OK, I've been looking through a representative sample of the MVC 3 routing questions/answers, and I answered 80% of my question. A good thing, but now the most difficult part remains unsolved.
In my world, I have a URL localhost/Location/Guid
Works great, based off of this route that I've entered before my default route:
routes.MapRoute(
"Location",
"Location/{id}",
new { controller = "Location", action = "Details", id = System.Guid.Empty }
);
I can pass in the Guid for the location I want displayed, but that's down-right FUGLY. I'd really like to see the URL displayed in the address bar, and linked within a page as: localhost/Location/Paris
Obviously, I could change the parameter to a string and pass in "Paris", but I don't understand how to get the database to understand that I want Paris, France and not Paris, Texas without the use of the Guid.
I really need some help on this one, not just to solve my immediate problem, but also to better understand routing in general. I thought I had a handle on it sufficient for my needs, but obviously, I don't.
Thanks in advance!
You're going to have to put something in the URL to disambiguate between Paris, France, and Paris, TX.
You could set up your route pattern to be `/Location/{country}/{region}/{city}', or you could slugify every possible location in your application
Use those location slugs: /Location/{locationSlug}. If you have multiple locations named "Paris", you slugify them and append an auto-incrementing # to the end (e.g., /Location/paris, /Location/paris-1, /Location/paris-2). Or you can add region/city/country info to the slug to disambiguate, instead of the #.
Do it stack overflow question style, where you have an ID, and then the location slug. It looks prettier and more concise if you are able to convert or map your GUID's to integers, so your pattern would be like this: Location/{id}/{locationSlug} (e.g., /Location/1245/paris).
Related
I'd like to know if it's possible (or even correct) to use embedded documents as reference in other documents.
I know I can move the embedded document to its own collection but the main goal is to have the performance benefit of embedded document and also avoid duplication.
For example:
User
{
_id: ObjectId("4fed0591d17011868cf9c982"),
_class: "User"
...
addresses: [ {
_id: ObjectId("87KJbk87gjgjjygREewakj86"),
_class: "Address",
...
} ]
}
Order
{
_id: ObjectId("gdh60591d123487658cf9c982"),
_class: "Order",
...
address: ObjectId("87KJbk87gjgjjygREewakj86")
}
Your case reminds me of the typical relational approach, which I was a victim of, too, when starting to use document-oriented DBs. All of your
entities in the example are referenced, there is no redundancy anymore.
You should start to get used to the idea of letting go normalization and starting to duplicate data. In many cases it is hard to determine which data should be referenced and which should be embedded. Your case tends to be quite clear, though.
Without knowing your entire domain model, the address seems to be a perfect candidate for a value object. Do not maintain an Address collection, embed it within the user object. In Order, you could either make a reference to the user, which gives you implicitly the address object and might make sense, since an order is made by a user.
But...I recommend that you embed the address entirely in the Order. First, it is faster since you don't need to resolve a reference. Second, the address in shipped orders should never change! Consider orders of the last year. If you hold a reference to the address you would lose the information to which address they were shipped, once the user changes his address.
Suggestion: Always take a snapshot of the address and embed it in the Order. Save the MongoDB ID of the user as a regular string (no #DBRef) within the `Order. If a user should change his address, you can make a query for all non-shipped orders of that user and amend the address.
Since you asked if this is even correct, I would say, gently, "No." At least not typically.
But if you did want to insist on using an embedded address from user:
You can reference the user embedded address in the Order object, just not the way you might think! If you stored the id of the user in the order (it should already be there if Order belongs_to User), then you merely use user.address instead of copying the address instance as you have done.
ALTERNATIVE
I hope to illustrate a better approach to modeling the domain...
A more common approach is to instantiate a new order object, using the user's address as the default "ship to" address for the order, yet allow the user to override the shipping address if desired. In theory, each order could have a different "ship to" address.
Just because two classes have an address, does not mean they are necessarily the same address.
COMMENTARY
Orders are more of an historical document, versus one that changes. Therefore, Orders are generally immutable once placed, your model allows the address to change every time the user changes their address. That change ripples into the Orders, and would be incorrect insofar as normal order business logic goes.
Assume your address last year was in Spain and you had Order #1 show Spain when you ran a report of Orders last year. Imagine if your address this year is now Portugal and Order #1 now shows Portugal in the same report. That would be factually incorrect.
BTW: #Matt gave you the tip that from a "problem domain" perspective, you likely do not want to model it as you have. I am merely elaborating on that...
