Howto

0) 02.00 How to get help on Aspire (18-Oct-04)

You can contact me (satya) using any of the following methods

As of June 6th 2004

• Cell: 904-662-5427
• email home: satya at activeintellect dot com
• yahoo chat: satya_egroups at activeintellect dot com
• news group: aspirej2ee at yahoogroups.com

1) 04.00 Aspire download directory (20-May-06)

http://www.activeintellect.com/aspire/aspire_distributions/?M=D

This directory on activeintellect.com provides latest aspire downloads. The following are available for downloading

• Latest aspire jar file
• Latest aspire properties file that goes with the above jar
• Latest complete distribution of aspire
• Any handy support jars

2) 05.00 A 30 minute guide to developing your first web application with Aspire (2-Jul-03)

This is a guide for beginers allowing them to create their first web application under tomcat and a first page.

3) 05.02 Painting web pages using Aspire : A step by step approach (15-Aug-03)

This document will describe the process of painting a web page using Aspire/J2EE. The document will start with a simple web page and proceeds to present web pages of increased complexity. I will talk about property files, aspire tags among other things

4) 05.04 How to use JSP and Aspire (30-Nov-07)

JSP Basics
Includes
Reading aspire data
using ihds
JSP References

5) 05.06 How to do updates in Aspire (18-Jul-06)

Updates are quite straight forward in Aspire. An update is initiated by a user submitting a form. A form can be submitted using either a get method or a post method. Or you can even use a javascript function to collect the relevent fields and fire of a URL to the server along with the parameters.

6) Aspire log file setttings (26-Nov-04)

Use these settings for your log file

7) Better syntax for display pages (or ihds) in newer releases of aspire (14-Jan-06)

Syntax for specifying data for a web page in one of the oldest in Aspire. As a result it is a bit awkward. Although I haven't completely fixed it due to backward compatibility concerns I have corrected it a bit. The following is an example.

###################################
# ManageUsersURL
###################################
ManageUsersURL=/login/manage-users.jsp
ManageUsersURL.transformType=jsp
ManageUsersURL.transform.classname=com.ai.jsp.JSPTransform
ManageUsersURL.dataRequestName=MUDR

request.MUDR.classname=com.ai.htmlgen.DBHashTableFormHandler1

request.MUDR.ActiveUsers.class_request.classname=com.ai.htmlgen.GenericTableHandler6
request.MUDR.ActiveUsers.query_request.classname=com.ai.parts.ReusablePart
request.MUDR.ActiveUsers.query_request.reuseRequestName=BL.GetActiveUsers

request.MUDR.InActiveUsers.class_request.classname=com.ai.htmlgen.GenericTableHandler6
request.MUDR.InActiveUsers.query_request.classname=com.ai.parts.ReusablePart
request.MUDR.InActiveUsers.query_request.reuseRequestName=BL.GetInActiveUsers

8) How can I redirect a page to different urls after an update (6-Nov-04)

How to redirect a page to different urls after an update

9) How do you know if you are logged into Aspire or not? (25-Sep-04)

Starting with build 21 look for a session variable called

profile_aspire_loggedin_status

The values are "true" or "false"

Previously this used to be called

aspire.loggedin_status

10) How to debug when something goes wrong while painting an HTML screen that uses Aspire Tags? (25-Jul-03)

Description to be entered

11) How to declare public URLs and public Update Requests to Aspire? (6-Dec-04)

This document shows how to declare public urls and public update requests using Trivial authentication

request.aspire.authentication.authenticationObject.className=\
com.ai.aspire.authentication.TrivialAuthentication

request.aspire.authentication.authenticationObject.publicRequestNames=\
AppendFeedbackRequest

request.aspire.authentication.authenticationObject.publicURLs=\
url1,url2

12) How to disable Aspire's http authentication and allow a login page (10-Sep-04)

Disable authentication for development mode
Or enable individual login pages

13) How to get autonumbers for inserts in Access? (18-Aug-03)

1. inserts
2. autonumbers
3. primary keys

14) How to send a jsp page as email under aspire (5-Oct-04)

Read this for sending a JSP page as an email using smtp mailer

15) How to send emails on the server side using Aspire (15-Oct-03)

An example of using the existing mail part.

16) How to submit a form in aspire a very trivial example (18-Jul-06)

Simple sample code of javascript to submit a form for aspire

17) How to take advantage of header substitutions (using function expressions) (22-Dec-07)

1. You can use this document for substituting common headers and footers on your aspire web sites.
2. How to write your own expressions
3. Source code of the default expression functions

18) How to take advantage of setCharacterEncoding for multi-lingual apps (19-May-04)

Description to be entered

19) How to test Connection Pools (27-Dec-06)

This class implements a mechanism to preload a certain number of connections for each data source. The facility also allows to keep those many minimum connections open during the clean up process.

