I have created an angular application in which data are being shown in a table. An user can update the entry in table cell. What I want is, sync among different browser tabs as well as different browsers for multiple users. As an user updates a value, it should get updated everywhere. Suggest some way to achieve this.
In tabs, you can take a look to Webstorage (localStorage is implemented in all modern browsers), but in browsers I think that it's impossible or at least, it has not an inmmediate solution...
Related
We've a net of vending machines of a few types and we have common API to rule them and get data from our vendors. The aim is to show live graphical schema for this net in a browser. The schema should include icons of machines, centers, servers etc. and the lines, connecting the objects with each other.
It's evident that the topography is flexible. We can set up new machines, change bindings, etc. Thus the schema should be traced automatically: I wish to give it some objects and relations as an array or JS object and see a graphical schema in the browser.
All the object should be clickable. I wish to click to the vendor icon and get statistics for it.
And last but not the least, this should work real-time. An operator should monitor this live schema, and, if trouble occurs, take some actions.
Back-end doesn't cause problems. I can do a DB and push all business-logic to server-side. But I wonder, is there a perfect way to display such stuff at front-end? Is there a ready-made solution for such kind of diagram?
Well, I don't think a ready-made solution of such a specific set of requirements exists (but I could easily be wrong on that). You could however take a look at D3. D3 is a Javascript 'data-driven' library to create dynamic charts and graphs. Maybe you can find something useful for your use case, as the library is quite flexible and offers many features.
I am facing the following challenge in an XPage: There are three databases with exactly the same views in it. The goal is to unite these three views from the three databases in one XPage and one view component!
AFAIK, one can usually provide just one view per view component. Currently, I have a Java back end where the documents are fetched. They are then processed to HTML markup and made more beautiful / functional by using jQuery data tables.
I see (at least) three disadvantages:
It is quite some code and if you want to display another view from the databases you quickly run into boiler plate code...
It is not too fast as it takes up to 30 sec. to fetch and display all records.
I can hardly image that my way is best practice.
Has anyone ever faced this challenge? I would like to reduce Java code, make it faster and use some standard component if possible.
Tim has good questions in his comment. With your current approach make sure you use ViewNavigator cache which is the fastest way to retrieve view entries:
Notes/Domino Release 8.52 or greater
View.setAutoUpdate must be False
ViewNavigator cache must be enabled
ViewNavigator.getNext() (or getPrev) must be used
http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/ddwiki.nsf/dx/Fast_Retrieval_of_View_Data_Using_the_ViewNavigator_Cache
I have a general requirement in my current project to make an existing XPage application faster. One thing we looked at was how to speed up some slower type-ahead fields, and one solution to this which seems to be fast, is implementing it using FTSearch rather than the DBColumn we originally had. I want to get advice on whether this would be an OK approach, or if there are any suggestions to do what we need in a different way.
Background:
While there are a number of factors affecting the speed (like network latency, server OS, available server memory etc.), as we are using 8.5.3, we have optimized the application in general as far as we can, making use of the IBM Toolkit to find problem areas, and also using the features IBM added to help with this in 8.5.3 (e.g. Partial Execution, using the optimized JS and CSS option, etc.). Unfortunately we are stuck with the server running on a 32bit Windows OS with 3.5Gb Ram for another few months.
One of the slowest elements to respond are in certain type-aheads which reference a large number of documents. The worst one averages around 5 or 6 seconds before the suggested list appears for a type-ahead enabled field.
It uses SSJS to call a java class to perform a dbcolumn call (using Ferry Kranenburg's XPages Snippet) to get a unique list from a view, then back in SSJS it loops though the array to check if each entry contains the search key value, and if found it adds a highlight (bold) html tag around the search text in the word, then returns the formatted list back to the browser.
I added a print statement to output the elapsed time it takes to run the code, and on average today on our dev server it is around 3250 ms.
I tried a few things to see how we could make this process faster:
Added a Java class to do all processing (so not using SSJS). This only saved an average of 100ms.
Using a view-scoped Managed Bean, I loaded the unique Lookup list into memory when the page is loaded. This produces a really fast type-ahead response (16ms), but I suspect this is a very bad way to do this with a large data set - and could really impact the general server if multiple users were accessing the application. I tried to find information on what would be considered a large object, but couldn't find any guidance or recommendation on how much is too much to store in memory (I searched JSF and XPage sites). Does anyone have any suggestions on this?
Still in a Java class - instead of performing a dblookup to get the 'list' of all values to search through, I have the code run a FT Search to get the doc collection, then loop each doc to extract the field value I want and add those to a 'SortedSet' (which automatically doesn't allow duplicates), then loop the sorted set to insert the bold tags around the search term, and return that to the browser. This takes on average 100ms - which is great and barely noticeable. Are there an drawbacks to this approach - or reasons I should not do it this way?