Since I got no answer I will post here how I did it. If you have a better solution I am happy to here it.
It looks like there's no way to create/reference a collection inside another collection, so I had to extract the addresses from the user collection to it's own collection and create a reference in the User and Order collections as mentioned here. I was expecting something more flexible, but couldn't find one.
User
{
_id: ObjectId("4fed0591d17011868cf9c982"),
_class: "User"
...
addresses: [ {
"$ref" : "addresses",
"$id" : ObjectId("87KJbk87gjgjjygREewakj86")
} ]
}
Address
{
_id: ObjectId("87KJbk87gjgjjygREewakj86"),
...
}
Order
{
_id: ObjectId("gdh60591d123487658cf9c9867"),
_class: "Order",
...
address: {
"$ref" : "addresses",
"$id" : ObjectId("87KJbk87gjgjjygREewakj86")
}
}
Can Magento view/manage our customers by their business name in addition to their contact names to find them easily? It is being used for B2B, so when emails go out they are pulling the customer’s name, instead of the company name which is more appropriate.
Is this a global setting?
thanks in advance.
Magento stores business name on the customer's address by default, so it's a little harder to get to.
There's no reason you cannot add another customer field to put the company name on the customer record itself. That way you'll have no problem accessing it, and can change other screens in the system to reflect it.
If you don't want to go to those lengths, you could always implement a method that pulls the company name from the default address, and save it into the session by default, for easier retrieval.
EDIT: Better idea.
Looking through the sales email templates, there are two methods that are used to grab a customer's name:
$order->getCustomerName();
$order->getBillingAddress()->getName();
I don't see any separate references to the company name, so you should be able to substitute these two methods for your own and get the desired outcome. You'll need to create your own module and override the models for customer/address and sales/order (others have covered this in depth elsewhere). Then create methods that look something like this:
public function getCustomerName() {
if($this->getBillingAddress()->getCompany()) {
return $this->getBillingAddress()->getCompany();
}
return parent::getCustomerName();
}
That's the example for sales order, modify accordingly for customer. Now your company names will be used whenever available, and when they aren't the fallback will be to the original implementation (customer name).
Hope that helps!
Thanks,
Joe
You are correct about the universal application. If you did want just the emails, the concern is whether you have access to your custom function where you need it. If there's no object handy, I'm not positive that you will be able to call just any method that you need to.
An approach that would work in this case would be to override the two objects mentioned below, but to instead add a getCompanyName method to them. That way, you'll have the right objects to call, and you can edit the emails specifically to taste.
So, I'm not quite sure how I should structure this in CakePHP to work correctly in the proper MVC form.
Let's, for argument sake, say I have the following data structure which are related in various ways:
Team
Task
Equipment
This is generally how sites are and is quite easy to structure and make in Cake. For example, I would have the a model, controller and view for each item set.
My problem (and I'm sure countless others have had it and already solved it) is that I have a level above the item sets. So, for example:
Department
Team
Task
Equipment
Department
Team
Task
Equipment
Department
Team
Task
Equipment
In my site, I need the ability for someone to view the site at an individual group level as well as move to view it all together (ie, ignore the groups).
So, I have models, views and controls for Depart, Team, Task and Equipment.
How do I structure my site so that from the Department view, someone can select a Department then move around the site to the different views for Team/Task/Equipment showing only those that belong to that particular Department.
In this same format, is there a way to also move around ignoring the department associations?
Hopefully the following example URLs clarifies anything that was unclear:
// View items while disregarding which group-set record they belong to
http://www.example.com/Team/action/id
http://www.example.com/Task/action/id
http://www.example.com/Equipment/action/id
http://www.example.com/Departments
// View items as if only those associated with the selected group-set record exist
http://www.example.com/Department/HR/Team/action/id
http://www.example.com/Department/HR/Task/action/id
http://www.example.com/Department/HR/Equipment/action/id
Can I get the controllers to function in this manner? Is there someone to read so I can figure this out?
Thanks to those that read all this :)
I think I know what you're trying to do. Correct me if I'm wrong:
I built a project manager for myself in which I wanted the URLs to be more logical, so instead of using something like
http://domain.com/project/milestones/add/MyProjectName I could use
http://domain.com/project/MyProjectName/milestones/add
I added a custom route to the end (!important) of my routes so that it catches anything that's not already a route and treats it as a "variable route".
