Once all of the information is given, WordPress will be installed. Step 2: Configure WordPress During installation, an administrative account will be created. Note the username and password for this account. Then, point your browser to http://yourdomain.com/blog/wp-admin/. The login page will be displayed. Type the username and password for the administrative account and click on the Login button. You will see the dashboard for administering WordPress. Go to Options | General. Now, change the Blog Address (URL) to Zen Cart's URL http://yourdomain.com/shop/. From the administration dashboard, go to Presentation | Themes and select WordPress Default 1.6. Step 3: Upload WordPress on Zen Cart When you unzip the WordPress on Zen Cart plug-in zip file, you will find that there is a directory called ZC_ROOT and WP_ROOT. Now, upload the contents of ZC_ROOT directory to Zen Cart's installation path on the server, that is, /public_html/shop/. Similarly, upload the contents of the WP_ROOT directory to WordPress' installation path, that is, /public_html/blog. Before uploading the contents of the ZC_ROOT directory, please change the name of the /ZC_ROOT/includes/templates/MY_TEMP/ directory to that of the template directory you are using for your Zen Cart shop Step 4: Edit WordPress File For older versions of WordPress, you may need to edit the /wp-include/template-loader.php file. Open the file in a text editor and replace all exit; with return;. However, you may not need this for the newer versions of WordPress. WordPress 2.3.1 can work without this modification. First, try without this modification. Step 5: Edit Zen Cart File You also need to edit another file in the Zen Cart installation. Open the /includes/extra_configures/wordpress-config.php file under the Zen Cart installation folder and find the following line: define ('ABSPATH','/var/www/vhost/example.com/public_html/blog/'); Type the appropriate WordPress path, that is, /home/username/public_html/blog/. The above line will look like this: define ('ABSPATH','/home/suhreed/public_html/blog/'); If you are trying it on Windows, you may need to put the absolute path, as in, e:/www/blog. Step 6: Configure Sideboxes from Layout Boxes Controller Once the file modifications have been done, login to the Zen Cart administration panel. Go to Tools | Layout Boxes Controller. The screen will notify you that some new sideboxes-wp_cats.php, wp_archives.php, wp_pages.php, wp_links.php, and wp_sidebar.php-have been found. To use these sidebars, click on the reset button at the bottom. To show these sideboxes on your Zen Cart shop, click on the sidebar and change its left/right column status.

Look and Feel: An Overview Moodle can be fully customized in terms of layout and branding. It has to be stressed that certain aspects of changing the look and feel require some design skills. While you as an administrator will be able to make most of the relevant adjustments, it might be necessary to get a professional designer involved, especially when it comes to styling. The two relevant components for customization are the Moodle front page and Moodle themes, though this article will focus only on Moodle front page. Before going into further details, let's try to understand which part is responsible for which element of the look and feel of your site. Have a look at the screenshot that would follow. It shows the front page of Moodle site after you are logged in as an administrator. It is not obvious which parts are driven by the Moodle theme and by the front page settings. The next table sheds some light on this: Element Settings Theme Other Logos - x - Logged-in information (location and font) - x - Language Drop Down - - x Site Administration block (position) x - - Available Courses block (position) x - - Available Courses block (content) - - x Course categories and Calendar block (position) x - - Course categories and Calendar block (icons, fonts, colors) - x - Footer text - x - Footer logo - x - Copyright statement - x -   While this list is by no means complete, it hopefully gives you an idea that the look and feel of your Moodle site is driven by a number of different elemen In short, the settings (mostly front page settings as well as a few related parameters) dictate what content users will see before and after they log on. The theme is responsible for the design scheme or branding, that is, the header and footer as well as colors, fonts, icons, and so on used throughout the site. Now let's move towards the core part of this article. Customizing Your Front Page The appearance of Moodle's front page changes after a user has logged in. The content and layout of the page before and after login can be customized to represent the identity of your organization. Look at the following screenshot. It is the same site that the preceding screenshot was taken from, but before a user has logged in. In this particular example, a Login block is shown on the left and the Course categories are displayed in the center, as opposed to the list of available courses. Front Page Settings To customize the front page, you either have to be logged in as Moodle administrator, or have front-page-related permissions in the Front Page context. From the Site Administration block, select Front Page | Front Page Settings. The screen showing all available parameters will be loaded displaying your current settings that are changeable. ts. Setting Description Full site name This is the name that appears in the browser's title bar. It is usually the full name of your organization, or the name of the dedicated course, or qualification the site is used for. Short name for site This is the name that appears as the first item in the breadcrumb trail. Front Page Description This description of the site will be displayed on the front page via the Site Description block. It can, therefore, only be displayed in the left or right column, never in the center of the front page. The description text is also picked up by the Google search engine spider, if allowed. Front Page Moodle can display up to four elements in the center column of the front page when not logged in. List of courses List of categories News items Combo list(categories and courses) The order of the elements is the same as the one chosen in the pull-down menus. Front page items when logged in Same as "Front Page", but used when logged in. Include a topic section If ticked, an additional topic section (just like the topic blocks in the center column of a topics-format course) appears on top of the front page's center column. It can contain any mix of resources or activities available in Moodle. It is very often used to provide information about the site. News items to show Number of news items that are displayed. Courses per page This is a threshold setting that is used when displaying courses within categories. If there are more courses in a category than specified, page navigation will be displayed at the top of the page. Also, when a combo list is used, course names are only displayed if the number is less than the specified threshold. For all other categories, only the number of courses is shown after the category name. Allow visible courses within hidden categories By default, courses in hidden categories are not shown unless the said setting is applied. Default frontpage role If logged-in users should be allowed to participate in front page activities, a default front page role should be set. The default is None.   