My company is upgrading our database hardware to facilitate a data process that potentially may not work (... long story) and in order to somewhat justify the purchase in case the data process does not work, the idea has been floated around of rewriting the site using Oracle APEX. I am wondering about the limitations of APEX and have been unable to find a solution to a few questions.
I currently have a fairly complex, dynamic ecommerce website written in NodeJS and ExpressJS using EJS for templating. There is a lot of logic done inside the .ejs files and the partial templates themselves are re-used in various places throughout the site. We are using ORDS calls from the Node server to retreive data from the database.
I am mainly curious about how one would go about implementing something similar to EJS partial views in APEX. I am pretty new to APEX (2-3 months working on another application) so I haven't gotten too in depth into the way templates are used, past the normal #REGION_01# substitution of simple elements.
I am assuming that most of the logic (deciding whether to show element A or element B based on a value from the database record of the product) would be done in PL/SQL or in a separate JS file.
Is something like the following possible?
A template containing a "Add To Cart" Button, MSRP, Sale Price, and a (HTML) table displaying possible discounts based on the quantity purchased
A template containing product information, like the product ID, name, manufacturer, and a small description of the product
A template combining the previous 2 options and a picture of the product into a row that can be re-used across the site
If someone has experience with this sort of thing, or could point me towards some good reference material on a similar topic, I would appreciate it.
I've been working with Oracle APEX for a while, specially in the front-end department because it does lack a bit in regards templates.
To answer your question. It depends on what you mean by template
If templates are the apex template objects
You can create and customize templates on Shared Components -> Templates. I'm almost sure you need to create new stuff or duplicate because the vanilla ones are locked.
Another option is to create plugins for you app which will function similarly and can be exported/shared with other projects and people.
If Template is just a page that you will keep changing the record displayed
Sure, you can create many things using the a blank page and adding the components. I've on teams developing ERPs, Mobile Apps, Stock Integration with Marketplaces (needed some Java, though) and several custom made Application that are not available out-of-the-box.
Related
I am trying to figure out how to pass data between database apps to theme app extensions. In backend, Merchant can create, edit and delete data and it will update database. I also try using Metafield in Product, but when I want to assign metafield to multiple products, it take too much time to save metafield in every product.
How can I pass data from Database to Theme App Extension to update latest data to display on Online Store?
My theme app extension as below:
(https://i.stack.imgur.com/aQ4CD.png)
https://i.stack.imgur.com/UJ8De.png
You have two choices. One, the obvious one, is using Liquid, and rendering your custom data using Liquid, which implies, Metafields. You say that takes too much time, but the reality is, that is by far the best way.
Your second option is to use an App Proxy. It is slower, and prone to network problems obviously, but it does allow your extension to access data from the App's database.
Hope that helps.
I'm looking into upgrading a .net 2.0 app. The app is used by the public authorities of a certain city to keep track of expenses and generate reports and forms.
The reports and forms were generated in VS2005 using Crystal report. They follow a well defined layout, like official documents usually do.
I am looking at options to upgrade the application and the main problem I have is in determining how to deal with the crystal report files.
I have successfully upgraded to VS2008, but any version after that doesn't have CR anymore, so my company would have to pruchase CR separately and because the client and my company are both tight, I'm looking at alternatives...
The obvious one is using SSRS. I have never touched it before in my life, but after playing around with it for a bit, I get the impression that it is not very well suited to generating forms with lots of non-tabular content and lots of formatting. Or am I wrong?
It seems that every line has to be drawn separately. There is no (that I can see) accurate way of positioning lines for formatting...
But I'm just a beginner, so I might be getting this all wrong?
If that is the case, are there any other alternatives to CR and SSRS?
I was thinking of maybe having a separate MVC web site project in the solution. Have that generate the layout in html and css with data from my entity model, then view the result in a (built-in or not) web browser. Am I overcomplicating on this?
I really need advice from somebody who's done that kind of thing before.
