I have a question for professional Orchard developers?
Given that I can create new ContentTypes and ContentParts using the UI, when should you use the UI to create new Content Types/Parts versus creating a custom module and coding everything. What are the tradeoffs? Is there a time to combine the approaches and create some of your content types/parts in the UI and then extend them further using code?
What are the advantages of each method? (For example, it seems to me that deploying changes is easier using code...but still possible using the UI using the Import/Export module?
UI it seems you get things done pretty quickly, but is less flexible and portable than writing code?
What are the things you HAVE to do in code?
I tend to start by using the UI to test ideas and just adding templates to my theme to display these new parts. I also use the UI when I just want to add a new part to an existing type.
Where I find making a very simple module with my types specified in migrations useful is where I have a site in production that I know will need upgrading in the future. I have a dev version of the site that I play about with and then when ready to go live I create a migration that will upgrade the site.
This also means I can test the migration before going live and I don't need to have a list of manual changes required to make to the live site that is prone to mistakes.
Related
I'm trying to build my first app on Hybris, but I'm not sure what is the best approach to build such applications. Let's say I sell flowers in my store. Currently there are 2 ways how to do it:
Create accelerator template and then reconfigure application.
Building app from the beginning.
The first solution may look very attractive, but I don't think it is better solution because:
Hybris doesn't provide an accelerator for my specific solution (flowers), application reconfiguration may take a lot of time.
Some accelerators contain more that one store - other stores should be removed.
The mess in the database. I have to spend time and understand which tables should be removed.
The second approach seems the most logical, but in this case I have some doubts, because the speed of development will be significantly reduced. Moreover, I think that developing a simple store on Spring Boot will be much faster than learning the Hybris platform's extensions and how they work together.
In this case, how should I start develop my application?
Honestly, I don't have experience with building complete SAP Hybris application from the scratch yet, but I have some experience related to development of the SAP Hybris extensions, so I'll try to provide my potential approach because I don't see many answers here.
I'd do it as follows:
Get the whole commerce suite
Run one of the recipe with the installer script (choose one, which will be the best for you - one of the most popular/common recipes is b2c_acc)
Remove unwanted extensions from the localextensions.xml file if necessary
Add another extensions, if you need them
Depending on your use case, create your own extension basing on the one of templates with ant extgen task inside the hybris/bin/platform/ dir (e.g. yacceleratorstorefront, ybackoffice, yempty, etc.)
Add your custom extension (or extensions) to localextensions.xml file
Start your development within your custom extension created out of available template
I know, it's kind of "specific" platform. I hope this answer will help a bit.
Cheers
VS2013 update 5, MVC5 using Areas
I have a stand-alone function programmed for a website. The functionality is a specific user interface to collect survey responses in a particular way. It has several controllers, a model and a group of views. The functionality is completely contained in an Area of the project, except for the Shared _Layout file that provides the main menu for consistency.
'Is it possible for me to' / 'how do I' compile this Area into a single or set of .dll file(s) that I could then add conveniently to other websites? I'm assuming creating something for transfer/download is very standard functionality. For example, I used Elmah.MVC for this site. What I want to do is pretty much create a package that can be downloaded in a similar way to how we integrate Elmah.MVC into a site. (Be certain I'm not talking about creating error logging software, I'm only using Elmah.MVC as an example of software that is easily integrated into other website applications.)
I've never compiled any website functionality into a .dll(s) for use elsewhere and would appreciate either some specific guidance, or perhaps what would be easier is to provide a link with a good step by step tutorial or explanation for how to do this. Most of what I've found on the web describes bits and pieces of doing this, but it's not enough for me to feel confident with it.
It seems to me there are a lot of 'moving parts' to taking a particular piece of an MVC application and turning it into something that is easily added to other projects.
A particular issue I don't quite grasp is the difference in downloaded packages between getting code and getting just the .dll(s). For instance, when I download an MVC5 site, I get controllers, models and views, but when I download Elmah I get a .dll and no code files. Also, I do understand the concept of transforms, but I'm just struggling right now with even getting from my programmed application into a 'package' regardless of the transforms that make it easy to integrate into another website.
These are just some of my questions I have about how to perform this particular process in developing deliverable and/or shareable software.
