What is the easiest way to load the VSIX extension for templates into VS2012? When I open VSIX file in VS I am getting binary data. Template is not accessible from gallery browser within Extensions manager.

Hi John,
regarding What’s Next?, i hope you can provide us with SPA LOB application like customers,orders,order_details
this type of application had many Challenges like one to many with same view order and order_details

Great course. On top of learning how to use the hot towel framework works, it’s a good review on knockout.js and an excellent course on learning how to organise javascript code (raviolis vs spaguettis). I understood at last how and why to uses promises.
Keep up the great work

Well done, watching the course right now.

I have built a SPA based on the older tutorial and i was doing my routing with sammy and a publish/subscribe mechanism because i needed some kind of sub-navigation.
I want to use the new framework for my upcoming page.
Do you have an idea on how to do a navigation hirachy?
Meaning for example the admin page with sub pages. So the admin page has to activate as the shell below the main-page shell with its own navigation of the admin pages.
Is this possible with durandal?

Keep up the good work!
Greets

John,

Can you show in your course Authentication? Whats the best way to control login and roles with SPA

John,
Thanks for the Pluralsight courses (I’ve already watched your 1st one a bunch of time and just started watching this latest one). Very helpful.

In the first part of your new Jump-Start SPA course you mention a site – trello.com. I’ve looked at that site and it seems very interesting too. In your SPAs you tend to navigate to different views, whereas trello seems to stay on one page and the end-user adds lists and cards to the lists all on-the-fly.

If you were sitting down right now to develop a SPA similar to trello, how would you go about doing it and would you use the same 3rd party libraries? That is, how would you develop a SPA in which the end-user can add/edit/delete the UI and UI components on the fly?

Thanks!

Hi John.Am absolutely loving your Single Page Apps Jumpstart course! I’ve been diligently following along in VS2012 and build/run successfully until I get to the 4th module, Foundations and Adding a View, Coding the Shell with Durandal.js at 14:14, where you indicate that it’s time to build, run and view our work thus far. When I do so, the splash screen appears, but stops. Checking out the console tab in Chrome developer tools indicates that we got past “Debug Mode Enabled”, “Starting Application” and “Started Application”. However, after that it displays “Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property ‘nodeType’ of null”, pointing to Knockout-2.2.1.debug.js, line 1724. A Google search indicates that I may be trying to bind an HTML element before it was created. I’ve gone through the module again, as well as compared my code to your “after” version of the code. This is, no doubt, an issue caused by me, but I can’t seem to find the issue. Might you have any clues as to what I might have left out or misplaced?

Thanks

Hi John,
A lot can be said for a good meal and time away from the code to give one clarity. Indeed, I was the culprit, typing “applicationhost”, instead of “applicationHost” in index.cshtml. This magically resolved the Knockout issue. Thank you in advance for any help you would have surely offered. Being an “old” WPF/MVVM guy, I think what you’ve done here with SPAs is to point the way to the next step in software development, gently providing a bridge. Many thanks for all your continued efforts.

Hi John,

Hugely enjoying the course but I’m having a fundamental problem getting the web api to work. Have since tried about 3 different projects both in vb and c# and can’t get it to work at all. I’m probably missing a crucial step.

I start with a blank web application, install web api nuget package, add a “global.asax” file and a “testController” then try and launch the site and go to “http://localhost:16489/api/test” but I just get “404: Not found” every time.

It hasn’t added a webapiconfig file to my app_start folder though – maybe that’s the problem? If I use yours it still doesn’t work. I think I’m missing a crucial step – anyone any ideas please?

Howdy John, I finished watching your new course over the weekend, I’m blown away, truly great stuff. In a LOB application one would have way too much breeze code in a single datacontext.js, I’m thinking about using datacontext to maintain state of the breeze manager etc. with perhaps some error handling and notifications, and separating the rest into a ‘dataservice per module’ i.e. customer-dataservice.js, orders-dataservice.js and so on, each dataservice would ‘require’ datacontex. Just wonder what you think about this type of approach?

Look forward to more amazing SPA courses.

