I am using Parse (www.parse.com) as backend in one of my project.
I would like to generate unique random (Promocode) by applying the current date and time every time in Java script. The random should be readable alphabets / numbers.
I know the the random generation process by searching in Google. But I am not sure whether this is unique always. So to check that, every time i have to contact the backend, whether any already existing random which matched to the current one. It is being a long process. Since I require this process to do at sign up process, I need a better solution for this.
Can anyone help on this?
What i could understand from your question is that you want a good hash function which ensures that the values are unique every time so you won't have to do the long processing of checking whether the value is unique or already exists.
First let me clear out something, hashing isn't doesn't necessarily mean 'unique' but they are supposed to be 'unique enough'. For the best hashing library in JS, you should check out crypto.js
They have different kinds of hashing functions available, take a look at this one:
<script src="http://crypto-js.googlecode.com/svn/tags/3.1.2/build/rollups/sha256.js"></script>
<script>
var hash = CryptoJS.SHA256("Message");
alert(typeof hash); // object
alert(hash); // 2f77668a9dfbf8d5848b9eeb4a7145ca94c6ed9236e4a773f6dcafa5132b2f91
</script>
I mean look at the value generated by that hash function.. the possibility of having a duplicate of that value is extremely extremely slim. So, you can safely use that one or also dig out the library to use the one which you think is the best for you.
Related
I would like to create order number (following) in header, which would create automatically for each different opening the file by customer. Can I achieve this by using some functions in JS? or another? In attached screen this number should generate in each opening file
I presume that you are using Acrobat Pro to create the PDF form.
The quick and easy way to do this is to auto generate an order number based on the current date and time. Create a text field in your form (I've called mine "ordernumber"), double click it and go to the calculate tab then insert the following two lines into the custom calculation script box:
f = this.getField("ordernumber");
f.value = util.printd("yyyy/ddmm/hhmmss", new Date());
This will give you a unique order code (unless someone creates two orders in the same second!). You can change around the year (yyyy), day (dd), etc to make something that you like as a format.
If the order number needs to conform to an existing format or align with other systems then you would need to get the PDF to access an external database or something like that which would be a bit more complicated and beyond my knowledge.
It depends on whether your order number has to be unique only, or whether order numbers have to be consecutive.
In the first case, #Chris' answer pretty much gives the solution; you may be fiddling around with the base data, but that's it.
If the number has to be consecutive, there is a possibility if the use of the form can be limited to one single computer. In this case, you would create a Persistent Global Variable (which is a variable that is written back to the system, and can be reused the next time you open the document). See Acrobat JavaScript documentation for code samples. When you open the document, you read in that number, increment it and feed it into your order number field, and write it back.
If the number has to be consecutive, and the order form is used by several users, you will have to maintain the order number externally (which means, on a server). In this case, it might be even better to have a server-side order management, where the user may enter some base data, and then gets the prefilled order form made available.
I have a MongoDB JavaScript function saved in db.system.js, and I want to use it to both query and produce output data.
I'm able to query the results of the function using the $where clause like so:
db.records.find(
{$where: "formatEmail(this.email.toString(), 'format type') == 'xxx'"},
{email:1})
but I'm unable to use this to return a formatted value for the projected "email" field, like so:
db.records.find({}, {"formatEmail(this.email.toString(), 'format type')": 1})
Is there any way to do this while preserving the ability to simply use a pre-built function?
UPDATE:
Thank you all for your prompt participation.
Let me explain why I need to do this in MongoDB and it's not a matter of client logic at the wrong layer.. What I am really trying to do is use the function for a shard bucketing value. Email was just one example, but in reality, what I have is a hash function that returns a mod value.
I'm aware of Mongo having the ability to shard based on a hashed value, but from what I gather, it produces a highly random value that can burden the re-balancing of shards with unnecessary load. So I want to control it like so func(_id, mod), which would return a value from 0 to say 1000 (depending on the mod value).
Also, I guess I would also like to use the output of the function in some sort of grouping scenario, and I guess Map Reduce does come to mind.. I was just hoping to avoid writing overly complex M/R for something so simple.. also, I don't really know how to do Map Reduce .. lol.
