StrataFrame Forum

Web site development and using extensive Search

http://forum.strataframe.net/Topic15794.aspx

By Doron Farber - 4/21/2008

Hi All,

I need to develop this kind of web site http://www.PeopleFinders.com. Is that possible to use the SF framework for this type of web site development?  

Is that possible to use the Role Based Security for this development? When the user logs in I will to validate his/her account as for starters.

Or like in this page a) https://www.peoplefinders.com/RegisterPF.asp 
 or this page as well: b) https://www.intelius.com/createaccount.php?ReportType=

 I need to enable the user to create an account and after the credit card was validated,  then save that record.   In the above particular page the account is good for 30 days!!  How the SF will handle that?

Also I need to perform a Search for people in several data bases while each one could be a 100 to 200 GB. Obviously it will be partitioned and then display the data for the user. Is there something in SF that can be utilized for this kind of Search?

In short I need to know if your Framework can help me in anyway for this type of web site development?

Thanks,

Doron
http://www.dfarber.com

 

 

By Trent L. Taylor - 4/21/2008

Doron,

StrataFrame can definitely help you and handle all of the areas that you mentioned on a website like this.  I think that first you need to make sure that your expectations of what the framework will do versus what is developer application design need to be established.

We have developers creating extremely complex and vast applications using StrataFrame...both Win and Web forms.  But you need to understand that StrataFrame is a framework...not an application generator.  There is a difference and many times people get confused as to what a framework will do for you.  Let's just start with your questions:

Is that possible to use the Role Based Security for this development? When the user logs in I will to validate his/her account as for starters.

Yes.  There are even some user contributed samples that show a bit of this.  However, there is more work when doing this online as we do not provide a UI for the web side.  The reason that we don't is because there are just too many opinions as to what it should look like, function like, etc.  But you can programmatically create users as you need them.  So you can create a page that captures the users information then create a RBS user record.  All of the authentication methods, etc. are in shared (static) classes so that you can access them from anywhere.

I need to enable the user to create an account and after the credit card was validated,  then save that record.   In the above particular page the account is good for 30 days!!  How the SF will handle that?

Again, this goes back to application design.  Is this really the responsibility of the framework or your application?  However, one idea would be to use RBS and have the account timeout after 30 days.  That way they would have to either pay up or go through some type of activation cycle to regain access to a page account.

Also I need to perform a Search for people in several data bases while each one could be a 100 to 200 GB. Obviously it will be partitioned and then display the data for the user. Is there something in SF that can be utilized for this kind of Search?

StrataFrame comes with many different tools to give you access to your data.  In regards to size, we have users with databases far larger than this.  But like anything else, a good database design is required to achieve the optimum performance.  As such, we have a need for something similar in our medical application.  When we need search across multiple databases, we may create a sproc or view that allows us to pull from a number of different databases.  You can take many different approaches here, including doing it all through a BO talking to different data connections (StrataFrame allows you to connect to as many different databases, servers, etc. within the same application).

In short I need to know if your Framework can help me in anyway for this type of web site development?

Absolutely.  But you need to understand that a framework is not an application generator.  When it comes to managing data, business logic, security (if you use RBS), managing BO sessions, etc. it will make a vast difference in time and performance.  But if you are expecting it to generate pages and code for you, it won't. 

By Greg McGuffey - 4/21/2008

Doron,



I'll add that you should browse through the forum here a bit. You'll notice that you can get just about any question answered, often quite in depth and in a timely manner. So, should you decide to give SF a try, you'll not only have a great framework, but will be able to get help as you work through the various issues. The forum is also a great repository of all sorts of .NET related info. In the year+ I've been using the framework (and developing with .NET), the SF folks and the community here have helped me immensely. This is a bit unusual in a framework (to have such high quality help available, especially on subjects not directly related to the product), so you might have missed that benefit. Good luck with your project, whatever you choose!



