Using Redmine REST API to concurrently update Issues - redmine

Hoping someone could shed some light as my searches have turned up very little information.
I want to use Redmine's REST API for Issues to do:
GET /issues/[id].json to get the content of a specific issue.
Make changes to the above content.
Finally PUT /issues/[id].json the content back.
But I want to perform this using some form of concurrency control (ideally optimistic locking), so that content isn't changed by someone else around 2, promptly followed by 3 destroying said change.
This link hints on such possibility:
redmine.exceptions.ConflictError - (Why does this class exist?)
I'd assume there'd be some way of specifying a compare value, possibly updated_on, to do compare-and-swap-esk locking with PUT /issues/[id].json, but I can't find anything regarding this.
Redmine's web interface provides a concurrency control mechanism, so I'm stumped as to why there's so little information on this.

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Ember Way to Add Rss Feed without third party widget, Front-end only

I am using Ember 3.0 at the moment. Wrote my first lines of code in ANY language about 1 year ago (I switched careers from something totally unrelated to development), but I quickly took to ember. So, not a ton of experience, but not none. I am writing a multi-tenant site which will include about 20 different sites, all with one Ember frontend and a RubyOnRails backend. I am about 75% done with the front end, now just loading content into it. I haven’t started on the backend yet, one, because I don’t have MUCH experience with backend stuff, and two, because I haven’t needed it yet. My sites will be informational to begin with and I’ll build it up from there.
So. I am trying to implement a news feed on my site. I need it to pull in multiple rss feeds, perhaps dozens, filtered by keyword, and display them on my site. I’ve been scouring the web for days just trying to figure out where to get started. I was thinking of writing a service that parses the incoming xml, I tried using a third party widget (which I DON’T really want to do. Everything on my site so far has been built from scratch and I’d like to keep it that way), but in using these third party systems I get some random cross domain errors and node-child errors which only SOMETIMES pop up. Anyway, I’d like to write this myself, if possible, since I’m trying to learn (and my brain is wired to do the code myself - the only way it sticks with me).
Ultimately, every google result I read says RSS feeds are easy to implement. I don’t know where I’m going wrong, but I’m simply looking for:
1: An “Ember-way” starting point. 2: Is this possible without a backend? 3: Do I have to use a third party widget/aggregator? 4: Whatever else you think might help on the subject.
Any help would be appreciated. Here in New Hampshire, there are basically no resources, no meetings, nothing. Thanks for any help.
Based on the results I get back when searching on this topic, it looks like you’ll get a few snags if you try to do this in the browser:
CORS header issues (sounds like you’ve already hit this)
The joy of working with XML in JavaScript (that just might be sarcasm 😉, it’s actually unlikely to be fun)
If your goal is to do this as a learning exercise, then doing it Javascript/Ember will definitely help you learn lots of new things. You might start with this article as a jumping off point: https://www.raymondcamden.com/2015/12/08/parsing-rss-feeds-in-javascript-options/
However, if you want to have this be maintainable for the long run and want things to go quickly and smoothly, I would highly recommend moving the RSS parsing system into your backend and feeding simple data out to Ember. There are enough gotchas and complexities to RSS feeds over time that using a battle-tested library is going to be your best way to stay sane. And loading that type of library up in Ember (while quite doable) will end up increasing your application size. You will avoid all those snags (and more I’m probably not thinking of) if you move your parsing back to the server ...

Is there a way to detect from which source an API is being called?

Is there any method to identify from which source an API is called? source refer to IOS application, web application like a page or button click( Ajax calls etc).
Although, saving a flag like (?source=ios or ?source=webapp) while calling api can be done but i just wanted to know is there any other better option to accomplish this?
I also feel this requirement is weird, because in general an App or a web application is used by n number of users so it is difficult to monitor those many API calls.
please give your valuable suggestions.
There is no perfect way to solve this. Designating a special flag won't solve your problem, because the consumer can put in whatever she wants and you cannot be sure if it is legit or not. The same holds true if you issue different API keys for different consumers - you never know if they decide to switch them up.
The only option that comes to my mind is to analyze the HTTP header and see what you can deduce from it. As you probably know a typical HTTP header looks something like this:
You can try and see how the requests from all sources differ in your case and decide if you can reliably differentiate between them. If you have the luxury of developing the client (i.e. this is not a public API), you can set your custom User-Agent strings for different sources.
But keep in mind that Referrer is not mandatory and thus it is not very reliable, and the user agent can also be spoofed. So it is a solution that is better than nothing, but it's not 100% reliable.
Hope this helps, also here is a similar question. Good luck!

