In the example bot implementations from Microsoft, they use enums to define options for dialog, as shown in the example below:
public enum LengthOptions { SixInch, FootLong };
public enum BreadOptions { NineGrainWheat, NineGrainHoneyOat, Italian, ItalianHerbsAndCheese, Flatbread };
Can we use a normal list to fetch the values from the database and display it as options?
Thanks
You can't do this out of the box, but you could subclass FormBuilderBase<T>, overriding various methods to build the Form using whatever datasource you prefer.
Edit:
You can find the base class and implementation of FormBuilder here: https://github.com/Microsoft/BotBuilder/blob/master/CSharp/Library/FormFlow/FormBuilder.cs
Basically, there are a mess of virtual methods that you can override to customize how you want to form to behave, but the main one is Build. In the default implementation, it iterates though the enums to create a list of Field, which are basically each step in you form. Instead of that, you can iterate through whatever data you have pulled from your database and create a new Field for each item. It may look something like this:
public override IForm<T> Build(Assembly resourceAssembly = null, string resourceName = null)
{
var list = GetListOfItemsFromDatabase();
foreach (var item in _list)
{
// FieldFromItem is an IField and will also need to be created
Field(new FieldFormItem<T>(item));
}
Confirm(new PromptAttribute(_form.Configuration.Template(TemplateUsage.Confirmation)));
}
return base.Build(resourceAssembly, resourceName);
}
I know its late but found myself struggling with the same and found that below would be the right solution for this.In your FormFlow class just add the Terms and Descriptions manually.From your example if we are talking about length options then change the type of LengthOptions to string add following code when you build the form.
return new FormBuilder<SandwichForm>()
.Field(new FieldReflector<SandwichForm>(nameof(LengthOptions))
.SetDefine(async (state, field) =>
{
// Call database and get options and iterate over the options
field
.AddDescription("SixInch","Six Inch")
.AddTerms("SixInch", "Six Inch")
.AddDescription("FootLong ","Foot Long")
.AddTerms("FootLong ", "Foot Long")
return true;
}))
.OnCompletion(completionDelegate)
.Build();
Related
Can somebody help me interpret what the heck this means from the bot framework documention:
You can also pass in LUIS entities to bind to the state. If the EntityRecommendation.Type is a path to a field in your C# class then the EntityRecommendation.Entity will be passed through the recognizer to bind to your field. Just like initial state, any step for filling in that field will be skipped.
When I call my dialog I pass in my LuisResult result Entities collection like so:
context.Call(new FormDialog<ItemSearch>( new ItemSearch(), ItemSearch.BuildForm, options: FormOptions.PromptInStart,entities:result.Entities), null);
Within those entities is at least one which maps in both name and type to a public property on my dialog however the state never gets filled. What am I missing?
TIA.
You can find an example of this in the PizzaOrderDialog. if you look at FormDialog implementation, it is using the entity.type to map the passed in entity recommendation to a step in the form. Then the detected entities will be provided as an input to that step of the form.
Here is an example of how form can skip the kind step based on the detected entities by Luis model in pizza form:
var entities = new List<EntityRecommendation>(result.Entities);
if (!entities.Any((entity) => entity.Type == "Kind"))
{
// Infer kind
foreach (var entity in result.Entities)
{
string kind = null;
switch (entity.Type)
{
case "Signature": kind = "Signature"; break;
case "GourmetDelite": kind = "Gourmet delite"; break;
case "Stuffed": kind = "stuffed"; break;
default:
if (entity.Type.StartsWith("BYO")) kind = "byo";
break;
}
if (kind != null)
{
entities.Add(new EntityRecommendation(type: "Kind") { Entity = kind });
break;
}
}
}
var pizzaForm = new FormDialog<PizzaOrder>(new PizzaOrder(), this.MakePizzaForm, FormOptions.PromptInStart, entities);
It also appears that there is an issue with passing Entities in. It seems to work if the property you are mapping to is a Enum (as per the PizzaBot sample). However if the public property is a string, it doesn't map. I'm not sure about other types.