So, I gather that from your answers, there is no way to return any formatted value back from mongo (without map/reduce), is that right?
I think you are mixing your "layers" of functionality here -- the database stores and retrieves data, thats all. What you need to do is:
* get that data and store the cursor in a variable
* loop through your cursor, and for every record you go through
* format and output your record as you see fit.
This is somewhat similar to what you have described in your question, but its not part of MongoDB and you have to provide the "formatEmail" function in your "application layer"
Hope it helps
As #alernerdev has already mentioned, this is generally not done at a database layer. However, sometimes storing a pre-formatted version in your database is the way to go. Here's some instances where you may wish to store extra data:
If you need to lookup data in a particular format. For example, I have a "username" and a "usernameLowercase" fields for my primary user collection. The lowercase'd one is indexed, and is the one I use for username lookup. The mixed-case one is used for displaying the username.
If you need to report a large amount of data in a particular format. 100,000 email addresses all formatted in a particular way? Probably best to just store them in that format in the db.
If your translation from one format to another is computationally expensive. Doubly so if you're processing lots of records.
In this case, if all you're doing is looking up or retrieving an email in a specific format, I'd recommend adding a field for it and then indexing it. That way you won't need to do actual document retrieval for the lookup or the display. Super fast. Disk storage space for something the size of an email address is super cheap!
Is it possible for a Javascript client create a UUID that cannot be faked?
For example, suppose one of the solutions from Create GUID / UUID in JavaScript? were used to generate a UUID and send a create request with UUID to the server. Is it possible for the server to check that the UUID was indeed created by the Javascript function and not by some other function?
One idea is to use a checksum, but the UUID generation and checksum code would be visible to a "hacker". They could simply modify the Javascript function and then add the checksum.
So, are there any good solutions to this problem?
You shouldn't care about who created the UUID. The server should only check if the UUID sent by the client respects the UUID format and perhaps check if somehow the same UUID was used already (this depends on your needs).
That is unless your UUID value is used as a secret (e.g. an activation number). In this case, the value shouldn't be generated client-side and the server should keep track of the values it generated.
You can do some basic sanity checks like length or format, but what you are actually asking is "Given a number can I check that it was generated by a particular random number generator?". If the random number generator is truly random then the answer has to be "no", since if I can back-track from the answer to the function that easily then it's not very random.
I'd like to use Firebase to make publicly-readable data whose location is difficult to guess. So, to give someone access to the data stored in "element [element ID = X]", I'd like to just send them "X", instead of sending them "X" along with a security token crafted to give them access to the element. Firebase's push() and childByAutoID seem like a natural fit: I can grant public read access to all individual elements, but deny public listing. My code will be blissfully free of token and random number generation. The automatically generated ID is supposed to be unique, and thus should be difficult to guess.
From looking at Firebase.js, it appears the first 8 characters of the automatically generated ID are based on the current timestamp, and the next 12 characters are randomly generated using Math.random(). I assume that the iOS framework does the same thing, and although I can't see the code, the library links to both SecRandomCopyBytes and arc4random.
For my purposes, this looks good enough, but has anyone seen guidance from Firebase on whether we can count on this behavior? I would hate to build code that assumes these names are relatively strong random strings and then have that assumption violated when I upgraded to a newer version of Firebase.
The purpose of the auto-generated IDs provided by Firebase is to allow the developer to create a chronologically ordered list in a distributed manner. It relies on Math.random and the timestamp to generate an ID unique to that client.
However, if you're going to use the auto IDs as security keys, it may not be the best idea depending on how secure you want your system to be. Math.random is not a cryptographically secure random number generator and since push() relies on it, the IDs generated by it aren't either.
The general concept of giving a user access to some data in Firebase if they know the key is a good one though. We have an example of using this type of security rule, but instead of using push IDs, we use a SHA-256 hash of the content itself (in this particular case, they are images). Hashing the content to generate the keys is more secure than relying on push() IDs.
I would like to write a JavaScript function that validates a zip code, by checking if the zip code actually exists. Here is a list of all zip codes:
http://www.census.gov/tiger/tms/gazetteer/zips.txt (I only care about the 2nd column)
This is really a compression problem. I would like to do this for fun. OK, now that's out of the way, here is a list of optimizations over a straight hashtable that I can think of, feel free to add anything I have not thought of:
Break zipcode into 2 parts, first 2 digits and last 3 digits.