Thanks for any feedback or advice on this.
Pam.
Update Aug, 14. 2013: I tried another approach (inspired by the IBM/Tony McGuckin Insights application on OpenNtf) as the Company Search type-ahead in that is using managed beans and is fast across a lot of data.
4 . Although the Insights application deals with data split across multiple databases, the principle for the type-ahead is similar. I couldn't use a view with getAllEntriesByKey though as I needed to search for a string within the text too, not just at the start of the entry. I tried creating a ViewEntryCollection based on a view FTSearch, but as we have a lot of duplicate names in the column, this didn't give the unique list I wanted. I then tried using a NotesViewNavigator on a categorized view, and looping through that. This produced the unique list I needed, but it turned out to be slower than any of the other methods above. (I did implement these ViewNavigator performance tips).
From my standpoint, performance may be affected by any of many layers every Domino application (not only XPages) consists of.
From top - browser (DOM, JS, CSS, HTML...), network (latencies, DNS, SSO...) to application layer (effective algorithms, caches), database/API (amount of data, indexes, reader names...) and OS/hardware (disks, memory...)
According to things you tested:
That is interresting, but could be expected: SSJS is cached and may use lower level API to get data (NAPI).
For your environment (32bit/3.5G RAM - I expect your statement about 3.5M is typo) I DO NOT recommend to cache big lists, especially if you apply it as a pattern to many fields/forms/applications. Cache in WeakHashMap could be more stable, though.
Use of FT search is perfectly fine, unless you need data that update frequently. FT index need some time and resources to update.
My suggestion is: go for FT, if it solves your problem. Definitely, troubleshoot FT performance in some heavy performance test on your server first.
(I cannot comment because of my low reputation)
I have recently been tackling with a similar problem. Here are some additional points to consider:
Are there many duplicate keywords in the view? Consider making a categorized view for #DbColumn.
FTSearching a view is often slower than a database, I believe. See Andre Guirard's article. Consider using db.FTSearch() and refining your FT query to include view's selection #Formula, if possible.
The FT index can be updated programmatically with db.updateFTIndex(). If keywords are added rarely, but need to be instantly available, you can perform index update in keyword document's QuerySave event (or similar). We used this approach when the keywords were stored in different (much smaller) database and the update was very fast.
The memory consumption can be checked this way:
Install XPages Toolbox from OpenNTF.
Open your application.
Create a JVM memory dump (Session dumps - Generate Heap Dump).
Install Eclipse Memory Analyzer Tool
Install IBM Diagnostic Tool Framework into Memory Analyzer.
Load your memory dump into MAT. You will see every Java object and their sizes.
In the end, I believe that there is no single general answer to your question. You need to test different approaches to find the fastest solution in your environment.
One problem with FT search is this error:
The full text index for this database is in use
Based on my experience this will occur for a while (maybe a few seconds) when the indexer task starts to index the database. If your users are not very demanding they can just try again and it will probably work.
But in many cases you want to minimize the errors the users get and will have to handle this error nicely. I've built my own FTSearch method which waits a bit and tries again until the error is not received. This will show as slowness to the user instead of error.
I am currently architecting a large SharePoint deployment.
This deployment has the potential to grow to petabytes in size over the course of several years.
One of the current issues we are discussing is the option of storing our data in SharePoint using InfoPath Forms. Some of these forms contain hundres of fields and require a lot of mapping to content types for persistence and search. Our search requirement is primarily a singular identifier and NOT the contents of the forms, although I am told I should preempt the "want" to search in the future.
We require our information to be utilised for secondary purposes (such as reporting etc). The information MUST be accessible instantly after persisting to the system.
My core questions therefore are:
What are the benefit/risks of this approach compared to storing
our data in a singular relational store using web-service
persistence?
If we decided on this approach what would be the
impact of changing the forms, content-types over time?
What happens when our farm grows beyond a single web-application / site collection how accessible will the information be?
Will I know where it is and how portable will the information be overtime?
1.)
Benefit:
Form templates can be created & deployed (relatively) easy
You can easily configure Field Validation
Probably no code involved
Risks:
Hitting SharePoint 2010 Limits (not so uncommon as you might
think)
Needs careful form design/planning (correct XML structure)
Information only accessible via SharePoint Object model or
WebService's (very slow)
2.) Well this is a tough one. Changing the form template and re-deploying is easy and only takes a few minutes. However changing the structure (underlying XML) of the template can get you in trouble very easily, because older (filled out) forms will be invalid - there is an option to "upgrade" older forms out-of-the-box, but in my experience it never worked as it supposed to.
