I'd like to give the users of my ASP.NET website the possibility to write/change texts on the start site.
The texts are constantly changing and are therefore not static.
The texts are on the start page of the site, so saving it to the database wouldn't be the best choice, right? Because there would be a database access at every page call.
So my question is: What is the best practice to save this texts? Should I save it in the database? In a text file? xml file? In the web.config?
Edit: An example for the usage:
There is a "contact" area on the start page, the admin should be able to modifiy the content of this contact area. So this data not static, it should be editable.
you can, of course, do many different things, but the normal thing is to just store it in a database and use a caching mechanism if you are concerned about round trips to database.
When a user clicks the submit, button it has to go to the database. Edits and small changing will happen normally. Once the submition, is clicked, it has to go somewhere and a database call needs to happen. You can save it in session, but that will go away if the user goes away.
If it is not a permanent data why not store it in Session?
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I will try to explain my situation and what I wanted to do. There is not any difficult and rare situation, but I can't find any relative questions or articles in internet.
I have created a web application on ASP.NET MVC 5. Users are not going to enter my application directly. Users will enter let's say to CentralInformationSystem.com. Then they must login to this website one of supported ways. After signing in, they will see a list of applications. There will be applications which has been allowed to use for the signed user. One of this applications will be my application which has developed in Asp.Net MVC.
And the main point is that our applications will not be opened in other tabs or in current tab and so on. Our application will be opened in a big iframe inside the current tab.
And other main point is our applications and CentralInformationSystem.com belong to other domains.
The other question of course is, how then I can now which user has signed in? And the answer is, CentralInformationSystem.com sends encrypted data with the query string to our web site. For example, the URL will look like that:
MyMvcApplication/Home/Index?Token=jkndid758adsai==qwdbqwiudhqwadoqidwqq=wqdiqw
Also keep in mind that they will always sent different tokens.
And after that, I will decrypt token and find to which user it belongs. Also keep in mind that, one Token can be used only once.
1. What type of application is my application?
User will enter very big form. It can actually take almost 3-4 hours. So, I have tried some-type of wizard logic. After entering some portion of datas, I will insert them to the database, get identifier from the database and store it somewhere and take the user to the next level and so on.
2. What I want to achieve?
I want to create such logic that, some identifier variables values must be stored in such place that never must be expired till the user closes browser or signing out. I don't want to increase session timeout to 5-6 hours.
3. What if user opens my application in more than one tab?
Alongside 2 I have also one problem, that user can open my website inside iframe more than one tab. I know that, in Asp.net we can differ session per each tab. But, I don't want to store datas in session, because user can stop filling forms after 20 minutes or 4 hours. Also, I cannot use cookie, because cookies will be same for all tabs.
My other option is, to inject hidden inputs with encrypted value to all views. But, I can't find how to automatically add these datas to each views. Also, it doesn't seem to me as most efficient way.
The other logic is to prevent user to open same application in more than one tab with differen tokens. But, don't how to achieve this also.
Additional:
I have read almost all articles and questions/answers. I know how to make it work. But, I want the best approach. Neither of my approaches are efficient.
Use your own concept of a persistent session that is identified by a hidden input on the page and does not expire, or at least does not expire for a very long time. Have all of your controllers derive from a single base controller and use the OnActionExecuted to add the session "key" to the ViewBag when the result is a ViewResult (you won't need it for partial views or JSON, etc). Every page can then access the ViewBag and create the hidden input - probably you want to use a partial view for this and simply include the partial on every page. Store the data associated with this session in the database.
I'm trying to help save time at work with for a lot of tedious copy/paste tasks we have.
So, we have a propitiatory CRM (with proper HTML ID's, etc for accessing elements) and I'd like to copy those vales from the CRM to textboxes on other web pages (outside of the CRM, so sites like Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc)
I'm aware browsers limit this for security and I'm open to anything, it can be a C#/C++ application, Adobe AIR, etc. We only use Firefox at work so even an extension would work. (We do have GreaseMonkey installed so if that's usable too, sweet).
So, any ideas on how to copy values from one web page to another? Ideally, I'm looking to click a button and have it auto-populate fields. If that button has to launch the web pages that need to be copied over to, that's fine.
Example: Copy customers Username from our CRM, paste it in Facebook's Username field when creating a new account.
UPDATE: To answer a user below, the HTML elements on each domain have specific HTML ID's. The data won't need to be manipulated or cleaned up, just a simple copy from ourCRM.com to facebook.com / twitter.com
Ruby Mechanize is a good bet for scraping the data. Then you can store it and post it however you please.
First, I'd suggest that you more clearly define exactly what it is you're looking to do. I read this as you're trying to take some unstructured data from Point A and copy it to Point B. Do the names of these fields remain constant every time you do the operation? Do you need to simply pull any textbox elements from the page and copy them all over? Do some sort of filtering of this data before writing it over?
Once you've got a clear idea of the requirements, if you go the C# route, I'd use something like SimpleBrowser. Judging by the example on their Github page, you could give it the URL of the page you're looking to copy, then name each of the fields you're looking to obtain the value of, perhaps store these in an IDictionary, then open a new URL and copy those values back into the page (and submit the form).
Alternatively, if you don't know the names of the fields, perhaps there's a provided function in that or a similar project that will allow you to simply enumerate all the text fields on the page and retrieve the values for all of them. Then you'd simply apply some logic of your own to filter those options down to whatever is on the destination form.
SO we thought of an easier way to do this (in case anyone else runs into this issue).
