Having recently migrated from years of web forms, I’ve built numerous dot net core razor page apps - So I’m not a complete beginner but I am struggling to understand the best way to approach one particular scenario. I have a page that captures some header information but also needs to capture some additional data that is specific to the “type” of record being edited. In webforms I dynamically loaded a user control for the relevant type using a path name (the path name of the user control being linked to the type so the system knew what form to load). With user controls I could then handle the form submission which meant the logic could be completely different for each type/form. Whereas I can use view components to create the relevant UI in the same way in my razor pages app, I can’t then handle the post back from there. So what would be the best way to approach this in razor pages? To make matters more complex, the type (and thus the objet i want to capture) could be defined in a RCL (another project). Also the type needs to be defined in a database entry, so I need to be able to load it from a string. Whereas a standalone page for each type would be easy, the management of this data is on one place in the core system so I can’t have a different page for each one.
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I have a requirement to configure the user's authorization per module per screen per action. For example, one user should be able to Create/Save WorkOrders in WorkOrder Module, but another user should only able to View/Delete WorkOrders. Similarly, a third user should only be able to View WorkOrders. This is an example of one screen. Now there are many screens in the application. Let's keep the actions same for all i.e. View, New, Update, Delete.
There is a reports module also, in which the user will create reports on the fly and add it into the application. So authorization is required here too. For example, a user can View/Print WorkOrder reports. But another user can only view reports. Let's keep the actions in reports only View & Print.
I am not sure Asp.Net Core built-in authorization is capable of this or not. What I have looked so far, it is not possible. Please correct me if I am wrong.
Now question is, how should I do this? I had a similar kind of requirement in a previously built application where I used database tables to store rights against each user and each screen. And upon log-in, I used to fetch that data, and then while loading the web page; I used to show or hide the relevant buttons & menus based on user's rights. But here in Asp.Net Razor Pages, the action method matters (If I'm not wrong), and certain functionality can be accessed via route. I am looking for some attribute-based solution.
I found this link with more or less above mentioned implementation using database tables and route URL to determine action name. So the URLs are saved in the database and on runtime they are checked and matched with the current URL and the user is authenticated.
Another link here, where the developer has used attribute-based filtering on action methods. But URL Routes are not being saved in the database or anywhere.
Are these the only & best solution to my problem? I have no problem implementing them, they look logical. But I just want to use the best available approach. Can anyone assist me with any other more suitable approach?
So, I'm trying to come up with a better way to do a dynamic help module that displays a distinct help page for each page of a website. Currently there is a help.aspx that has a title and div section that is filled by methods that grab a database record. Each DB record is stored html withy the specific help content. Now, this works but it is an utter pain to maintain when, say an image, changes or the text has to be edited, you have to find and updated 1 or more DB records. I was thinking instead, I could build a single html page that basically shows/hides panels and inside each panel is the appropriate help content. As long as you follow a proper naming convention (name the panels ID to the page/content it represents) using ctrl + f will get you where you need to go and make it easier to find the content you need. What I'm curious of is would this have an impact on performance? The html page would be a fairly large file and would be hosted/ran at the server but it would also remove the need for Database calls. Would the work even be worth the benefit here or am I reinventing the wheel already in place?
Dynamic anything should be stored in the database. A truly usable web application should NEVER need code modified to change content. Hiding content is usually not a good idea, imagine if you expanded your application to 100 different pages that need their own help page. Then when someone clicks help their browser has to load 99 hidden pages to get 1 that it will show. You need to break your help page down into sections and just store the plain text in the database. I would need to know more about what language you're using as well as the architecture you're using to elaborate further but take a look below.
The need your describing is pretty much what MVC (web application architecture type) was built for.
If you're already using ASP.net and you aren't too far into your project I would consider switching to MVC. It's an architecture built specifically with dynamic page content in mind. You build different 'Views' (the V in MVC) that will dynamically build the HTML based on the content it receives from the Controller (The C in MVC) which pulls it's data from the database/Model (The M) and modifies it for the View. Also once you get into MVC you can couple it with Razor and half of your code get's written for you. It's a wonderful thing.
http://www.asp.net/mvc
My project aims to provide the end user the ability to dynamically design forms in run-time. That would be something like a simple web based IDE to design web-forms.
The end user should be able enter all the components and their respective properties of the web form at runtime.
A web form should be generated based on the components and properties defined by the user and the final form should be displayed.
Is reflections the best ways to do this? If so could you please point me an appropriate page as to how I would have to do this?
Are there other ways to implement this apart from reflections?
I tried researching on web-parts but , I came to realize that web parts was not what I intended to do with the project because I would not know any of the properties of the components in advance during compile time.
Does it have to be webforms and its controls running from server ( from System.Web.UI )?
Just to share some experience, we have a huuge codegeneration like applications, which given parameters ( which could be input like ones or the whole database depending of the case ) can generate html submiting forms to server side using jquery and/or dojo ajax features...
because we want simplicity, we decided we would not generate server side controls dinamicaly
the bottom line is, I don't know your requirement, but maybe you want to do something similar.
I am currently investigating the possibilities of different CMSs for a company-site.
Done quite a few projects in classical ASP, ASP.NET, Joomla etc..
I would like to use Umbraco 5 for the first time.
For that project we have a SQL-Table with Job-Opportunities:
like: JobName, Department, Description, etc..