See here https://github.com/Microsoft/BotBuilder/issues/151
Using Orchard CMS, I am dealing with a record and a part proxy, but cannot figure out how to save it into the DB. In fact, I confess I don't even know how to get the items I'm trying to save into this paradigm. I was originally using enum's for choices:
MyEmum.cs:
public enum Choices { Choice1, Choice2, Choice3, Choice4 }
MyRecord.cs:
public virtual string MyProperty { get; set; }
MyPart.cs:
public IEnumerable<string> MyProperty
{
get
{
if (String.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(Record.MyProperty)) return new string[] { };
return Record
.MyProperty
.Split(new[] { '.' }, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries)
.Select(r => r.Trim())
.Where(r => !String.IsNullOrEmpty(r));
}
set { Record.MyProperty = value == null ? null : String.Join(",", value); }
}
Now, in my service class, I tried something like:
public MyPart Create(MyPartRecord record)
{
MyPart part = Services.ContentManager.Create<MyPart>("My");
...
part.MyProperty = record.MyProperty; //getting error here
...
return part;
}
However, I am getting the following error: Cannot implicitly convert 'string' to System.Collections.Generic.IEnumerable<string>'
Essentially, I am trying to save choices from a checkboxlist (one or more selections) as a comma-separated list in the DB.
And this doesn't even get me over the problem of how do I use the enum. Any thoughts?
For some background:
I understand that the appropriate way to handle this relationship would be to create a separate table and use IList<MyEnum>. However, this is a simple list that I do not intend to manipulate with edits (in fact, no driver is used in this scenario as I handle this on the front-end with a controller and routes). I am just capturing data and redisplaying it in the Admin view for statistical/historical purposes. I may even consider getting rid of the Part (considering the following post: Bertrand's Blog Post.
It should be:
part.MyProperty = new[] {"foo", "bar"};
for example. The part's setter will store the value on the record's property as a comma-separated string, which will get persisted into the DB.
If you want to use enum values, you should use the Parse and ToString APIs that .NET provide on Enum.
I am developing an ASP.NET MVC3 application in C#.
I am trying to implement in my application a "narrow-down" functionality applied the result-set obtained from a search.
In short, after I perform a search and the results displayed in the center of the page, I would like to have on the left/right side of the page a CheckBoxList helper for each property of the search result. The CheckBox of each CheckBoxList represent the distinct values of the property.
For instance if I search Product and it has a Color property with values blue, red and yellow, I create a CheckBoxList with text Color and three CheckBox-es one for each color.
After a research on the Web I found this Dynamic LINQ library made available by Scott Guthrie. Since the most recent example/tutorial I found is from 2009, I was wondering whether this library is actually good (and maintained) or not.
In the latter case is jQuery the best way to implement such functionality?
You can solve it by building the needed predicate expressions dynamically, using purely .NET framework.
See code sample below. Depending on the criteria, this will filter on multiple properties. I've used IQuerable because this will enable both In-Memory as remote scenario's such as Entity Framework. If you're going with Entity Framework, you could also just build an EntitySQL string dynamically. I expect that will perform better.
There is a small portion of reflection involved (GetProperty). But this could be improved by performing caching inside the BuildPredicate method.
public class Item
{
public string Color { get; set; }
public int Value { get; set; }
public string Category { get; set; }
}
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
var list = new List<Item>()
{
new Item (){ Category = "Big", Color = "Blue", Value = 5 },
new Item (){ Category = "Small", Color = "Red", Value = 5 },
new Item (){ Category = "Big", Color = "Green", Value = 6 },
};
var criteria = new Dictionary<string, object>();
criteria["Category"] = "Big";
criteria["Value"] = 5;
var query = DoDynamicWhere(list.AsQueryable(), criteria);
var result = query.ToList();
}
static IQueryable<T> DoDynamicWhere<T>(IQueryable<T> list, Dictionary<string, object> criteria)
{
var temp = list;
//create a predicate for each supplied criterium and filter on it.
foreach (var key in criteria.Keys)
{
temp = temp.Where(BuildPredicate<T>(key, criteria[key]));
}
return temp;
}
//Create i.<prop> == <value> dynamically
static Expression<Func<TType, bool>> BuildPredicate<TType>(string property, object value)
{
var itemParameter = Expression.Parameter(typeof(TType), "i");
var expression = Expression.Lambda<Func<TType, bool>>(
Expression.Equal(
Expression.MakeMemberAccess(
itemParameter,
typeof(TType).GetProperty(property)),
Expression.Constant(value)
),
itemParameter);
return expression;
}
}
I don't really get why would you need the Dynamic LINQ here? Are the item properties not known at compile-time? If you can access a given item properties by name, eg. var prop = myitem['Color'], you don't need Dynamic LINQ.
