How-To Tutorials

Active Directory (AD) failure, which includes corruption, is something that is dreaded by any administrator. Simply put, it means that the directory service can no longer read the Active Directory database that it has locally. This will prevent logon and authentication as well as any directory-dependent services. Essentially, it renders the domain controller (DC) useless. What's worse, though, is that several times, the replication keeps going so that the corrupted database spreads out to the other DCs. In this article by Florian Rommel, we will look at the different options and approaches available to recover a DC that has a database corruption. In addition, this article outlines, symptoms, causes, and solutions for this scenario. Problems and Symptoms Let's take a look at the symptoms and then the causes. Symptoms The database gets corrupted and the DC is no longer able to process and authenticate or perform directory lookups. This becomes apparent when replication fails for some reason, or a large amount of specific event log errors appear. Another symptom could be that the AD services don't start on the DC. Causes This scenario can be caused by:      A software glitch, which can due to upgrading the schema, but having customized schema entries      An unclean AD write      A replication that has been interrupted      An accidental or malicious change in the AD schema with low level tools such as ADSIedit or something similar. Solution Process The recovery process is as follows:      You will have to verify that it is, in fact, a failure or corruption within the AD database, and not a network-related problem or other problem.      You will then have to perform a specific directory restore mode recovery, where you have to decide between an authoritative and a non-authoritative mode.      Once the recovery is complete, you will need to verify whether the DC is replicating and functioning properly. Solution Details What follows is a complete outline of what to do during each part of the solution process. Verification of Corruption If the AD on a domain controller becomes corrupted, or stops replicating to other DC's, or both, find out the root cause for this. A good starting point is to check again that the DNS is in order, and revert any manual changes that may have been made recently. Also, ensure that it is not a network-related problem—this means that no routers and routes have been changed, or firewalls re-configured, and the connection is not down. These are more often than not the main causes, and not an actual corruption. If you can safely rule out those causes, you can use utilities such as ReplMon and DCDiag, which are included in the Windows 2003 support tools, available free from Microsoft's website or on your install CD. Although ReplMon is a graphical utility, it is pretty small, and one of the best tool for checking whether or not there are replication errors within an entire domain. It shows which DCs are not replicating and why. The other utility, DCDiag, scans every DC, and determines if and why they have replication and other errors. When you have checked that all other DCs replicate just fine, you should check the Event log for specific event IDs (467 and 1018), that only occur when you have a real database corruption, and the AD jet database, which AD uses, is unreadable. Tools for Verification The Windows 2003 support tools (found on your installation CD under the SUPPORT folder) and the Windows 2003 resource kit tools (found at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=9d467a69-57ff-4ae7-96ee-b18c4790cffd&displaylang=en ) provide a variety of tools to verify if the DC is still operational, if there is actually a problem, and where the problem lies. Although the usage of these programs can also be described as part of an AD health check, in this case, we will focus on a single DC. The output from some of these tools is fairly long, and for brevity's sake, we will focus on only the relevant parts. ReplMon ReplMon, short for Replication Monitor, is essential in your arsenal of tools for detecting replication errors within a domain. It can also provide you with a good view of replication partners for each DC, and allows you to run a check against an entire domain for replication errors. The following screenshot shows the default ReplMon window, while the next screenshot shows the right-click action menu for a monitored DC. To run ReplMon,  simply type replmon from the command line. An example of where ReplMon becomes very useful is to detect errors while trying to replicate to other DCs. There are different errors for different scenarios. but, for example, a server that cannot be reached, or is offline, would show the following error in the domain-wide search for errors: DCDiag DCDiag is a command line utility that performs a full check of the DC as regards AD. These tests include forest DNS tests, to check that the DNS is okay at the forest level, domain DNS tests, to do the same on a domain level, configuration test, schema test, and the FSMO test to check that all FSMO servers are available. Running it is as simple as typing dcdiag at the command line, and watching the output. You might want to add an output file such as dcdiag > c:dcdiag_output.txt at the end, to save everything to a text file that you can read easily. A successful DCDiag test would have the following results: NetDiag and DNSDiag Both of these utilities check the network connectivity of the DC on which they are installed. DNSDiag is more geared towards Exchange, and checks that all of the essential DNS records are valid and are working, by pretending to follow the MX records. It also gives us a lot of output with regard to the domain DNS structure, and identifies if there are any problems. NetDiag checks the local networking stack. It tests all the installed protocols and services, including WINS, NetBT, and TCP/IP. Sonar The Sonar.exe utility provides a GUI, which shows exactly where a replication failed, and what the state of the File Replication Service (FRS) is on each of the DCs. This is particularly useful for large environments. It also has different views that allow you to troubleshoot your FRS on a DC. Options to Recover and Stop the Spread of Corruption If, in effect, you have a corrupted or failed AD database, and it hasn't spread yet, meaning it is only on one DC, you should remove that DC from the replication chain as quickly as possible. A good way is, of course, to disconnect the network connection, though this will have an impact if you are working remotely on the machine. The other option is to isolate the DC with firewall rules. This is also the safest way that still gives you access to the machine remotely. If neither option is available to you, you can use the Repadmin utility to stop outbound and inbound replication. The two options are repadmin /options DCNAME +DISABLE_INBOUND_REPL and repadmin /options DCNAME +DISABLE_OUTBOUND_REPL, where DCNAME is the name of the DC that should be disabled. If you want to enable the replication, simply retype the command with a - instead of a + so as repadmin /options DCNAME -DISABLE_INBOUND_REPL. The following screenshot shows the command line for disabling outbound replication with Repadmin. Please note that when you disable outbound replication, errors with Event ID 1115 will appear in the event log, just as errors with event ID 1113 will show when inbound replication is disabled. When either one is re-enabled, informative Event IDs 1116 (outbound) and 1114 (inbound) will appear in the event log. The fastest way to recover from a corrupted AD database is to forcefully demote the DC to become a member server, and to promote it again to replicate off of another DC, if there is one in the same network. You should take this step only if you are sure, and have verified that the AD is actually working on the other DC. You can use DCDiag to easily verify whether everything is correctly order. You should not replicate from another DC within the same site if you cannot verify whether the DC is actually operational. Make sure that the event log does not contain any Jet database, or FRS errors such as 1173, which would indicate an internal error in the Jet Database. You will have to perform a metadata cleanup if you force-demote the DC because a clean demotion is not an option. If you use Dcpromo normally, it will replicate its "change" out to another DC. In other words, you are spreading the corrupted or non-functioning database this way. You can easily force-demote it by running  dcpromo /forceremoval, and then do a metadata cleanup. Non-Authoritative and Authoritative Restore To speed up the data replication of the AD, for example, for sites that have a slow or saturated network connection, or to make the whole restore process much quicker, you should perform a non-authoritative restore of the AD database. Non-authoritative restore means that you are restoring a database, but that database will not assert authority in the AD. This means that it will take all changes that the replication partners send it, where an authoritative restore is set to be the master replication in your domain. It will restore itself, and give itself such high update sequence numbers to objects that every other DC in the domain replicates from it because it is assumed it has the newest copy. Effectively, you are restoring a backup of the AD database to its original location, overwriting the current database. This can only be done when you are in Directory Restore mode. After the database is restored, reboot your DC normally. If you have changed the boot order, reverse the order again. Please make sure your backups are run regularly, whether it is on tape or on disk, according to your organization's backup policy. After the restore is complete, and you reboot the DC, the next replication will be much faster because only changed objects will be replicated to the server. This is because it has most of the AD database already, depending on how much the AD has changed, and how recent the backup was. In a non-authoritative restore, data that is restored includes AD objects with original update sequence numbers. This requires a lot of caution, as any data that is restored with a non-authoritative restore will appear to be outdated to the AD replication system. Hence, the data will not get replicated to other domain controllers. You therefore run the risk of having the data overwritten from DCs that have not yet been restored to, and contain somewhat newer data, including other corruptions. Since this article is meant for a corruption or AD failure on a single DC only, with a replication partner relatively close by, we will skip the authoritative restore. The following figure illustrates how authoritative and non-authoritative restores work. Option One: Restoring AD from a Backup In order to restore an AD database on a Domain Controller, you have to go into the "Directory Services Restore" mode. To do this, reboot the DC, and at the boot prompt, which is where the boot process waits for a second before the splash screen of Windows 2003 comes up, press the F8 key, after which you will be presented with a menu similar to the following: Windows 2003 Advanced Options MenuPlease select an option: Safe ModeSafe Mode with NetworkingSafe Mode with Command Prompt Enable Boot LoggingEnable VGA ModeLast Known Good ConfigurationDirectory Services Restore Mode (Windows NT domain controllers only)Debugging Mode Use | and | to move the highlight to your choice.Press Enter to choose. At the menu, select the Directory Services Restore Mode, by moving up and down with the arrow keys on your keyboard, and then press ENTER. You will then be in the same menu again. Press ENTER again, after which, your display will show Directory Restore Mode at the bottom of the screen. Your DC will now boot, but no AD-related services will be started. Once booted, restore the AD/system state from a trusted and recent backup, and reboot the machine. After the machine is rebooted, you should have working AD services with a slightly outdated AD database. Wait for the replication to take effect, and your AD will be updated. No Physical Access to the Machine If you do not have physical access to the machine in question, you can achieve the same effect by editing the boot.ini file, which is located in c:. This file, bydefault, is hidden and may be write-protected. To see the hidden files and system files, you will need to change your Windows Explorer settings, as shown in the following screenshot. When you can see the file, check its properties, that is, whether it is read-only or not, by right-clicking on it and selecting Properties. However, instead of changing file permissions of system files, you can edit this quite easily with the Graphical User Interface. Some people are not comfortable editing protected files, and then you can also run into problems if you forget to un-mark or re-mark the read-only flag. To get to the GUI editor, right-click on My Computer in your Start menu, or click the icon with the server name in the right hand upper-right, and then select Properties. Once you have done this, the following screen will appear: On the properties window, go to the Advanced tab, as shown in the following screenshot: And then click on Settings in the Startup and Recovery section of the  Advanced tab, as shown in the screenshot below: In the resulting window, which contains quite a few options and sections, you can click on the  Edit button and the boot.ini file will be opened in Notepad. Once editing is completed, and the file has been saved and closed, all permissions will be reset to their original settings. The editing of this file is pretty straightforward, yet not easily understandable for someone who has never done this. In the following screenshot, you can see the actual file displayed: To edit the file in order to reboot in Directory Restore Mode, it is recommended to just copy and paste the last line again, and perform two changes:      Change the display name by adding something like Recovery.      Add the /safeboot:dsrepair at the end of the line, as shown in the following screenshot: When editing is done, save and close the file as you would with any other text file, and click  OK in the Startup and Recovery window so that it closes. To select the option on which you want to boot, click SETTINGS in the  Startup and Recovery section again. And As you can see in the following screenshot, you can now select the boot default from the drop-down menu in the opening window: Select the Recovery line and click OK. Then click OK again to reboot the server. It will now boot automatically into the Directory Restore Mode. Restoring from a Backup Once you are in Directory Restore Mode (DRM), you can use your company's backup software to recover the AD database. If you use Windows backup, you can safely backup and restore the system state of the server, as you can see in the following screenshot. This will allow you to fully revert to a completely working system. However, if you do not need to, or do not want to, recover the whole system state, you can easily choose to restore only AD from the list, as shown in the following screenshot. We assume that we have a complete backup of the server, and that we need to restore the AD database. You can restore the AD or system state to a different location, or overwrite the original files, depending on whether you want to perform an authoritative or a non-authoritative restore, or even an install from media. Option Two: Replication In case you have no valid recent backup media from which to restore the AD, or you need to act very fast, you can restore the AD by first force-demoting the DC in question with dcpromo /forceremoval. This way, demoting will prevent replication to any replication partners, but will successfully demote the DC from the domain. If you have any important Flexible Server Master Operations (FSMO) roles running on the DC that you are removing by force, you will be presented with the following warning: Make sure that you seize the FSMO roles after you have demoted the DC, or after you disconnect its network cable. Do not forget this though, as the FSMO roles are quite important. As you can see in the following screenshot, the Active Directory wizard will now proceed to remove AD without updating the forest. This means that it will not replicate out its own data or changes. Once demoted, reboot the server, and remove its leftover information from AD as a DC. Then, verify whether the network connection is fully functional, and promote the DC again with the same name. You should encounter no problems in completing the promotion. The AD will replicate to it during the next scheduled replication. If your AD is very large and contains many records or files, such as pictures in the user information, the replication to a "blank" DC will take a long time and stress your network quite heavily. The replication option in a larger environment with a large dataset can take along time if the other DC is either busy, or the replication link is not a very high-speed connection. The size of the AD databases can start from 1 GB and may run up to several gigabytes. If your DC has to replicate from a DC over a leased line, or an average consumer Internet class connection (2 to 8mbit), you may have to consider the other option of  restoring from a backup, or performing a non-authoritative restore. Option Three: Rebuild DC with Install from Media Starting from Windows 2000 SP3, there is a dcpromo option available called "IFM" (install from media). This option adds a step to the DC promotion that will pre-populate the AD database on the promoted DC from a recent system state backup of a working DC, which is restored to a disk, CD or DVD. IFM is the fastest option if you have to install, recover, or re-install a DC that is connected by only a slow link to its closest replication partner. As you are pre-populating the local AD, the replication changes it will get from its partner are much smaller, and therefore will replicate much faster. To use IFM, restore the backup to the server BEFORE you make it a DC, and before you run dcpromo. A good way to do this, if you want to, or need to, restore several DCs with IFM, is to restore it to a network drive.. To prepare a backup and restore for IFM, please see Microsoft's Knowledge base article http://support.microsoft.com/kb/311078 IFM can only be used for additional DCs within a domain, not for the first DC. You can also only pre-populate, or restore a DC with a backup of the domain that you are building in. A good option for this is to force-demote the DC, reboot it, and start it as a normal member server. You then need to clean up all of the records from the AD regarding the DC, and then perform an install from Media. Restore the most recent backup to a separate directory, for example, c:restore. This restore should be a restore of the System State of a DC, and the directory will contain sub-directories such as AD, Boot Files, Registry and so on. Once the restore has succeeded, click on Start, Run, and enter dcpromo /adv as shown: The /adv flag in the Dcpromo command gives you advanced options within Dcpromo, such as the install from media options. Follow the dialog as you would normally do for a dcpromo. However, when you see the screen regarding Copying Domain Information, select the option:  From these restored backup files, and navigate to and select the directory to which you restored the system state. As you can see in this screenshot, you also have the option to pre-populate immediately from an existing DC. This is, of course, an option, but if your link is slow, or if your replication partner is busy serving other partners, it will be much slower than from media. Not just for disaster recovery! If you have to install several DCs for any reason, the /adv switch can save you the time spent waiting for the first replication, if you have a fast link, or a backup, that you can use to pre-populate. When following the wizard, you will be asked if you want to make this DC a Global Catalog, and then you may be required to use an account with Administrator privileges in order to proceed with the dcpromo. Once the Dcpromo wizard completes its task, and the AD records are copied from a previous backup, at the next replication only the changes since the last backup will be replicated. This saves a lot of bandwidth and time. This is especially useful for sites with a slow or saturated network connection, where replication would take far too long, so if you need to recover or install fast, this is probably your best bet. Summary In this article, we looked at the recovery procedure in the event of a corruption or failure of the AD database on a single domain controller. This is a scenario that happens more frequently than one might expect. So, instead of "just re-installing", these options and procedures will help you get a healthy DC back in no time while limiting the amount of errors in the event log. We also looked at some tools that will help you not only diagnose AD problems, but also allow you to perform, when used regularly, AD health tests to make sure your AD is always in perfect working order. This way, you might prevent failures because you might find the symptoms earlier.  

