How-To Tutorials

article-image-useful-maven-plugins-part-2

09 Nov 2009

12 min read

Useful Maven Plugins: Part 2

09 Nov 2009

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0
7273

article-image-simple-item-selector-using-jquery

Packt

09 Nov 2009

4 min read

Simple Item Selector Using jQuery

Packt

09 Nov 2009

4 min read

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2945

How-To Tutorials

article-image-including-charts-and-graphics-pentaho-reports-part-1

Packt

09 Nov 2009

8 min read

Including Charts and Graphics in Pentaho Reports (Part 1)

Packt

09 Nov 2009

8 min read

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0
5208

article-image-using-javascript-effects-joomla

Packt

06 Nov 2009

7 min read

Using JavaScript Effects with Joomla!

Packt

06 Nov 2009

7 min read

Customizing Google Maps Google Maps has a comprehensive API for interacting with maps on your website. MooTools can be used to load the Google Maps engine at the correct time. It can also act as a bridge between the map and other HTML elements on your site. To get started, you will first need to get an API key to use Google Maps on your domain. You can sign up for a free key at http://code.google.com/apis/maps/signup.html. Even if you are working on your local computer, you still need the key. For instance, if the base URL of your Joomla installation is http://localhost/joomla, you will enter localhost as the domain for your API key. Once you have an API key ready, create the file basicmap.js in the /components/com_js folder, and fill it with the following code: window.addEvent('domready', function() { if (GBrowserIsCompatible()) { var map = new GMap2($('map_canvas')); map.setCenter(new GLatLng(38.89, -77.04), 12); window.onunload=function() { GUnload(); }; }}); The entire script is wrapped within a call to the MooTools-specific addEvent() member function of window. Because we want this code to execute once the DOM is ready, the first parameter is the event name 'domready'. The second parameter is an anonymous function containing our code. What does the call to function() do?Using function() in JavaScript is a way of creating an anonymous function. This way, you can create functions that are used in only one place (such as event handlers) without cluttering the namespace with a needless function name. Also, the code within the anonymous function operates within its own scope; this is referred to as a closure. Closures are very frequently used in modern JavaScript frameworks, for event handling and other distinct tasks. Once inside of the function, GBrowserIsCompatible() is used to determine if the browser is capable of running Google Maps. If it is, a new instance of GMap2() is declared and bound to the HTML element that has an id of 'map_canvas' and is stored into map. The call to $('map_canvas') is a MooTools shortcut for document.GetElementById(). Next, the setCenter() member function of map is called to tell Google Maps where to center the map and how far to zoom in. The first parameter is a GLatLng() object, which is used to set the specific latitude and longitude of the map's center. The other parameter determines the zoom level, which is set to 12 in this case. Finally, the window.onunload event is set to a function that calls GUnload(). When the user navigates away from the page, this function removes Google Maps from memory, to prevent memory leaks. With our JavaScript in place, it is now time to add a function to the controller in /components/com_js/js.php that will load it along with some HTML. Add the following basicMap() function to this file: function basicMap(){ $key = 'DoNotUseThisKeyGetOneFromCodeDotGoogleDotCom'; JHTML::_('behavior.mootools'); $document =& JFactory::getDocument(); $document->addScript('http://maps.google.com/maps?file=api&v= 2&key=' . $key); $document->addScript( JURI::base() . 'components/com_js/basicmap.js'); ?> <div id="map_canvas" style="width: 500px; height: 300px"></div> <?php} The basicMap() function starts off by setting $key to the API key received from Google. You should replace this value with the one you receive at http://code.google.com/apis/maps/signup.html. Next, JHTML::_('behavior.mootools'); is called to load MooTools into the <head> tag of the HTML document. This is followed by getting a reference to the current document object through the getDocument() member function of JFactory. The addScript() member function is called twice—once to load in the Google Maps API (using our key), then again to load our basicmap.js script. (The Google Maps API calls in all of the functions and class definitions beginning with a capital 'G'.) Finally, a <div> with an id of 'map_canvas' is sent to the browser. Once this function is in place and js.php has been saved, load index.php?option=com_js&task=basicMap in the browser. Your map should look like this: We can make this map slightly more interesting by adding a marker to a specific address. To do so, add the highlighted code below to the basicmap.js file: window.addEvent('domready', function() { if (GBrowserIsCompatible()) { var map = new GMap2($('map_canvas')); map.setCenter(new GLatLng(38.89, -77.04), 12); var whitehouse = new GClientGeocoder(); whitehouse.getLatLng('1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW', function(latlng) { marker = new GMarker( latlng ); marker.bindInfoWindowHtml('<strong>The White House</strong>'); map.addOverlay(marker); }); window.onunload=function(){ GUnload(); }; }}); This code sets whitehouse as an instance of the GClientGeocoder class. Next, the getLatLng() member function of GClientGeocoder is called. The first parameter is the street address to be looked up. The second parameter is an anonymous function where the GLatLng object is passed once the address lookup is complete. Within this function, marker is set as a new GMarker object, which takes the passed-in latlng object as a parameter. The bindInfoWindowHTML() member function of GMarker is called to add an HTML message to appear in a balloon above the marker. Finally, the maker is passed into the addOverlay() member function of GMap2, to place it on the map. Save basicmap.js and then reload index.php?option=com_js&task=basicMap. You should now see the same map, only with a red pin. When you click on the red pin, your map should look like this: Interactive Maps These two different maps show the basic functionality of getting Google Maps on your own website. These maps are very basic; you could easily create them at maps.google.com then embed them in a standard Joomla! article with the HTML code they provide you. However, you would not have the opportunity to add functions that interact with the other elements on your page. To do that, we will create some more HTML code and then write some MooTools-powered JavaScript to bridge our content with Google Maps. Open the /components/com_js/js.php file and add the following selectMap() function to the controller: function selectMap(){ $key = 'DoNotUseThisKeyGetOneFromCodeDotGoogleDotCom'; JHTML::_('behavior.mootools'); $document =& JFactory::getDocument(); $document->addScript('http://maps.google.com/maps?file=api&v =2&key=' . $key); $document->addScript( JURI::base() . 'components/com_js/selectmap.js'); ?> <div id="map_canvas" style="width: 500px; height: 300px"></div> <select id="map_selections"> <option value="">(select...)</option> <option value="1200 K Street NW">Salad Surprises</option> <option value="1221 Connecticut Avenue NW">The Daily Dish</option> <option value="701 H Street NW">Sushi and Sashimi</option> </select><?php} This function is almost identical to basicMap() except for two things—selectmap.js is being added instead of basicmap.js, and a <select> element has been added beneath the <div>. The <select> element has an id that will be used in the JavaScript. The options of the <select> element are restaurants, with different addresses as values. The JavaScript code will bind a function to the onChange event so that the marker will move as different restaurants are selected.

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5030

article-image-including-charts-and-graphics-pentaho-reports-part-2

Packt

29 Oct 2009

6 min read

Including Charts and Graphics in Pentaho Reports (Part 2)

