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UFOs and .NET, Constructing a Hand-Crafted Distributed Web Application

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31 Oct 2002CPOL14 min read 174.8K   3.4K   78   20
A narrative article demonstrating creation of a .NET distributed web application through hand-coding using best practices.

Introduction

Agent Blue was assigned the task to hire a consultant to work with and create a web application that would replace the paper methods they used to track their covert UFO sighting operation - and they had to do it as cheaply as possible. They wanted it to be simple and scale easily without much modification because the work they were doing was expanding.

His operation had a recently acquired web server that had the .NET Framework and ASP.NET; an application (business logic) server, also featuring .NET; and a SQL Server 2000 database box. Due to the fringe nature of his operation and its budget constraints, they could not buy any fancy development tools to help him out, let alone maintain the application to any great degree.

I received an encrypted IP telephone call from Agent Blue, asking me to assist in creating the application. I met him at our usual information exchange location, and after an hour or two's discussion over Bistec a la Brasas and Chilean Merlot about the application, I agreed to help. The requirements were simple, and the constraint on hand-coding and timely delivery was a welcome challenge.

Intelligence Gathering

The operation consisted of field agents filing paper reports on UFO sightings from their various locations. Agent Blue told me that agents can also follow up on their reports, or other field agent reports. The operation leaders wanted the application to mirror how they currently operated, but wanted also to be able to provide location-specific reports and follow ups to outside agencies.

Agent Blue outlined the policy about agents, reports and follow ups:

  • An agent can file a report, but once filed, can only file follow ups.
  • An agent may file follow ups to his or her own reports as well as other reports filed by other agents.
  • Once filed, a report cannot be edited by an agent, only followed-up on.
  • Once filed, a follow up cannot be edited by an agent, a separate follow up must be submitted.
  • Reports can be searched on for text in the title, report, location, or agent. The results shall not be paged.
  • All reports can be listed for a single location. The results shall not be paged.
  • Reports must be sorted by date descending, and no other criteria.

He also relayed the policy about the web application:

  • Agents access over a trusted TCP/IP network where security isn't that big an issue, but the network is huge, so potential users will be a factor. It must scale well.
  • An agent signing on will use their code name and a password.
  • An agent signed on can enter a report from a location, and review reports by location, following up on reports if they choose to do so.
  • Outside agencies (but within the same overseeing organization) can utilize the application services to get reports and follow ups for use in their own applications. They can only read information, not add reports or follow ups.
  • It had to be easy to maintain and upgrade.
  • The operation leaders fancied .NET, so a mandate came down that the implementation was to be done in C# and ASP.NET, using no fancy development tools since they could not budget for them.
  • We had a week to design, build, test, and roll out the application.

Alien MVC

Architecting the solution, which we decided to call NetUFO, didn't prove to be too difficult, given the policies Agent Blue outlined. It would follow a modified Model View Controller [MVC] structural design pattern as a way of separating the user view of the application, from its rules and its data:

  • The View. ASP.NET pages with code-behind to pass requests onto the
  • Controller, C# components which would enforce the "business logic" behind the
  • Model, the SQL Server database where the actual agents, location, reports and follow up data would be stored.

Web Services would be part of the View, and would be created to support (via requests to the Controller):

  • Retrieving a list of available reports for a location
  • Retrieving a report
  • Retrieving follow ups for a report

Model View Controller [MVC] is a design pattern coming from the Smalltalk world, where Object Oriented Analysis and Design was born. In the original MVC, the model could notify the View, and was originally geared towards Graphical User Interfaces. The way we used MVC is similar, but tailored for our needs for separation of the NetUFO components. In true MVC, the user tells the controller something, which modifies the model, and returns things using the view. Our version uses the View to interact solely with the controller, and is one way to describe the internal boundaries of an application. You could also call this an n-tiered application, where n just happens to be 3 (three.)

Following this paradigm, the "layers" of the application would be discreet, allowing for better maintainability and a way to distribute the application:

  • The View: On the ASP.NET web server(s)
  • The Controller: On the business logic server(s)
  • The Model: On the database server(s)

If and when the UFO reporting operation expanded, they could add more web servers to handle the requests. As the web server requests increased, they could add additional application servers to groups of web servers, and as those increased, database boxes to groups of application servers. It would eventually grow to look like this:
Scaling out NetUFO

From here we would design an efficient model (database), come up with C# objects to bring to life our controller, design the view to look good and interact with the controller, and finally, implement the Web Services.