Content Types behave very similar, say you want to delete a column from a content type because it's no longer needed - you'll have to remove all references to it, which means removing all items so you can delete the column.
3.) Well portability is definitly an issue with InfoPath, because it heavily relies on the corresponding URL structure. You absolutely can add more site collections, but this means you have to deploy your form template to each site collection. Information (filled out forms) can't easily be shared between site collection's because each form contains the SourceURL (where it came from) and the Namespace of the template (which changes constantly once you deploy).
Considering your requirements, i would strongly recommend a relational store instead of InfoPath - simply because it is not designed to be a data storage.
I would use a SQL database to store the data and a custom UI (WebPart or Application Page) to perform CRUD operations. This means that the information is not actually stored in SharePoint - just displayed (which also means that it can't be searched with the builtin SharePoint Search). There is also the possibilty to use the Business Connectivity Services (which basically does all of the above without you needing to create a custom UI - however very slow with large amount of data).
If you do need the information just in SharePoint, why not just make all this happen with Lists only?
This is going to be a long one and may not have an answer just because there's no silver bullet for what you're looking for. It's mostly insight and ultimately the choice is up to you.
the option of storing our data in SharePoint using InfoPath Forms
This statement throws me a little. SharePoint data is stored in SharePoint (well, SQL technically) but InfoPath is just a UI layer for accessing any part of that data.
Some of these forms contain 100s of fields and require alot of mapping to content types for persistence and search
From this I assume there are multiple forms which would mean different types of data being accessed (and probably different purposes). Hundreds of fields is no problem and it really boils down to managing the form and view design.
From the form side you should check out cxpartners form design crib sheet. This gives you a nice standard to follow to manage all those fields. Another thing would be to look at breaking the form up in tabs or views itself (in InfoPath) based on what the user needs to fill out. Basically it breaks down to not creating a form with 100s of fields on one massively scrolling screen the user will just freak out over.
Same with the views on the form or document library you're storing the form data in. InfoPath forms are just xml stored in a library (so regardless of how many fields you have, the footprint is pretty minimal). You don't want to map and surface every field in the form nor do you want to have a view with 100 columns on it. You should look at breaking down the views as they're fit for purpose, with only a few hundred items in each view with a few columns. It's a balancing act too as you don't want to create 100s of views either so you need to find out what's right. A good B.A. or Information Architect will help with this with the SharePoint/InfoPath guru and business user helping out.
We require our information to be utilised for secondary purposes (such as reporting etc). The information MUST be accessible instantly
This is another requirement that's going to be a little difficult to meet exactly. If the library has thousands of items (or 10s of thousands) and a view has dozens of fields then expect the view to come to crawl (especially if the user is insistent on "seeing everything" and wants the limits of each view to be set to 1000 items, like anyone could process that much information at once). Instant access is difficult if you're keeping everything online for a long time (like for reporting). There's the operational side where users are filling out forms, finding forms, editing them, etc. and for that you only want a few hundred items to be live at any given moment (up to a few thousand but you need to be careful on the views). If you have a list with 100,000 items in it and users are using this for daily activities and trying to run reports for trending or long term operations against it, you're going to lose the performance battle. Look at doing reporting offline, potentially shipping the data that's reportable to a second source like SQL and using SSRS against it. Performance Point is an option but adds a layer of complexity to the architecture. The question will ultimately fall to what reporting looks like and how important is it in relation to daily operations.
To try to answer your questions directly:
The benefits to using SharePoint over a database are that the data can be easily viewed and sliced and diced up. Creating a view is child's play and can quickly show you useful information like # of sales in a month or customer feedback grouped by call centre person. SharePoint makes it easy to view this information and even setup dashboards, hook in KPIs, etc. without having to get some developer to craft custom web pages. As far as risks go, you need to be careful with letting things grow organically and out of control. Don't let the users design views of data, they generally want something but not sure and will ask for all columns to be available which they just export to Excel to slice and dice. Make sure there's a good design around the views and lists and they're fit for purpose and meet what needs the user is trying to get out of the data. Ask the question of what they're looking for and why, that will help shape what to expose.
Any change needs to be thought out and planned and tested. It's no different in SharePoint if you add a column to a list as you would by adding a column to a SQL database. Form updates should be considered and while you won't get it 100% right the first time, you should try to get as much as possible without going overboard and putting in crazy things like 100 "blank" fields that are players to be named later. Strike a balance by understanding the needs of the users and company and where things are going. Hopefully someone will have a vision of what this thing might be when it grows up and that'll go a long way to understanding the impact of change.