Packt

29 Oct 2009

6 min read

Ring chart The ring chart is identical to the pie chart, except that it renders as a ring versus a complete pie. In addition to sharing all the properties similar to the pie chart, it also defines the following rendering property : Options Property Group Property name Description section-depth This property defines the percentage of the radius to render the section as. The default value is set to 0.5. Ring chart example For this example, simply open the defined pie chart example and select the Ring chart type. Also, set the section-depth to 0.1, in order to generate the following effect: Multi pie chart The multi pie chart renders a group of pie charts, based on a category dataset. This meta-chart renders individual series data as a pie chart, each broken into individual categories within the individual pie charts. The multi pie chart utilizes the common properties defined above, including the category dataset properties. In addition to the standard set of properties, it also defines the following two properties: Options Property Group Property name Description label-format This label defines how each item within a chart is rendered. The default value is set to "{0}". The format string may also contain any of the following: {0}: To render the item name {1}: To render the item value {2}: To render the item percentage in relation to the entire pie chart by-row This value defaults to True. If set to False, the series and category fields are reversed, and individual charts render series information. Note that the horizontal, series-color, stacked and stacked-percent properties do not apply to this chart type. Multi pie chart example This example demonstrates the distribution of purchased item types, based on payment type. To begin, create a new report. You'll reuse the bar chart's SQL query. Now, place a new Chart element into the Report Header. Edit the chart, selecting Multi Pie as the chart type. To configure the dataset for this chart, select ITEMCATEGORY as the category-column. Set the value-columns property to QUANTITY and the series-by-field to PAYMENTTYPE. Waterfall chart The waterfall chart displays a unique stacked bar chart that spans categories. This chart is useful when comparing categories to one another. The last category in a waterfall chart normally equals the total of all the other categories to render appropriately, but this is based on the dataset, not the chart rendering. The waterfall chart utilizes the common properties defined above, including the category dataset properties. The stacked property is not available for this chart. There are no additional properties defined for the waterfall chart. Waterfall chart example In this example, you'll compare by type, the quantity of items in your inventory. Normally, the last category would be used to display the total values. The chart will render the data provided with or without a summary series, so you'll just use the example SQL query from the bar chart example. Add a Chart element to the Report Header and select Waterfall as the chart type. Set the category-column to ITEMCATEGORY, the value-columns to QUANTITY, and the series-by-value property to Quantity. Now, apply your changes and preview the results. Bar line chart The bar line chart combines the bar and line charts, allowing visualization of trends with categories, along with comparisons. The bar line chart is unique in that it requires two category datasets to populate the chart. The first dataset populates the bar chart, and the second dataset populates the line chart. The bar line chart utilizes the common properties defined above, including the category dataset properties. This chart also inherits the properties from both the bar chart, as well as the line chart. This chart also has certain additional properties, which are listed in the following table: Required Property Group Property name Description bar-data-source The name of the first dataset required by the bar line chart, which populates the bars in the chart. This value is automatically populated with the correct name. line-data-source The name of the second dataset required by the bar line chart, which populates the lines in the chart. This value is automatically populated with the correct name. Bar Options Property Group Property name Description ctgry-tick-font Defines the Java font that renders the Categories. Line Options Property Group Property name Description line-series-color Defines the color in which to render each line series. line-tick-fmt Specifies the Java DecimalFormat string for rendering the Line Axis Labels lines-label-font Defines the Java font to use when rendering line labels. line-tick-font Defines the Java font to use when rendering the Line Axis Labels. As part of the bar line chart, a second y-axis is defined for the lines. The property group Y2-Axis is available with similar properties as the standard y-axis. Bar line chart example To demonstrate the bar line chart, you'll reuse the SQL query from the area chart example. Create a new report, and add a Chart element to the Report Header. Edit the chart, and select Bar Line as the chart type. You'll begin by configuring the first dataset. Set the category-column to ITEMCATEGORY, the value-columns to COST, and the series-by-value property to Cost. To configure the second dataset, set the category-column to ITEMCATEGORY, the value-columns to SALEPRICE, and the series-by-value property to Sale Price. Set the x-axis-label-width to 2.0, and reduce the x-font size to 7. Also, set show-legend to True. You're now ready to preview the bar line chart. Bubble chart The bubble chart allows you to view three dimensions of data. The first two dimensions are your traditional X and Y dimensions, also known as domain and range. The third dimension is expressed by the size of the individual bubbles rendered. The bubble chart utilizes the common properties defined above, including the XY series dataset properties. The bubble chart also defines the following properties: Options Property Group Property name Description max-bubble-size This value defines the diameter of the largest bubble to render. All other bubble sizes are relative to the maximum bubble size. The default value is 0, so this value must be set to a reasonable value for rendering of bubbles to take place. Note that this value is based on pixels, not the domain or range values. The bubble chart defines the following additional dataset property: Required Property Group Property name Description z-value-columns This is the data source column to use for Z value, which specifies the bubble diameter relative to the maximum bubble size. Bubble chart example In this example, you need to define a three dimensional SQL query to populate the chart. You'll use inventory information, and calculate Item Category Margin: SELECT"INVENTORY"."ITEMCATEGORY","INVENTORY"."ONHAND","INVENTORY"."ONORDER","INVENTORY"."COST","INVENTORY"."SALEPRICE","INVENTORY"."SALEPRICE" - "INVENTORY"."COST" MARGINFROM"INVENTORY"ORDER BY"INVENTORY"."ITEMCATEGORY" ASC Now that you have a SQL query to work with, add a Chart element to the Report Header and select Bubble as the chart type. First, you'll populate the correct dataset fields. Set the series-by-field property to ITEMCATEGORY. Now, set the X, Y, and Z value columns to ONHAND, SALEPRICE, and MARGIN. You're now ready to customize the chart rendering. Set the x-title to On Hand, the y-title to Sales Price, the max-bubble-size to 100, and the show-legend property to True. The final result should look like this:

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4011

article-image-phx-place-holders-extended-modx

Packt

28 Oct 2009

4 min read

PHx (Place Holders extended) in MODx

Packt

28 Oct 2009

4 min read

PHx in action Let us learn our need of PHx by building a new functionality for our site that lets us add profiles of our family members and friends. We will add a new page called 'Family and Friends' that will show the list of all the individuals that we add. Once the user clicks on an individual, it will show certain details such as name, relationship to you, occupation, web site. This is easy to implement; all we have to do is create the template variables for each of the fields, and create a template that uses these template variables. So, to display the Occupation, the template will have a code similar to the following: Occupation: [*occupation*] Though this might appear to work initially, it has a small glitch in it. When we are entering the personal details of an individual, we may not want to enter all of the values for every individual. In the case of not having a value for the variable, it looks cleaner to not show the label at all instead of leaving it blank. In our case—if we have no value for occupation—it will look cleaner to not show the label Occupation. So here comes a need for displaying certain text only if the template variable—in this case, occupation—has a value. We can do this using PHx without having to write a snippet. Installing PHx To download PHx, use the following steps: Download PHx from http://MODxcms.com/PHx-1006.html. Extract the contents of the downloaded file. Create a directory called phx in the assets/plugins folder of your MODx installation. Copy all the files within the extracted folder to the assets/plugins/phx folder. Create a new plug-in using the MODx Manager interface: Click on the Manage Resources menu item in the Resources menu Click on the Plugins tab Click on the New Plugin link Fill it with the following details: Field Name Field Value Plugin Name PHx Plugin Code Contents of the file phx.plugin.txt in the extracted folder System Events | OnParseDocument Checked 6.Click on Save. Adding Family and Friends documents Let us create a page that lists all the members from the Family or Friends group. This document will be a container that will have a document for each member that you would like to add. Hence, just as you have learned earlier, a call to the Ditto snippet can get you all the documents that a container holds. Create a page with the following details: Field Name Field Value Title Family and Friends Uses template Learning MODx default template Modify the page created in the previous step to have the following code. (Note that we need to know the ID of the created page for the code and hence, we are modifying it after creating it.) <ul> [!Ditto? &parents=`65` &tpl=`familyandfriendslist`!]</ul> Here, 65 is the ID of the created document. We give the ID of this document here as we will be adding the other documents as child documents of this document. In the above Ditto call, we have indicated that we are using a custom chunk to control the appearance of the listing. Create a chunk with the following details, to show a neat list of the documents that represent a member with the title and a link to the document. Field Name Field Value Chunk name familyandfriendslist Existing Category Learning MODx Chunk Code <li> <h3><a href="[~[+id+]~]">[+title+]</a></h3> </li>

