What is the recommended way to persist the state in a SharePoint 2013 application?
I need implement a Shopping Cart functionality in SP.
Also, it would be great if you can point me an open source implementation of a Shopping Cart in SP.
Thanks.
I would recommend persisting the data in a database. You will need to store some sort of identifier on the client (I used a cookie for the web order id along with a hashed & salted value of the order id). Once you have that bit figured out it is relatively straight forward to read/write back to the database to persist the order info.
Also going this route lets you follow up with the customer should they be logged in or identifiable (Think of the way Best Buy emails you if you leave something in the cart and never order it, marketing folks LOVE that).
Just some food for though, HTH!
Related
I am working on designing an approval system in CRM and need some inputs on the security design. The entity I am using has User/Team level R/W rights. The overall implementation is bit complex but to keep this question simple, consider the following two parties involved in the system:
Requester: Needs R/W access on requests created by him.
Approver Team: These are pre-defined teams whose users will approve/reject the request. Needs R/W access on requests which need their approval.
Question:
How can I handle providing R/W access for both - Requester and Approver Team at the same time? Since we can't have multiple owners of a record in CRM, the Owner field can only contain either of them (Requester or Approver Team) at one time.
I can think of two solutions to this using sharing functionality and wanted to confirm my understanding:
a. Set Requester as the record Owner and share the record with Approver Team programmatically. The problem with this approach is that even if I share the record with Approver Team, I won't be able to show the sharing details on the main form (which is a requirement).
b. Set Approver Team as the record Owner and programmatically share the record with Requester using Access Templates.
Is there any better solution to handle this requirement, in case I am missing any OOB possibilities?
Well I believe that you can make solution A working with a little bit of coding (I'm not sure if you don't mind coding, but we are on StackOverflow, so I think you should consider that).
First of all the design depends on the simple question - should this Request be shared with multiple teams, or only single team? Single team is simple - just add a lookup on the Request, that will point to a Team. When this team is filled in (I'm assuming that choice of this team is done somehow automatically, but it does not matter as in any scenario you would have to choose the team anyway somehow), you run a simple plugin that shares the record for this team. Sharing using SDK is really simple, just use the GrantAccessRequest:
var grantAccessRequest = new GrantAccessRequest
{
PrincipalAccess = new PrincipalAccess
{
AccessMask = AccessRights.ReadAccess | AccessRights.WriteAccess,
Principal = teamEntityReference
},
Target = requestReference
};
So on the form of the request you will keep the owner of the Request and will have a lookup pointing to a Team that is handling this request. Of course you can further pimp it up by for example un-sharing when the request is accepted or declined or the lookup on the request is changed etc. That would keep the POA table more happy as sharing huge amount of records can lead to fast grow of that table, so it's important to unshare records if sharing no longer needed.
If you want to share to multiple teams, you can still create a N:N relationship between your Request and Team and simply share your Request in a plugin on Associate message between Request and Team (this was a standard option before Access Teams were introduced for the users, remains still the only option for teams). This relationship can be show as a subgrid on Request form (it would look like an access team subgrid).
Of course to prevent users from Sharing the Request record on their own (in that case you will not have the Team in your lookup/subgrid) they should not have Sharing privilege. The plugin should do the sharing in admin context.
UPDATE:
As for the POA considerations from the comments: both solutions will make your POA grow, because for both solutions you will have to share the Request either with the team or with the user. If you will use access team you will still have one POA entry for each Request (so 100K entries per year). I believe that the most important thing here is what happens with the Request when it ends it's lifecycle. If it does not have to be visible to the Team, after it was accepted/rejected then you should simply have a mechanism (plugin or some custom app running on some timely manner) that would unshare all the Requests that no longer require sharing, keeping your POA table in reasonable size.
There is another way of handling your scenario that would not require that much sharing/unsharing logic. You can create a "Request Acceptation" entity in 1:N parental relationship with Request. Because it's parental relationship, user owning Request will see all the "Request Acceptation" and "Request Acceptation" will be owned by proper Team (so only this team will have access). Of course I don't know anything about the business logic, but I assume that "Request Acceptation" can contain only the information relevant to the Team which can be copied in a plugin or workflow.
UPDATE2: As I just saw that you cannot unshare the record at a later stage. But I'm assuming that at some point of time Request is done/accepted/finished/rejected or whatever. If at this point both Teams and User should have access to this Request, then maybe it's a good thing to create some kind of separate entity "Archived Requests", that would not be shared, simply cloned for all the principals that are interested in seeing this information and deleting original Request. There are many variations of this idea, I hope that you get it and can adapt it accordingly to your scenario
Your option a makes the most sense: Requester being the creator, should own the Request. Approver just acts on the Request, so it should be shared with.
