Advantage of DyaActionForm over ActionForm? - struts

with the use DyaActionForm , we can define the form properties in strus-config.xml instead of creating new form bean class.The only advantage i can think is
it will provide is the properties defined in xml file there will be no need of compilation and reduce the development time. Is it the only main pupose of
dynaAction Form?

It helps keep your code base slim. Less to test, less to break, etc.

Related

Getting lazy instance via kernel (Ninject)

I am using Ninject in substitution of MEF and I was wondering if it's possible to get lazy instances via standard kernel methods and not via [inject] .
I need this since when building up my application's menu I have to pass all particular view models and then if the user is enabled on that function to add it to the menu
Thanks
Sure thing, you can inject a Lazy<T> and the value will only be instanciated when you access Lazy<T>.Value.
You can also inject a Func<T> and use it to create T whenever you like (with the func, every call creates a new instance).
Of course you can also do IResolutionRoot.Get<Lazy<T>>() or IResolutionRoot.Get<Func<T>>(), but usually that's a sign of bad design (service locator), so use constructor injection when it's feasible.
EDIT: When is the "enabling of the user" happening? Is it a one time thing? What is being displayed before and after?
There might be other/better designs to achieve this but it's hard to say with that little information.

unit tests - white box vs. black box strategies

I found, that when I writing unit tests, especially for methods who do not return the value, I mostly write tests in white box testing manner. I could use reflection to read private data to check is it in the proper state after method execution, etc...
this approach has a lot of limitation, most important of which is
You need to change your tests if you rework method, even is API stay
the same
It's wrong from information hiding (encapsulation) point of view -
tests is a good documentation for our code, so person who will read
it could get some unnecessary info about implementation
But, if method do not return a value and operate with private data, so it's start's very hard (almost impossible) to test like with a black-box testing paradigm.
So, any ideas for a good solution in that problem?
White box testing means that you necessarily have to pull some of the wiring out on the table to hook up your instruments. Stuff I've found helpful:
1) One monolithic sequence of code, that I inherited and didn't want to rewrite, I was able to instrument by putting a state class variable into, and then setting the state as each step passed. Then I tested with different data and matched up the expected state with the actual state.
2) Create mocks for any method calls of your method under test. Check to see that the mock was called as expected.
3) Make needed properties into protected instead of private, and create a sub-class that I actually tested. The sub-class allowed me to inspect the state.
I could use reflection to read private data to check is it in the proper state after method execution
This can really be a great problem for maintenance of your test suite
in .Net instead you could use internal access modifier, so you could use the InternalsVisibleToAttribute in your class library to make your internal types visible to your unit test project.
The internal keyword is an access modifier for types and type members. Internal types or members are accessible only within files in the same assembly
This will not resolve every testing difficulty, but can help
Reference

FxCop, compose list of callers from dependent assembly

I'm building a couple of customs FxCop rules and one of the rules needs to enforce that a constructor is called in specific methods. For that, I need to create a list of callers, to that specific constructor, prior to performing the actual test. How is this possible? Is there some kind of handle to acquire a list of all loaded assemblies in the ApplicationDomain, where I can iterate through the classes and find the constructor Method object? Ideally the list of callers should be composed in the BeforeAnalysis method.
The Microsoft.FxCop.Sdk.CallGraph.CallersFor(Method) method may give you what you want. However, the general approach you seem to be describing is rarely a good idea because it would typically assign the problems to the wrong target. For example, in the scenario you describe, it would presumably be desirable to attribute the problems to the methods that should but do not contain the target contructor call. However, if your analysis target is the constructor, the detected problems will be attributed to the constructor rather than the methods that should have called it.
I think I haven't explained the question very well, but I see your point.
I have 3 different assemblies and for certain method calls from one assembly to another, I need to ensure that a benchmark constructor invoked. The benchmark class resides in a 4th assembly. Now my problem was that only VS2010 only loads one target assembly for analysis and when I used the CallGraph to construct the a list of methods calling the constructur, it would not find any. When Invoking FxCopCmd.exe manually I could just add the dependent assemblies manually with the /file: parameter.
My solution is to load the different assemblies manually (not relying on the loaded assembly in RuleUtilities.AnalysisAssemblies and contruct the list of callers in the BeforeAnalysis method.
RuleUtilities.GetAssembly(
RuleUtilities.AnalysisAssemblies
.First().Directory + "\\" + additionalAssemblyFilename)
.Types.SelectMany(type => type.Members)
.Where(member => member.IsPublic)
.Where(CanBeCastedToMethod)
.Cast<Method>()
.SelectMany(CallGraph.CallersFor);
With this approach I can contruct a list of callers, for each of the assemblies and for the benchmark class constructor. Works perfectly i VS2010.