Signature Verification by Oracle WSM Oracle Web Services Manager can actually validate the signature in the incoming i.e. request SOAP message. By using Oracle WSM to validate the signature, organizations can actually centralize the policy enforcement and also the public key management. As organizations deploy more web services that are accessed by other divisions and business partners, managing the signature verification process might become tedious, as with each new consumer, the certificate information should be maintained. Oracle WSM can address such issues by centralizing those operations. This section  will describe how to configure Oracle WSM policy to validate the signature of the SOAP request message. In order to view the policy, you can click on Policy Management and then Manage Policies. This will bring you to the screen with the gateway information and a hyperlink for policies (see the following screen capture).   You can then click on Policies to see all the policies and you will see theVerifyAndSign policy too that is created by default. A default policy is attached to the service. We can now click Edit to edit the  policy. When you click Edit, you will see the policy steps as shown in the  following screenshot. In this section, we want to configure the Request pipeline to validate the signature of the incoming SOAP message. In order to validate the signature, click Add Step Below to add the Verify Signature policy step as shown in the following screenshot. Once you click OK, the verify signature policy step is added, but that policy step should be configured. If you click on the Configure button on the verify signature policy step, it will take you to the screen where you can configure the verify signature policy information as shown in the following screen capture. In the previous screenshot, I configured Verify Signature policy steps with: Location of the key store Key store type as PKCS12 Password of the key store Public key alias in the key store Set Remove Signatures to true to remove the digital signature after the signature validation Enforce Signing is set to true to make sure that the incoming requests are signed In order to generate a PKCS12 key store from certifcate that is installed already in Microsoft certifcate services, you should frst export the certifcate (with or without private key) and then import that certifcate in FireFox (Advanced option) and then export back to PKCS12. Once the verify signature policy has been configured and saved (Commit Policy), the policy would enforce that any request for the time service with the particular service ID be digitally signed. Signature Generation by Oracle WSM In the last section, we discussed how to digitally sign a web service request by Microsoft .NET application and how to validate the signature by Oracle WSM. In this section, we will discuss how to digitally sign the web service response message. In the earlier section, we discussed how to register the service and how to attach the verify signature policy step to the request pipeline. In order to digitally sign the response message, the response pipeline of the policy should be modified to include the sign message policy step. The policy with the request pipeline that is already configured to verify signature would look like: Now we have to add the step in the Response pipeline to actually sign the response message. In order to add the policy step, click on Add Step Below and then select the Sign Message policy step. Once the Sign Message policy step is added, it can then be configured, as shown in the following screenshot, to include the appropriate key store location for the public key to digitally sign the message. In the previous figure, the location of the key store that has the private key, along with the Keystore password, alias and part of message to be signed are specified. Once the policy is created, it would look like: In the previous screenshot, the Response pipeline has two log steps—one to log the message before digitally signing and one to log the message after digitally signing the message. In this sample, we are using the same WSEQuickStartServer certificate to sign the message. Once the policy is saved, the response message will be digitally signed. The client application (Microsoft .NET) can be configured to validate the signature.

This article will include: dotProject setup options including server, database, and browser issues Prerequisites for installation of the tool The process for control panels and browser-based installations Troubleshooting your installation Installing dotProject is usually an automated process if your server and database are already installed and configured. dotProject is packaged with an installation wizard that walks you through the basic setup process. It is always wise to have an understanding of the process and the setup options before you begin. Prerequisites It is important to make sure that everything is ready and in place for dotProject to be installed. Let's go over what we need to have prepared for a successful installation of dotProject. Before you Install It seems redundant to review the requirements again, doesn't it? There are a few last-minute things to discuss, especially if a control panel installation is not possible. First, make sure that the software required to run dotProject is already installed. Installing a web server, MySQL, and PHP is beyond the scope of this book. There are many fine books and online materials that explain the installation of web servers, MySQL, and PHP in detail. The dotProject team recommends the following environment: Apache web server (version 1.3.x or 2.x). MySQL server (version 3.23.x). A downloaded copy of dotProject. 2.0.4 or later is ideal. The most recent stable release can be downloaded from SourceForge. MySQL should be set up first, so that a dotProject user can create temporary tables during installation. Specifically, the database user should have ALTER and DROP permissions. In the section on browser-based installation, we will go over how to deal with the config.php file. If your installation already contains a config.php file (not a config_dist.php file, etc.), then dotProject will assume you are trying to upgrade. Your PHP installation should have register_globals set to OFF in order for dotProject to run in an optimized and more secure mode. The dotProject installer automatically detects the state of register_globals. dotProject will work with register_globals set to ON, but it is not recommended. LAMP, WAMP, or WIMP? There are several key requirements to run dotProject. You must have an active web server running PHP and MySQL, and an Internet browser. There are three main web-server setups that people running dotProject use. Which one you pick depends on what you already have and whether you have a preference for one over the other. If you use an Internet Service Provider (ISP) you may not have a choice on which to use. LAMP : Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP WAMP : Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP WIMP : Windows, IIS, MySQL, PHP LAMP is the most popular in the open-source community. Using LAMP provides an entirely open-source environment. Web Server Most web servers used today are either Apache or Microsoft IIS. Apache version 1.3.x or 2.x should be used. Your ISP or that clever person in the IT department knows which one your organization is using. There are always exceptions, so check the dotProject forums if you are using a different web server. Apache is the preferred environment for running dotProject. PHP To install dotProject 2.0, you must be using version 4.1 or higher of the very popular online programming language PHP. If you are using an Internet Service Provider, check your service details to see if PHP is provided. PHP can be downloaded from http://www.php.net/downloads.php. PHP 4.46 is the last stable version of PHP 4. PHP 5 is not recommended for use with version 2.0.4. MySQL dotProject uses the MySQL database system. You will need to have it installed before you begin as well. Version 3.23.x is recommended for use with dotProject. MySQL can be downloaded from http://www.mysql.org/downloads/. The dotProjectteam recommends that MySQL version 5 and above should not be used with version 2.0.4 of dotProject. The recent release of dotProject, version 2.1.0-rc 1 has been made more compatible with PHP 5 and MySQL 5; however, the changes incorporated does not take care of this completely. The features of this release are discussed in http://docs.dotproject.net/index.php/What%27s_New_-_2.1.0_-_rc1. Windows Using a bundled combination of PHP/Apache/MySQL is the best way to go if you do not already have them installed. This will save you the time and headache of installing them one at a time. The dotProject volunteers list the Apache2Triad available at http://apache2triad.sourceforge.net. Since there are limitations of dotProject being compatible with PHP5, version 1.2.3 is the download that is advisable. Browser dotProject works best with browsers that support cascading style sheets (CSS) and JavaScript. JavaScript and cookies should be turned on for full functionality. Most recent browsers such as Internet Explorer (version 5.5 or better), Mozilla 1.2, Netscape 7.x, and Firefox will work just fine. dotProject's PNG image files with alpha-transparency render best in Internet Explorer 6.0 and above. Internet Explorer 7 provides increased support for PNG image files. Mail Server As of version 2.0, sending mail is not a requirement. Administrators can set up the outgoing mail in the Administration panel. Fonts TrueType fonts are used for JpGraph, which is in turn used by the Gantt charts module. Most of the fonts JpGraph uses should already be installed on your system. All the fonts are not provided with dotProject because some of them have very specific licenses. If the Gantt charts module is insisting that font files are missing and you don't already have a spare copy of the files, search SourceForge or another reliable site for available fonts. Memory Limit The Gantt charts module can eat up your allocated memory. If the Gantt charts won't appear, and there is no error, chances are, you've reached your memory limit as set in the php.ini file. If your service is hosted, you will need to talk to your Internet Service Provider about increasing the memory limit set in your php.ini file. Installation There are two methods of dotProject installation: Online control panel installation Browser-based installation The most recent versions of dotProject, 2.0 and later, are not meant to be manually installed. The online control panel method is very simple and usually takes between five and ten minutes. The browser-based installation generally takes a little longer, roughly ten minutes to an hour. Which should you choose? If you already have an ISP who hosts your domain, they probably already provide you with an installation script for dotProject using one of the popular online control panels such as cPanel or Plesk. If they do not have the script available, they may be willing to install it for you if you make the request. dotProject can also be installed using a browser-based installation wizard. I recommend the online control panel installation for people who want a quick installation or are not technically inclined. The browser installation method is best for IT administrators or those who are comfortable installing web applications. If your only choice is a browser installation, don't worry; we will walk through one later in this article. Backup First It is always smart to take back up of any crucial files or databases that might be affected by a new installation. Always have a backup plan when a new installation is about to be performed. Installing with an Online Control Panel Most control panel installations can be completed in a few steps. Be sure to write down or otherwise make a note of any file, folder paths, or other crucial information as you go. We will walk through a control panel installation using cPanel/Fantastico. If you have never used cPanel before, this is a great opportunity to get your feet wet. Your ISP should have provided you with a link to your cPanel when you first setup your service. You will need a user name and password provided by your ISP to log in to cPanel. Once you are logged in you will see a screen with icons for different online tools. Log into your cPanel control panel. Select Fantastico (double mouse-click). The Fantastico icon is usually located at the bottom right corner of the screen. Scroll down the Fantastico screen until the Project Management category appears. Left mouse-click on dotProject. There will be a short description about dotProject. Make a note of the version of dotProject available. The latest stable installation should be listed. The version of dotProject is in parenthesis by the new installation link. We will be using version 2.0.4 in the examples. Click on the New Installation link to begin the installation process.Type in the name of the subfolder, where your dotProject installationshould be installed. If you leave it blank, then dotProject will be installed in the root folder of the URL path. For example, if I had left the folder field blank, the install tool would have placed the dotProject files directly in the public_html folder of www.leesjordan.net. I do not recommend leaving the folder field blank unless you already have a special URL set aside or are using a sub-domain.