20) How to use AspireContext for writing portable web applications (9-Sep-04)

Describes how to write web applications that can hook up to any web application context. Removes the need to hard code web application context in web applications

21) How to use com.ai.parts.URLStringReaderPart (12-Oct-04)

# USing the URLStringReader to retrieve a url as a string
#
request.GetBodyText.classname=com.ai.parts.URLStringReaderPart
request.GetBodyText.URL=\
/webapp/display?url=DisplayURL&ordid={ordid}&useid1={useid1}
request.GetBodyText.resultName=bodyText

22) How to use ConnectionPoolConnectionManager4 (27-Dec-06)

This class implements a mechanism to preload a certain number of connections for each data source. The facility also allows to keep those many minimum connections open during the clean up process.

23) How to use filters in Aspire (18-Dec-03)

In brief this article discusses

. What are filters
. What are they used for
. Specifying filters in properties file
. A complete example where a filter is used
. What sort of filters available
. An example of a filter class implementation

24) How to use if expressions and functions in an Aspire tag based html (20-Nov-12)

Aspire allows "if" tags in your html pages. Here is an example.

<!--RLF_TAG BGN_IF aspire_key_name=literal_value if1 -->
..html segment
<!--RLF_TAG END_IF aspire_key_name=literal_value if1 -->

Aspire will take the "aspire_key_name" and try to locate it in the aspire data set. If it is there its value is taken and compared to the literal_value. The key is not case sensitive but the values are. If the strings are the same (or match) then the html segment will be included in the page otherwise not.

25) How to use Javascript to construct dyanmic where clauses for database searches (27-Aug-03)

Key words

1. searching databases
2. dynamic where clause
3. javascript
4. form fields
5. form processing

summary

It is common to have search form when you are retrieving rows from a database. If the number of fields you are searching on are more than a few, it is cumbersome to check every field and correspondingly alter the where clause. These javascript routines allow you construct these where clauses on the fly. In this article I am going to show you the source code for these routines and how to use them in your form processing.

26) How to use Javascript to format display fields in Aspire (18-Aug-03)

1. How to further format display fields
2. substr, document.write, inline javascript, field formatting

27) How to use shorter urls when developing with Aspire (9-Sep-04)

By slightly altering the the web-inf\web.xml you will be able to do this

http://host/your-app/display?url=Pag1URL&arg1=10
http://host/your-app/update?request_name=StateChangeRequest&arg1=10

Previously you would have needed to do

http://host/your-app/servlet/DisplayServlet?url=Pag1URL&arg1=10
http://host/your-app/servlet/UpdateServlet?request_name=StateChangeRequest&arg1=10

28) How to use stored procedures in Aspire (16-Sep-06)

Aspire not only allows you to access and update data using stored procedures but also allows additional features to use stored procedures as the business layer. Here are a few things where and how stored procedures could be used in Aspire

29) How to validate HTML form fields using Aspire JS utilities (19-Aug-03)

Aspire comes with a set of javascript utilities to validate form fields. These utilities can jump start your validation process. For complex validations you may either have to extend or use your own tools. But these utilties atleast will show the way for accomplishing this.

30) How to work with access database in aspire (6-Aug-03)

Description to be entered

31) How to work with directory aliases in Aspire (4-Mar-04)

Aspire being an application server that serves html files on request, Aspire needs a way to locate these html files. Aspire also delivers these html files based on a mapping between a url name and the real html template file. Aspire gathers this information from properties or configuration files. As a result Aspire also need to read these files from the disk.

32) How to write a login application using Aspire (30-Sep-04)

Detailed guide for writing login application

33) Managing global exceptions in Aspire (21-Jan-06)

Read this article to know how you can specialize what happens when uncaught exceptions are thrown and how to handle them.

34) Revisting updates in aspire: How to get the last insert id in MicrosoftAccess (20-Aug-03)

Talks about

1. update
2. redirecturl
3. inserts
4. autonumbers
5. Microsoft access

35) Source code for ConnectionPoolConnectionManager5 (14-Feb-07)

This class allows you to use connection pools from apache or tomcat

36) Structure of Display and Update URLs in Aspire: A brief explanation (3-Feb-05)

This document discusses the property file sections that deal with the display pages and update pages in Aspire.

37) Syntax for jsp pages that doesn't need any data (14-Jan-06)

..or reusing data definitions

Some time you want to write a jsp page that uses data from the url, session, or a configuration file but doesn't need any sql to be executed. You can define such a jsp page as follows ...

38) Taking advantage of Generic Transformations in Aspire (4-Aug-04)

Aspire has a unique concept called generic transformations. These generic transformatons come handy while developing web pages as debugging tools and also discovery tools. A web page in Aspire has data and a transformation. Data is defined in a configuration file. Generic transformations allows you to retrieve data in various generic formats such as "text" and "xml" and "excel" with out ever painting a page.

Using this facility you can retrieve data before starting to write a JSP page or an Aspire tags page. This data importantly also shows the column names or meta data which is useful at the time of painting. Advanced applications can even convert this data to a typed language class.

39) Writing Login Pages in Aspire (1-Feb-05)

This document describes the general phiolosophy of writing a login web page with in Aspire. I want to emphasize that because increasingly user authorization is being handled by such things as portals with single sign on and also enterprise security tools such as Netegrity or via servlet filters while leaving the main framework such as Aspire for painting and updating state.