It depends on how you render the results. There is a lot of ways to achieve the desired behavior, in general:
Fully client-side. If you do everything client-side (fetching data, rendering, paging) - jQuery would be the best way to go.
Server-side + client-side. If you render results on the server, you may add HTML attributes (for each property) to each search result markup and filter those client-side. The only problem in this case can be paging (if you do paging server-side, you will be able to filter the current page only)
Fully server-side. Post the form with search parameters and narrow down the search results using LINQ - match the existing items' properties with form values.
EDIT
If I were you (and would need to filter results server-side), I'd do something like:
var filtered = myItems.Where(i => i.Properties.Match(formValues))
where Match is an extension method that checks if a given list of properties matches provided values. Simple as this - no Dynamic LINQ needed.
EDIT 2
Do you need to map the LINQ query to the database query (LINQ to SQL)? That would complicate things a bit, but is still doable by chaining multiple .Where(...) clauses. Just loop over the filter properties and add .Where(...) to the query from previous iteration.
you may have a look at PredicateBuilder from the author of C# 4.0 in a Nutshell
As already pointed out by #Piotr Szmyd probabbly you don't need dynamic Linq. Iterating over all properties of T doesn'require dynamic linq. Dynamic Linq is mainly usefull to build complete queries on the client side and send it in string format to the server.
However now, it become obsolete, since Mvc 4 supports client side queries through Api Controllers returning an IQueryable.
If you just need to iterate over all properties of T you can do it with reflection and by building the LambdaExpressions that will compose the filtering criterion. You can do it with the static methods of the Expression class.
By using such static methods you can build dynamically expressions like m => m.Name= "Nick" with a couple instructions...than you put in and them...done you get and expression you can apply to an exixting IQueryable
LINQ implementation still has not changed so there should be no problem using the dynamic LINQ library. It simply creates LINQ expressions from strings.
You can use AJAX to call action methods that run the LINQ query and return JSON data. JQuery would populate HTML from the returned data.
I have the following code -
public void LoadAllContacts()
{
var db = new ContextDB();
var contacts = db.LocalContacts.ToList();
grdItems.DataSource = contacts.OrderBy(x => x.Areas.OrderBy(y => y.Name));
grdItems.DataBind();
}
I'm trying to sort the list of the contacts according to the area name that is contained within each contact. When I tried the above, I get "At least one object must implement IComparable.". Is there an easy way instead of writing a custom IComparer?
Thanks!
try this:
public void LoadAllContacts()
{
var db = new ContextDB();
var contacts = db.LocalContacts.ToList();
grdItems.DataSource = contacts.OrderBy(x => x.Areas.OrderBy(y => y.Name).First().Name);
grdItems.DataBind();
}
this will order the contacts by the first area name, after ordering the areas by name.
Hope this helps :)
Edit: fixed error in code. (.First().Name)
I was in a discussion with #AbdouMoumen but in the end I thought I'd provide my own answer :-)
His answer works, but there two performance issues in this code (both in the answer as in the original question).
First, the code loads ALL contacts in the db. This may or may not be a problem, but in general I would recommend NOT to do this. Many modern controls support paging/filtering out of the box, so you'd be better off supplying an not-yet-evaluated IQueryable<T> instead of List<T>. If however you need everything in memory, you should delay the ToList to the last possible moment.
Second, in AbdouMoumen's answer, there is a so-called 'SELECT N+1' problem. Entity Framework will by default use lazy loading to fetch additional properties. I.e. the Areas property will not be fetched from the database until it's accessed. In this case this will happen in the controls 'for loop', while it's ordering the result set by name.
