The important functionality of any ecommerce system is to transfer the content using SSL when the user enters the user name & password or while accepting the credit card info. Steve Sanderson has blogged about this and unfortunately it didn’t work for me. Also MVC Futures has RequiresSSL extension which transform the content to secure. But in a typical system, we need to redirect back to HTTP as well, i.e if there is a booking flow, after we get the credit card and validating the payment details, the confirmation page might or should be in HTTP.

There are various solution available, i have decided to use the MVC Futures code and slightly modify the same to implement this functionality.

public sealed class SwitchSsl : FilterAttribute, IAuthorizationFilter
{
    public void OnAuthorization(AuthorizationContext filterContext)
    {
        if (!Enable)
            return;

        if (filterContext == null)
        {
            throw new ArgumentNullException("filterContext");
        }
        if (!filterContext.HttpContext.Request.IsSecureConnection && Mode==Protocol.https)
        {
            if (!this.Redirect)
            {
                throw new HttpException(0x193, "Must use SSL");
            }
            RedirectUrl(Protocol.https, filterContext);
        }
        else if (filterContext.HttpContext.Request.IsSecureConnection && Mode==Protocol.http)
        {
            RedirectUrl(Protocol.http, filterContext);
        }
    }

    public bool Redirect { get; set; }

    public Protocol Mode { get; set; }

    public bool Enable
    {
        get {
            return Convert.ToBoolean(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings.Get("EnableSsl"));
        }
    }

    private void RedirectUrl(Protocol scheme, AuthorizationContext filterContext)
    {
        UriBuilder builder2 = new UriBuilder();
        builder2.Scheme = scheme.ToString();
        builder2.Host = filterContext.HttpContext.Request.Url.Host;
        builder2.Path = filterContext.HttpContext.Request.RawUrl;
        UriBuilder builder = builder2;
        filterContext.Result = new RedirectResult(builder.ToString());
    }

    public enum Protocol
    {
        http,
        https
    }

}

Enable property is an optional configuration in the web.config, so that we can enable this only in the production environment. And in the controller action,we can call like below.

[SwitchSsl(Redirect = true, Mode=SwitchSsl.Protocol.https)]
public ActionResult Reserve()

Happy Coding!

It is important to have logging enabled in any production site which will be used by the technical team to debug the issues or monitor the health of the site. We chose BitFactory logging (Now the author is calling as Termite) to implement the logging in WCF Services, Business Layer & ASP.NET MVC Sites.

Why did we choose BitFactory?

• It is very easy to implement.
• Absolutely working with complex categories (we have 43 projects in a solution with more than 25 categories configured for logging)
• No issue with Multithreading or Filelocking issue.

I have used Nlog, Log4net, MS Enterprise library & Elmah in various projects, somehow my choice at this time is BitFactory. Other frameworks are good on their own flavor and i am not against any frameworks whether it is commercial or open source.

In ASP.NET MVC we have to use HandleError attribute to redirect to the customized error page and i would like to implement the logging using the same attribute. Thanks to Mark Seemann for the poor man’s Dependency Injection for the logging. I used the same snippet but tried to integrate BitFactory logging.

ErrorHandlingActionInvoker.cs

public class ErrorHandlingActionInvoker : ControllerActionInvoker
{
    private readonly IExceptionFilter filter;

    public ErrorHandlingActionInvoker(IExceptionFilter filter)
    {
        if (filter == null)
        {
            throw new ArgumentNullException("filter");
        }
        
        this.filter = filter;
    }

    protected override FilterInfo GetFilters(ControllerContext controllerContext, ActionDescriptor actionDescriptor)
    {
        var filterInfo =base.GetFilters(controllerContext, actionDescriptor);
        filterInfo.ExceptionFilters.Add(this.filter);
        return filterInfo;
    }

}

ErrorHandlingControllerFactory.cs

public class ErrorHandlingControllerFactory : DefaultControllerFactory
{
    public override IController CreateController(RequestContext requestContext,string controllerName)
    {
        var controller =base.CreateController(requestContext,controllerName);
        var c = controller as Controller;
        if (c != null)
        {
            c.ActionInvoker = new ErrorHandlingActionInvoker(new LoggingExceptionFilter(new HandleErrorAttribute()));
        }
        return controller;
    }