Field Work

Agent Blue was a little worried about having to hand-code the whole thing, and as daunting as it may seem in this day of GUI development tools, hand-coding isn't so bad if you're used to doing it on the command line, as I am on Linux using make and gcc. So, with that knowledge, I knew I could use the .NET Framework tools, nmake and csc to do something similar, but that's a little digression. First thing's first...

The Model (Database)

I like to make sure the data that needs to be stored is done so efficiently, and that accessing the raw data is a clean, simple affair. What this meant to the project was coming up with the tables, and ways to get data in and out of them. I won't bore you with Set Theory and all the valid and glorious methods Database Administrators create and design databases. Suffice it to say, each table we would end up with would have a unique identifier and contain only the particular set of data associated with that identifier. The relationships between the tables would be meaningful and clean. Getting data in and out of them should pose no surprises or threat to one's sanity.

It's common to develop applications that access databases using dynamically generated SQL statements. While this is highly flexible, the cost is that you have to compile the SQL each time and if the tables changed, code maintenance would be an issue. With that in mind, a decision was made that any updates to the data store would be via SQL stored procedures. That way, the SQL statements would be compiled, and execute much faster. That means it would scale better. It also meant that even if the table structure was changed, as long as the parameters to the stored procedures and the expected results didn't change, we just had to alter only the internals of the procedures and no other part of the system!

Agent Blue and I were cautious to assert that only pure operations on data would be part of the design of the stored procedures. We are only concerned with what's stored, not the business or process rules about the data; it is not the Model's responsibility - business logic should exist where it belongs - outside the data logic. The same went for defaults and constraints on the data.

Along with the stored procedures, we agreed it would be nice to create a couple of SQL Views to aid in the aggregation of data.

With the future in mind, NetUFO, will most likely be using multiple databases and passing data between them. That led us to use an SQL uniqueidentifier as each table's primary key. This ensured that records created on one server would still be unique if and when replicated to another.

NetUFO consists of 4 (four) tables: agent, location, report, and followup. Their relationships are:

  • One agent to many reports
  • Each report would be associated with one location
  • One report to many follow ups
  • One agent to many follow ups

One can create a database diagram importing all the tables in the SQL Server Enterprise Manager to view the tables and their relationships.

The Controller

Agent Blue and I decided the contact point between the controller objects and the model would be an object which act as an intermediary using ADO.NET. This would further optimize NetUFO. Accessing the data would be through this object, instead of rolling ADO.NET data access code into each object. The object would be capable of caching SqlParameter arrays using a HashTable so we would not have to always create parameters for the stored procedures on the fly. This would decrease the memory and processor usage footprint as well as speed up requests for data. The SqlDataReader would be used for result sets for speed.

The other components would map to the rules in a straightforward manner:

  • Location management and lookup
  • Agent management / lookup / authorization
  • Report submission / retrieval
  • Followup submission / retrieval
  • Support classes for the above

Now that the components were designed to fit the UFO sighting report rules we had a nice framework around which we could build the View, which is how the human (or other) agents will interact with NetUFO.

The View

We had used our version of MVC in designing NetUFO, so the look and feel of the application could be entirely changed, enhanced, mutated, or replaced without affecting the rest of the system. We could even write a desktop or telephone application and use the controller from there, the end result would be a View, interacting with the controller, updating the model thus forming the "Application."

I knew that as an architect and programmer that as programmers, we often make lousy user interfaces. This is no jibe at our technical prowess, but a fact that often gets overlooked in projects: the end user. They always see things differently than us. So I asked a friend (with Agent Blue's approval, of course,) to design the user interface for the web. Over the next day he gladly drew up several designs, and we finally settled on one, so he created a template HTML file, images and style sheet. Using this template, we would construct the all the pages where we would "wire up" the controller.

As far as the View security went, we formulated a strategy: The default page and login page would be accessible directly without a login, the rest of the pages would use ASP.NET Forms authentication.

