Installing Mongrel on Windows 7 was rather easy though; it involved

gem install mongrel

Then just navigating to the directory with the rails application in it and typing:

mongrel_rails start

CTRL-C stops the process.

The instructions here for installing the win32-service didn’t work, but this did help… So i ran the following command:

gem install win32-service –platform x86-mswin32

… and it installed. Now we need to install mongrel_service

gem install mongrel_service

… which fails… and i still need to resolve this

I found this question on Stackoverflow which helped me with a solution. The solution was as follows:

HttpContextWrapper httpContextWrapper =
    new HttpContextWrapper(HttpContext.Current);

UrlHelper urlHelper = new UrlHelper(
    new RequestContext(
        httpContextWrapper, 
        new RouteData()));

I previously got confused about the RouteData object, but it seems (unless I’m mistaken) to essentially be route values, which in this case i don’t need… Not sure on that though!

As constructed above, the UrlHelper is able to take the RequestContext and get all the registered routes and therefore generate a correctly structured url when you call Action etc.

Firstly a simple bit of html:

<a id="to_dialog_a" href="javascript:void(0);">click me</a>
<div id="to_dialog" style="border: 1px solid gold; background-color: #336699"></div>

And here is some javascript to wire it up. In the example below I have done things a little differently as the application we are developing needs to be localized; so i used the button index.

Note: This example doesn’t have any jquery.ui css to deal with.

A whole example html file is located here

        $(document).ready(function() {
            $("#to_dialog_a").click(function() {
                $("#to_dialog").dialog("open");
            });
            $("#to_dialog").dialog({
                autoOpen: false,
                buttons : {
                    ok: function() {
                        alert("you clicked me!");
                    },
                    what: function() {
                        alert("you clicked me!");
                    },
                    cancel: function() {
                        alert("you clicked me!");
                    }
                }
                ,
                open: function(event, ui) {
                    // Get the dialog
                    var dialog = $(event.target).parents(".ui-dialog.ui-widget");

                    // Get the buttons
                    var buttons = dialog.find(".ui-dialog-buttonpane").find("button");

                    var okButton = buttons[0];
                    var whatButton = buttons[1];
                    var cancelButton = buttons[2];

                    // Add class to the buttons
                    // Add class to the buttons
                    $(okButton).addClass("primary");
                    $(whatButton).addClass("secondary");
                    $(cancelButton).addClass("thirdary");
                }
            });
        });

onselectstart="return false;" style="-moz-user-select: none;"

This worked for me on Chrome, IE 8, and FireFox 3.6.

Found this tidbit here.

Update: 2010-07-05 – Found this interesting extension to jQuery also. Note the replies also as they may be of use.

textarea {resize: none}

System > Administration > StartUp-Manager gives you a GUI for editing the Grub configuration

ssh -X 196.139.12.32

Open the application on the remote computer. For example

DISPLAY=:0.0 gedit junk.txt

Source

The solution is to clear your browser cookies.

James Crowley has a bit of information on it (first link in resources below!)

Resources

http://weblogs.asp.net/james_crowley/archive/2010/03/18/beware-upgrade-to-asp-net-mvc-2-0-with-care-if-you-use-antiforgerytoken.aspx

http://n2cms.codeplex.com/Thread/View.aspx?ThreadId=199385

Note you will need to make the resource file public if referencing as resource file in another assembly.

// Get the ResourceManager on the type
var resourceManager = (ResourceManager)ResourceType.GetProperty("ResourceManager",
    System.Reflection.BindingFlags.Public | System.Reflection.BindingFlags.Static).GetValue(ResourceType, null);

// Get information on the getstring method
return resourceManager.GetString(_resourceKey, CultureInfo.CurrentCulture);

• An Expression as a method argument
• Getting a valid name for the form field
• Getting type information about the property specified on the view.

An Expression as a method argument

The Below gives a basic example of a strongly types helper method definition

public static MvcHtmlString MyHelperFor<TModel, TProperty>(
            this HtmlHelper<TModel> htmlHelper,
            Expression<Func<TModel, TProperty>> expression)

{
}

Getting a valid name for the form field

Say we put this into the view

<%= Html.EnumDropDownFor(Model => Model.ContactDetails.Phone.Type) %>

We can generate a form field name like this:

var fullPropertyPath =
    htmlHelper.ViewContext.ViewData.TemplateInfo.GetFullHtmlFieldName(
        ExpressionHelper.GetExpressionText(expression)); 

This would result in fullPropertyPath being “ContactDetails.Phone.Type”. We can then use this as the name attribute on the form field we render.

Getting type information about the property specified on the view.

We can also get meta data about the type that the …Phone.Type property get’s/sets using ModelMetadata class’s FromLambdaExpression method like this:

var modelMetadata = ModelMetadata.FromLambdaExpression<TModel, TProperty>(
    expression, htmlHelper.ViewData);

var propertyType = modelMetadata.ModelType;

• The field is required. You have to put the Url in.
• Url must be an absolute path
• Url must accept “http://localhost” style uri
• Url must accept ip addresses (E.g. “http://10.0.0.12”)
• We wanted to use a custom class called requiredUrl without adding custom rules to the validate method.
• We want the code seperate from everything else, meaning we wanted to put the code in a different file, in other words, we didn’t want to polute the View (ASP.NET MVC) with rules nor alter the jquery.validate.js file directly.

The validate plugin allows you to add custom methods which allows the addition of a method that can be executed to validate a fields value… The method takes 3 parameters:

1. The name of the method; in our case it is “requiredUrl”
2. The function to do the validation… Returns true or false and takes 3 parameters: the value of the field, the element itself, and a params argument (not really sure why on this last one… haven’t looked it up as I’ve not had any need for it yet.)
3. The third parameter is the message to show if the value is invalid.