Data is just xml and as long as you're not doing stupid stuff in the form like hard coding absolute paths to services (use data connection libraries) the impact of growth will be minimal. Growing beyond a web application into multiple ones is a pretty big change and not something to be taken lightly. Even splitting site collections out is big and there needs to be a really good reason for this. Site collections can handle thousands of sites and millions of documents without issue. Web applications are really there for dividing up areas of interest or separation of purpose (like team sites on one web app and a publishing portal on another) and not really meant for splitting data due to growth concerns.
Like I said, there's no silver bullet here and what you're asking for is an architecture for a solution that nobody here has all the requirements for. Hope this helps.
I am building a tool that searches people based on a number of attributes. The values for these attributes are scattered across several systems.
As an example, dateOfBirth is stored in a SQL Server database as part of system ABC. That person's sales region assignment is stored in some horrible legacy database. Other attributes are stored in a system only accessible over an XML web service.
To make matters worse, the the legacy database and the web service can be really slow.
What strategies and tips should I consider for implementing a search across all these systems?
Note: Although I posted an answer, I'm not confident its a great answer. I don't intend to accept my own answer unless no one else gives better insight.
You could consider using an indexing mechanism to retrieve and locally index the data across all the systems, and then perform your searches against the index. Searches would be an awful lot faster and more reliable.
Of course, this just shifts the problem from one part of your system to another - now your indexing mechanism has to handle failures and heterogeneous systems, but that may be an easier problem to solve.
Another factor is how often the data changes. If you have to query data in real-time that goes stale very quickly, then indexing may not be practical.
If you can get away with a restrictive search, start by returning a list based on the search criteria corresponding to the fastest data source. Then join up those records with the other systems and remove records which don't match the search criteria.
If you have to implement OR logic, this approach is not going to work.
While not an actual answer, this might at least get you partway to a workable solution. We had a similar situation at a previous employer - lots of data sources, different ways of accessing those data sources, different access permissions, military/government/civilian sources, etc. We used Mule, which is built around the Enterprise Service Bus concept, to connect these data sources to our application. My details are a bit sketchy, as I wasn't the actual implementor, just an integrator, but what we did was define a channel in Mule. Then you write a simple integration piece to go between the channel and the data source, and the application and the channel. The integration piece does the work of making the actual query, and formatting the results, so we had a generic SQL integration piece for accessing a database, and for things like web services, we had some base classes that implemented common functionality, so the actual customization of the integration piecess was a lot less work than it sounds like. The application could then query the channel, which would handle accessing the various data sources, transforming them into a normalized bit of XML, and return the results to the application.
This had a lot of advantages for our situation. We could include new data sources for existing queries by simply connecting them to the channel - the application didn't have to know or care what data sources where there, as it only looked at the data from the channel. Since data can be pushed or pulled from the channel, we could have a data source update the application when, for example, it was updated.
It took a while to get it configured and working, but once we got it going, we were pretty successful with it. In our demo setup, we ended up with 4 or 5 applications acting as both producers and consumers of data, and connecting to maybe 10 data sources.
Have you thought of moving the data into a separate structure?
For example, Lucene stores data to be searched in a schema-less inverted indexed. You could have a separate program that retrieves data from all your different sources and puts them in a Lucene index. Your search could work against this index and the search results could contain a unique identifier and the system it came from.
http://lucene.apache.org/java/docs/
(There are implementations in other languages as well)
Have you taken a look at YQL? It may not be the perfect solution but I might give you starting point to work from.
Well, for starters I'd parallelize the queries to the different systems. That way we can minimize the query time.
You might also want to think about caching and aggregating the search attributes for subsequent queries in order to speed things up.
You have the option of creating an aggregation service or middleware that aggregates all the different systems so that you can provide a single interface for querying. If you do that, this is where I'd do the previously mentioned cache and parallize optimizations.
However, with all of that it you will need weighing up the development time/deployment time /long term benefits of the effort against migrating the old legacy database to a faster more modern one. You haven't said how tied into other systems those databases are so it may not be a very viable option in the short term.
EDIT: in response to data going out of date. You can consider caching if your data if you don't need the data to always match the database in real time. Also, if some data doesn't change very often (e.g. dates of birth) then you should cache them. If you employ caching then you could make your system configurable as to what tables/columns to include or exclude from the cache and you could give each table/column a personalizable cache timeout with an overall default.
Use Pentaho/Kettle to copy all of the data fields that you can search on and display into a local MySQL database
http://www.pentaho.com/products/data_integration/
Create a batch script to run nightly and update your local copy. Maybe even every hour. Then, write your query against your local MySQL database and display the results.