I'm new to MVC3 (and MVC in general) and looking for a bit of advice. Pointing me in the direction of some good articles or tutorials would be good enough I think. I'm a bit familiar with the concept of MVC, and I've been a c# programmer (hobbyist and partly professional) for a while now.
The issue I have is that I have an object (call it "Game"), which has a List<T> as a property (call T "Player"), and I want the user to "select" the player to add them to the Game.
All players would be managed in another part of the application, so there is no need to think about "managing" the master player pool at this point.
I'm looking for a best practice for:
adding custom objects to a list that of n length while on a page.
Searching for and selecting a custom object in the first place.
I can do the standard pages for the database access so that's not a problem. In asp I would have just done something like a wizard and managed everything through postback on the page, but I want to try and keep to best practice where i can for this project.
Any pointers welcome, also looking for some good physical books to buy on MVC.
If I understand you correctly you want two elements within the page, a player search (over all players) and a list of players already added to the game.
For the player search you want to use a bit of jQuery to hook up an actionResult that returns a JSON result of your player results. You can then display these results without having to leave the page, in appearance much like an AJAX post in webforms.
You have more options for how you add the player to the game, depending on if you want to add more than one at once, or want a backout stage (so you can "add" players and then cancel out and they won't be added).
the option I think would give the most seamless interface would be a jQuery/javascript call to an action method which datawise adds your player to the game, and use jQuery to add the element to your players in the game on the page.
For the adding of a player in your controller you could return a bool in a JSON result, just you have confirmation that the player was successfully added to the list.
For reference: This is quite an old article but highlights the power of working with jQuery and MVC quite nicely I think http://andreasohlund.net/2008/12/21/asp-net-mvc-jquery-true/
Related
I have written python code that analyses two text sources and compares them.
I'd like to implement this dynamically via two text boxes that a user could either type into or manually upload. I have already begun coding this using HTML. Would it be better to implement a widget or the models instead to make the text area boxes?
Edit:
I wrote this question when I was just figuring Django out, so forgive me if it sounds confusing. But everyone starts somewhere. I'm unable to delete the question as contributions have been made already. YouTube courses proved helpful in learning the basics, if any beginners stumble upon this.
You use a form object. Django has form objects (https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/2.0/topics/forms) that take a model and translate it into html elements. So I guess in a way, you implement the model but I want to stress that that's not actually what's happening from a technical standpoint. A better way to say it is that you're implementing forms. The reason I stress this so much is so that you understand what's really going on so that you don't have misunderstandings that end up costing you in code clarity and readability.
So to answer your question, you can implement django forms to do this very easily. The way you implement it depends on your models and how they are designed since the forms use the models to create the right html form elements. If you're dealing with one model that will be instantiated by the form input, create a model form. This will take the input from the form and create your model instance. If you're dealing with one form that uses multiple models, then use a generic form. In this case, you will have to write your own save method that does the actual logic of the form.
One other thing to add... No matter what, your end result will always be a widget on the HTML in the end. Django forms translate a model class into a form element with input elements. If you didn't use Django forms, you would still do the translating, but you would have to do it from scratch.
I hope this helps and that I correctly understood your question.
I have a joomla site and would like to integrate some old unfinished webcomics to it, so I can pick them up where I stopped in a CMS that won't leave me in an absolute frothing rage (thanks, wordpress).
I've got some experience with Joomla and I believe it would be a pretty good platform for managing multiple comics... except for the small issue of horrid navigation between pages/articles. Joomla's integrated article navigation is a humble but passable start, but if you intend to use categories to organize chapters then getting from the end of one to the beginning of the next is... yeah. This is a pity, as Joomla's category and article management options are beautiful for archiving and presentation, and adding gantry 5 to it means a great deal of control over the reading experience. Basically, joomla has pretty much everything I want, except for the navigation.
Ideally, what I'd like to be able to accomplish for comic navigation in joomla is:
Clickable full-article-image leading to next article/page
Prev/next article buttons (already available)
Prev/next category buttons (do we have those?)
The latter two in a module I can choose where to publish (optional)
And this is it, basically. I understand that implementing the first could be very hard without some major template customization, in which case I'd be willing to insert the image as a link in the article body... but only if there was one single code I could use, like the one that generates the next category article button. Because I'm not willing to create hundreds of menu items to generate links page-by-page.
So is any of this doable?
This is a quick answer but too much for a comment. I'm assuming since you are on SO that you don't mind coding (as opposed to just configuring).