Arranging Front Page Blocks To configure the left and right column areas with blocks, you have to turn on editing (using the Blocks editing on button). The menu includes blocks that are not available in courses such as Course/Site description and Main menu. Blocks are added to the front page in exactly the same way as in courses. To change their position, use the standard arrows. The Main Menu block allows you to add any installed Moodle resource or activity inside the block. For example, using labels and links to (internal or external) websites, you are able to create a menu-like structure on your front page. If the Include a topic section parameter has been selected in the Front Page settings, you have to edit the part and add any installed Moodle activity or resource. This topic section is usually used by organizations to add a welcome message to visitors, often accompanied by a picture or other multimedia content. Login From a Different Website The purpose of the Login block is for users to authenticate themselves by entering their username and password. It is possible to log into Moodle from a different website, maybe your organization's homepage, effectively avoiding the Login block. To implement this, you will have to add some HTML code on that page as shown: <form class="loginform" name="login" method="post" action="http://www.mysite.com/login/index.php">   <p>Username :     <input size="10" name="username" />   </p>   <p>Password :     <input size="10" name="password" type="password" />   </p>   <p>     <input name="Submit" value="Login" type="submit" />   </p></form> The form will pass the username and password to your Moodle system. You will have to replace www.mysite.com with your URL. This address has to be entered in the Alternate Login URL field at Users | Authentication | Manage authentication in the Site Administration block. Other Front Page Items The Moodle front page is treated as a standalone component in Moodle, and therefore has a top-level menu with a number of features that can all be accessed via the Front Page item in the Site Administration menu. Having now looked in detail at the front page settings, let's turn to examining the other available options. Front Page Roles The front page has its own context in which roles can be assigned to users. This allows a separate user to develop and maintain the front page without having access to any other elements in Moodle. Since the front page is treated as a course, a Teacher role is usually sufficient for this. Front Page Backup and Restore The front page has its own backup and restore facilities to back up and restore all elements of the front page including any content. The mechanism of performing backup and restore is the same as for course backups.   Front page backups are stored in the backupdata folder in the Site Files area, and can be accessed by anybody who is aware of the URL. It is therefore best to move the created ZIP files to a more secure location. Front Page Questions Since the Moodle front page is treated in the same way as a course, it also has its own question bank, which is used to store any questions used on front-page quizzes. For more information on quizzes and the question bank, go to the MoodleDocs at http://docs.moodle.org/en/Quiz . Site Files The files areas of all courses are separate from each other, that is, files in Moodle belong to a course and can only be accessed by users who have been granted appropriate rights. The difference between Site files and the files area of any other course is that files in Site files can be accessed without logging in. Files placed in this location are meant for the front page, but can be accessed from anywhere in the system. In fact, if the location is known, files can be even be accessed from outside Moodle. Make sure that in the Site files area, you only place files that are acceptable to be seen by users who are not authenticated on your Moodle system. Typical files to be placed in this area are any images you want to show on the front page (such as the logo of your organization) or any document that you want to be accessed (for example, the curriculum). However, it is also used for other files that are required to be accessible without access to a course, such as the Site Policy Agreement, which has to be accepted before starting Moodle. To access these publicly available Site files elsewhere (for example, as a resource within other courses), you have to copy the link location that has the format: http://mysite.com/file.php/1/file.doc. Allow Personalization via My Moodle By default, the same front page is displayed for all users on your Moodle system. To relax this restriction and to allow users to personalize their own front page, you have to activate the My Moodle feature via the Force users to use My Moodle setting in Appearance | My Moodle in the Site Administration block. Once enabled, Moodle creates a /my directory for each user (except administrators) at their first login, which is displayed instead of the main Moodle front page. It is a very flexible feature that is similar to a customizable dashboard, but requires some more disk space on your server. Once logged in, users will have the ability to edit their page by adding blocks to their My Moodle area. The center of the page will be populated by the main front page, for instance displaying a list of courses, that users cannot modify. Making Blocks Sticky There might be some blocks that you wish to "stick", that is, display on each My Moodle page, making them effectively compulsory blocks. For example, you might want to pin the Calendar block on the top right corner of each user's My Moodle page. To do this, go to Modules | Blocks | Sticky blocks in the Site Administration block and select My Moodle from the pull-down menu. You can now add any item from the pull-down menu in the Blocks block. If the block is single instance (that is, only one occurrence is allowed per page), the block will not be available for the user to choose from. If the user has already selected a particular block, a duplicate will appear on their site, which can be edited and deleted. To prevent users from editing their My Moodle pages, change the moodle/my: manageblocks capability in the Authenticated user role from Allow to Not set. The sticky block feature is also available for course pages. A course creator has the ability to add and position blocks inside a course unless they have been made sticky. Select the Course page item from the same menu to configure the sticky blocks for courses, as shown in the preceding screenshot. Summary After providing a general overview of look and feel elements in Moodle, the article covered front page customization. As mentioned earlier, the front page in Moodle is a course. This has advantages (you can do everything you can do in a course and a little bit more), but it also has certain limitations (you can only do what you can do in a course and might feel limited by this). However, some organizations are now using the Moodle front page as their homepage.

