I am kind of a newbie at programming (have worked a bit with Delphi years back) but have started to build an application for Windows Phone 7.5 Mango, as I have a great idea for an app :D
In the application the user should be able to pick different locations from a list (a very large list, 5k+ items) - to make sure that all users always get the latest list, I have created a SQL on my website to generate the list as XML - which I load to the application via httpwebrequest; I am not quite sure what best practise is when dealing with a large list, which will be updated frequently etc.?
That is not the main question thou, because this seems to work pretty okay - my real question is, how to add a search function to my application, so the user can search for a location instead of scrolling throug the entire list?
My SQL is build up with ID, Country, State, Region, City (and a few more irrelevant tables for a search function).
I do not know what the best way to approach this is? Should I make a query on my website and generate the result as XML and use httpwebrequest to get the result to the phone - or should it be a search function on the device to search the entire list? And if so, how do I do that?
Thank you ;-)
First of all I have to inform you that fetching an list with over 5k+ items via a smartphone that not are using Wireless Network, will take a while. So, acrording to me there would be a huge waste of traffic to download the whole list if the user only are interested in a few items. This basically means that you are downloading a bunch of date but only are using 0,01% of it which is not the way you should build a program.
So, acording to me you should make an webservice so that the user can call the webservice and make a http request using its search parameter. And then you basically just use the parameter in an SQL Search Query, which could be an stored procedure or just bare in code, but I don't know how your server/database is build and structed so you can basically choose that whatever.
Here is an example:
SELECT * FROM TABLE_NAME WHERE (ID=#ID) OR (Country=#Country) OR (State=#State) OR (Region=#Region) OR (City=#City)
If i would have done this application I would have had two parameters. One that are representing the user input, in other words the search text and one that explains what the serach parameter is. (ID, Country, State, Region or City?).
You have to register your handle function for TextBox.TextChanged with some logic to filter queries that happens too often (for example typing name John may cause 4 requests: J, Jo, Joh, John). It can be done by using System.Threading.Timer with delayed start and changing it starting time when user types new character (if you need example - ask).
Then I recommend you to use WCF service to "talk" with SQL database. On WCF service use any ORM (Entity framework is simplest) to query you database.
Related
I'm in the process of building a bot and the experience has been challenging for me so far. This is most likely since I'm coming from v1 and I'm trying to rebuild my bot in v4 style, which is pretty much a completely different framework it seems.
I find there's quite a lot of documentation out there, but it's been split up into theory and practice, probably due to the different development frameworks you can use (i.e. Node, C#). But having to go back and forth between these articles is not helping,
After quite a bit of messing around, I got to a point where things are beginning to get a bit more decent, but I still feel there's lots of room for improvement. I can't share the whole project at the moment, but I've created a gist of the most important code here: https://gist.github.com/jsiegmund/831d5337b1a438133991070daba8a27e
So my issues/questions with this code are the following:
The way to add dialogs and mainly the need to add prompts for retrieving the answers is confusing. I get the idea, but not the inner workings. For instance: I now have the prompts named after the same method names of the corresponding dialog step, is that the way it's supposed to work? There seems to be some magic code linking everything together, by convention? It would make much more sense to me when the waterfall steps would also include the prompts.
What's the right way of feeding the dialog with information so it can skip steps? I've got LUIS intents set-up in the main dialog which then open up this dialog for hour booking. Suppose my user says "I'd like to book 8 hours on customer X", I'd like the dialog to pre-populate the amount to 8 and the customer to X.
The customer/project resolving is maybe a not-so-standard requirement here. These come from a third party application, retrieved through API/SDK. So based on the logged-in user I need to go out to that application and retrieve the data for this user. This comes back in key/value pairs, where the key is a GUID. I don't want the user to type in GUIDs, so I have created these action buttons with the names of the customers, but to get the ID value into the next step it now 'writes' the GUID in the chat instead of the customer name. Using the name is tricky as I can't fully rely on those being unique. Also, for selecting the project I need the customer GUID and saving the final entry I also need the ID's. But I don't want the user to see those.
The way I now have the cards built is also weird to me. I first need to add a dialog for the card, and later when calling stepContext.PromptAsync I need to supply the card as an attachment as well. Feels duplicate to me, but removing either one of the steps fails. The normal style prompt doesn't work for me as that doesn't handle key/value but just strings (see number 3).
Okay, so those are some of the things I'm struggling with. I'm getting there and it works for now, but as said I can't escape the feeling that I'm not doing it right. If anyone could shine a light on this that would be highly appreciated.
Yeah, there is a lot of changes from version to version. Do you really mean v1?! 😲 Or v3?