I think you need to do two things. First you need to create a pagination.php for your template. This will let you really super control what the pagination looks like. You can have images, special css and js, whatever you want. You can also add the "last" and "first" options.
I think you need to make a new plugin to replace the core pagenavigation plugin and that also generates the previous/next category links. (Or I guess you could make one just to do categorynavigation depending on what you want.) HOWEVER, it seems to me that there is data on the sibling links that is already being generated in the content category model so you might be able to use that. (Check the code; I think there was never a UI for it, but it is there. Even if it isn't there, siblings are very easy to obtain in nested sets)
The other thing you can really think about if you go that route is changing the whole thing somewhat to use a module that gets the current ID and category ID from JInput. You might also be able to use JPagination. The important thing, however is that you make sure to do the caching the way the pagination that is there does it. In other words you really want to cache the whole list in the order you want so you are not running so many queries and slowing your site down. You may want to look at the categories and category modules to get some ideas about the queries to do.
Hope that gets you started, but it is definitely something you can do without too much trouble.
Today when I searched on the internet I saw the View first approach in web development of Lift framework. Can somebody tell me the differences between view first and MVC approach ?
Thank you very much
View first is based not on a model and a controller, but mostly interested in the view. Many problem domains do not neatly compose in controllers and models. Think about a ecommerce site, the shopping cart exists on all pages, but should every controller control it? Personally in MVC too much of my time is spent thinking about how to logically make the problem fit into MVC than just coding. View first takes away this controller / view / model and instead just has a view which in Lift can call "snippets". It is almost a superset of MVC since if you wanted you could only have a single snippet per page, but Lift allows you to do much more. Snippets can be cross cutting concerns or very page specfic logic.
From the lift website..
Lift is different [from MVC]. For HTML requests, Lift loads the view first and builds your page from the view. Lift also supports REST style requests for non-HTML data. (See 11 on page 1↑) “Why?” Because complex HTML pages rarely contain a dominant piece of logic... a single controller... but contain many different components. Some of those components interact and some do not. In Lift, you define the collection of components to be rendered in the resulting HTML page in the view.
When your using lift, you basically have a view(page) and from this you could incorporate any snippet(app) that you have without much of the antics you'd normally have to do in an MVC framework/environment.
Basically you don't have to choose what the most important thing on the page is just what you want to add to a page and then add it.
Currently, in our deployment we have a abstract type Component which represents a part of our Page, basically an element such as a Question, which can have multiple choice, a text box or any other form of answering it, or a Video that users can play, basically a shard of a page that is interchangeable, basically, our design was to have a specific area in our website which would be rendered through a list of Components, we tried at first to have each "Page" object have a List of Components, and each Component would have a method render that would return a Spring View, we thought we could iterate over the list and somehow mash the views together.
We also tried using XSTLViews with no more success, it seems to be more of a design problem and our abuse of the way Spring MVC should be used.
We will really be glad to receive any advice/tips/corrections about how to do it right and maybe some corrections about misconceptions we might have.
It sounds like you're more than half way to a design that uses AJAX to build your page. You're trying to mash up a bunch of Components into one request. What if you returned a container page which then requested/inserted a block of html for each URL it was given a render time. Each of these URLs would refer to a single component. It might be a performance hit if you are including a lot of these Components, but it seems to fit the design.
The title might not be easy to understand but it seems to me it is a basic design question when dealing with smart models.
I have a hierarchy of model objects that represent different types of document.
Say I have a view with different buttons, each one opens the document of the underlying object model. When I click on a button I have to display a view whose controller implementation depends only on the underlying model object class. How do I get this implementation ?
(It could be in the implementation of the button but then the question becomes how do I get the implementation of the button)
Should it be a factory that takes as an input the type of my model and returns my view controller ? Should it be my model that knows how to build its controller (seems dirty nè ?) ? Should I use composition ? Something else ?
I hope I am being clear enough. I am a bit struggling with this !
Your question is too abstract to give a specific advice. MVC pattern appears in many forms and in many technologies. For a web page it will have one shape, for a WPF app it will have another. In general there are both "view-first" and "controller-first" approaches. You can start with any one and see if it comes natural for your problem, if not -- refactor.
One other area you can explore is the area of modern composite application frameworks which provide out-of-the-box modular MVC\MVVM solutions. If you're writing for web, read about ASP.NET MVC and its best practices. If you're writing for WPF, read about MVVM approach and take a look at Prism, for example. You might find that your problem is already solved by existing tools.