RavenDB 4 and Identities Id - ravendb

I just upgraded a project from RavenDB 3.5 to 4.0 and one of the biggest change I noticed is the way they change the way Ids are generated.
In my project most of the collections have a basic id structure like "[collection name]/[progressive id]", where the progressive id is an integer, and not the new default "[progressive]-[node]".
Following the documentation I specified the pattern id for new documents as "[collection name]|" and is actually generating unique/progressive/integer ids.
The problem is when I've to save transactionally 2 or more documents and reference them between themselves. Let's say I've two kind of object:
User entity
{
"Id": "users/1",
...
}
User address entity
{
"Id": "userAddresses/1",
"UserId": "users/1",
...
}
Where in the second document I need to reference the first one via the UserId field.
Before the version 4.0 I was able, in the same transaction, to do something like:
User newUser = new User();
session.Store(newUser)
UserAddress newUserAddress = new UserAddress();
newUserAddress.UserId = newUser.Id;
session.Store(newUserAddress);
session.SaveChanges();
After the session.Store(newUser) if I accessed the newUser.Id property I was able to see the generated Id. Now I just see "users|", I've to wait after the SaveChanges() to see the generated Ids.
This behaviour seems to happen only for Identities Ids, if I use the id structure "[collection name]/[progressive]-[node]" I'm able to see the generated id right after the Store().
Is it by design? Is there a way to force the old behaviour?
OR How can I manage transactionally a situation like this one using progressive/integer ids?

In RavenDB v4.0 you have the same behavior. After you call to session.Store(entity), or await session.StoreAsync(entity) for the async session, you should have the entity.Id filled with the ID.
It is setting the ID using the HiLo approach, which you can read about it here:
https://ravendb.net/docs/article-page/4.0/Csharp/server/kb/document-identifier-generation#hilo-algorithm
The only difference in RavenDB v4.0 that the ID would be like: users/1-A instead of users/1 in the previous versions.

Related

Sitefinity - Safely delete orphaned dynamic content records

I've been adding records to a dynamic module via the API and in the process during my experimentation I added a bunch of records that weren't associated correctly with any valid parent record.
I've checked and so far I can see that Sitefinity stores data about these records in a number of tables:
mydynamiccontenttype_table
sf_dynamic_content
sf_dynmc_cntnt_sf_lnguage_data
sf_dynmc_cntent_sf_permissions
I would like to clean up the database by deleting these records but I want to make sure I don't create more problems in the process.
Anyone know if there are more references to these dynamic content type records or a process to safely delete them?
There are probably other tables, so your safest option would be to delete the items using the Sitefinity API.
Just get the masterId of the item and use a code like this:
public static void DeleteDataItemOfType(this DynamicModuleManager manager, string type, Guid Id)
{
Type resolvedType = TypeResolutionService.ResolveType(type);
using (var region = new ElevatedModeRegion(manager))
{
manager.DeleteDataItem(resolvedType, Id);
manager.SaveChanges();
}
}

Existing saga instances after applying the [Unique] attribute to IContainSagaData property