Open up SQL Server Profiler to see what I mean: you will see a SELECT statement for all the contacts, and an additional SELECT statement for each contact that fetches the Areas for that contact.
A much better solution would be the following:
public void LoadAllContacts()
{
using (var db = new ContextDB())
{
// note: no ToList() yet, just defining the query
var contactsQuery = db.LocalContacts
.OrderBy(x => x.Areas
.OrderBy(y => y.Name)
.First().Name);
// fetch all the contacts, correctly ordered in the DB
grdItems.DataSource = contactsQuery.ToList();
grdItems.DataBind();
}
}
Is it one to one relation (Contact->Area)?
if yeah then try the following :
public partial class Contact
{
public string AreaName
{
get
{
if (this.Area != null)
return this.Area.Name;
return string.Empty;
}
}
}
then
grdItems.DataSource = contacts.OrderBy(x => x.AreaName);
The functionality I am trying to use is:
- Create a ObjectDataSource for selection and updating controls on a web page (User Control).
- Use the DataObjectTypeName to have an object created that would send the data to an UpdateMethod.
- Before the values are populated in the DataObjectTypeName’s object, I would like to pre-populate the object so the unused items in the class are not defaulted to zeros and empty strings without me knowing whether the zero or default string was set by the user or by the application.
I cannot find a way to pre-populate the values (this was an issue back in 2006 with framework 2.0). One might ask “Why would anyone need to pre-populate the object?”. The simple answer is: I want to be able to randomly place controls on different User Controls and not have to be concerned with which UpdateMethod needs to handle which fields of an object.
For Example, let’s say I have a class (that reflects a SQL Table) that includes the fields: FirstName, LastName, Address, City, State, Zip. I may want to give the user the option to change the FirstName and LastName and not even see the Address, City, State, Zip (or vice-versa). I do not want to create two UpdateMethods where one handled FirstName and LastName and the other method handles the other fields. I am working with a Class of some 40+ columns from multiple tables and I may want some fields on one screen and not another and decide later to change those fields from one screen to another (which breaks my UpdateMethods without me knowing).
I hope I explained my issue well enough.
Thanks
This is hardly a solution to the problem, but it's my best stab at it.
I have a GridView with its DataSourceID set to an ObjectDataSource.
Whenever a row is updated, I want the property values in the object to be selectively updated - that is - only updated if they appear as columns in the GridView.
I've created the following extension:
public static class GridViewExtensions
{
public static void EnableLimitUpdateToGridViewColumns(this GridView gridView)
{
_gridView = gridView;
if (_gridView.DataSourceObject != null)
{
((ObjectDataSource)_gridView.DataSourceObject)
.Updating += new ObjectDataSourceMethodEventHandler(objectDataSource_Updating);
}
}
private static GridView _gridView;
private static void objectDataSource_Updating(object sender, ObjectDataSourceMethodEventArgs e)
{
var newObject = ((object)e.InputParameters[0]);
var oldObjects = ((ObjectDataSource)_gridView.DataSourceObject).Select().Cast<object>();
Type type = oldObjects.First().GetType();
object oldObject = null;
foreach (var obj in oldObjects)
{
if (type.GetProperty(_gridView.DataKeyNames.First()).GetValue(obj, null).ToString() ==
type.GetProperty(_gridView.DataKeyNames.First()).GetValue(newObject, null).ToString())
{
oldObject = obj;
break;
}
}
if (oldObject == null) return;
var dynamicColumns = _gridView.Columns.OfType<DynamicField>();
foreach (var property in type.GetProperties())
{
if (dynamicColumns.Where(c => c.DataField == property.Name).Count() == 0)
{
property.SetValue(newObject, property.GetValue(oldObject, null), null);
}
}
}
}
And in the Page_Init event of my page, I apply it to the GridView, like so:
protected void Page_Init()
{
GridView1.EnableLimitUpdateToGridViewColumns();
}
This is working well for me at the moment.
You could probably apply similar logic to other controls, e.g. ListView or DetailsView.
I'm currently scratching my head to think of a way this can be done in a rendering-agnostic manner - i.e. without having to know about the rendering control being used.
I hope this ends up as a normal feature of the GridView or ObjectDataSource control rather than having to hack it.