For the longest time, for some reason or another, CSS floats have been a mystery to me. I tend to just float something, add some clears around it, and see what happens.
I recently found a great tutorial explaining how the float and clear CSS attributes work.
“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive”
–Howard Thurman
For the longest time, I have been trying to get away from M$ products and my dependence upon them. My blog, however, continues to generate a majority of its hits from just a few very specific articles on Microsoft SharePoint. It seems that I will have to do a lot more blogging to steer myself away from this unwanted association!
Conditions are never just right. People who delay action until all factors are favorable do nothing.”
– William Feather
“Very few men are wise by their own counsel, or learned by their own teaching. For he that was only taught by himself had a fool for his master” –Ben Johnson
Our best friends and our worst enemies are our thoughts. A thought can do us more good than a doctor or a banker or a faithful friend. It can also do us more harm than a brick.
–Frank Crane
How true this is! How many times have I been prevented from doing something simply because of a doubtful or fearful thought? How powerful and empowering are ‘true’ and ‘right’ thoughts about our self and others!
Men spend their lives in anticipation, in determining to be vastly happy at some period when they have time. But the present time has one advantage over every other — it is our own. Past opportunities are gone, future have not come.
–Charles C. Colton
If we all worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true really was true, there would be little hope of advance.
–Orville Wright
How different would all our lives be if Mr. Wright hadn’t challenged assumptions about the possibility of flight?
I just downloaded the latest version of the Castle MonoRail assemblies. For a while, I have been wary of using the Scaffolding for controller and View because the views seem to stumble over nullable data types in the Model classes. While that seem to still be a problem (maybe I’ll write a patch for it), I have started to use Scaffolding for the controllers and the customizing the Views.
Here are a list of the parameters available in the PropertyBag along with the names of the files you should create. I’m using NVelocity, so my views end with the .VM extension.
View Name: List.vm
$Items : a listing of all the records for the given model
This is the view that collects information for a new record. The form action should point to the Create controller action.
View Name: new{classname}.vm (e.g.: if you have a model called Study, your view name will be newStudy.vm)
${classname} : is the item that you’re editing.
When creating for elements, you should name them with the format name=”classname.propertyname” (e.g.: for the Study model, if I have a property called Name, then I should add a form element with the name “Study.Name”.
There is none… this controller action just redirects to the list view after the new record is created.
View Name: edit.vm
Query String:
id : the primary key of the record (I’m not sure what happens with models using composite keys)
The form elements have the same name format as the Create view, which is name=”classname.propertyname”.
[I'm still working to gather information on the child collection properties and the available options for those collections]
This is the delete confirmation view. I usually use the JavaScript ‘confirm’ method and the do a redirect to the delete action.
View Name: confirm.vm
$classname : the record to delete
QueryString:
id: the primary key of the record to delete.
There is no view for this action. The controller just redirects to the list view.
Over the past few months, I have been designing a system which integrates with a number of database servers (7 within a single application) across several different schema types (3 in a single application). I have also started to see the value in writing good unit tests as connecting to a live database usually cannot give you the correct data for a good test.
I have found that using the Object Mother design pattern to create the model objects that I use inside a test has decrease the number of lines I have to write for a realistic unit test. Essentially, the object mother is a class with several static functions used to create object. Using this class to create your objects means that the code inside you unit test function can focus on the actual testing. Martin Fowler has a good overview of the Object Mother Design Pattern and Peter Schuh and Stephanie Punke have also written a nice paper on the pattern as well.
Person Class
Person Mother Class
You can then use the PersonMother class like so:
Person newPerson = PersonMother.Create();newPerson.FirstName = "John";newPerson.LastName = "Doe";newPerson.Save();
This is all fine and good, but what if you need to customize your object once you’re object mother has returned the object to you? Maybe we want to automatically set the person’s name to “John Doe” in our create method, but what if we want to add some children? What if in some cases, we don’t want to have the returned Person object to have any Children in the collection. Then you’re back to having a complex unit test again where more lines (and screen real estate) is dedicated to the object rather than the test.
Note that if your domain model is such that a few more static methods on the Mother class will do, then you’re probably fine with the basic ObjectMother pattern. However, if your domain model is complex and you need to test any number of model permutations very easily, then method chaining may help.
The concept here is to create a single method in the Object Mother called Create() which takes no parameters and returns a valid instance of the Object Mother Class. This means that if the object is persisted to the database right after the object mother returns, the database shouldn’t throw any validation errors.
BaseMother Generic Class
The concrete Object Mother class then has a series of methods which return an instance of the Object Mother.
In this way, methods can be executed in a chained manner, reducing the number of lines used to create and customize the object. An added benefit is that dependent objects can be assembled by another Object Mother class and the passed into a method on the parent object’s mother class.
PersonMother Class with Method Chaining. The Create method is static here.
Using .Net generics, we can create a base Object Mother class which can make the implementation of concrete Object Mother Classes much easier.
Person newPerson = PersonMother.Create() .SetName("John") .AddChild(PersonMother.Create().SetName("Johnny").Value)) .Value;newPerson.Save();
Note that all that code can be on one line. I’ve just expanded it to make it easier to read in this format.
In my most recent project, I have been using ActiveRecord as my ORM. I created a subclassed ObjectMother class, allowing me to perform database operations as part of the method chain. This is especially useful when object persistence has to occur is a certain order (of courses, defining a proper cascade within the BelongsTo attribute can also help with this… this is just an example).
ARBaseMother Class with Method Chaining
I have a few other methods on the ARBaseMother to help with my ActiveRecord testing.
Person Mother AR Class with Method Chaining
Now, the example again:
Person newPerson = PersonMother.Create() .SetName("John") .AddChild(PersonMother.Create().SetName("Johnny").Save().Value) .Save() .Value;newPerson.Save();
I have found that this pattern makes writing unit tests much easier… which means that I might actually write more of them!
Do you have any patterns which help you write tests? Please share them in the comments below.