Built-In Search Engine Verity comes in package with ColdFusion. One of the reasons why people pay for ColdFusion is the incredible power that comes with this tool. It should be noted that one of the most powerful standalone commercial search engines is this tool. Some of the biggest companies in the world have expanded internal services with the help of the Verity tool that we will learn about. We can see that in order to start, we must create collections. The building of search abilities is a three-step process. There is a standard ColdFusion tag to help us with each of these functions. Create collections Index the collections Search the collections These collections can contain information about web pages, binary documents, and can even work as a powerful way to search cached query result information. There are many document formats supported. In the real business world, the latest bleeding-edge solutions will still store a previous version. Archived and shared documents should be stored in appropriate formats and versions that can be searched. Creating a Collection The first thing is to make our collection. See the ColdFusion Administrator under Data & Services. Here, we will be able to add collections and edit existing collections. There is one default collection included in ColdFusion installations. This is the bookclub demonstration application data. We will be creating a collection of PDF documents for this lesson. We have placed a collection of ColdFusion, Flex, and some of the Fusion Authority Quarterly periodicals in a directory for indexing. Here is the information screen for adding the collection through the administrator. We choose to select the Enable Category Support option. Also, there are libraries available for multiple languages if that is appropriate in a collection. We now see that there is a new collection for our devdocs. There are four icons to work with this collection. They are, from right to left, index, optimize, purge, and remove actions. The Name link takes us to the index action. The collection gives us the number of actual documents present, and the size of the index file on the server. The screen will show the details of the index as to when it was last modified, and the language in which it is stored. It lists the categories, and also shows the actual path where the index is stored. Here is a code version of creating a collection that would achieve the same thing. This means that it is possible to create an entire administrative interface to manage collections. It is also possible to move from tags to objects, and wrap up all the functions in that style. <cfcollection action="create" collection="devdocs" path="c:ColdFusion8veritycollectionsdocuments" /> If we have categories in our collection, and we want to get a list of the categories, then the following code must be used: <cfcollection action="categoryList" collection="bookClub" name="myCats" /><cfdump var="#myCats#"> Indexing a Collection We can do this through the administration interface. But here, we will do it as shown in the the following screenshot. This is a limited directory that we have used as an example for searching. This is the result of the devdocs submitted above. This gave a result of 12 documents with a search collection of the size, 4,611 Kb. Now, we will look at how to do the same search using code and build the index outside the administrator interface. This will require the collection to be built before we try to index files into it. The creation of the collection can also be done inside the administration interface or in code. It should also be noted that ColdFusion includes a security called Sandbox Security. These three core tags for Verity searching among many others can be blocked if you find it better for your environment. Just consider what is actually getting indexed and what needs to be searched. Hopefully, documents will be secured correctly and it will not be an issue. When we are making an index, we have to make sure that we can either choose to use a recursive search or not. A recursive search means that all the subdirectories in a document or web page search will be included in our search. It should also be noted that the service will not work for indexing other websites. It is for indexing this server only. <cfindex name="myCats" action="refresh" collection="bookClub" recurse="true" type="path" extensions=".html .htm .cfm .cfml" key="c:inetpubwwwrootdocuments" urlpath="http://localhost/documents/" /> Your collection has been indexed. It is important to note that there is no output from this tag. So we need to put some text on the screen to make sure the person using the site can know that the task has been completed. If we want to index a single file rather than a whole directory path, we can do it with this code: <cfindex action="refresh" collection="bookClub" recurse="true" type="file" extensions=".pdf" key=" c:inetpubwwwrootdocumentsColdFusioncf8_devguide.pdf" urlpath="http://localhost/documents/ColdFusion" /> Your collection has been indexed.

Password Strength Checker Visual cues are great way to inform the user of the status of things in the application. Message boxes and alerts are used much too often for this purpose, but they usually end up irritating the user. A much smoother and enjoyable user experience is provided by subtly indicating to the user the status as an application is used. In this section, we are going to create an application that indicates the strength of a typed password to the user by the use of colors and checkboxes. We are going to use check-boxes very differently than their normal usage. This is an example of using GWT widgets in new and different ways, and mixing and matching them to provide a great user experience. Time for Action—Creating the Checker In the current day and age, passwords are required for almost everything, and choosing secure passwords is very important. There are numerous criteria suggested for creating a password that is secure from most common password cracking exploits. These criteria run the gamut from creating 15 letter passwords with a certain number of lower case and numeric digits to creating passwords using random password generators. In our example application, we are going to create a password strength checker that is very simple, and only checks the number of letters in the password. A password string that contains less than five letters will be considered weak, while a password that contains between five and seven letters will be considered to be of medium strength. Any password containing more than seven letters will be considered as strong. The criteria were deliberately kept simple so that we can focus on creating the application without getting all tangled up in the actual password strength criteria. This will help us to understand the concepts and then you can extend it to use any password strength criteria that your application warrants. This example uses a service to get the password strength, but this could also be done all on the client without needing to use a server. 