OK so my question is self explanatory, here is some code so you can understand a little more.
public Dictionary<string,VcardWindow> VcardWindowManager
= new Dictionary<string,VcardWindow>();'
And access like so:
public void ShowVcardWindow(string VcardOwner)
{
VcardWindow Window;
if(VcardWindowManager.ContainsKey(VcardOwner))
{
Window = VcardWindowManager[VcardOwner];
}
else
{
Window = new VcardWindow(VcardOwner);
//Startup Code
VcardWindowManager.Add(VcardOwner,Window);
}
//Invoker here
}
Is by storing windows in a dictionary OK? Are there other means that are faster and safer?
An instance of a Form is an object like any other, and so you can store its reference in a Dictionary. Using a Dictionary in this case is the correct way to store a collection of objects that need to be accessed according to a key, in a single-threaded scenario.
Related
This seems to be a problem that comes up a lot. I've been coming up with the same solution nearly every time but was curious if people have a better method of accomplishing this.
I have one class that is a list of instances of another class. The state of the parent class is dependent upon state of ALL the children
As an example. Say I have the following classes
class Box
{
int _objectId= <insert_unique_id>;
int _itemCount = 0;
public void AddItem()
{
_itemCount = Max(_itemCount + 1, 5);
}
public int GetId()
{
return _objectId;
}
public bool IsFull()
{
return _itemCount == 5
}
}
class BiggerBox
{
Map<int, Box> _boxes;
public void AddToBox(int id)
{
_boxes[id].AddItem();
}
public bool IsFull()
{
foreach(var box in _boxes.Values)
if(!box.IsFull())
return false;
return true;
}
}
All additions to a "Box" are done via the BiggerBox.AddToBox call. What I would like to do is be able to determine box.IsFull() without iterating over every single item every time we add an element.
Typically i accomplish this by keeping a SET or a separate collection of what items are full.
Curious, has anyone come up to an ingenious solution to this or is the simple answer that there is no other way?
There are two things you need to do in order to accomplish what you want:
Be able to control every entrypoint to your collection
React to changes to the objects in the collection
For instance, if the objects in the collection are mutable (meaning, they can change after being added to your collection) you need your main object to react to that change.
As you say, you could create a separate set of the objects that are full, but if the objects can change afterwards, when they change you either need to take them out of that set, or add them to it.
This means that in order for you to optimize this, you need some way to observe the changes to the underlying objects, for instance if they implement INotifyPropertyChanged or similar.
If the objects cannot change after being added to your main object, or you don't really care if they do, you just need to control every entrypoint, meaning that you basically need to add the necessary checks to your AddItem method.
For your particular types I would implement an event on the Box class so that when it is full, it fires the event. Your BiggerBox class would then hook into this event in order to observe when an underlying box becomes full.
You can upkeep the number of complete (or non-complete) boxes in BiggerBox class, and update it in all the functions.
E.g., in AddToBox it could be:
bool wasFull = _boxes[id].IsFull;
_boxes[id].AddItem();
if (!wasFull && _boxes[id].IsFull) // After this update box has become full.
completeBoxes += 1;
It is also possible to implement this upkeep procedure in other hypothetical functions (like RemoveFromBox, AddBox, RemoveBox, etc.)
I am trying to analyze what problem i might be having with unsafe threading in my code.
In my mvc3 webapplication i try to the following:
// Caching code
public static class CacheExtensions
{
public static T GetOrStore<T>(this Cache cache, string key, Func<T> generator)
{
var result = cache[key];
if(result == null)
{
result = generator();
lock(sync) {
cache[key] = result;
}
}
return (T)result;
}
}
Using the caching like this:
// Using the cached stuff
public class SectionViewData
{
public IEnumerable<Product> Products {get;set;}
public IEnumerable<SomethingElse> SomethingElse {get;set;}
}
private void Testing()
{
var cachedSection = HttpContext.Current.Cache.GetOrStore("Some Key", 0 => GetSectionViewData());
// Threading problem?
foreach(var product in cachedSection.Products)
{
DosomestuffwithProduct...
}
}
private SectionViewData GetSectionViewData()
{
SectionViewData viewData = new SectionViewData();
viewData.Products = CreateProductList();
viewData.SomethingElse = CreateSomethingElse();
return viewData;
}
Could i run inte problem with the IEnumerable? I dont have much experience with threading problems. The cachedSection would not get touched if some other thread adds a new value to cache right? To me this would work!
Should i cache Products and SomethingElse indivually? Would that be better than caching the whole SectionViewData??
Threading is hard;
In your GetOrStore method, the get/generator sequence is entirely unsynchronized, so any nymber of threads can get null from the cache and run the generator function at the same time. This may - or may not - be a problem.
Your lock statement only locks the setter of cache[string], which is already thread safe and doesn't need to be "extra locked".
The variation of double-checked locking in the cache is suspect, I'd try to get rid of it. Since the thread that never enters the lock() section can get result without a memory barrier, result may not be entirely constructed by the time the thread gets it.