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1561

How-To Tutorials

article-image-external-tables-oracle-10g11g-database-part-2

Packt

28 Oct 2009

13 min read

External Tables in Oracle 10g/11g Database: Part 2

Packt

28 Oct 2009

13 min read

0
0
2900

article-image-elgg-social-networking-installation

Packt

28 Oct 2009

14 min read

Elgg Social Networking - Installation

Packt

28 Oct 2009

14 min read

Installing Elgg In addition to its impressive feature list, Elgg is an admin's dolly. In this tutorial by Mayank Sharma, we will see how Elgg can be installed in popular Linux web application rollout stack of Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP, fondly referred to as LAMP. As MySQL and PHP can run under Windows operating system as well, you can set up Elgg to serve your purpose for such an environment. Setting Up LAMP Let's look at setting up the Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP web server environment. There are several reasons for the LAMP stack's popularity. While most people enjoy the freedom offered by these Open Source software, small business and non-profits will also be impressed by its procurement cost—$0. Step 1: Install Linux The critical difference between setting up Elgg under Windows or Linux is installing the operating system. The Linux distribution I'm using to set up Elgg is Ubuntu Linux ( http://www.ubuntu.com/ ).It's available as a free download and has a huge and active global community, should you run into any problems. Covering step-by-step installation of Ubuntu Linux is too much of a digression for this tutorial. Despite the fact that Ubuntu isn't too difficult to install, because of its popularity there are tons of installation and usage documentation available all over the Web. Linux.com has a set of videos that detail the procedure of installing Ubuntu ( http://www.linux.com/articles/114152 ).Ubuntu has a dedicated help section ( https://help.ubuntu.com/ ) for introduction and general usage of the distribution. Step 2: Install Apache Apache is the most popular web server used on the Internet. Reams and reams of documents have been written on installing Apache under Linux. Apache's documentation sub-project ( http://httpd.apache.org/docs-project/ ) has information on installing various versions of Apache under Linux. Ubuntu, based on another popular Linux distribution, Debian, uses a very powerful and user-friendly packaging system. It's called apt-get and can install an Apache server within minutes. All you have to do is open a terminal and write this command telling apt-get what to install: apt-get install apache2 apache2-common apache2-doc apache2-mpm-prefork apache2-utils libapr0 libexpat1 ssl-cert This will download Apache and its most essential libraries. Next, you need to enable some of Apache's most critical modules: a2enmod ssla2enmod rewritea2enmod include The rewrite module is critical to Elgg, so make sure it's enabled, else Elgg wouldn't work properly. That's it. Now, just restart Apache with: /etc/init.d/apache2 restart. Step 3: MySQL Installing MySQL isn't too much of an issue either. Again, like Ubuntu and Apache, MySQL can also boast of a strong and dedicated community. This means there's no dearth of MySQL installation or usage related documentation ( http://www.mysql.org/doc/ ). If you're using MySQL under Ubuntu, like me, installation is just a matter of giving apt-get a set of packages to install: apt-get install mysql-server mysql-client libmysqlclient12-dev Finally, set up a password for MySQL with: mysqladmin -h yourserver.example.com -u root password yourrootmysqlpassword Step 4: Install PHP Support You might think I am exaggerating things a little bit here, but I am not, PHP is one of the most popular and easy to learn languages for writing web applications. Why do you think we are setting up out Linux web server environment to execute PHP? It's because Elgg itself is written in PHP! And so are hundreds and thousands of other web applications. So I'm sure you've guessed by now that PHP has a good deal of documentation ( http://www.php.net/docs.php )as well. You've also guessed it's now time to call upon Ubuntu's apt-get package manager to set up PHP: apt-get install libapache2-mod-php5 php5 php5-common php5-gd php5-mysql php5-mysqli As you can see, in addition to PHP, we are also installing packages that'll hook up PHP with the MySQL database and the Apache web server. That's all there is to setting up the LAMP architecture to power your Elgg network. Setting Up WAMP If you are used to Microsoft's Windows operating system or want to avoid the extra minor learning curve involved with setting up the web server on a Linux distribution, especially, if you haven't done it before, you can easily replicate the Apache, MySQL, PHP web server on a Windows machine. Cost wise, all server components the Apache web server, MySQL database, and the PHP development language have freely available Windows versions as well. But the base component of this stack, the operating system —Microsoft Windows, isn't. Versions of Apache, MySQL, and PHP for Windows are all available on the same websites mentioned above. As Windows doesn't have an apt-get kind of utility, you'll have to download and install all three components from their respective websites, but you have an easier way to set up a WAMP server. There are several pre-packaged Apache, MySQL, and PHP software bundles available for Windows(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_WAMPs).I've successfully run Elgg on the WAMP5 bundle (http://www.en.wampserver.com/). The developer updates the bundle, time and again, to make sure it's running the latest versions of all server components included in the bundle. Note - While WAMP5 requires no configuration, make sure you have Apache's rewrite_module and PHP's php_gd2 extension enabled. They will have a bullet next to their name if they are enabled. If the bullet is missing, click on the respective entries under the Apache and PHP sub-categories and restart WAMP5. Installing Elgg Now that we have a platform ready for Elgg, let's move on to the most important step of setting up Elgg. Download the latest version of Elgg from its website. At the time of writing this tutorial, the latest version of Elgg was Elgg-0.8. Elgg is distributed as a zipped file. To uncompress under Linux: Move this zipped file to /tmp and uncompress it with the following command: $ unzip /tmp/elgg-0.8.zip To uncompress under Windows: Right-click on the ZIP file and select the Extract here option. After uncompressing the ZIP file, you should have a directory called Elgg-<version-number>, in my case, elgg-0.8/. This directory contains several sub directories and files. The INSTALL file contains detailed installation instructions. The first step is to move this uncompressed directory to your web server. Note: You can set up Elgg on your local web server that sits on the Internet or on a paid web server in a data center anywhere on the planet. The only difference between the two setups is that if you don't have access to the local web server, you'll have to contact the web service provider and ask him about the transfer options available to you. Most probably, you'll have FTP access to your web server, and you'll have to use one of the dozens of FTP clients, available for free, to transfer Elgg's files from your computer to the remote web server. Optionally, if you have "shell" access on the web server, you might want to save time by transferring just the zipped file and unzipping it on the web server itself. Contact your web server provider for this information. The web server's directory where you need to copy the contents of the Elgg directory depends upon your Apache installation and operating system. In Ubuntu Linux, the default web server directory is /var/www/. In Windows, WAMP5 asks where it should create this directory during installation. By default, it's the www directory and is created within the directory you installed WAMP5 under. Note: Another important decision you need to make while installing Elgg is how do you want your users to access your network. If you're setting up the network to be part of your existing web infrastructure, you'll need to install Elgg inside a directory. If, on the other hand, you are setting up a new site just for the Elgg-powered social network, copy the contents of the Elgg directory inside the www directory itself and not within a subdirectory. Once you have the Elgg directory within your web server's www directory, it's time to set things in motion. Start by renaming the config-dist.php file to config.php and the htaccess-dist to .htaccess. Simply right-click on the file and give it a new name or use the mv command in this format: $ mv <original-file-name> <new-file-name> Note : To rename htacces-dist to .htaccess in Windows, you'll have to open the htaccess-dist file in notepad and then go to File | Save As and specify the name as .htaccess with the quotes. Editing config.php Believe it or not, we've completed the "installation" bit of setting up Elgg. But we still need to configure it before throwing the doors open to visitors. Not surprisingly, all this involves is creating a database and editing the config.php file to our liking. Creating a Database Making an empty database in MySQL isn't difficult at all. Just enter the MySQL interactive shell using your username, password, and hostname you specified while installing MySQL. $ mysql -u root -h localhost -pEnter password: Welcome to the MySQL monitor. Commands end with ; or g.Your MySQL connection id is 9 to server version: 5.0.22-Debian_0ubuntu6.06.3-logType 'help;' or 'h' for help. Type 'c' to clear the buffer.mysql> CREATE DATABASE elgg; You can also create a MySQL database using a graphical front-end manager like PHPMyAdmin, which comes with WAMP5. Just look for a database field, enter a new name (Elgg), and hit the Create button to create an empty Elgg database. Initial Configuration Elgg has a front-end interface to set up config.php, but there are a couple of things you need to do before you can use that interface: Create a data directory outside your web server root. As described in the configuration file, this is a special directory where uploaded files will go. It's also advisable to create this directory outside your main Elgg install. This is because this directory will be writable by everyone accessing the Elgg site and having such a "world-accessible" directory under your Elgg installation is a security risk. If you call the directory Elgg-data, make it world-readable with the following command: $ chmod 777 elgg-data Setup admin username and password. Before you can access Elgg's configuration web front-end, you need an admin user and a password. For that open the config.php file in your favorite text editor and scroll down to the following variables: $CFG->adminuser = "";$CFG->adminpassword = ""; Specify your chosen admin username and password between the quotes, so that it looks something like this: $CFG->adminuser = "admin";$CFG->adminpassword = "765thyr3"; Make sure you don't forget the username and password of the admin user. Important Settings When you have created the data directory and specified an admin username and password, it's time to go ahead with the rest of the configuration. Open a web browser and point to http://<your-web-server>/<Elgg-installation>/elggadmin/ This will open up a simple web page with lots of fields. All fields have a title and a brief description of the kind of information you need to fill in that field. There are some drop-down lists as well, from which you have to select one of the listed options. Here are all the options and their descriptions: Administration panel username: Username to log in to this admin panel, in future, to change your settings. Admin password: Password to log in to this admin panel in future. Site name: Enter the name of your site here (e.g. Elgg, Apcala, University of Bogton's Social Network, etc.). Tagline: A tagline for your site (e.g. Social network for Bogton). Web root: External URL to the site (e.g. http://elgg.bogton.edu/). Elgg install root: Physical path to the files (e.g./home/Elggserver/httpdocs/). Elgg data root: This is a special directory where uploaded files will go. If possible, this should live outside your main Elgg installation? (you'll need to create it by hand). It must have world writable permissions set, and have a final slash at the end. Note: Even in Windows, where we use back slashes () to separate directories, use Unix's forward slashes (/) to specify the path to the install root, data root, and other path names. For example, if you have Elgg files under WAMP's default directory in your C drive, use this path: C:/wamp/www/elgg/. Database type: Acceptable values are mysql and postgres - MySQL is highly recommended. System administrator email: The email address your site will send emails from(e.g. elgg-admin@bogton.edu). News account initial password: The initial password for the 'news' account. This will be the first administrator user within your system, and you should change the password immediately after the first time you log in. Default locale: Country code to set language to if you have gettext installed. Public registration: Can general members of the public register for this system? Public invitations: Can users of this system invite other users? Maximum users: The maximum number of users in your system. If you set this to 0, you will have an unlimited number of users. Maximum disk space: The maximum disk space taken up by all uploaded files. Disable public comments: Set the following to true to force users to log in before they can post comments, overriding the per-user option. This is a handy sledgehammer-to-crack-a-nut tactic to protect against comment spam (although an Akismet plug-in is available from elgg.org). Email filter: Anything you enter here must be present in the email address of anyone who registers; e.g. @mycompany.com will only allow email address from mycompany.com to register. Default access: The default access level for all new items in the system. Disable user templates: If this is set, users can only choose from available templates rather than defining their own. Persistent connections: Should Elgg use persistent database connections? Debug: Set this to 2047 to get ADOdb error handling. RSS posts maximum age: Number of days for which to keep incoming RSS feed entries before deleting them. Set this to 0 if you don't want RSS posts to be removed. Community create flag: Set this to admin if you would like to restrict the ability to create communities to admin users. cURL path: Set this to the cURL executable if cURL is installed; otherwise leave blank. Note : According to Wikipedia, cURL is a command line tool for transferring files with URL syntax, supporting FTP, FTPS, HTTP, HTTPS, TFTP, SCP,SFTP, Telnet, DICT, FILE, and LDAP. The main purpose and use for cURL is to automate unattended file transfers or sequences of operations. For example, it is a good tool for simulating a user's actions at a web browser. Under Ubuntu Linux, you can install curl using the following command: apt-get install curl Templates location: The full path of your Default_Template directory. Profile location: The full path to your profile configuration file (usually, it's best to leave this in mod/profile/). Finally, when you're done, click on the Save button to save the settings. Note : The next version of Elgg, Elgg 0.9, will further simplify installation. Already an early release candidate of this version (elgg-0.9rc1) is a lot more straightforward to install and configure, for initial use. First Log In Now, it's time to let Elgg use these settings and set things up for you. Just point your browser to your main Elgg installation (http://<your-web-servergt;/<Elgg-installation>). It'll connect to the MySQL database and create some tables, then upload some basic data, before taking you to the main page. On the main page, you can use the news account and the password you specified for this account during configuration to log in to your Elgg installation.

