I want to create a record of an entity, but I need to pass a list of guids to the pre create plugin. I don't want to create fields or related entities to do this. Can I use the Shared Variables to do it?
In other words is it possible to set shared variables before initiating the action that will trigger the plugins that will consume them?
EDIT:
I can be creating this type of records from different points that integrate with crm, silverlight, external pages or even plugins of other entities. My current problem can be solved with a field on the entity, but this way if I had to send parameters to control the execution of the plugin for two or more independent actions I would need one field for each action or instead use only one field using a complex format/parse pattern to parameterize each different action. Using fields to accomplish this feature looks a bit excessive.
If the shared variables could be set before the call of the action that will trigger the plugin that would solve the problem and I wouldn't have to create fields in the crm database, because the data I want to pass to the plugin it will only be needed at that time, like a parameter in a function, no need to persist them in the database.
But if it is not possible I will have to stick with the fields :(
Not if they vary by entity/execution of the plugin.
Options:
Set them in the plugin configuration if they don't change but need to be updated
without a recompile.
Apply them as a delimited string in a single field on the entity if they vary per record.
What's the reason for not wanting to use 2?
Nope. The easiest solution that I can think of is to add a BAT (big-ass text) field to the entity and populate it with a comma-delimited list of GUIDs, then access that field in your Create plugin. You could even clear it out if you don't want that extra data in your system.
Edit after your edit:
General comment about your thinking process: you are probably overthinking it. :) Using a single field, you could pass in any kind of "command" using a json or xml formatted string. As I said above, in the pre-create plugin, after you have extracted this "argument" field, you can clear out that field in the Target entity image and that data will never be persisted to the database. Technically it achieves the exact result you want with the only side effect being one extra "argument" field that is always NULL in the database. Don't fight simplicity so hard! :)
Related
Can I update a table in Keystone when I add data to another table?
For example: I have a table named Property where I add details of the property. As soon as I enter the data into this Property table, another table, named NewTable, should automatically get populated with the contents.
Is there a way to achieve this?
There are two ways I can see to approach this:
The afterOperation hook, which lets you configure an async function that runs after the main operation has finished
A database trigger that runs on UPDATE and INSERT
afterOperation Hook
See the docs here. There's also a hooks guide with some context on how the hooks system works.
In your case, you'll be adding a function to your Property list config.
The operation argument will tell you what type of operation just occurred ('create', 'update', or 'delete') which may be handy if you also want to reflect changes to Property items or clean up records in NewTable when a Property item is deleted.
Depending on the type of operation, the data you're interested in will be available in either the originalItem, item or resolvedData arguments:
For create operations, resolvedData will contain the values supplied but you'll probably want to reference item, it'll also contain generated and defaulted values that were applied, such as the new item's id. In this case originalItem will be null.
For update operations, resolvedData will be just the data that changed, which should have everything you need to keep the copy in sync. If you want a move compete picture originalItem and item will be the entire item before and after the update is applied.
For delete operations originalItem will be the last version of the item before it was removed from the DB. resolvedData and item will both be null.
The context argument is a reference to the Keystone context object which includes all the APIs you'll need to write to your NewTable list. You probably want the Query API, eg. context.query.NewTable.createOne(), context.query.NewTable.updateOne(), etc.
The benefits to using a Keystone hook are:
The logic is handled within the Keystone app code which may make it easier to maintain if your devs are mostly focused on JavaScript and TypeScript (and maybe not so comfortable with database functionality).
It's database-independent. That is, the code will be the same regardless of which database platform your project uses.
Database Triggers
Alternatively, I'm pretty sure it's possible to solve this problem at the database level using UPDATE and INSERT triggers.
This solution is, in a sense, "outside" of Keystone and is database specific. The exact syntax you'll need depends on the DB platform (and version) your project is built on:
PostgreSQL
MySQL
SQLite
You'll need to manually add a migration that creates the relevant database structure and add it to your Keystone migrations dir. Once created, Prisma (the DB tooling Keystone uses internally) will ignore the trigger when it's performing its schema comparisons, allowing you to continue using the automatic migrations functionality.