I have a bunch of existing sagas in various states of a long running process.
Recently we decided to make one of the properties on our IContainSagaData implementation unique by using the Saga.UniqueAttribute (about which more here http://docs.particular.net/nservicebus/nservicebus-sagas-and-concurrency).
After deploying the change, we realized that all our old saga instances were not being found, and after further digging (thanks Charlie!) discovered that by adding the unique attribute, we were required to data fix all our existing sagas in Raven.
Now, this is pretty poor, kind of like adding a index to a database column and then finding that all the table data no longer select-able, but being what it is, we decided to create a tool for doing this.
So after creating and running this tool we've now patched up the old sagas so that they now resemble the new sagas (sagas created since we went live with the change).
However, despite all the data now looking right we're still not able to find old instances of the saga!
The tool we wrote does two things. For each existing saga, the tool:
Adds a new RavenJToken called "NServiceBus-UniqueValue" to the saga metadata, setting the value to the same value as our unique property for that saga, and
Creates a new document of type NServiceBus.Persistence.Raven.SagaPersister.SagaUniqueIdentity, setting the SagaId, SagaDocId, and UniqueValue fields accordingly.
My questions are:
Is it sufficient to simply make the data look correct or is there something else we need to do?
Another option we have is to revert the change which added the unique attribute. However in this scenario, would those new sagas which have been created since the change went in be OK with this?
Code for adding metadata token:
var policyKey = RavenJToken.FromObject(saga.PolicyKey); // This is the unique field
sagaDataMetadata.Add("NServiceBus-UniqueValue", policyKey);
Code for adding new doc:
var policyKeySagaUniqueId = new SagaUniqueIdentity
{
Id = "Matlock.Renewals.RenewalSaga.RenewalSagaData/PolicyKey/" + Guid.NewGuid().ToString(),
SagaId = saga.Id,
UniqueValue = saga.PolicyKey,
SagaDocId = "RenewalSaga/" + saga.Id.ToString()
};
session.Store(policyKeySagaUniqueId);
Any help much appreciated.
EDIT
Thanks to David's help on this we have fixed our problem - the key difference was we used the SagaUniqueIdentity.FormatId() to generate our document IDs rather than a new guid - this was trivial tio do since we were already referencing the NServiceBus and NServiceBus.Core assemblies.
The short answer is that it is not enough to make the data resemble the new identity documents. Where you are using Guid.NewGuid().ToString(), that data is important! That's why your solution isn't working right now. I spoke about the concept of identity documents (specifically about the NServiceBus use case) during the last quarter of my talk at RavenConf 2014 - here are the slides and video.
So here is the long answer:
In RavenDB, the only ACID guarantees are on the Load/Store by Id operations. So if two threads are acting on the same Saga concurrently, and one stores the Saga data, the second thread can only expect to get back the correct saga data if it is also loading a document by its Id.
To guarantee this, the Raven Saga Persister uses an identity document like the one you showed. It contains the SagaId, the UniqueValue (mostly for human comprehension and debugging, the database doesn't technically need it), and the SagaDocId (which is a little duplication as its only the {SagaTypeName}/{SagaId} where we already have the SagaId.
With the SagaDocId, we can use the Include feature of RavenDB to do a query like this (which is from memory, probably wrong, and should only serve to illustrate the concept as pseudocode)...
var identityDocId = // some value based on incoming message
var idDoc = RavenSession
// Look at the identity doc's SagaDocId and pull back that document too!
.Include<SagaIdentity>(identityDoc => identityDoc.SagaDocId)
.Load(identityDocId);
var sagaData = RavenSession
.Load(idDoc.SagaDocId); // Already in-memory, no 2nd round-trip to database!
So then the identityDocId is very important because it describes the uniqueness of the value coming from the message, not just any old Guid will do. So what we really need to know is how to calculate that.
For that, the NServiceBus saga persister code is instructive:
void StoreUniqueProperty(IContainSagaData saga)
{
var uniqueProperty = UniqueAttribute.GetUniqueProperty(saga);
if (!uniqueProperty.HasValue) return;
var id = SagaUniqueIdentity.FormatId(saga.GetType(), uniqueProperty.Value);
var sagaDocId = sessionFactory.Store.Conventions.FindFullDocumentKeyFromNonStringIdentifier(saga.Id, saga.GetType(), false);
Session.Store(new SagaUniqueIdentity
{
Id = id,
SagaId = saga.Id,
UniqueValue = uniqueProperty.Value.Value,
SagaDocId = sagaDocId
});
SetUniqueValueMetadata(saga, uniqueProperty.Value);
}
The important part is the SagaUniqueIdentity.FormatId method from the same file.
public static string FormatId(Type sagaType, KeyValuePair<string, object> uniqueProperty)
{
if (uniqueProperty.Value == null)
{
throw new ArgumentNullException("uniqueProperty", string.Format("Property {0} is marked with the [Unique] attribute on {1} but contains a null value. Please make sure that all unique properties are set on your SagaData and/or that you have marked the correct properties as unique.", uniqueProperty.Key, sagaType.Name));
}
var value = Utils.DeterministicGuid.Create(uniqueProperty.Value.ToString());
var id = string.Format("{0}/{1}/{2}", sagaType.FullName.Replace('+', '-'), uniqueProperty.Key, value);
// raven has a size limit of 255 bytes == 127 unicode chars
if (id.Length > 127)
{
// generate a guid from the hash:
var key = Utils.DeterministicGuid.Create(sagaType.FullName, uniqueProperty.Key);
id = string.Format("MoreThan127/{0}/{1}", key, value);
}
return id;
}
This relies on Utils.DeterministicGuid.Create(params object[] data) which creates a Guid out of an MD5 hash. (MD5 sucks for actual security but we are only looking for likely uniqueness.)
static class DeterministicGuid
{
public static Guid Create(params object[] data)
{
// use MD5 hash to get a 16-byte hash of the string
using (var provider = new MD5CryptoServiceProvider())
{
var inputBytes = Encoding.Default.GetBytes(String.Concat(data));
var hashBytes = provider.ComputeHash(inputBytes);
// generate a guid from the hash:
return new Guid(hashBytes);
}
}
}
That's what you need to replicate to get your utility to work properly.
What's really interesting is that this code made it all the way to production - I'm surprised you didn't run into trouble before this, with messages creating new saga instances when they really shouldn't because they couldn't find the existing Saga data.
I almost think it might be a good idea if NServiceBus would raise a warning any time you tried to find Saga Data by anything other than a [Unique] marked property, because it's an easy thing to forget to do. I filed this issue on GitHub and submitted this pull request to do just that.

