I am trying to get the base URL from the worker role. I can't get it from there.
How do I get the base URL in this situation?
I have found this property:
Application.Current.Host.Source
but, in order for this to work, I need the reference System.Windows.dll which is in the Silverlight folder. Since I am not using Silverlight for this part of the application I am not sure if I should use it here or find another way.
What do you think?
Are you trying to find the external URL of your app? (Like something.cloudapp.net?) If so, there isn't a good way to do this from within a Windows Azure application (without calling out to the Service Management API and looking up the deployment by ID).
Related
I've written a REST server in Delphi XE (using the wizard) and I want to change the URLs a bit so that instead of having
http://192.168.1.84:8080/datasnap/rest/TServerMethods1/GetListings
I get something that looks more like http://192.168.1.84:8080/GetListings
Is there a nice easy of doing this?
The naming convention is (Delphi XE3):
http://my.site.com/datasnap/rest/URIClassName/URIMethodName[/inputParameter]
You can easily change the "datasnap" and "rest" part of the URL in the TDSHTTPWebDispatcher component properties. You can change the Class Name and Method Name of the URL by simply changing the name of your class and method. However, you still have to have 4 components to the URL, so for example it could be:
http://my.site.com/api/v1/People/Listing
See here:
http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/RADStudio/XE3/en/REST#Customizing_the_URL_for_REST_requests
You could put IIS or Apache in between to accomplish this, and indeed rewrite the URL to point to your service the way you like.
That provides some more advantages anyway (security and scalability mostly). For example, you can create a fail-safe setup with double servers, or you can create multiple machines with your service, and have your web server do the load balancing for example.
You'll get extra logging capabilities, and if you easily want to serve other web content it's easy to have a full fledged web server anyway.
URL rewriting is usually done in the web server configuration, in Apache using entries in the .htaccess file
When writing a RESTful API that needs to access different environments such as a lab/test database and a production database, what's the best practices around setting up the API?
Should there be a #PathParam?:
/employee/{emp_id}/{environment}
/{environment}/employee/{emp_id}/
Should there be a #QueryParam?:
/employee/{emp_id}/?environment="test"
/employee/{emp_id}/?environment="prod"
Should there be a field in the payload?:
{"emp_id":"123","environment":"test"}
{"emp_id":"123","environment":"production"}
In fact I see two ways to handle this. The reason to use one or the other corresponds to what is the most convenient to implement in your RESTful application.
Using a path parameter
With this approach, it should be a path parameter at the very beginning of the resource path. So URL would be like this: /{environment}/employee/{emp_id}. Such approach is convenient if you have several applications deployed under different root paths. For example:
/test: application packaged with the configuration for the test environment
/prod: application packaged with the configuration for the production
In this case, applications for each environment are isolated.
Using a custom header
You could also a custom header to specify on which environment to route. Github uses something like that to select the version of the API to use. See this link: https://developer.github.com/v3/#current-version. It's not exactly the same thing but you could have something like that:
GET /employee/{emp_id}
x-env: test
A reverse proxy could handle this header and route the request to the right environment.
I'm not convinced by the approach within the payload since an field environment isn't actually a part of the representation for element resource employee. Regarding the query parameter approach, it's similar since such parameters apply to the request on the resource.
Hope it helps you,
Is it possible to get the Portal base URL (like http://www.thisismyportal.com) from a Portlet using Portlet 2.0 API?
Right now I'm planning to manually build it concatenating PorletRequest.getServerName(), PortletRequest.getServerPort() and PortletRequest.getContextPath(); but it seems kind of clumsy (and there's no PortletRequest.getProtocol())
While it is clumsy, it is the safest way to construct the URL; and while there is no PortletRequest.getProtocol() method, you can conclude the protocol using the PortletRequest.isSecure() method.
I would advise against using an external configuration for the base URL, for a couple of reasons.
First, it would be yet another configuration item for you to maintain across environments (test, integration, production and so forth). There's very little justification to hold, in configuration, something that is fully reproducible using the current request.
Second, under certain circumstances, it might be impossible to designate a particular URL as a "base URL" for the portal. An example would be the case in which the portal server is associated with multiple hosts, or multiple host aliases.
We had those configuration properties in Resource Environment Provider for the purpose of generating external URLs for sending them in emails. It was specific solution and it wasn't a problem for us as we had other properties stored there as well so we knew it will be available at runtime. I don't know if that suits your needs. It depends on your scenario.
Also, we used https only during login, so we always generated http URLs.
Hope this helps.
I have a web app, that also has an iPhone and Android app using the same API. It hasn't yet been made publicly available, so I wanted to look to convert from SOAP to REST.
I was only able to find a few tutorials that go into thorough explanations of how to code a REST web service, and of those I only found the MSDN one useful. The problem is I got really confused when they started using URI data types inside the object.
My question is, if you are converting SOAP to REST, do you have to recreate all the objects to add the URI? Am I not able to just have a REST entry point, then call one of the classes that retrieve the data?
Once the REST service is made it will only be used by my mobile apps, but not the website (since that can directly access the classes), which makes me not want to change the objects to add a URI. Is that a correct assumption to make, or should the web services also be called by the website?
Sorry if these are newbie questions, but I am struggling to get my head around REST, and I haven't had much experience creating the architecture of potentially high user base apps.
If anyone is able to point me to an actual code set, that would be helpful.
Edit: I am using VS2010, coding in C# and .Net 4.
Thanks a lot,
Andy
Im doing a very similar thing right now :). Rest via wcf isnt too hard, you do have to sometimes add your endpoints in the web config and give it the [webget]/[webinvoce] attributes in the refrence.cs of the web refrence when consuming though c# which is annoying.
Here is a code set i used when getting started. There are a few more on code project too.
I made an app in VB that I want to turn into a web service. I've been told I can create a web service from VB.NET but how? Can I convert my app into a ASP.NET app or do I have to re-write it? Can I turn my app into an Active X control and create a active x web service?
It's probably good to first try to understand exactly what you want and why you need it. A web service has little to do with ActiveX or ASP.NET technologies. It is a way to call methods of your libraries using SOAP or REST (or similar) requests. Once you know what for you need it, you can decide how to set it up.
You can use all the code you currently have but only if it was designed to be used with a library in mind. That means: no interactive forms, messageboxes etc. There are other restrictions, but let's not get ahead of ourselves too much.
To get from A to B, change your code such that it compiles as a DLL lib that you can use and call from other applications. From there to a web service is then only a small step away.