Note that, due to how Prisma works, the table with the copy of the data (NewTable in your example) will need to either be:
Defined as another Keystone list so Prisma can create and maintain the table, or..
Manually created in different database schema, so Prisma ignores it. (I believe this isn't possible on SQLite as it lacks the concepts of multiple schemas within a single DB)
If you try to manually create and manage a table within the default database schema, Prisma will get confused (producing a Drift detected: Your database schema is not in sync with your migration history error) and prompt you to reset your DB.
I create internal table by two steps, both refer to the RTTS-techniques.
The first step loads and parses a tab-delimited file into a table.
The second step reads this table by RTTI, then, hardcoded, adds some other columns in front of the old columns from the file and, finally adds the old fields back again, the table now has about 12 new hardcoded columns, in front of those from the file. The RTTS helps to create the final table, which then is passed as the data source to the ALV grid.
My former requirement did not take into account that the ALV-grid-toolbar-functions will ever be needed by the end-user, however, as always, this has changed. I enabled the toolbar functions, the default ones, without any custom button.
So, now the user can remove some columns from the display or add them back again, she/he can also change their order. Everything is fine but I never encountered this situation with a table, which is created during runtime.
Are there special culprits I need to be aware of ?
<ITAB> created using RTTS functionality is fully supported either by the REUSE_ALV_LIST_DISPLAY or one of ALV OOPS technologies. All the layouts should work fine. In fact I think in the cl_salv_table=>factory RTTS is responsible for automatic creation of the field catalog of the ITAB since it do not need field catalog passed by the parameter. The only thing that I heard is lost pointers of the <ITAB> ant this leads to refresh problems and so on but this is different story.
From my experience, ALV column maximum size is 120 characters. So if your file could have more than that, you could have a problem. Otherwise, do not expect any major thing.
I'm building a Sharepoint 2010 export tool for back up reasons (a bit like the filemanager from Metavis).
When downloading a file to local disk I need to back up the metadata associated with the document. Which I will store in a csv-file. My first approach was to iterate all listItem.fieldvalues, but that doesn't really work because some fieldvalues are complex types, which would needlessly complicate the backup file. Some values even have line endings, for example "MetaInfo". Furthermore not all values are needed to restore the content when that might be necessary.
So my idea is to only get the values from the Fieldvalues collection which are needed to do a functional restore, supplemented with all the user added metadata.
To do this I want to check all fieldvalues against an exclusion list to see if it is present. If it is present don't back up. If it is it is either user generated metadata or a value I need like for instance "author", "created".
So my question is, does anyone know of a list of all fieldvalues keys?
Or is there a better approach to my problem?
Thanks
Update: Well, as I was iterating through the FieldValues collection any way. It was easy to do a dump of all the values to a CSV. Running it once was enough to get all the values. Now all I need to write is an xml file for configuration. This leaves the question: is there a better way of doing this?
Filter the list fields by writing following code
using System;
using Microsoft.SharePoint.Client;
clientContext.Load(
listItems,
items => items
.Include(
item => item["Title"],
item => item["Category"],
item => item["Estimate"]));
Source: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee857094.aspx#SP2010ClientOM_Creating_Windows_Console_Application
You can create an view with all fields, get the view using sharepoint object model and and get its column name from collection and filter them as per your requirement.
I have finished the application. As I wrote in my update I have made a list of all fieldValues by exporting them to a CSV file. After that I made a configuration-file with a boolean 'Backup'. This makes it possible to control which values are to be used when a backup is made.
I retrospect I think a configuration file was not needed. The values used when backing up are so much part of the whole workings of the program that a configuration file gives an administrator or casual future developer the impression that a simple reconfiguring will fulfill there needs.
I can now see that if the program needs to change due to new requirements the code has to be changed anyway. So even though setting a value to 'True' will change the output. Some other code has to be written as well. If I were to write it again I would probably use constants. This makes it all less dynamic, but still fulfill the needs of the program.
(BTW a list of all the names off the standard fieldValues would have been nice to start with. I would publish it here, but I don't have access to the file anymore, because I switched jobs recently.)
The templates for these HTML emails are all the same, but there are just different variables for say, first name, last name and such.
