Where in the code can i find the connections between different screens? - expression-blend

I am going to expand an existing sketchflow application. The problem is that the person who created it didn't understood how component screens work. This means that instead of having one connection to the menu, every screen has one connection to every item that the menu is linked to. To solve this i implemented a component screen...the problem is that the connections still exists in the "sketchflow map" even tho there aint a connection in the application anymore. This makes it impossible to follow the applications flow.
Is there any way to go into the code files and remove the connections the hard way?

The connections are stored in XML in the Sketch.flow file. There is no supported way to remove them programitcally, but the file format is xml and is fairly straightforward. If you are familiar with XML you should be able to do it.

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Permanent client/server connection in Symfony

I'm doing a pet project with Symfony. In it, I scrape and parse the content of a few websites and APIs (it's all for personal use), and mix everything together. Up until now, I've been separating all the different retrieval processes, and basically it works like this: I have a menu, and each button updates something. When I push it, some website is loaded, the content is parsed and my database is updated. This takes some time, depending on the website loading time, the parsing etc. Basically, when I choose to update something, I lose control and I have no output about the situation until everything is done.
I'm rethinking the whole process, and the way I see this is having a page where I push a button, and a "permanent" connection is established with the server. Then, one thing a time, everything is updated. This could take some time (I would guess even 20 minutes), and therefore the server notifies the client with updates, and possibly even requires the user to make choices (I'm connecting data from different sources, and there are a few edge cases where it just can't automatically guess the right relationships).
I'm thinking about the best way to implement this. At first I thought simple Ajax/jQuery would work, but it seems to me that the relationship between client/server is too permanent and bidirectional to be able to keep everything simple. Then I thought about working with streams and/or websockets, but I don't really know the topics.
What is the best/correct way to do this, especially in a Symfony context?
I don't think this is really tight to Symfony, what you are looking for is called Server Sent Events.
Server-sent events (SSE) is a technology for a browser to get
automatic updates from a server via HTTP connection. The Server-Sent
Events EventSource API is standardized as part of HTML5 by the W3C.
For PHP in general, I generally use the Hoa\EventSource library which makes things easy
For Symfony, you can have a dedicated API endpoint that will use this library.

What's the correct methodology to implement In App Purchase that unlocks existing functionality?

So I've built an iOS app (my first) and I want to distribute it for free. It's a content creation app, and my plan is to allow the user full access to record up to 5 records of content for the purpose of evaluation. If the user likes the app and wants to continue generating new content, he'll have to purchase an unlock via in-app-purchase.
I've looked at the documentation, and I'm going to use MKStoreKit to do this. I understand that I'm going to be creating a non-consumable, non-subscription product to sell.
So my problem is that while I can find lots of information on HOW to do the actual IAP, I can't find anything on where or how to track that it was purchased. That is, how do I go about ensuring the app is unlocked? Does it require a round trip to the AppStore servers on every app startup? If this is the case, I'm a bit concerned about it because network connectivity is not a guarantee.
Another possibility I've been thinking about is writing some kind of semaphore somewhere when unlock is purchased, whether it's a file or just modifying a setting in a .plist. This is certainly optimal from a user-experience point of view, but can it be easily hacked? If I write a file, can a user just take that file and distribute it to whomever?
Is there some standard mechanism or methodology that's typically employed here?
Thanks for any assistance.
What I usually do is check with the Apple servers if the content is unlocked. If so, I change some attribute in a .plist and check it to unlock the content.
There are two common approaches to achieve that: The first is to check only if the attribute is not set (or with a specific value) and the other, more secure but, im my opinion, not the best, is to have a point in your app that everytime it is executed the Apple servers are verified again.
What you need to have in mind is that if your application is hacked, you can't do anything, but there is a great number of users (most of them) that don't care about hacks and not even Jailbreaks... so forget it and apply the check when the app opens and only if it is not unlocked yet.

Any way to use MvcMiniProfiler on windows application? Or is there a sister application?

So I've started using MvcMiniProfiler on our websites and quite like it. We have a Windows Application component/framework that is leveraged by the website and I was wondering if it was possible to use the profiler on that. I'm assuming not, but maybe there is a subcomponent of the code that could be used? I see that there is a way to configure where the results are stored (i.e. Sql Server) so maybe it is close to possible?
We have the following flow:
Website submits job to 'broker' then returns a 'come back later' page.
Broker runs and eventually data in the websites database gets updated by the broker.
Website displays the results.
I'd be great if there was a way I could get the entire workflow profiled. If there is no way/no intentions from the developers to make MvcMiniProfiler available to Windows applications, any recommendations for similar styled profilers?
You could get this working by using SqlServerStorage, there is very little in the code base that heavily depends on ASP.NET, in fact the SQL interceptor is generalized and so it the stack used to capture the traces.
I imagine that a few changes internally need to be made, eg: use Thread.SetData as opposed to HttpContext but they are pretty superficial.
The way you would get this going is by passing the "profiling identity" into the App and then continuing tracking there. Eventually when the user hits the site after it happens, it would show up as little "chiclets" on the left side.
A patch is totally welcome here but it is not something it does in its current version.
(note to future readers, this is probably going to be out of date at some point, if it is please suggest an edit)
Yes, there's a Windows porting of MiniProfiler: http://nootn.github.io/MiniProfiler.Windows/

Write to shared txt file or DB table from web service?

I am developing a web service that will be invoked (using JSON) from client side each time the selection of a drop down changes.
The goal is to register each "intermediate" change (on client side) using the "OnSelectedIndexChanged" event and before submitting the form to the Server.
Each new selected value will be written to a shared txt file calling a relative web method via Ajax/JSON.
Would it be better to write these changes to a txt file (having to implement a lock/unlock policy to assure exclusive access) or rather define a DB table and save the changes there?
Everyday the web app will have around 10 to 20 active users that might potentially changes the DropDownLists and usually the right value will be selected at first, hence generally no more than one "intermediate" entry would be registered.
Thanks.
Don't use the filesystem. It's slow. Use mongodb via a node.js webserver.
http://howtonode.org/express-mongodb
Good Luck!
This sounds exactly like what you would want to use a database for, since ACID is already implemented there.
If you want a real headache (and a programming challenge!) trying to debug overlapping writes, resource starvation and deadlocks, by all means, go with a shared text file!

Changing domain linked to a Selenium::Client::Driver instance

I'm using the Selenium Client (v 1.2.18) to do automated navigation of retail websites for which there exists no external API. My goal is to determine real-time, site-specific product availability using the "Check Availability" button that exists on a lot of these sites.
In case there's any concern, each of these checks will be initiated by a real live consumer who is actually interested in whether or not something's available at that store. There will be no superfluous requests or other internet badness.
I'm using Selenium's Grid framework so that I can run stuff in parallel and I'm keeping each of the controlled browsers open between requests. The issue I'm experiencing is that I need to perform these checks across a number of different domains, and I won't know in advance which one I will have to check next. I didn't think this would be too big an issue, but it turns out that when a Selenium browser instance gets made, it gets linked to a specific domain and I haven't been able to find any way to change what domain that is. This requires restarting a browser each time a request comes in for a domain we're not already linked to.
Oh, and the reason we're using Selenium instead something more light-weight (eg. Mechanize) is because we need something that can handle JavaScript.
Any help on this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.
I suppose you are restricted from changing domain because of same origin policy. Did you try using browser with elevated security privileges like iehta for internet explorer and chrome for firefox browsers. While using these modes of browsers, use open method in your tests and pass the URL which you want to open. This might solve your problem.

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