I've been developing a web application in CakePHP 2.x that uses an Image cropping tool to manipulate an image. Currently it passes Ajax calls to handle the manipulation onto a function within the current Controller which then calls a Component which contains the main processing and functionality.
I'm currently going through and refactoring this section of the code and I was wondering if it's possible to directly call the Component from Ajax and whether or not it is a good idea or not as it would simplify a chunk of the code if possible.
Thoughts, opinions and tips are greatly appreciated. Thanks :)
I'm currently going through and refactoring this section of the code and I was wondering if it's possible to directly call the Component from Ajax and whether or not it is a good idea or not as it would simplify a chunk of the code if possible.
It's not a good idea because this is how components are thought to be used. A component is not thought to receive a request directly but to provide additional - reuseable functionality - to the controlller level in the MVC pattern.
Taken from the documentation:
Components are packages of logic that are shared between controllers. CakePHP comes with a fantastic set of core components you can use to aid in various common tasks. You can also create your own components. If you find yourself wanting to copy and paste things between controllers, you should consider creating your own component to contain the functionality. Creating components keeps controller code clean and allows you to reuse code between projects.
Is it possible to do a KendoUI mobile project, using ASP.net mvc? Watching the introduction on Pluralsight, I'm sort of confused. As an example, KendoUI Mobile uses something like this to navigate:
<a href="#someView" data-role="button">Go to some view</button>
When rendering views through RenderBody in my main layout, will I have to specify this view as a mobile view, or does the application defined in my main layout pick up on this?
So, I guess my question is this; Has anyone got any experience on this combination and, if so, could you provide some resources as to where this combination is being used?
I figured this on out. Seems to be a few projects out there using this combination. One example is this project: KendoUI mobile task manager
That being said, I'll try to play around and tweak the framework to my needs.
The answer is Yes. I was searching for the same answers, and found this resource very helpful, using MVC4, with detailed explanations:
Single Page App using MVC and Kendo Mobile
When searching for references and tutorials, what is not immediately clear is that Kendo UI Mobile is a different setup from Kendo UI. As WhizKid points out it is a single page application, and all your data must go through AJAX.
If you have not used them before, you will probably need to learn Kendo's MVVM and datasources. You must decide what sort of interface you will use for data exchange (eg. WebApi, OData) and fix the routing.
The reason I am going this way is because Kendo comes with good looks, and MVC can help me with localization.
I am working on a .Net MVC2 project where I am trying to modularize functionality as much as possible. One aspect of this would be to place a form in a partial views which is then called using RenderAction. This is so that the form's GET, POST, validation and redirection can be handled independently of the parent view.
I have read blogs and forums etc that suggest that this is not ideal behaviour for MVC, however I cannot think of a way round it. The main issue I am having is redirecting from the rendered action and I understand why I cannot do this.
What I need to know is this: if I can't and shouldn't code my modules in this way, how should I code them so they are independent of the parent view?
I need to render an ASP.NET MVC view to a string so as to be able to send it via an email (it is an order confirmation email defined in an .ascx file ).
I've successfully been able to render an ASP.NET MVC View to string using one of the methods in this question.
However now I need to be able to do it via a WCF service (that will be accessed via silverlight) and so I don't have a ControllerContext. This WCF service is contained within the same project as my MVC project so has access to all my models etc.
I've looked at several questions on Stackoverflow about this issue, but they all seem to need a controller context. I thought there was something in mvccontrib but it doesn't seem to be there anymore.
The closest I've found is the accepted answer to the aforementioned question, but it unfortunately breaks with RenderPartial within the view you're rendering.
I'm hoping maybe some of the behind the scenes work for ASP.NET MVC 2 related to RenderAction may help make this possible now?
BuildStarted and I have put together a standalone Razor templating engine which you might find useful (Github). You'll need to adapt your .ascx content into a simple string template, but it should do the job.
If you've got NuGet, you can run Install-Package RazorEngine
You may checkout the following blog post. Also Postal is worth looking at.
You need to create a fake HttpContextBase with a fake HttpRequestBase that return meaningful values from their properties.
I am trying to find the optimal architecture for an ajax-heavy Django application I'm currently building. I'd like to keep a consistent way of doing forms, validation, fetching data, JSON message format but find it exceedingly hard to find a solution that can be used consistently.
Can someone point me in the right direction or share their view on best practice?
I make everything as normal views which display normally in the browser. That includes all the replies to AJAX requests (sub pages).
When I want to make bits of the site more dynamic I then use jQuery to do the AJAX, or in this case AJAH and just load the contents of one of the divs in the sub page into the requesting page.
This technique works really well - it is very easy to debug the sub pages as they are just normal pages, and jQuery makes your life very easy using these as part of an AJA[XH]ed page.
For all the answers to this, I can't believe no one's mentioned django-piston yet. It's mainly promoted for use in building REST APIs, but it can output JSON (which jQuery, among others, can consume) and works just like views in that you can do anything with a request, making it a great option for implementing AJAX interactions (or AJAJ [JSON], AJAH, etc whatever). It also supports form validation.
I can't think of any standard way to insert ajax into a Django application, but you can have a look to this tutorial.
You will also find more details on django's page about Ajax
Two weeks ago I made a write up how I implement sub-templates to use them in "normal" and "ajax" request (for Django it is the same). Maybe it is helpful for you.
+1 to Nick for pages displaying normally in the browser. That seems to be the best starting point.
The problem with the simplest AJAX approaches, such as Nick and vikingosegundo propose, is that you'll have to rely on the innerHTML property in your Javascript. This is the only way to dump the new HTML sent in the JSON. Some would consider this a Bad Thing.
Unfortunately I'm not aware of a standard way to replicate the display of forms using Javascript that matches the Django rendering. My approach (that I'm still working on) is to subclass the Django Form class so it outputs bits of Javascript along with the HTML from as_p() etc. These then replicate the form my manipulating the DOM.
From experience I know that managing an application where you generate the HTML on the server side and just "insert" it into your pages, becomes a nightmare. It is also impossible to test using the Django test framework. If you're using Selenium or a similar tool, it's ok, but you need to wait for the ajax request to go return so you need tons of sleeps in your test script, which may slow down your test suite.
If the purpose of using the Ajax technique is to create a good user interface, I would recommend going all in, like the GMail interface, and doing everything in the browser with JavaScript. I have written several apps like this using nothing but jQuery, state machines for managing UI state and JSON with ReST on the backend. Django, IMHO, is a perfect match for the backend in this case. There are even third party software for generating a ReST-interface to your models, which I've never used myself, but as far as I know they are great at the simple things, but you of course still need to do your own business logic.
With this approach, you do run into the problem of duplicating code in the JS and in your backend, such as form handling, validation, etc. I have been thinking about solving this with generating structured information about the forms and validation logic which I can use in JS. This could be compiled at deploy-time and be loaded as any other JS file.
Also, avoid XML. The browsers are slow at parsing it, it is a pain to generate and a pain to work with in the browser. Use JSON.
Im currently testing:
jQuery & backbone.js client-side
django-piston (intermediate layer)
Will write later my findings on my blog http://blog.sserrano.com