I'm using Ulysses application for iPad. This app uses iCloud as a sync system. In case of conflicts the app shows a popover with the descriptions of the devices involved.
In particular:
Name of the device (e.g. Matteo's Macbook Pro)
Time stamps (e.g. 22nd March 2015 9:34)
Choosing the right version of the note it's than possible to complete the synchronization.
I've already setup the icloud stack to handle the synchronization, and it works pretty good but i can't figure out how, in case of conflicts, retrieve that kind of informations.
Any suggestions?
Listen for the NSPersistentStoreDidImportUbiquitousContentChangesNotification and rather than just calling mergeChangesFromContextDidSaveNotification:, first examine the two versions.
This can be done by retrieving the userInfo dictionary of the notification which should contain the NSManagedObjectIDs of the changed objects under the NSUpdatedObjectsKey.
Related
Last year, I developed a simple Angular-Express-SQLite based application for a local Warehouse(Logistics Hub) which was used to keep track of daily incoming and outgoing trucks with information like their weight, origin, etc. and I deployed the app on an offline desktop.
Everything went well until I came to know that the computer operator of the Warehouse resold the app to other Warehouses for a decent amount.
Now, the first Warehouse owner has contacted me again with some changes in the app with some crucial inputs as per the new guidelines from the government, I'm looking for some solution to prevent the app from getting stolen again.
I'm looking for a solution that is as light in size as possible because of the type of desktops the app runs on are way too cheap(with lowest possible configuration), hence the choice of SQLite instead of some other Database providers.
The app should be deployed in such a manner that it can't be copy-pasted from one machine to other. It could be achieved by simple, not so secure methods too as the operators aren't that tech-savvy and only know the bare minimum knowledge about Computers, like copy-paste.
So I came across a low-level workaround since I'll be the one who'd set up the application on the client machine.
While initialising the application, an encrypted entry in the database could be set up with the name of the computer by reading the environment variable using express/node.
process.env.COMPUTERNAME
Or using some other system variable unique to that particular Computer and then comparing the stored value and current value on every login.
As Joachim already said in his comment, if the App has internet access, you can check for a license-key or something similar on a server.
Perhaps something like PKG can help, which compiles your sources into a single executable file. PKG on npmjs
Some years ago Apple released the iCloud sync of Core Data apps. Then I released an app for iPad / iPhone / MAC with a shared model using the new Apple mechanism.
Things have not gone as expected. The sync mechanism sometimes doesn't work. For example, the last months, in my case, rarely the sync ends well through my 3 devices. Uploading objects in general works fine. But the download process of new or deleted objects normaly crash.
Apple released some time ago a way to force the devices to redownload ALL the objects of the model (NSPersistentStoreRebuildFromUbiquitousContentOption) that normaly works but it's not an acceptable solution.
My questions: Does someone have accomplished to get iCloud + Core Data working fine? What about running iCloud+CD under iOS 9 + El capitan, any experience?
I'm evaluating migrate to new CloudKIT API but I don't like the idea of self-manage an object upload if the device is offline. Does the new mechanism of push notifications indicating model changes works fine?
Thanks
This is a question I've researched deeply in these last few months, I'm afraid without a definitive answer.
Here's what I can tell you from my experience:
If you, like me, don't want to start over with CloudKit, which works reliably but requires you to manually handle much of the syncing work and the conversion of CKRecords to ManagedObjects, give Ensembles.io a chance: it's working very well for me, the layer between Core Data and iCloud really is working in my case, where CD+iCloud didn't.
I'm using the 1.0 version, which is open source and supports iCloud as one of its possible backends (and version 2.0, paid, supports even more); in a few days I got reliable sync with automatic de-duplication (you have to provide a uniqueIdentifier property to have it working, but I already had something in place...).
The only issue I haven't figured out yet: sometimes (1 case out of 10, I'd say) an object doesn't sync right away when edited or deleted, but it always get on the other device when another object is added, edited or deleted: nothing got lost and everything has been handled "automatically" for me when these delays occurred, but still, I'd prefer that everything always synced right away.
Ensembles also has a good logging for debug, something you'll appreciate coming from vanilla CD+iCloud.
If you want to give it a try, you should take a look at these resources:
Ensembles.io company website
Ensembles on Github
A presentation/introduction from the creator of Ensembles
This, and other posts, on a blog I found after I implemented Ensembles in my Swift project; I could have used these informations, if I had found them before... but they're more useful if you're writing Swift code, if you're Objective C then the official Ensembles book is the way to go
If you are absolutely sure that you don't want layers / third party code between Core Data and iCloud (I thought so myself, but I've changed my mind when I realized I lost three months of my life and got nothing in return), the implementations of Core Data + iCloud that I've found online and looked more promising were these:
Sample Library Style Core Data Apps with iCloud Integration, looks a bit complex to me, but I've read many good things
Tim Roadley's book and sample code
I haven't tried myself these last two solutions, because my last plan of attack was to try Ensembles and, if it didn't work for me, go with those approaches. Since Ensembles has been very good to me, I didn't need to try them, but again they looked solid.
One last thought that bothers me: in 2015 WWDC sessions there's no mention of Core Data + iCloud. This, to me, spells doom for the syncing solution we're choosing.
Hope this helps.
We have been looking at automatically logging all unexpected client errors to our bug tracker. For reference our application is written in Java/GWT/Guice/Hibernate/Jetty and our bug tracker is the hosted version of FogBugz which can create bugs programatically or via an email.
The biggest problem I see with doing this is stack traces that happen in a loop overload the bug tracker by creating thousands of cases. Does anybody have a suggested way to handle automatic bug creation like this?