MVC 4 Lookup UserName Based on UserId

I'm using the MVC 4 template with VS 2012. I have enabled a comments section which stores the logged in user's UserId to a table. When I display the comments I want to display the user's user name and email from the UserProfiles table.
I've tried the following code:
public static string GetUserName(int userId)
{
using (var db = new UsersContext())
{
return db.UserProfiles.Single(x => x.UserId == userId).UserName;
}
}
But I get an exception:
The model backing the 'UsersContext' context has changed since the database was created. Consider using Code First Migrations to update the database (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=238269).
Any suggestions?
The exception is pretty descriptive. Your model does not reflect what your database look like. I recommend you to read this about code first migrations, basically what migrations mean is that you update your database to match your models, its done with one line of command in VS.
Hope this helps
Also I would recommend you to use .Find() or .First() instead of .Single()

Tridion 2011 - Engine.GetObject overloads

I found the following difference between the old VBScript API and the .Net API:
In the old VBScript API it's possible to invoke "TDSE.getObject" to retrieve a Tridion object passing by the webdav path, an integer to select how to open it (read only, read and write, etc) and the ID of the publication where there is the exact element of the blueprint we want.
In the new .Net API all I found was "Engine.GetObject" but it only receives the TCM ID or the webdav path of an element.
Our scenario is the following; in the old VBScript code, this overload of the getObject method was used to avoid some permission issues detected while using TCM IDs instead of the webdav paths and because it's much more handful when you need to copy the code between different environments (see DEV, PREPROD and PROD for example), avoiding changing TCM IDs.
So my questions are:
Is there and overload like the old one in the new .Net API?
If not, is there a way of retrieving items by webdav keeping in mind that some of them could be localized and changed from their parent? (the old way works with this, if you send the root webdav path it will retrieve local objects even if their names aren't exactly the same as the parents)
Thank you!
Do you want to be able to use the webdav url of the top-level item, and specify the publication id from which to get the item?
I would create an extension method on Engine that does this for you:
public static T GetObject<T>(this Engine engine, string webDavUrl, int publicationId)
where T : IdentifiableObject
{
[logic to retreive the item and then if needed
get the correct tcm uri and get the intended item]
return item as T;
}
However, this is quite an expensive operation since you get two objects instead of one. So I dont know if I would use this method very often.
Here some samples
IdentifiableObject item = engine.GetObject(new TcmUri("tcm:5-677"));
//will give you the latest approved version in the publication 5.
IdentifiableObject item = engine.GetObject(new TcmUri("tcm:5-677-v0"));
//will give you the WF or Editable version.
TcmUri uri = new TcmUri("tcm:5-677");
uri.PublicationId = 6;
IdentifiableObject item = engine.GetObject(uri);
//will give you the latest approved version in the publication 6.
Engine.GetObject has 4 overloaded method.
GetObject(Session, string)
GetObject(string)
GetObject(TcmUri)
GetObject(Item)
You can check the Tom.Net Api for more details.
Actually, using Engine.GetObject Method (String) should work.
public virtual IdentifiableObject GetObject(
string itemUriOrWebDavUrl
)
You can do something in this way:-
Get the Object based on WebDav URL
Get the TCM ID from this object
Based on your publication, modified your TCM ID accordingly and do your stuff
OR
Try something this way too:-
Repository testRepository = (Repository)session.GetObject("tcm:0-2-1");
Component testComponent = (Component)testRepository.GetObject(webdavURL); //Assuming actual TCM ID is "tcm:1-3"
Console.WriteLine(testComponent.Id); // should show "tcm:2-3"
// Do Your Other Stuff

Why does NHibernate need to know the ID of an auto ID based entity before flush is called?

With my only ORM knowledge being L2S/EF, I was surprised when the following code inserted a row into the database before I called repo.Save:
var repo = new UserRepository();
var user = new User { Name = "test" }
repo.Add(user);
//repo.Save();
Repo looks like this:
public void Add(T entity)
{
session.Save(entity);
}
public void Save()
{
session.Flush();
}
After some digging, it seems NHibernate needs to make the insert happen right away in order to get the ID of the new entity (since it's using an auto increment ID). But L2S/EF doesn't work like this; I can add many entities and save them all at the end.
Question is: is there a way to achieve the same thing with NHibernate, while still using auto increment IDs, and out of interest does anyone know why it works like this?
Fabio Maulo already blogged about the usage of identity generator a few times. The answer is: use hilo, guid.comb or something like this.
NHibernate needs the identity because every entity in the session (they are called "persistent entities") needs to be identified. The identity is also normally used to determine if the record already exists in the database (unsaved value).
session.Save actually only makes a transient entity persistent. When the database is generating the id, it needs to be stored to get the id. If NH can create the id itself (eg using hilo), it could be stored next time when the session gets flushed.