What SSRS is good for:
Talking to SQL Server, much faster than other products as it in many cases retains the database better when in other programs IMHO they repeat query at times.
Designing collapsable grids and chart objects from datasets. You can have 'groups' that can nest aggregates of collapsed values and can be un collapsed or collapsed on demand based on expressions, parameters, or a recusive parent set.
A web service for deployment ease where you can deploy one or many objects. You can also write add ons for this service with C# and the ReportingService.asmx web service.
You can talk to the web service directly in a 'form' object in HTML and manipulate it's output.
You can schedule reports to send out via email and file saves automatically to clients or internal users.
What SSRS IS NOT GOOD FOR:
It is not event driven hardly at all except for parameters. You cannot click on many things and get other parts on the form itself to update. You may do an 'action' that goes to another location, report, or site. But in essence you are calling a seperate object, not the same instance again.
Multiple layers of reporting. Beyond tweaking tool tips you cannot do 'hover over' reporting without hacking SSRS. You can make javascript windows show other reports but it is not baked in to SSRS. So you are either clicking into new reports or tab stops in a report but not getting hover over quick objects beyond text and expressions that are in tool tips.
What do you want before considering what you need to impement?
I want to input and export things while talking to my database - ASP.NET with potentially HTML 5 or MVC4 if you want to be very new. ASP.NET is made for actively talking to a server and taking commands IN as well as OUT.
I want a form to auto update periodically on a page as a landing site and dashboard - AJAX and Javascript on top of HTML, Java or ASP.NET.
I want to create reports that exist on a Server and can be hosted on a wide variety of platforms in .NET via web service calls - SSRS.
SSRS's biggest selling point to me is it's reusability once you dial a report in. They are pretty easy to create, easy to configure, easy to deploy, and if you get a little advanced in calling the webservice you can get SSRS report objects in other technologies if you want.
There is Crystal reports for VS2010 and VS2012. It is just not shipped with them. You can download the installation from here: http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-7824
I am running through the same decision process at this time. There is a .NET product from a company called "Windward" that will allow you to design your reports in Microsoft Office. If you are in the MS ecosystem already or want your users to design reports instead of always calling on you, this might help.
Their template design tool is called AutoTag and you can deploy these template to their .NET based engine in a few lines of code.
I know the question is regarding SSRS vs. Crystal comparison but thought you should know there are other alternatives and some can make life easier
Ryan
We are currently using a number of open source and commercial products to store different type of information (in our internal network). All these products come with their own repositories (usually a database) and their own search capabilities and store different type of information.
Currently the list of products is as follows:
Wordpress
Jira
Confluence
Sharepoint
Dynamics AX
Moodle
The problem we are facing is that when one needs to search for information, one needs to login into all these different systems and execute a search on each one.
I Googled for "search engine frontend", "meta search engine", etc. but i was not able to find something obvious that solves our problem. At this point, i have to say that we are not interested in building one "central repository" to be searched, but instead we are in need of a frontend that will accept the query from the user, "package it" to the format that each of the individual search engines understand, receive the respone (JSON or XML) and present it to the user
Any suggestions on how we could solve it?
Your strategy is right: If you are not interested in building a central index, you will need an application that accepts the query from the user, converts it to the format that each of the individual search engines understand, receives the responses and presents them to the user. This is exactly what a meta search engine does. Even if you use a framework (e.g. Carrot2), much work will probably remain to write those query and result transformers, and you will probably experience slow results because the meta search can never be faster than the underlying search modules of the components you search through.
Instead of querying each backend separately you can put your data into one backend.
You could export your data to a Apache Solr server and use a frontend like CorePages, http://www.corepages.biz . You could add a backlink to your data so you can directly jump to your search result entry, f. e. a Jira Ticket or a wiki article.
Or at least could anybody point me to docs about its crazy proprietary url parameters and html field name obfuscation? I can only suppose this is caused by SharePoint...
