Load Partial Template Ajax - With Grails - ajax

I am creating a grails webapp, and have the main index gsp, and there are several common components that will be common across most of the pages on the site that I am using partial templates for.
Each partial template will be quite isolated and contain very different information, so each one should be getting info from different controllers.
What I want is on page loading, for each partial template to make a call to a controller to load the required content - Im hoping there is some tag I can easily place in my partial templates specifying a controller/action that will automatically call the controllers on load.
Is this possible?
----EDIT-----
Also, one of the partial templates' controllers will be pulling back information from a web service that can take some time, so it would be good if i could also load these templates asynchronously..
Thanks!

That's what the <g:include> Tag is for. It's very useful by itself but even more if combined with the springcache plugin and using page fragment caching.
Since the include calls a regular action in a controller you can also consume it by an ajax call.

Related

Implementing ecommerce analytics with MVC Razor

I am implementing various analytic tracking services in an MVC3 site (Google, Coremetrics) and researching if a custom HTML helper or partial view would work better given the following details:
-Code runs multiple sites and business logic is needed to change analytic service account Ids.
-The class must accept an object with order details to render the appropriate tags.
-The code must know which view is being rendered.
The solution I am working on includes am HTML helper base class that accepts the needed objects and is inherited by each provider's individual HTML helper. These helpers will live on the common layout. Is there a better way of implementing analytics on MVC and are partial views better suited since business logic is needed?
The GA analytics tracking code is pretty simple, we also use ASP.NET MVC3 but have just dropped the necessary code directly into our 'Order Complete' view.
There's no reason why you couldn't use an HTML helper instead though. I suggest not overly complicating your object model. Just use a single helper that has parameters matching the parameters used in the JavaScript.
You should be able to find examples of eCommerce tracking code, add parameters as appropriate, done. You might want to create another overload that pulls GA ID and domain name from the web.config as in the example as well, but still accepts the order details as parameters.

MVC3 Dynamic SubDomain Routing

First of all, I have read a lot of post relating this issue like:
Asp.net MVC RouteBase and IoC ,
Tenant-specific routes for dynamically loaded modules ,
and many others.
What I want is:
- Dynamically create pages like tenant1.mydomain.com, tenant2.mydomain.com, etc.
- My tenants will have the same functionality but just different content, styles, title, etc.
I have tried extending RouteBase class but have read that is not a clean solution.
Then I have tried creating a custom RouteConstraint like above posts recommend but not succeded.
Help me!
Thanks!
I have achieved this by doing two things. 1) was to provide functionality to select the correct content by providing the repositories via a factory which was handed the URL on creation. The issue here is that it might be possible to fetch the wrong data via relationships from entities that themselves don't have a tennantid field.
2) Is a basic custom view engine which looks up the host part of the URL and would look for a client specific template (via a folder structure) if the template was found it was used, otherwise the default template is returned.
Between these two I've got a system that delivers (in my case) multiple websites via the same bespoke CMS and product management tool.

Designing an application around HMVC and AJAX [Kohana 3.2]