Optimisation tips when migrating data into Sitecore CMS

I am currently faced with the task of importing around 200K items from a custom CMS implementation into Sitecore. I have created a simple import page which connects to an external SQL database using Entity Framework and I have created all the required data templates.
During a test import of about 5K items I realized that I needed to find a way to make the import run a lot faster so I set about to find some information about optimizing Sitecore for this purpose. I have concluded that there is not much specific information out there so I'd like to share what I've found and open the floor for others to contribute further optimizations. My aim is to create some kind of maintenance mode for Sitecore that can be used when importing large columes of data.
The most useful information I found was on Mark Cassidy's blogpost http://intothecore.cassidy.dk/2009/04/migrating-data-into-sitecore.html. At the bottom of this post he provides a few tips for when you are running an import.
If migrating large quantities of data, try and disable as many Sitecore event handlers and whatever else you can get away with.
Use BulkUpdateContext()
Don't forget your target language
If you can, make the fields shared and unversioned. This should help migration execution speed.
The first thing I noticed out of this list was the BulkUpdateContext class as I had never heard of it. I quickly understood why as a search on the SND forum and in the PDF documentation returned no hits. So imagine my surprise when i actually tested it out and found that it improves item creation/deletes by at least ten fold!
The next thing I looked at was the first point where he basically suggests creating a version of web config that only has the bare essentials needed to perform the import. So far I have removed all events related to creating, saving and deleting items and versions. I have also removed the history engine and system index declarations from the master database element in web config as well as any custom events, schedules and search configurations. I expect that there are a lot of other things I could look to remove/disable in order to increase performance. Pipelines? Schedules?
What optimization tips do you have?
Incidentally, BulkUpdateContext() is a very misleading name - as it really improves item creation speed, not item updating speed. But as you also point out, it improves your import speed massively :-)
Since I wrote that post, I've added a few new things to my normal routines when doing imports.
Regularly shrink your databases. They tend to grow large and bulky. To do this; first go to Sitecore Control Panel -> Database and select "Clean Up Database". After this, do a regular ShrinkDB on your SQL server
Disable indexes, especially if importing into the "master" database. For reference, see http://intothecore.cassidy.dk/2010/09/disabling-lucene-indexes.html
Try not to import into "master" however.. you will usually find that imports into "web" is a lot faster, mostly because this database isn't (by default) connected to the HistoryManager or other gadgets
And if you're really adventureous, there's a thing you could try that I'd been considering trying out myself, but never got around to. They might work, but I can't guarantee that they will :-)
Try removing all your field types from App_Config/FieldTypes.config. The theory here is, that this should essentially disable all of Sitecore's special handling of the content of these fields (like updating the LinkDatabase and so on). You would need to manually trigger a rebuild of the LinkDatabase when done with the import, but that's a relatively small price to pay
Hope this helps a bit :-)
I'm guessing you've already hit this, but putting the code inside a SecurityDisabler() block may speed things up also.
I'd be a lot more worried about how Sitecore performs with this much data... assuming you only do the import once, who cares how long that process takes. Is this going to be a regular occurrence?

To modify start-up behavior of an MFC app

This is my first substantial MFC application.
My out-of-the-wizard MFC app wants to open a blank, new file of the type I specified for my app, when it starts, but that's not meaningful for my application. I want my app to open some connections to some remote sites and get data from them.
Where should I consider interrupting or overriding MFC's default behavior? I could subclass CWinApp::ProcessShellCommand(). I could modify the CCommandLineInfo object it works on. I could excise the whole command line processing and just call my go-get-the-data functions. I probably should just altogether excise the whole document-as-a-file related processing. I'm not opening or saving any files, except debug files or logs that are outside of the UI's concern. The only saving or collecting of local information is via a database, to which and from which I handle the serialization myself, so no CArchive, either.
I've got all this code but it's hanging in front of me disjointed and disintegrated. I'm too new to this and there's too many alternatives. Some simple guidance for a simple beginner is what I'm asking for.
So, if you'll say, sure, lop off the document-as-file handling, tell me, please, where I need to go to do that bit of surgery, I can see it's not just one object that'd be affected. And so forth. Thanks.
You might consider generating a new application, but when you do, tell it that you want a database application without file handling. Even if you don't use its database capability, it'll produce an application whose basic layout is set up roughly for what you're trying to do, so you'll basically just substitute your database interface for what it provides, but won't get involved with trying to rip out file handling and such that's apparently irrelevant for your program.
I found an answer with respect to modifying default file opening. While I made the database app Coffin suggested, I saw the phrase "storing database objects in views" and I rather aimlessly searched MSDN with that. If I was going to try the database app approach and do my own serialization, I had to learn about this.
I thus found an MSDN page concerning handling the file menu in database apps, which discusses how to alter and even disable the OnFileOpen command. It's applicable to OnFile New and it is the approach I was hoping for.