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0
16066

How-To Tutorials

Packt

28 Oct 2009

28 min read

Installation of FreeNAS

Packt

28 Oct 2009

28 min read

0
0
7275

article-image-working-xml-flex-3-and-java-part2

Packt

28 Oct 2009

7 min read

Working with XML in Flex 3 and Java-part2

Packt

28 Oct 2009

7 min read

Loading external XML documents You can use the URLLoader class to load external data from a URL. The URLLoader class downloads data from a URL as text or binary data. In this section, we will see how to use the URLLoader class for loading external XML data into your application. You can create a URLLoader class instance and call the load() method by passing URLRequest as a parameter and register for its complete event to handle loaded data. The following code snippet shows how exactly this works: private var xmlUrl:String = "http://www.foo.com/rssdata.xml";private var request:URLRequest = new URLRequest(xmlUrl);private var loader:URLLoader = new URLLoader(;private var rssData:XML;loader.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, completeHandler);loader.load(request);private function completeHandler(event:Event):void { rssData = XML(loader.data); trace(rssData);} Let's see one quick complete sample of loading RSS data from the Internet: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?><mx:Application creationComplete="loadData();"> <mx:Script> <![CDATA[ import mx.collections.XMLListCollection; private var xmlUrl:String = "http://sessions.adobe.com/360FlexSJ2008/feed.xml"; private var request:URLRequest = new URLRequest(xmlUrl); private var loader:URLLoader = new URLLoader(request); [Bindable] private var rssData:XML; private function loadData():void { loader.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, completeHandler); loader.load(request); } private function completeHandler(event:Event):void { rssData = new XML(loader.data); } ]]></mx:Script><mx:Panel title="RSS Feed Reader" width="100%" height="100%"> <mx:DataGrid id="dgGrid" dataProvider="{rssData.channel.item}" height="100%" width="100%"> <mx:columns> <mx:DataGridColumn headerText="Title" dataField="title"/> <mx:DataGridColumn headerText="Link" dataField="link"/> <mx:DataGridColumn headerText="pubDate" dataField="pubDate"/> <mx:DataGridColumn headerText="Description" dataField="description"/> </mx:columns></mx:DataGrid><mx:TextArea width="100%" height="80" text="{dgGrid.selectedItem.description}"/></mx:Panel></mx:Application> In the code above, we are loading RSS feed from an external URL and displaying it in DataGrid by using data binding. Output: An example: Building a book explorer In this section, we will build something more complicated and interesting by using many features, including custom components, events, data binding, E4X, loading external XML data, and so on. We will build a sample books explorer, which will load a books catalog from an external XML file and allow the users to explore and view details of books. We will also build a simple shopping cart component, which will list books that a user would add to cart by clicking on the Add to cart button. Create a new Flex project using Flex Builder. Once the project is created, create an assetsimages folder under its src folder. This folder will be used to store images used in this application. Now start creating the following source files into its source folder. Let's start by creating a simple book catalog XML file as follows: bookscatalog.xml:<books> <book ISBN="184719530X"> <title>Building Websites with Joomla! 1.5</title> <author> <lastName>Hagen</lastName> <firstName>Graf</firstName> </author> <image>../assets/images/184719530X.png</image> <pageCount>363</pageCount> <price>Rs.1,247.40</price> <description>The best-selling Joomla! tutorial guide updated for the latest 1.5 release </description> </book> <book ISBN="1847196160"> <title>Drupal 6 JavaScript and jQuery</title> <author> <lastName>Matt</lastName> <firstName>Butcher</firstName> </author> <image>../assets/images/1847196160.png</image> <pageCount>250</pageCount> <price>Rs.1,108.80</price> <description>Putting jQuery, AJAX, and JavaScript effects into your Drupal 6 modules and themes</description> </book> <book ISBN="184719494X"> <title>Expert Python Programming</title> <author> <lastName>Tarek</lastName> <firstName>Ziadé</firstName> </author> <image>../assets/images/184719494X.png</image> <pageCount>350</pageCount> <price>Rs.1,247.4</price> <description>Best practices for designing, coding, and distributing your Python software</description> </book> <book ISBN="1847194885"> <title>Joomla! Web Security</title> <author> <lastName>Tom</lastName> <firstName>Canavan</firstName> </author> <image>../assets/images/1847194885.png</image> <pageCount>248</pageCount> <price>Rs.1,108.80</price> <description>Secure your Joomla! website from common security threats with this easy-to-use guide</description> </book></books> The above XML file contains details of individual books in an XML form. You can also deploy this file on your web server and specify its URL into URLRequest while loading it. Next, we will create a custom event which we will be dispatching from our custom component. Make sure you create an events package under your src folder in Flex Builder called events, and place this file in it. AddToCartEvent.as:package events{ import flash.events.Event; public class AddToCartEvent extends Event { public static const ADD_TO_CART:String = "addToCart"; public var book:Object; public function AddToCartEvent(type:String, bubbles_Boolean=false, cancelable_Boolean=false) { super(type, bubbles, cancelable); } }} This is a simple custom event created by inheriting the flash.events.Event class. This class defines the ADD_TO_CART string constant, which will be used as the name of the event in the addEventListener() method. You will see this in the BooksExplorer.mxml code. We have also defined an object to hold the reference of the book which the user can add into the shopping cart. In short, this object will hold the XML node of a selected book. Next, we will create the MXML custom component called BookDetailItemRenderer.mxml. Make sure that you create a package under your src folder in Flex Builder called components, and place this file in it and copy the following code in it: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?><mx:HBox cornerRadius="8" paddingBottom="2" paddingLeft="2"paddingRight="2" paddingTop="2"><mx:Metadata>[Event(name="addToCart", type="flash.events.Event")]</mx:Metadata><mx:Script><![CDATA[import events.AddToCartEvent;import mx.controls.Alert;[Bindable][Embed(source="../assets/images/cart.gif")]public var cartImage:Class;private function addToCardEventDispatcher():void {var addToCartEvent:AddToCartEvent = new AddToCartEvent("addToCart", true, true);addtoCartEvent.book = data;dispatchEvent(addtoCartEvent);}]]></mx:Script><mx:HBox width="100%" verticalAlign="middle" paddingBottom="2"paddingLeft="2" paddingRight="2" paddingTop="2" height="100%"borderStyle="solid" borderThickness="2" borderColor="#6E6B6B"cornerRadius="4"><mx:Image id="bookImage" source="{data.image}" height="109"width="78" maintainAspectRatio="false"/><mx:VBox height="100%" width="100%" verticalGap="2"paddingBottom="0" paddingLeft="0" paddingRight="0"paddingTop="0" verticalAlign="middle"><mx:Label id="bookTitle" text="{data.title}"fontSize="12" fontWeight="bold"/><mx:Label id="bookAuthor" text="By: {data.author.lastName},{data.author.firstName}" fontWeight="bold"/><mx:Label id="coverPrice" text="Price: {data.price}"fontWeight="bold"/><mx:Label id="pageCount" text="Pages: {data.pageCount}"fontWeight="bold"/><mx:HBox width="100%" backgroundColor="#3A478D"horizontalAlign="right" paddingBottom="0" paddingLeft="0"paddingRight="5" paddingTop="0" height="22"verticalAlign="middle"><mx:Label text="Add to cart " color="#FFFFFF"fontWeight="bold"/><mx:Button icon="{cartImage}" height="20" width="20"click="addToCardEventDispatcher();"/></mx:HBox></mx:VBox></mx:HBox></mx:HBox>

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0
2014

article-image-installing-alfresco-software-development-kit-sdk

Packt

28 Oct 2009

6 min read

Installing Alfresco Software Development Kit (SDK)