I am currently designing an application that will have a few different pages, and each page will have components that update through AJAX. The layout is similar to the new Twitter design where 'Home', 'Discover', and 'Connect' are separate pages, but interacting within the page (such as clicking 'Followers' or 'Following') uses AJAX.
Since the design requires an initial page load with several components (in the context of Twitter: tweets, followers, following), each of which can be updated individually through AJAX, I thought it'd be best to have a default controller for serving pages, and other controllers with actions that, rather than serving full pages, strictly handle querying the database and returning JSON objects. This way, on initial page load several HMVC requests can be made to gather the data for each component, and AJAX calls can also be made to update each component individually.
My idea is to have a Controller_Default that handles serving pages. In the context of Twitter, Controller_Default would contain:
action_home()
action_connect()
action_discover()
I would then have other Controllers that don't deal with serving full pages, but rather components of pages. For instance, in the context of Twitter Controller_Tweet may have:
action_get()
which returns a JSON object containing tweets for a specific user. Action_home() could then make several HMVC requests to get the data for the several different components of the page (i.e. make requests to 'tweet/get', 'followers/get', 'following/get'). While on the page, however, AJAX calls could be made to the function specific controllers (i.e. 'tweet/get') to update the content.
My question: is this a good design? Does it make sense to have the pages served through a default controller, with page components served (in JSON format) through other function specific controllers?
If there is any confusion regarding the question please feel free to ask for clarification!
One of the strengths of the HMVC pattern is that employing this type of layered application doesn't lock you into a workflow that might be difficult to change later on.
From what you've indicated above, this would be perfectly acceptable as a way of serving content to a client; the default controller wraps sub-requests, which avoids multiple AJAX calls from the client to achieve the same goal.
Two suggestions I might make:
Ensure that your Twitter back-end requests are abstracted out and managed in a library to make the application DRY'er and easier to maintain.
Consider whether the default controller is making only the absolutely necessary calls on each request. Employ caching to avoid pulling infrequently changed data on every request (e.g., followers might only be updated every 30 seconds). This of course depends entirely on your application requirements, but if you get heavily loaded you could quickly find your Twitter API request limit being reached.
One final observation: if you do find the server is experiencing high load and Twitter API requests are taking a long time to return, consider provisioning another server and installing a copy of your application. You can then "point" sub-requests from the default gateway application to your second application server, which should help improve response times if the two servers are connected by a high-speed link.

Sitemesh different decorators for the same URL

I'm using urlrewriteFilter (org.tuckey.web.filters.urlrewrite.UrlRewriteFilter) to forward pages like www.mysite.com/myname to a Struts2 action. The action is mapped up in sitemesh, and it works properly.
But now I want to keep the same URL but apply another decorator to the page, based on whether the user is logged in or not.
I'm using AppFuse-stack Struts2.
Ok - since no-one else looks like having a go.
Sitemesh selects the decorators based on the incoming url string, so to have different decorators you need different urls depending on the login status of your client. AFAIK Sitemesh uses the entire Url string so this includes parameters so you might get away with appending ?loggedIn="true" or ?loggedIn="false" and map the decorators on this. However this doesn't help with POST requests.
Another way to do it would be to create two Struts packages - one for logged in users and one for anonymous users so your actions will have different paths and then map on the path part of the Url.
I don't know how practical this might be in your scenario, but a third option maybe to have one common decorator and control the layout via seperate stylesheets which you could control via a test in your jsp.
HTH
Regards

Static pages in MVC framework?

Where do you guys put your static pages, like "home", in an MVC framework? Do you have a "home" controller? A "pages" controller? Do you create actions for each static page?
I'm using CFWheels now, and I'm trying to figure out the best place to put them.
Edit: Apparently CFWheels doesn't require you to create actions for all your views. So you can just create an empty controller and call the views like actions, but not have to write out the blank functions.
CakePHP (and I guess, Ruby On Rails) has a "pages" controller. There is a routing function which redirects requests to /pages/foo to /pages/display/foo. Similarly, / is redirected to /pages/display/home. The display action looks up the views/pages folder for any file with a matching name and renders that.
At the end of the day, a static page is a view without a model, that was returned based on an action the user requested from your server by hitting particular route. :-)
Yes, technically you could expose the direct location of the view resource to the user and rely on the http daemon to go fetch it and return it. However, that means that the resource URL is now tied not to the semantic of the resource you want to expose, but to actual bits. This means that if you want another representation of that same resource, you have to expose it on a different URL.
So, when you create the structure of your web app, think first about the URLs and the resources you want to expose and then think how to implement each resource.
I put my static pages in the database using a simple CMS with a private admin page.
This way, the clients can make simple changes themselves.
In Wheels, you don't even need to create the controller file.
If you create your view here:
views/about/index.cfm
You don't need to create the controller file at all. Then you should be able to just call this with no problems:
http://www.example.com/about

Resources