The design also included caching of the data on the View components so that requests did not have to go all the way to the Model via the Controller. This would be ideal in this project because of the rules stating that once filed, reports and follow ups couldn't be edited. This would be implemented using the ASP.NET built-in caching mechanism.

Finally, the Web Services can actually be thought of as a part of the View, because they too, are another way of interacting with the application. We agreed that these would be implemented last.

In the Beginning was the Command Line

After creation of the database, stored procedures and views, it was time to do some real code, so I set up a project directory structure and fired up a shell. I must say that I love the command line. It's where I began my career on a friend's SCO Unix box, and not soon after, on my own i386 running Linux 0.99. (I wish I still had the bible-thick stack of 5 1/4" floppies!) The .NET Framework's nmake is quite similar to the make used by many a command-line freak.

I had to follow the same rules for setting up the internal variables, targets, and what not that modern-day GUI development suites do for you quite conveniently - at least compiling C# in .NET is simpler than all the fun gyrations for C++. The initial "makefile" for the Controller ended up being quite compact, and would serve as a template for others.

I wanted to make sure I did things properly, and this meant having proper .NET Assembly information for the Controller, I wrapped this up in an assembly.cs file, but before I did, I generated a key pair for the Application using the sn.exe tool. This ensured the Application assembly would have a strong, unique name for deployment. I saved the resulting file in the root directory of my project, along with a "top-level" Makefile, to build the whole project.

For the Controller, I broke out the stored procedure parameter names (and lengths if applicable,) and the stored procedure names into static string constants. Instead of allocating a string on the fly, they'd be compiled in. I'm a firm believer in defining constants, especially for "magic" numbers, that way the meaning could be conveyed through the constant name. This habit formed because of code reviews where I'd try to glean vaporous information from a programmer's code, where

C++
if (9 == x) /* some voodoo would happen */

It's definitely easier to change one number or string in one place, than the same in possibly hundreds of locations.

Without a snazzy GUI development suite, the benefit of auto complete, and other niceties, it was a bit tedious at first: writing code, ALT-tabbing over to run nmake, ALT=tabbing back to fix typos, testing and repairing things; looking in MSDN for parameters and case-sensitive methods - but slogging through made it worthwhile, and brought even deeper understanding of what goes on in .NET. Before I knew it, I had completed the Controller.

Solar Sailing

With the Controller complete, I split up the layout the designer created for us into several components for use in our aspx pages: header, navigation, content, and footer. These I would implement as classes, and similar to the Controller, created static string constants for a lot of the HTML, to reduce run-time overhead. We were two days into the project, and far ahead of schedule.

With all the up-front design, implementation of the ASP.NET pages was fairly trivial, even with the tedium wiring up each page to it's code-behind, but that's a why a good text editor helps. I have to admit that the temptation to use Visual Studio.NET was the greatest at this point.

I set up an initial Web.config file, copying it from an MSDN sample and modifying it for our needs, setting the authorization elements for the pages we would "lock down." I created a generic error page and added it to the configuration, to be shown only to remote users (a nice feature in ASP.NET, and helps tremendously in debugging, without having to change code or configurations to see an exception dump.)

As each page was created, tested, and the whole site tested, Agent Blue's excitement increased. It was day three, and we "deployed" the application for user testing, while working on the Web Services, which were probably the easiest portion of the application to implement. They return straight DataSets so that clients can use them right away.

On day five, after a couple of tweaks, it was made accessible to the UFO reporting agency, with quiet aplomb.

Expanding Universe

Please note that the sample code does not include management pages for Agents or Locations for brevity.

To install (Agent Blue and I didn't have time to create a nice .msi installer):

  1. Unzip to the folder of your choice (it will expand into a subfolder called netufo.
  2. Run the model\create.sql using the Query Analyzer on your SQL Server instance.
  3. Add the ASPNET user as a database owner to the database (this is quite important.)
  4. Open up your Internet Information Services MMC console and create a Virtual Directory named NetUFO and point it to the view subfolder where you unzipped the files. You must also open up the Virtual Directory properties and
    1. Create an application for it
    2. Use Scripts Only for the Execute Permissions
    3. default.aspx is enabled as the default document

That should just about do it, so you can surf over to http://localhost/NetUFO! The sample code automatically puts blue/blue as the user name/password on the login pages. You can alternatively login as red/red. The Web Services are at http://localhost/NetUFO/webservices.asmx. Enjoy!