Enumerating the cached IEnumrators is safe as long as nothing modifies them at the same time. If GetSectionViewData() returns an object with immutable (as in non changing) collections, you're safe.
Your code is missing parts like how would Products be populated? Only in GetSectionViewData?
If so, then I don't see a major problem with your code.
There is however a chance that two threads generate the same data(CachedSection) for the same key, it shouldn't create a threading problem except that you are doing the work twice, so if this was an expensive operation I would change the code so it only generates it once per key. If it is not expensive, it works fine as is.
IEnumerable for Products is not touched (assuming you create it separately per thread, but the enumerator on the cache is modified for each insert operation, hence it is not thread safe. So if you are using this I would be careful about that.
Im working on a MVVM Windows phone app that displays weather info.
When the app loads up it opens MainPage.xaml. It makes a call the the service to get weather info and binds that data to the UI. Both Fahrenheit and Celcius info are returned but only one is displayed.
On the setting page, the user can select to view the temp in either Fahrenheit or Celcius.
The user can change this setting at any time and its stored in IsolatedStorageSettings.
The issue Im having is this:
when the user navigates to the Settings page and changes their preference for either Fahrenheit or Celcius, this change is not reflected on the main page.
This issue started me thinking about this in a broader context. I can see this being an issue in ANY MVVM app where the display depends on some setting in IsolatedStorage. Any time any setting in the IsoStore is updated, how does the ViewModels know this? When I navigate back in the NavigationStack from the settings page back to MainPage how can I force a rebind of the page?
The data in my model hasnt changed, only the data that I want to display has changed.
Am I missing something simple here?
Thanks in advance.
Alex
Probably you have code like this:
public double DisplayTemperature
{
get { return (IsCelsium) ? Celsium : Fahrenheit; }
}
And IsCelsium is:
public double IsCelsium
{
get { return (bool)settings["IsCelsium"]; }
set { settings["IsCelsium"] = value; }
}
So you need to add NotifyPropertyChanged event to notify UI to get new values from DisplayTemperature property:
public double IsCelsium
{
get { return (bool)settings["IsCelsium"]; }
set
{
settings["IsCelsium"] = value;
NotifyPropertyChanged("DisplayTemperature");
}
}
Take a look at Caliburn Micro. You could implement something similar or use CM itself. When using CM I don't even think about this stuff, CM makes it so simple.
When your ViewModel inherits from Screen there are life-cycle events that fire that you can override. For example, OnInitialize fires the very first time the ViewModel is Activated and OnActivate fires every time the VM is activated. There's also OnViewAttached and OnViewLoaded.
These methods are the perfect place to put logic to populate or re-populate data.
CM also has some special built in features for allowing one to easily tombstone a single property or an entire object graph into Iso or phone state.
ok, so Ive come up with a solution. Before I get to it, let me provide some background. The app that Im working on uses both MVVM Light and WP7Contrib. That being the case, I am using Funq for DI and the MVVMLight Toolkit. After I posted my initial question, I gave the question a bit more thought. I remembered a video that I watched a while back from MIX2011 called Deep Dive MVVM with Laurent Bugnion
http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MIX/MIX11/OPN03
In it, he talks about just this problem (view models not living at the same time) on Windows Phone. The part in question starts around the 19 minute mark.
Anyway, after I remembered that and realized that the ViewModel locator is exposed in App.xaml, this became a trivial problem to solve. When the user changes the Fahrenheit/Celcius option on the setting page, I simply get a reference to the MainViewModel via the ViewModelLocator and reset the collection that is bound to the UI thus causing the bindings to update.
public bool AddOrUpdateValue(string Key, Object value)
{
bool valueChanged = false;
// If the key exists
if (settings.Contains(Key))
{
// If the value has changed
if (settings[Key] != value)
{
// Store the new value
settings[Key] = value;
valueChanged = true;
}
}
// Otherwise create the key.
else
{
settings.Add(Key, value);
valueChanged = true;
}
return valueChanged;
}
public bool ImperialSetting
{
get
{
return GetValueOrDefault<bool>(ImperialSettingKeyName, ImperialSettingDefault);
}
set
{
if (AddOrUpdateValue(ImperialSettingKeyName, value))
{
Save();
RaisePropertyChanged("ImperialSettingText");
var vml = new ViewModelLocator();
vml.MainViewModel.Cities = (App.Current as App).Cities;
}
}
}
It was a mistake on my part not to realize that I could get access to the viewModel via the ViewModelLocator. Hopefully this post saves someone else the time I burned on this issue.
I'm using Linq and having trouble doing something that I believe should be trivial. I want to return data from one layer so it can be used independently of linq in another layer.