1) From our CRM, we added a "Sign up for Facebook" button
2) The button opens a new window with GET variables in the URL
3) Use a greasemonkey script to read those GET variables and fill in textbox values
4) SUCCESS!
Simple, took about 10 minutes to get working. Thanks for you suggestions.
I'm making a website that lets you share your music tastes, it works with a desktop client that monitors your media player (iTunes, whatever), and sends the details of the song that is currently playing to the site, where it is associated with your profile.
This output is displayed on your profile, and the idea is the page mirrors your local music player, right down the the position of a progress bar.
However I can't decide how to store the data. As soon as the song is over, it becomes useless, so something permanent like a MySQL database seems pointless.
Session variables don't work, because the script that does the work is not directing you to the page that displays the output. The idea is that the backend script just gets the info as it arrives and saves it somewhere, and you can get the latest info whenever you load the profile page.
I'm currently using a textfile, as a bad and temporary solution, just writing a new line each time and then reading it.
What is there between session variables and SQL?
And how can I get the output page to update every time there is new data? I need a way of storing it that allows events to be triggered, so checking it mustn't be too intensive.
I think a (My)SQL database would be alright, especially if you want to show the last few songs somebody played.
But if you just need a temporary data store to hold a single song per user, you could use a key-value store like memcached. It stores data directly in memory instead of a file or database. The key would be something unique (like the user's name or id) and the value would be data about the currently playing song.
You should look into memcached with a low cache expiry on keys of this type.
I would definitely store this in a database with a timestamp. For your display query, all you have to do is select the most recent (unless it has been more than a certain amount of time, in case the player is disconnected).
It might be best to hang on to this data. You may want it later to show which songs they play most or something. Otherwise, you can always delete the old records. I suspect keeping them will be worthwhile later. (Also consider the privacy implications of this. Make sure you tell your users the kind of data you keep in your privacy policy.)
Well I think you could use SQL, just have a table that stores the UserId, "current/last" song field, "currentlyPlaying" (bool), and you keep writting on top of that field everytime there is a new song, so that way you only have one row for each user all the time. It is still permanent, but you only keep track of the last song.
As a sidenote, you might want to save in a more permanently way all the songs a user plays.. if it is supposed to be a music tastes sharing site, having a history of played songs would let you make some nice algorithms like recommendations, etc.
I want to make a very simple CMS for my sites. So what I am thinking is this a user logs in and a list of their pages shows up. Now they change their ends and save it. My C# code would then write over the file/section.
So I don't think it would be to bad to do this however I am not sure about how it works with read and write premission and how to set it up.
Like I want the user to only be able to read and write to their files they own.
So if User A has Page1.html and Page2.html they can only read those files and write to those files they can touch User B's page3.html and Page4.html
So how would I setup this up?
Thanks
When you create your list of files, you will be reading that list from a database repository. Include in that code conditions that allow only those records for which the user has permission.
The most straightforward way to do this is to create a table with two columns: UserID and DocumentID. A presence of a record in the table indicates that the user has permission to that particular document. Add records to this table that give the user permissions to the appropriate documents.
Then, when you read the documents from the database, you can join this table to the documents table via the DocumentID, and filter the table by UserID. This will return only those records for which the user has permission. You can then use that set of records as the basis for the list of documents that you display to the user.
You could employ a cms the SharePoint way. You begin with a base file on the network. If a change to it is made then the page is stored in a database. each subsequent change is a db change and the application renders the last entry in the table for that page.
this does two things. first, you can see revisions and re-instate them. you can see a complete history of the page, who made the changes and when.
it also allows you to lock pages within the database and assign roles/users against the pages. you can then apply a decoration to the controller which checks rights and either renders the page or displays a access denied page and then log the attempted access to the page.
i know this sounds complex but can you foresee a time when after you've gone live with your cms that the client is going to want more from it? you need to implement a solution that's adaptable to needs.
if it's worth writing then it's worth writing well.
The user needs to click on browse button to browse his system .He then selects a text file & clicks ok.Once he clicks ok all the data in the text file should be displayed in a text area.How do I do that? I am using JavaScript & c# designing aspx pages.It would be preferable if i avoid round trip to the server.
You can't do it without a trip to the server, the only way for you to get the content of the file is by submitting it as part of a form. You can make the trip to the server happen in an iframe via XHR and then update the text area with the result from the XHR call, so it sort of seems like one wasn't involved, but you can't directly access the content of files of the user's machine, for obvious reasons.
I know you said you would prefer a round trip, but its the only way you are going to be able to accomplish what you want.
You could put the file upload in an iframe, and do the upload behind the scenes (No page refresh, gmail does this :) ) then use AJAX to download the data and insert it into the textarea.
It can't in general be done, as answers here outline.
However, it can be done in Firefox 3+ only, using the uploadfield.files array. Other browsers would have to fall back to the server round-trip.
For security reasons, JavaScript cannot access the local filesystem like that.
Javascript cannot do that without putting a severe security risk on the user. That said, the file will need to be posted to your server.
As other posters here have indicated, you're not allowed to access the local filesystem from Javascript directly. But you can set up an action on your server to take the file form POST input, and simply echo the data right back out to the response. If you hide an iframe inside your page as the form POST target, that response data can appear in the hidden iframe, and then the page won't have to reload. Then once the iframe has loaded with the text, you can use JS to pull the text out of the iframe, and put it into the text area that you're interested in.
Alternately, if you're inclined to restrict usage to Firefox users with an extension, you should be able to accomplish this without a roundtrip using a Greasemonkey user script (see www.greasespot.com) or something like it, that uses the custom Mozilla extensions.