}

LoggingExceptionFilter.cs

public class LoggingExceptionFilter : IExceptionFilter
{
    private readonly IExceptionFilter filter;
    private readonly ConfigLogger logWriter = ConfigLogger.Instance;

    public LoggingExceptionFilter(IExceptionFilter filter) 
    { 
        if (filter == null) 
        { 
            throw new ArgumentNullException("filter"); 
        } 
        if (logWriter == null) 
        { 
            throw new ArgumentNullException("logWriter"); 
        } 
        this.filter = filter; 
    }

    public void OnException(ExceptionContext filterContext)
    {
        this.logWriter.LogError(filterContext.Exception);
        this.filter.OnException(filterContext);
    }
}

Web.Config

<BitFactory.Logging name="global" xmlns="http://BitFactory.Logging">
  <rollingDateFileLoggers>
    <rollingDateFileLogger isEnabled="true" name="FrontEndLogger" formattedFileName="C:\Logs\services_{timestamp:yyyyMMdd}.log"/>
  </rollingDateFileLoggers>
</BitFactory.Logging>

Add this line in Global.asax.cs

ControllerBuilder.Current.SetControllerFactory(new ErrorHandlingControllerFactory());

Happy Coding!

In my current project I need to load the user control dynamically without post back. After some googling found couple of posts which converts the partial view as string. The issue here is it doesn’t support viewcontext, in my case i have custom view engine which implements localization. Earlier i have gone through this useful cheat sheet. Below is the simple implementation which works with custom view engine and view context.

[AcceptVerbs(HttpVerbs.Get)]
public ActionResult LoadTopDestinations()
{
    return PartialView("TopDestinations");
}

And this is how i call the controller from the javascript using jquery post.

function TopDestinationClick() {
    proxy.invoke("/Home/LoadTopDestinations", "", TopDestinationCallback, OnError);

}

Thanks to Rick Strahl for the easy service proxy for jquery post.

function serviceProxy(serviceUrl)
{
    var _I = this;
    this.serviceUrl = serviceUrl;
    
    // *** Call a wrapped object
    this.invoke = function(method, data, callback, error) {
        // *** The service endpoint URL        
        var url = _I.serviceUrl + method;
        //alert(url);
        $.ajax({
            url: url,
            data: '',
            type: "GET",
            contentType: "html",
            timeout: 10000,
            success: callback,
            error: OnError
        });
    }
}

// *** Create a static instance
var serviceUrl = "";
var proxy = new serviceProxy(serviceUrl);

And the callback event, just use jquery.html() method to load the partial view result.

I hope the .NET developers are enjoying with C# 3.0 lambda expressions. This is one of the easiest way for removing items from the generic list object based on a condition.

_sessionList.RemoveAll(x => x.MarkforRemoval == true);

The above code removes all the items marked for removal. This also avoid the error “Collection was modified; enumeration operation may not execute” if you are checking the conditions in the foreach loop and removing it.

Quick snippet, hopefully useful.

We used to bind model class in ASP.NET MVC dropdownlist like below

<%= Html.DropDownList("ApprovalStatus", Model.ApprovalStatus, new { @class = "select", onchange = "javascript:CheckApprovalStatus(this);" })%>

The HTML output of the above is

<select class="select" id="ApprovalStatus" name="ApprovalStatus" >
<option value="Approved">Approved</option>
<option value="Rejected">Rejected</option>
<option value="InProgress">In Progress</option>
</select>

What if you would like to have Keys & Value separately and like below and if the model class is KeyValuePair

<select class="select" id="Country" name="Country">
<option value="US">United States</option>
<option value="IN">India</option>
<option value="SG">Singapore</option>
</select>

then it should bind with Keys & Values.

CountryList = new SelectList(Country.ToList(),"Key","Value");

Happy Coding!

It is very easy to format the datetime to string in .NET and this is commonly used by the developers while displaying the date & time in desired format. But if you would like to store the formatted value in datetime variable, the value changes according to the .NET default format.

Default datetime format in .NET is

We will try this to format the value,

When we try to assign the formatted value to a datetime variable the format again changed to default format

To avoid this, use DateTime.ParseExact

DateTime dt = DateTime.ParseExact(DateTime.Now.ToString("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss.fff"), "yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss.fff", CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);

Where is this useful?
If you develop client server application the .NET stores the datetime value with timezone. The above syntax is timezone free, which will be useful across the application.