1. Create a new Java file named PasswordStrengthService.java in the com.packtpub.gwtbook.samples.client package. Define a PasswordStrengthService interface with one method to retrieve the strength of a password string provided as a parameter to the method: public interface PasswordStrengthService extends RemoteService{public int checkStrength(String password);} 2. Create the asynchronous version of this service definition interface in a new Java file named PasswordStrengthServiceAsync.java in the com.packtpub.gwtbook.samples.client package : public interface PasswordStrengthServiceAsync{public void checkStrength(String password, AsyncCallback callback);} 3. Create the implementation of our password strength service in a new Java file named PasswordStrengthServiceImpl.java in the com.packtpub.gwtbook.samples.server package. public class PasswordStrengthServiceImpl extendsRemoteServiceServlet implements PasswordStrengthService{private int STRONG = 9;private int MEDIUM = 6;private int WEAK = 3;public int checkStrength(String password){if (password.length() <= 4){return WEAK;}else if (password.length() < 8){return MEDIUM;}else{return STRONG;}}} 4. Now let's create the user interface for this application. Create a new Java file named PasswordStrengthPanel.java in the com.packtpub.gwtbook.samples.client.panels package that extends the com.packtpub.gwtbook.samples.client.panels.SamplePanel class. Create a text box for entering the password string an ArrayList named strengthPanel for holding the checkboxes that we will use for displaying the strength of the password. Also create the PasswordStrengthService object. public TextBox passwordText = new TextBox();final PasswordStrengthServiceAsync pwStrengthService =(PasswordStrengthServiceAsync)GWT.create(PasswordStrengthService.class);public ArrayList strength = new ArrayList(); 5. Add a private method for clearing all the checkboxes by setting their style to the default style. private void clearStrengthPanel(){for (Iterator iter = strength.iterator(); iter.hasNext();){((CheckBox) iter.next()).setStyleName(getPasswordStrengthStyle(0));}} 6. Add a private method that will return the CSS name, based on the password strength. This is a nice way for us to dynamically set the style for the checkbox, based on the strength. private String getPasswordStrengthStyle(int passwordStrength){if (passwordStrength == 3){return "pwStrength-Weak";}else if (passwordStrength == 6){return "pwStrength-Medium";}else if (passwordStrength == 9){return "pwStrength-Strong";}else{return "";}} 7. In the constructor for the PasswordStrengthPanel class, create a HorizontalPanel named strengthPanel, add nine checkboxes to it, and set its style. As mentioned before, the styles that we are using in the sample applications in this book are available in the file Samples.css, which is part of the source code distribution for this book. We also add these same checkboxes to the strength object, so that we can retrieve them later to set their state. These checkboxes will be used for displaying the password strength visually. Create a new VerticalPanel that we will use as the container for the widgets that we are adding to the user interface. Finally, create the service target and set its entry point. HorizontalPanel strengthPanel = new HorizontalPanel();strengthPanel.setStyleName("pwStrength-Panel");for (int i = 0; i < 9; i++){CheckBox singleBox = new CheckBox();strengthPanel.add(singleBox);strength.add(singleBox);}VerticalPanel workPanel = new VerticalPanel();ServiceDefTarget endpoint=(ServiceDefTarget) pwStrengthService;endpoint.setServiceEntryPoint(GWT.getModuleBaseURL() +"pwstrength"); 8. In the same constructor, set the style for the password text box, and add an event handler to listen for changes to the password box. passwordText.setStyleName("pwStrength-Textbox");passwordText.addKeyboardListener(new KeyboardListener(){public void onKeyDown(Widget sender, char keyCode, int modifiers){}public void onKeyPress(Widget sender, char keyCode, int modifiers){}public void onKeyUp(Widget sender, char keyCode,int modifiers){if (passwordText.getText().length() > 0){AsyncCallback callback = new AsyncCallback(){public void onSuccess(Object result){clearStrengthPanel();int checkedStrength = ((Integer) result).intValue();for (int i = 0; i < checkedStrength; i++){((CheckBox) strength.get(i)).setStyleName(getPasswordStrengthStyle(checkedStrength));}}public void onFailure(Throwable caught){Window.alert("Error calling the password strengthservice." + caught.getMessage());}};pwStrengthService.checkStrength(passwordText.getText(), callback);}else{clearStrengthPanel();}}}); 9. Finally, in the constructor, add the password text box and the strength panel to the work panel. Create a little info panel that displays descriptive text about this application, so that we can display this text when this sample is selected in the list of available samples in our Samples application. Add the info panel and the work panel to a dock panel, and initialize the widget. HorizontalPanel infoPanel = new HorizontalPanel();infoPanel.add(new HTML("<div class='infoProse'>Start typing a passwordstring. The strength of the password will bechecked and displayed below. Red indicates that thepassword is Weak, Orange indicates a Mediumstrength password and Green indicates a Strongpassword. The algorithm for checking the strengthis very basic and checks the length of the passwordstring.</div>"));workPanel.add(passwordText);workPanel.add(infoPanel);workPanel.add(strengthPanel);DockPanel workPane = new DockPanel();workPane.add(infoPanel, DockPanel.NORTH);workPane.add(workPanel, DockPanel.CENTER);workPane.setCellHeight(workPanel, "100%");workPane.setCellWidth(workPanel, "100%");initWidget(workPane); 10. Add the service to the module file for the Samples application—Samples.gwt.xml in the com.packtpub.gwtbook.samples package. <servlet path="/pwstrength" class="com.packtpub.gwtbook.samples.server.PasswordStrengthServiceImpl"/> Here is the user interface for the password strength checking application: Now start typing a password string to check its strength. Here is the password strength when you type a password string that is less than five characters: What Just Happened? The password strength service checks the size of the provided string and returns an integer value of three, six, or nine based on whether it is weak, medium, or strong. It makes this determination by using the criteria that if the password string is less than five characters in length, it is weak, and if it is more than five characters but not greater than seven characters, it is considered a medium strength password. Anything over seven characters is considered to be a strong password. The user interface consists of a text box for entering a password string and a panel containing nine checkboxes that visually displays the strength of the typed string as a password. An event handler is registered to listen for keyboard events generated by the password text box. Whenever the password text changes, which happens when we type into the field or change a character in the field, we communicate asynchronously with the password strength service and retrieve the strength of the given string as a password. The returned strength is displayed to the user in a visual fashion by the use of colors to symbolize the three different password strengths. The password strength is displayed in a compound widget that is created by adding nine checkboxes to a HorizontalPanel. The color of the checkboxes is changed using CSS depending on the strength of the password string. This process of combining the basic widgets provided by GWT into more complex widgets to build user interfaces is a common pattern in building GWT applications. It is possible to build quite intricate user interfaces in this way by utilizing the power of the GWT framework. Summary In the current day and age, passwords are required for almost everything, and choosing secure passwords is very important. In this article, we implemented a password strength checker in Google Web Toolkit (GWT) and AJAX. By going through the article, the reader can also get a general idea of implementing other interactive user forms.