About showing sharing details, you can put a subgrid in the form: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics/crm-customer-center/create-a-team-template-and-add-to-an-entity-form.aspx
Add a team template to the entity form
Make sure you have the System Administrator security role or
equivalent permissions in Microsoft Dynamics 365.
Check your security role
[read more in the linked page]
Since Requester is a USER an Approver is a TEAM, OOB you can only do option b (assign to the team, share with the user via Access Team).
I can't think of any clean solution involving enumerating the team members and act on each of them, so I won't suggest it.
I'm developing a multi-lingual site for a client in Joomla 2.5. I wonder if there is any way to auto assign newly registered users to a group based on the language they are on when they register.
I.e. so if I visit the Italian site and register I will automatically be put in the group "Italian".
The underlying reason I want to this is to better separate the forum sections in my Kunena forum so that, for example, Italian users only have access to the Italian forum. Is there a way to solve this in a better way?
Also, I understand that this is by no means any kind of guarantee for people sticking to their respective language's forum but it is a request from the client who wants to direct the users as much as possible.
As far as I know, the language information are stored inside a cookie, so you can't access them server-side.
You should create a user plugin: when the user register, you can try to guess the country using IP lookup, then add it to the linked user group.
I have implemented many multi site implementations in the past, so I get how to set up the environment. What I haven't done, is set up multiple websites that can share the same cart session.
So if you are on site1.com and add something to your cart or are logged on, when you go to site2.com you are logged in and have the same items in your cart.
From what I read around the forums, well there isn't much about the best way to share session. But I do know that using the configuration to enable SID on the frontend will pass the session id if you transfer between sites. I figured this is all you need to have, but I see where people are saying that only stores can share checkout sessions and that stores can have their own domain.
I am thinking the best way to do this is to setup multiple websites not one website multiple stores and then just make sure when linking to the other site, I use proper magento url methods to build out the link and it will pass over the SID and the users session will be transferred over.
Is this the preferred way to do this? Is there anything I need to know in terms of configuration? Is there any negatives doing it this? Is there a better way?,
Well if you want to have such possibility only for logged customers then i propose to you to use sales_flat_quote table which is represented by Mage::getModel('sales/quote').
With this model you can manage cart and focus only in passing customer identifier which would bring us to security subject... How would you pass customer identifier in secure way as SID isn't very secure.
Plus SEO doesn't like SID in URL from what i've heard.
Ok, so imagine a bank has a call-centre filled with low-trust staff. The staff need to provide basic service to customers over the phone. The call centre staff take calls from a customer, ask them certain security questions, and then service the accounts in some way.
Now, from the customer's point of view, the bank is verifying who they are by asking the security questions. This is subtly different from the bank's point of view: It is verifying that the call centre employee is talking to the customer.
Why is this difference important? The bank wants to restrict these low trust staff, so they cannot view any details of the accounts until the customer calls them. So a call centre employee can't browse account details of customers that haven't just contacted him and asked for service.
So the question is:
Is this sort of setup possible in Dynamics CRM 2011? How would one go about implementing it? Some level of customization would be OK, but a bespoke application driven from the CRM data is not.
I'm thinking that maybe it's possible to create a custom component that temporarily modifies the user's permissions to a record (and all its children) after answering some security questions. However, I'm not even sure that record-based security (beyond Ownership) is supported in CRM...? I guess one could temporarily assign ownership to the user. Is that wise?
Please note: Simply hiding views & find buttons from the GUI isn't the sort of level of security we're looking for here. We're looking to literally restrict the user from accesing the records in question.
I can see a couple of options:
Working within the permissions model. This could work. You could have access restricted by default, and then have another entity where you'd enter in the account details, a plugin would run and verify the details, and then share the record to the current user. I'd be a little concerned, however, on how the unsharing would work. What would trigger it? Would there be a process that just runs outside of CRM and unshares records periodically. What if that process fails? We've also had performance issues in the past with this type of model... CRM seems to do a lot of work under the hood every time an individual record's permissions are changed like this.
Reassigning the owner, as you suggest. Would multiple users ever need to look at the same data? Does the owner of the record need to be maintained for any other reason (e.g. This is Joe's account because he's the owner).
Working exclusively with plugins. You could have a plugin registered on Retrieve and RetrieveMultiple of a record. This plugin could filter out all the details you want to hide from the end user. When the user needs to view the rest of the data, they fill out a form or dialog or something with the data. This data is then included in the Retrieve call for the record. The plugin checks for the hidden data, verifies that it's there and correct, then strips it out and lets the request continue, only this time it retrieves all attributes, and the form populates as expected.
Disclaimer: this answer is based on plenty of CRM 4.0 experience and reading the release notes for 2011.
Short answer: no.