In principle the simplest approach that actually always works is the following: Load the Joomla! 1.5 beta.zip file onto your local PC and unpack it in a temporary directory. Load the just unpacked files by means of FTP onto your rented server. The files must be installed in the publicly accessible directory. These directories are usually named htdocs, public_html, or simply html. You can specify a subdirectory within the directory into which you install your Joomla!. Many web hosts allow you to link your rented domain name to a directory. This name is necessary to call your website from a browser. You have to find out what your database is called. Usually one or several databases are included in your web-hosting package. Sometimes the user name, database name, and password are fixed; sometimes you have to set them up. There is usually a browser-based configuration interface at your disposal. You can see an example of such an interface in the following figure. You will need these access data for Joomla!'s web installer. You can get going after you have loaded these data onto your server and are in possession of your access data. Joomla! Installation To install Joomla!, you need the source code. Download the Joomla_1.5.0-Beta-Full_Package.zip package and save it on your system. Selecting a Directory for Installation You have to decide whether Joomla! needs to be installed directly into a document directory or a subdirectory. This is important, since many users prefer a short URL to their homepage. An Example If Joomla! is unzipped directly in /htdocs, the web page starts when the domain name http://www.myhomepage.com is accessed from its local computer http://localhost/ and/or from the server on the Internet. If subdirectories are created under /htdocs/, for example, /htdocs/Joomla150/ and we unzip the package there, we have to enter http://localhost/Joomla150/ in the browser. This isn't a problem locally, but doesn't look good on a production Internet page. Some HTML files and subdirectories, however, are already in /htdocs in the local XAMPP Lite environment under Windows, which, for example, displays the start page of XAMPP Lite. In a local Linux environment, a starting page dependent on the distribution and the web server settings is also displayed. Directory I recommend that you create a subdirectory under the document directory named Joomla150 in Windows by using Windows Explorer. (With Linux, use the Shell, KDE Konqueror, or Midnight Commander.) [home]/htdocs/Joomla150/ The directory tree in Windows Explorer should look like this: An empty index appears in the XAMPP Lite version when the URL http://localhost/Joomla150 is entered in the browser: With Linux or with another configuration it can happen that you get a message saying that you don't have access to this directory. This depends on the configuration of the web server. For security reasons, the automatic directory display is often deactivated in Apache's configuration. A potential hacker could draw many interesting conclusions about the directory structure and the files on your homepage and target your computer for an attack. For security reasons, you are usually not allowed to access the appropriate configuration file of the Apache web server. Should you be able to, you should leave the content directories deactivated and/or only activated for those directories that contain files for downloading.        

What Needs Backing Up in TYPO3? We need to back up: The TYPO3 files A copy of the database These two things make up our TYPO3 installation. We need the database as it contains the website's content and records of the website's users. We need the TYPO3 files as they contain the website's settings in the configuration files, copies of the website's design, and copies of data that has been cached by TYPO3. Backing Up the TYPO3 Files Depending on the operating system we are using, there are a number of different ways in which we can back up the files from TYPO3. In this article, we will look into backing up the files on Windows and on Linux. This is because Windows is the most used operating system, and Linux is the most popular hosting environment for websites. Backing Up Our Files on Windows In Windows, we can easily create a compressed file containing all the TYPO3 files (known as a ZIP file), using the Windows Compressed Folder tool, or a program such as WinZip. Provided we've used the default installation path, TYPO3 will be located in the folder C:Program FilesTypo3_4.0.2Apache and the folder that we want to compress is typo3_src. We could just back up the fileadmin, typo3conf, and uploads folders. This way, should we lose our entire website, we can simply restore the whole thing instead of having to restore TYPO3 and then our extra TYPO3 files. Now that we have a backup, we should copy it to a separate location (preferably on an external disk, or on another computer) for safe keeping. Backing Up Our Files on Linux or Linux Hosting We can create a complete backup of our home directory on a Linux hosting environment. This home directory contains all of our files on the hosting account. Alternatively, we can run a simple command to compress a particular folder. If we have a web hosting account that provides us with access to the cPanel hosting control panel, we can use that to generate a backup of our entire website (except for the database—which is done separately via cPanel). To access the backup utilities, we need to log in to cPanel, which is located at www.ourdomain.com/cpanel, and then enter our hosting account's username and password. In cPanel, we have the backup option on the main screen, as shown in the following screenshot: The Backups section has a number of options, but the one that we want is the Download a home directory Backup. This will generate a backup of all the files of our website and allow us to download it. In the previous screenshot, there is a warning message. This is because my web server does not have the option to back up the entire server, just an individualuser's webspace. The backup tool then takes a moment or two of processing, and then prompts us to download the backup file. Command-Line Backup To create a backup via the command line, we need to have SSH access to the server that is hosting our website. SSH is a protocol that allows us to remotely administer another machine using the command line. We can use a program such as Putty to connect to the server. We can download Putty from http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/. Putty only needs to be downloaded, after which it can be run straight away, and does not require to be installed. When we open the program, we are presented with a screen similar to the one shown in the following screenshot. We enter the server's address (i.e. the web address) into the Host Name box and then click on Open. Putty will then try to connect to the server, and will prompt us to enter our username and password, as shown in the following screenshot: Once we are connected, we can type two commands to back up our site. The first is to navigate to the folder that contains our TYPO3 installation. This depends entirely on the server's setup and your username, but is generally /home/the first 8 characters of your web address/public_html (you should contact your web host for more information or if you need help). Once we are in the correct folder, we can use the tar command to compress our TYPO3 folder to a single file named TYPO3. cd /home/michaelp/public_html/tar cvzf file.tar.gz typo3 Now that we have our backup created, we can download it from www.ourwebaddress.com/file.tar.gz (where we will be prompted to save the file). We should then delete this from our server once we have downloaded it.

In addition to infrastructure-related updates such as the aforementioned platform modernization, Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V virtualization support, and additional options for fail over clustering, BizTalk Server also includes new core functionality. You will find better EDI and AS2 capabilities for B2B situations and a new platform for mobile development of RFID solutions. One of the benefits of the new WCF SQL Server Adapter that I mentioned earlier was the capability to use this adapter outside of a BizTalk Server solution. Let's take a brief look at three options for using this adapter by itself and without BizTalk as a client or service. Called directly via WCF service reference If your service resides on a machine where the WCF SQL Server Adapter (and thus, the sqlBinding) is installed, then you may actually add a reference directly to the adapter endpoint. I have a command-line application, which serves as my service client. If we right-click this application, and have the WCF LOB Adapter SDK installed, then Add Adapter Service Reference appears as an option. Choosing this option opens our now-beloved wizard for browsing adapter metadata. As before, we add the necessary connection string details and browse the BatchMaster table and opt for the Select operation. Unlike the version of this wizard that opens for BizTalk Server projects, notice the Advanced options button at the bottom. This button opens a property window that lets us select a variety of options such as asynchronous messaging support and suppression of an accompanying configuration file. After the wizard is closed, we end up with a new endpoint and binding in our existing configuration file, and a .NET class containing the data and service contracts necessary to consume the service. We should now call this service as if we were calling any typical WCF service. Because the auto-generated namespace for the data type definition is a bit long, I first added an alias to that namespace. Next, I have a routine, which builds up the query message, executes the service, and prints a subset of the response. using DirectReference = schemas.microsoft.com.Sql._2008._05.Types.Tables.dbo; … private static void CallReferencedSqlAdapterService() { Console.WriteLine("Calling referenced adapter service");TableOp_dbo_BatchMasterClient client = new TableOp_dbo_BatchMasterClient("SqlAdapterBinding_TableOp_dbo_BatchMaster"); try{string columnString = "*";string queryString = "WHERE BatchID = 1";DirectReference.BatchMaster[] batchResult =client.Select(columnString, queryString);Console.WriteLine("Batch results ...");Console.WriteLine("Batch ID: " + batchResult[0].BatchID.ToString());Console.WriteLine("Product: " + batchResult[0].ProductName);Console.WriteLine("Manufacturing Stage: " + batchResult[0].ManufStage);client.Close(); Console.ReadLine(); } catch (System.ServiceModel.CommunicationException){client.Abort(); } catch (System.TimeoutException) { client.Abort(); } catch (System.Exception) { client.Abort(); throw; } } Once this quick block of code is executed, I can confirm that my database is accessed and my expected result set returned.

If you’re a regular blog reader then it’s likely that you’ve encountered the Recent Visitors widget form (http://mybloglog.com). This widget displays the profile like name, picture and sites authored by members of Mybloglog who have recently visited your blog. In the Mybloglog widget, when you move the mouse cursor to the member’s picture, you’ll see a popup displaying a brief description of that member. A glance at MyBlogLog widget The above image is of a MyBlogLog widget. As you can see in the right part of the widget, there is a list of the recent visitors to the blog from members of MyBlogLog. You may also have noticed that in the left part of the widget is a popup showing the details and an image of the visitor. This popup is displayed when the mouse is moved over the image on the widget. Now, let’s look at the code which we got from MyBlogLog to display the above widget. <script src="http://pub.mybloglog.com/comm3.php?mblID=2007121300465126&r= widget&is=small&o=l&ro=5&cs=black&ww=220&wc=multiple"></script> In the above script element, the language and type attributes are not specified. Although they are optional attributes in HTML - you must specify a value in the type attribute to make the above syntax valid in an XHTML web page. If you closely looked at the src attribute of the script element, you can see that the source page of the script is a .php file. You can use the JavaScript code with any file extension like .php , .asp, and so on , but whenever you use such a file in src attribute please note that the final output code of the file (after being parsed by server) should be a valid JavaScript code. Creating pop-up image widget This pop-up image widget is somewhat similar to MyBlogLog widget but it is a simplified version of that widget. This is a very simple widget with uses JavaScript, PHP and CSS. Here you’ll see four images in the widget and a pop-up image (corresponding to the chosen image) will be displayed when you move the mouse over it. After getting the core concept, you can extend the functionality to make this look fancier. Writing Code for Pop-up Image Widget As I’ve already discussed, this widget is going to contain PHP code, JavaScript and a little bit of CSS as well. For this, you need to write the code in a PHP file with the .php extension. First of all, declare the variables for storing the current mouse position and string variables for storing the string of the widget. var widget_posx=0;var widget_posy=0;var widget_html_css=''; The widget_posx variable is to hold the x co-ordinate values of the mouse position on the screen, whereas, the widget_posy variable will store the y co-ordinate. The widget_html_css variable stores the HTML and CSS elements which will be used later in the code. The (0,0) co-ordinate of the output devices like monitor is located at the top left position. So the mouse position 10,10 will be somewhere near the top left corner of monitor. After declaring the variables, let’s define an event handler to track the mouse position on the web page. document.onmousemove=captureMouse; As you can see above, we’ve called a function captureMouse() When the mouse is moved anywhere on the document (web page), the event handler which is the function captureMouse() is called on the onmousemove event. The Document object represents the entire HTML document and can be used to access and capture the events of all elements on a page. Each time a user moves the mouse one pixel, a mousemove event occurs. It engages system resources to process all mousemove events, hence, use this event carefully! Now, let’s look at the code of the captureMouse() function. function captureMouse(event){ if (!event){var event = window.event;}if (event.pageX || event.pageY) { widget_posx = event.pageX; widget_posy = event.pageY; } else if (event.clientX || event.clientY) { widget_posx = event.clientX; widget_posy = event.clientY; } } As you can see in the above function, the event variable is passed as a function parameter. This event variable is the JavaScript’s Event object. The Event object keeps track of various events that occur on the page, such as the user moving the mouse or clicking on the link, and allows you to react to them by writing code which is relevant to the event. if (!event){var event = window.event;} In the above code, the first line of the event handler ensures that if the browser doesn’t pass the event information to the above function, then we would obtain it from any explicit event registration of the window object. We can track different activity in the document by the event object with the help of its various defined properties. For example, if eventObj is the event object and we’ve to track whether the ctrl key is pressed (or not) - we can use the following code in JavaScript: eventObj.ctrlKey If we’ve assigned the x, y-position of mouse in the page using the pageX and pageY properties, we can also get the same mouse position of the mouse cursor using clientX and clientY property. Most browsers provide both pageX/pageY and clientX/clientY. Internet Explorer is the only current browser that provides clientX/clientY, but not pageX/pageY. To provide cross-browser support, we’ve used both pageX/pageY and clientX/clientY to get the mouse co-ordinates in the document, and assigned them to the widget_posx and widget_posy variables accordingly. Now, let’s look at widget_html_css variable, where we’re going to store the string which is going to be displayed in the widget. widget_html_css+='<style type="text/css">';widget_html_css+='.widgetImageCss';widget_html_css+='{ margin:2px;border:1px solid #CCCCCC;cursor:pointer}';widget_html_css+='</style>'; As you can see in the string of the above variable, we’ve added the style for the HTML element with the class name widgetImageCss within the style element. When applied, this class in the HTML adds a 2 pixel margins ‘brown color border’ to the element. Furthermore, the mouse cursor will be converted into pointer (a hand) which is defined with the cursor attribute in CSS. widget_html_css+='<div id="widget_popup"style="position:absolute;z-index:10; display:none">&nbsp;</div>'; Using the above code, we’re adding a division element with id widget_popup to the DOM. We’ve also added style to this element using inline styling. The position attribute of this element is set to absolute so that this element can move freely without disturbing the layout of the document. The z-index property is used for stacking the order of the element and in the above element it is set 10 so that this element will be displayed above all the other elements of the document. Finally, the display property is set to none for hiding the element at first. Afterwards, this element will be displayed with the pop-up image using JavaScript in the document. Elements can have negative stack orders i.e. you can set the z-index to -1 for an element. This will display it underneath the other elements on the page. Z-index only works on elements that have been positioned using CSS (such as position:absolute). Now, the PHP part of the codes comes in. We’ve used PHP to add the images to the widget_html_css string variables of JavaScript. We’ve used PHP in this part rather than using JavaScript for making this application flexible. JavaScript is a client side scripting language and can’t access the database or do any kind of server activity. Using PHP, you can extract and display the images from the database which might be the integral part of your desired widget.