Make a giant if-else statement first checking the first 2 digits, then checking ranges within the last 3 digits.
Or, covert the zips into hex, and see if I can do the same thing using smaller groups.
Find out if within the range of all valid zip codes there are more valid zip codes vs invalid zip codes. Write the above code targeting the smaller group.
Break up the hash into separate files, and load them via Ajax as user types in the zipcode. So perhaps break into 2 parts, first for first 2 digits, second for last 3.
Lastly, I plan to generate the JavaScript files using another program, not by hand.
Edit: performance matters here. I do want to use this, if it doesn't suck. Performance of the JavaScript code execution + download time.
Edit 2: JavaScript only solutions please. I don't have access to the application server, plus, that would make this into a whole other problem =)
You could do the unthinkable and treat the code as a number (remember that it's not actually a number). Convert your list into a series of ranges, for example:
zips = [10000, 10001, 10002, 10003, 23001, 23002, 23003, 36001]
// becomes
zips = [[10000,10003], [23001,23003], [36001,36001]]
// make sure to keep this sorted
then to test:
myzip = 23002;
for (i = 0, l = zips.length; i < l; ++i) {
if (myzip >= zips[i][0] && myzip <= zips[i][1]) {
return true;
}
}
return false;
this is just using a very naive linear search (O(n)). If you kept the list sorted and used binary searching, you could achieve O(log n).
I would like to write a JavaScript function that validates a zip code
Might be more effort than it's worth, keeping it updated so that at no point someone's real valid ZIP code is rejected. You could also try an external service, or do what everyone else does and just accept any 5-digit number!
here is a list of optimizations over a straight hashtable that I can think of
Sorry to spoil the potential Fun, but you're probably not going to manage much better actual performance than JavaScript's Object gives you when used as a hashtable. Object member access is one of the most common operations in JS and will be super-optimised; building your own data structures is unlikely to beat it even if they are potentially better structures from a computer science point of view. In particular, anything using ‘Array’ is not going to perform as well as you think because Array is actually implemented as an Object (hashtable) itself.
Having said that, a possible space compression tool if you only need to know 'valid or not' would be to use a 100000-bit bitfield, packed into a string. For example for a space of only 100 ZIP codes, where codes 032-043 are ‘valid’:
var zipfield= '\x00\x00\x00\x00\xFF\x0F\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00';
function isvalid(zip) {
if (!zip.match('[0-9]{3}'))
return false;
var z= parseInt(zip, 10);
return !!( zipfield.charCodeAt(Math.floor(z/8)) & (1<<(z%8)) );
}
Now we just have to work out the most efficient way to get the bitfield to the script. The naive '\x00'-filled version above is pretty inefficient. Conventional approaches to reducing that would be eg. to base64-encode it:
var zipfield= atob('AAAAAP8PAAAAAAAAAA==');
That would get the 100000 flags down to 16.6kB. Unfortunately atob is Mozilla-only, so an additional base64 decoder would be needed for other browsers. (It's not too hard, but it's a bit more startup time to decode.) It might also be possible to use an AJAX request to transfer a direct binary string (encoded in ISO-8859-1 text to responseText). That would get it down to 12.5kB.
But in reality probably anything, even the naive version, would do as long as you served the script using mod_deflate, which would compress away a lot of that redundancy, and also the repetition of '\x00' for all the long ranges of ‘invalid’ codes.
I use Google Maps API to check whether a zipcode exists.
It's more accurate.
Assuming you've got the zips in a sorted array (seems fair if you're controlling the generation of the datastructure), see if a simple binary search is fast enough.
So... You're doing client side validation and want to optimize for file size? you probably cannot beat general compression. Fortunately, most browsers support gzip for you, so you can use that much for free.
How about a simple json coded dict or list with the zip codes in sorted order and do a look up on the dict. it'll compress well, since its a predictable sequence, import easily since it's json, using the browsers in-built parser, and lookup will probably be very fast also, since that's a javascript primitive.
This might be useful:
PHP Zip Code Range and Distance Calculation
As well as List of postal codes.