Does anybody know how to use the JsonRest store in dojo witn an Observable weapper, like the one in dojo.store.Observable?
What do I need, server side, to implement the store and make it work as an Observable one? What about the client side?
The documentation says http://dojotoolkit.org/reference-guide/1.7/dojo/store/Observable.html
If you are using a server side store like the JsonRest store, you will need to provide a queryEngine in order for the update objects to be properly included or excluded from queries. If a queryEngine is not available, observe listener will be called with an undefined index.
But, I have no idea what they mean. I have never created a store myself, and am not 100% familiar with queryEngine (to be honest, I find it a little confusing). Why is queryEngine needed? What does the doc mean by "undefined index"? And how do you write a queryEngine for a JsonRest store? Shouldn't I use some kind of web socket for an observable REST store, since other users might change the data as well?
Confused!
I realize this quesiton is a bit old, but here's some info for future reference. Since this is a multi-part question, I'll break it down into separate pieces:
1) Server-side Implementation of JsonRest
There's a pretty decent write up on implementing the server side of JsonRest Store. It shows exactly what headers JsonRest will generate and what content will be included in the rest. It helps form a mental model of how the JsonRest api is converted into HTTP.
2) Query Engine
Earlier in the same page, how query() works client side is explained. Basically, the query() function needs to be able to receive an object literal (ex: {title:'Learning Dojo',categoryid:5}) and return the objects in the store that match those conditions. "In the store" meaning already loaded into memory on the client, not on the server.
Depending on what you're trying to do, there's probably no need to write your own queryEngine anyway -- just use the built-in SimpleQueryEngine if you're building your own custom store. The engine just needs to be handed an object literal and it adds the whole dojo query() api for you.
3) Observables
My understanding is that the Observables monitor client side changes in the collection of objects (ex: adding or removing a result) or even within a specific object (ex: post 5 has changed title). It does NOT monitor changes that happen server-side. It simply provides a mechanism to notify other aspects of the client-side app that data changed so that all aspects of the page stay synchronized.
There's a whole write up on using Observables under the headings 'Collection Data Binding' and 'Object Data Binding: dojo/Stateful'.
4) Concurrency
There's two things you'd want to do in order to keep your client side data synchronized with the server side data: a) polling for changes from other users on the server, b) using transactions to send data to the server.
a) To poll for changes to the data, you'd want to have your object store track the active query in a variable. Then, use setTimeout() or setInterval() to run the query in the background again every so often. Make sure that widgets or other aspects of your application use Observables to monitor changes in the query result set(s) they depend on. That way, changes on the server by other users would automatically be reflected throughout your application.
b) Use transactions to combine actions that must be combined. Then, make sure the server sends back HTTP 200 Status codes (meaning 'It Worked!'). If the transactions returns a HTTP status in the 400s, then it didn't work for some reason, and you need to requery the data because something changed on the backend. For example, the record you want to update was deleted, so you can't update it. There's a write up on transactions as well under the heading 'Transactional'
Related
I'm having a trouble wrapping my head around following concept.
I'm sending OSC messages to query status of instruments in Ableton, so I have emmiter/receiver combo going on. Now, thing is that I'd like to avoid having to keep up some sort of global state and wrap everything around this.
and I do communicate with Ableto in following fashion:
sender.emit("/live/device", queryData);
receiver.on("/live/device", function(responseData){
// process response here...
})
So you can tell that I'm not really sure when I got data back and cannot really sequence new queries based on responses.
What I'd like to do is to simply
query number of instruments on ONE certain channel
get number back
query parameters of each instrument of that channel based on first query
receive parameters back
But problem is that I have no idea how to wrap eventListeners to respond to these queries, or rather how to sequence them in way that is non-blocking and yet still avoiding having some sort of global state going on.
Querying data and storing Promises to be resolved by eventListener seems like a solution, but then I'm stuck on how to pass them back to sequence.
After some research, it seems that this kind of behaving breaks the whole concept of event listeners, but then I suppose the whole point is to have some global state to keep track of what is going on, right?
Event listeners are telling you some asynchronous action coming from a user action or any other interrupt. Depending on the API you are facing, they might have re-used event listeners for replies instead of providing a promise or callback return for the send API. If the server has multiple clients interacting with it, it might want to tell all clients at the same time when their state changes as well.
If you are sure there is no way to directly provide a callback in the send method for a reply to your request or a request does not yield a promise that resolves with the reply at some point, there are usually workarounds.
Option 1: Send context, receive it back
There are APIs that allow sending a "context" object or string to the API. The API then sends this context to the event listeners whenever it answers this specific question along with their payload. This way, the context part of their payload can be checked if it's the answer to the request. You could write your own little wrapper functions for a more direct send/reply pattern then.
Option 2: Figure out the result data, if it fits your request
If the resulting data has something specific to match on, like keys on a JSON object, it may be possible to find out what the request was.