Suppose I have a Data Access Layer. It knows about the entity framework and how to interact with it. But, it doesn't care who accesses it. The one interesting requirement I have is that the queries in the entity framework return projected data that is not part of the Entity Model itself. Please don't ask me to change this part of the requirement and make POCOs for each return type, as it is not the best design given the problem I am trying to solve. Below is an example.
public class ChartData
{
public function <<returnType??>> GetData()
{
MyEntities context = new MyEntities();
var results = from context.vManyColumnsOfData as v
where v.CompanyName = "acme"
select new {Year = v.SalesYear, Income = v.Income};
return ??;
}
}
Then, I would like to have an ASP.Net UI layer be able to call into the Data Access Layer to get the data in order to bind it to a control. The UI layer should have no notion of where the data came from. It should only know that it has the data it needs to bind. Below is an example.
protected void chart_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
// set some chart properties
chart.Skin = "Default";
...
// Set the data source
ChartData dataMgr = new ChartData();
<<returnType?>> data = dataMgr.GetData();
chart.DataSource = data;
chart.DataBind();
}
What is the best way to send linq projected data back to another layer?
If you don't need to use the projected type statically, just return IEnumerable<object>.
Please don't ask me to change this part of the requirement and make
POCOs for each return type, as it is not the best design given the
problem I am trying to solve.
I feel like I should rightly ignore this, as the best thing to do is to return a defined type. Anonymous types are useful when they are wholly contained within the method that creates them. Once you start passing them around, it is time to go ahead and give them the proper class treatment.
However, to live within your imposed limitations, you can return IEnumerable<object> from the method and use that or var at the callsite and rely upon the dynamic binding of the control to get at the data. It's not going to help you if you need to deal with the object programmatically, but it will serve fine for databinding.
You can not return an anonymous type, so basically for this you will need POCO's even though you don't want them.
"not the best design given the problem I am trying to solve"
Could you explain what you are trying to achieve a little more? It might be possible to return some type of list containing a dictionary of items (ie rows and columns). Think something like an untyped dataset (yuck)
Your GetData method can use IEnumerable (the "old" non-generic interface) as its return type.
Any dynamic resolution (e.g. ASP.NET or XAML bindings) should work as expected, which seems to be what you want to do.
However, if you want to use the results in your code, you will probably have to resort to .NET 4's dynamic keyword.
The following example can be run in LINQPad (in "C# Program" mode) and illustrates this:
void Main()
{
var v = GetData();
foreach (dynamic element in v)
{
((string)element.Name).Dump();
}
}
public IEnumerable GetData()
{
return from i in Enumerable.Range(1, 10)
select new
{
Name = "Item " + i,
Value = i
};
}
Keep in mind that, design-wise, coding like this will make most people frown and can affect performance.
I need to store and retrieve lists in PhoneApplicationService.Current.State[] but this is not a list of strings or integers:
public class searchResults
{
public string title { get; set; }
public string description { get; set; }
}
public List<searchResults> resultData = new List<searchResults>()
{
//
};
The values of the result are fetched from internet and when the application is switched this data needs to be saved in isolated storage for multitasking. How do I save this list and retrieve it again?
If the question really is about how to save the data then you just do
PhoneApplicationService.Current.State["SearchResultList"] = resultData;
and to retrieve again you do
List<searchResults> loadedResultData = (List<searchResults>)PhoneApplicationService.Current.State["SearchResultList"];
Here is a complete working sample:
// your list for results
List<searchResults> resultData = new List<searchResults>();
// add some example data to save
resultData.Add(new searchResults() { description = "A description", title = "A title" });
resultData.Add(new searchResults() { description = "Another description", title = "Another title" });
// save list of search results to app state
PhoneApplicationService.Current.State["SearchResultList"] = resultData;
// --------------------->
// your app could now be tombstoned
// <---------------------
// load from app state
List<searchResults> loadedResultData = (List<searchResults>)PhoneApplicationService.Current.State["SearchResultList"];
// check if loading from app state succeeded
foreach (searchResults result in loadedResultData)
{
System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine(result.title);
}
(This might stop working when your data structure gets more complex or contains certain types.)
Sounds like you just want to employ standard serialisation for your list object, see here in the MSDN docs
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms973893.aspx
Or also XML serialisation if you want something that can be edited outside of the application (you can also use the Isolated Storage exploter to grab the file off and edit later)
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/182eeyhh(v=vs.71).aspx
Alternatively i would also suggest trying out the Tombstone Helper project by Matt Lacey which can simplify this for you greatly
http://tombstonehelper.codeplex.com/
The answer by Heinrich already summarizes the main idea here - you can use the PhoneApplicationService.State with Lists like with any objects. Check out the MSDN docs on preserving application state: How to: Preserve and Restore Application State for Windows Phone. There's one important point to notice there:
Any data that you store in the State dictionary must be serializable,
either directly or by using data contracts.
Directly here means that the classes are marked as [Serializable]. Regarding your List<searchResults>, it is serializable if searchResults is serializable. To do this, either searchResults and all types referenced by it must be marked with the [Serializable] OR it must be a suitable Data Contract, see Using Data Contracts and Serializable Types. In short, make sure the class is declared as public and that it has a public, parameterless constructor.