I have a block that displays the number of clicks on the page it is installed.
I want to display that block on every page.
I have tried creating a stack and then including that stack into a global area. The problem is that when the stack is included it includes the same block on every page.
So instead of having different blocks on every page, I have the same block on every page. That results in counting the clicks on all pages instead of only the current one.
How can I include a block on every page, but each having an unique ID as it has when added manually?
Thanks.
There's no way to have a unique block on every page without adding it manually. Even if you make it a "page type default", you'll end up with a shared block ID until you make the first edit (at which point it'll get it's own ID). And if you hardcode into the page's PHP code, it won't have a block ID at all.
With that being said, I don't know why you need a unique block ID. Obviously, each page is going to have a unique ID. So your block should be able to store clicks (I'm not sure exactly what you mean here, but it's probably irrelevant) against the page ID (collection ID in c5 parlance), and retrieve it against that, too.
Edit:
Considering your comment, and based on my understanding of what you're trying to do, there's no reason why you can't combine the block ID (which will, as you say, be duplicated across pages, but will be different on each block ON a page) and the page ID. So if you place two blocks in a stack, they'll get IDs 1 and 2. They'll have IDs 1 and 2 on every page the stack is own. So when you're trying to "record" whatever data they product, you combine the bID with the cID to get 1-103 and 2-103, and 1-4719, etc.
Edit 2:
So if your difficulty isn't so much "keying" the data, but physically storing the data, then see jordanlev's comment below. You won't be using the $btTable table as that's keyed off the bID. Instead you'll use db.xml to create a new table which can take your new key, and whatever other data you want to store. It's then your responsibility to query and update it with Loader::db(). See his block, or see the core's "survey" block for examples of how to manage your own db table.
Related
In Eloqua, can you send out an email to a contact list but version the "hero" image headline for each segment using dynamic content blocks?
And then can you do the reverse, have the main image remain the same, and dynamically populate products below that they've purchased in the past?
For scenario 1, yes that is possible out of the box.
Scenario 2 however is a bit more complicated and would generally require a 3rd party tool to provide this type of dynamic code generation based upon a lookup table (in this case a line item inventory or purchases). Because a contact could have zero or more products (commonly as individual records in a CDO), you would generally need to aggregate or count the number of related records, and then generate your HTML table and formatting around those record values, and be contextually aware if it is the first or last record (to begin and close the table). Dynamic content does not have mathematical functions and would not be able to count those related records - this is something usually provided by a B2C system like SFMC using ampscript or dynamically generated through custom code and sent through a transactional SMTP service. You could have multiple dynamic content on top of each other, but your biggest limitation becomes the field merge, with only lets you select a record based upon earliest/last creation date, or last modified. This is not suitable if you have more than 2 records. A third party service that provides a cloud content module for your email is your best bet.
I'm have a DynamoDB table called URLArray that contains a list of URL's (myURL) and a unique video name (myKey).
I need to do two things:
When a user clicks the next video button, a random entry needs to be selected from this URLArray. There could be potentially tens of thousands of rows.
The user is logged into the app. Everytime they finish watching a video, the video's unique video name is recorded. So....when the user has seen a video, its added to a list in a table called Users under the user's info row.
Soo...This random entry that gets selected when the user clicks the next video button in point 1, has to be compared to the list of videos they've already seen. To make sure that it doesn't randomly appear again for that particular user.
I do something woefully inefficient so far, that works, but it's not great:
By the way i'm using AppSync + GraphQL to interact with the DynamoDB table. I first get a local copy of the URLArray:
//Gets a list of the Key/URL pairs in the UrlArrays table in GraphQL ****IN CONSTRUCTOR, so we have this URLArray data when componentDidMount()****
listUrlArrays = async () => {
try {
URLData = await API.graphql(graphqlOperation(ListUrlArrays)); //GraphQL query
//URLData[] is available in the entire class
this.setState({urlArrayLength: apiData.data.listURLArrays.items.length}); //gets the length of URLArray (i.e. how many videos are in the database)
}
}
As an overview, when user clicks for the next video:
//When clicking next video
async nextVideo(){
await this.logVideosSeen(); //add myKey to the list of videos in *Users* table the logged in user has now seen
await this.getURL(); //get the NEXT upcoming video's details, for Video Player to play and make sure it's not been seen before
}
//This will update the 'listOfVideosSeen[]' in Users table with videos unique myKey, the logged in user has seen
logVideosSeen = async () => {
.......
