I have a Service which, depending on content type, either uses Razor to return HTML or returns JSON. When in HTML mode I want to support server side (non-JavaScript) validation of Forms. I wish to rely on the repository for validation, if the repo returns an error I re-display the form along with the error message from the repo.
The model I am using is this:
in json mode simply throw an Exception
in HTML mode return a response containing both the partially created object and the response status.
This allows me to re-display the form using the same View that I would use when editing an existing object and also display the error message contained in Model.ResponseStatus.Message.
My question: Does anyone have any thoughts on how well I am using the facilities provided by ServiceStack? Is there a better, cleaner, simpler way?
Related
I need to call a SOAP service and I'm having trouble comming up with the correct input parameters for a call. I inspect the WSDL and it seems - to me - like the nesting for the input goes deep (looks like I have to send a very complex data structure to get a result).
I was thinking, isn't there a program or a way i can have the WSDL parsed and display the object structure? It's for a nodejs project, so i can't just import the WSDL and have Java generate the objects. If i could somehow get type completion in my editor VSC, that would be great, but i just need some way to display the hieraki.
Would importing the WSDL into a testing tool like soapUI get you what you are looking for? You could then see the structure of all of the requests expected by the web service endpoint.
I have a custom search component which searches for some parameter(s) from a dropdown [myParam] and displays the search results in another page. I currently use the default (GET) form
<form id="searchForm" action="/content/myWeb/searchResult.html" method="get" target="_blank">
In the result page, a component picks up the request params and processes the search.
I need to make it a POST submission so that the search parameters are NOT visible in the URL. But if I make it a method="Post" in the form above, I get this error:
Status
500
Message
javax.jcr.nodetype.ConstraintViolationException: no matching property definition found for {}myParam
Location /content/myWeb/searchResult
Parent Location /content/myWeb
Path
/path/to/search/page
That exception is the incidental way that Sling tells you that the servlet to which you are attempting to POST can not be found. What happens, in this case, is that Sling defaults to the SlingDefaultPostServlet, which attempts to to POST properties (represented by your form values) to the node /content/myWeb/searchResult. There's no way for Sling to say "I can't find a servlet that's registered to your request", so it just falls back to it's default behavior.
I'm assuming /content/myWeb/searchResult is a cq:Page node type. That node type is very restrictive, which is why it tells you that you cannot add properties that correspond to your form values.
This worked before, because your GET request to /content/myWeb/searchResult.html was able to resolve and execute. All GET requests to a page node can be served up by the system, inherently.
Now, since you are trying to do a POST, you need to create and register a new servlet that can handle this POST request. To do this, you'll need to create a SlingPostServlet and register it to your specific path (not recommended) or a specific selector/extension combination (recommended). That servlet should process the request parameters and respond with an HTML document.
A caveat...
What I just described will help you technically build what you are asking. That said, I don't agree with the premise that you should "make it a POST to hide the request parameters." The reason this is so much extra work, is because you are circumventing the principles of REST, which Sling is theoretically built to support. Your URL (via request path and parameters) should be communicating "I want the page at /content/myWeb/searchResult, given the criteria param1=x, param2=y, and so on". The GET with request params is an appropriately RESTful request.
I suggest you rethink what you're trying to do. Building a more complex solution around RESTful principles is not a good practice.
Just as a sidenote, you can always check if a given URL is bound to a servlet via the sling servlet resolver. Reachable via the OSGI-console or via URL:
http://localhost:4502/system/console/servletresolver
This can at least help you find closure on, if the servlet is registered to the given URL.
You can create a POST.jsp for your page, which could handle the POST request.
It is not restful to make get like request with POST, but sometimes it can be useful. Also With POST, dispatcher won't cache your request.
We have a working website using ServiceStack as the back end that amounts to a complex data-entry form.
My users have requested an "offline editor" for the forms. To use the offline program, the user will have to connect to the ServiceStack service, create empty instances of the forms, and then I will save the POCOs from the service to disk using ServiceStack's JSON serializer. From there the user can log off the service and edit the POCOs. When they're done, they reconnect to the service, and post/put the edited POCO object.
This all works great. My question involves validation. The validation logic is built into my Service.Interface library, which isn't available offline. The winforms program references only the POCO library and the ServiceStack "common" libraries, which do not look like they include the ServiceStack.Validation namespace.
Is there a way I can rearrange my project so that both the service and the Winforms client can run Validation against the POCOs, so that they can have data validation while offline?
UPDATE:
getting closer, I think - I moved all of the Validation classes into their own project. From my Winforms project, I can now manually set up a validator for a POCO class like this:
ServiceStack.FluentValidation.IValidator<SomePOCO> IValidator;
IValidator = new Tonto.Svc.Validation.SomePOCOValidator();
ServiceStack.FluentValidation.Results.ValidationResult vr =
IValidator.Validate(_rpt);
I can see the validator constructor being set up and the rules being initialized, but the .Validate method doesn't seem to do anything. (object comes back as valid, and breakpoints into custom validator code never get there).