Greg
By Doron Farber - 4/22/2008

Hi There,

Yes.  There are even some user contributed samples that show a bit of this.  However, there is more work when doing this online as we do not provide a UI for the web side.  The reason that we don't is because there are just too many opinions as to what it should look like, function like, etc.  But you can programmatically create users as you need them.  So you can create a page that captures the users information then create a RBS user record.  All of the authentication methods, etc. are in shared (static) classes so that you can access them from anywhere.

So you are saying that I need to create the UI for the web based, but can I use all classes from the Role Based Security to implement my web security?

Do you have any classes  that handles cookies and Session State? Remember  we are talking web site in here and not win forms.Smile

Absolutely.  But you need to understand that a framework is not an application generator.  When it comes to managing data, business logic, security (if you use RBS), managing BO sessions, etc. it will make a vast difference in time and performance.  But if you are expecting it to generate pages and code for you, it won't. 

I am aware that this not an application generator and I will need to create my own design.  

Can you provide some links for users that created a full blown web site with some transactions that are using the SF framework?

Beside the WebForm template that you created in SF, is there any other classes forms that were created just for the web based development? 


Thanks,

Doron
http://www.dfarber.com

 

 

By Chan - 4/23/2008

Hi,



Yes. There are even some user contributed samples that show a bit of this. However, there is more work when doing this online as we do not provide a UI for the web side. The reason that we don't is because there are just too many opinions as to what it should look like, function like, etc. But you can programmatically create users as you need them. So you can create a page that captures the users information then create a RBS user record. All of the authentication methods, etc. are in shared (static) classes so that you can access them from anywhere.




Do you think VisualWebGUI might help?
By Trent L. Taylor - 4/23/2008

So you are saying that I need to create the UI for the web based, but can I use all classes from the Role Based Security to implement my web security?

Yes.  The RBS classes can be used to implement your web security.

Do you have any classes  that handles cookies and Session State? Remember  we are talking web site in here and not win forms.

We do not have classes to handle cookies and sessions outside of the framework logic.  What I mean by this is that the BOs are automatically handled for you.  Whatever state you leave a BO on one page will be in the exact same state when you go to another page. (assuming they are using the same ApplicationBasePage).

Can you provide some links for users that created a full blown web site with some transactions that are using the SF framework?

StrataFrame is one of them, but without getting conscent from our users I will not post their sites here.  I will say, however, that there are some customers that you would know of that have created web applications to manage as many as 1000-4000 sites through a single web application (load balanced across a web farm in some cases).  These sites I do not believe are available to the public, but there are some very large web applications that have been created with SF.

Beside the WebForm template that you created in SF, is there any other classes forms that were created just for the web based development?

There are two different web form templates, one that allows a master page to be selected and another that does not.  We also have the templates that help you create either a site or an application.  You should really be create a web application versus a site as there are many design-time benefits, but you can go either way.

By Doron Farber - 4/25/2008

Hi Trent,

Some of the data will be needed to get from another server from a different firm where they will charge us a small fee for any search and we will need to present the data for the user as it came from our server. Also it will be needed to pass some parameters and it depends on the fields the user filled in with data.

Is that possible using a biz object and grabbing the data as XML and then creating and object so the data can be in displayed in a web form?

Ho would you utilize the SF for such a transaction?

Regards,

Doron

By Trent L. Taylor - 4/25/2008

Doron,

You can retrieve data from any location that you require.  If you are talking to a database, then just create another DataSource to which that BO communicates and the BO will not care nor know where the data is coming from.  If you are talking to a web service then you will create a shared method in a BO class or any other class, that performs the query from that server and then bringins it into a BO.  In this case you would probably want to create a custom property on a BO that acts as a standard field that performs this logic for you so you can then bind to it if you need to.

This is no different than what we do when we process a credit card order.  We have a BO that talks to a credit card processing entity via a web server, then retrieves the results, stores it, and then presents the results to the end-user.