Also refer this link for DateTime best practices http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms973825.aspx

When there is nested master pages and when we try to access the control inside the base master page, you will get an error "NullReferenceException". The reason is ASP.NET didn't have the method to find the control in recursive.

To explain in detail, we have BaseMaster.master file

<%@ Master Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeFile="BaseMaster.master.cs" Inherits="MasterPage" %>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head runat="server">
    <title>XTP Site Manager</title>
    <asp:ContentPlaceHolder id="head" runat="server"></asp:ContentPlaceHolder>
</head>
<body>
    <form id="form1" runat="server">
    <div id="div_body">
        <asp:ContentPlaceHolder id="body" runat="server">
        </asp:ContentPlaceHolder>
    </div>
    </form>
</body>
</html>

Another Master file which inherits BaseMaster, HomeMaster.master

<%@ Master Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeFile="HomeMaster.master.cs" Inherits="MasterPages_HomeMaster" MasterPageFile="~/MasterPages/BaseMaster.master" %>
<asp:Content runat="server" ID="Content1" ContentPlaceHolderID="body">
             
        <!-- HEADER -->
        <div id="div_header" runat="server" style="position: absolute; top: 0px; left: 0px; width: 900px; height: 100px">
            <asp:contentplaceholder id="Header" runat="server">
            </asp:contentplaceholder>
          </div>
        
        <!-- LEFT NAV -->
        <div id="div_leftnav" runat="server" style="position: absolute; top: 100px; left: 0px; width: 200px; height: 500px">
            <asp:contentplaceholder id="LeftNav" runat="server">
            </asp:contentplaceholder>

        </div>
        
        <!-- CENTER CONTENT -->
        <div id="div_content"  runat="server" style="position: absolute; top: 100px; left: 200px; width: 550px; height: 500px">
            <asp:contentplaceholder id="Center" runat="server">
            </asp:contentplaceholder>

        </div>
        
        <!-- RIGHT NAV -->
        <div id="div_rightnav" runat="server" style="position: absolute; top: 100px; left: 750px; width: 150px; height: 500px;">
            <asp:contentplaceholder id="RightNav" runat="server">
            </asp:contentplaceholder>

        </div>
        
        <!-- FOOTER -->
        <div id="div_footer" runat="server" style="position: absolute; top: 600px; left: 0px; width: 900px; height: 100px;">
            <asp:contentplaceholder id="Footer" runat="server">
            </asp:contentplaceholder>
        </div>             
  
</asp:Content> 

Now we have default page which inherits HomeMaster.master and in the codebehind we will try to add an user control to the master page.

ContentPlaceHolder cp = new ContentPlaceHolder();
cp = Page.FindControl("Header") as ContentPlaceHolder;
if (cp != null)
{
    UserControl uc = this.LoadControl("usercontrols/static_widget.ascx") as UserControl;
    cp.Controls.Add(uc);
}

public static class PageExtensionMethods
{
    public static Control FindControlRecursive(this Control ctrl, string controlID)
    {
        if (string.Compare(ctrl.ID, controlID, true) == 0)
        {
            // We found the control!
            return ctrl;
        }
        else
        {
            // Recurse through ctrl's Controls collections
            foreach (Control child in ctrl.Controls)
            {
                Control lookFor = FindControlRecursive(child, controlID);

                if (lookFor != null)
                    return lookFor;     // We found the control
            }

            // If we reach here, control was not found
            return null;
        }
    }
}

ContentPlaceHolder cp = new ContentPlaceHolder();
cp = Page.FindControlRecursive("Header") as ContentPlaceHolder;
if (cp != null)
{
    UserControl uc = this.LoadControl("usercontrols/static_widget.ascx") as UserControl;
    cp.Controls.Add(uc);
}

Everybody is enjoying with new SQL Server 2008 intellisense feature. At the same time you would have wondered that it is not working with new tables, views, stored procedures created. This is due to cache refresh issue with SQL Server 2008 and you can simply refresh the cache as explained below.

I have added new table “Active Reports”, but it is not showing up in the SQL Intellisense.

Even if you type the sql query analyzer shows as error, even if you execute the query it will not show error and you will be blaming the intellisense feature.

Now, go to SQL Menu Edit -> IntelliSense -> Refresh Local Cache (Ctrl+Shift+R), the intellisense detected the table as shown below.

Hope this helps to the new comers of SQL 2008