The way to add dialogs and mainly the need to add prompts for retrieving the answers is confusing. I get the idea, but not really
the inner workings. For instance: I now have the prompts named after
the same method names of the corresponding dialog step, is that the
way it's supposed to work? There seems to be some magic code linking
everything together, by convention? It would make much more sense to
me when the waterfall steps would also include the prompts.
Essentially. The steps listed in the waterfall array are the names of the method names you've created. Basically, this is where you are giving the order of the steps that should be done by the bot. Prompts are classes used to retrieve data and are populated into the ("main") dialog using AddDialog() and are stored in dialog state with unique names so that they can be retrieved correctly. I see your point on how it might be simple to have everything setup in one "call" or declaration, and there probably could have been other approaches to how this was implemented; but this is what we got.
What's the right way of feeding the dialog with information so it can skip steps? I've got LUIS intents set-up in a main dialog which
then open up this dialog for hour booking. Suppose my user says "I'd
like to book 8 hours on customer X", I'd like the dialog to
pre-populate the amount to 8 and the customer to X.
Typically, steps use the previous steps value to reply, act or continue. In simple scenarios, skipping steps can be done by checking the state for those values. In the multiturn sample, if the user does not want to supply their age, it goes on to the next step and then it checks for the value and skips the step (it really doesn't skip it, it reports no age given, but you could just continue without any reply). Assuming the LUIS side of things is correct and getting the right intent+entities (let's say 'booking' intent and entities ['time' and 'customer']), then that should be doable. You would populate state info for both of those entities and then the later step (say prompting for the customer step) would just skip/bypass.
But, what you really want to do is look at adaptive dialogs. They are new and make this type of scenarios much more dynamic and flexible. Look here:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/bot-service/bot-builder-adaptive-dialog-introduction?view=azure-bot-service-4.0
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/bot-service/bot-builder-dialogs-adaptive?view=azure-bot-service-4.0&tabs=csharp
https://github.com/microsoft/BotBuilder-Samples/tree/main/samples/csharp_dotnetcore/adaptive-dialog
The customer / project resolving is maybe a not-so-standard requirement here. These come from a third party application, retrieved
through API/SDK. So based on the logged in user I need to go out to
that application and retrieve the data for this user. This comes back
in key/value pairs, where the key is a GUID. Obviously I don't want
the user to type in GUIDs, so I have created these action buttons with
the names of the customers, but to get the ID value into the next step
it now 'writes' the GUID in the chat instead of the customer name.
Using the name is tricky as I can't fully rely on those being unique.
I'm not 100% sure on this part. Let me look into it and get back to you.
Also, for selecting the project I need the customer GUID and saving
the final entry I also need the ID's. But I don't want the user to see
those.
State (conversation|user|etc) would be a good place to manage this.
The way I now have the cards built is also weird to me. I first need to add a dialog for the card, and later when calling
stepContext.PromptAsync I need to supply the card as an attachment as
well. Feels duplicate to me, but removing either one of the steps ends
in failure. The normal style prompt doesn't work for me as that
doesn't handle key/value but just strings (see number 3).
Nope, that's correct. I know it feels weird, but that is the way to do it. Basically, anything but simple text will be an attachment. Cards are JSON, therefore an attachment and you need to send that to the user/client.
You're doing it all correct. Again; I would suggest on looking at adaptive dialogs as that's the newer tech and the move forward. But otherwise; you're on the right path!
We've built a system for generating anesthesia records.
We're now trying to model them as FHIR documents.
I understand that a Document (in FHIR terms) is supposed to end up being kind of a self-contained resource.
But, in our case, we have a process where this document will be gradually assembled.
What's the best way to handle this while we're gathering resources before we're ready to create a document.
We want to use FHIR to create and save various resources as we go, and then at the very end, assemble a document.
Assume the following:
A patient
A provider
A health history
Some info about the procedure being performed
An extensive set of vitals observations
An extensive set of drug doses administered
Various procedure, and recovery notes
A final signature by the provider that will "finalize" the report
I understand we can create and save various resources throughout. But we want to kind of keep them all lumped together so we can easily fetch everything related to what will ultimately become that document.
How would this work in terms of RESTful operations?
POST /Bundle of type "document" with a composition as first element (to create document)
Use resulting ID from bundle? Will I also get an ID for the composition?
Then, how do I add/update/remove individual items from the composition? Do i need to do PUTs of the entire composition to add something?
I have entire series of checkpoints every 5 minutes with full vitals (BP, SpO2, Temp, Respiratory rate, etc). Would I first create those observations with a POST, and then do a PUT to update the composition with a reference to them?
As I'm sure you can tell, I just want to understand how FHIR expects you to do this kind of thing in terms of HTTP operations.
Thanks in advance for any guidance!
