Re: What pattern should I use? - Design and Architecture Discussion Boards

Hi,
I have a WebService-WS, WebApp-WA and DTOproject-DTO. I made a DTO, SZ, serializable and added it as reference to WS and WA. When I call webmethod WS.oneWS.method() it returns an array of WS.SZ where I need DTO.SZ. Am I missing something here apart from making SZ serializable? Please help me.
Thanks in advance.

Hello there,

I'm starting up a little personal project that I'm not too sure what the best way to tackle is. I'm hoping someone could give me a few pointers and/or some ideas on questions I should answer before I dig in.

The problem I'm trying to solve to determine file and project dependancies in a big, mature, sprawling codebase, with tens of thousands of files. This codebase has evolved over time and can be quite unwieldy. To build a small tool I need to build most of the build tree because it's almost impossible to figure out what all my dependancies are.

So I found a library that will allow me to watch file activity, for example file open, creates, and so forth. So my thought is if I run a full clean build and monitor and record all of the file activity of a build and can generate a dependency graph of the entire project and/or be able to automatibally create a command file that to build any project I want and have it build everything I need in the proper order. I'm sure there will be other interesting things I can do with this information. I'd also like to try and visualize the entire project and maybe create a change heat map from it, but looking at the source server info.

My quandry is how best to record the file activity so that I can build a depenecy tree. Ideally I'd like to be able to do this in a multi-threaded way and be able to tell which files need to be built before others and which files are grouped in a project and so on.

My current proposed approach is to record all file activity to a logfile and the post process it to generate the depenecy graphs. I'm still a little hazy about all the data that I need to record. I'm currently thinking I'll figure that out as I go when I find I'm missing some important information.

Any pointers or thoughts would be greatly appriciated.

Thanxx,

Adam

Adam,
Apologies if I'm just rephrasing your question: View what you want as a series of graph nodes and verticies where different verticies represent the reason for a link (dependancy) between the nodes.
Try drawing a few views on paper to see what you, as the user, want to see. Eg "library used by" or "header used by" etc. This should give you the answer to your question.

I hope you don't mind I'm using this group as a sounding board. I'm posting my thoughts in part to help solidify them in my head and then also to see if anyone out there has any interesting observations or experience that can help. Smile | :)

I have been thinking about what I and my customers would like to get from this tool and have come up with a great many pieces of information that I could/should track. But I'm thinking that I just need to find the core pieces of information and then use queries against the information store to figure out the rest. For example, some of the things I'd like to be able to do are:

1. Determine build order of files/projects
2. Determine which projects can be built simultaneously
3. See all the dependancies of file X/project Y
4. See all the dependancies on file X/project Y
5. Find duplicate files
6. Which projects create which files and then which other project then consume those files.

I have some ideas on what to track I just need to implement it and see how it works. The more I think about this issue I think the harder part will be to actually collect this information. Ideally I'd be collecting this information while multiple instances of the compilation tools are executing at once. I'm having some fun wrapping my head around having a single process monitoring multiple processes and maintaining the build ordering/hiereachy inside and outside of a project. I'm wondering if it would be best to do this in two passes.

Then there's the question of what's the best design for processing all of those file open/creation transactions. My current thought is to have one thread per compilation process. I only expect to have 4-8 processes going at once, so that doesn't seem like it should be to resource intesive.

And just so you know this is the biggest project I've ever tackled, so I'm a bit nervous about getting my approach organized before I start and then making sure I'm starting in the correct place.

Thanxx for your input,

Adam

Storing the data produced by monitoring the file activity and processing it should be kep apart In my opinion. In this case you need a format that both Data-Storer and Data-Processor can work with, and it would seem to be wise to pick a format that can be extended easily. If you start storing data A,B and C but later realise you need D as well for each file it should be relatively easy to add.
Coding any of the 'knowledge' about how processing occurrs in the Storer side would seem to be wrong.
This will allow you to work on the Data-Storing code side independantly of the Processing.

Presuming you store a certain set of data in this format. From this data you will produce some information, or at least rearrange the data so that it's in a format more suitable for the user or for a second stage of processing at least. This makes me think that breaking your Data-Processing down into smaller units should perhaps be woth considering.

Personally I'd leave out for now how you are going to implemenet it, i.e.leave the problems of multi processes and threads until later and settle on what you are going to do first.

To be able to debug this etc what about starting it all as single threaded processing file/data in serial rather than in parallel to prove that your idea of what needs to be done is correct?

How to play an Animation and make video render before logon through credential provider ?(Vista)
It seams VMR9 cannot work fine before logon. It's too slowly by creating a WPF process.
(development of facial recognition credential)

modified on Wednesday, February 4, 2009 9:24 PM

Hi all:

I have inherited a web application that's used for reporting. Each report has three main sections: Input section where the users select dates and other info, Summary screen where a summary of the data is shown, and a Detail screen where detailed data is shown.

I don't think it makes sense to create a new Input, Summary, and Detail page when a user asks for a new report. Too much duplication!

Is there a pattern I can use to simplify this? Let me know if you need more details.

Thanks!

Nick

First suggestion is, don't be afraid of "duplication". For one, Input, Summary, and Detail views, while they may all work with the same data, have distinct purposes, and will have distinct functionality that drive them. While you could probably merge all that functionality into a single glob, from a maintainability perspective...isolation of purpose (called separation of concerns and single responsibility in architect-speak) can offer you a lot in terms of long-term maintainability.