}
async getURL() {
var dbIndex = this.getUniqueRandomNumber(this.state.urlArrayLength); //Choose a number between 0 and N number of videos in URLArray
//the hasVideoBeenSeen() basically gets the list of videos a user has already seen from `Users` table with the GraphQL getusers command, and creates a local copy of this list (can get big). I use javascripts indexOf() to check whether myKey already exists in the list
while(await this.hasVideoBeenSeen(this.state.URLData[dbIndex].myKey)) //while true i.e. user has seen that video before
{
dbIndex = this.getUniqueRandomNumber(this.state.urlArrayLength); //get another random number to fetch a new myKey
}
//If false, we'll exit the loop and know we've got a not seen before myKey, proceed to set to play...
if(dbIndex != null){
this.setState({ playURL: this.state.URLData[dbIndex].vidURL }); //Retrieve the URL from the local URLArray that we're going to play (i.e. the next video to come)
}
}
I can share a little more code if needed, but essentially I wanted to know how to:
Let a Lambda function select a random number based on the current URLArray size (i may need to keep a local copy of URLArray anyway). But i think point 2 here is where it's really inefficient..
Let a Lambda function check (the while loop) against the Users table whether myKey has already been seen. Mainly to shift this computational burden to the cloud instead of the local device the app runs on.
AFTER A THINK................
Thanks for the suggestion Seth. I have been thinking about it for some time, and while the randomness requirement still holds true, I think there is some truth in what you’ve suggested. The reason I need randomness, is so that 2 users sat side by side for example, can’t predict which video is coming next. It shouldn’t be a predictable sequence of videos. I'm not sure I can use Scan function with AWS Amplify/GraphQL. So remember there’s 2 things going on here: (1) a video upload, recording it in the URLArray sensibly for future reference. (2) users viewing a previously unseen random video and then moving onto another unseen random video
*(1)
I like your idea of using a number to index the URLArray, and it’s helped to make life a bit easier. So the first URL being at index 0, the next at 1 etc…
My thinking here (to avoid me doing a ListUrlArrays() and bringing the WHOLE array locally to the phone), is to create a GSI called VideoNumber for the URLArray table. This will be the unique VideoNumber column with a number 0-N. So imagine the diagram above having another column called VideoNumber. Row 1 having VideoNumber set to 0, Row 2 having VideoNumber set to 1 etc… THEN all I would need to do, is locally on the device, generate a random number between 0-N, call a getURLArrayIdbyVideoNumber() query specific for that GSI, with the number that we just generated, and it’ll unlock the information I need from the row. Voila! I think that shifts most of that heavy burden away now.
Question: Before each video is uploaded, how do I easily get the current total number of rows N in the table (or row count)? I would then increment it by one.
The other thing I can do is save this current count number in another DynamoDB table that I use for persisted data, read the number from there before upload, and write an N+1 after upload to increment it (2 DynamoDB operations per upload). It’s not ideal.
*(2)
When a user has finished watching a video, I can log in a list (under the users information in DynamoDB), which video’s they’ve already seen. So for example this could now be a seen list: [3,12,73,108,57] for the 5 videos they’ve seen so far. When the user clicks nextVideo() we’ll generate a random newNumber, and straight away compare that with any number in the seen list. I use seenlist.indexOf(newNumber) and it will, either go again or stop if the newNumber doesn’t exist in the list. THEN I can go through the GSI query, and retrieve the relevant information to display the video from URLArray.
I think that this indexOf() is the biggest computational burden on the device, and obviously gets a little slower as the seenList increases. But it should be quicker with pure integer numbers then an alphanumeric myKey as I was using before. Any other suggestion would be welcome :)
I’ve yet to try it, but it was just an idea, as I need to keep the random element. But first, do you know how I can easily find the number of rows or table count of URLArray?
I think you'll have an easier time coming up with a solution to this problem if you drop the randomness requirement. It sounds like the more important requirement is presenting the user with a video they haven't seen before.
If that's correct, it sounds like your access pattern could be stated as
Fetch previously unseen video for user
which is an easier problem to solve.
Unlike SQL databases, there are often many ways to implement a given access pattern in DynamoDB. My answer here is just one way.
Imagine your URLArray table as a giant array. The first URL is at index 0, the next URL is at index 1, the second URL at index 2, and so on. Each user of your application would start by watching the video at URL index 0, then URL index 1, etc. This would ensure the user never sees the same video twice. You would not need to store a list of all the videos they've seen. Instead, you could store the index of the last video they saw.
Your application could grab the first n videos from the table to present to your users. Once that list was exhausted, it could go grab the next n videos. And so on...