Packt

28 Oct 2009

6 min read

Obtaining the SDK If you are running the Enterprise network, it is likely that the SDK has been provided to you as a binary. Alternatively, you can check out the Enterprise source code and build it yourself. In the Enterprise SVN repository, specific releases are tagged. So if you wanted 2.2.0, for example, you'd check out V2.2.0-ENTERPRISE-FINAL. The Enterprise SVN repository for the Enterprise network is password-protected. Consult your Alfresco representative for the URL, port, and credentials that are needed to obtain the Enterprise source code. Labs network users can either download the SDK as a binary from SourceForge (https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=143373&package_id=189441) or check out the Labs source code and build it. The SVN URL for the Labs source code is svn://svn.alfresco.com. In the Labs repository, nothing is tagged. You must check out HEAD. Step-by-Step: Building Alfresco from Source Regardless of whether you are using Enterprise or Labs, if you've decided to build from the source it is very easy to do it. At a high level, you simply check out the source and then run Ant. If you've opted to use the pre-compiled binaries, skip to the next section. Otherwise, let's use Ant to create the same ZIP/TAR file that is available on the download page. To do that, follow these steps: Check out the source from the appropriate SVN repository, as mentioned earlier. Set the TOMCAT_HOME environment variable to the root of your Apache Tomcat install directory. Navigate to the root of the source directory, then run the default Ant target: ant build.xml ant build.xml It will take a few minutes to build everything. When it is done, run the distribute task like this: ant -f continuous.xml distribute Again, it may take several minutes for this to run. When it is done, you should see several archives in the build|dist directory. For example, running this Ant task for Alfresco 3.0 Labs produces several archives. The subset relevant to the article includes: alfresco-labs-sdk-*.tar.gz alfresco-labs-sdk-*.zip alfresco-labs-tomcat-*.tar.gz alfresco-labs-tomcat-*.zip alfresco-labs-war-*.tar.gz alfresco-labs-war-*.zip alfresco-labs-wcm-*.tar.gz alfresco-labs-wcm-*.zip You should extract the SDK archive somewhere handy. The next step will be to import the SDK into Eclipse. Setting up the SDK in Eclipse Nothing about Alfresco requires you to use Eclipse or any other IDE. But Eclipse is very widely used and the Alfresco SDK distribution includes Eclipse projects that can easily be imported into Eclipse, so that's what these instructions will cover. In addition to the Alfresco JARs, dependent JARs, Javadocs, and source code, the SDK bundle has several Eclipse projects. Most of the Eclipse projects are sample projects showing how to write code for a particular area of Alfresco. Two are special, however. The SDK AlfrescoEmbedded project and the SDK AlfrescoRemote project reference all of the JARs needed for the Java API and the Web Services API respectively. The easiest way to make sure your own Eclipse project has everything it needs to compile is to import the projects bundled with the SDK into your Eclipse workspace, and then add the appropriate SDK projects to your project's build path. Step-by-Step: Importing the SDK into Eclipse Every developer has his or her own favorite way of configuring tools. If you are going to work with multiple versions of Alfresco, you should use version-specific Eclipse workspaces. For example, you might want to have a workspace-alfresco-2.2 workspace as well as a workspace-alfresco-3.0 workspace, each with the corresponding Alfresco SDK projects imported. Then, if you need to test customizations against a different version of the Alfresco SDK, all you have to do is switch your workspace, import your customization project if it isn't in the workspace already, and build it. Let's go ahead and set this up. Follow these steps: In Eclipse, select File|Switch Workspace or specify a new workspace location. This will be your workspace for a specific version of the Alfresco SDK so use a name such as workspace-alfresco-3.0. Eclipse will restart with an empty workspace. Make sure the Java compiler compliance level preference is set to 5.0 (Window|Preferences|Java|Compiler). If you forget to do that, Eclipse won't be able to build the projects after they are imported. Select File|Import|Existing Projects into Workspace. For the root directory, specify the directory where the SDK was uncompressed. For the root directory, specify the directory where the SDK was uncompressed. You want the root SDK directory, not the Samples directory. Select all of the projects that are listed and click Import. After the import, Eclipse should be able to build all projects cleanly. If not, double-check the compiler compliance level. If that is set but there are still errors, make sure you imported all SDK projects including SDK AlfrescoEmbedded and SDK AlfrescoRemote. Now that the files are in the workspace, take a look at the Embedded project. That's quite a list of dependent JAR files! The Alfresco-specific JARs all start with alfresco-. It depends on what you are doing, of course, but the JAR that is referenced most often is likely to be alfresco-repository.jar because that's where the bulk of the API resides. The SDK comes with zipped source code and Javadocs, which are both useful references (although the Javadocs are pretty sparse). It's a good idea to tell Eclipse where those files are, so you can drill in to the Alfresco source when debugging. To do that, right-click on the Alfresco JAR, and then select Properties. You'll see panels for Java Source Attachment and Javadoc Location that you can use to associate the JAR with the appropriate source and Javadoc archives. The following image shows the Java Source Attachment for alfresco-repository.jar: The following image shows the Javadoc Location panel for alfresco-repository.jar. Source and Javadoc are provided for each of the Alfresco JARs, as shown in the following table. Note that source and Javadoc for everything is available. This is open source software after all, not just all bundled with the SDK: Alfresco JAR Source archive Javadoc archive alfresco-core.jar Src|core-src.zip Doc|api|core-doc.zip alfresco-remote-api.jar Src|remote-api-src.zip Doc|api|remote-api-doc.zip alfresco-web-client.jar src|web-client-src.zip doc|api|web-client-doc.zip alfresco-repository.jar src|repository-src.zip doc|api|repository-doc.zip