Option 3: Use state on your side to keep track of everything
In most cases where I have seen such APIs, the server didn't care much about requests and only sent out their current state if it was changed by some kind of request. The client needs to replicate the state of the server by listening to all events, if it wants to show the current server state.
In most situations where I faced this issue, I thought about Option 1 or 2 but ended up with Option 3 anyways: Other clients or hardware switches might interfere with my client UI and change the server state without me listening on that change. That way I would loose information that invalidates my UI, so I would need to listen and replicate the state of the server/machine/hardware anyways.
first question here but i really don't know where to go. I cannot find anything that help me on google.
i'm doing huge processing server side and i would like to keep track of the state and show it on the client side.
For that purpose i have a variable that i'm updating as the process go through. To keep track of it i'm using that client side:
Template.importJson.onCreated(function () {
Session.set('import_datas', null);
this.autorun(function(){
Meteor.call('readImportState', function(err, response) {
console.log(response);
if (response !== undefined) {
Session.set('importingMessage',response);
}
});
})
});
I'm reading it from template that way (in template.mytemplate.helpers):
readImportState: function() {
return Session.get('importingMessage');
},
And here is the server side code to be called by meteor.call:
readImportState: function() {
console.log(IMPORT_STATE);
return IMPORT_STATE;
}
The client grab the value at start but it is never updated later....
What am i missing here?
If somebody could point me in the right direction that would be awesome.
Thank you :)
TL;DR
As of this writing, the only easy way to share reactive state between the server and the client is to use the publish/subscribe mechanism. Other solutions will be like fighting an uphill battle.
In-memory State
Here's the (incorrect) solution you are looking for:
When the job starts, write to some in-memory state on the server. This probably looks like a global or file scoped variable like jobStates, where jobStates is an object with user ids as its keys, and state strings as its values.
The client should periodically poll the server for the current state. Note an autorun doesn't work for Meteor.call (there is no reactive state forcing the autorun to execute again) - you'd need to actually poll every N seconds via setInterval.
When the job completes, modify jobStates.
When the client sees a completed state, inform the user and cancel the setInterval.
Because the server could restart for any number of reasons while the job is running (and consequently forget its in-memory state), we'll need to build in some fault tolerance for both the state and the job itself. Write the job state to the database whenever it changes. When the server starts, we'll read this state back into jobStates.
The model above assumes only a single server is running. If there exist multiple server instances, each one will need to observe the collection in order to write to its own jobStates. Alternatively, the method from (2) should just read the database instead of actually keeping jobStates in memory.
This approach is complicated and error prone. Furthermore, it requires writing the state to the database anyway in order to handle restarts and multiple server instances.
Publish/Subscribe
As the job state changes, write the current state to the database. This could be to a separate collection just for job states, or it could be a collection with all the metadata used to execute the job (helpful for fault tolerance), or it could be to the document the job is producing (if any).
Publish the necessary document(s) to the client.
Subscribe for the document(s) on the client and use a simple find or findOne in a template to display the state to the user.
Optional: clean up the state document(s) periodically using with something like synced cron.
As you can see, the publish/subscribe mechanism is considerably easier to implement because most of the work is done for you by meteor.
I have an app that uses a sync API to get its data, and requires to store all the data locally.
The data set itself is very large, and I am reluctant to store it in memory, since it can contains thousands of records. Since I don't think the actual data structure is relevant, let's assume I am building an email client that needs to be accessible offline, and that I want my storage mechanism to be IndexedDB (which is async).
I know that a simple solution would be to not have the data structure as part of my state object and only populate the state with the required data (eg - store email content on state when EMAIL_OPEN action is triggered). This is quite simple, especially with redux-thunk.
However, this would mean I need to compromise 2 things:
The user data is no longer part of the "application state", although in truth it is. Since the sync behavior is complex, and removing it from the app state machine will hurt the elegance of the redux concepts (the way I understand them)
I really like the redux architecture and would like all of my logic to go through it, not just the view state.
Are there any best-practices on how to use redux with a not-in-memory state properties? The thing I find hardest to wrap my head around is that redux relies on synchronous APIs, and so I cannot replace my state object with an async state object (unless I remove redux completely and replace it with my own, async implementation and connector).
I couldn't find an answer using Google, but if there are already good resources on the subject I would love to be pointed out as well.
UPDATE:
Question was answered but wanted to give a better explantation into how I implemented it, in case someone runs into it:
The main idea is to maintain change lists of both client and server using simply redux reducers, and use a connector to listen to these change lists to update IDB, and also to update the server with client changes:
When client makes changes, use reducers to update client change list.
When server sends updates, use reducers to update server change list.
A connector listens to store, and on state change updates IDB. Also maintain internal list of items that were modified.
When updating the server, use list of modified items to pull delta from IDB and send to server.