What is the use of reflection in Java/C# etc [duplicate]

This question already has answers here:
What is reflection and why is it useful?
(23 answers)
Closed 6 years ago.
I was just curious, why should we use reflection in the first place?
// Without reflection
Foo foo = new Foo();
foo.hello();
// With reflection
Class cls = Class.forName("Foo");
Object foo = cls.newInstance();
Method method = cls.getMethod("hello", null);
method.invoke(foo, null);
We can simply create an object and call the class's method, but why do the same using forName, newInstance and getMthod functions?
To make everything dynamic?
Simply put: because sometimes you don't know either the "Foo" or "hello" parts at compile time.
The vast majority of the time you do know this, so it's not worth using reflection. Just occasionally, however, you don't - and at that point, reflection is all you can turn to.
As an example, protocol buffers allows you to generate code which either contains full statically-typed code for reading and writing messages, or it generates just enough so that the rest can be done by reflection: in the reflection case, the load/save code has to get and set properties via reflection - it knows the names of the properties involved due to the message descriptor. This is much (much) slower but results in considerably less code being generated.
Another example would be dependency injection, where the names of the types used for the dependencies are often provided in configuration files: the DI framework then has to use reflection to construct all the components involved, finding constructors and/or properties along the way.
It is used whenever you (=your method/your class) doesn't know at compile time the type should instantiate or the method it should invoke.
Also, many frameworks use reflection to analyze and use your objects. For example:
hibernate/nhibernate (and any object-relational mapper) use reflection to inspect all the properties of your classes so that it is able to update them or use them when executing database operations
you may want to make it configurable which method of a user-defined class is executed by default by your application. The configured value is String, and you can get the target class, get the method that has the configured name, and invoke it, without knowing it at compile time.
parsing annotations is done by reflection
A typical usage is a plug-in mechanism, which supports classes (usually implementations of interfaces) that are unknown at compile time.
You can use reflection for automating any process that could usefully use a list of the object's methods and/or properties. If you've ever spent time writing code that does roughly the same thing on each of an object's fields in turn -- the obvious way of saving and loading data often works like that -- then that's something reflection could do for you automatically.
The most common applications are probably these three:
Serialization (see, e.g., .NET's XmlSerializer)
Generation of widgets for editing objects' properties (e.g., Xcode's Interface Builder, .NET's dialog designer)
Factories that create objects with arbitrary dependencies by examining the classes for constructors and supplying suitable objects on creation (e.g., any dependency injection framework)
Using reflection, you can very easily write configurations that detail methods/fields in text, and the framework using these can read a text description of the field and find the real corresponding field.
e.g. JXPath allows you to navigate objects like this:
//company[#name='Sun']/address
so JXPath will look for a method getCompany() (corresponding to company), a field in that called name etc.
You'll find this in lots of frameworks in Java e.g. JavaBeans, Spring etc.
It's useful for things like serialization and object-relational mapping. You can write a generic function to serialize an object by using reflection to get all of an object's properties. In C++, you'd have to write a separate function for every class.
I have used it in some validation classes before, where I passed a large, complex data structure in the constructor and then ran a zillion (couple hundred really) methods to check the validity of the data. All of my validation methods were private and returned booleans so I made one "validate" method you could call which used reflection to invoke all the private methods in the class than returned booleans.
This made the validate method more concise (didn't need to enumerate each little method) and garuanteed all the methods were being run (e.g. someone writes a new validation rule and forgets to call it in the main method).
After changing to use reflection I didn't notice any meaningful loss in performance, and the code was easier to maintain.
in addition to Jons answer, another usage is to be able to "dip your toe in the water" to test if a given facility is present in the JVM.
Under OS X a java application looks nicer if some Apple-provided classes are called. The easiest way to test if these classes are present, is to test with reflection first
some times you need to create a object of class on fly or from some other place not a java code (e.g jsp). at that time reflection is useful.

Is it good practice to call module functions directly in VB.NET?

I have a Util module in my VB.NET program that has project-wide methods such as logging and property parsing. The general practice where I work seems to be to call these methods directly without prefixing them with Util. When I was new to VB, it took me a while to figure out where these methods/functions were coming from. As I use my own Util methods now, I can't help thinking that it's a lot clearer and more understandable to add Util. before each method call (you know immediately that it's user-defined but not within the current class, and where to find it), and is hardly even longer. What's the general practice when calling procedures/functions of VB modules? Should we prefix them with the module name or not?
Intellisense (and "Goto Definition") should make it trivial to find where things are located, but I always preface the calls with a better namespace, just for clarity of reading. Then it's clear that it's a custom function, and not something built in or local to the class you're working with.
Maybe there's a subtle difference I'm missing, but I tend to use shared classes instead of modules for any code that's common and self-contained - it just seems easier to keep track of for me, and it would also enforce your rule of prefacing it, since you can't just call it from everywhere without giving a namespace to call it from.
I usually put the complete namespace for a shared function, for readibility.
Call MyNameSpace.Utils.MySharedFunction()
Util is such a generic name.
Example from the .Net framework. You have System.Web.HttpUtility.UrlEncode(...). Usually you refer to this as HttpUtility.UrlEncode since you have an import statement at the top.
The name of the class which has the static utility methods should be readable and explainable. That is good practice. If you have good class names they might just as well reside in a Utils namespace, but the class name should not be Utils.
Put all your logging in a Logger class. All your string handing in a StringUtils class etc. And try to keep the class names as specific as possible, and I'd rather have more classes with fewer functions than the other way around.