How to encourage non-anonymous editing on MediaWiki?

Problem
At work we have a department wiki (running Mediawiki). Unfortunately several
persons edit without logging in, and that makes it very difficult to track
down editors to ask questions about the content.
There are two strategies to improve this
encourage logged in editing
discourage anonymous editing.
Encouraging
For this part, any tips are welcome. But of course there is always risks involved
in rewarding behaviours.
Discourage
I know that this must be kept low or else it will discourage any editing.
But something just slightly annoying would be nice to have.
[update]
I know it is possible to just disallow anonymous editing, but that will put a high barrier to any first time contribution (especially for people outside our department!), so I do not think that is an option.
[/update]
[update2]
Using LDAP or Active Directory does not solve the problem since the wiki is also accessible and used by external contractors.
[/update2]
[update3]
I am no longer working for this company. That does not mean that I completely have lost interest in this question, but from my current interest point the most valuable part is the "Did you forget to log in?" part below, and I will accept answers based on this part of the question.
[/update3]
Confirmation
One thought was to have an additional confirmation step for anonymous users -
"Are you really sure you want to submit this anonymously?", although with
such a question there is a risk that people will give up or resist editing. However,
if that question is re-phrased in a more diplomatic way as "Did you forget
to log in?" I think it will appear as much more acceptable. And besides that
will also capture those situations where the author did in fact forget to
log in, but actually would want to have his/her contributions credited
his/her user. This last point is by itself a good enough reason for wanting it.
Is this possible?
Delay
Another thought for something to be slightly annoying is to add an extra
forced delay after "save page" displaying something like "If you had logged
in you would not have to wait x seconds". Selecting a right x is difficult
because if it is to high it will be a barrier and if it too low might not
make any difference. But then I started thinking, what about starting at
zero and then add one second delay for each anonymous edit by a given IP
address in a given time frame? That way there will be no barrier for
starting to use the wiki, and by the time the delay is getting significant
the user has already contributed a lot so I think the outcome is much
more likely to be that the editor eventually creates a user rather than
giving up. This assumes IP addresses are rather static, but that is very
typically is the case in a business network.
Is this possible?
You can Turn off Anonymous Editing in Mediawiki like so:
Edit LocalSettings.php and add the following setting:
$wgDisableAnonEdit = true;
Edit includes/SkinTemplate.php, find $fname-edit and change the code to look like this (i.e., basically wrap the following code between the wfProfileIn() and wfProfileOut() functions):
wfProfileIn( "$fname-edit" );
global $wgDisableAnonEdit;
if ( $wgUser->mId || !$wgDisableAnonEdit) {
// Leave this as is
}
wfProfileOut( "$fname-edit" );
Next, you may want to disable the [Edit] links on sections. To do this, open includes/Skin.php and search for editsection. You will see something like:
if (!$wgUser->getOption( 'editsection' ) ) {
Change that to:
global $wgDisableAnonEdit;
if (!$wgUser->getOption( 'editsection' ) || !$wgDisableAnonEdit ) {
Section editing is now blocked for anonymous users.
Forbid anonymous editing and let people log in using their domain logins (LDAP). Often the threshold is the registering of a new user and making up username and password and such.
I think you should discourage anonymous edits by forbidding them - it's an internal wiki, after all.
The flipside is you must make the login process as easy as possible. Hopefully you can configure the login cookie to have a decent length (like 1 month) so they only need to login once per month.
Play to the people's egos, and add a rep system kind of like here. Just make a widget for the home page that shows the number of edits made by the top 5 users or something. Give the top 1 or 2 users a MVP reward at regular (monthly?) intervals.
Well, I doubt that this solution will be valuable for hlovdal, given that this question is now two months old, but maybe somebody else will find it useful:
The optimum solution to this problem is to enable automatic logins. This requires two steps. First, you need to add automatic authentication to your web service. Right now, we're using Apache with the Debian usn-libapache2-authenntlm-perl package on our internal application server*. (Our network is Active Directory and, obviously, the server runs on Debian Linux.) Second, you need a MediaWiki extension that makes MediaWiki aware of the web service's authentication. I've used the Automatic REMOTE_USER Authentication module successfully on an Apache web server that was tied into our network via an NTLM authentication module, but I do recall that it required a bit of massaging the code to make it work:
I had to follow the "horrid hacks" given on the extension's page, changing the setPassword() and addUser() functions to always return true instead of always returning false.
Since Active Directory is case-insensitive and MediaWiki isn't, I replaced both instances of the statement $username = $_SERVER['REMOTE_USER'] with $username = getCanonicalName($_SERVER['REMOTE_USER']).
Since I wanted to only allow certain people within the company to use our wiki, I set autoCreate() to always return false. It doesn't sound as if you need to worry about this, so you should leave autoCreate() at always returning true, which means that anybody on your company network will be able to access the wiki.
The nifty thing about this solution is that nobody has to log in into the wiki, ever; they simply go to a wiki page and they are logged in under their network ID.
* We just switched to this from a Red Hat server that was using mod_ntlm. Unfortunately, mod_ntlm hasn't been updated in a while and it's been starting to sporadically fail. I mention this because I've started to stumble on a performance issue with our current MediaWiki configuration that may require further code massaging....
Make sure users don't get logged out if they look away from the screen or sneeze or scratch their head. You want long, persistent, sessions. Once logged in, stay logged in.
That's the problem with the MediaWiki our company is using internally - you log in, do stuff, then come back later and it logged you out, but the notification of not being logged in anymore is so insignificant on the screen that the user never notices.
If this runs within an internal network, you could pull Active Directory information so that no one has to log in, ever. That's how I do it at work. That is, if they are logged into their windows machine, then my webapps can pick up their username and associate that (or their userid) with their edits.
I don't know if this would be easy to add to MediaWiki, though.
I'd recommend checking out wikipatterns.org - a great site about the social aspects of wikis
Explicitly using some form of directory service (LDAP) would probably be a good idea, so that your users are always fully identified. On the other hand, wikis are subject to their own dynamics, in fact some wikis are so successful because they can be anonymously edited, so that's another thing to keep in mind.
Apart from that, personally I'd try to create some sort of incentive for users to contribute openly and identifiable: this could be based on a point/score system so that there are stats shown for all users who have contributed to the wiki each day, this could possibly even create some sort of competition.
Likewise, the wiki could by default not show any anonymously contributed contents without them being reviewed first, which would be another incentive for users to contribute openly.
SO has an extremely low barrier for posting. You could allow people to specify their name when making an edit. When they are ready, they can finally log in to avoid having to type their name all the time.
You said this is in a departmental situation. Can't you add a feature to the wiki where it makes an educated guess as to who is editing based on the IP address, and annotates the edit accordingly?
I agree absolutely with everyone who recommends carefully researching the effects of anonymity in your application before you start "forbidding" it. In a great many cases people prefer anonymous editing because they DO NOT WANT TO BE ASKED ABOUT IT, IDENTIFIED WITH IT, OR SUFFER SOME PROBLEM FOR POINTING IT OUT. You need to be VERY sure these factors are not driving users to prefer anonymous edits, and frankly you should continue to allow anonymized edits with a generic credential login like "anonymous_employee" or "anonymous_contractor", in case someone wants to point out an issue without becoming identified with it.
Re the "thought... to have an additional confirmation step for anonymous users- "Are you really sure you want to submit this anonymously?", it's a good idea, but do not "re-phrase" in a way that suggests it is wrong to not be logged in as yourself, i.e. don't say "Did you forget to log in?" I'd instead note it this way:
"Your edit will appear as an IP number - it may be attributed to 'anonymous_employee' or 'anonymous_contractor' or 'anonymous_contributor' for your privacy protection. You will not be notified of any answer or response to it. If you prefer to have this contribution credited, then [log in right now]."
That leaves it absolutely clear what will happen, doesn't pressure anyone to do it either way, and does not bias what is being contributed with some "rewards".
You can also, alternately, force a login via LDAP / cookies, and then ask them if they prefer this edit to be anonymous. That is the approach taken on some blog platforms. In an intranet the abuse potential for this is basically zero, so you would presumably only have situations where someone didn't want 'how they knew' or 'why they raised this' to be the question rather than the data itself... IBM has shown in some careful research that anonymized feedback is very much more useful than attributed in correcting groupthink & management blind sides.