These should be listed on a page. In ASP.NET I would use something like a Repeater, etc.. with PageSize option and automatic paging.
In the Backend (Backoffice in Umbraco, I assume) there has to be an Insert/Edit/Delete Page with the corresponding input boxes, which are maintained by the company employees, not by web-developers.
Which route should I look at? I am completely stuck, is there an example anywhere?
Can I use my own data-tables, or could/should I use the Umbraco content tables for this?
Thank you,
Reinhard
Welcome to Umbraco.
If you choose to use a pre-existing database, you're going to need the following pieces:
an ORM to access read/write the data
a custom hive provider for that data to allow for Umbrace to read it as an entity
a custom tree to allow for editing and adding data in the backoffice
a macro to display the content on the frontend.
http://web-matters.blogspot.com/2011/11/umbraco-5-hive-provider-tree-editor.html
is a great place to start.
As you're probably picking up on, this is a lot of work.. so, most importantly: Are you trying to maintain two applications?
If so, do you really need to be able to edit the list in both applications? Your task would be much simpler if you only allowed editing from the other application, and displayed the read-only list using web services.
If not, ditch the custom database. Umbraco 5 is a full EAV/CR system, so unlike some CMS products, you'll be able to represent any rdbs structure you can imagine. The simplest way would be to create a custom document type with those properties to represent a job opportunity, and store those job opportunities on a new node in the content tab.
About document types: http://our.umbraco.org/wiki/how-tos/working-with-document-types
I'm a big fan of keeping application logic in the servlet, and keeping the JSP as simple as possible. One of the reasons for this is that any good web designer should be able to expand upon his HTML knowledge to build in a few JSTL tags to do simple iteration, access beans, etc. We also keep the more complex/ajax/js components behind a tag library (similar to displayTag but for our own components).
Most of the time everything works out ok - The servlet does any SQL it needs to, and stores the results in beans for the JSP to access. Where we have a problem is when the records we wish to access are specified by the design.
The clearest example would be the home page - it needs to be eye-catching and effective. It doesn't need to be uniform like rest of the site. There are lots of one-offs or "special cases" here, where we want to query a particular product record, or whatever.
What the designer really wants is a way to get a product bean by the product id so he can access the properties as normal. We obviously don't want to query for all products, and I don't want to query in the presentation.
I'm pretty sure I'm asking the impossible here and that I have to give something up. My question is what?
EDIT
Am I wrong in thinking that all application logic should be complete before calling the JSP? I was under the impression it was considered best practice to do all querying/calculating/processing in the servlet then pass (fairly) dumb beans to a (very) dumb JSP.
There are a couple of methods whereby the actual complexity of the query can be encapsulated in another class (custom tag or bean), and the JSP can call it. This
keeps the JSP simple (goal 1) but the JSP is still "triggering" the query - quite
late in the process.
Have I got this totally wrong and it's fine to do this.
Is it a general rule, but perfectly ok to do this in this instance.
Might I run into problems?
EDIT - Example
I'm hoping this example will help:
The home page isn't a "template" like the category/search pages - it is custom designed to work very well with say a marketing image and a couple of specific product images. It does however have information about those two products which should be obtained dynamically (so the name, and importantly price) stay in sync with the db.
The servlet can't know which products these will be, because if the designer wants to change them/remove them/add more, he should only have to edit the JSP (and possibly XML as one answer suggested).
If I understand correctly, you have logic in the JSP that wants a particular product, but at this point you don't want to query from the DB, and its too late for the servlet to be aware of it.
(A side note, while I respect your will to maintain separation of concerns, the fact that this is an issue clearly shows that your framework has too much logic in the presentation tier...but since we probably can't fix that...moving on).
My recommendation is that your designer creates a configuration XML file that contains whatever special cases it needs for the frontend, and yours servlet can read that, then pass dumb beans back to the JSP.
OR...you break things down into multiple requests using XMLHTTPRequest and call back to the servlet for each individual query, then assemble the page on the client.
It sounds like you need better separation between the display and database code. You should have separate classes that just deal with interacting with the database, and know nothing about display.
Then you just create a method that will look up the product by id and return that bean so the display can pull out the attributes it wants.
You need to create a custom bean which will perform your queries for the front end. Actually, it's probably more like a few beans to get the data for you, according to what you say here.
There's no problem with doing that from a design perspective; it's just that the specific design of the home page has more heterogenous requirements than the rest of your site. Make sure your designer knows that he needs to communicate his needs well to the development team to create the BO for your homepage (or whatever) and thing should go fine.
You are not wrong in thinking that all application logic should be complete before rendering the JSP.
If there is a need to fetch more stuff for displaying in your JSP, it would be another request to the server and another Page cycle. If you are looking for 'interactive' loading experience, you could use AJAX.
In a single page life-cycle, I find it hard to understand why do you have to invoke database calls from a JSP. Hasn't the page been previously posted with all the required form variables to help you find the data in Servlet/Helper classes?
If you could give an example of a case, it would be helpful.
[Edit] Looking at your example, yes your designer (or the admin of the site) should set that information as a configuration, not a part of JSP. Or, you could have a small app/admin page to maintain the information in a database so that it could be changed on the go. When you show your homepage, read the configs and load the appropriate data.
I am not sure what is the question. I f you want to have sql statements out of your jsp pages then you can put them in a property file and just read the property file from the jsp page.