If you're using FogBugz bugscout (also see up-to-date docs here) then it has the ability to just increase number of occurences of same problem, instead of creating new case for same exception again and again.
Are you sure that you want to do that?
It obviously depends on your application but even by carefully taking care of the cases that could generate lots of bug reports (because of the loops) this approach could still end up filling the bug tracker.
How about this?
Code your app so that every time an exception is thrown, you gather info about the client (IP, login, app version, etc) and send that + the stack trace (or the whole exception object .ToString()) by email to yourself (or the dev team).
Then on you email client, have a filter that sorts that incoming mail and throws it in a nice folder for you to look at later.
Thus you can have tons of emails about maybe one of more issues but then you don't really care because you input the issues yourself in the bugtracker, and easily delete that ton of mail.
That's what I did for my app (which is a client-server desktop app). It plays out well in this case.
Hope that helped!
JIRA supports automated issues creation using so called services: documentation.
Does anybody have a suggested way to handle automatic bug creation...?
Well, I have. Don't do that.
What are you going to gain from that? Tester's effort? in my experience, whatever effort one can save from that was lost multiple times with overhead transferred to developers who had to analyze and maintain the automatically created tickets anyway. Not to mention overall frustration caused by that.
The least counterproductive way I can imagine would be something like establishing a dedicated bugs category or issue tracker instance, such that only testers can see and use it.
In that "sandbox", auto-created bugs could be assigned to testers who would later pass analyzed and aggregated bug reports to developers.
And even in that case, I'd recommend to pay close attention to what users (testers) say about the system. If they, say, start complaining about the system, consider trying a manual way of doing things instead.
I'm sure many of you are familiar with the IBM i5 series emulator (looks like this poop)
My company uses this religiously and there is no Biz logic in it so anytime somone in our finance dpt makes a human error it accepts it and adds it to the database. Not to mention its ugly, hard to use, not intuitive, etc....
I would like to create a frontend for this interface so that we can control the logic before its submitted to the system (we dont control the system itself) so in effect I need to make my own emulator app.
However I cant seem to find any information on how to interface with the i series, namely login, send commands, and view or gather data from the screens it would normally send back.
Any suggestions?
The problem is not the iSeries but the software package your company is running on it.
There ARE advantages to use green screens: it's fast and it's almost unbeatable at data entry, provided you get used to it.
But to answer your question, the iSeries is a J2EE enabled machine: a HTTP server comes installed and depending of the version of the iSeries, WebSphere might be already installed, or are entitled to install it. Then you can use JT400, which is the java toolkit for the os400 containing the jdbc drivers to connect the database and the necessary classes for calling programs.
If you prefer php, there is a flavor of the Zend framework made to work on the iSeries but I never tried it.
I'd recommend that you take a look at both the Attachmate Verastream Host Integrator (VHI) and IBM's Host Access Transformation Services (HATS) products. They effectively just screen scrape the green screen terminals to allow you to pull and push data and provide macro recording and editing tools to automate the process. App integration can be achieved via web services or html/jsp/servlet programming (plus .Net for VHI and EJB's for HATS). They do come with enterprise pricing however which may be an obstacle for some. They do have free trial offerings for evaluation purposes to help determine if they are an appropriate solution to your problem.
What software packages are they using? Most programs that I use in the 5250 emulator has some business logic that error checks the data before adding it to the database. Can you get us some more information so we can direct you in a better direction.
There are vendors that sell products that screen-scrape the 5250 data stream and produces a web front-end. Or you can write your own front-end in the language of your choice and just do SQL calls to the database.
THere's got to be some source code. Start by looking at the menu and menu option your users are accessing and figure that's running behind them.
Use command STRPDM to look for source code - look in different libraries (they are like folders)
You might have source code in a "member" called something like xxxMNUSRC xxxRPGSRC (rpg program source) or xxxCLSRC (cl programs), xxxDDSSRC (display/screen source, physical/logical file source)
Objects a "compiled" objects such as files (tables), screens, priter files (reports)
Stay away from Qxxx and #xxx libraries - those are system libraries.
http://systeminetwork.com/ is a good resource for iSeries related questions.
At the moment support requests / bug reports made by customers are coming in by mail. It is getting harder to organize priorities and stay at the helm of all this. So I am looking for bugtracking(?) tools. Not all reports are bugs of course, sometimes it's just feature request or support requests.
So my question is: whicht open source bugtracker / support request handling tool do you recommend? I know Mantis which seems to be my front runner for a more elaborate evaluation, but I already worked with it (as a reporter / contributor) and found the GUI a little cumbersome. Another issue is that I thought about using the tool for multiple website projects of different customers.
Intuitively I would prefer to run only one instance of the tool for all projects to have a better overview of all critical issues (independently of the project). Of course customer A should not be able to see customer Bs request (but every customer can have multiple reporting accounts) Is Mantis able to handle that? Can you recommend any other alternatives?
P.S.: I heard about Jira, but I will try to find a free tool for my first try.
It's possible to use email with Mantis, so that you can get incoming email (directly or by forwarding) to Mantis.
Then you can have a workflow in Mantis, f.ex. have an incoming project and customer projects, and you can send email with bcc Mantis and subject containing issue number (I use [1234] as a pattern).
I haven't used other issue trackers as much, but my experience with a customized Mantis is good regarding different kinds of issues and using with email.
Since you're turned to Open source, I'd say install a project management platform like Launchpad, redmine... etc and then create a project for each of your clients (of course you can have multiple accounts for only one client). The bug tracker in these platforms can serve as a support request service.
I'd go for Launchpad because it also has the Q/A feature and blueprints, and is also nice looking and very very user-friendly. And also damn easy to install on a Ubuntu Server.
Kind regards