What I've described here is essentially how pagination is implemented in DynamoDB. To bring this abstraction back to the world of DynamoDB, your algorithm could look something like this:
Scan the URLArray table for the first "page" of URLs (a scan operation with no filter criteria)
Along with the results, DynamoDB will respond with a LastEvaluatedKey, which will allow you to retrieve the next page of results starting from this position
Present your user with each video you pulled back from the scan operation, making sure to record the id (the Primary Key) the the last video they saw.
When you exhaust the URLs from step 1, execute another scan operation with the ExclusiveStartKey set to the LastEvaluatedKey returned from step 2.
When users return to your application, query for the next page from the URLArray table with ExclusiveStartKey set to the id of the last video they viewed.
This effectively uses the scan operation to search through your URLArray table one page at a time. Your application would effectively be searching the table from top to bottom, keeping track of where each user is at any given time. When a user revisits your application, just start where they left off.
In response to your edit:
If your use case requires the next video to be unpredictable (e.g. no 2 users can predict what video is next), you have a few problems to solve at the same time:
Selecting an item in an unpredictable/random manner
Tracking what a user has already seen
Putting those two requirements together makes for a tricky access pattern. Let's say you have N videos in your table, and the user has viewed N-1 of these videos leaving only one video unseen. If you are fetching your next video randomly and need to ensure it has not yet been seen, how will you find the last unseen video? How many times would you need to guess before you came across the only unseen video? What query/scan operation could you perform that does this in a single request to DDB? I'm not saying it's impossible, it's just...complicated.
I think it's better to generate a strategy that is unpredictable to the user, but predictable to you when it comes to select the next unseen video.
For example, you could pre-calculate a random order of indexes from 1..N ahead of time, which would represent the order you present the videos for a given user. You could go through that list sequentially, keeping track of the last seen index. That way, you'd always know which video was next and that the video hadn't previously been seen by this user. Fetching that video would be a simple query operation to DDB.
You also asked how to find the number of items in DynamoDB. Unfortunately, there is no DynamoDB equivalent of the SQL count operation. The answer to this question is not straightforward. For the benefit of the community (and to get a diverse set of answers), I'd suggest you make a separate question on Stackoverflow regarding the number of items in a DDB table.
it might be possible I'm searching for the wrong keywords, but so far I couldn't find anything useful.
My problem is quite simple: At the moment I get a list of individual Ids through a report parameter, I pass them to a procedure and show the results.
The new request is like this: Instead of showing the list for all individuals at once, there should be a list for each individual id.
Since I'm quite a beginner in srss, I thought the easiest approach would be the best: Create a subreport, copy the shown list, and create a subreport per individual id.
The amount of this IDs is dynamic, so I have to create a dynamic amount of subreports.
Funny enought, this doesnt seem to be possible. This http://forums.asp.net/t/1397645.aspx url doesnt show exactly the problem, but it shows the limit of the subreports.
I even ran trough the whole msdn pages starting http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd220581.aspx but I couldnt find anything there.
So is there a possibility, to create a loop like:
For each Individual ID in Individual IDs, create a subreport and pass ONE ID to this?
Or is there another approach I should use to make this work?
I tried to create a 'Fake'-Dataset with no sql query but just for iterating the id list, but it seems the dataset needs a data-source...
As usual, thanks so far for all answers!
Matthias Müller
Or is there another approach I should use to make this work?
You didn't provide much detail about what sort of information needs to be included in the subreport, but assuming it's a small amount of data (say, showing a personnel record), and not a huge amount (such as a persons sales for the last year), a List might be the way to go.
I tried to create a 'Fake'-Dataset with no sql query but just for iterating the id list, but it seems the dataset needs a data-source...
All datasets require a data source, though if you're merely hard-coding some fake return data, any data source will do, even a local SQL instance with nothing in it.
I'm currently working on a project in MongoDB where I want to get a random sampling of new products from the DB. But my problem is not MongoDB specific, I think it's a general database question.
The scenario:
Let's say we have a collection (or table) of products. And we also have a collection (or table) of users. Every time a user logs in, they are presented with 10 products. These products are selected randomly from the collection/table. Easy enough, but the catch is that every time the user logs in, they must be presented with 10 products that they have NEVER SEEN BEFORE. The two obvious ways that I can think of solving this problem are:
Every user begins with their own private list of all products. Each time they get one of these products, the product is removed from their private list. The result is that the next time products are chosen from this previously trimmed list, it already contains only new items.
Every user has a private list of previously viewed products. When a user logs in, they select 10 random products from the master list, compare the id of each against their list of previously viewed products, and if the item appears on the previously viewed list, the application throws this one away selects a new one, and iterates until there are 10 new items, which it then adds to the previously viewed list for next time.