You'd start by posting a Composition to have a focal point (table of contents) to update as you gather your data. You would then POST your individual Observations, Procedures, etc. and either PUT or PATCH the Composition to add references to the relevant data. Once you've got all of the relevant information gathered and tied into the Composition, you would then generate the document Bundle. You could create the Bundle earlier in the process and update it each time the Composition changes if you wanted to be able to render the draft document using a FHIR document rendering tool, but otherwise there's no real reason for the Bundle to exist until you're ready to lock down the document.
I have a question about getting 'random' chunks of available content from a RESTful service, without duplicating what the client has already cached. How can I do this in a RESTful way?
I'm serving up a very large number of items (little articles with text and urls). Let's pretend it's:
/api/article/
My (software) clients want to get random chunks of what's available. There's too many to load them all onto the client. They do not have a natural order, so it's not a situation where they can just ask for the latest. Instead, there are around 6-10 attributes that the client may give to 'hint' what type of articles they'd like to see (e.g. popular, recent, trending...).
Over time the clients get more and more content, but at the server I have no idea what they have already, and because they're sent randomly, I can't just pass in the 'most recent' one they have.
I could conceivably send up the GUIDS of what's stored locally. The clients only store 50-100 locally. That's small enough to stuff into a POST variable, but not into the GET query string.
What's a clean way to design this?
Key points:
Data has no logical order
Clients must cache the content locally
Each item has a GUID
Want to avoid pulling down duplicates
You'll never be able to make this work satisfactorily if the data is truly kept in a random order (bear in mind the Dilbert RNG Effect); you need to fix the order for a particular client so that they can page through it properly. That's easy to do though; just make that particular ordering be a resource itself; at that point, you've got a natural (if possibly synthetic) ordering and can use normal paging techniques.
The main thing to watch out for is that you'll be creating a resource in response to a GET when you do the initial query: you probably should use a resource name that is a hash of the query parameters (including the client's identity if that matters) so that if someone does the same query twice in a row, they'll get the same resource (so preserving proper idempotency). You can always delete the resource after some timeout rather than requiring manual disposal…
I am building a mobile web application that targets webkit. I have a requirement to perform a live search (on keypress) against a database of ~5000 users.
I've tried a number of different techniques:
On page load, making an AJAX call which loads an in-memory representation of all 5000 users, and querying them on the client. I tried sending JSON, which proved to be too large, and also a custom delimited string, which was then parsed using split(). This was better, but ultimately searches against this array of users was slow.
I tried using a conventional AJAX call, which would return users based on a query, also using the custom delimited string technique. This was better, but I was forced to tune it so that searches were only performed with a minimum of 3 characters. This is not optimal, as I would like to be able to start filtering after 1 character. I could also throttle the calls so that not every keystroke within a certain threshold triggered a request. This could help with performance, but I'd rather not have to fiddle with that sort of thing.
Facebook mobile does this very well if you try their friend search. Searches happen instantaneously, and are triggered after 1 character.
My question is, does anyone have any suggestions for faster live searches for a mobile app? Should I be looking at localStorage? Is this reliable, feasible?
Is there any reason you can't use a binary search? The names you're looking for should be in a block. If you want first and last name search, you could create a second copy of the data sorted by last name and look in both sets.
Some helpful but more complicated data structures that address this type of problem include:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed_acyclic_word_graph
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trie
Beforehand let me thank you all !! Really guys you help a lot. When I will finish my web site and will have much time on watching how userbase is growing I will come here again and again to answer to another people questions(if I can )
So here is the problem.
I made a web-site on CodeIgniter. A social network engine. Something like phpfox, classmates_com or facebook.
It's right now somehow not multilingual, So the UI strings are in the view files, and next step will be move them to the language files.
I want the user to have ability to change the language. So I assume that in database user will have row "lang_local" which would be by default set to en, and then to any other language he will change .
So what is eating my nervs and enery is following.
I will make on this engine several demographic social networks,and I would like to manage theese web-sites in centralized manner with one backend . So whenever I would like to make a new web-network, I just add the domain settings install the script in new folder and add it in database sites
I see it like this
on every table in database like users,comments,messages,categories ,etc I will have a row site_id , and on each query add/update/delete I add a WHERE SITE_ID=XXX
and in table sites(site_id,site_name,domain_name) will have all domains , so that in backend I can filter data by website.
Is this a good way? What if i will need then to be multiserver, what about load balancing? Who can tell me what would be a right,PROFESSIONAL way? My maximum user limit for a database is something like for start 10.000 in one-two year 100.000users
There are loads of ways to do multi-site, but this is a perfectly good way to handle things. I use this approach in my internal work CMS.
The only downside is that it could potentially become massive and have performance issues. You may need to write an export script so you can grab everything belonging to a site then move them to their own install.