Filtering As mentioned earlier, filtering is one of the very powerful tools within NAV C/AL. Filtering is the application of defined limits on the data to be considered in a process (to learn more about Data types in NAV, visit here). Filter structures can be applied in at least three different ways, depending on the design of the process. The first way is for the developer to fully define the filter structure and the value of the filter. This might be done in a report designed to show only information on a selected group of customers, for example those with an open Balance on Account. The Customer table would be filtered to report only customers who have an Outstanding Balance greater than zero. The second way is for the developer to define the filter structure, but allow the user to fill in the specific value to be applied. This approach would be appropriate in an accounting report that was to be tied to specific accounting periods. The user would be allowed to define what period(s) were to be considered for each report run. The third way is the ad hoc definition of a filter structure and value by the user. This approach is often used for general analysis of ledger data where the developer wants to give the user total flexibility in how they slice and dice the available data. It is quite common within the standard NAV applications and in the course of enhancements to use a combination of the different filtering types. For example, the report just mentioned that lists only customers with an open Balance on Account (via a developer-defined filter) could also allow the user to define additional filter criteria. Perhaps, the user wants to see only Euro currency-based customers, so they would filter on the Customer Currency Code field. Filters are an integral part of FlowFields and FlowFilters, two of the three Field Classes. These are very flexible and powerful tools, which allow the NAV designer to create forms, reports, and other processes that can be used by the user under a wide variety of circumstances for various purposes. In most systems, user inquiries (forms and reports) and processes need to be quite specific to different data types and ranges. The NAV C/AL toolset allows you to create relatively generic user inquiries and processes and then allow the user to apply filtering to fit their specific needs. Defining Filter Syntax and Values Let us go over some common ways in which we can define filter values and syntax. Remember, when you apply a filter, you will only view or process records where the filtered data field satisfies the limits defined by the filter. Equality and inequalityeither an equal (=) sign or no sign filters for data "equal to" the filter value. Data Type - description Example Filters Integer =200 Integer 200 Text Chicago Text " (two single quote marks)         a greater than (>) sign filters for data greater than the filter value Data Type - description Example Filters Integer >200 Date >10/06/07 Decimal >450.50         a less than (<) sign filters for data less than the filter value Data Type - description Example Filters Integer <150 Date <10/07/07

Reviewing Jayaram's other OLAP related articles may greatly help in understanding this article. Creating a New Cube The folder structure for the project developed in Part 1 is shown in the next figure. The Northwind.ds data source and the Northwind.dsv data source view were configured in Part 1. There are no pre-existing cubes in Nwind2008. Right click the Cubes folder and from the drop-down menu you can create a new Cube. Click on New Cube... menu item. This opens the Cube Wizard welcome window as shown. Click on the Next button. This opens the Select Creation Method page of the wizard as shown. There are three options and the default is used for this article. Click on the Next button. This opens the Select Measure Groups tables. At least one table must be chosen to continue. There is even the option of asking for a suggestion. Click on the Suggest button at the top. The program goes through the motions and comes up with two tables as candidates for Measures group, the Products table and the Order Details table. You will see check marks appearing for these two tables. Accept the suggested tables for measures and click on the Next button. This opens the Select Measures window where you can choose measures that you want to include in the Cube as shown. Uncheck the ID related items in the Products table and click on the Next button. This brings up the Select New Dimensions window as shown in the next figure. Here also one could choose the needed items. For this article the default is accepted. Click on the Next button. This takes you to the Completing the Wizard window which shows your Cube contents in a tree view as shown. Now click on the Finish button. This creates the Cube as shown in the Solution Explorer. Now you will see additional tabs open up for the Northwind.cube as shown. Using these tabs you can look at more details. These are outside the scope of this article. Also separate windows gets displayed for Cube's Measures and Dimensions as shown. Also, the Data Source View of the Cube with the relationships between the Dimensions and Measures gets displayed as shown.    