The following screenshot describes a simple web application, which has a page for the new user registration. The user has to provide the necessary field details. After entering the details, the user will click on the Register button provided in the web page to submit all the details so that it gets registered to the site. To confirm this to the user, the system will send a notification with a welcoming email to the registered user. The mail is sent to the email address provided by the user. In the application shown in the above screenshot, the entire registration process cannot be automated for testing. For example, the email verification and checking the confirmation email sent by the system will not be automated as the user has to go manually and check the email. This part of the manual testing process will be explained in detail in this article. Manual tests Manual testing, as described earlier, is the simplest type of testing carried out by the testers without any automation tool. This test may contain a single or multiple tests inside. Manual test type is the best choice to be selected when the test is too difficult or complex to automate, or if the budget allotted for the application is not sufficient for automation. Visual Studio 2008 supports two types of manual tests file types. One as text file and the other as Microsoft Word. Manual test using text format This format helps us to create the test in the text format within Visual Studio IDE. The predefined template is available in Visual Studio for authoring this test. This template provides the structure for creating the tests. This format has the extension of .mtx. Visual Studio servers act as an editor for this test format. For creating this test in Visual Studio, either create a new test project and then add the test or select the menu option Test | New Test... and then choose the option to add the test to a new project. Now create the test using the menu option and select Manual Test (Text Format) from the available list as shown in the screenshot below. You can see the list Add to Test Project drop–down, which lists the different options to add the test to a test project. If you have not yet created the test project and selected the option to create the test, the drop-down option selected will create a new test project for the test to be added. If you have a test project already created, then we can also see that project in the list to get this new test added to the project. We can choose any option as per our need. For this sample, let us create a new test project in C#. So the first option from the drop-down of Add to Test Project would be selected in this case. After selecting the option, provide the name for the new test project the system will ask for. Let us name it TestingAppTest project. Now you can see the project getting created under the solution and the test template is also added to the test project as shown next. The template contains the detailed information for each section. This will help the tester or whoever is writing the test case to write the steps required for this test. Now update the test case template created above with the test steps required for checking the email confirmation message after the registration process. The test document also contains the title for the test, description, and the revision history for the changes made to the test case. Before executing the test and looking into the details of the run and the properties of the test, we will create the same test using Microsoft Word format as described in the next section. Manual test using Microsoft Word format This is similar to the manual test that was created using text format, except that the file type is Microsoft Word with extension .mht. While creating the manual test choose the template Manual Test (Word format) instead of the Manual Test (Text Format) as explained in the previous section. This option is available only if Microsoft Word is installed in the system. This will launch the Word template using the MS Word installed (version 2003 or later) in the system for writing the test details as shown in the following screenshot. The Word format helps us to have richer formatting capabilities with different fonts, colors, and styles for the text with graphic images and tables embedded for the test. This document not only provides the template but also the help information for each and every section so that the tester can easily understand the sections and write the test cases. This help information is provided in both the Word and Text format of the manual tests. In the test document seen in previous screenshot, we can fill the Test Details, Test Target, Test Steps, and Revision History similar to the one we did for the text format. The completed test case test document will look like this: Save the test details and close the document. Now we have both formats of manual tests in the project. Open the Test View window or the Test List Editor window to see the list of tests we have in the project. It should list two manual tests with their names and the project to which the tests are associated with. The tests shown in the Test View window looks like the one shown here: The same tests list shown by the Test List Editor would look like the one shown below. The additional properties like test list name, the project name the test belongs to, is also shown in the list editor. There are options for each test either to run or get added to any particular list. Manual tests also have other properties, which we can make use of during testing. These properties can be seen in the Properties window, which can be opened by choosing the manual test either in the Test View or in the Test List Editor windows by right-clicking the test and selecting the Properties option. The same window can also be opened by choosing the menu option View | Properties window. Both formats of manual testing have the same set of properties. Some of these properties are editable while some are read-only, which will be set by the application based on the test type. Some properties are directly related to TFS. The VSTFS is the integrated collaboration server, which combines team portal, work item tracking, build management, process guidance, and version control into a unified server.

I will build a prototype for a hotel reservation system outlining the way Software Configuration Management makes the job easier. Don't worry if you are not fully familiar with the technologies used. The purpose of this application is purely for reference, so you can sit back and relax. At this point I will use my time machine and get a screenshot for the final application so you can see how it will look like. Or, I can insert the screenshot after it finished. I think the first way seems more reasonable. This is what the public reservation site looks like: If you like it, you can download the application from the book's website: http://orbitalhotel.alexandruserban.com. Now let's get back to our time and start the development lifecycle on the Orbital Hotel product. The first phase is the specifications phase. Specifications—Project Architecture In order to build a software system, we need a list of requirements. What is the purpose of the system? What are the actions performed by the system and against the system? Who will use the system and how? The answers to these questions will let us identify the main parts of the system and the way these parts work together. System Requirements Let's take a look at the Orbital Hotel's reservation system's requirements. The purpose of the reservation system is to allow guests to make room reservations. There are several room types each having a number, occupancy, price, availability, description, and image. The reservations can be made by using the hotel's internet website, through the websites of travel agencies (third parties), or by making phone calls to the hotel's client service. Reservations can be also made by internal client service staff who receive phone calls from guests. When guests use the hotel's website, they will create a user with a username and password and input their personal details such as first name, last name, address, city, zip code, state, country, phone, email address, and card number. Then they will choose a room and complete the reservation details such as arrival date, the number of nights they will be staying and the number of adults, teenagers, children, and pets. They will also be able to cancel their reservation. When making a reservation over the phone, a guest will provide the same personal information and reservation details to the hotel's client-service staff. The staff will create a reservation for the guest using an internal application. The staff members will also authenticate using a username and password. Travel agencies and other third parties must also be able to make hotel reservations. Taking a big picture about the type of system we are going to build, what we need is an application design that will be as flexible as possible. It should provide us with a variety of options like reservations through phone calls, personal or third-party websites, smart devices like PDAs or cell phones, and so on. This is where we gather the specifications and plan the system architecture. In this phase we have to consider as many aspects as we can, based on our requirements and specifications. So, let's see what the main existing application architectures are, and see what application architecture fits our requirements. Application Architectures The computer and computer programming history is a very short one in comparison with that of other industries. Although it is short, it has evolved and continues to evolve very rapidly, changing the way we live. Taking into account the architectures used at the beginning of computer programming, we can see an evolution from the single, powerful, fault-tolerant, expensive super mainframe computer applications, towards multiple, distributed, less expensive smaller machine applications, the personal computers. During this evolution, three main application architectures can be identified: Compact application architecture Component application architecture Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) We are going to take a brief look at these application architectures and outline their characteristics. Compact Application Architecture During application development for the single mainframe, there was no clear separation between application layers and no reusable components were used. All the data access, business logic, and user interface-specific code were contained in a single executable program. This traditional compact architecture was used because the mainframe computers had specific proprietary programming languages and formats for accessing and manipulating the data. All the data access-specific procedures as well as the business logic and business rules code are written in this programming language. At the surface, a user interface is presented to the user for data visualisation and manipulation. This application architecture works for applications that do not need data input from multiple sources and can be easily developed by a single programmer. However, this approach has several major disadvantages when it comes to building large-scale systems: Application components cannot be reused in other applications because they are tightly coupled and dependent on one another. Tight coupling means that in order for a piece of code to use another piece of code, it must have intimate knowledge about its implementation details. Being tightly coupled, a change to one component can affect the functionality of another, making debugging and maintenance a difficult task. The application is actually a black box; no one, except the main developer, knows what it is in there. Applying security is another problem because the user interface cannot be separated from the business logic components using security-specific mechanisms like authentication and authorization. Application integration is affected because the code is platform dependent. Integration between two such applications requires special and specific coding and can be difficult to maintain. Scalability issues are considered when the system grows and need to be scaled across several machines. Using this application architecture, scalability is not possible as you can't separate different application parts across different physical boundaries because of the tight coupling. To address the issues with the compact application architecture, the component-based application architecture was developed. Component Application Architecture In the component application architecture, the application's functionality is defined using components. A component is like a black box, a software unit that encapsulates data and code and provides at the surface a set of well-defined interfaces used by other components. Since a component only needs to support a well-defined set of interfaces, it can change the inner implementation details without affecting other components that use its external interfaces. Components that export the same interfaces can be interchanged, allowing them to be reused and tight coupling to be eliminated. This makes them loosely coupled because they don't need to know internal implementation details of one another. This separation of application functionality using components allows the distribution of development tasks across several developers and makes the overall application more maintainable and scaleable. In the Windows environment, the most used component application architecture is the Component Object Model (COM). Typically, components are grouped into logical layers. For example, an application uses the data access layer to access the different data sources, the business logic layer to process the data according to the business rules, and the presentation layer also known as the user interface layer to present the data to end users. Using well-defined application layers allows for a modular design, component decoupling, and therefore the possibility for component reuse. Data Access Layer This architecture forms a chain of layers that communicate with one another. The base is the data access layer, which is responsible for querying, retrieving, and updating the data from and to different data sources while providing a uniform data view to the layers above. Business Layer Above the data access layer is the business logic layer. The business logic layer uses the uniform data provided by the data access layer and processes it according to the business rules it contains. The business logic layer doesn't need to know from what source and how the data was obtained. Its purpose is only data manipulation and processing. Presentation Layer At the top of the chain is the presentation layer or the user interface layer. Its purpose is to present the data processed by the business logic layer to end users and to receive input and commands from these end users. The presentation layer will propagate these commands down the chain to the business layer for processing. Characteristics The component application architecture solves many software problems and it has been used extensively in the past. But because software evolves continuously, new requirements introduce new challenges. Let's suppose we have several applications on different platforms, each incorporating its presentation layer, business logic layer, and data access layer. We want to integrate them into a bigger distributed system, a system that spans across several heterogeneous environments. At some point, one application will need to access the data existing in another application. While components can work well in a homogenous environment on the same platform, for example COM in the Windows environment, problems appear in components working across several platforms. For example, it is very difficult for a COM component to be used from a Java application or vice-versa, mainly because they don't speak the same language. Integration between two or more applications running on different platforms would require a middle component-dependent intercommunication layer that is expensive, difficult to build, and reintroduces tight coupling between systems, which is what we tried to avoid in the first place. Avoiding building this intercommunication layer would require that the data exchange between these applications be done by a person who will read the necessary data from the source application and write it into the target application. We need to integrate these systems, and maintain the loose coupling between them. What we need to do, is make these components understand each other, making them to speak the same language. This is where the concept of services and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) comes into play. Service-Oriented Architecture SOA describes an information technology architecture that enables distributed computing environments with many different types of computing platforms and applications. To enable distributed computing environments, SOA defines the concept of services. A service is a well-defined, self-contained unit of functionality, independent of the state of other services. Let's see how services can be used to create distributed applications, integrate component-based applications, and make them communicate with each other. We keep our data access layer and business logic layer as they are, but we completely decouple the presentation layer so we can change it later without affecting the other layers. In order to expose the functionality of the business logic layer, we wrap it in a service interface. The service interface wraps the business logic layer components offering a point of access for any process that needs to access the business logic, whose functionality has now become a service. Service-oriented architecture is basically a collection of services that communicate with each other. The communication can involve either simple data passing or it can involve two or more services coordinating some activity. Whatever the required functionality may be, we have now separated the functionality of applications into specific units, the services that we use to construct flexible, distributed applications. Typically services reside on different machines. They are exposed to the outside world by service interfaces. A service provider provides its functionality using the service interfaces that are used or consumed by the service consumers. A service consumer sends a service request to a service interface and receives a service response. The following figure represents a typical service consumer-service provider request. A service can be a service provider and a service consumer at the same time as it can consume other services. They communicate using a communication medium like a local area network for internal services or the Internet for external services. This communication medium is called a service bus. We saw that services don't have a presentation layer as we've decoupled the presentation layer from the rest. This presents an advantage because we can now use any platform able to understand and consume the service to build a presentation layer. The service interface has to provide a standard and open way of communication, a common language that both service providers and service consumers can understand, regardless of the machine type they are deployed on, their physical location, and the language in which they are written. XML Web Services In today's world, the communication standard used to connect services is achieved using web services. Web services are small, reusable applications that help computers with many different operating system platforms work together by exchanging messages. Web services are based on industry protocols that include XML (Extensible Markup Language), SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), and WSDL (Web Services Description Language). These protocols help computers work together across platforms and programming languages enabling data exchange between otherwise unconnected sources: Client-to-Client: Devices, also called smart clients, can host and consume XML web services, allowing data sharing anywhere, anytime. Client-to-Server: A server application can share data with desktop or mobile devices using XML web services over the Internet. Server-to-Server: Independent server applications can use XML web services as a common interface to share and exchange data. Service-to-Service: Systems that work together to deliver complex data processing can be created using XML web services. The following figure shows an example of services exposed using web services, which deliver their functionality to a wide variety of platforms and applications. Service-oriented architecture provides us with the maximum flexibility in building applications. Individual services define specific application functions and interact with one another to provide the entire business process functionality. Encapsulation: Just as an object encapsulates its internal implementation details inside while providing public methods to external objects, services encapsulate their internal complexity and implementation from the service consumers who don't have to know the internal details. Mobility: As services are independent and encapsulated, they can be deployed in any location. Since they are using the same standard communication language, they are accessed in the same way irrespective of their physical location or implementation details. Parallel development: A service-oriented application is built using several service layers and clients. These application components can be built in parallel by developers specialized in specific layer functionality, speeding up the development process. Platform independence: Service providers and service consumers can be written in any language and deployed on any platform, as long as they can speak the standard communication language. Security: More security can be added to a service-oriented application at the service interface layer. Different application components require different security levels. The security can be enforced by using firewalls configured to allow access only to the required service providers only by the required service consumers. In addition, by using Web Service Enhancements (WSE), authentication, authorization, and encryption can be easily added. Reusability: Once a service is constructed and deployed, it can be used by any other service consumer without problems related to platform integration and interoperability. Choosing an Application Architecture Now that we have seen the existing application architectures, we must choose one that meets our project requirements. As you may have guessed by this point, the best application architecture we can use for our project is a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). The SOA allows us to build a distributed system, a system that has great flexibility and interoperability with other systems on other platforms. This will allow us to build the business logic functions and expose them as services that will be used by higher functionality layers. Choosing an Application Platform After choosing our application architecture, we must choose a platform capable of building and supporting it. For the purpose of our system we will choose the Microsoft .NET Framework platform and build the system using Microsoft Visual Studio.NET 2005 and Microsoft SQL Server as the back-end database for storing the data. Microsoft .NET Framework From a Service-Oriented Architecture point of view, the .NET Framework is the Microsoft strategy for connecting systems, information, and devices through software such as web services. .NET technology provides the capability to quickly build, deploy, manage, and use connected, security-enhanced solutions through the use of web services. Intrinsically, the .NET Framework is an environment for development and execution that allows different programming languages and libraries to work together to create Windows-based applications that are easier to build, manage, deploy, and integrate with other networked systems. The .NET core components are: The Common Language Runtime (CLR): A language-neutral development and execution environment that provides a consistent model and services to manage application execution that includes: Support for different programming languages: A variety of over 20 programming languages that target the CLR, such as C#, VB.NET, and J#, can be used to develop applications. Support for libraries developed in different languages: Libraries developed in different languages integrate seamlessly, making application development faster and easier. Support for different platforms: .NET applications are not tied to a single platform and can be executed on any platform that supports the CLR. Enhanced security: The .NET Code Access Security model provides a managed environment for application execution and security. Automatic resource management: The CLR automatically handles process, memory, and thread management, enabling developers to focus on the core business logic code.   The Framework Class Libraries (FCL): An object-oriented library of classes that extends a wide range of functionality including: Support for basic operations: Input/output and string management, standard network protocols, and network standards such as TCP/IP, XML, SOAP, and HTTP are supported natively to allow basic operations and system connections. Support for data access and data manipulation: The FCL includes a range of data access and data manipulation classes forming the ADO.NET technology that natively supports XML and data environments such as SQL Server and Oracle. Support for desktop applications: Rich desktop and mobile client applications can be easily created using the Windows Forms technology. Support for web applications: Thin web clients, websites, and web services can be created using web forms and XML web services technologies that form ASP.NET.   In the planning phase we've gathered the project requirements and specifications and we've also chosen an application architecture. The next phase is the design phase. Designing the System In the design phase, we will create an application design based on the application architecture, project requirements, and specifications. Gathering all the information needed to design the system is a difficult task, but the most important step is to start writing down the first idea. System Structure The system will be composed from the following main component categories: Core components (Data Access Layer, Business Logic Layer) forming the middle-tier component layers. Web service components (XML Web service) forming the Service Interface layer. Website components (ASP.NET website) forming the front-end WebReservation application, a web presentation layer. Windows Application components (Windows Forms Application) forming the WinReservation application, a Windows presentation layer. The following figure illustrates the overall system structure, outlining each system component: As we saw earlier, one major advantage of a service-oriented application is the decoupling of the presentation layer from the business logic layer. This allows for the business logic layer being exposed as a web service to be used by other third parties to integrate its functionality into their business process. Database Structure The back-end database is hosted by a Microsoft SQL Server system. According to the project specifications the internal database structure will be composed of the following database tables: User (Contains the user accounts) Guest (Contains the personal details of the guests) Room (Contains the details of each of the hotel's rooms) Reservation (Contains the details of the reservation made by each user) The following figure illustrates these tables and the relations between them. The bold fields are mandatory (not NULL). The User table contains the following rows:    