Router::connect('/project/:project/:controller/:action/*', array(), array('project' => '[a-zA-Z0-9\-]+'));
Whatever route you put means that you can't already (or ever) have a controller by that name, for that reason I consider it a good practice to use a singular word instead of a plural. (I have a Projects Controller, so I use "project" to avoid conflicting with it.)
Now, to access the :project parameter anywhere in my app, I use this function in my AppController:
function __currentProject(){
// Finding the current Project's Info
if(isset($this->params['project'])){
App::import('Model', 'Project');
$projectNames = new Project;
$projectNames->contain();
$projectInfo = $projectNames->find('first', array('conditions' => array('Project.slug' => $this->params['project'])));
$project_id = $projectInfo['Project']['id'];
$this->set('project_name_for_layout', $projectInfo['Project']['name']);
return $project_id;
}
}
And I utilize it in my other controllers:
function overview(){
$this->layout = 'project';
// Getting currentProject id from App Controller
$project_id = parent::__currentProject();
// Finding out what time it is and performing queries based on time.
$nowStamp = time();
$nowDate = date('Y-m-d H:i:s' , $nowStamp);
$twoWeeksFromNow = $nowDate + 1209600;
$lateMilestones = $this->Project->Milestone->find('all', array('conditions'=>array('Milestone.project_id' => $project_id, 'Milestone.complete'=> 0, 'Milestone.duedate <'=> $nowDate)));
$this->set(compact('lateMilestones'));
$currentProject = $this->Project->find('all', array('conditions'=>array('Project.slug' => $this->params['project'])));
$this->set(compact('currentProject'));
}
For your project you can try using a route like this at the end of your routes.php file:
Router::connect('/:groupname/:controller/:action/*', array(), array('groupname' => '[a-zA-Z0-9\-]+'));
// Notice I removed "/project" from the beginning. If you put the :groupname first, as I've done in the last example, then you only have one option for these custom url routes.
Then modify the other code to your needs.
If this is a public site, you may want to consider using named variables. This will allow you to define the group on the URL still, but without additional functionality requirements.
http://example.com/team/group:hr
http://example.com/team/action/group:hr/other:var
It may require custom routes too... but it should do the job.
http://book.cakephp.org/view/541/Named-parameters
http://book.cakephp.org/view/542/Defining-Routes
SESSIONS
Since web is stateless, you will need to use sessions (or cookies). The question you will need to ask yourself is how to reflect the selection (or not) of a specific department. It could be as simple as putting a drop down selection in the upper right that reflects ALL, HR, Sales, etc. When the drop down changes, it will set (or clear) the Group session variable.
As for the functionality in the controllers, you just check for the Session. If it is there, you limit the data by the select group. So you would use the same URLs, but the controller or model would manage how the data gets displayed.
// for all functionality use:
http://www.example.com/Team/action/id
http://www.example.com/Task/action/id
http://www.example.com/Equipment/action/id
You don't change the URL to accommodate for the functionality. That would be like using a different URL for every USER wanting to see their ADDRESS, PHONE NUMBER, or BILLING INFO. Where USER would be the group and ADDRESS, PHONE NUMBER< and BILLING INFO would be the item sets.
WITHOUT SESSIONS
The other option would be to put the Group filter on each page. So for example on Team/index view you would have a group drop down to filter the data. It would accomplish the same thing without having to set and clear session variables.
The conclusion is and the key thing to remember is that the functionality does not change nor does the URLs. The only thing that changes is that you will be working with filtered data sets.
Does that make sense?
Playing with the new(ish) url rewriting functionality for web forms, but I'm running into trouble trying to declare parameters as optional.
Here's the scenario. I've got a search function which accepts two parameters, sku and name. Ideally I'd like the URL for this search function to be /products/search/skuSearchString/nameSearchString. I also have various management pages that need to map to things like /products/management/ or /products/summary/. In other words, the last two parameters in the URL need to be optional - there might be one search string, or two, or none.
This is how I've declared my virtual URL:
Friend Const _VIRTUALURL As String = "products/{action}/{sku}/{*product}"
And added the following defaults:
Me.Defaults = New Web.Routing.RouteValueDictionary(New With {.sku = "/"})
Me.Defaults = New Web.Routing.RouteValueDictionary(New With {.product = "/"})
I have two problems with this setup. The most pressing is that the url seems to expect an sku parameter. So, /products/summary/ cannot be found but /products/summary/anyTextAtAll/ maps to the correct page. You get the same result whether the defaults are set to "/" or "". How do I ensure both sku and product parameters are optional?