Long answer: yes, but the customisation would be major. The 'easiest' option that springs to mind, is that the authentication process is carried out as a bespoke asp.net page that either a) uses a service account to re-assign an entity to an individual and then returns them to the relevant CRM form, then a plug in that re-assigns it back on saving changes
or
b) has it's own set of forms to that update and retrieve information as a service account, and only do so after answering the security questions.
As an aside, any kind of 'scripted' form is almost impossible in CRM 4.0. I believe 2011 slightly improves on that, but what I've seen is still not encouraging. Using CRM in a contact centre for us has meant investing in a piece of third party form building software and creating bespoke forms that can be launched from CRM and return data via the web services (which are impressively flexible). We only use the CRM interface for viewing historic requests - even most updates trigger one of the bespoke forms.
If I was to implement such a scenario I would create a customer access record (new_custaccess) that is linked to the customer record (new_customer). For this example - keeping it simple - I'm going to assume that the customer has a simple access code they must provide before the bank employee (Operator) can access the record. The access code is stored on new_custaccess in a field (new_secretcode).
Security is that the Operator has no privileges to new_customer and read/update privileges to new_custaccess.
There is a single field (new_secretcodeoperator) on new_custaccess that the operator can update. All other fields are restricted from update (and, if appropriate, read) to the Operator.
When the Customer calls and the Operator searches for the appropriate new_custaccess record. Once they locate the record they enter the Customer provided secret code into the field new_secretcode and do a save.
A Pre-Update query executes on new_custaccess in the context of a user with full privileges (call it MASTER, for fun here.) That plug-in checks to see if the provided code matches the secret code. If it doesn't it throws an error and the Operator can retry. If it does match the plug-in strips the field new_secretcodeoperator from the record, to keep it from saving the value. It also shares appropriate permission on the record new_customer to the appropriate operator.
The Operator now has access to the Customer record (you'll have to decide whether to cascade permissions or share on each record - that decision is beyond this discussion.)
We now need to deal with rescinding permission on the Customer record. I would handle this by having an entity new_customeraccess that is generated by the previous plug-in whenever access is granted to a Customer record. A workflow should be triggered on Create of new_customeraccess that cause new_customeraccess to be updated every 20 minutes (or whatever time the client prefers.)
A plugin is registered on Update of new_customeraccess that fires when the field updated by the workflow is modified. This plug-in will determine - via whatever criteria is decided on by the business - whether to continue sharing or revoke sharing.
I would also create some javascript/html based pop-up from the new_customer ribbon to end sharing by updating a field on new_customeraccess. Provide the Operator with limited Update privs on new_customeraccess via field level security.
This should accomplish what you want without going outside the standard CRM customization model. Not exactly sure of where you draw the line on bespoke but this is probably as close as you'll get to OOTB. A few plug-ins are all the C# you'll need. And the only JavaScript will be for usability, not functionality.
Let me know if you have questions.
I can't imagine that there doesn't exist an efficient, lightweight, secure authentication and authorization library for ASP.NET applications that is easy to use in e.g. your controllers and views. I read tons of articles and I performed a zillion searches, but did not find one yet. Does anyone know of such a library? Or did anyone create one himself and is willing to share?
The ASP.NET authentication system is mainly based on the Username rather than on UserId. I really don't understand that. Imagine you want to create a blog with comments. A user can register and post a comment. Two well-known MVC examples (Nerddinner and MVC Music Store) use the default asp.net authentication system (membershipprovider / identy / principal etc.) and use the Username to store the user that belongs to some object, e.g. "HostedBy"-field.
To me, this seems not a very good practice:
It's not possible to change username without having to change all the related records.
Why not us an int as Id? You need just 8 bytes to store 16 million users. Unless you limit the username to 8 byte-characters, it is less efficient in terms of storage space.
A string-based relationship seems not very efficient, as string based lookups are slower than integer based lookups.
Oke, I can imagine why you want to use a Guid and not an int, because that is virtually impossible to guess and to remember and that could increase security in some way; if that's the reason, that's fine to me.
But, then remains the question why the IIdentity interface makes just the Username available and NOT the UserId. If you use the UserId as foreign key, it's hard to e.g. fetch a list of all the posts of the current logged in user: you always need a database lookup to fetch the UserId that belongs to the username.
Another thing I wonder about is that the authentication system seems rather bloated. My best guess is that at at most 90% of the users will use an authentication system for just one application. So, why create default functionality to make it capable of serving multiple applications? (the application column in aspnet_Users).
If you don't care about these things, it's might be allright, but, I want to prepare for 16+ million users, don't you? Or, I want to server my pages under 50ms... So.. why the heck did Microsoft build the default authentication system this way? It seems pretty bloated and crappy to me.
A related question (which doesn't give answer to mine):
How can I access UserId in ASP.NET Membership without using Membership.GetUser()?
OK, you dislike the ASP.NET Membership Provider. If you're an NHibernate shop, then you could take a look at Rhino Security by Ayende Rahien.