When accessing the data, use normal actions to pull from IDB (eg using redux-thunk)
The only caveat with this approach is that since the real state is stored in IDB, so we do lose some of the value of having one state object (and also harder to rewind/fast-forward state)
I think your first hunch is correct. If(!) you can't store everything in the store, you have to store less in the store. But I believe I can make that solution sound much better:
IndexedDB just becomes another endpoint, much like any server API you consume. When you fetch data from the server, you forward it to IndexedDB, from where your store is then populated. The store gets just what it needs and caches it as long as it doesn't get too big or stale.
It's really not different than, say, Facebook consuming their API. There's never all the data for a user in the store. References are implemented with IDs and these are loaded when required.
You can keep all your logic in redux. Just create actions as usual for user actions and data changes, get the data you need and process it. The interface is still completely defined by the user data because you always have the information in the store that is needed to GET TO the rest of it when needed. It's just somewhat condensed, i. e. you only save the total number of messages or the IDs of a mailbox until the user navigates to it.
Imagine you have a UI that consists of a list of items, each with a checkbox beside them. You can select multiple checkboxes and click a button to perform a bulk operation. The desire is to have as many of the rows be processed as possible. So if one row fails, the other selected rows should not roll back.
To do this with Breeze, would it make more sense to send multiple different saves, or is there a way to handle this scenario out of the box?
Sorry. I am new to Breeze, and have been looking through the docs, samples, and API and can't see any clear indication that this is possible. It appears that each call to SaveChanges is transactional. Or is a Named Save required to achieve this behavior?
Thanks in advance!
There is no simple way to do a non-transactional batch save in Breeze. You're easiest course is to save each change individually. You can fire them off in parallel and wait for all to complete if that's important to you.
However, if you're game for some serious programming, it can be done. Here is the outline of the approach.
How to write a non-transactional batch save in Breeze
The easy part is turning off the transaction on the server.
Take a look at the second parameter of ContextProvider.SaveChanges. It's a Breeze TransactionSettings object. If you "new" that up you'll get this
public TransactionSettings()
{
this.IsolationLevel = System.Transactions.IsolationLevel.ReadCommitted;
this.Timeout = TransactionManager.DefaultTimeout;
this.TransactionType = TransactionType.None;
}
You can change create one with any value you like but I'm calling attention to TransactionType.None.
Pass that in your call to SaveChanges
[HttpPost]
public SaveResult SaveChanges(JObject saveBundle)
{
return _contextProvider.SaveChanges(saveBundle, myTransactionSettings);
}
I believe that will prevent the EFContextProvider from saving transactionally.
Now you have to fix things on the client side. I haven't turned off transactions so I'm not familiar with how errors are caught and transmitted to the client.
The real challenge is on the client. You have to do something when the save fails partially. You have to help the Breeze EntityManager figure out which entities succeeded and which failed and process them appropriately ... or your entity cache will become unstable.
You will have to write a custom Data Service Adapter with some very tricky save processing logic. That is not easy!
I've done it in my Breeze Labs Abstract Rest Adapter which is not documented and quite complex. You're welcome to read it and apply its reasoning to your own implementation of the "web api" Data Service Adapter. If you have budget, you might engage IdeaBlade professional services (makers of Breeze)
If using Ember.js with the ember-data REST adapter, is there some sort of conflict resolution strategy for handling persisting data to the server?
At the very least, for my case, failing and rolling back would be sufficient in the case of conflicts, if the user can be informed of this. So, would sort of data/structure would be required for this? Some sort of "version" id on the models, where the server can check the submitted versions, and make sure that the client had the most recent data. Is there anything in Ember.js to make this a bit less manual? And if so, what?
Edit: Also, is there anything that helps with conflicts of bulk commits of models? Say we have a parent model with a "hasMany" relationship to several child models, and all of them are to be persisted to the database at the same time. If just dealing with server-side code, I feel I could wrap this up on a transaction in whatever database I'm using, and fail if something is out of date. How does this translate to Ember.js transactions?
I see a flag bulkCommit in the Adapter class. This seems to be able to bulk commit objects of the same type, in one request. However, if I'm persisting records of more than one type, then this would result in multiple requests to the server. Is there a way to either a) make this happen in one request to the server, or b) match up ember-data's transactions with transactions on the server, so if the transaction on the server fails, and needs to be rolled back, the ember-data transaction fails as well?
[I'm evaluating Ember.js for an upcoming project, and testing a few features and what it's like to develop in. I'm actually considering more real-time updates using socket.io or similar. I see derby.js has made some movements towards automatic conflict resolution]
As you can see in the Ember Data source code here, you can return 422 HTTP status code with errors as dictionary. Errors will be added to the model by Ember Data library by key as model's property and the model itself will be considered invalid. Model will automatically leave this state once each property with errors on them changed.
You could watch for errors on version property and reloadRecord once concurrency error appears.