Hibernating Rhinos

New Client Coming to RavenDB – Mono For Android

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 10:00:00 GMT

You requested it and we listened, we now have a client for Android (with mono).

The client supports all the regular client side operation except from Distributed Transactions which are not relevant for mobile devices

The Client will be available through a Nuget Package or by referencing the dll to your project

All you need to do is reference the Raven.Client.MonoForAndoird.dll to your Mono for android project.

In there you can use the code as you normally would.

If you want to start working with this already you can download the dll here:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/e2n5fioobv3v09u/Raven.Client.MonoForAndroid.dll

Pay attention this is an early build, so if you have something not working, we will appreciate if you could create a failing test for it

You can see how we are testing from this repository https://github.com/DanielDar/ravendb on branch 2.5

Look at the project Raven.Tests.MonoForAndroid

There is also Raven.Tryouts.MonoForAndroid for testing a complete app

You can see a sample for the using android with raven here: https://github.com/DanielDar/RavenAndroidToDoList

In this sample you have a to do list that is updated between all of the android devices running it.

EFProf now supports EF 6 alpha 3

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 10:00:00 GMT

We got a mail from a customer asking about the support of Entity Framework 6 alpha 3 by the Entity Framework Profiler. It took 2 hours before we got a new build which now support it.

Part of this speedy patch was that the customer provided a nice small project that reproduce the issue, which is always the best way to get things fixed fast, but the most critical thing was that the EF team addressed the issues that we faced in the previous release, EF 6 alpha 2, as outlined here.

So if you are using EF 6 alpha 3, the workaround that was outlined here is not needed anymore. You should just call `EntityFrameworkProfiler.Initialize()` at the very first of your application and this is it.

Use ProfilerIntegration static class in order to hook into the profiler

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 10:00:00 GMT

A user asked us how can he use this class so I thought it may be a good idea to blog about that.

You can use the HibernatingRhinos.Profiler.Appender.ProfilerIntegration static class in order to hook into the profiler and do some interesting staff.

The two most uses of this class is 1. telling the profiler to ignore some code and not record it. 2. record something that wasn’t executed by the ORM but by ADO.NET directly in the profiler.

Ignore and not profile a portion of code

This is mostly useful when running unit tests and you need to do some initialization to the database which you prefer not to see in the profiler output.

You can do this using:

using (ProfilerIntegration.IgnoreAll())
{
    // Do something
}

ProfilerIntegration.IgnoreAll();
// Do something
ProfilerIntegration.ResumeProfiling();

Record custom messages inside the profiler

This is mostly useful if you doing some use of the pure ADO.NET api alongside to the ORM that you’re using and you want to record those actions.

In this case, since you aren’t using the DbConnection/DbDataReader/DbCommnad etc that the profiler created, you’ll need to notify the profiler about each action.

This can be done using the following code:

ProfilerIntegration.PublishProfilerEvent("session id", "logger name", "message");

This is 3 parameters:

Session ID = a string that identify the session to which this statement belongs. In NHibernate you’ll want to use ((SessionImpl)session).SessionId.ToString(). In the other ORM, you can use some GUID which should be the same for statements in this session.

Logger name = specifies the log type. This is ORM specific, in NHibernate you’ll use "NHibernate.SQL" in order to log a statement while that in EF this will be "EntityFramework.Sql".

Message = The actual message to record. If this an SQL statement, you’ll provide the SQL statement here.

Example:

            const string sql =
                @"SELECT
        first 5 this_.LOG_ID as LOG1_0_0_,
        this_.LOG_DATE as LOG2_0_0_,
        this_.APP_NAME as APP3_0_0_,
        this_.LOGGER as LOGGER0_0_,
        this_.LOG_LEVEL as LOG5_0_0_,
        this_.MESSAGE as MESSAGE0_0_,
        this_.EXCEPTION_MESSAGE as EXCEPTION7_0_0_,
        this_.CONTEXT as CONTEXT0_0_
FROM APP_LOG this_ ORDER BY this_.LOG_DATE desc";

            using (var s = (SessionImpl)factory.OpenSession())
            {
                ProfilerIntegration.PublishProfilerEvent(
                    s.SessionId.ToString(),
                    "NHibernate.SQL",
                    sql);
            }

PublishProfilerEvent is really low level API. If you’re using Entity Framework Profiler you can use the EntityFrameworkAppender class which provides more high level API:

   1:  var sessionId = Guid.NewGuid();

   2:  var entityFrameworkAppender = new EntityFrameworkAppender("My app");

   3:  entityFrameworkAppender.ConnectionStarted(sessionId);

   4:  var statementId = Guid.NewGuid();

   5:  entityFrameworkAppender.StatementExecuted(sessionId, statementId, "Select ...");

   6:  entityFrameworkAppender.StatementRowCount(sessionId, statementId, 8);

   7:  entityFrameworkAppender.StatementError(sessionId, new InvalidOperationException("Report an error to the profiler"));

   8:  entityFrameworkAppender.ConnectionDisposed(sessionId);

But this is considered internal API which may be changed.

NHibernateProfiler doesn’t expose a high level API like this, so you’ll need to call ProfilerIntegration.PublishProfilerEvent with the correct logger name. If you would like to know a particular logger name you can email us and we’ll provide you with the information that you need.

Use log4net version 1.2.11.0 with NHibernate Profiler

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 12:51:00 GMT

We got lots of requests to support log4net 1.2.11.0 when using the web.config or app.config to configure the profiler. We already supported log4net 1.2.11 if you initialized the profiler using code, eg NHibernateProfiler.Initialize(), by auto compiling our inner appedner against the version of log4net that your application is using. But when you initialize the profiler using config file you need an assembly that is already compiled against log4net.

We thought how we can support this, and we came up with an interesting solution.

Starting with build #2122, we let you call the following code from your application, which will generate an assembly that will be compiled against the version of log4net that your application is using, and will be saved to the location that you can specify in the parameter:

NHibernateProfiler.GenerateAssemblyForCustomVersionOfLog4Net(AppDomain.CurrentDomain.BaseDirectory);

This will create the following dll in the output folder:

HibernatingRhinos.Profiler.Appender.CustomNHibernateLog4Net.dll

Now you can use this dll in order to initialize the profiler using the configuration file.

Entity Framework Profiler support for Entity Framework 6 alpha 2

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 10:00:00 GMT

Recently a lot of our users asked us to support Entity Framework 6 alpha 2 in Entity Framework Profiler. We started to look on how we can support it right away but we found that we could not support it easily.

The main issue was that Entity Framework 6 alpha 2 expose a class called DbConfiguration which you can use as an injection point to EF. But the way that EF currently works, it looks for this class only in the same assembly that uses the DbContext, which is your application executable/dll but not our appender dll.

So we contact the EF team (which they were very helpful and responsive) and discussed some of the issues that we saw. While a few of the issues was been addressed already by the EF team and committed to the EF repository, the good news that we found a way to support Entity Framework 6 alpha 2 by adding just one source file to your application.

Take the following file and add to your application: https://gist.github.com/4539561.

Now make sure to use the use build #2111 or later of Entity Framework Profiler and it will work.

I’m also attaching the same source code from the above gist to here. Enjoy using Entity Framework Profiler!

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Data.Common;
using System.Data.Entity.Config;
using System.Data.Entity.Core.Common;
using System.Data.Entity.Core.EntityClient;
using System.Data.Entity.Infrastructure;
using System.Data.Entity.Migrations.Sql;
using System.Data.Entity.SqlServer;
using System.Reflection;
using HibernatingRhinos.Profiler.Appender.EntityFramework;
using HibernatingRhinos.Profiler.Appender.ProfiledDataAccess;

namespace HibernatingRhinos.Profiler.IntegrationTests.EntityFramework6Beta2
{
    public class ProfiledDbConfiguration : DbConfiguration
    {
        public ProfiledDbConfiguration()
        {
            AddDependencyResolver(new ProfiledDbDependencyResolver(this));
        }
    }

    public class ProfiledDbDependencyResolver : IDbDependencyResolver
    {
        private readonly IDbDependencyResolver rootResolver;

#if DEBUG
        public static HashSet<string> types = new HashSet<string>();
#endif

        public ProfiledDbDependencyResolver(DbConfiguration originalDbConfiguration)
        {
            // Get the original resolver
            var internalConfigProp = originalDbConfiguration.GetType().GetProperty("InternalConfiguration", BindingFlags.Instance | BindingFlags.NonPublic);
            var internalConfig = internalConfigProp.GetValue(originalDbConfiguration, null);
            var rootResolverProp = internalConfig.GetType().GetProperty("RootResolver", BindingFlags.Instance | BindingFlags.NonPublic | BindingFlags.Public);
            rootResolver = (IDbDependencyResolver)rootResolverProp.GetValue(internalConfig, null);
        }

        public object GetService(Type type, object key)
        {
#if DEBUG
            types.Add(type.Name);
#endif

            if (type == typeof(IDbProviderFactoryService))
            {
                var innerFactoryService = (IDbProviderFactoryService) rootResolver.GetService(type, key);
                return new ProfiledDbProviderFactoryService(innerFactoryService);
            }

            if (type == typeof (DbProviderServices))
            {
                var inner = (DbProviderServices)rootResolver.GetService(type, key);
                var appender = new EntityFrameworkAppender(typeof (SqlProviderServices).Name);
                var profiledDbProviderServicesType = EntityFrameworkProfiler.CompiledAssembly.GetType("HibernatingRhinos.Profiler.Appender.EntityFramework.ProfiledDbProviderServices");
                if (profiledDbProviderServicesType == null)
                    throw new InvalidOperationException("Could not get the profiled DbProviderServices.");
                return Activator.CreateInstance(profiledDbProviderServicesType, new object[] {inner, appender});
            }

            if (type == typeof(MigrationSqlGenerator))
            {
                if (rootResolver.GetService(type, key) is SqlServerMigrationSqlGenerator)
                {
                    return new ProfiledMigrationSqlGenerator();
                }
            }

            return null;
        }
    }

    public class ProfiledDbProviderFactoryService : IDbProviderFactoryService
    {
        private readonly IDbProviderFactoryService innerFactoryService;

        public ProfiledDbProviderFactoryService(IDbProviderFactoryService innerFactoryService)
        {
            this.innerFactoryService = innerFactoryService;
        }

        public DbProviderFactory GetProviderFactory(DbConnection connection)
        {
            if (connection is ProfiledConnection)
            {
                var connectionType = connection.GetType();
                if (connectionType.IsGenericType)
                {
                    var innerProviderFactory = connectionType.GetGenericArguments()[0];
                    var profiledDbProviderFactory = EntityFrameworkProfiler.CompiledAssembly.GetType("HibernatingRhinos.Profiler.Appender.EntityFramework.ProfiledDbProviderFactory`1").MakeGenericType(innerProviderFactory);
                    return (DbProviderFactory) Activator.CreateInstance(profiledDbProviderFactory);
                }
            }

            if (connection is EntityConnection)
                return innerFactoryService.GetProviderFactory(connection);

            throw new InvalidOperationException("Should have ProfiledConnection but got " + connection.GetType().FullName + ".If you got here, you probably need to modify the above code in order to satisfy the requirements of your application. This code indented to support EF 6 alpha 2.");
        }
    }

    public class ProfiledMigrationSqlGenerator : SqlServerMigrationSqlGenerator
    {
        protected override DbConnection CreateConnection()
        {
            return DbProviderFactories.GetFactory("System.Data.SqlClient").CreateConnection();
        }
    }
}

Hibernate Profiler now supports Hibernate 4

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 10:00:00 GMT

Starting from build #2112, Hibernate Profiler now fully supports Hibernate 4.

Instructions how to setup Hibernate Profiler can be found here: http://hibernatingrhinos.com/products/hprof/learn/general/gettingstarted.

We think to provide a maven package for Hibernate Profiler for you, so instead of downloading Hibernate Profiler by hand you’ll be able to use maven in order to get the binaries. Would you like to see this feature coming? Tell us in the comments!

Uber Prof Production Profiling–Profiling production application on Azure

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 16:18:00 GMT

In this post I’m going to cover one of the great features of Uber Prof v2.0: production profiling of remote applications running on Windows Azure.

The production profiling feature is currently supported in the following profilers: NHibernate Profiler, Entity Framework Profiler, Linq to SQL Profiler, LLBLGen Profiler. In this post I’m going to demonstrate how to use this with the Entity Framework Profiler.

First, we need to create our project. Since we want to host the project on Windows Azure, I’ll use an ASP.NET MVC + Web API project.

The next thing is to enable production profiling. In order to so, we need to install the EntityFrameworkProfiler.Production NuGet package.

As a side note, if you wonder what is the other package called EntityFrameworkProfiler, you probably want to read this post.

After the package is installed, you can see that it created the following file in our project:

using System;
using System.IO;
using System.Web.Http;
using HibernatingRhinos.Profiler.Production;

[assembly: WebActivator.PreApplicationStartMethod(typeof(ProductionProfilingOnAzureSample.App_Start.EntityFrameworkProfilerProductionBootstrapper), "PreStart")]
namespace ProductionProfilingOnAzureSample.App_Start
{
    public static class EntityFrameworkProfilerProductionBootstrapper
    {
        public static void PreStart()
        {
            // Initialize the profiler with the production profiling feature. 
            // Production profiling let's you let you see profiling information remotely using the following URL: http://your-server/profiler/profiler.html
            string license = GetResource("ProductionProfilingOnAzureSample.App_Start.EntityFrameworkProfilerLicense.xml");
            ProductionProfiling.Initialize(license, GlobalConfiguration.Configuration);
        }

        private static string GetResource(string sourcesResource)
        {
            using (var sourceCodeStream = typeof(EntityFrameworkProfilerProductionBootstrapper).Assembly.GetManifestResourceStream(sourcesResource))
            {
                if (sourceCodeStream == null)
                    throw new InvalidOperationException(string.Format("Resource file is missing: {0}", sourcesResource));
                return new StreamReader(sourceCodeStream).ReadToEnd();
            }
        }
    }
}

This class will run on the startup of your project and will expose a URL endpoint that we can use to load the profiler UI. In this case we’re using the GlobalConfiguration.Configuration from the WebAPI Web Host package, but please note that you can also expose your own self hosted server in order to production profile a different types of projects, like a service, or what not…

Also note that we’re embedding the license file as an embedded resource in our project and we’re passing the license string to the Initialize method of the ProductionProfiling class. This is needed since the profiler is now split into to parts, the server – which is embedded right into your application and will run within your application own process, and the UI client which is a Silverlight application that you can get from the remote server through your browser. So again, the license string is passed and evaluated right from the server initialization process.

Now it’s time to run our project. I’m running it but get the following exception: …

Resource file is missing: ProductionProfilingOnAzureSample.App_Start.EntityFrameworkProfilerLicense.xml

Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code.
Exception Details: System.InvalidOperationException: Resource file is missing: ProductionProfilingOnAzureSample.App_Start.EntityFrameworkProfilerLicense.xml
Source Error:

Line 22: 			{
Line 23: 				if (sourceCodeStream == null)
Line 24: 					throw new InvalidOperationException(string.Format("Resource file is missing: {0}", sourcesResource));
Line 25: 				return new StreamReader(sourceCodeStream).ReadToEnd();
Line 26: 			}

Source File: c:\Users\Fitzchak\Documents\Visual Studio 11\Projects\ProductionProfilingOnAzureSample\ProductionProfilingOnAzureSample\App_Start\EntityFrameworkProfilerBootstrapper.cs Line: 24

Remember what I told you? We need to embedded a license file. So let’s go and ask for a trial license file: http://hibernatingrhinos.com/products/efprof/trial.

After that I’m doing that, I got a trial license in my email inbox. Now we need to include this in the project as an embedded resource.

And now we are ready to see the profiler in action. Run the project and browse to the /profiler/profiler.html endpoint:

Do you see that? This is Entity Framework Profiler running right in your browser and let you profile your remote production application right from your computer!

You may be wonder why we do not see actual data in the profiler yet but this is your work to do. Attach it to your application and you’ll see some nice information that will let you understand what your ORM is doing easily.

Here is an example:

Wait a second… Didn’t you said that we’re going to run this on Azure?

Yes, I added the following code to the HomeController and pushed the code to azure:

public class HomeController : Controller
{
    public ActionResult Index()
    {
        for (int i = 0; i < 2; i++)
        {
            using (var context = new ApplicationContext())
            {

                context.Messages.Add(new Message {Text = "Text 1", CreatedAt = DateTime.UtcNow});
                context.SaveChanges();

                var messages = context.Messages.ToList();

                var messages2 = context.Messages
                                        .Where(message => message.Text == "Profiling on Azure" && message.Text.Length > 10)
                                        .ToList();
            }
        }
        return View();
    }
}

You can run the above code by opening the following page, http://efprof.cloudapp.net/, and see the profiler in action here: http://efprof.cloudapp.net/profiler/profiler.html.

For any feedback, please contact us in the profilers forums, by email (support at hibernatingrhinos.com) or just leave a comment here.

What’s new in Uber Prof v2.0?

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 07:32:00 GMT

Along with the launch of our new website hibernatingrhinos.com, we’re happy to announce that v2.0 of Uber Prof profilers is now in beta!

While we’re perfecting the product, you can take advantage on that and buy a license now with a 20% discount. This will work for both monthly license and standard license.

You can also request a trial license on the website, which will let you use the profiler for 30 days.

Uber Profiler	Buy
NHibernate Profiler	Buy	Try	Screen Shots
Hibernate Profiler	Buy	Try	Screen Shots
Entity Framework Profiler	Buy	Try	Screen Shots
Linq to SQL Profiler	Buy	Try	Screen Shots
LLBLGen Profiler	Buy	Try	Screen Shots

Now for the interesting staff, what’s new in Uber Prof v2.0?

1. Silverlight interface. When you run the profiler.exe the UI that opens is a OOB Silverlight application. You can also open the profiler interface in your browser, which means that you can profiler remote systems! In fact, we ported all of the WPF user interface of v1.0 to Silverlight in order to enable production profiling of remote systems.

2. Production profiling. We now supports profiling production systems, using the HibernatingRhinos.Profiler.Production.dll. If you’re using ASP.NET MVC, you will be able to configure the profiler to use the following route “/profiler” in order to see the profiler interface in your browser.

3. Performance. We tuned to performance of the profiler and the profiler now it far more responsive. You can run the profiler now for days, and it will still work.

4. Running on the cloud. We did some work in order to let you profile your application on Azure. You can profiler your cloud application right from your browser, using the production profiling feature.

The next post will contains instructions how to run the profiler in a production application, on Azure.

Feature explained–Spatial Geocode from address

Tue, 23 Oct 2012 10:00:00 GMT

In August we added the option in spatial queries to get the Geocode by address.

We already did something like that in the “Events” page in the RavenDB website and It was quite easy with the Google Maps API.

However when we tried to implement it in the studio we discovered that to do that in Silverlight is not as simple.

Apparently in order to get Google API to work with Silverlight you need to set a bridge server that has the appropriate clientaccesspolicy.xml because the settings on the Google API server does not match the permissions required for Silverlight.

So we looked for another service that has the settings that allowed to work with Silverlight without any complications, what we found is that the Yahoo! Maps Geocoding does just that.

The setting of the Yahoo API was even easier then Google’s and is done like this:

   1: var url = "http://where.yahooapis.com/geocode?flags=JC&q=" + queryModel.Address;   2:             var webRequest = WebRequest.Create(new Uri(url, UriKind.Absolute));   3:             webRequest.GetResponseAsync().ContinueOnSuccessInTheUIThread(doc =>   4:             {   5:                 RavenJObject jsonData;   6:                 using (var stream = doc.GetResponseStream())   7:                 {   8:                     jsonData = RavenJObject.Load(new JsonTextReader(new StreamReader(stream)));   9:                 }  10:    11:                 var result = jsonData["ResultSet"].SelectToken("Results").Values().FirstOrDefault();  12:    13:                 if (result != null)  14:                 {  15:                     queryModel.Latitude = double.Parse(result.Value<string>("latitude"));  16:                     queryModel.Longitude = double.Parse(result.Value<string>("longitude"));  17:                 }  18:    19:             }).Catch();  20:  

As you can see it is simply a web request with a default url with the addition of the address

For mode information about the Yahoo geocode API: http://developer.yahoo.com/maps/rest/V1/geocode.html

New Option in the RavenDB Studio–Patching

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 10:00:00 GMT

Not long ago we added the option to do Eval Patching in RavenDB (see: http://ayende.com/blog/157185/awesome-ravendb-feature-of-the-day-evil-patching)

Recently we added this option to the studio.

Now when you open the studio you will see a new tab in the options for “Patch”

Once there you will see the next screen:

As you can see this page has many options so lets look at them separately

At the top left you have this toolbar with several options, the first one is a combo-box where you can choose what you want to patch (“Document”, “Collection” or “Index”).

Next to it you have the “Test” Option, with this option (which will only be available after selecting a document to check the patch on) when we click on this button the fields on the bottom of the screen (titled “Before Patch” and “After Patch”) will be populated with the selected document and how will it be after we patch.

Next we have the “Save” and “Load” options. With those you can save this page setting and load them again for later use.

Next we have the Patch option that executes the Patch command (this will save the changes to the database)

Let’s look at a small example of patching:

In this case I want to change the Genre name from “Rock” to “Rock and Roll”, after I pressed “Test” I got the screen below, as you can see the “Name” is different.

as you can see on the right of the script we have the “Parameters” list, in there I can do this patch in a different way:

Now I as you can see we added another value to the document with the help of parameters.

Now lets go over the changes when using “Collection”

In “Collection” you can see that the “Patch” option changed into 2 options: “Patch Selected” and “Patch All”.

In order to patch only some of the items in the collection you can select then in the “Matching Documents” section that was added to the page.

Another thing we have is the option to select on which collection we want to patch.

And last we have the option to patch by index:

In addition to the changes we had for “Collection” we now have a field “Query” for the index and the patch will apply only to the documents that match this query (and the “Matching Documents” will update accordingly).

Update in RavenDB: A new statistics page

Thu, 13 Sep 2012 09:00:00 GMT

Lately we updated the statistics page in RavenDB Studio.

This is how the new page looks:

If you look you can see that the data we see in "Artists" is different than what we see in "AlbumsByCountSold" this is because "Artists" has data on reduce and we want to see that.

Another thing we added is the option to view statistics in groups, In the top left you can see a ComboBox in there you can choose from several options:

If you select "Single Items" you will see all the data that is not a part of a list:

For each index in your database you will see an item in the ComboBox that will show the stats for this index

In addition you can view all the indexes.

If you have stale indexes another section will be added to the page:

If you'll press the stale index name you will see the stats for this index.

Another thing we have added is that in the query page if you are using an index (not dynamic query) you can go directly to this index statistics

The most right button will send you to the statistics page with the data for this index displayed.

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Wed, 12 Sep 2012 09:00:00 GMT

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New feature in RavenDB Studio: get spatial geocode from address

Wed, 29 Aug 2012 09:00:00 GMT

For a while now we had the option to do spatial search, in order to do that we need the longitude and latitude of center we want to search around.

However most of the time that we really want to check is result round a specific location (we don’t really care about the longitude and latitude but the address they represent) so usually you would look in some site that you input an address and you get the longitude and latitude.

With the new feature in RavenDB Studio we let you enter an address and we update the longitude and latitude for you:

The new UI:

We enter an address:

And after we press the "Calculate from address":

It is that simple.

In my next post, I’ll discuss exactly how we did it. In turned out that it isn’t as trivial in Silverlight as we might want.

Dealing with conflicts in RavenDB studio

Mon, 27 Aug 2012 09:00:00 GMT

Recently we added the option to manage bundles in the studio (see http://blogs.hibernatingrhinos.com/12577/ravendb-1-2-studio-features-the-new-database-wizard).

One of these bundles is the Replication bundles, sometimes with replication a conflict can happen (this could happen by several reason like 2 or more documents with the same id being created on different destinations), the way RavenDB deals with this is by creating one document to each of the versions available of the document and in the “original” document we have the names of these copies.

With the new conflict resolution UI when you try to edit the original document you will receive a suggestion of resolution.

Let create a conflict on purpose and see some of the options:

In order to create the conflict we will create 2 databases on the same server, both with replication bundle enabled but we will not set the destination yet:

Now we will create a document on each database with the same Id:

Now we will edit the destinations on the left and connect it to the right :

Now we will go to the destination and look the the documents list:

As you can see we have 3 documents with Id starts with “Example/1”.

Now we get to the interesting part if we go and try to edit “Example/1” we will get the next page:

The Studio realizes that we wanted to edit a document that had a conflict and gave us a suggestion, as long as there are comments on the document you will not be able to save it.

Now you can see that RavenDB Studio saw an issue with the Name, we give you a list of all possible names and all you need to do is delete what you don’t want there.

Let say we want it to be “Hibernating” we will delete what we don’t want and save:

Before save:

After save:

Now if we take a look at the documents list you can see that we are left with just the fixed version:

Now let look what RavenDB will suggest for several other conflicts:

Example 2 – Same Item:

The result:

Notice that we still let you know that a conflict has accrued but you have not comments in there which means you can simply save to resolve the conflict

Example 3 – List With Different Items

The result:

We put both items in the array but add the comment so that the user will know that the data was changed.

Example 4 – List with some items the same and some different

The result:

We combined all the data into one array with no repeats and inform on the change.

For more about conflicts read: https://ravendb.net/docs/server/scaling-out/replication/handling-conflicts

Creating a Wizard in Silverlight

Fri, 24 Aug 2012 09:00:00 GMT

When creating the new “Create New Database” for the studio we ran into an issue with showing several child windows one after the other (and keeping in mind that if in one page cancel was click we don’t want to show the next windows) like an install wizard.

Unfortunately Silverlight does not have anything like that so we needed to create on for ourselves.

First thing we had in mind when we came to approach this is that Silverlight works asynchronously which means that we want to wait for a page to close before we open the next one.

The way we dealt with that was listening to every windows Closed event and on close open the next page (if exists) the Wizard class looks like this:

The ShowNext() method will check to see if we have more windows to show and show the next one or return with the result if we are done.

We use a TaskCompletionSource and the TPL to make sure that all of that is wrapped in a nice Task, and that is pretty much it. With that done, we can start using it. You can see how easy it is here:

Dynamic Tab View In Silverlight

Thu, 23 Aug 2012 09:00:00 GMT

With the new “Create New Database” feature to the RanvenDB Studio we added the option to edit your bundles.

We wanted something that seemed to be quite strait forward: A tab view that we could dynamically choose which tabs a visible and which are not.

At first we tried doing it with the TabControl and bind the header visibility of each TabItem to a property in the model that let us know if this database has that bundle.

This is how I had done it:

At first it seemed to work, however when looking closely we noticed something like this:

As you can see, in the header we only have “Versioning” but the tab we see is the “Quotas Tab”

This happened because we hid the header but the item itself was still the “SelectedItem”.

So we tried to bind the “SelectedItem” as well, but apperantly there is an issue with TabControl and MVVM.

Finally we decided to create our own implementation of Tab View and this is how we did it:

In the Model size we have:

The Bundles Collection is updated with the list of bundles that are active for this database.

One other this we needed to add was to initialize the SelectedBundle to be the first one in the list.
We did that where we initialize the Bundles collection like that:

RavenDB 1.2 Studio Features: The New Database Wizard

Wed, 22 Aug 2012 09:00:00 GMT

In the new version of the RavenDB Management Studio we wanted to enhance the options you have, one of these enhancements is the new "Create New Database" wizard.

We wanted to add the option to choose bundles for your database, configure various options and in general give you a easy way to control options that you could previously do only if you mastered the zen of RavenDB.

Now then you select the New Database option from the databases page you will get the next window:

If you check the “Advanced Settings” option you will get this window:

Now you can change the location where the data (path), logs and indexes will be stored.
In some cases putting the data, logs and the indexes in different drives can improve performance.

On the left side you have the Bundles Selection area, every bundle that you select here will be added to your database. More data about bundles: https://ravendb.net/docs/server/bundles

Some of the bundles have settings that you can (and should) configure:

Encryption:

In here you can choose you encryption key (or use the random generated on) after the database creation a pop up with the key will show you the key on last time. Make sure you have this key saved somewhere; after that window will close we will not give you the key again.

Quotas Bundle

In here you can set the limits for quotas (see http://ravendb.net/docs/server/bundles/quotas)

Replication Bundle

In here you can set the replications (and add as many as needed)
(see http://ravendb.net/docs/server/scaling-out/replication)

Versioning

In here you can set the versioning (see http://ravendb.net/docs/server/bundles/versioning)

Notice that you can’t remove the default configuration or change the Collection for it but you can edit the values.

After you will press “OK” the database will be created (if you have the encryption bundles you will now see the encryption key one last time)

If in the future you want to edit the setting to the bundles (for quotas, replication and versioning) you can right-click the database in the databases view and select “edit bundles”

Note: you cannot change which bundles are part of the database after creation.

Does a blog post have an image?

Thu, 16 Aug 2012 09:00:00 GMT

Following on my previous post, a different requirement that I may have, is to have a picture for each blog post. I say may have, because this is how the designer designed the website. In the HTML that I got, each blog post has a picture. But in practice, none of Hibernating Rhinos blog and Ayende blog has a picture for each blog item. This is not even a requirement for those blogs. After all, blog posts are all about text, so it perfectly valid to have a blog post without an image.

At fist I thought to just change the design and remove the picture. But than I thought well some of the blog posts do have an image or two in them. What I just parse the blog content and look for an <img /> tags there? I can use them! It may be worth to test this.

A quick search led me to this answer on StackOverflow.

Based on that, I modified the code in the previous post to the following:

Very simple. I’ll wait to see how this will behave in practice, with real data. And now I’m thinking that I can even improve this further, be query the actual images pick the best one that match the target dimensions.

I like this too.

Async await. Wait them All!

Wed, 15 Aug 2012 09:00:00 GMT

While we’re working on the new website for the company, I had a fair task to complete. The homepage shows two blog posts at the bottom of the page, one from the company blog, which is this blog, and the other from the ayende blog. This is a fair task but also interesting. Let’s see why.

Look on the following snippet of code:

public void Consume(GetLatestBlogPosts message)
{
    var ayendePost = GetLatestBlogPostAsync("http://ayende.com/blog/rss");
    var companyPost = GetLatestBlogPostAsync("http://blog.hibernatingrhinos.com/rss");

    Task.WaitAll(ayendePost, companyPost);

    UpdateIfNew(ayendePost.Result, companyPost.Result);
}

What it does is very simple. The GetLatestBlogPostAsync method returns a Task<BlogItem> which holds the latest post of the requested blog. I run this against two blogs in order to fetch all latest posts asynchronously, so I use Task.WaitAll in order to wait for the both of the tasks to finish. Than I build a LatestBlogPosts entity, which is like a view model, and put it in the database. See UpdateIfNew method for more details:

private void UpdateIfNew(BlogPost ayendePost, BlogPost companyPost)
{
    using (var session = DocumentStore.OpenSession(DocumentStoreHolder.CompanyWebsite))
    {
        var latestPosts = session.Load<LatestBlogPosts>(LatestBlogPosts.IdConst);
        if (latestPosts == null)
        {
            latestPosts = new LatestBlogPosts();
            session.Store(latestPosts, LatestBlogPosts.IdConst);
        }

        if (latestPosts.Ayende == null ||
            latestPosts.Ayende.Title != ayendePost.Title ||
            latestPosts.Ayende.Description != ayendePost.Description)
        {
            latestPosts.Ayende = ayendePost;
        }

        if (latestPosts.HibernatingRhinos == null ||
            latestPosts.HibernatingRhinos.Title != companyPost.Title ||
            latestPosts.HibernatingRhinos.Description != companyPost.Description)
        {
            latestPosts.HibernatingRhinos = companyPost;
        }

        session.SaveChanges();
    }
}

This is the code for LatestBlogPosts entity:

public class LatestBlogPosts
{
    public const string IdConst = "LatestBlogPosts";

    public string Id { get; set; }

    public BlogPost Ayende { get; set; }
    public BlogPost HibernatingRhinos { get; set; }
}

public class BlogPost
{
    public string Title { get; set; }
    public string Description { get; set; }
    public string Link { get; set; }
    public string PubDate { get; set; }
}

Now, let proceed to the interesting staff, the implementation of GetLatestBlogPostAsync method. Let recap what it needs to do: download an rss feed and return the first blog item from it.

My first attempt was the following code:

private readonly HttpClient client = new HttpClient();

public Task<BlogPost> GetLatestBlogPostAsync(string url)
{
    return client.GetAsync(url)
        .ContinueWith(task =>
        {
            if (task.IsFaulted || task.Result.StatusCode != HttpStatusCode.OK)
            {
                return null;
            }

            return task.Result.Content.ReadAsStreamAsync()
                .ContinueWith(task1 =>
                {
                    var xDocument = XDocument.Load(task1.Result);
                    var lastItem = xDocument.Descendants("item").First();
                    var post = new BlogPost
                    {
                        Title = lastItem.Descendants("title").First().Value,
                        Description = lastItem.Descendants("description").First().Value,
                        Link = lastItem.Descendants("link").First().Value,
                        PubDate = lastItem.Descendants("pubDate").First().Value,
                    };
                    return post;
                });
        });
}

Ah, what a complicated code! And even worth, it does not even compile! Why? I don’t know. But hey, I do not even interested to know. This code looks ugly to me, and I know that I can do better. I’m writing the code in Visual Studio 2012 RC, so I can make a use of the C# 5.0 async and await keywords. Or at least I remember me read so a while ago. So, it is time to try it.

Ah? GetAsync is a not awaitable method. Why? I know that I can use C# 5.0 in order to generate assemblies that targets .NET 4.0, so what the problem is?

I googled a little bit in order to find out that I need to install the Microsoft.CompilerServices.AsyncTargetingPack NuGet package. After I installed it I was able to make a use of the await keyword. (Hah finally! Wish I have knew this before!).

Now let’s see how the GetLatestBlogPostAsync will look with this?

Well, the code now is much more readable and easy to understand. And hey, it works!

I like this!

Implementing a VirtualizingWrapPanel

Tue, 14 Aug 2012 09:00:00 GMT

This is a guest post by Samuel Jack, a freelancer who has worked with us on the new RavenDb Studio features.

If you’ve used Silverlight or WPF for any length of time, you will know all about Panels – StackPanel, DockPanel, Grid and the like - which handle the positioning of UI elements on screen. You’ll also know about VirtualizingStackPanel, which can work wonders for UI performance when displaying substantial lists of data. It does this by deferring the creation of UI elements for off-screen list items until they are scrolled into view. (If you don’t know about Panels, and want to learn, a good place to start is on Dr WPF’s blog)

What if you have a huge stash of data but don’t want to display it in a boring old list? What if you want items laid out like cards on a table? Silverlight and WPF both include a WrapPanel class which can achieve the desired layout. But as its name suggests, it doesn’t virtualize. Use a WrapPanel in your 10,000-item ListBox, and you’ll be twiddling your thumbs whilst it goes off to create elements you might never see.

This was a problem we faced when we were implementing the new data virtualization features in RavenDb Studio 1.2, which lets you scroll through your entire collection of documents. We wanted the card layout, but WrapPanel wasn’t up to the job of working with huge numbers of items.

So I set about implementing a VirtualizingWrapPanel, which I’ll share with you today. You can see it in action in our sample Netflix browser (switch the Display Style to Card). The code is all available on GitHub.

First I’ll give you a quick refresher on how you make ListBox use a custom Panel, then I’ll run through how one goes about implementing a virtualizing panel in Silverlight.

A Quick Refresher on Using Panels

Here’s a snippet of XAML showing a ListBox using a VirtualizingWrapPanel:

<ListBox x:Name="DocumentsList"
                        ItemsSource="{Binding Items}" DisplayMember="Item.Name">
      <ListBox.Template>
          <ControlTemplate>
              <Border CornerRadius="2" 
                    BorderBrush="{TemplateBinding BorderBrush}"
                    BorderThickness="{TemplateBinding BorderThickness}">
                  <!-- We set the TabNavigation to Cycle on this ScrollViewer to work around a bug which causes the ListBox to loose focus when navigating down (with Down Arrow or Page Down) from the last visible item
              (or even when navigating Up/Down on an item that is only partially visible at the bottom of the screen) -->
                  <ScrollViewer x:Name="ScrollViewer" Padding="{TemplateBinding Padding}" Background="{TemplateBinding Background}" BorderBrush="Transparent" BorderThickness="0" 
                                  TabNavigation="Cycle" IsTabStop="False">
                      <ItemsPresenter />
                  </ScrollViewer>
              </Border>
          </ControlTemplate>
      </ListBox.Template>
    <ListBox.ItemsPanel>
        <ItemsPanelTemplate>
            <VirtualCollection1:VirtualizingWrapPanel ItemWidth="200"
                                            ItemHeight="230"/>
        </ItemsPanelTemplate>
    </ListBox.ItemsPanel>
</ListBox>

The key part is right down at the bottom of the snippet, where we set the ItemsPanel property of the ListBox. There we specify an ItemsPanelTemplate which instantiates the VirtualizingWrapPanel. Notice that you need to tell the panel how big each item is going to be up front, so that it knows how much room to allow for items which are off screen.

There’s one other important point. Notice that I’ve overridden the Template property for the ListBox. This is so that I can tweak the ScrollViewer which is going to contain the VirtualizingWrapPanel. The tweak is a small one: I set its TabNavigation property to Cycle. Without this, keyboard navigation doesn’t work properly within the VirtualizingWrapPanel: under certain circumstances, navigating with the Up/Down or Page Up/Page Down keys would move the keyboard focus out of the ListBox, rather than to the next item in the ListBox.

Birds-Eye View of a Virtualizing Panel

So how do you implement a Virtualizing Panel in Silverlight?

There’s a post on my own blog which explains how to create Panels of the standard variety, and I suggest you go there first for a bit of background. Suffice to say here that normal Panels have one job in life: they must layout the elements given to them by their parent control.

Virtualizing Panels have two additional responsibilities. First, they must keep track of their own scroll state. And second, they must manage the creation of UI elements - item containers -for each data item as and when they are needed. They don’t actually create the elements – that is done by an ItemContainerGenerator. They just decide when each item container should be generated.

Implementing a virtualizing panel that can handle UI items of any size you throw at it is a very tricky job. That’s because, in order to accurately position any given element, you need to know the sizes of all the elements that come before it in the list. To know their sizes, you have to measure them, and to be measured, they need to exist. But the very reason for using a virtualizing panel is to avoid creating item unnecessarily. That is why virtualizing panels tend to take one of two easy routes out of the conundrum.

VirtualizingStackPanel’s favoured approach is to use index based scrolling, where it only ever shows whole items, and the scroll bar reflects the current items’ indexes in the list and has nothing to do with their sizes. This has the downside of jerky scrolling if you have large items, since each movement of the scrollbar will move previous items entirely out of view.

Jerky scrolling is avoided by the approach I’ve taken, which is to require that each item displayed by the panel is the same size. This enables us to easily calculate the position of any given item based on its index in the list.

Scrolling Responsibilities

How does a virtualizing panel discharge its scrolling responsibilities?

The panel needs to implement IScrollInfo so its containing ScrollViewer knows that it is going to manage its own scrolling. IScrollInfo’s job splits into two parts: one is to report on the current scroll state through properties like ExtentHeight and ViewportWidth. The Extent represents the logical size of the panel – what it would be if no scrolling was taking place and everything was visible at once. The Viewport is the rectangle of the panel that is actually visible at this moment.

IScrollInfo’s other job is to enable that scroll state to be manipulated, through methods like LineUp and MouseWheelDown. In many implementations, these manipulation methods all end up by calling one of two other methods on IScrollInfo, SetVerticalOffset and SetHorizontalOffset.

Both SetVerticalOffset and SetHorizontalOffset do much the same thing, so I’ll just show the SetVerticalOffset method:

public void SetVerticalOffset(double offset)
{
  if (_isInMeasure)
  {
      return;
  }

  offset = Clamp(offset, 0, ExtentHeight - ViewportHeight);
  _offset = new Point(_offset.X, offset);

  InvalidateScrollInfo();
  InvalidateMeasure();
}

After checking that the given offset is within the scrollable range, the method simply updates a field to show where the panel is scrolled to. Then it notifies its parent ScrollViewer that its state has changed, and, by calling InvalidateMeasure, tells the framework that its layout (i.e. the arrangement of its children) needs updating. The method does one other check: if it discovers that the panel is already in the middle of updating its layout (i.e. _isInMeasure is true) it doesn’t bother changing the scroll offset. This circumvents a problem I’ve encountered where Silverlight tries to scroll to elements newly created during the layout process.

Handling Layout

Layout happens in two parts. First we measure, calculating how much space the panel will occupy taking into account its children; then we arrange, allocating each child its place within the parent. Measuring happens in MeasureOverride, and arranging in ArrangeOverride. Most of the work in the VirtualizingWrapPanel actually happens in MeasureOverride because the panel needs to generate items containers before it can measure them. You might wonder why we need to measure the item containers when we’ve already decided that they have a fixed size? That is so that the item containers can handle their own layout, which happens using the same Measure and Arrange process.

Before I show you the code for MeasureOverride, here’s an outline of what it does:

GetExtentInfo is called to calculate the full height of the list – i.e. how tall it would be if we displayed it all instead of scrolling.
GetLayoutInfo then works out, based on the scroll offset, which item indexes fall inside the visible range. We always make sure to include realize one item before the first visible item, and one item after the last visible item. This enables keyboard scrolling to work properly, because Silverlight can then scroll that item into view, thus triggering the panel to realize the rest of the row.
Any of the current item containers that now fall outside of the visible range are recycled – handed back to the ItemContainerGenerator so that it can reuse them for other items.
MeasureOverride then loops through the visible item indexes and:
1. Asks the ItemContainerGenerator to create the UI container for the item. If the visibility of the item hasn’t changed, ItemContainerGenerator will give us back the same item container we had before
2. Calls SetVirtualItemIndex to tag the container with the index in the list that it is now representing. This is used in step 3 the next time round when we check for items that fall outside of the visible range.
3. Makes sure the container is in the correct place in the Panel’s list of visual children, and thus part of the visual tree. If an item is not in the correct order, keyboard navigation won’t work correctly
4. Asks the ItemContainerGenerator to Prepare the container – apply its styles, etc.
5. Measures the item container – this must come after step 4, because until that point the item container isn’t fully initialized, and might not even know what its content is.
6. Decide where exactly the item container is going to be displayed: its layout rectangle is recorded in the _childLayouts dictionary. This is used by the ArrangeOverride method to arrange each child
Now we can go through the panel’s list of item containers and remove any which were never actually reused. Back in step 3 every existing item container’s VirtualItemIndex tag was set to –1; and in step 4.2, containers which are in use have their tag set to the item of the index they are now representing. So item containers which were never reused will still have a VirtualItemIndex of –1.
Update the scroll state with the new extent height and viewport size so that scroll bars can be drawn in the correct proportions.
Decide what size to report as the desired size for the Panel. The Panel wants to take up all the available space (within the confines of its parent), so in most cases, that’s what it reports. But if it is told that the available size is Infinite, then it returns a size of 0, and by convention, Silverlight takes that to mean “use all the available space”.

Here’s the code:

protected override Size MeasureOverride(Size availableSize)
{
  if (_itemsControl == null)
  {
      return availableSize;
  }
  
  _isInMeasure = true;
  _childLayouts.Clear();

  var extentInfo = GetExtentInfo(availableSize, ItemHeight);

  EnsureScrollOffsetIsWithinConstrains(extentInfo);

  var layoutInfo = GetLayoutInfo(availableSize, ItemHeight, extentInfo);

  RecycleItems(layoutInfo);

  // Determine where the first item is in relation to previously realized items
  var generatorStartPosition = _itemsGenerator.GeneratorPositionFromIndex(layoutInfo.FirstRealizedItemIndex);

  var visualIndex = 0;

  var currentX = layoutInfo.FirstRealizedItemLeft;
  var currentY = layoutInfo.FirstRealizedLineTop;

  using (_itemsGenerator.StartAt(generatorStartPosition, GeneratorDirection.Forward, true))
  {
      for (var itemIndex = layoutInfo.FirstRealizedItemIndex; itemIndex <= layoutInfo.LastRealizedItemIndex; itemIndex++, visualIndex++)
      {
          bool newlyRealized;

          var child = (UIElement)_itemsGenerator.GenerateNext(out newlyRealized);
          SetVirtualItemIndex(child, itemIndex);

          if (newlyRealized)
          {
              InsertInternalChild(visualIndex, child);
          }
          else
          {
              // check if item needs to be moved into a new position in the Children collection
              if (visualIndex < Children.Count)
              {
                  if (Children[visualIndex] != child)
                  {
                      var childCurrentIndex = Children.IndexOf(child);

                      if (childCurrentIndex >= 0)
                      {
                          RemoveInternalChildRange(childCurrentIndex, 1);
                      }

                      InsertInternalChild(visualIndex, child);
                  }
              }
              else
              {
                  // we know that the child can't already be in the children collection
                  // because we've been inserting children in correct visualIndex order,
                  // and this child has a visualIndex greater than the Children.Count
                  AddInternalChild(child);
              }
          }

          // only prepare the item once it has been added to the visual tree
          _itemsGenerator.PrepareItemContainer(child);

          child.Measure(new Size(ItemWidth, ItemHeight));

          _childLayouts.Add(child, new Rect(currentX, currentY, ItemWidth, ItemHeight));

          if (currentX + ItemWidth * 2 >= availableSize.Width)
          {
              // wrap to a new line
              currentY += ItemHeight;
              currentX = 0;
          }
          else
          {
              currentX += ItemWidth;
          }
      }
  }

  RemoveRedundantChildren();
  UpdateScrollInfo(availableSize, extentInfo);

  var desiredSize = new Size(double.IsInfinity(availableSize.Width) ? 0 : availableSize.Width,
                             double.IsInfinity(availableSize.Height) ? 0 : availableSize.Height);

  _isInMeasure = false;

  return desiredSize;
}

It’s a Wrap

That concludes our look at the VirtualizingWrapPanel. Go and check out the whole sample on GitHub, and let us know what you make of it.