Would it just make sense to store the most minimal of data that I need, and load the template in and replace the variables everytime?
Another option would be to actually create the HTML file and store a reference to it, which probably would be the easiest to do except it might be a pain managing the files, and it adds complexity in regards to migrating, file permissions, et cetera.
Looking for opinions from people who've done this before...
GOAL/PURPOSE/USE:
I have a booking engine. When users make a booking, they are sent a confirmation email, generated from the sessionized booking data.
This email provides a "Cannot view this email? See it here" link which provides a web view of the email, in addition to a plaintext view.
I need to display the same email that was sent out, in addition to the plaintext view.
The template is subject to change, but I think because of that very fact I should have a table of templates and map the data to a template.
That's what I would do, because the template layout may change over the time, but the person information should remain the same. So, it makes sense to just store the person information in the database and leave the template out from the database.
In fact, it would be even better if you use template engine such as Velocity (in Java) to construct your HTML emails... very easy, by the way.
On the one hand cpu is more expensive then memory, so mostly it is better to save more data to reduce cpu power used by computation.
But in your case, I would save the minimal data, the emails or what you are tying to save, because it allows you to easily remodel your templates, and to reuse the data at multiple places of your application.
You persist redundant data (especially because of the template) which is in no way normalized. I would not suggest to do that. But mentioned in the comment it is important what you want to do with that data.
If you only save the data you need you could for example exchange that template easy and use another one.
Yea, your right on track. I did a similar thing. All dynamic/runtime variables were starting from ##symbol.
So in database you would have one Template table. One table would be for dynamic/runtime variables. One table for Mapping between Template and dynamic/runtime variables.
tblTemplate - TemplateID, TemplateValue
tblRuntimeVariables - RuntimeVariableID, VariableString, VariableSQL
tblMapping - TemplateID, RuntimeVariableID, RuntimeVariableValue
Advantage of using an extra mapping table is that on adding new dynamic variables to existing change would mean making no change to existing database. Only more rows would be added to tblMapping.
In my case I was also having one extra column for storing SQL Statements in tblRuntimeVariables in case the value for a runtime variable is fetched from database.
I would like to be able to loop through all of the defined parameters on my reports and build a display string of the parameter name and value. I'd then display the results on the report so the user knows which parameters were used for that specific execution. The only problem is that I cannot loop through the Parameters collection. There doesn't seem to be an indexer on the Parameters collection, nor does it seem to implement IEnumerable. Has anyone been able to accomplish this? I'm using SSRS 2005 and it must be implemented within the Report Code (i.e., no external assembly). Thanks!
Unfortunately, it looks like there's no simple way to do this.
See http://www.jameskovacs.com/blog/DiggingDeepIntoReportingServices.aspx for more info. If you look at the comments of that post, there are some ways to get around this, but they're not very elegant. The simplest solution will require you to have a list of the report parameters somewhere in your Report Code, which obviously violates the DRY principle, but if you want the simplest solution, you might just have to live with that.
You might want to rethink your constraint of no external assembly, as it looks to me that it would be much easier to do this with an external assembly. Or if your report isn't going to change much, you can create the list of parameter names and values manually.
If I'm understanding your question, just do what I do:
Drop a textbox on the report, then while you are setting up the report, insert the following:
="Parameter1: " + Parameters!Parameter.Label + ", Parameter2: " + Parameters!Parameter2.Label...
Granted, it's not the prettiest thing, but it does work pretty well in our app.
And I'm using Labels instead of Values since we have datetime values, and the user only cares about either the short date or the month and year (depending on circumstance), and I've already done that formatting work in setting up the parameters.
I can think of at least two ways to do this. The first might work, the second will definitely work.
Use the web service. I'm pretty sure I saw API for getting a collection of parameters. Even if there's no direct access you can always create a standard collection and copy the ReportParameter objects from one to the other in a foreach loop - and then access Count, with individual parameter properties available by dereferencing the ReportParameter instances.
Reports are RDL. RDL is XML. Create an XmlDocument and load the RDL file, then use the DOM to do, well, anything you like up to and including setting default values or even rewriting connection strings.
If your app won't have file-system access to the RDL files you can get them via the web service.