My recommendation is this. Even if you need the Input, Summary, and Detail views to be represented as a single thing to the user...develop them as individual components that make use of a core, shared set of objects. Input should be a view component that encapsulates the logic required to display a form to the user and process that input. Summary should be a view component that takes the processed input and renders the summary. Detail should be a view component that takes the processed input and renders the full detailed report. Since each one is its own, isolated component, they can be maintained individually. That doesn't preclude them from being rendered into a larger composite view, so you still achieve what you want for the user (a single "page" from which a report can be queries, previewed, and rendered in full detail).

If there is some duplication of code between the three components...that is ok. If you can centralize any common logic into a helper class that can be shared accross all three, great. If the logic is similar, but can't really be normalized, thats ok too. The key thing is that Input, Summary, and Detail are independant components that can be maintained, updated, and modified (i.e. with new functionality) independant of each other, which will improve your long term maintenance and product flexibility. Regardless of up-front costs...long term maintenance is by far the greatest cost of any project.

Thanks for the response Jon!

hii all..i got a problem regarding to convert the requested memory address to bus address..as we know, for the CPU to access a memory (doing transaction) it must go to bus address first..txx

er.....

Hi,

what is your application, why would you need this? Are you going to write a device driver that services a DMA device? Normally all addresses handled by code running on the CPU will get translated from logical to physical addresses automatically by the built-in MMU; you should not worry unless you dive into the kernel, the drivers and/or your own hardware... Confused | :confused:

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oke,let me explain to you..i need to convert the requested memory addressto bus address.. because for a CPU to do a transaction such as I/O Read, I/o Write ,interrupt and others memory transaction, the CPU need to got through the front-side bus for it to access to requested memory in the DDR or in the Memory Controller Hub (MCH).By the way thanks for your help. i will try my best!

Hi there,

I am seeking help for building a document-centric application. More specifically, handling extensions and icons for the different file types the application is going to manage. I know how to register extensions within windows, I'm just unsure how to do it inside my own application!

My current design is something like this:

Each document has it own class (the documents are actually just the objects serialized, gzipped and stored on the disk). Those can be extended through a plugin system (with external dlls being loaded during runtime), so the number of file types may be extended at will. Each file type should have its own extension and can have its own icon. I'm using multidotted extensions to keep the naming scheme sane.

To define a new document, thus a new file type, one has to implement a interface, lets say, IDocument, which has common properties like Name, Description and Remarks, and then define what his document will contain.

Now, the problem is: Where should I specify which will be the default extension and icon for a particular document class I'm writing? At first I thought about adding static properties to the interface in order to ensure its implementation, but I know interfaces cant have such things. I also need to be able to, given an extension, return the System.Type of the related document, or given a Type, return its extension. I could write a table of extensions and related types, but then how could I enforce every class that inherits from IDocument will register itself into this table?

It should be mandatory for a document to have a extension, but I can not think of a way to enforce this rule. Sorry for the long question, but I hope I could explain what I'm trying to achieve.

Thanks in advance,
C

Well, you could always implement an abstract base class that your document classes must inherit from, and put rules inside here to ensure that a document has an extension and icon.

"WPF has many lovers. It's a veritable porn star!" - Josh Smith

My blog | My articles | MoXAML PowerToys

Hi, thanks for replying.

Its a nice sugestion, but then to retrieve this information I'd have to create an instance of the class, wouldn't I? If I have to look for a particular extension, I'd be instantiating several classes, one for each document, only to check the overriden methods.

If there was a way to enforce a inherited class to have a particular static method, then it would be easy, but there isn't. At least none that I'm aware of.

I think its possible to create a mechanism to register this information in a static structure somewhere based on overriden virtual methods, but I would have to instantiate the class at least once for this.

There's no easy way to do this internally. You could always store the extension and the type it relates to in a database/config file and then perform the instantiation based on that.

"WPF has many lovers. It's a veritable porn star!" - Josh Smith

My blog | My articles | MoXAML PowerToys

Where should I specify which will be the default extension and icon for a particular document class I'm writing?

I would consider that these defaults are the defaults of the context or system in which they are used. That is, the default is not of the document, but of the system its saved in. Moving a document from System A to System B may mean a different default icon, so information on defaults does not need to be part of the document.

Hello Friends,

How to create DFD for my project documents.

My project definition is Inventory System.

Please help me.

Thanks in advance.

Pin

Member 4679436 wrote:
Hello Friends,

Unlikely. I've never met you before.

Member 4679436 wrote:
How to create DFD for my project documents.

Any text editor will do - you could always use Notepad.

"WPF has many lovers. It's a veritable porn star!" - Josh Smith

My blog | My articles | MoXAML PowerToys

Pete O'Hanlon wrote:
you could always use Notepad.

Real programmers would use vi

led mike wrote:
Real programmers would use vi

Did he strike you as a real programmer?

"WPF has many lovers. It's a veritable porn star!" - Josh Smith

My blog | My articles | MoXAML PowerToys

Ohhhh, did I ever walk right into that one! Laugh | :laugh:

I would like to hear comments and suggestions on the proper way to avoid circular references between projects.

Consider an app with the following assemblies:

- UI
- BusinessLogic
- DAL
- Common

So typically, the dependencies would look like this:
UI >> BusinessLogic >> DAL
and all 3 above depend on Common

So far, so good, but... lets say that I have a common collection of data that is required to be used in all 3 of the main assemblies, such as a list of supported cultures.

So I create a static helper class in the Common assembly and this gives me access to the shared singleton collection from all 3 main assemblies.

However, to populate that singleton collection when the app starts, I need to hit the database once. To do this right, I would load the collection from the database using my BusinessLogic layer.

But I cannot do this because doing so would cause a circular reference between Common and BusinessLogic.

What is the best architecture to avoid/work around this problem?

Thanks.

Leftyfarrell wrote:
What is the best architecture to avoid/work around this problem?

Model-View-Controller[^]

led mike