The second is more a matter of interest. Ideally, I'd like the url to be able to tell whether or not it's got a product search string or a url search string. The obvious way to do this is to make one or the other default to a value I can just pick up and ignore, but is there a neater way of handling it?
I'm not sure I entirely understood the question, but I have some comments about what you've shown so far:
The manner in which you're setting defaults seems incorrect. You're first setting a default value dictionary with a value for "sku". You're then replacing the default value dictionary with a value for "product".
A default value of "/" is unlikely to be what you want. In this case it sounds like you want a default value of just "" (empty string).
Try something like:
Me.Defaults = New Web.Routing.RouteValueDictionary(New With {
.sku = "",
.product = "" })
My VB skills are rather weak, so the syntax I showed might not be exactly right.
I think that if you change both of these then you should be good to go.
Let's say I'm building a web application whose user pages can be found at http://example.com/NAME. What's the best way to make sure the username doesn't conflict with a reserved word (e.g. 'about', 'contact', etc.)? I can think of two ways:
Maintain a list somewhere in my code. This is great and all, but means I have another piece of code I have to edit if I decide to, say, change the "about" page to "aboutus".
Request the URI (e.g. http://example.com/someusername) and check if it exists (doesn't return a 404). This feels kind of like a hack, but on the other hand it does exactly what it's supposed to do. On the other hand, I can't reserve anything without making a page for it.
What would be the best way to go about this? Manual validation of usernames is not an option. Thanks!
EDIT: I forgot to mention, the username has to go at the root, like this:
http://example.com/USERNAME
Not like this:
http://example.com/users/USERNAME
Hence why I'm asking this question. This is for technical reasons, don't ask.
I would strongly suggest using a unique path like http://example.com/users/NAME instead. Otherwise, what are you going to do if you want to add a reserved word, but a user has already taken it as their user name? You'll end up with all kinds of potential migration problems down the track.
Alternatively, if you must have something that goes straight off http://example.com/, could you possibly prefix all user names? So that user jerryjvl would translate to link http://example.com/user_jerryjvl?
If there is really no other possible solution, then I'd say either check user names against whatever data source determines what the 'reserved words' are, or make a lookup file / table / structure somewhere that contains all the reserved words.
In the interest of completeness, if you can't change the routing. Another possibility is to have your user routes and your non-user routes have a programmatic distinction. For example, if you appended a '_' to the end of each of your user routes, then you can make sure that users are located at: http://example.com/NAME_ and the other route would never end in '_'
How about changing your routing scheme so that users are at example.com/users/NAME ?
I maintain the reserved words inside the code.
This is the PERL code that I use in the http://postbit.com/ website to check if the usernamename is a reserved word:
# Black list of logins and sub-domains reserved keywords
my #black_list = qw(
about access account accounts add address adm admin administration
adult advertising affiliate affiliates ajax analytics android anon
anonymous api app apps archive atom auth authentication
...
);
my $username_normalized = lc($username);
$username_normalized =~ s/\W//gs; # 'log-in' -> 'login'
for my $this_username (#black_list) {
if ($username_normalized eq $this_username) {
die("This username is already taken. Please choose other username.\n");
}
}
The complete list of reserved names (like 'css', 'images', 'js', 'admin', 'root', 'old', 'test', 'www', 'admin', 'login', 'devel'...) with more than 300 login usernames is posted here:
http://blog.postbit.com/reserved-username-list.html
You only know what are these 'reserved' words. So better maintain a list and validate against it.
Another method will be if you use a CMS, then all these keywods 'about', 'contact' etc. will be there in your database. Validate against it.
Right next to the text box something like: "Please use your personal nickname or you real name. Usernames with common words indicating affiliation with the site administration may be revoked".
How about just create dummy accounts first with all the reserve words? just list all the possible ones and create them.
if you use
www.example.com/user/name
then there will be no problem but it seems like you'd like the URL to be short.
Maintain a list somewhere in my code. This is great and all, but means I have another piece of code I have to edit if I decide to, say, change the "about" page to "aboutus".
Your menus should be stored in an array/list. This way you would have only 1 piece of code to edit, not 2. =]
Then, since all menus are in one array, you can match username with elements in the array.
for example
$menu = array('About', 'Contact', 'Home')
if( in_array($username, $menu) ) {
echo 'invalid username'
}
You could always look and see how stackoverflow.com works.