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2601

article-image-working-report-builder-microsoft-sql-server-2008-part-1

Packt

28 Oct 2009

16 min read

Working with the Report Builder in Microsoft SQL Server 2008: Part 1

Packt

28 Oct 2009

16 min read

The Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services Report Builder 2.0 tool can be installed from a standalone installer available at this Microsoft site, http://download.microsoft.com/download/a/f/6/af64f194-8b7e-4118-b040-4c515a7dbc46/ReportBuilder.msi. The same file is also available from a collection of download files when you access the Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Feature Pack, October 2008 at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=228DE03F-3B5A-428A-923F-58A033D316E1&displaylang=en. Report Builder overview In the present version of SQL Server 2008 [Enterprise Evaluation edition] there are two Report Builders available. Report Builder 1.0, which has remained as a program that can be launched from the Report Manager, and the new Report Builder 2.0, which is a stand alone report authoring tool that needs to be independently launched. Although Report Builder 1.0 can access Report Models built with Visual Studio 2008 and the Report Manager, it cannot be used to create reports using those models. It also does not work with Reports generated by Visual Studio 2008/BIDS/Report Builder 2.0. The errors can be summarized as follows: When you try to access the Report Server 2008 from the link provided on the Report Builder 1.0 interface you get the following error message: Specifying credentials in a URL is not supported When you try to open a report created using VS2008/BIDS/ReportBuilder2.0 using the Open Report… and Open File… navigational items in Report Builder 1.0 you get the following error message: System.IO.StreamReader: The Report element was not found Report Builder 1.0 allows you to access Report Models created with VS2008/BIDS/Report Manager and even allows you create a report in design view but this report cannot be processed on the Report Server. If you try to do so, you get the following error message: MemoryStream length must be non-negative and less than 2^31-1-origin. Parameter name: offset; Remote GDI stream version: ?. Expected version: 11.0.1 In this article the Report Builder 2.0 interface will be described along with the new features that are incorporated into this version. Report Builder 2.0 is admirably suited to address all items in the Report Definition Language of 2008. One of the important features of Report Builder 2.0 is the empowerment it provides business users to create ad hoc reports using the Report Models built on the databases they use. In this article you will be learning mostly about the Report Builder 2.0 interface details and working with it to create reports or modify them. It may be noted that Report Builder generates 2008 compliant RDL files as described in http://download.microsoft.com/download/6/5/7/6575f1c8-4607-48d2-941d-c69622e11c32/RDL_spec_08.pdf and therefore, cannot work with reports generated using 2005 technology. Report Builder 2.0 user interface description Report Builder is a report authoring tool and the basic procedure for authoring a report consists of the following steps: Report planning Connecting to a source of data Extracting a dataset from source Designing the report and data binding Previewing the report Although deploying the report is not included in the above, Report Builder can deploy the report as well. It is not always necessary to deploy a completed report, as any part of a report definition file can be deployed. This makes modifying a report on the server very flexible. In the following sections, the various parts of the Report Builder interface will be described starting at the very top and going to the bottom of the interface The menu for file operations Report Builder 2.0 can be accessed from Start | All Programs | Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Report Builder | Report Builder 2.0. This brings up the Report Builder Interface 2.0 as shown with the design area containing two icons: Table or Matrix and Chart. Each of these will launch a related wizard which will step you through the various tasks. The Report Builder 2.0 interface is very similar to Office 2007. More than one instance of Report Builder can be launched. At the very top of the following screen shown you have the undo and redo controls as well as a save icon. When you click on the save icon the Save as Report window gets displayed as shown. Here you provide a name for the report. The default save extension is *.rdl and it will be saved to the report server. It may also be persisted to a folder on your machine. Clicking on the Office Button (top left) opens a drop-down window shown in the following screenshot: In this window, you can carry out a number of tasks such as creating a new report, opening an existing report, saving a report, and saving a report with a different name. The Save button saves it to the default location seen earlier and Save as invokes the same window to save the report with a different name as seen earlier displying the report server instance as the Save to location. The Recent Documents pane shows the more recent reports created with this tool. New allows you to create a new report. When you click on Open, the following Open Report window gets displayed with the default location http://Hodentek2:8080/ReportServer_SANGAM/My Reports. You will also notice the message: This folder is not available because the My Reports feature is not enabled on the computer. Also the Open Reports window allows you look for reports with the extension .rdl. Therefore, unless the My Reports feature is enabled, this window is unusable. This is supposed to be possible from Report Manager but there are no controls in Report Manager that would do this. An alternative was suggested by one of the MSDN forum moderators (see http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/sqlreportingservices/thread/6c695160-29e8-4185-be6d-5fe027a6975c/). Hands-on exercise (Part 2) will describe how you may enable My Reports. The idea of My Reports is similar to My Documents where each user can keep his reports. When the Options button (in the previous screenshot) is clicked it opens the window Report Builder Options window with two tabbed pages Settings and Resource shown as follows: Here you can view, as well as modify, Report Builder settings. The defaults are more than adequate to work with the examples in this book. Clicking on the Resources button brings up this interesting window which enables you to interact with Microsoft regarding SSRS activities, concerns, community, and so on. If you are serious about Reporting Services, these are very valuable links. The About button when clicked can provide you with Report Builder version information. The ribbon The main menu consists of Home, Insert, and View menu items which are part of the "ribbon". The ribbon introduced by Microsoft in Office 2007 is actually a container for other toolbar items. The ribbon is the replacement for the classic menus, toolbars, and is supposed to be more efficient and discoverable by the user. In fact you see a lot more on the "ribbon" than in the classic menu. Home The next figure shows the Home menu with its toolbar arranged from left to right and divided into sections. The Run toolbar item with the title Views when clicked would run the report open in the design view (in fact, even without a report open in the design view, the report can be run. The result would be the current date and time getting displayed in the center of the screen of an untitled report which has just ExecutionTime as the only item in the report). The Font, Paragraph, Border, and Number toolbar sections become enabled if parts of a report need editing. The formatting of textboxes in the report, the formatting of numbers in the report, and the alignment of components in the layout can all be independently managed using these toolbar items. Insert When you click on the Insert menu item on the "ribbon", the tabbed page for this item is displayed as shown in the following screenshot: It has four sections: Data Regions, Report Items, Subreports, and Header & Footer. These are all the normal items that are used either individually or together to make up a report. There can be more than one data region in a report. Data Regions In the Data Regions section you have both the Tablix (Table, Matrix, and List) and the graphic controls that can be bound to data—the Chart and the Gauge. Gauge is new in SQL Server Reporting Services 2008. Chart and gauge implementations are the off shoot of collaboration with Dundas (http://www.dundas.com/). Report Builder is built in such a way that the dataset must be defined before any of the data regions are added to the report body. For the purpose of describing the various data regions in this section, it is assumed (in order to get the screen shots shown here) that a dataset has been defined and the default wizards on the design surface have been removed. Table The Table is meant for displaying data retrieved from a database either all data detailed in groups or a combination (some grouped and some detailed) of both. It has a fixed number of columns which can be adjusted at design time. The table length expands to accommodate the rows. Data can be grouped by a single field or by multiple fields. Expression designer can be used in grouping as well. The grouping is carried out by creating row groups. Static rows can be added for row headings (labels) and totals. Aggregates for groups can be added. Both detailed data as well as grouped data can be hidden initially and the user can interactively reveal the data needed by drill downs. When you click on Insert | Table | Insert Table and then click on the design surface you can add a table to the design area. The table appears as shown with handles to adjust its dimensions. The table can be dragged to any other location on the design surface (the body of the report) as well. After placing the table, which by default has three columns and two rows, when you click on any other part of the design area you will see the table as shown. When you hover over the cell marked Data on the table you will see a little icon. This icon is a minimized version of the dataset fields. The grayed out feature that surrounds the table indicate the position of the rows and columns of the table. It also shows such other features as whether it is a detail, or whether it is a group. In the case of group, within a group the feature would indicate the nesting schematically as well. When you want to increase the size of a column or a row you can drag the double headed arrow that gets displayed when your cursor is placed between two columns or between two cells as shown. When you click on the dataset icon in the cell Data you get a drop-down list containing the fields in the dataset as shown. You can choose any of the fields to occupy the cell you clicked and the corresponding header will be added to the table. In this particular dataset there are nine fields and you can choose any of them to occupy the cell. When you right-click on a cell, a drop-down menu will be available. It can be used for the following: Work with the highlighted textbox (each cell of the table is a textbox) including to copy, cut, delete, and paste contents. Work with the properties of the Textbox. Populate the textbox with an expression using the expression builder. The expression builder gets displayed when fx Expression is clicked. Use Select to select the body or the Tablix. Insert a new column or a new row. Columns can be added to the right or the left of the clicked cell and rows can be added above or below the clicked cell. Delete columns and rows. Add a group. Both row and column groups can be added. When you click on the properties of the textbox, the Text Box Properties window is displayed. The textbox has several properties which are arranged on the left as a list with each item having its own page as shown. The Help button on any of the pages will take you directly to the definition of the properties and is extremely useful. In the General page, you can make changes to the elements in the Name, Value, and Sizing options page as shown. The Value is one which you choose among the column values (from the drop-down) from the dataset. You may also add a text for the ToolTip, which will display this text when the report is generated and this cell is accessed by hovering over it in the report. Alternatively you can set the Value and Tooltip using fx—the button that brings up the Expression window. In the Number page you can set the number and date data type formatting options for the cell that contains a number or a date. This is what you normally would find in most Microsoft products such as Excel and Access. In the Alignment page you can choose the vertical and horizontal alignments as well as the padding of the textbox content from the edges of the cell. Similarly the Font and Border properties are the same ones you find in most Microsoft products. The Fill property lets you add or change background color to the report as well as add a graphic element. The graphic element can be embedded, external, or originate from a database (being one of the fields accessed). Expressions can be developed to set a desired color for the Fill. The Visibility of the textbox can be any of Show, Hide, Show or Hide based on an expression. In each of these cases the visibility can be toggled when another table cell is clicked (which can be chosen). This page also gives access to the Expression window which is similar to the MS Access expression builder. The Interactive Sorting page allows you to define interactive sorting options on the textbox. Matrix Matrix provides a similar functionality (roughly speaking rows against columns) to cross-tab reports in MS Access (http://aspalliance.com/1041_Creating_a_Crosstab_Report_in_Visual_Studio_2005_Using_Crystal_Reports.all) and Pivot Table dynamic views (http://www.aspfree.com/c/a/MS-SQL-Server/On-Accessing-Data-From-An-OLAP-Server-Using-MS-Excel/3/). The matrix should have at least one row group and one column group. The matrix can expand both ways to accommodate the data, horizontally for column groups and vertically for row groups. The matrix cells (intersection of rows and columns) display summary information (aggregates). When you click on Insert Matrix in the Insert menu and drop it on the design area of Report Builder 2.0, it gets displayed as shown in the following figure: Now if you click inside the boundary of the (2x2) empty matrix you will see more features of the matrix as shown in the following screenshot. The basic elements are the ColumnGroup (Column Groups), the RowGroup (Row Groups), and the Data. The group information is also displayed as shown by overlaid lines pointing to them. There needs to be a minimum of one group and one column for the matrix and there could be a hierarchy of column and row groups. The row and column group cells have their own properties which can be displayed when you right-click on them as shown in the next screenshot for the row group. When you right-click on the cell marked Rows, the following drop-down menu pops up. In addition to the properties that you can set for the textbox in that cell, you have additional submenu items that work with the grouping and totaling. These are part of representing data in a matrix. Each of the Tablix for the Rows and Columns has the additional submenu items which are shown here for the Rows. Similar ones apply for the Columns as well. These are useful when you want to create nested groups. With the Matrix design interface in SQL Server 2005 this would not have been possible. Add Group Row Group Parent Group... Child Group... -------------------- Adjacent Above Adjacent Below Row Group Delete Group Group Properties Add Total Before After In addition to the above, each of the items Rows and Columns cells has the following items as well. These specify how new columns and rows are inserted with reference to the current cell as shown. The differences are due to the geometrical positions that are allowed for the new columns or rows as shown. For the "Columns" cell: Insert Column Inside Group-Left Inside Group-Right ------------------ Outside Group-Left Outside Group-Right Insert Row Inside Group-Above Inside Group-Below ------------------ Outside Group_Above For the "Rows" cell: Insert Column Inside Group-Left Inside Group-Right ------------------ Outside Group-Left Insert Row Inside Group-Above Inside Group-Below ------------------ Outside Group_Above Outside Group_Below Besides using a cell as a starting point, one could also use the rows as a whole or column as a whole to add further structure as shown in the next figure. Of course you need to use the proper submenu option to arrive at a particular matrix structure. Clicking at the indicated points would let you choose the structure you want for your matrix. If you click at the location shown for the Tablix you could choose to the delete the whole matrix. The Tablix graphical arrangement gives you the maximum flexibility in extending the matrix in 2-dimensions. List The list data region repeats for each row of data. List element provides a single container for the data which can be used to generate what are called Free Form Reports. In this kind of report there is no rigid structure such as a table for the data. You can also place a list inside another list or even a chart inside a list. You can drag a column from a dataset and drop it into the list. You can work with the list using the properties of the Rectangle it contains as well as its Tablix properties. As described earlier, the design interface is very flexible and you can leverage all features provided by the Tablix structure like displaying details and adding groups either independent, or nested. The properties pages described earlier allow you to sort and filter grouped data. When you drop a List on the design surface you will see just a single cell as shown. You can change its dimensions to suit your needs. When you click on the List you can access its handles as shown: When you add a List, there is one column and one row (just one cell). This can be extended in both directions by choosing the appropriate submenu items. These can be displayed by right-clicking on the handles as shown:

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7158

article-image-enabling-spring-faces-support

Packt

28 Oct 2009

9 min read

Enabling Spring Faces support

Packt

28 Oct 2009

9 min read

The main focus of the Spring Web Flow Framework is to deliver the infrastructure to describe the page flow of a web application. The flow itself is a very important element of a web application, because it describes its structure, particularly the structure of the implemented business use cases. But besides the flow which is only in the background, the user of your application is interested in the Graphical User Interface (GUI). Therefore, we need a solution of how to provide a rich user interface to the users. One framework which offers components is JavaServer Faces (JSF). With the release of Spring Web Flow 2, an integration module to connect these two technologies, called Spring Faces has been introduced. This article is no introduction to the JavaServer Faces technology. It is only a description about the integration of Spring Web Flow 2 with JSF. If you have never previously worked with JSF, please refer to the JSF reference to gain knowledge about the essential concepts of JavaServer Faces. JavaServer Faces (JSF)—a brief introductionThe JavaServer Faces (JSF) technology is a web application framework with the goal to make the development of user interfaces for a web application (based on Java EE) easier. JSF uses a component-based approach with an own lifecycle model, instead of a request-driven approach used by traditional MVC web frameworks. The version 1.0 of JSF is specified inside JSR (Java Specification Request) 127 (http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=127). To use the Spring Faces module, you have to add some configuration to your application. The diagram below depicts the single configuration blocks. These blocks are described in this article. The first step in the configuration is to configure the JSF framework itself. That is done in the deployment descriptor of the web application—web.xml. The servlet has to be loaded at the startup of the application. This is done with the <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup> element.  <servlet> <servlet-name>Faces Servlet</servlet-name> <servlet-class>javax.faces.webapp.FacesServlet</servlet-class> <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup> </servlet> <servlet-mapping> <servlet-name>Faces Servlet</servlet-name> <url-pattern>*.faces</url-pattern> </servlet-mapping> For the work with the JavaServer Faces, there are two important classes. These are the javax.faces.webapp.FacesServlet and the javax.faces.context.FacesContext classes.You can think of FacesServlet as the core base of each JSF application. Sometimes that servlet is called an infrastructure servlet. It is important to mention that each JSF application in one web container has its own instance of the FacesServlet class. This means that an infrastructure servlet cannot be shared between many web applications on the same JEE web container.FacesContext is the data container which encapsulates all information that is necessary around the current request.For the usage of Spring Faces, it is important to know that FacesServlet is only used to instantiate the framework. A further usage inside Spring Faces is not done. To be able to use the components from Spring Faces library, it's required to use Facelets instead of JSP. Therefore, we have to configure that mechanism. If you are interested in reading more about the Facelets technology, visit the Facelets homepage from java.net with the following URL: https://facelets.dev.java.net. A good introduction inside the Facelets technology is the http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-facelets/ article, too. The configuration process is done inside the deployment descriptor of your web application—web.xml. The following sample shows the configuration inside the mentioned file. <context-param> <param-name>javax.faces.DEFAULT_SUFFIX</param-name> <param-value>.xhtml</param-value></context-param> As you can see in the above code, the configuration parameter is done with a context parameter. The name of the parameter is javax.faces.DEFAULT_SUFFIX. The value for that context parameter is .xhtml. Inside the Facelets technology To present the separate views inside a JSF context, you need a specific view handler technology. One of those technologies is the well-known JavaServer Pages (JSP) technology. Facelets are an alternative for the JSP inside the JSF context. Instead, to define the views in JSP syntax, you will use XML. The pages are created using XHTML. The Facelets technology offers the following features: A template mechanism, similar to the mechanism which is known from the Tiles framework The composition of components based on other components Custom logic tags Expression functions With the Facelets technology, it's possible to use HTML for your pages. Therefore, it's easy to create the pages and view them directly in a browser, because you don't need an application server between the processes of designing a page The possibility to create libraries of your components The following sample shows a sample XHTML page which uses the component aliasing mechanism of the Facelets technology. <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"><html > <body> <form jsfc="h:form"> <span jsfc="h:outputText" value="Welcome to our page: #{user.name}" disabled="#{empty user}" /> <input type="text" jsfc="h:inputText" value="#{bean.theProperty}" /> <input type="submit" jsfc="h:commandButton" value="OK" action="#{bean.doIt}" /> </form> </body></html> The sample code snippet above uses the mentioned expression language (for example, the #{user.name} expression accesses the name property from the user instance) of the JSF technology to access the data. What is component aliasingOne of the mentioned features of the Facelets technology is that it is possible to view a page directly in a browser without that the page is running inside a JEE container environment. This is possible through the component aliasing feature. With this feature, you can use normal HTML elements, for example an input element. Additionally, you can refer to the component which is used behind the scenes with the jsfc attribute. An example for that is <input type="text" jsfc="h:inputText" value="#{bean.theProperty}" /> . If you open this inside a browser, the normal input element is used. If you use it inside your application, the h:inputText element of the component library is used The ResourceServlet One main part of the JSF framework are the components for the GUI. These components often consist of many files besides the class files. If you use many of these components, the problem of handling these files arises. To solve this problem, the files such as JavaScript and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) can be delivered inside the JAR archive of the component. If you deliver the file inside the JAR file, you can organize the components in one file and therefore it is easier for the deployment and maintenance of your component library. Regardless of the framework you use, the result is HTML. The resources inside the HTML pages are required as URLs. For that, we need a way to access these resources inside the archive with the HTTP protocol. To solve that problem, there is a servlet with the name ResourceServlet (package org.springframework.js.resource). The servlet can deliver the following resources: Resources which are available inside the web application (for example, CSS files) Resources inside a JAR archive The configuration of the servlet inside web.xml is shown below: <servlet> <servlet-name>Resource Servlet</servlet-name> <servlet-class>org.springframework.js.resource.ResourceServlet</servlet-class> <load-on-startup>0</load-on-startup></servlet> <servlet-mapping> <servlet-name>Resource Servlet</servlet-name> <url-pattern>/resources/*</url-pattern></servlet-mapping> It is important that you use the correct url-pattern inside servlet-mapping. As you can see in the sample above, you have to use /resources/*. If a component does not work (from the Spring Faces components), first check if you have the correct mapping for the servlet. All resources in the context of Spring Faces should be retrieved through this Servlet. The base URL is /resources. Internals of the ResourceServlet ResourceServlet can only be accessed via a GET request. The ResourceServlet servlet implements only the GET method. Therefore, it's not possible to serve POST requests. Before we describe the separate steps, we want to show you the complete process, illustrated in the diagram below: For a better understanding, we choose an example for the explanation of the mechanism which is shown in the previous diagram. Let us assume that we have registered the ResourcesServlet as mentioned before and we request a resource by the following sample URL: http://localhost:8080/ flowtrac-web-jsf/resources/css/test1.css. How to request more than one resource with one requestFirst, you can specify the appended parameter. The value of the parameter is the path to the resource you want to retrieve. An example for that is the following URL: http://localhost:8080/ flowtracweb-jsf/resources/css/test1.css?appended=/css/test2.css. If you want to specify more than one resource, you can use the delimiter comma inside the value for the appended parameter. A simple example for that mechanism is the following URL: http://localhost:8080/ flowtrac-web-jsf/resources/css/test1.css?appended=/css/test2.css, http://localhost:8080/flowtrac-web-jsf/resources/css/test1.css?appended=/css/test3.css. Additionally, it is possible to use the comma delimiter inside the PathInfo. For example: http://localhost:8080/flowtrac-web-jsf/resources/css/test1.css,/css/test2.css. It is important to mention that if one resource of the requested resources is not available, none of the requested resources is delivered. This mechanism can be used to deliver more than one CSS in one request. From the view of development, it can make sense to modularize your CSS files to get more maintainable CSS files. With that concept, the client gets one CSS, instead of many CSS files. From the view of performance optimization, it is better to have as few requests for rendering a page as possible. Therefore, it makes sense to combine the CSS files of a page. Internally, the files are written in the same sequence as they are requested. To understand how a resource is addressed, we separate the sample URL into the specific parts. The example URL is a URL on a local servlet container which has an HTTP connector at port 8080. See the following diagram for the mentioned separation: The table below describes the five sections of the URL that are shown in the previous diagram:

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1
26934

article-image-extending-application-using-microsoft-dynamics-nav-2009-part-1

Packt

28 Oct 2009

11 min read

Extending the Application using Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 (Part 1)