History

2002-11-01. Initial revision.

References

License

This article, along with any associated source code and files, is licensed under The Code Project Open License (CPOL)


Written By
Chief Technology Officer
United States United States
20+ years as a strategist at the intersection of business, design and technology.

Comments and Discussions

 
Questionwhen i start asp.net application using develpoment wizard the error is shown Pin
Anonymous14-Oct-05 2:07
Anonymous14-Oct-05 2:07 
AnswerRe: when i start asp.net application using develpoment wizard the error is shown Pin
ian mariano14-Oct-05 3:18
ian mariano14-Oct-05 3:18 
The problem is that this sample code was not developed using Visual Studio.

If you were able to follow the "Expanding Universe" instructions and could run the app, great!

In order to get a VS.NET solution, you'll have to create a new, blank solution and manually create one (this is what the layout might look like when you're done):

netufo/
   netufo.sln
      NetUFO.snk
      controller.csproj (C# library, Assembly/Namespace = NetUFO.Controller)
         *.cs files
      view.csproj (Web Project, pointing to the NetUFO IIS virtual dir)
         *.aspx pages and *.aspx.cs code-behind, css,
         global.* global files
         web.config
         *.asmx web service w/*asmx.cs code-behind
         controls/
            *.cs web control source
         images/
            image files



Ian Mariano - Glide

GeneralDeployment Pin
Adam Stirk16-Feb-05 23:34
Adam Stirk16-Feb-05 23:34 
GeneralTalking to the controller in another app domain Pin
DanMayer6-Jun-04 14:59
DanMayer6-Jun-04 14:59 
GeneralRe: Talking to the controller in another app domain Pin
ian mariano8-Jun-04 2:00
ian mariano8-Jun-04 2:00 
GeneralYou have done a great job, I have a couple of questions... Pin
DengJW19-Feb-04 4:20
DengJW19-Feb-04 4:20 
GeneralRe: You have done a great job, I have a couple of questions... Pin
ian mariano19-Feb-04 5:57
ian mariano19-Feb-04 5:57 
GeneralGreat Read Pin
Douglas Troy7-Jan-04 6:05
Douglas Troy7-Jan-04 6:05 
Generalquestion about uniqueidentifier Pin
Dominique Plante22-Aug-03 10:30
Dominique Plante22-Aug-03 10:30 
GeneralRe: question about uniqueidentifier Pin
ian mariano22-Aug-03 10:43
ian mariano22-Aug-03 10:43 
QuestionHow to add the ASPNET user as a database owner to an MSDE database? Pin
Dominique Plante13-Aug-03 9:11
Dominique Plante13-Aug-03 9:11 
AnswerRe: How to add the ASPNET user as a database owner to an MSDE database? Pin
ian mariano13-Aug-03 9:26
ian mariano13-Aug-03 9:26 
GeneralRe: How to add the ASPNET user as a database owner to an MSDE database? Pin
Dominique Plante21-Aug-03 14:16
Dominique Plante21-Aug-03 14:16 
GeneralRe: How to add the ASPNET user as a database owner to an MSDE database? Pin
ian mariano21-Aug-03 18:16
ian mariano21-Aug-03 18:16 
GeneralRe: How to add the ASPNET user as a database owner to an MSDE database? Pin
Dominique Plante21-Aug-03 20:01
Dominique Plante21-Aug-03 20:01 
GeneralRe: How to add the ASPNET user as a database owner to an MSDE database? Pin
ian mariano22-Aug-03 3:35
ian mariano22-Aug-03 3:35 
GeneralNice! Pin
bigreddog6-Nov-02 0:14
bigreddog6-Nov-02 0:14 
GeneralRe: Nice! Pin
ian mariano6-Nov-02 6:48
ian mariano6-Nov-02 6:48 
QuestionWinXXX => NetXXX? Pin
Uwe Keim2-Nov-02 9:25
sitebuilderUwe Keim2-Nov-02 9:25 
AnswerRe: WinXXX => NetXXX? Pin
ian mariano2-Nov-02 9:31
ian mariano2-Nov-02 9:31 

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