Base Appliance Image We will use an Ubuntu Feisty domain image as the base image for creating these appliances. This image should be made as sparse and small as possible, and free of any cruft. A completely stripped down version of Linux with only the bare necessities would be a great start. In this case, we will not need any graphical desktop environments, so we can completely eliminate software packages like the X11 and any window manager like Gnome or KDE. Once we have a base image, we can back it up and then start using it for creating Xen appliances. In this article we will use an Ubuntu Feisty domain as the base image. Once this domain image is ready we are going to update it and clean it up a little bit so it can be our base. Edit the sources list for apt and add in other repositories that we will need to get software packages we will need when creating these appliances. Update your list of software. This will connect to the apt repositories and get the latest list of packages. We will do the actual update in the next step. Upgrade the distribution to ensure that you have the latest versions of all the packages. Automatically clean the image so all unused packages are removed. This will ensure that the image stays free of cruft.   Now we have the base appliance image ready, we will use it to create some Xen appliances. You can make a backup of the original base image and every time you create an appliance you can use a copy as the starting point or template. The images are nothing but domU images, which are customized for running only specific applications. You start them up and run them like ay other Xen guest domains. MySQL Database Server MySQL is one of the most popular open-source databases in the world. It is a key component of the LAMP architecture – (Linux Apache MySQL and PHP). It is also very easy to get started with MySQL and is one of the key factors driving its adoption across the enterprise. In this section we will create a Xen appliance that will run a MySQL database server and also provide the ability to automatically backup the database on a given schedule. Time for Action – Create our first Xen appliance We will use our base Ubuntu Feisty domain image, and add MySQL and other needed software to it. Please ensure that you have updated your base image to the latest versions of the repositories and software packages before creating this appliance. Install mysql-server using apt. Once it is installed, Ubuntu will automatically start the database server. So before we make our other changes, stop MySQL. Edit the /etc/mysql/my.cnf and comment out the line for the bind-address parameter. This will ensure that MySQL will accept connections from external machines and not just the localhost. Start a mysql console session to test that everything is installed and working correctly. Next we will install the utility for doing the automated backups. In order to do that we will first need to install the wget utility for transferring files. This is not a part of the base Ubuntu Feisty installation. Download the automysqlbackup script from the website. Copy this script to wherever you like, maybe /opt. Create a link to this location so it’s easy to do future updates. # cp automysqlbackup.sh.2.5 /opt# ln -s automysqlbackup.sh.2.5 automysqlbackup.sh Edit the script and modify the parameters at the top of the script to match your environment. Here are the changes to be made in our case. # Username to access the MySQL server e.g. dbuserUSERNAME=pchaganti# Username to access the MySQL server e.g. passwordPASSWORD=password# Host name (or IP address) of MySQL server e.g localhostDBHOST=localhost# List of DBNAMES for Daily/Weekly Backup e.g. "DB1 DB2 DB3"DBNAMES="all"# Backup directory location e.g /backupsBACKUPDIR="/var/backup/mysql"# Mail setupMAILCONTENT="quiet" Schedule this backup script to be run daily by creating a crontab entry for it, in the following format. 45 5 * * * root  /opt/automysqlbackup.sh >/dev/null 2>&1 Now we have a MySQL database server with automatic daily backups as a nice reusable Xen appliance. What just happened? We created our first Xen appliance! It is running the open-source MySQL database server along with an automated backup of the database as per the given schedule. This image is essentially a domU image and it can be uploaded along with its configuration file to a repository somewhere, and can be used by anyone in the enterprise or elsewhere with their Xen server. You can either start up the domain manually as and when you need it or set it up to boot automatically when your xend server starts. Ruby on Rails Appliance Ruby on Rails is one of the hottest web development frameworks around. It is simple to use and you can use all the expressive power of the Ruby language. It provides a great feature set and has really put the Ruby language on the map. Ruby on Rails is gaining rapid adoption across the IT landscape and for a wide variety of web applications. In this section, we are going to create a Rails appliance that contains Ruby, Rails, and the Mongrel cluster for serving the Rails application and nginx web server for the static content. This appliance gives you a great starting point for your explorations into the world of Ruby on Rails and can be an excellent learning resource. Time for Action – Rails on Xen We will use our base Ubuntu Feisty domain image and add Rails and other needed software to it. Please ensure that you have updated your base image to the latest versions of the repositories and software packages before creating this appliance. Install the packages required for compiling software on an Ubuntu system. This is required as we will be compiling some native extensions. Once the image is done, you can always remove this package if you want to save space. Install Ruby and other packages that are needed for it. Download the RubyGems package from RubyForge. We will use this to install any Ruby libraries or packages that we will need, including Rails. Now install Rails. The first time when you run this command on a clean Ubuntu Feisty system, you will get the following error. Ignore this error and just run the command once again and it will work fine. This will install Rails and all of its dependencies. Create a new Rails application. This will create everything needed in a directory named xenbook. $ rails xenbook  Change into the directory of the application that we created in the previous step and start the server up. This will start Ruby’s built-in web server, webrick by default. Launch a web browser and navigate to the web page for our xenbook application. We have everything working for a simple Rails install. However, we are using webrick, which is a bit slow. So let’s install the Mongrel server and use it with Rails. We will actually install mongrel_cluster that will let us use a cluster of Mongrel processes for serving up our Rails application.