The main problem is, given a start page built with SharePoint, I can't recreate a form post with a programmative client because:
field names vary, they are appended with a some sort of id, hash, whatever (I think session.wise? Not sure)
tracing HTTP traffic on my side, I see the HTTP request is packed with strange parameters like __REQUESTDIGEST, __VIEWSTATE, and many others
Is this an intentional protection device put up by SharePoint? Which is the underlying architecture and which objects are involved (script callbacks, ... )?
(BTW, I'm not doing anything evil, just trying to extract public government data from a website).
Thanks.
SharePoint is nothing more than an ASP.NET Application, SharePoint completely Built on top of ASP.NET 2.0.
Being said that __VIEWSTATE is nothing but a Hidden Field that has the View State Information
Coming to __REQUESTDIGEST this is an Intentional Protection, this carries some sort of
securito validation which is called FormDigest
And finally to answer your Question, You will not be able to guess field and stuffs unless you have control to change the sourcecode of the application. Reason why the Name of the fields looks like obfuscated is because those controls are not handwritten but generated by the Code of ASP.NET Engine and parser, Reason field having such a name called Naming Container
One suggestion I would say is that, rather than trying to scraping the screen data, you can try alternate approaches, like each of the List in the SharePoint has the XML Feed inbuilt,try to consume it, if you have access to the site, try to retrieve the information using export to excel etc.
In addition to RSS, SharePoint also has a Web Services interface that you can use to get at and interact with data stored in SharePoint in a programatic way.
I've built a web part for Sharepoint that retrieves data from an external service. I'd like to display the items in a way that's UI-compatible with Sharepoint (fits in with its surroundings.)
I'm aware of the "DataFormWebPart" but was unable to get one working properly. It requires a valid DataSource and I was unable to build one from the results of a web service call... Part of the problem is that my web service wrappers don't expose the XML return info, rather I have a bunch of deserialized objects. There doesn't seem to be an easy way to turn actual objects into a datasource, or populate a "generic" datasource from object data.
I could use an SPGridView to get the same UI, but the grid control doesn't have much in the way of smarts -and- it forces every field into its own column. I'd prefer to render each list item as a single cell with complex rendering (for instance the way that StackOverflow shows its lists of questions.) I'd also like to get as much of the Sharepoint-standard UI as possible, such as the sorting, filtering, and paging controls.
So, first: Has anyone here written a Sharepoint control that does this, and if so do you have sample code to share? If not: am I overlooking some useful control, whether MS-supplied or available in an external library?
Thanks!
Steve
Sharepoint: Best way to display lists
of non-Sharepoint content with
“compatible” UI?
Take a look at the built in sharepoint web controls:
Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls Namespace
It contains all the controls used in sharepoint. I'd tell you more, but the documentation is very thorough.
Problem with SharePoint is that there are a bunch of different ways to do this. If your data is not changing too often and is not overly large it may be worth considering entering it into a list for display.
If you have the Enterprise licence it may be worth getting your data into the BDC and using it there.
you may have to convert the objects into xml or use the serialised objects with the XML webpart for display. This still has the issue of custom rendering using XSLT.
Here's a great article that explains how to configure BDC connections to web services using the BDC Definition Editor:
Creating a Web Service Connection by Using the Business Data Catalog Definition Editor
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb737887.aspx
The best way to do this IMO is to make a Web Part. As a Web Part the UI will be automatically rendered to be the same as the theme the site is using (unless you override it) and it will be able to be placed anywhere by anyone with admin privileges.
Tutorial on making a Web Part
Tutorial on packaging and deploying a Web Part
Example Web Part Source Code
You could create a custom web part and use an SPGridView. You say you don't like it, because it forces every field into its own column, but that's not true. You can create a template (ITemplate) for every column and fully customize what's shown inside it, just like you would using a normal ASP.Net GridView. Using this approach I've added the little "New" images right next to a list item's Title, just like SharePoint does itself.