What you are looking to do is create a portable MVC Area project. A Portable Area is a set of reusable multi page functionality can be dropped into an application to provide rich functionality without having to custom build functionality that is literally the same in every application. An MVC Portable Area is really just a dll that contains the views, controllers, scripts, etc… needed to use in a website that is either a Web Forms website or an MVC website. A developer can use them for a reusable widget or a complete engine. I have actually used them for both. Here is a link with some basic info to get started. http://elegantcode.com/2012/04/06/mvc-portable-areas/
I am having a little problem in my workplace where we have a IIS 6 server where Orchard (1.7) will not run. We are planning an upgrade but that's going to take some time.
Since we are using this site on IIS6 only to run one particular custom module we wrote for Orchard (basically a MVC module with its own Controllers/Actions etc.) I was thinking that a temporary solution could be to rip that module out of Orchard and run it independently.
Of course this extraction needs to take into account how many ties I have with the framework. I was wondering if there is some kind of guide to perform this and if there is something I need to take specially into account.
I am using the Users in Orchard so I would probably have to rewrite some users code. I am also using the Authorizer, which again may mean I need to re-wire something else.
It seems like a daunting job so I am looking for some quick tips on how to proceed if you know any.
Thanks a lot!
It all depends on what components you actually use within your module.
Hard to write any tutorial on this, really.
Regarding Orchard.Users - you could drop all related code usages and rely on the default ASP.NET roles-based authentication/authorization model.
If dependency injection is what you want to keep, then you need to integrate it yourself (for Autofac, but other DI containers will also work). Feel free to copy and change any Orchard components that you use, stripping the unneeded code.
In my opinion the hardest thing to strip out and replace would be any code that relies on content items - hope you don't have it. Rewriting this pieces sounds like an overkill. But if you just use IRepository, going for plain NHibernate or EF instead should be quite easy.
The project I’m working on is revamping an existing web portal.
Migration from the old controls (Infragistics) to a new suite (Telerik) is part of the revamp.
Would you recommend to keep the old Visual studio project and put the new controls in or starting a new VS project altogether?
It depends on how much you are using the third party controls and what portion of your site it is. If it is a small portion it may be better to continue with the existing project. If you have very heavy usage of the third party controls that you are removing on each page a rewrite may be easier.
If you are looking at possibly rewriting using a new project you may also want to consider the technology that you are using as well. For example if you were using ASP.NET Web Forms before, maybe it would make sense to use ASP.NET MVC now.
I believe the best answer to your question is that you need to evaluate what you are using and the amount of work that each approach will require and determine what is best for your specific scenario.
What is your approach for creating your own set of controls aka own Extensions Library? After a few years of Xpages development we have a huge set of controls that are general purpose for building UI, some web services etc. (Probably as most other developers.) When we start a new project now we have to copy the entire stuff from one database to new one which involves controls, jars, css, images, JAVA code ... and then you completely loose control to maintain some central version of this controls & codes, everything is scattered among several projects/databases and things get messy fast.
We have thought about creating our own extension library as described here
http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/ddwiki.nsf/dx/Master_Table_of_Contents_for_XPages_Extensibility_APIs_Developer_Guide but there is not enough documentation for this topic and the entire development process is quite complicated (at least seems to me. I tried two times based on docs above going through eclipse plugin project -> feature project -> update site and still having some bugs around)
What is your experience and approach for creating and maintaining shared Xpages controls in your Domino environment? Is there some hidden feature we miss here that can help us?
Take a look at the XSP Starter Kit on OpenNTF and the XPages SDK to setup an eclipse environment for plugin development. You'll also want Eclipse IDE for RCP and RAP Developers. Install the starter kit and SDK into eclipse and you should be all set.
The starter kit is a sample plugin with all kinds of examples of phase listeners, components, etc. Once you want to deploy your plugin, create an update site from within eclipse and use the Update Site NSF available on your server install to place your update site. Once that's done, you can replicate that NSF to any other servers that may need the plugin.
For more information about the starter kit, take a look at this slide deck. There is also a github project for the starter kit. Documentation for the XPages SDK can be found here. And a video for setting up the SDK is available on youtube. Lastly, here's the documentation for setting up the update site NSF.
While we haven't gotten to that yet in XPages, our model for regular Notes design elements is to have a central template that contains the elements that are shared, with those specific design elements marked to inherit from that template. Sometimes, a database inherits design elements from two different central templates.
That way, those centrally controlled design elements remain the same in all databases.
I would recommend looking at some example's on github for how they have library/components setup. One of the more simpler examples that has just a single component built into a Library is Steve Pridemore's App Layout Extension...https://github.com/DominoDev, Another good one is Nathan Freeman's Starterkit: https://github.com/the-ntf/xspstarterkit. Hopefully these will help you get the file structure down on which files you need and how they work.