This section uses the space you have already created as a part of your Intranet sample application. As a part of sample application, you will manage content in the Intranet | Marketing Communications space. As you have secured this space earlier, only the administrator (admin) and users belonging to the Marketing group (Peter Marketing and Harish Marketing) can add content in this space. You can log in as Peter Marketing to manage content in this space. Create Content The web client provides two different interfaces for adding content: one to create inline editable content such as HTML, Text, and XML and the other to add binary content such Microsoft office files and scanned images. You need to have the Administrator, Contributor, Collaborator, Coordinator role on a space to create content within that space. Creating Text Documents—HTML, Text, and XML To create an HTML file in a space, follow the steps given below: Ensure that you are in the Intranet | Marketing Communications | Switch to open source ECM | 02_Drafts space. On the header, click Create | Create Content. The first pane of the Create Content wizard appears as shown in the screenshot on the next page. In this wizard, and in any Alfresco wizard, you can track your progress through the wizard from the list of steps at the left of the pane. Provide the name of the HTML file, select HTML as Content Type, and click the Next button. The Enter Content pane of the wizard appears as shown in the next screenshot. Note that Enter Content is now highlighted in the list of steps at the left of the pane. You can see that there is a comprehensive set of tools to help you format your HTML document. Enter some text, using some of the formatting features. If you know HTML, you can also use an HTML editor by clicking on the HTML icon given. The HTML source editor is displayed. Once you have updated the HTML content, click on the update button to return to the Enter Content pane in the wizard, with the contents updated. After the content is entered and edited in the Enter Content pane, click Finish. You will see the Modify Content Properties screen to update metadata associated with the content as shown in the screenshot below: If you are satisfied with the properties, click the OK button to return to the 02_Drafts space, with your newly created file inserted. You can launch the newly created HTML file by clicking on it. Your browser launches most of the common files such as HTML, text, and PDF. If the browser could not recognize the file, you will be prompted with the Windows dialog box containing the list of applications, from which you must choose an application. This is the normal behavior if you try to launch a file on any Internet page. Uploading Binary Files—Word, PDF, Flash, Image, and Media Using the web client, you can upload content from your hard drive. Choose a file from your hard disk that is not an HTML or text file. I chose Alfresco_CIGNEX.doc from my hard disk for the sample application. Ensure that you are in the Intranet | Marketing Communications | Switch to open source ECM | 02_Drafts space. To upload a binary file in a space, follow the steps given below: In the space header, click the Add Content link. The Add Content dialog appears. To specify the file that you want to upload, click Browse. In the File Upload dialog box, browse to the file that you want to upload. Click Open. Alfresco inserts the full path name of the selected file in the Location text box. Click the Upload button to upload the file from your hard disk to the Alfresco repository. A message informs you that your upload was successful as shown in the following screenshot. Click OK to confirm. The Modify Content Properties dialog appears. Verify the pre-populated properties and add information in the text boxes. Click OK to save and return to the 02_Drafts space. The file that you uploaded appears in the Content Items pane. Alfresco extracts the file size from the properties of the disk file, and includes the value in the size row. Now that you have two files, you can edit them as you like. Edit Content Using the web client you can edit the files that you have added previously. Note that you need to have edit permissions on the content to edit them Inline Editing of HTML, Text, and XML HTML files and plain text files can be created and edited inline. Each file type is edited in its own WYSIWYG editor. If you have edit access to a file, you will notice a small pencil (edit) icon as shown in the screenshot below. Clicking on the pencil icon will open the file in its editor.

SOAP SOAP, formerly known as Simple Object Access Protocol (until the acronym was dropped in version 1.2), came around shortly after XML-RPC was released. It was created by a group of developers with backing from Microsoft. Interestingly, the creator of XML-RPC, David Winer, was also one of the primary contributors to SOAP. Winer released XML-RPC before SOAP, when it became apparent to him that though SOAP was still a way away from being completed, there was an immediate need for some sort of web service protocol. Like XML-RPC, SOAP is an XML-based web service protocol. SOAP, however, satisfies a lot of the shortcomings of XML-RPC: namely the lack of user-defined data types, better character set support, and rudimentary security. It is quite simply, a more powerful and flexible protocol than REST or XML-RPC. Unfortunately, sacrifices come with that power. SOAP is a much more complex and rigid protocol. For example, even though SOAP can stand alone, it is much more useful when you use another XML-based standard, called Web Services Descriptor Language (WSDL), in conjunction with it. Therefore, in order to be proficient with SOAP, you should also be proficient with WSDL. The most-levied criticism of SOAP is that it is overly complex. Indeed, SOAP is not simple. It is long and verbose. You need to know how namespaces work in XML. SOAP can rely heavily on other standards. This is true for most implementations of SOAP, including Microsoft Live Search, which we will be looking at. The most common external specifications used by a SOAP-based service is WSDL to describe its available services, and that, in turn, usually relies on XML Schema Data (XSD) to describe its data types. In order to "know" SOAP, it would be extremely useful to have some knowledge of WSDL and XSD. This will allow one to figure out how to use the majority of SOAP services. We are going to take a "need to know" approach when looking at SOAP. Microsoft Live Search's SOAP API uses WSDL and XSD, so we will take a look at SOAP with the other two in mind. We will limit our discussion on how to gather information about the web service that you, as a web service consumer, would need and how to write SOAP requests using PHP 5 against it. Even though this article will just introduce you to the core necessities of SOAP, there is a lot of information and detail. SOAP is very meticulous and you have to keep track of a fair amount of things. Do not be discouraged, take notes if you have to, and be patient. All three, SOAP, WSD, and XSD are maintained by the W3C. All three specifications are available for your perusal. The official SOAP specification is located at http://www.w3.org/TR/soap/. WSDL specification is located at http://www.w3.org/TR/wsdl. Finally, the recommended XSD specification can be found at http://www.w3.org/XML/Schema. Web Services Descriptor Language (WSDL) With XML Schema Data (XSD) Out of all the drawbacks of XML-RPC and REST, there is one that is prominent. Both of these protocols rely heavily on good documentation by the service provider in order to use them. Lacking this, you really do not know what operations are available to you, what parameters you need to pass in order to use them, and what you should expect to get back. Even worse, an XML-RPC or REST service may be poorly or inaccurately documented and give you inaccurate or unexpected results. SOAP addresses this by relying on another XML standard called WSDL to set the rules on which web service methods are available, how parameters should be passed, and what data type might be returned. A service's WSDL document, basically, is an XML version of the documentation. If a SOAP-based service is bound to a WSDL document, and most of them are, requests and responses must adhere to the rules set in the WSDL document, otherwise a fault will occur. WSDL is an acronym for a technical language. When referring to a specific web service's WSDL document, people commonly refer to the document as "the WSDL" even though that is grammatically incorrect. Being XML-based, this allows clients to automatically discover everything about the functionality of the web service. Human-readable documentation is technically not required for a SOAP service that uses a WSDL document, though it is still highly recommended. Let's take a look at the structure of a WSDL document and how we can use it to figure out what is available to us in a SOAP-based web service. Out of all three specifications that we're going to look at in relationship to SOAP, WSDL is the most ethereal. Both supporters and detractors often call writing WSDL documents a black art. As we go through this, I will stress the main points and just briefly note other uses or exceptions. Basic WSDL Structure Beginning with a root definitions element, WSDL documents follow this basic structure:     <definitions>        <types>        …        </types>        <message>        …        </message>        <portType>        …        </portType>        <binding>        …        </binding>    </definitions> As you can see, in addition to the definitions element, there are four main sections to a WSDL document: types, message, portType, and binding. Let's take a look at these in further detail. Google used to provide a SOAP service for their web search engine. However, this service is now deprecated, and no new developer API keys are given out. This is unfortunate because the service was simple enough to learn SOAP quickly, but complex enough to get a thorough exposure to SOAP. Luckily, the service itself is still working and the WSDL is still available. As we go through WSDL elements, we will look at the Google SOAP Search WSDL and Microsoft Live Search API WSDL documents for examples. These are available at http://api.google.com/GoogleSearch.wsdl and http://soap.search.msn.com/webservices.asmx?wsdl respectively. definitions Element This is the root element of a WSDL document. If the WSDL relies on other specifications, their namespace declarations would be made here. Let's take a look at Google's WSDL's definition tag:     <definitions name="GoogleSearch"        targetNamespace="urn:GoogleSearch"                                                > The more common ones you'll run across are xsd for schema namespace, wsdl for the WSDL framework itself, and soap and soapenc for SOAP bindings. As these namespaces refer to W3C standards, you will run across them regardless of the web service implementation. Note that some searches use an equally common prefix, xs, for XML Schema. tns is another common namespace. It means "this namespace" and is a convention used to refer to the WSDL itself. types Element In a WSDL document, data types used by requests and responses need to be explicitly declared and defined. The textbook answer that you'll find is that the types element is where this is done. In theory, this is true. In practice, this is mostly true. The types element is used only for special data types. To achieve platform neutrality, WSDL defaults to, and most implementations use, XSD to describe its data types. In XSD, many basic data types are already included and do not need to be declared. Common Built-in XSD Data Types Time Date Boolean String Base64Binary Float Double Integer Byte For a complete list, see the recommendation on XSD data types at http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-2/. If the web service utilizes nothing more than these built-in data types, there is no need to have special data types, and thus, types will be empty. So, the data types will just be referred to later, when we define the parameters. There are three occasions where data types would be defined here: If you want a special data type that is based on a built-in data type. Most commonly this is a built-in, whose value is restricted in some way. These are known as simple types. If the data type is an object, it is known as a complex type in XSD, and must be declared. An array, which can be described as a hybrid of the former two. Let's take a look at some examples of what we will encounter in the types element. Simple Type Sometimes, you need to restrict or refine a value of a built-in data type. For example, in a hospital's patient database, it would be ludicrous to have the length of a field called Age to be more than three digits. To add such a restriction in the SOAP world, you would have to define Age here in the types section as a new type. Simple types must be based on an existing built-in type. They cannot have children or properties like complex types. Generally, a simple type is defined with the simpleType element, the name as an attribute, followed by the restriction or definition. If the simple type is a restriction, the built-in data type that it is based on, is defined in the base attribute of the restriction element. For example, a restriction for an age can look like this:     <xsd:simpleType name="Age">        <xsd:restriction base="xsd:integer">            <xsd:totalDigits value="3" />        </xsd:restriction>    </xsd:simpleType> Children elements of restriction define what is acceptable for the value. totalDigits is used to restrict a value based on the character length. A table of common restrictions follows: Restriction Use Applicable In enumeration Specifies a list of acceptable values. All except boolean fractionDigits Defines the number of decimal places allowed. Integers length Defines the exact number of characters allowed. Strings and all binaries maxExclusive/ maxInclusive Defines the maximum value allowed. If Exclusive is used, value cannot be equal to the definition. If Inclusive, can be equal to, but not greater than, this definition. All numeric and dates minLength/ maxLength Defines the minimum and maximum number of characters or list items allowed. Strings and all binaries minExclusive/ minInclusive Defines the minimum value allowed. If Exclusive is used, value cannot be equal to the definition. If Inclusive, can be equal to, but not less than, this definition. All numeric and dates pattern A regular expression defining the allowed values. All totalDigits Defines the maximum number of digits allowed. Integers whiteSpace Defines how tabs, spaces, and line breaks are handled. Can be preserve (no changes), replace (tabs and line breaks are converted to spaces) or collapse (multiple spaces, tabs, and line breaks are converted to one space. Strings and all binaries A practical example of a restriction can be found in the MSN Search Web Service WSDL. Look at the section that defines SafeSearchOptions.     <xsd:simpleType name="SafeSearchOptions">        <xsd:restriction base="xsd:string">            <xsd:enumeration value="Moderate" />            <xsd:enumeration value="Strict" />            <xsd:enumeration value="Off" />    </xsd:restriction> </xsd:simpleType> In this example, the SafeSearchOptions data type is based on a string data type. Unlike a regular string, however, the value that SafeSearchOptions takes is restricted by the restriction element. In this case, the several enumeration elements that follow. SafeSearchOptions can only be what is given in this enumeration list. That is, SafeSearchOptions can only have a value of "Moderate", "Strict", or "Off". Restrictions are not the only reason to use a simple type. There can also be two other elements in place of restrictions. The first is a list. If an element is a list, it means that the value passed to it is a list of space-separated values. A list is defined with the list element followed by an attribute named itemType, which defines the allowed data type. For example, this example specifies an attribute named listOfValues, which comprises all integers.     <xsd:simpleType name="listOfValues">        <xsd:list itemType="xsd:integer" />    </xsd:simpleType> The second is a union. Unions are basically a combination of two or more restrictions. This gives you a greater ability to fine-tune the allowed value. Back to our age example, if our service was for a hospital's pediatrics ward that admits only those under 18 years old, we can restrict the value with a union.     <xsd:simpleType name="Age">        <xsd:union>            <xsd:simpleType>                <xsd:restriction base="decimal">                        <xsd:minInclusive value="0" />                </xsd:restriction>            </xsd:simpleType>            <xsd:simpleType>                <xsd:restriction base="decimal">                        <xsd:maxExclusive value="18" />                </xsd:restriction>            </xsd:simpleType>        </xsd:union>    </xsd:simpleType> Finally, it is important to note that while simple types are, especially in the case of WSDLs, used mainly in the definition of elements, they can be used anywhere that requires the definition of a number. For example, you may sometimes see an attribute being defined and a simple type structure being used to restrict the value. Complex Type Generically, a complex type is anything that can have multiple elements or attributes. This is opposed to a simple type, which can have only one element. A complex type is represented by the element complexType in the WSDL. The most common use for complex types is as a carrier for objects in SOAP transactions. In other words, to pass an object to a SOAP service, it needs to be serialized into an XSD complex type in the message. The purpose of a complexType element is to explicitly define what other data types make up the complex type. Let's take a look at a piece of Google's WSDL for an example:     <xsd:complexType name="ResultElement">        <xsd:all>            <xsd:element name="summary" type="xsd:string"/>            <xsd:element name="URL" type="xsd:string"/>            <xsd:element name="snippet" type="xsd:string"/>            <xsd:element name="title" type="xsd:string"/>            <xsd:element name="cachedSize" type="xsd:string"/>            <xsd:element name=                        "relatedInformationPresent" type="xsd:boolean"/>            <xsd:element name="hostName" type="xsd:string"/>            <xsd:element name=                        "directoryCategory" type="typens:DirectoryCategory"/>            <xsd:element name="directoryTitle" type="xsd:string"/>        </xsd:all>    </xsd:complexType> First thing to notice is how the xsd: namespace is used throughout types. This denotes that these elements and attributes are part of the XSD specification. In this example, a data type called ResultElement is defined. We don't exactly know what it is used for right now, but we know that it exists. An element tag denotes complex type's equivalent to an object property. The first property of it is summary, and the type attribute tells us that it is a string, as are most properties of ResultElement. One exception is relatedInformationPresent, which is a Boolean. Another exception is directoryCategory. This has a data type of DirectoryCategory. The namespace used in the type attribute is typens. This tells us that it is not an XSD data type. To find out what it is, we'll have to look for the namespace declaration that declared typens.