Packt

28 Oct 2009

11 min read

Learning to fish Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach him to use the Internet, and he won't bother you for weeks! This is going to be a real challenge for the one that wants to play with the new technology that Web services enablement brings, but is a little unsure where to start. A good number of people that are experienced NAV consultants and C/AL developers are going to need to learn some new technologies if they want to start experimenting with the new extensibility options in Dynamics NAV 2009, or even simply understand what options are available for their new solution designs or sales presentations. This article is going to be all about practical examples—real sample applications that you can create for yourself. Some of these examples start off with one set of requirements that evolve as we progress through the design process. The examples are deliberately kept this way to help you to understand that the path to your final working solution is not always the shortest. Sometimes you get an idea for an application and as you proceed with the design, you think of things that would be better or easier to use. Sometimes your initial design simply won't work when you start to try it out. It's important to realize that designs are not precious and it's OK to change your mind. There are a couple of important issues to consider: always ensure you are solving the business problem, and don't get carried away gold-plating your design. Keep it simple, and once it is working and meets the initial requirements, you can then go back and add the bells and whistles (but you'd better check with whoever is paying the bills first). If you aren't a .NET programmer, and you have never created a web site or Web service in your life, this article is not a place to tell you the best way to do these things, but instead is a place to show you that with a very limited knowledge of .NET, a web browser to do some research, and enough time, you can create pretty much anything you can imagine. First of all, let's get some theory out of the way so that we have a basic understanding of what we're dealing with. What's a Web service? Web services have been around for a few years now but they are new to NAV (well, sort of— but more on that later). A good way to distinguish between technical and non-technical NAV consultants is to ask them if NAV supports Web services and watch to see if their eyes glaze over. There's no wonder some NAV consultants struggle to understand Web services as a concept; if you're not a developer and you have never worked with Web services, learning the basics might be more than a little bit scary. Here's a typical definition you might find on the Web; don't be put off by the geek-speak. A scary geeky definition of a Web service A 'Web service' (also Web Service) is defined by the W3C as 'a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network'. Web services are frequently just Web APIs that can be accessed over a network, such as the Internet, and executed on a remote system hosting the requested services. There are a lot of acronyms and jargon phrases to learn if you want to talk the talk, but let's take a look at what a Web service is in simple terms. To start with, let's consider a comparison between web sites, something we are all familiar with, and Web services. One might like to think that a Web service is to a computer what a web site is to a person. If you want to know what's on TV tonight, you can type the URL for a TV Listings site into a web browser and bring up a page with details. It's not going to take you long to find the required information, but what if you wanted to write a computer program to send an e-mail when your favorite TV show was about to start, how would you go about that? This is a more complex problem, we know the data is there on the web site, freely available to all humans, but we can't just tell our computer to go off and read the web site (well we can—but deciphering it may require a fair amount of clever programming). Wouldn't it be great if there was a computer-friendly version of the data on the web site that allowed computers to ask for information and get answers back? Wouldn't it be great if you could write your program to make the call to this service without the need to install any special software components on your computer? Yes, it is great, and that's why Web services came into being and have now become so popular. It's not just for the Web It's not immediately obvious why we would want to expose our precious company data that we keep locked up in our ERP system on the Web, but just because they're called Web services doesn't mean they're just for the World Wide Web. Let's consider the intranet compared to the internet. It didn't take long for companies to realize that the popularity of internet sites and the ease of use that everyone was experiencing through the world wide web could provide great benefits within the boundaries of a company's safe internal network—a kind of mini-internal-internet or intranet. For Dynamics NAV, the analogy between Web Sites and Web services works even better when we consider an intranet. What if different departments could pull data directly from the ERP system and use it in their own specialist applications? This is where the real value of Web services enablement in Dynamics NAV 2009 comes into its own. It is now possible to take any functionality from within the ERP solution and expose it to other applications as Web services; it's not just possible, it's dead easy! What can we do with them? OK, so it's easy to expose NAV functionality, so what? Well if you can call any Codeunit or Page from within NAV with pretty much any software package that you can extend, there are limitless possibilities to create fantastic productivity applications for the business. Here are just a few examples: Let staff submit their expenses from Excel, or from their mobile phone, without needing to re-key them into the finance system. Allow users to create new customer accounts from within Word or from an intranet web page. Provide a Vista Sidebar gadget that shows the number of documents requiring approval and allows the user to approve the document without needing to open the ERP. Provide a simple single-task Windows application that will let staff see where stock is. These examples are just a few that spring immediately to mind, but if you have the know-how, you can do pretty much anything. So how easy is it to expose NAV functionality as a Web service? Let's find out. Calling a NAV Web service There is a great series of articles on MSDN by Manuel Oliveira that explain how to expose NAV functionality as a Web service. If you have never read these, you may want to skim through them after reading this example to see just how easy we have it with the new version of NAV. Talking with NAV—the hard way! Visit http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms952182.aspx and http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms952079.aspx for a couple of examples that explain the multiple hoops we needed to jump through in order to access NAV functionality using Web services. That's before NAV 2009 came along! Since these early examples of NAV extensibility, the Windows Communication Framework has made things easier, and Kris Rafnsson has provided a blog posting and sample application that allows you to call NAV functionality as a Web service without using message queues. This example is pretty amazing, but there is still a fair amount of work required to get this up and running and build new solutions. Although this is a big improvement on the Message Queue approach, it is nothing compared to the simplicity and elegance of the NAV 2009 Web services enablement. You can read through Kris's post at http://blogs.msdn.com/nav/archive/2008/04/15/using-web-services-toaccess-microsoft-dynamics-nav-5-0.aspx. In Manuel's first example (although not actually a Web service), he creates a simple NAV function that will accept a text string and return the text string back but converted to upper case. This example spans 15 printed pages and uses a lot of geeky stuff. As a bare minimum, we are going to need a Codeunit to expose and a .NET program to call the thing, so let's forget about these and just compare the components that are needed to take care of the plumbing: Microsoft Message Queue Navision Communication Component XMLDOM automation control Navision Application Server A lot of complicated C/AL code using InStreams and OutStreams and XML manipulation Manuel's examples were written in 2004 and, although they're very well written, the whole thing is just too hard! After reading the articles, you'll understand why there hasn't been a glut of NAV components on the market using Web services exposed by NAV. Our example by contrast requires the following (again ignoring the Codeunit we are exposing and the .NET program needed to call it): Dynamics NAV 2009 Business Web services A new record in a table with a check in a box Creating a Web service Let's start by creating our very simple Codeunit. In this example, I have created Codeunit 50001 called NAV Codeunit, which has a single function called ConvertStrToUpperCase that takes a 50 character text field and returns a 50 character text field that has been converted to upper case. It wasn't absolutely necessary for this example, but I put some code in the OnRun() trigger of the Codeunit that will demonstrate the Codeunit working when run. Here is the output from running the Codeunit in NAV: Now we can expose this Codeunit as a Web service. In the Classic client, select Administration | IT Administration | General Setup | Web Services. This is just a regular NAV form, so fill in the details on a new record with Object Type as Codeunit, Object ID as 50001, and Service Name as NAV Codeunit. To publish the Web service, tick the Published field. I just happened to give the Web service the same name as the Codeunit, but this is not necessary, you can call it whatever you like. We have now exposed NAV functionality as a Web service—how easy was that? Calling the Web service The .NET program to call the Web service is going to be a little harder. We're going to create a simple C# console application using Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition. (This is installed on the Marketing Beta release of the product which all partners can download from PartnerSource.) Create a new Console Application, let's call this one SayHelloToNAV2009. The project gets created with a Program.cs file with enough code generated for you to allow the project to compile and run. There's no way I can teach you to program in C# in this article, there are whole books dedicated to the subject; instead what I'll do is give you the details you need to be able to recreate our examples for yourself. If you like what you see, maybe you'll go on to do some more .NET programming and your next book will be one on C#. The great thing about .NET languages and Visual Studio is there's a huge amount of knowledge freely available on the Web. The first thing we need to do is add our Web service to the project. To do this, right-click on the References node in the Solution Explorer window and select Add Service Reference. Visual Studio 2005 is differentThese instructions are for adding a web reference using Visual Studio 2008. In 2005, things work a little differently. Instead of selecting References | Add Service Reference | Advanced | Add Web Reference, you simply selected Add Reference | Add Web Reference. In the dialog that is displayed, click the Advanced button, and then click the Add Web Reference button. In the Add Web Reference dialog form, enter http://nav-srv-01:7047/DynamicsNAV/ws/CRONUS_International_Ltd/Services as the URL for the Web service. This will display the group of Web services that are exposed by NAV. Where do I find that URL? The format of the URL is quite straightforward. Let's break it up into chunks.

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2791

How-To Tutorials

article-image-how-bridge-client-server-gap-using-ajax-part-i

Packt

28 Oct 2009

18 min read

How to Bridge the Client-Server Gap using AJAX (Part I)

Packt

28 Oct 2009

18 min read

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2659

How-To Tutorials

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Extending the Application using Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 (Part 1)

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