Here is the requiredUrl method added to the validate plugin:

jQuery.validator.addMethod("requiredUrl", function(value, element, param) {
    var expression = /^(http:\/\/|https:\/\/)?((([\w-]+\.)+[\w-]+)|localhost)(\/[\w- .\/?%&=]*)?/i;
    return expression.test(value);
}, jQuery.validator.messages.url);

Notice the following:

• The validation Regex requires something to be entered. Otherwise you would normally go as follows to also validate whether the field was required.

     return this.optional(element) || expression.test(value);

• The last parameter is using the default Url validation message (jQuery.validator.messages.url)

With the following form field…

<input type=”text” class=”requiredUrl” />

…you could use the code as follows in your view:

$(document).ready(function() {
    $("#ServerForm").validate({
    rules: {
       webService: {
           requiredUrl: true
       }
    }
    });
});  

The rule being added is for the form field with the Name of “webService” and the “requiredUrl” method is activated for that field, or in other words, this is the name of the method to execute when validation occurs for this field.

As already stated, I didn’t want to add this to the View so I wanted to just do the validation like this…

$(document).ready(function() {
    $("#ServerForm").validate();
});  

To do that we need to register the css class “requiredUrl” with the validate plugin and tell it to use the “requiredUrl” method we registered earlier. I figure out you could do it like this:

jQuery.validator.classRuleSettings.requiredUrl = {requiredUrl: true};

The first “requiredUrl” refers to the css class to look for, and the second one refers to the name of the method that we added earlier.

Summary:

So the code would be:

jQuery.validator.addMethod("requiredUrl", function(value, element, param) {
    var expression = /^(http:\/\/|https:\/\/)?((([\w-]+\.)+[\w-]+)|localhost)(\/[\w- .\/?%&=]*)?/i;
    return expression.test(value);
}, jQuery.validator.messages.url);

jQuery.validator.classRuleSettings.requiredUrl = {requiredUrl: true};

Our form field would be:

<input type=”text” class=”requiredUrl” />

And our wireup to validate would be something like this:

$(document).ready(function() {
    $("#ServerForm").validate();
});

I was trying to figure out how to get details from an exception thrown in JavaScript and it seems the structure is like this:

{
  message : “the error message”,
  fileName : “file:///c:/User/me/Desktop/Stuff.js”,
  lineNumber : 57,
  stack : “bunch of stuff here”
}

(Used json2.js to stringify the error message as Firebug didn’t seem to be showing it… ?)

When you throw your own exceptions you can of course throw anything including a string like this:

throw “This is a string”;

… and when you analyse what you caught it will be a simple string with that value.

try {
    throw "This is a string";
} catch(error) {
    alert(error);
}

The result will be an alert box with the value "This is a string" displayed.

Just found out here that you can do this:

throw new Error(reason);

You can use the output clause to insert certain columns in the inserted table into a temporary table. For example:

The table we are working with…

CREATE TABLE dbo.junk (
      id uniqueidentifier NOT NULL
        DEFAULT newsequentialid()
    , name varchar(100)
)
GO

CREATE TABLE dbo.junk_history (
      id uniqueidentifier NOT NULL
    , name varchar(100)
    , date datetime DEFAULT getutcdate()
)
GO

The first table is the table we are inserting into, the second table we want to have filled with the newly inserted values including the id column…

The Stored procedure we have is as follows:

CREATE PROCEDURE dbo.junk_insert
    @name nvarchar(100)
AS
BEGIN
    INSERT INTO dbo.junk (name)
        OUTPUT inserted.id, inserted.name INTO dbo.junk_history (id, name)
        SELECT @name
END
GO

In the insert statement I’m getting the id and name from the row inserted and inserting that into the junk_history table… You can insert the data into a temporary table variable or an actual table.

DECLARE	@return_value int

EXEC	@return_value = [dbo].[junk_insert]
		@name = N'Jimbo Jumbalock'

SELECT	'Return Value' = @return_value

GO

SELECT * FROM dbo.junk
SELECT * FROM dbo.junk_history

The above script calls the sproc and shows you the contents of both tables…

Note: that this was a very quickly put together script to get an example working, so please ignore any weirdness

References:

• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms177564.aspx

first time using YouTube… it’s not very clear, but hopefully it helps! … hopefully when this one has finished processing it will be clearer than it is now… as i said. noob at the (you)tube!

Steps are basically:

1. Add the globalization attribute in the Web.config file
2. Add a folder for the resx files.  (we don’t want it in App_GlobalData as it won’t be compiled into the current assembly, but a seperate one!)
3. Create your resx file and contents
4. Ensure the resx is set to public.
5. Copy the resx
6. Create translation (say fr for french)
7. Create the view to show the contents
8. Test in both languages

So it’s very simple: Create the resx files, ensure they are public (not 100% whether this is needed, not tested yet!) set the globalization attribute in web.config and change your browser language to test!

How to Create the Custom Controller Factory

1. Create a class that inherits from DefaultControllerFactory (see this)
2. Set the controller factory in application start (see this)

That’s should be about it

Why would you implement a custom controller factory? (Thoughts for me relating specifically to IoC)

1. You can configure which type of controller you want, so you can configure the IoC container to load a new class that is in a dll that you chuck in the bin directory.
2. You can inject the dependencies (like repositories) into the constructor automatically

Other interesting tidbits.

• OdeToCode – MVC 2 Areas and Containers