AJAX Debugging Overview Unfortunately, today’s tools for client-side debugging and tracing aren’t as evolved as their server-side counterparts. For example, things such as capturing ongoing communication traffic between the client and the server, or client-side debugging, aren’t usually supported by today’s IDEs (Integrated Development Environments) such as Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. The next version of Visual Studio (code-named Orcas at the time of writing) promises a lot of improvements in this area: Improved IntelliSense technology with support for JavaScript code, which provides coding hints based on specially-formatted comments in the code Breakpoints in inline JavaScript code These are only the most important new coming features; there are others as well. For more information we suggest that you browse and keep an eye on Scott Guthrie’s blog at http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/, the JScript blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/jscript/, Bertrand Le Roy’s blog at http://weblogs.asp.net/bleroy/. Until this new edition of Visual Studio is released, we can rely on third-party tools that can do a very good job at helping us develop our AJAX applications. You’ll find a number of tools for Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox for this purpose. Debugging and Tracing with Microsoft AJAX Library The common practices for debugging JavaScript code are: Putting alert messages throughout the code to get notified about the values of the variables Logging tracing messages in a <div> element While the first option is straightforward, the second option offers a centralized place for storing different messages and could be considered more appropriate. Nevertheless both options can come in quite handy depending on the circumstances. Microsoft AJAX Library offers the Sys.Debug object that has a series of methods that you can use for debugging and tracing. The diagram of this class is presented in figure below. The Debug class As we can easily see in the diagram, Sys.Debug offers the most common features that we can find also in other languages: assert(), trace(), traceDump(), fail(), and clearTrace(). assert(), trace(), and fail() automatically send the messages to the debugging console of the browser. To see the messages in IE you need to have the Web Development Helper, and for Firefox you need the Firebug plugin. Both of these tools are presented later in this article. Internally assert() calls fail() if the expression evaluates to false. fail() simply logs the message passed in by assert to the debugging console. trace() offers an interesting feature beside logging to the debugging console: it offers the possibility to log the trace message in a <textarea> element with the ID TraceConsole. If such an element is found, trace() will log this message in this element too. The clearTrace() function simply clears the TraceConsole element, if found. The traceDump() function traces all the information about an object including its properties. Internally this function uses the trace() function so that we can have the information logged in the browser’s debugging console, and in the TraceConsole element (if it exists). MicrosoftAjax.debug.js You might have wondered why the Microsoft AJAX Library comes with both release and debug version of the JavaScript file. The major features of the debug version of the library files are:  The script is nicely formatted. The names of variables are not obfuscated. The script contains code comments. Some of the functions have the optional summary data that will be used by Visual Studio “Orcas” for code auto-completion. The script outputs debugging-friendly information. Parameters are validated. Once the development stage is finished, you can switch your application to the release version of the script (MicrosoftAjax.js), which is smaller and doesn’t contain the debugging features presented above. Perhaps the most interesting features of the debug version are the last two: debugging-friendly information and parameter validation. Anonymous Functions vs. Pseudo-Named Functions We will explain these two concepts by taking a look at how different functions are defined in the debug and release version of the library. The debug version of the library contains: function Sys$_Debug$assert(condition, message, displayCaller) {   ...}Sys._Debug.prototype = {  assert: Sys$_Debug$assert,  ...} and: String.format = function String$format(format, args) {...} In the release version of the library we have: Sys._Debug.prototype = {  assert: function(c, a, b) {  ...} and: String.format = function() {...} In the release version, we have methods that are anonymous functions. This means that within a debugger stack trace the method name will read JScript anonymous function. This is not very useful for debugging purposes, is it? Call Stack showing anonymous functions However, the debug version of the library uses the dollar-syntax to provide alias names for our functions: String$format for String.format and Sys$Debug$assert for Sys.Debug.assert. When using the debug version of the file, the stack trace would look like: Call Stack showing named functions We can still notice some anonymous functions as they are the result of creating callback or delegate functions. The example shows two different ways of coding:  In the debug version, the function is declared outside the prototype and then referenced in the prototype declaration. In the release version, the declaration is done directly where the function is declared (outside or inside the prototype). Parameters Validation Another interesting feature that has not been documented in the Microsoft AJAX Library documentation is that of parameters validation. Type safety is one of the typical problems when it comes to using JavaScript. Although the dynamic type features are really useful, sometimes we might really want to make sure that a parameter or object is of a certain type. To check the data type of an object, you can try converting the object to the desired type, or using the methods defined by Type. Fortunately the Microsoft AJAX Library has a function that does the dirty work for us: Function._validateParams(). The class diagram in figure below shows the _validateParameter() and _validateParams() methods of the Function class. The Function class The Function._validateParams() function, even if it is declared as private (by convention, using the leading underscore), can be used by our scripts as it is used throughout the debug version of the Microsoft AJAX Library. Here’s an example of using this function: function Sys$_Debug$fail(message) {/// <param name="message" type="String" mayBeNull="true"></param>   var e = Function._validateParams(arguments,          [ {name: "message", type: String, mayBeNull: true} ]);   if (e) throw e; This shows how the parameter for the fail() function is validated as a String. We can also see the additional code comments inside the function, which are meant to be used by the IntelliSense feature in Visual Studio “Orcas” to check for the correctness of the parameter types. While the first parameter of _validateParams() represents an array of parameters to be checked, the second parameter is an array of JSON objects describing the validation rules for the array of parameters. Each JSON object contains a validation rule for a parameter. The JSON object is a dictionary of keys and values. The list of keys that can be used is described in the table that follows. Key Description name The name of the parameter type The allowed type for this parameter (ex: String, Array, Function, Sys.Component, etc.) mayBeNull Boolean value indicating whether this parameter can be passed as null or not domElement Boolean value indicating whether this parameter is a DOM element or not integer Boolean value indicating whether this parameter should have an integer value or not optional Boolean value indicating whether this parameter is optional or not parameterArray Boolean value indicating whether this parameter should be an Array or not elementType The allowed type for each element of an array (type must be Array) elementMayBeNull Boolean value indicating whether an array element could have null or not (type must be Array) elementDomElement Boolean value indicating whether each element of an array is a DOM element (type must be Array) elementInteger Boolean value indicating whether each element of an array should have an integer value (type must be Array) The function returns an error message if the parameters don’t validate and the error is typically thrown like this: if (e) throw e; This exception could be caught and the appropriate measures taken programmatically. If the exception is not caught, the error will pop up in the debugging console of the browser.

Without LINQ, we would have to go through the values one-by-one and then find the required details. However, using LINQ we can directly query collections and filter the required values without using any looping. LINQ provides powerful filtering, ordering, and grouping capabilities that requires minimum coding. For example, if we want to find out the types stored in an assembly and then filter the required details, we can use LINQ to query the assembly details using System.Reflection classes. The System.Reflection namespace contains types that retrieve information about assemblies, modules, members, parameters, and other entities as collections are managed code, by examining their metadata. Also, files under a directory are a collection of objects that can be queried using LINQ. We shall see some of the examples for querying some collections. Array of Integers The following example shows an integer array that contains a set of integers. We can apply the LINQ queries on the array to fetch the required values.     int[] integers = { 1, 6, 2, 27, 10, 33, 12, 8, 14, 5 };       IEnumerable<int> twoDigits =       from numbers in integers       where numbers >= 10       select numbers;       Console.WriteLine("Integers > 10:");       foreach (var number in twoDigits)       {          Console.WriteLine(number);       } The integers variable contains an array of integers with different values. The variable twoDigits, which is of type IEnumerable, holds the query. To get the actual result, the query has to be executed. The actual query execution happens when the query variable is iterated through the foreach loop by calling GetEnumerator() to enumerate the result. Any variable of type IEnumerable<T>, can be enumerated using the foreach construct. Types that support IEnumerable<T> or a derived interface such as the generic IQueryable<T>, are called queryable types. All collections such as list, dictionary and other classes are queryable. There are some non-generic IEnumerable collections like ArrayList that can also be queried using LINQ. For that, we have to explicitly declare the type of the range variable to the specific type of the objects in the collection, as it is explained in the examples later in this article. The twoDigits variable will hold the query to fetch the values that are greater than or equal to 10. This is used for fetching the numbers one-by-one from the array. The foreach loop will execute the query and then loop through the values retrieved from the integer array, and write it to the console. This is an easy way of getting the required values from the collection. If we want only the first four values from a collection, we can apply the Take() query operator on the collection object. Following is an example which takes the  first four integers from the collection. The four integers in the resultant collection are displayed using the foreach method.    IEnumerable<int> firstFourNumbers = integers.Take(4);   Console.WriteLine("First 4 numbers:");   foreach (var num in firstFourNumbers)   {      Console.WriteLine(num);   } The opposite of Take() operator is Skip() operator, which is used to skip the number of items in the collection and retrieve the rest. The following example skips the first four items in the list and retrieves the remaining.    IEnumerable<int> skipFirstFourNumbers = integers.Skip(4);   Console.WriteLine("Skip first 4 numbers:");   foreach (var num in skipFirstFourNumbers)   {      Console.WriteLine(num);   } This example shows the way to take or skip the specified number of items from the collection. So what if we want to skip or take the items until we find a match in the list? We have operators to get this. They are TakeWhile() and SkipWhile(). For example, the following code shows how to get the list of numbers from the integers collection until 50 is found. TakeWhile() uses an expression to include the elements in the collection as long as the condition is true and it ignores the other elements in the list. This expression represents the condition to test the elements in the collection for the match.    int[] integers = { 1, 9, 5, 3, 7, 2, 11, 23, 50, 41, 6, 8 };   IEnmerable<int> takeWhileNumber = integers.TakeWhile(num =>      num.CompareTo(50) != 0);   Console.WriteLine("Take while number equals 50");   foreach (int num in takeWhileNumber)      {         Console.WriteLine(num.ToString());      } Similarly, we can skip the items in the collection using SkipWhile(). It uses an expression to bypass the elements in the collection as long as the condition is true. This expression is used to evaluate the condition for each element in the list. The output of the expression is boolean. If the expression returns false, the remaining elements in the collections are returned and the expression will not be executed for the other elements. The first occurrence of the return value as false will stop the expression for the other elements and returns the remaining elements. These operators will provide better results if used against ordered lists as the expression is ignored for the other elements once the first match is found.    IEnumerable<int> skipWhileNumber = integers.SkipWhile(num =>      num.CompareTo(50) != 0);   Console.WriteLine("Skip while number equals 50");   foreach (int num in skipWhileNumber)   {      Console.WriteLine(num.ToString());   } Collection of Objects In this section we will see how we can query a custom built objects collection. Let us take the Icecream object, and build the collection, then we can query the collection. This Icecream class in the following code contains different properties such as Name, Ingredients, TotalFat, and Cholesterol.     public class Icecream    {        public string Name { get; set; }        public string Ingredients { get; set; }        public string TotalFat { get; set; }        public string Cholesterol { get; set; }        public string TotalCarbohydrates { get; set; }        public string Protein { get; set; }        public double Price { get; set; }     } Now build the Icecreams list collection using the class defined perviously.     List<Icecream> icecreamsList = new List<Icecream>        {            new Icecream {Name="Chocolate Fudge Icecream", Ingredients="cream,                milk, mono and diglycerides...", Cholesterol="50mg",                Protein="4g", TotalCarbohydrates="35g", TotalFat="20g",                Price=10.5        },        new Icecream {Name="Vanilla Icecream", Ingredients="vanilla extract,            guar gum, cream...", Cholesterol="65mg", Protein="4g",            TotalCarbohydrates="26g", TotalFat="16g", Price=9.80 },            new Icecream {Name="Banana Split Icecream", Ingredients="Banana, guar            gum, cream...", Cholesterol="58mg", Protein="6g",            TotalCarbohydrates="24g", TotalFat="13g", Price=7.5 }        }; We have icecreamsList collection which contains three objects with values of the Icecream type. Now let us say we have to retrieve all the ice-creams that cost less. We can use a looping method, where we have to look at the price value of each object in the list one-by-one and then retrieve the objects that have less value for the Price property. Using LINQ, we can avoid looping through all the objects and its properties to find the required ones. We can use LINQ queries to find this out easily. Following is a query that fetches the ice-creams with low prices from the collection. The query uses the where condition, to do this. This is similar to relational database queries. The query gets executed when the variable of type IEnumerable is enumerated when referred to in the foreach loop.     List<Icecream> Icecreams = CreateIcecreamsList();    IEnumerable<Icecream> IcecreamsWithLessPrice =    from ice in Icecreams    where ice.Price < 10    select ice;    Console.WriteLine("Ice Creams with price less than 10:");    foreach (Icecream ice in IcecreamsWithLessPrice)    {        Console.WriteLine("{0} is {1}", ice.Name, ice.Price);     } As we used List<Icecream> objects, we can also use ArrayList to hold the objects, and a LINQ query can be used to retrieve the specific objects from the collection according to our need. For example, following is the code to add the same Icecreams objects to the ArrayList, as we did in the previous example.     ArrayList arrListIcecreams = new ArrayList();    arrListIcecreams.Add( new Icecream {Name="Chocolate Fudge Icecream",        Ingredients="cream, milk, mono and diglycerides...",        Cholesterol="50mg", Protein="4g", TotalCarbohydrates="35g",        TotalFat="20g", Price=10.5 });    arrListIcecreams.Add( new Icecream {Name="Vanilla Icecream",        Ingredients="vanilla extract, guar gum, cream...",        Cholesterol="65mg", Protein="4g", TotalCarbohydrates="26g",        TotalFat="16g", Price=9.80 });    arrListIcecreams.Add( new Icecream {Name="Banana Split Icecream",        Ingredients="Banana, guar gum, cream...", Cholesterol="58mg",        Protein="6g", TotalCarbohydrates="24g", TotalFat="13g", Price=7.5    }); Following is the query to fetch low priced ice-creams from the list.     var queryIcecreanList = from Icecream icecream in arrListIcecreams    where icecream.Price < 10    select icecream; Use the foreach loop, shown as follows, to display the price of the objects retrieved using the above query.     foreach (Icecream ice in queryIcecreanList)    Console.WriteLine("Icecream Price : " + ice.Price);