Categories, Products, and Attributes Products are the items that are sold. In Magento, Categories organize your Products, and Attributes describe them. Think of a Category as the place where a Product lives, and an Attribute is anything that describes a Product. Each one of your Products can belong to one or more Categories. Also, each Product can be described by any number of Attributes. Is it a Category or an Attribute? Some things are clearly Categories. For example, if you have an electronics store, MP3 players would make a good Category. If you're selling jewellery, earrings would make a good Category. Other things are clearly Attributes. Color, description, picture, and SKU number are almost always Attributes. Sometimes, the same thing can be used for a Category or an Attribute. For example, suppose your site sells shoes. If you made size an Attribute, then after your shoppers have located a specific shoe, they can select the size they want. However, if you also made size a Category, the shoppers could begin their shopping by selecting their size. Then they could browse through the styles available in their size. So should size be an Attribute, a Category, or both? The answer depends upon what kind of shopping experience you want to create for your customers. Examples The hierarchy of Categories, Products, and Attributes looks like this: Category 1 Product 1 Attribute 1 Attribute 2 Product 2 Attribute 1 Attribute 2 Category 2 Product 3 Attribute 1 Attribute 3 Product 4 Attribute 1 Attribute 3 We are building a site that sells gourmet coffee, so we might organize our store like this: Single Origin Hawaiian Kona Grind (whole bean, drip, French press) Roast (light, medium, dark) Blue Mountain Grind Roast Blends Breakfast Blend Grind Caffeine (regular, decaffeinated) Afternoon Cruise Grind Caffeine In Magento, you can give your shoppers the ability to search your store. So if the shoppers know that they want Blue Mountain coffee, they can use the Search function to find it in our store. However, customers who don't know exactly what they want will browse the store. They will often begin browsing by selecting a category. With the organization that we just saw, when customers browse our store, they will start by selecting Single Origin or Blends. Then the shoppers will select the product they want: Hawaiian Kona, Blue Mountain, Breakfast Blend, or Afternoon Cruise. After our shoppers decide upon a Product, they select Attributes for that product. In our store, shoppers can select Grind for any of the products. For Single Origin, they can also select Roast. For blends, they can select Caffeine. This gives you a clue about how Magento handles attributes. To each Product, you can apply as many, or as few, attributes as you want. Now that we have definitions for Category, Product, and Attribute, let's look at each of them in detail. Then, we can start adding products. Categories Product Categories are important because they are the primary tool that your shoppers use to navigate your store. Product Categories organize your store for your shoppers. Categories can be organized into Parent Categories and Subcategories. To get to a Subcategory, you drill down through its Parent Category. Categories and the Navigation Menu If a Category is an Anchor Category, then it appears on the Navigation Menu. The term "Anchor" makes the category sound as if it must be a top-level category. This is not true. You can designate any category as an Anchor Category. Doing so puts that category into the Navigation Menu. When a shopper selects a normal Category from the Navigation Menu, its landing page and any subcategories are displayed. When a shopper selects an Anchor Category from the menu, Magento does not display the normal list of subcategories. Instead, it displays the Attributes of all the Products in that category and its subcategories. Instead of moving down into subcategories, the shopper uses the Attributes to filter all the Products in that Anchor Category and the Categories below it. The Navigation Menu will not display if: You don't create any Categories, or You create Categories, but you don't make any of them Anchors, or Your Anchor Categories are not subcategories under the Default Category. The Navigation Menu will display only if: You have created at least one Category You have made at least one Category an Anchor You have made the Anchor Category a Subcategory under Default. When you first create your Magento site and add Products, you won't see those Products on your site until you've met all of the previous conditions. For this reason I recommend that you create at least one Anchor Category before you start adding Products to your store. As you add each Product, add it to an Anchor Category. Then, the Product will display in your store, and you can preview it. If the Anchor Category is not the one that you want for that Product, you can change the Product's Category later Before we add Products to our coffee store, we will create two Anchor Categories: Single Origin and Blends. As we add Products, we will assign them to a Category so that we can preview them in our storefront. Making best use of Categories There are three things that Categories can accomplish. They can: Help the shoppers, who know exactly what they want, to find the product that they are looking for. Help the shoppers, who almost know what they want, to find a product that matches their desires. Entice the shoppers, who have almost no idea of what they want, to explore your store. We would like to organize our store so that our Categories accomplish all these goals. However, these goals are often mutually exclusive. For example, suppose you create an electronics store. In addition to many other products, your store sells MP3 players, including Apple iPods. A Category called iPods would help the shoppers who know that they want an iPod, as they can quickly find one. However, the iPods Category doesn't do much to help shoppers who know that they want an MP3 player, but don't know what kind. On the Web, you usually search something when you know what you want. But when you're not sure about what you want, you usually browse. In an online store, you usually begin browsing by selecting a Category. When you are creating Categories for your online store, try to make them helpful for shoppers who almost know what they want. However, what if a high percentage of your shoppers are looking for a narrow category of products? Consider creating a top-level Category to make those products easily accessible. Again, suppose you have an electronics store that sells a wide variety of items. If a high percentage of your customers want iPods, it might be worthwhile to create a Category just for those few products. The logs from the Search function on your site are one way you can determine whether your shoppers are interested in a narrow Category of a Product. Are 30 percent of the searches on your site for left-handed fishing reels? If so, you might want to create a top-level Category just for those Products. Attributes An Attribute is a characteristic of a Product. Name, price, SKU, size, color, and manufacturer are all examples of Attributes. System versus Simple Attributes Notice that the first few examples (name, price, and SKU) are all required for a Product to function in Magento. Magento adds these Attributes to every product, and requires you to assign a value for each of them. These are called System Attributes. The other three examples (size, color, and manufacturer) are optional Attributes. They are created by the store owner. They are called Simple Attributes. When we discuss creating and assigning Attributes, we are almost always discussing Simple Attributes. Attribute Sets Notice that the Single Origin coffees have two Attributes: Grind and Roast. Also notice that the blends have the Attributes of Grind and Caffeine. Single Origin Hawaiian Kona Grind (whole bean, drip, French press) Roast (light, medium, dark) Blue Mountain Grind Roast Blends Breakfast Blend Grind Caffeine (regular, decaffeinated) Afternoon Cruise Grind Caffeine In this example, the store owner created three Attributes: Grind, Roast, and Caffeine. Next, the store owner grouped the Attributes into two Attribute Sets: one set contains Grind and Roast, and the other set contains Grind and Caffeine. Then, an Attribute set was applied to each Product. Attributes are not applied directly to Products. They are first grouped into Attribute Sets, and then a set can be applied to a Product. This means that you will need to create a set for each different combination of Attributes in your store. You can name these Sets after the Attributes they contain, such as Grind-Roast. Or, you can name them after the type of Product which will use those Attributes, such as Single Origin Attributes. If each Product in a group will use the same Attribute as every other Product in that group, then you can name the set after that group. For example, at this time, all Single Origin coffees have the same Attributes: Grind and Roast. If they will all have these two Attributes and you will always add and remove Attributes to them as a group, then you could name the set Single Origin Attributes. If the Products in a group will likely use different Attributes, then name the set after the Attributes. For example, if you expect that some Single Origin coffees will use the Attributes Grind and Roast, while others will use just Roast, then it would not make sense to create a set called Single Origin Attributes. Instead, create a set called Grind-Roast, and another called Roast. Three types of Products In Magento, you can create three different types of Products: Simple, Configurable, and Grouped. The following is a very brief definition for each type of Product. Simple Product A Simple Product is a single Product, with Attributes that the store owner chooses. As the saying goes, "What you see is what you get." The customer does not get to choose anything about the Product. In our coffee store, a good example for a Simple Product might be a drip coffee maker. It comes in only one color. And while the customer can buy drip coffee makers of various sizes (4 cups, 8 cups, 12 cups, and so on), each of those is a separate Product. A bad example of a Simple Product would be a type of coffee. For example, we might want to allow the customer to choose the type of roast for our Hawaiian Kona coffee: light, medium, or dark. Because we want the customer to choose a value for an Attribute, that would not be a good Simple Product. Configurable Product A Configurable Product is a single Product, with at least one Attribute that the customer gets to choose. There is a saying that goes, "Have it your way." The customer gets to choose something about the Product. A good example of a Configurable Product would be a type of coffee that comes in several different roasts: light, medium, and dark. Because we want the customer to choose the roast(s) he wants, that would be a good Configurable Product. Grouped Product A Grouped Product is several Simple Products that are displayed on the same page. You can force the customer to buy the group, or allow the customer to buy each Product separately. The previous definitions are adequate for now. However, when you start creating Products, you will need to know more about each type of Product.

EAI - The Broader Perspective No one should have (or will) ever dared to build a 'Single System' which will take care of the entire business requirements of an enterprise. Instead, we build few (or many) systems,and each of them takes care of a set of functionalities in a single Line of Business (LOB). There is absolutely nothing wrong here, but the need of the hour is that these systems have to exchange information and interoperate in many new ways which have not been foreseen earlier. Business grows, enterprise boundaries expands and mergers and acquisition are all norms of the day. If IT cannot scale up with these volatile environments, the failure is not far. Let me take a single, but not simple problem that today's Businesses and IT face - Duplicate Data. By Duplicate Data we mean data related to a single entity stored in multiple systems and storage mechanisms, that too in multiple formats and multiple content. I will take the 'Customer' entity as an example so that I can borrow the 'Single Customer View' (SCV) jargon to explain the problem. We gather customer information while he makes a web order entry or when he raises a complaint against the product or service purchased or when we raise a marketing campaign for a new product to be introduced or ... The list continues, and in each of these scenarios we make use of different systems to collect and store the same customer information. 'Same Customer' - is it same? Who can answer this question? Is there a Data Steward who can provide you with the SCV from amongst the many information silos existing in your Organization? To rephrase the question, does your organization at least have a 'Single View of Truth', if it doesn't have a 'Single Source of Truth'? Information locked away inside disparate, monolithic application silos has proven a stubborn obstacle in answering the queries business requires, impeding the opportunities of selling, not to mention cross-selling and up-selling. Yeah, it's time to cleanse and distill each customer's data into a single best-record view that can be used to improve source system data quality. For that, first we need to integrate the many source systems available. Today, companies are even acquiring just to get access to it's invaluable Customer information! This is just one of the highlights of the importance of integration to control Information Entropy in the otherwise complicated IT landscape. Figure 1. The 'Single Customer View' Dilemma So Integration is not an end, but a means to end a full list of problems faced by enterprises today. We have been doing integration for many years. There exist many platforms, technologies and frameworks doing the same thing. Built around that, we have multiple Integration Architectures too, amongst which, the Point to Pont, Hub and Spoke, and the Message Bus are common. Figure 2 represents these integration topologies. Figure 2. EAI Topologies Let us now look at the salient features of these topologies to see if we are self-sufficient or need something more. Point to Point In Point to Point, we define integration solutions for a pair of applications. Thus, we have two end points to be integrated. We can build protocol and/or format adaptors/transformers at one or either end. This is the easiest way to integrate, as long as the volume of integration is low. We normally use technology specific APIs like FTP, IIOP, Remoting or batch interfaces to realize integration. The advantage is that between these two points, we have tight coupling, since both ends have knowledge about their peers. The downside is that if there are 6 nodes (systems) to be interconnected, we need at least 30 separate channels for both forward and reverse transport. So think of a mid-sized Enterprise with some 1000 systems to integrate! Hub & Spoke Hub And Spoke Architecture is also called as the Message Broker. It provides a centralized hub (Broker) to which all applications are connected. Each application connects with the central hub through lightweight connectors. The lightweight connectors facilitate application integration with minimum or no changes to the existing applications. Message Transformation and Routing takes place within the Hub. The major drawback of the Hub and Spoke Architecture is that if the Hub fails, the