UPDATE #2
I discovered my validator code wasn't running from Winforms because my validators all specify a servicestack ApplyTo Put/Post only (see sample code below). When I remove the entire Ruleset clause, though, then validation happens in my service on GETs - something I never want.
Can anyone think of a way to configure the validator rules to run for POST/PUT only when called from ServiceStack, but to also always run when NOT in servicestack? So close!
public class SomePOCOValidator : AbstractValidator<SomePOCO>
{
public SomePOCO()
{
RuleSet(ApplyTo.Put | ApplyTo.Post, () =>
{
(rules)
});
}
}
If your validation is doing anything interesting, then it probably HAS to be done "online".
Maybe just allow your client to save the POCOs locally until they go back online, at which point you send them up to your server. Any transactions that are okay, get processed normally, and any that fail, get returned for the user to edit (so your client will need some smarts to have a working set of POCOs for editing)...
If you don't want ANY extra stuff on the client, just have the transactions that fail to validate get stuffed into a "needs_corrections" table on the server, and then code up a supervisor-sort of screen to manage that table.
The validation framework that ServiceStack uses is named FluentValidation. There is no WinForms support in it. Jeremy Skinner the creator of FluentValidation answerd a question about this back in 2010 on his forum here.
Personally I don't use FV with WinForms - the vast majority of my projects are web-based with the occasional WPF project.
However, if I was going to do this then I probably wouldn't validate the controls directly, but instead use a ViewModel which is bound to the controls. I'd use a fairly strict convention where the names of the controls would match the names of the properties that they're bound to. Then, after validation completes I'd walk the control hierarchy to find the control with the name that matches the property that failed validation (I'm not sure how you'd do this in WinForms, but in WPF I'd use LogicalTreeHelper.FindLogicalNode) and then use the ErrorProvider to set the appropriate error.
Jeremy
I was able to work out a solution that allowed me to use ServiceStack validation libraries on both a ServiceStack client and an offline client. Here are the details.
Move all AbstractValidators to their own project: Proj.Svc.Validation.
get rid of all RuleSets in your AbstractValidators.
Reference Proj.Svc.Validation from Proj.Svc.Interface and Proj.OfflineWinformsClient projects.
Turn OFF the ValidationFeature() plugin in your service. All validation will have to be done manually. This means no iOC injected validators in your service classes.
When it's time to validate, either from your service or the offline client, manually declare the validator and use it like this.
IValidator validator = new
Tonto.Svc.Validation.SomePOCOValidator();
ServiceStack.FluentValidation.Results.ValidationResult vr =
validator.Validate(poco);
if (!vr.IsValid)
(throw exception or notify user somehow);
I'm extremely new to node.js, and have years of experience in PHP, so my thinking about the issues below, might be tainted by my backed ways.
I'm currently using node set up with foundation CSS, and using their reveal modal windows to display most of my forms. I want to avoid re-displaying them upon submit, and instead, validate them on client side.
Basic user creation will have fields as per below:
name
email
password
password confirmation
Form my basic validation i can use require to validate the input,
input(type="text",name="user[email]",placeholder="#",required)
but I would also like the client to check if the email already exists after the user types it in, and whether the passwords are correct.
I've been reading about the validator module but from the documentation I read about it, I only understand how to validate the values after they've been posted. I've seen the express-form module as well, but It's no longer maintained, so I would rather avoid it.
Could someone point me in the right direction?
I don't have any experience with validator or express-form, and I am not sure you need them for what you are trying to achieve. Most of what you are trying to do will be client side work (e.g. jQuery Ajax calls to validate the data) That kind of client-side code should be pretty much the same regardless of whether you use a Node.js backend or a PHP backend.
Injecting the initial JavaScript in your Jade page should be pretty straightforward once you figure out the proper syntax to include JavaScript in a Jade page. The wiring of DOM events on the page to make Ajax calls (onClick, onTextChanged, et cetera) will be conceptually the same as if you were writing a plain HTML page.
In your Node.js server side you'll need a route to handle the request to validate if an e-mail address already exists and that code very likely will return JSON that you will use in your client side form to display the results of the validation to the user. But that should also be very similar to what you would have done with a PHP backend.
I'm trying to write a userscript/Chrome extension to capture JSON data being sent while using a web service so that I can reformat it and display selected portion on page. Currently the JSON is sent as the application loads (as I've observed from watching traffic with Fiddler 2). Is my only option to request the JSON again or is capture possible? As I'm not providing a code example, a requested answer is even some guidance on what method / topic to research or if I'm barking up the wrong tree.
No easy way.
If it is for a specific site you might look into intercepting and overwriting part of a code which sends a request. For example if it is sent on a button click you can replace existing click handler with your own implementation.
You can also try to make a proxy for XMLHttpRequest. Not sure if this even possible, never seen a working example. You can look at some attempts here.
For all these tasks you probably would need to run your javascript code out of sandboxed content script to be able to access parent page variables, so you would need to inject <script> tag with your code right into the page from a content script: