Andreas Wijaya's Blog

New Songs - Blooming Or Withering Flower

2012-03-05T21:20:00.004+08:00

Which one suits your mood? :)

Enjoy,

Andreas

CRM 2011 LINQ Left Join Through Entity Reference

2012-02-07T10:28:00.000+08:00

Let's say we have a custom lookup field new_accountid on our phonecall activity (don't ask me why I don't just use from/to field :)) and that field is NOT a required field.

We want to get the account number using LINQ in our code somehow.

This is the way to do it. The trick is that we have to check whether the new_accountid is null and combine those records with the ones that are null.

Hope this helps,Andreas

CRM 2011 Get OptionSetValue Value through Label

2012-01-24T08:46:00.007+08:00

Sometimes we want to be able to get the OptionSetValue value from the label itself. One way is to use the metadata request and loop through it but this is a cumbersome way.

The easier way is to put those OptionSetValue data into an enum like this:

We use Description Attribute for the Label so that it supports string format.

Then we use this helper method:

And there you go. You can easily get the value like this:

Hope this helps,
Andreas

Happy New Year 2012!

2012-01-05T23:11:00.002+08:00

Happy New Year everyone!

May this year bring you good things and happiness!

Take care,
Andreas

CRM 2011 Activity Party Add, Remove, Delete from code

2011-11-21T13:28:00.002+08:00

Sometimes we want to append the activity party list, update particular item in the existing activity party list, or remove specific activity party from the list.

Below is what I discovered on how to do this. Since we can't use the Create/Update/Delete method from the service context on ActivityParty entity, we need to alter the content of the list before attaching to the Activity Field.

In my case I have an ActivityRecipient custom entity that have N:1 to Email entity. Whenever the user add/update/delete this custom entity, the corresponding 'To' recipients gets updated as well.

I use this function in my pre create/update/delete message of my ActivityRecipient entity.

Note: for some reason Recurring Appointment doesn't like Organization Service Context (early bound), therefore we have to use IOrganizationService with Retrieve Request.

Hope this helps,
Andreas

CRM 2011 SMS custom activity Characters Remaining field

2011-10-12T15:59:00.002+08:00

Paul Nieuwelaar in his blog has implemented some javascript for the characters remaining field.

This saves me a lot of time from reinventing the wheel. All I then did was to set the default value to the field (160 characters for SMS).

Also make sure that you put the 160 limit on the multiline textbox, but leave the minimum value for the charactersremaining field to be -20000000 to avoid the annoying message box.

Hope this helps,
Andreas

CRM 2011 disable lookup type for customer field or partylist

2011-10-12T15:49:00.001+08:00

Sometimes we want to lock the lookup type for customer field type or partylist type. To do this, use the javascript (e.g. Account Type only):

Hope this helps,
Andreas

CRM 2011 Export Entities Tabs and Sections Name

2011-10-12T15:45:00.001+08:00

CRM does not provide a functionality to list all your tab and section names. With the help of SQL XML parsing feature, I managed to create an sql script to read the FormXML of the entities and parse out the tabs and sections name.

This is useful if you want to see all the tabs and sections that you have added. Enough said, this is the script:

Hope this helps,
Andreas

CRM 2011 Ajax Loading Message Screen with JQuery

2011-09-21T11:50:00.002+08:00

When you use ajax request in CRM2011 (for example, the OData call), the user is not notified when this process happens in the background. Although this call is relatively fast, sometimes you can't predict the performance of it and you want some kind of notification that lets the user know what's happening.

Fortunately with the power of JQuery you can easily make this happen. In my case, I have a custom 'Create Opportunity' button on my custom entity form that gets the data from that entity (and related entity) and create opportunity with those data.

When creating the opportunity using the OData way, I will show the loading message popup with the animated OOTB CRM progress gif image.

To make this happen, it's simple. Just put this function into your onLoad form:

You notice the center() method above. This is an add-on to the jQuery method that you can safely put on your jQuery file:

That's it. Now whenever there is an Ajax call on the form, you will get this message shown up.

Hope this helps,
Andreas

CRM 2011 JQuery OData REST Endpoints Create Record

2011-09-21T11:38:00.000+08:00

In CRM 2011, we can create record easily using JQuery and OData. This will get triggered asynchronously using the ajax functionality.

Create Record function from the SDK:

To create new record, you just need to instantiate your object and call the function. The tricky part is when you want to assign Lookup field or OptionSetValue. You can get more info on this from the SDK itself. Here is an example:

CRM 2011 Javascript Fetch XML synchronous or asynchronous call

2011-09-21T11:32:00.001+08:00

Using helper function to execute FetchXML request is great.

The code below is retrieved from this blog, and all I had to do is to add extra logic when parsing the XML result because I want to grab the attributes from the related entity as well.

Modified FetchUtil.js:

To use it you just need to do it like this (synchronous)

If it's asynchronous the last bit will be:

The parsed result object can be queried like this:

Hope this helps,
Andreas

CRM 2011 Import Custom Workflow Error - Assembly must be registered in isolation

2011-09-08T14:33:00.000+08:00

This error does not tell much, but I fixed it by adding myself as a Deployment Administrator.

Hope this helps,
Andreas

CRM 2011 Partial Refresh with jQuery

2011-09-08T14:16:00.003+08:00

This post is a little update on my previous post regarding the Form Refresh after Sub-grid changes.

I find the previous solution annoying in the way that when the user click 'Save' or 'Save and New' , the parent form that got refreshed would get the focus. Also, if the sub-grid had paging on it, the form would get refreshed when you move to the next page - thus you will always get the first page of the sub-grid.

In order to avoid this I found a way to do a partial form element refresh using jQuery load function. The only tricky part is that you have to move your subgrid out of the tab that you want to do partial refresh on. (i.e. partial refresh does not work on sub-grid element).

In my case, my fields that I want to update is on General Tab:

hope this helps,
Andreas

CRM 2011 Custom Workflow Activity - Send Email to Managers

2011-09-06T12:27:00.002+08:00

In CRM 2011 (not online), you can create custom workflow activity for things that are not achievable using the OOTB workflow.

In my scenario, I want to send Overdue Case Reminder to group of users (in this case - managers) when a case has reached the Follow Up By date.
If you look at the SystemUser, it has a manager field by default. However, I need to be able to send the email to multiple managers.

My idea is that we create a separate Security Role (e.g. Managers) and put all managers in that role. Then we create a custom workflow activity to get all the users in that role and construct an email to notify them when the case is overdue.

Note: for the CaseLink input, I'm using the CRM 2011 Workflow Utilities to generate the Case Link and put it into the Email Description field.

Hope this helps,
Andreas

CRM 2011 Get OptionSetValue Label Text

2011-09-06T11:23:00.000+08:00

In CRM 2011, when you try to get the value of an OptionSet, you will always get an Integer value instead of the label value.

I found out that you have to use RetrieveAttributeRequest and get the OptionMetadata in order to get the label text of a given value. This is intended so that it supports multiple languages.

Therefore I created a service extension method in order to get the label from the OptionSet:

To use this you just need to pass in the Entity, the OptionSet attribute you're looking for, and the Option Value you want to get the label from:

Example (early bound):

Hope this helps,
Andreas

CRM 2011 Convert Activity to Case - Populate Case Details

2011-08-25T14:44:00.005+08:00

When converting an activity (such as Phone Call) to case, we can only specify the Customer and the Subject on the popup dialog. What if we want to auto-populate the case details with the information from the activity?

At first I thought we can write a plugin that triggers on the post-create of a case. However this is not possible since CRM creates the Case before it sets the Regarding field on the Activity.

The workaround for this is to create the post-update plugin on the Activity itself. This way when the Regarding field is assigned by CRM, it will look for the Case and update its details.

Be careful though because this might not work when converting Activity to Case from Outlook. I read somewhere that when converting Email to Outlook, the Regarding field is set to the Parent Customer of the Case rather than the Case itself.

Hope this helps,
Andreas

CRM 2011 Custom Filtered Lookup

2011-08-23T14:59:00.002+08:00

Sometimes the filtered lookup functionality provided by CRM 2011 doesn't fit your requirement. However Microsoft provides a function for us to add our own custom view for the lookup field.

Example: In a 'Case' form we have customer field. I use this field only for 'Contacts', and I have created a relationship to the 'Account' so that we can see both on the form. I want the Accounts to only show Contacts that have 'Connections To' and vice versa (Only show Contacts that have 'Connections From' if I specified the Account first). If nothing is specified then I want both to show just Active Contacts/Accounts.

The script:

Then you can use it like this:

However there is still a major limitation of FetchXML that you cannot use UNION clause (or something similar). So If you want to show the primarycontact/parentcustomer along with the connections, you're out of luck as you can only do one of them.

Hope this helps,
Andreas

CRM 2011 Javascript Retrieve Record using jQuery REST Endpoints.

2011-08-23T12:23:00.001+08:00

Using jQuery and REST Endpoints is one of the easiest way to get record details in CRM 2011.

To do this you just need to include:
1. jquery-1.6.2.min.js (or just get the latest version)
2. json2.js

The SDK provides some functions for retrieving records:

Use retrieveRecord if you know the ID of the record. Otherwise, use retrieveMultiple if you want to get the record(s) based on some filters as it will return an array of result objects.

Example:
In a custom entity form, I have an Account lookup field and an Account Number field. I want to auto-populate one of the field based on the other field and vice versa. Therefore:

Hope this helps,
Andreas

CRM 2011 Auto-populate Name from Fields or Attributes

2011-08-16T15:09:00.010+08:00

Are you tired of thinking about what to put into the name field when creating records and want a way to populate that name automatically?

I have created a service extension method to make my life easier. The goal of this is to autopopulate name field using the format like [field1] - [field2] - [field3] through pre-plugin:

To use this you just need to construct the column set and pass in the entity from the plugin context:

We also need a javascript to disable this name field when the form load:

Hope this helps,
Andreas

CRM 2011 Refresh Form after Subgrid Changes or Refresh

2011-08-12T08:48:00.001+08:00

I found on some articles that to be able to do this you need to attach an OnRefresh event to the element that then calls the function to load the parent window again:

When I deployed to CRM 2011 Rollup 3, I found some issues that throw error like null object (document not ready) and in some IE versions the form keeps refreshing for eternity...

After spending some time investigating this annoying issue, I found out that we have to wait for the subgrid to finish loading its contents for this to work properly. The final javascript is as follows:

Hope this helps,
Andreas

CRM Report Pre-Filtering with Multiple Datasets

2011-08-10T08:45:00.001+08:00

As you know there are two ways of doing pre-filtering with CRM Reports (SQL and not FetchXML). The first one is using the CRMAF_ prefix alias like this:

I soon found limitation using this method. You can't use the same CRMAF_Filtered multiple times because it only filters on the first instance.

Therefore if you have multiple datasets or UNION query that are using that filter more than once, it will not work. To avoid this issue, we can use the Explicit pre-filtering - the second method that CRM provides.

Let's say that you want to have a report that display single Account details and the associated related records information. However rather than building complex single query you want to break it down into multiple datasets.

The Steps:

Create a parameter called @CRM_FilteredAccount. You can set the default value to just:
Build your datasets using this parameter. Use the SQL Dynamic Query so that CRM will replace the parameter with the Advanced Find instance that you specify when running the report.

These are two of the dataset examples:

Hope this helps,
Andreas

CRM 2011 Embed Report in IFrame and Pass Parameters from the Form

2011-08-09T10:07:00.000+08:00

In CRM you can insert SubGrid and Chart. However this functionality is limited in a way that it can only grab the related entities that have direct relationship to that entity. If we want to get the other related entities from the related entity, it's not possible using the OOTB Subgrid and Chart.

In my case I want to display a chart in an Engagement Plan entity. This Engagement Plan is associated with an Account (N:1). The Account has 1:N relationships with Production History and Contract History entities that have information about commodity and tonnes produced. I want that chart to be shown on the Engagement Plan form. The parameters for this chart will be the Account Id and the Season Id located on the form.

The Steps:

Create a custom SSRS Report to display this chart, taking @CRM_AccountId and @CRM_SeasonId as parameters.
Insert an IFRAME on the form and give dummy Url. Also uncheck 'Restrict Cross Site Scripting' to allow cross scripting between servers.
Create a javascript that is triggered in Form_OnLoad, Account_OnChange, and Season_OnChange:

The method for the form OnLoad is 'Form_onload'
The method for the field Onchange is 'loadChart'

Hope this helps,
Andreas

CRM 2011 Report Error - rsProcessingAborted

2011-08-09T09:39:00.003+08:00

I encountered this error in my project when trying to run CRM reports within CRM (including the default reports). In the reportservice logs it says:

Cannot create a connection to data source 'CRM'. ---> Microsoft.Crm.Reporting.DataExtensionShim.Common.ReportExecutionException: Immediate caller Domain\SqlService has insufficient privilege to run report as user S-1-5-21-1162093662-620106126-315576832-39399.

The CRM is installed on the application server and the SSRS is installed on different server. After futher investigation it turns out that it's caused by double hopping issue regarding the authentication and we just need to set the correct SPN on the machines.

setspn -a http/your-crm-server-name domain\crm-user
setspn -a http/your-crm-server-name(FQDN) domain\crm-user

Other things to check to make sure your reports work:
1. Make sure your SRS connector has the same RollUp version as the CRM Server RollUp
2. In Reporting Service Configuration Manager, uncheck the 'Specify an Execution Account'
3. Browse to both SharedReports\5.0.xxxx\ and _MSCRM report folder and check the MSCRM_DataSource connection. The connection string should be empty, DataSource Type should be Microsoft Dynamics CRM SQL, and the connection should be Credentials supplied by the user running the report (uncheck the Windows Credentials box)

---
To run the report from the report server Url, you might find that if you are using normal domain account for username/password you will get the following error:

An error has occurred during report processing (rsProcessingAborted) Cannot create a connection to data source ‘CRM.’ (rsErrorOpeningConnection) Guid should contain 32 digits with 4 dashes (xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx).

This is because the Username should be 'systemuserid' and the Password should be 'organizationid'. You can get this by running the query against the CRM database:

SELECT fullname, systemuserid, organizationid FROM FilteredSystemUser

Hope this helps,
Andreas

CRM 2011 Plugin Template

2011-08-03T14:49:00.001+08:00

Here is the template to get you started on plugin development in CRM 2011:

To get the service context of your organisation :

Important Notes:

PRE PLUGINS

You don't need to call SaveChanges because the entity can be updated before it is saved into database.
For pre-update, entity will only have attributes that are changed. To get the other attributes that don't change, you can query those attributes using the service context.

POST PLUGINS

You don't need to call SaveChanges because the entity can be updated before it is saved into database.
For pre-update, entity will only have attributes that are changed. To get the other attributes that don't change, you can query those attributes using the service context.
When doing the post update of an entity that update the same entity attributes, loop will occur. To avoid this you can use context.Depth to check the loop count.

OTHERS

For delete message, the context.InputParameters["Target"] is an EntityReference instead of Entity.
You can check the context message using context.MessageName

Hope this helps,
Andreas

CRM 2011 Custom Button on Custom Entity to trigger Workflow through JavaScript

2011-07-28T21:34:00.005+08:00

I will provide detailed step on what I did to do this. The objective of my example is to have a custom button 'Create Opportunity' on my custom entity that triggers a workflow to create an Opportunity. This way the users don't have to click 'Run Workflow' and choose which workflow they want to run. You can also alter the JavaScript to do other stuff as well.

There are three places where we should put the button mainly:
1. Custom Entity Form

2. Homepage Grid

3. Sub Grid

THE STEPS:
1. In order to inspect the correct sequence number of where the button will be placed on each section, you can first run the tool provided from the sdk \sdk\samplecode\cs\client\ribbon\exportribbonxml. Just modify the exportribbonxml.cs to only generate the entity you are interested in:

Run the tool program, specify your server connection and it should give you the XML in the output folder with the name Ribbon.xml.

Open the xml, search for the sections and write down the sequence numbers of where you want to put them in. In this case I want to put it after 'Start Dialog' button:

Sequence is 25, 50, 40

2. Export your solution with the custom entity you want. Open the customisations.xml and inside the RibbonDiffXml tag, specify all the contents of the child tags that describe the rules, custom actions, commands, etc. (Look at the SDK for more information). This is the section that I wrote:

3. For the JavaScript that triggers the workflow, there is a post that describes how to do that here and I just make use of that. The CRM Parameter passed from the above is iterated and the workflow is triggered for each of the selection.

Hope this helps :)

Andreas

CRM 2011 Javascript Functions

2011-07-21T16:18:00.003+08:00

Starting to use CRM 2011, here are some useful javascript reference (this list will get longer and longer as time goes):

Hide/Show Field

Hide/Show Field but removing white space

Disable/Not Disable Field

Set Requirement Level

Set Required Level

Validate Number Field and Character Limit

Validate Future DateTime

Example function to hide left navigation item based on a condition

Avoiding the checkbox OnChange bug so that it fires off immediately (put this in OnLoad event of the form)

Set Lookup Value
Hide Picklist Item Text

Piano Song Composition (Song Of Life & Smile)

2011-05-24T22:49:00.001+08:00

Just check my YouTube channel for more information :) Hope you enjoy them.

Andreas

SSRS Repeat Subreport with MultiValue parameter

2011-04-19T11:30:00.001+08:00

When you want to print a report with a given ID for example, you would just pass that single ID into a report parameter and there you go. Simple.

How about if let's say, the user wants to be able to do multiple selection of records from the UI (e.g. select multiple records in a grid) and click Print button to generate the report for each ID in one single report? It's not that hard either.

For this example I have a Service Sheet report that takes assetID and display maintenance details for that asset. Then I went ahead and created another report, put a listbox and added that report as a subreport.

I used list instead of table because SSRS2005 has a bug when exporting the report to excel.

The next thing to do is to create the multi-value string parameter. This parameter will take comma separated values for the IDs.

We need to set the dataset for the ListBox. I used a stored procedure for this one. The stored procedure will get that parameter and break each ID into its own row.

That's it. All you need to do is then set the dataset for the listbox. In the grouping field, set the field returned by the SP (in this case maintenanceRequestId). Also check 'Page break at end' so each ID report will start on the new page.

Enjoy,
Andreas

CRM Javascript

2011-03-02T21:37:00.001+08:00

Simple field validation using RegEx (e.g. ABN):

Hiding fields:

Hiding tabs:

Disabling fields within a section:

Get Potential Customer's Primary Contact and set it to Customer Contact field:

Lock Potential Customer to 'Account' Only:

CRM Entity Relationship Many to Many (N:N)

2011-02-22T11:21:00.004+08:00

There are two ways of getting the related entity details in many to many relationship in CRM 4.0

One way is to use RetrieveMultipleRequest function from the SDK:

For example, if we have a Loan custom entity and we want to return sets of borrowers (contacts):

---
Second way is to use Fetch function to return the XML of the related entities:

James Downey created a nice little program FetchXMLBuilder to help you build the fetch query.

---
Just for completion, below is the CRMServiceWrapper constructor that I use:

Hope this helps ^_^

Valentine Piano Song

2011-02-15T18:41:00.000+08:00

New Song that I created to share my Valentine Day =)

CRM Plugin - Parent and Child Pipeline

2011-02-10T18:02:00.001+08:00

This concept tends to confuse people often - and I was no exception. I came across this problem when trying to create custom auto-numbering for one of my projects.

Creating auto-number for Opportunity is easy. This is because the user creates opportunity straight from the home screen - thus the plugin runs on parent pipeline. However, it's a different story if you are dealing with Quote entity.

Quote can be created in 2 ways, through the home screen OR the opportunity screen. If you create it from the latter, it will run on the child pipeline and you will find that your plugin will not work.

Registering it as a child pipeline is easy, but CRM makes it harder since you can't use ICRMService. Instead, you have to create CRMService manually by using this piece of code:

Not only that, with the child plugin you can't use Query expression to fetch other entities in your code unless you register it as ASYNCHRONOUS plugin. Mark Kovalcson in his blog found out that:

A CrmService running Synchronously in a child pipeline is limited to the following:

Create
Delete
Update
RetrieveExchangeRate

However a child plugin running in Asynchronous Execution Mode is not limited this way.

Those 4 allowed actions are hard coded by MS whenever the plugin is executed inside a transaction, and it appears that all synchronous child pipeline events occur inside a transaction.

However you can do a query in child pipeline if it is registered as asynchronous.

In review:

Use ICrmService for all parent pipelines when at all possible.
Use CrmService for child pipelines in asynchronous execution mode.
There is very limited functionality allowed with CrmService for any plugin registered in a synchronous child pipeline
Querying CRM data in a plug-in registered as a synchronous Pre Create in a child process is currently very unsupported. (ie. direct SQL access)

In the end, if you want to generate a custom auto-number for QuoteNo, you have to create a child post create plugin and register it as asynchronous (in order to query the quote and update the entity). The code is shown below:

In this case I'm creating quote with the format SQ00001. The rest of the related code is below:

Note that for autonumbering:

I created new custom entity new_autonumber
Create 2 attributes : new_name and new_autonumbervalue
Create new record. "Quote" as new_name, 0 as new_autonumbervalue

I hope you find this useful. People who think the CRM autoprefix is ugly will agree with me :)

Andreas

CRM Service Extensions and Dynamic Entity Extensions helper

2011-02-10T17:34:00.003+08:00

Useful extension methods for Dynamics CRM 4.0 :
My ex-colleague wrote this I believe - visit his blog for more detail: http://loosechainsaw.com

CRM Service

Dynamic Entity

2011-01-05T23:51:00.001+08:00

Happy New Year Everyone !

This is my first new song in the new year ^_^

For you who don't know, my youtube channel is http://www.youtube.com/nevrene

All the best and hope you can achieve your dream in 2011!

White Christmas Piano Song

2010-12-10T23:13:00.000+08:00

Christmas is coming everyone!! Merry Christmas ^_^

SharePoint 2007 list item print button with SSRS reportviewer

2010-09-28T14:21:00.002+08:00

Recently I was tasked to migrate the old Asset data on Access db to SharePoint 2007. It's not difficult using 'Export to Sharepoint List' command and modified certain things such as creating new asset content type, site columns etc.

I can view the list and the items. Great. but there is no print button! In Access db, they were using Access form to print the asset item. In SharePoint 2007, turns out that I have to do a bit of development to do just that.

I found the nice blog on how to do this. However, I don't want to spend ridiculous amount of time playing with HTML markup to get the design I want. It is error-prone as well in terms of printing etc.

Therefore, I decided to try using Reporting Service reportviewer control on the page that will render the layout. The list item details will be passed as parameters :) Cool!

If you search google, you would find many articles about passing the parameters in the URL. this is not good since you will get ugly url and it will give you limitation in size. By exposing the 'custom action' into a list 'content type', we can get the List and ID to work with (mentioned in the above blog).

Enough of the theory, let's see how we can get this going:
1. Design the SSRS report (uh-huh). Add the parameters for each of the list item column you want to include.

2. Upload it to your report server. Then your report is ready for our printing page to consume :)

3.If you follow the blog to add a print button, you should have the button in your list dispform.aspx now! Except that inside the body tag of the print.aspx, we use the reportviewer control :

4. On your code behind (or inside a script tag if you don't want any code behind), get the report from the server and pass the parameters into the Report in the load event:

5. Notice that you need to provide ReportServerCredentials and set the ProcessingMode to Remote. This will ensure that you don't get the nasty 401 Unauthorized Error. The ReportServerCredentials class is listed below:

6. Also don't forget to check if your ReportViewer handlers exist in your web.config:

7. When you successfully deploy your feature, the print button now will take you to the print.aspx and the page will display your report like this:

I hope this article will help you someday :)

.NET Convert Word Document into PDF

2010-09-10T09:21:00.002+08:00

Howdy,

I came across this old code of converting Word into PDF:

This used to work well until recently the avdoc object sometimes doesn't get the instance (i.e. null) , however running it twice usually fixed it.

I don't know what caused this. It might be a system update or something. I also researched that the above code shouldn't even work since it's using Acrobat interop to open a 'doc' type - so that code was kind of a hack.

To fix the issue, I decided to find alternative way of converting word to PDF pro grammatically. This other way requires office 12 interop instead. So the idea is to open the doc in office and save it as PDF. Simple enough! here is the code:

P.S: Don't forget to install Office2007 and Acrobat on the machine :) enjoy!

Starlight - New Piano Composition

2010-08-02T21:23:00.001+08:00

Here you go:

Hope you enjoy it :)

Load and Deploy XAP into Silverlight Application through MEF Deployment Catalog

2010-07-01T12:39:00.003+08:00

What a sunny day today, and it feels brighter when everything comes into place together. Fortunately, this is also the case for MEF (Managed Extensibility Framework).

At first I could not really be bothered with learning this stuff, however I found out that this framework is what I will be needing most for my project! Why? because MEF has the ability to join every piece of functionality together!

Managed Extensibility Framework

It basically contains three steps that you need to implement:

Export : this can be any class, interface, or objects that you want to export.
Import : This is the place where you can get the exported pieces and do stuff with them.
Composition : Imagine this as a connector between export and import. It basically compose any/all parts that you specify in export and make them available for the import.

In MEF, a piece of functionality is described as a catalog. The new deployment catalog (which I'm going to be using) is very flexible in terms of adding and removing external functionality in your application.

For more information, you can read Glenn Block posts. I will also use his deployment catalog service for easier XAP adding/removing.

Real Example - Embedding Bible Application into Silverlight Business Application

No, this won't be a difficult demo and No, this won't be a Hello World example. I like showing people a real example of situation that you might encounter in the real world.

For that purpose, I will be embedding my simple Indonesian Bible application that I wrote into Silverlight Business Application.

So the idea here is that I have built a Silverlight application and I want to just load that in my main business application. This is really cool, especially if you want to organize your source code in a neat manner. MEF really can provide you with plug-in architecture.

Let's get started then! :)

Export
I need to add little piece of code into my bible application. To be able to let other application to import my bible, I need to make this application available. Therefore I need to add the export attribute.

Here I just export the usercontrol of my application. Don't forget to add to the MEF reference System.ComponentModel.Composition located in C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Silverlight\v4.0\Libraries\Client\System.ComponentModel.Composition.dll

Rebuild the project.

Import
In other posts, they built the application in the same solution as the host. In my case, I don't want to do that. The only thing MEF worry about in Silverlight is that there is an external XAP file in ClientBin directory of the host.

For this demo, I am just going to copy paste the XAP in the previous section (after the rebuild) into the ClientBin directory of the Silverlight Business Application.

Also, add the System.CompositionModel.Composition and System.CompositionModel.CompositionInitializer to the host application. I will then do the import inside my Home page of the host.

To do this, in Home.xaml I create an ItemsControl that will load the imported usercontrol and bind it to a property of the view model:

The home view model is like this:

Here I use ImportMany and set AllowRecomposition to True. This indicates that we can import more widget as they are available. Also the recomposition is automatically done for you when there is any change in the composition.

I won't explain the Lazy declaration as Glenn Block explained it well in his blog.

Composition - Deployment Catalog

The DeploymentCatalogService is this:

Thank you Glenn for posting this!

Here are the steps to make things connect together:
1. In App.xaml.cs, call DeploymentCatalogService.Initialize(); inside Application_Startup

2. In my home.xaml.cs, I call the SatisfyImports, and add the external XAP using the DeploymentCatalogService. When user is navigated away from the page, I remove the XAP to avoid conflict of adding an existing XAP to the application.

Hooray. Now when I run my Silverlight Business Application, my bible application will load inside my home page.

Thanks for reading this and I hope you would find it useful ^_^

Hosting WCF Service 4.0 in IIS 7.5

2010-06-28T14:49:00.003+08:00

Hi Everyone,

Today I want to show you what I did to get my WCF Service hosted on my development machine IIS (this could be your web server too). I am using VS 2010, .NET 4.0 framework, and IIS 7.5 in Windows 7 environment.

In this demonstration I am going to use my AlkitabWebService.svc found in this post: Silverlight 4 Simple Project Part 2 (WCF Service).

Step 1 - Enabling IIS + ASP.NET Registration

Click Start -> Control Panel -> Programs -> Programs and Features.
On the left tab, click Turn Windows Features on or off. Turn on the features below and click OK.

When you go to http://localhost , you will now see the IIS7 homepage.
Now go to a command prompt and run aspnet_regiis:

Step 2 - Publish the WCF service from VS 2010

Right-click the project and click Publish.
Choose 'File System' as Publish method, and type C:\inetpub\wwwroot\AlkitabWebService\

This will create a folder for your WCFService that you can refer to from IIS in the next step.

Step 3 - Create New Application in IIS

Go to your IIS Manager (can be accessed from Administrative Tools).
Right-click Default Web Site -> Add Application...
Enter in the Application Name and point the physical path to the folder that contains our published WCF service.

Step 4 - CrossDomain.xml and ClientAccessPolicy.xml

In order to be able to access your localhost in IIS, you need to implement a cross domain policy. I'm just going to make this simple. In your C:\inetpub\wwwroot folder, create a crossdomain.xml and clientaccesspolicy.xml files:

Crossdomain.xml

Clientaccesspolicy.xml

Step 5 - Test your WCF Service

In IIS Manager, click the AlkitabWebService (alias).
On the right tab, click Browse*:80 to go to your http://localhost/AlkitabWebService/
You should get the view like this:

Clicking on AlkitabWebService.svc is our Service page. Yay!

Silverlight 4 Simple Project Part 4 (Binding & Command)

2010-06-23T11:47:00.012+08:00

Silverlight 4 Simple Project Part 3 (MVVM Pattern)

This is the last part of the blog (finally :P).

In the previous post we already created our MVVM. How do we connect our View to the ViewModel? Easy! There are couple of ways to do this. We can do it declaratively in XAML or we can do it in the code-behind.

View - View Model & Binding

I will choose the first option.

Looking at the XAML snippet above, we declare our ViewModel as a User Control Resource and set the DataContext of our main grid to that resource.

Having done that, now we can easily do our data binding for our user elements.

How cool is that? We don't need any code-behind at all for our XAML! This is the beauty of MVVM Pattern.

Now when we select our book title, chapter, or verse, we will get our results back in the grid without any postback since all calls are made asynchronously.

Command

Another new feature in Silverlight 4 is the built-in Commanding option. In this project, if you look at the image above, there is an 'Enable Range' button. I attached a command to this check box so that when IsChecked is True, it will enable the SelectBookVerseEnd selection. If IsChecked is False, it will disable the combobox.

The SelectBookVerseEnd property will in turn decide whether we call the GetAlkitabSnippet function (single AlkitabSnippet object) or the GetAlkitabSnippets function (multiple AlkitabSnippet objects).

Notice that I use UI Element to Element binding between the IsEnabled property of the combobox and the IsChecked property of the checkbox.

To make the commanding easier, I am using the DelegateCommand class (put this inside your ViewModel) that implements the ICommand interface. This class will have the Action and CanExecute parameters that are required by the interface.

If you look at the XAML, the command of the checkbox is bound to DisableRangeCommand.
Lets look at how the commanding is implemented in our view model

and that's it! Simple is that. Commanding enables MVVM pattern since we don't require to handle the UI event in the XAML code behind.

I will post the solution later on. Thanks for reading this and I hope you will find it useful for your own purposes.

Regards,

Andreas

Silverlight 4 Simple Project Part 3 (MVVM Pattern)

2010-06-23T10:34:00.002+08:00

Silverlight 4 Simple Project Part 2 (WCF Service)

In Part 2 we already created our WCF Service that can return some results to us when functions are called.

In this post I will start building my Silverlight Application :)

Silverlight Project

Create new project inside the same solution. Choose Silverlight Application and name it AlkitabApplication. Right-click the project and choose Add Service Reference. click Discover and you can see that our AlkitabWebService.svc is shown. Easy!

In the above picture you can also see that I created three new folders called Model, ViewModel, and Views. Move the MainPage.xaml to the Views folder.

Model View View Model (MVVM) Pattern

For those who are new to this term, you can read this. Otherwise you might want to move on.

MVVM is just a pattern. There is no strict procedure on how to implement it. This pattern is created for developers to separate the logic of their application, providing a nice way to do unit testing and creating blendability between designer <-> developer.

What this means is that designers can focus on playing around with the Views and developers can provide back-end data in the View Model (that perform queries against the Model) independently. The View can then just hook the View Model into it and create the bindings between the UI Elements <-> data. Moreover, developers can provide designers with dummy data to test while designing the Views.

People have been creating tools and frameworks to assist this pattern, such as MVVM Light, MEF, and Prism. However, I won't be using any of those since my application is really simple.

Confused? Let's see in action!

Model

Rather than calling WCF Service straight in our XAML code behind, we will create a class called AlkitabService.cs in our Model folder. It is nice to have a high level layer that provides us with one logical purpose: Our Data Source!

This class will provide us sets of functions that call WCF Service functions asynchronously. Asynchronous call is what Silverlight is all about right? :)

Views

I am not much of a designer, but I like clean design :) Here is what the application looks like:

I won't show you the XAML just yet because I will show it when I'm doing the bindings. In this project I am using Telerik Silverlight controls (RadComboBox and RadGridView). Simple reason, they have nice features such as Auto-Complete, Filtering, etc. However you can use the normal Silverlight controls to do the same thing.

View Model

Here is the main player. This is where all the logic resides. Inside the folder, I created two classes: ViewModelBase.cs and AlkitabViewModel.cs

ViewModelBase is just a base class that implements INotifyPropertyChanged. Remember that all data/properties exposed in the UI need to have this event raised to notify the UI elements.

Inside AlkitabViewModel.cs is where we call our Model and store the data into our class properties that we can then bind to our UI.

Notice that we raise the NotifyPropertyChanged event in the setter of all properties.

I hope you don't get a headache from this. In the next post I will talk about hooking up our ViewModel to our Views and perform the bindings. I will also quickly explain the Commanding in Silverlight 4.

Silverlight 4 Simple Project Part 4 (Binding & Command)

Silverlight 4 Simple Project Part 2 (WCF Service)

2010-06-23T09:28:00.001+08:00

Silverlight 4 Simple Project Part 1 (Overview & Database)

Here I will create a WCF Service as a middleman for our Silverlight <-> Alkitab Database that I mentioned in Part 1.

New Project & LINQ to SQL

To start, I will create a WCF Service Application from Visual Studio 2010 (I didn't choose WCF Service Library because we will host it as a 'web' application in the future).

Then right-click the project, Add New Item -> LINQ to SQL Classes. We want to drag our two tables from the Server Explorer into the dbml file. This will provide us the DataContext we require for performing our queries.

WCF Service

Next, rename Service.svc and IService.cs to friendlier names like AlkitabWebService.svc and IAlkitabWebService.cs

IAlkitabWebService.cs is the interface class for our service. This will hold all the OperationContract (functions) declarations and any DataContract (web class) that you want to create along with its DataMember (class property). Here I have sets of operations and AlkitabSnippet class that will hold verse and content:

[ServiceContract]
public interface IAlkitabWebService
{
[OperationContract]
string GetContent(string bookTitle, int bookChapter, int bookVerse);

[OperationContract]
ObservableCollection<AlkitabSnippet> GetAlkitabSnippet(string bookTitle, int bookChapter, int bookVerse);

[OperationContract]
ObservableCollection<AlkitabSnippet> GetAlkitabSnippets(string bookTitle, int bookChapter, int bookVerseStart, int bookVerseEnd);

[OperationContract]
ObservableCollection<string> GetBookTitles();

[OperationContract]
ObservableCollection<int> GetBookChapters(string bookTitle);

[OperationContract]
ObservableCollection<int> GetBookVerses(string bookTitle, int bookChapter);
}


// Use a data contract as illustrated in the sample below to add composite types to service operations.
[DataContract]
public class AlkitabSnippet
{
string verse;
string content;

[DataMember]
public string Verse
{
get { return verse; }
set { verse = value; }
}

[DataMember]
public string Content
{
get { return content; }
set { content = value; }
}
}

In the AlkitabWebService.svc.cs, we implement all the service functions that we need to get data out of the database. Here are two of the functions:

public class AlkitabWebService : IAlkitabWebService
{
public ObservableCollection<AlkitabSnippet> GetAlkitabSnippets(string bookTitle, int bookChapter, int bookVerseStart, int bookVerseEnd)
{
ObservableCollection<AlkitabSnippet> snippets = new ObservableCollection<AlkitabSnippet>();

AlkitabDataContext db = new AlkitabDataContext();

var query = from c in db.Alkitabs
join b in db.AlkitabBooks
on c.book equals b.bookno
where b.booktitle == bookTitle && c.chapter == bookChapter && c.verse >= bookVerseStart && c.verse <= bookVerseEnd
select new { verse = c.verse, content = c.content };

foreach (var e in query)
{
AlkitabSnippet snippet = new AlkitabSnippet();
snippet.Verse = bookTitle + " " + bookChapter + ":" + e.verse;
snippet.Content = e.content;
snippets.Add(snippet);
}

return snippets;
}

public ObservableCollection<string> GetBookTitles()
{
ObservableCollection<string> booktitles = new ObservableCollection<string>();

AlkitabDataContext db = new AlkitabDataContext();

Table<AlkitabBook> AlkitabBook = db.GetTable<AlkitabBook>();

var query = from a in AlkitabBook orderby a.bookno select a.booktitle;

foreach (var e in query)
{
booktitles.Add(e.ToString());
}

return booktitles;
}
}

One question you might ask (I asked this to myself as well when I was a total newbie) is what is an ObservableCollection. WCF Proxy Class use this type of collection by default. However, this collection is different from other type of normal collection, lets say List, in a sense that it provides notification when items get added, removed, or refreshed and when the items property is changed (it implements INotifyCollectionChanged and INotifyPropertyChanged).

This is required for Silverlight to get the notification any change so that it can update all the UI elements associated with the collection.

That's all we need to do for our WCF Service :)

In the next post we will create our Silverlight application that references this service. I will start with the explanation of MVVM model, the popular pattern of building your application.

Silverlight 4 Simple Project Part 3 (MVVM Pattern)

Silverlight 4 Simple Project Part 1 (Overview + Database)

2010-06-23T09:10:00.012+08:00

Howdy!

This will be my first technical blog. The motivation behind this is that I love learning Silverlight (and it's version 4 now!). So I decided to create my own simple project as I am thinking of building a website for my church community group in the future.

Overview:

Why not start with a simple module? I want to be able to search for a bible verse in a quick way and no hassle of having to spend much time on it. Therefore I want the users to be able to select the book title, chapter, and verse (or verse range) and have the contents showed in front of them straight away!

Here is a video showing the completed application with some explanation:

Database:

Now.. I found out that there are already some English bible web services out there. However since my community is Indonesian, I want to have an Indonesian bible, and it turns out that there is none! and there is no SQL formatted database dump available either :(

However, I could find the text format of the bible. I looked inside and here is what it looks like:

'This must be my day', I said to myself; This is because I could easily do this:

And just use bulk insert to load the txt file (Alkitab = Bible):

BULK INSERT Alkitab
FROM 'c:\IndonesianBible.txt'
WITH
(
FIELDTERMINATOR = '\t',
ROWTERMINATOR = '\n'
)

Nice. Now I have my Indonesian bible database. To improve my database, I am going to create another table that contains my book title and link both tables together:

In the next post I will create a WCF Service with some functions that will query this database and return the contents that will be consumed by our Silverlight application. :)

Silverlight 4 Simple Project Part 2 (WCF Service)

My Piano Songs - Blog Started!

2010-06-22T20:30:00.000+08:00

Hello Everyone,

As I am starting my blog, I want to entertain you all with few of my popular songs. Feel free to listen to all of them and give any feedback! ^_^

Here you go:

1. Rising

2. Winter Love

3. The Truth

I will probably post my other songs regularly. I will also post my YouTube videos here as well. Feel free to follow my blog :)

Thanks and Enjoy!

Andreas