entire Integration topology fails. Enterprise Message Bus An Enterprise Message Bus provides a common communication infrastructure which acts as a platform-neutral and language-neutral adaptor between applications. This communication infrastructure may include a Message Router and/or Publish-Subscribe channels. So applications interact each other through the message bus with the help of Request-Response queues. Sometimes the applications have to use adapters that handle scenarios like invoking CICS transactions. Such adapters may provide connectivity between the applications and the message bus using proprietary bus APIs and application APIs. Service Oriented Integration (SOI) Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) provides us with a set of principles, patterns and practices, to provide and consume services which are orchestrated using open standards so as to remove single vendor lock-into provide an agile infrastructure where services range from business definition to technical implementation. In SOA, we no longer deal with single format and single protocol, instead we accept the fact that heterogeneity exists between applications. And our architecture still needs to ensure interoperability and thus information exchange. To help us do integration in the SOA manner, we require a pluggable service infrastructure where providers, consumers, and middleware services can collaborate in the famous 'Publish -- Find -- Bind' triangle. So, similar to the integration topologies described above, we need a backbone upon which we can build SOA that can provide a collection of middleware services that provides integration capabilities. This is what we mean by Service Oriented Integration (SOI). Gartner originally identified Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) Architecture as a core component in the SOA landscape. ESB provides a technical framework to align your SOA based integration needs. In the rest of the article we will concentrate on ESB. Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) Roy Schutle from Gartner defines an ESB as:"A Web-services-capable middleware infrastructure that supports intelligent program-to-program communication and mediates the relationships among loosely-coupled and uncoupled business components." In the ESB Architecture (Refer Figure 2), applications communicate through an SOA middleware backbone. The most distinguishing feature of the ESB Architecture is the distributed nature of the integration topology. This makes the ESB capabilities to spread out across the bus in a distributed fashion, thus avoiding any single point of failure. Scalability is achieved by distributing the capabilities into separately deployable service containers. Smart, intelligent connectors connect the applications to the Bus. Technical services like transformation, routing, security, etc. are provided internally by these connectors. The Bus federates services which are hosted locally or remotely, thus collaborating distributed capabilities. Many ESB solutions are based on Web Services Description Language (WSDL) technologies, and they use Extensible Markup Language (XML) formats for message translation and transformation. The best way to think about an ESB is to imagine the many features which we can provide to the message exchange at a mediation layer (the ESB layer), a few among them is listed below: Addressing & Routing  Synchronous and Asynchronous style invocations  Multiple Transport and protocol bindings  Content transformation and translation  Business Process Orchestration (BPM)  Event processing  Adapters to multiple platforms  etc... Service Aggregation in ESB ESB provides you the best ways of integrating services so that services are not only interoperable but also reusable in the form of aggregating in multiple ways and scenarios. This means, services can be mixed and matched to adapt to multiple protocols and consumer requirements. Let me explain you this concept, as we will explore more into this with the help of sample code too. In code and component reuse, we try to reduce ‘copy and paste’ reuse and encourage inheritance, composition and instance pooling. Similar analogy exists in SOI where services are hosted and pooled for multiple clients through multiple transport channels, and ESB can do this in the best way integration world has ever seen. We call this as the notion of shared services. For example, if a financial organization provides a ‘credit history check service’, an ESB can facilitate reuse of this service by multiple business processes (like a Personal Loan approval process or a Home Mortgage approval process). So, once we create our 'core services', we can then arbitrarily compose these services in a declarative fashion so as to define and publish more and more composite services. Business Process Management (BPM) tools can be integrated over ESB to leverage service aggregation and service collaboration. This facilitates reuse of basic or core (or fine grained) services at Business Process level. So, granularity of services is important which will also decide the level of reusability. Coarse grained or composite services consume fine grained services. Applications that consume  coarse-grained services are not exposed to the fine-grained services they use. Composite services can be assembled from coarse-grained as well as fine-grained services. To make the concept clear, let us take the example of provisioning a new VOIP (Voice Over IP) Service for a new Customer. This is a composite service which in turn calls multiple coarse grained services like 'validateOrder', 'createOrVerifyCustomer', 'checkProductAvailability', etc. Now, the createOrVerifyCustomer coarse grained service in turn call multiple fine grained services like 'validateCustomer', 'createCustomer', 'createBillingAddress', 'createMailingAddress', etc. Figure 3. Service Composition Java Business Integration (JBI) Java Business Integration (JBI) provides a collaboration framework which provides standard interfaces for integration components and protocols to plug into, thus allowing the assembly of Service Oriented Integration (SOI) frameworks. JSR 208 is an extension of Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE), but it is specific for Java Business Integration Service Provider Interfaces (SPI). SOA and SOI are the targets of JBI and hence it is built around Web Services Description Language (WSDL). The nerve of the JBI architecture is the NMR (Normalized Message Router). This is a bus through which messages flow in either directions from a source to a destination. You can listen to Ron Ten-Hove, the Co-spec lead for JSR 208 here and he writes more about JBI components in the PDF download titled JBI Components: Part 1. JBI provides the best available, open foundation for structuring applications by composition of services rather than modularized, structured code that we have been doing in traditional programming paradigms. A JBI compliant ESB implementation must support four different service invocations, leading to four corresponding Message Exchange Patterns (MEP):   One-Way (In-Only MEP): Service Consumer issues a request to Service Provider. No error (fault) path is provided.  Reliable One-Way (Robust In-Only MEP): Service Consumer issues a request to Service Provider. Provider may respond with a fault if it fails to process the request.  Request-Response (In-Out MEP): Service Consumer issues a request to Service Provider, with expectation of response. Provider may respond with a fault if it fails to process request.  Request Optional-Response (In Optional-Out MEP): Service Consumer issues a request to Service Provider, which may result in a response. Both Consumer and provider have the option of generating a fault in response to a message received during the interaction.