The problem with #1 is it seems like a tremendous waste. You would basically be duplicating the list data for n number of users. Also removing/adding new items to the system would be a nightmare since it would have to iterate through all users. #2 seems preferable, but it too has issues. You could end up making a lot of extra and unnecessary calls to the DB in order to guarantee 10 new products. As a user goes through more and more products, there are less new ones to choose from, so the chances of having to throw one away and get new one from the DB greatly increases.
Is there an alternative solution? My first and primary concern is performance. I will give up disk space in order to optimize performance.
Those 2 ways are a complete waste of both primary and secondary memory.
You want to show 2 never before seen products, but is this a real must?
If you have a lot of products 10 random ones have a high chance of being unique.
3 . You could list 10 random products, even though not as easy as in MySQL, still less complicated than 1 and 2.
If you don't care how random the sequence of id's is you could do this:
Create a single randomized table of just product id's and a sequential integer surrogate key column. Start each customer at a random point in the list on first login and cycle through the list ordered by that key. If you reach the end, start again from the top.
The customer record would contain a single value for the last product they saw (the surrogate from the randomized list, not the actual id). You'd then pull the next ten on login and do a single update to the customer. It wouldn't really be random, of course. But this kind of table-seed strategy is how a lot of simpler pseudo-random number generators work.
The only problem I see is if your product list grows more quickly than your users log in. Then they'd never see the portions of the list which appear before wherever they started. Even so, with a large list of products and very active users this should scale much better than storing everything they've seen. So if it doesn't matter that products appear in a set psuedo-random sequence, this might be a good fit for you.
Edit:
If you stored the first record they started with as well, you could still generate the list of all things seen. It would be everything between that value and last viewed.
How about doing this: crate a collection prodUser where you will have just the id of the product and the list of customersID, (who have seen these products) .
{
prodID : 1,
userID : []
}
when a customer logs in you find the 10 prodID which has not been assigned to that user
db.prodUser.find({
userID : {
$nin : [yourUser]
}
})
(For some reason $not is not working :-(. I do not have time to figure out why. If you will - plz let me know.). After showing the person his products - you can update his prodUser collection. To mitigate mongos inability to find random elements - you can insert elements randomly and just find first 10.
Everything should work really fast.
Good Morning All,
I have loaded over 1,300 blurbs into my client's database with table schema of BlurbID, Seq, Content, Keywords. A separate database table will contain vote details (voteID, BlurbID, Seq, VoteDate). His intent is to have a blurb website that serves up humorous quotes. Users must vote for the first blurb before being allowed to see the next one, and so forth.
The client will modify the blurb table as needed to re-sequence the blurbs. He wants the blurbs displayed on content pages in the website according to the value of the SEQ field in the Blurbs table. Thus, the entry with SEQ=1 will be the first Blurb displayed on the site etc. Users will be required to vote using a radiobuttonlist for each blurb before being allowed to see the next blurb.
Question: Is it advisable to use one content page (default.aspx) to serve up the blurbs? If I do that, how do I structure a stored procedure to select the blurbs according to the SEQ field in the blurb table? Conversely, do I create content pages for each of the 1,300 blurbs? If I use one content page, what would the TSQL look like to iterate through the blurbs according to the SEQ field after a vote is cast for each blurb? Pseudo code would be: if radiobuttonlist.value >0 then select blurb id, seq, blurbcontent, keywords from blurbs where seq = current seq +1
Finally, for SEO purposes, should I output the keywords database field to a hidden field on the content page?
If you have written this type of site before, I would greatly appreciate your insight and guidance.
Thanks,
Sid
Learn asp.net ;) Seriously - especially the ASP.NET routing added some time ago, and while you are at it, learn MVC.
There is no sense to even have more than one view on the data. It is all the same.
Years ago, those who did not know made something like "/default.aspx/id=1
Years ago, those who DID read the documentation wrote something like "/content.ashx/112
Today everyone should use URL routing and write something like /sometitle.html for everything, and use the routing mechanism to route that call to a program module (page, view, whatever) that generates the html.
I suggest pulling the title from the database (or use the first x words) so you have some textual reference, not jut an ID.
Now, database
What do you mean with "how do I structure a stored procedure to". This is similar to "how do I structure a pizza delivery service to deliver pizza tonno". The stored procedure sturecture should depend on your coding guidelines, not on what data you retrieve- this is for the code part in the structure. And that will depend a lot on your needs, which obviously are - given from the site design.
Why do you think you even need a stored procedure here? ;)