You must obtain and install an additional download to enable Alfresco WCM functionality. The download includes a new Spring bean configuration file, a standalone Tomcat instance pre-configured with JARs, and server settings that allow a separate Tomcat instance (which is called the virtualization server) to run web applications stored in Alfresco WCM web folders. This capability is used when content managers "preview" an asset or a website. Just as in the core Alfresco server, you can either build the WCM distribution from source or obtain a binary distribution. Step-by-Step: Installing Alfresco WCM If you are building from source, the source code for Alfresco WCM is included with the source code for the rest of the product. Once the source code is checked out, all you have to do is run the distribute Ant task as follows: ant -f continuous.xml distribute After several minutes, the WCM distribution will be placed in the build|dist directory of your source code's root directory. Alternatively, if you are using binaries, download the binary distribution of the Alfresco WCM extension. Where you get it depends on whether you are running Labs or Enterprise. The Labs version is available for download from http://www.alfresco.com. The Enterprise version can be downloaded from the customer or partner site using the credentials provided by your Alfresco representative. Regardless of whether you chose source or binary, you should now have an Alfresco WCM archive. For example, the Labs edition for Linux is named alfresco-labs-wcm-3b.tar.gz. To complete the installation, follow these steps: Expand the archive into any directory that makes sense to you. For example, on my machine I use |usr|local|bin|alfresco-labs-3.0-wcm. Copy the wcm-bootstrap-context.xml file to the Alfresco server's extension directory ($TOMCAT_HOME|shared|classes|alfresco|extension). Edit the startup script (virtual_alf.sh) to ensure that the APPSERVER variable is pointing to the virtual-tomcat directory in the location to which you expanded the archive. Using the example from the previous step, the APPSERVER variable would be: APPSERVER=|usr|local|bin|alfresco-labs-3.0-wcm|virtual-tomcat Start the virtual server by running: |virtual_alf.sh start</i> Start the Alfresco server (or restart it if it was already running). You now have Alfresco with Alfresco WCM up and running. You'll test it out in the next section, but you can do a smoke test by logging in to the web client and confirming that you see the Web Projects folder under Company Home. Creating Web Projects A web project is a collection of assets, settings, and deployment targets that make up a website or a part of a website. Web projects are stored in web project folders, which are regular folders with a bunch of web project metadata. The number of web project folders you use to represent a site, or whether multiple sites are contained within a single web project folder is completely up to you. There is no "right way" that works for everybody. Permissions are one factor. The ability to set permissions stops at the website. Therefore, if you have multiple groups that maintain a site that are concerned with the ability of one to change the other's files, your only remedy is to split the site across web project folders. Web form and workflow sharing is another thing to think about. As you'll soon learn, workflows and web forms are defined globally, and then selectively chosen and configured by each site. Once made available to a web project, they are available to the entire web project. For example, you can't restrict the use of a web form to only a subset of the users of a particular site. SomeCo has chosen the approach of using one web project folder to manage the entire SomeCo.com website. Step-by-Step: Creating the SomeCo Web Project The first thing you need to do is create a new web project folder for the SomeCo website. Initially, you don't need to worry about web forms, deployment targets, or workflows. The goal is simply to create the web project and import the contents of the website. To create the initial SomeCo web project, follow these steps: Log in as admin. Go to Web Projects under Company Home. Click Create, and then Create Web Project. Specify the name of the web project as SomeCo Corporate Site. Specify the DNS name as someco-site. Click Next for the remaining steps, taking all defaults. You'll come back later and configure some of these settings. On the summary page, click Finish. You now have a web project folder for the SomeCo corporate site. Click SomeCo Corporate Site. You should see one Staging Sandbox and one User Sandbox. Click the Browse Website button for the User Sandbox. Now you can import SomeCo's existing website into the web project folder. Click Create, and then Bulk Import. Navigate to the "web-site" project in your Eclipse workspace. Assuming you've already run Ant for this project, there should be a ZIP file in the build folder called someco-web-site.zip. Select the file. Alfresco will import the ZIP into your User Sandbox. What Just Happened You just created a new web project folder for SomeCo's corporate website. But upon creation of a web project folder, there is no website to manage. This is a big disappointment for some people. The most crestfallen are those who didn't realize that Alfresco is a "decoupled" content management system—it has no frontend framework and no "default" website like "coupled" content management systems such as Drupal. This will change in the 3.0 releases as Alfresco introduces its new set of clients. But for now, it's up to you to give Alfresco a website to manage. You just happened to have a start on the SomeCo website sitting in your Eclipse workspace. Alfresco knows how to import WAR and ZIP files, which is a convenient way to migrate the website into Alfresco for the first time. Because web project sandboxes are mountable via CIFS, simply copying the website into the sandbox via CIFS is another way to go. The difference between the two approaches is that the WAR/ZIP import can only happen once. The import action complains if an archive contains nodes that already exist in the repository. If you haven't already done so, take a look at the contents of your sandbox. You should see index.html in the root of your User Sandbox and a someco folder that contains additional folders for CSS, images, JavaScript, and so on. The HTML file in the root is the same index.html file you deployed to the Alfresco web application in order to implement the AJAX ratings widget. Click the preview icon. (Am I the only one who thinks it looks eerily similar to the Turkish nazar talisman used to ward off the "evil eye"?) You should see the index page in a new tab or window. The list of Whitepapers won't be displayed. That's because the page is running in the context of the virtualization server, which is a different domain than your Alfresco server. Therefore, it is subject to the cross-domain restriction, which will be addressed later. Playing Nicely in the Sandbox Go back to the root of your web project folder. The link in the breadcrumb trail is likely to be the fastest way to navigate back. Click the Browse Website link in the Staging Sandbox. It's empty. If you were to invite another user to this website, his/her sandbox would be empty as well. Sandboxes are used to isolate changes each content owner makes, while still providing him/her the full context of the website. The Staging Sandbox represents your live website. Or in source code control terms, it is the HEAD of your site. It is assumed that whatever is in the Staging Sandbox can be safely deployed to the live website at any time. It is currently empty because you have not yet submitted any content to staging. Let's go ahead and do that now. If you click the Modified Items link in the User Sandbox, you'll see the index.html file and the someco folder. You could submit these individually. But you want everything to go to staging, so click Submit All: Provide a label and a description such as initial population and click OK. It is safe to ignore the warning that a suitable workflow was not found. That's expected because you haven't configured a workflow for this web project yet. Now the files have been submitted to staging. Here are some things to notice: If you click the Preview Website link in the Staging Sandbox, you'll see the website just as you did in the User Sandbox earlier. If you browse the website in the Staging Sandbox, you'll see the same files currently shown when you browse the website in your User Sandbox. A snapshot of the site was automatically taken when the files were committed and is listed under Recent Snapshots: Inviting Users To get a feel for how sandboxes work, invite one or more users to the web project (Actions, Invite Web Project Users). The following table describes the out of the box web project roles:   WCM User Role Can do these things Content Contributor Create and submit new content; but cannot edit or delete existing content Content Reviewer Create, edit, and submit new content; but cannot delete existing content Content Collaborator See all sandboxes, but only have full control over their own Create, edit, and submit new content; but cannot delete existing content Edit web project settings Content Manager See and modify content in all sandboxes; exert full control over all content See and deploy snapshots and manage deployment reports Edit web project settings Invite new users to the web project Delete the web project and individual sandboxes You'll notice that each new user gets his/her own sandbox, and that the sandbox automatically contains everything that is currently in staging. If a user makes a change to his/her sandbox, it is only visible within their sandbox until they commit the change to staging. If this is done, everyone else sees the change immediately. Unlike some content management and source code control systems, there is no need for other users to do an "update" or a "get latest" to copy the latest changes from staging into their sandbox. It is important to note that Alfresco will not merge conflicts. When a user makes a change to a file in his/her sandbox, it will be locked in all other sandboxes to prevent conflicts. If you were to customize Alfresco to disable locking, the last change would win. Alfresco would not warn you of the conflict. The Alfresco admin user and any user with Content Manager Access can see (and work within) all User Sandboxes. Everyone else sees only their own sandboxes. Mounting Sandboxes via CIFS All sandboxes are individually mountable via CIFS. In fact, in staging, each snapshot is individually mountable. This gives content owners the flexibility to continue managing content in their sandbox using the tools they are familiar with. The procedure for mounting a sandbox is identical to that of mounting the regular repository via CIFS, except that you use "AVM" as the mount point instead of "Alfresco". One difference between mounting the AVM repository through CIFS and mounting the DM repository is that the AVM repository directory structure is more complicated. For example, the path to the root of admin's sandbox in the SomeCo site is: |someco-site--admin|HEAD|DATA|www|avm_webapps|ROOT The first part of the path, someco-site, is the DNS name you assigned when you set up the web project. The admin string indicates which User Sandbox we are looking at. If you wanted to mount to the Staging Sandbox, the first part of the path would be someco-site without --admin. The next part of the path, HEAD, specifies the latest-and-greatest version of the website. Alternatively, you could mount a specific snapshot like this: |someco-site--admin|VERSION|v2|DATA|www|avm_webapps|ROOT As you might expect, the normal permissions apply. Users who aren't able to see another user's sandbox in the web client won't be able to do so through CIFS.