Paul
(just wish exercise files where available to us non PLUS subscribers)

Sorry John! One more niggling error I just can’t lose now. I have almost all of section 4 complete now I’ve resolved my earlier problem and even though I’ve now replaced virtually every one of my self-written files with your files from “after” I still get:

Uncaught ReferenceError: ko is not defined (line 284 of composition.js in durandal)

…when I start up the app. I’ve removed and re-added the durandal package. No change.

Not many hits on google for this… anyone got any idea where I could start looking please. So close to getting main bit working!

I am sure you have said this before but I cannot seem to find the post that discusses it. I noticed that you get a lot of intellisense for your js, even items loaded with RequireJS. I am not getting that and it certainly makes new (new to me anyhow) libraries less discoverable. Can you cover what is needed to get VS2012 to surface the rich intellisense I see in your videos and were I can get some of this magic?

Hi John

Just finished module 7 of the course. It’s great – learning so much. A minor piece of feedback for you: Module 7 seems a bit rushed – you charge through the content so quickly (lots to cover, I know) and it’s meant that I’ve had to rewind lots of times to catch up/understand. Also there are concepts introduced (such as the functionality contained within Q) that probably merits a course in its own right, but is confusing to have to accept it on a “it just works” kind of basis!

It may be covered at a later point in the course, but just in case it’s not and whilst it’s fresh in my mind, this is a common issue/problem with master/detail and I’m not sure if it can be addressed or not. When scrolling down the list of sessions in the sessions page, say I’m a third of the way down the page, I select a session and see the detail. I then “go back” either by the button or the browser back button and I’m right back up top of the sessions list again. It doesn’t retain the memory of where it was in the list. Is this fixable?

Hi John,

I’m really enjoying the course.
I’ve hit a snag launching a details page from a list page, using the bindEventToList technique that you showed. I’m clicking a row and reaching the router.navigateTo(url), but this causes a route not found error.

I’m hard coding the url as #/opportunitydetail/123
But I’m getting
["No Route Found", "/#/opportunitydetail/123", Sammy.Object] in the console.

the opportunitydetail.js is in the viewmodels folder

Any ideas?

John,

How do i get that javascript Intelicence that u have?

Hi John

Really nice course, i learn a lot new stuff. I’ve seen you use normal HTML pages (.html) to represent a view against MVC 4 View Pages (.cshtml) + Controller. How would you implement a file upload?

Hi John,

While running this application in it is working fine in Chrome and Mozilla, but when i am trying in IE8.0, it throws error in breeze.debug.js file. Below is the exact code where it fails. The last return statement breaks here. Any clue what needs to be done? Also tried to find out the issue in google, and got the answer to put “content=”IE=edge” in index.cshtml , but no luck even after putting the same.

function exec(self) {
// clear off last one if null
var contexts = self._contexts;
if (contexts[contexts.length - 1] == null) {
contexts.pop();
}
if (contexts.length === 0) {
return undefined;
}
return contexts.some(function (context) {
return context.fn(context, self.v);
});
}

Mr. Papa. How does one load ko.lite javascript libraries using only requirejs (not putting script tags in the HTML)?

Hi John,
Enjoyed the course, very well done!
I have couple of questions regarding the bundling of the scripts under /app (SPA itself). Whats the best way to bundle and minnify these? And how do we version scripts release to release? I want to get the browser cache busted when my new release goes out.
(I am thinking using Web.Optimization and pushing it to browser earlier will defeat the purpose of AMD, even though it combines, minifies and versions)

I would love to hear your suggestions.

Thank you,
Binu

I was wondering why you sometimes define functions such as:

var refresh = function () {
// Do refresh stuff here
};

and other times:

function refresh() {
// Do refresh stuff here
}

Do you do that so that all public ones are var name = function () {} and private are function name() {}?

Is there any benefit to using var name = function() {} over function name() {}? It seems that since function name() {} gets defined earlier you would run into less issues, or am I missing something?

Thanks!

Hi,

any recommendations on using/not using breeze for us people not working with Entity Framework? We already have a service facade which we would like to build upon and below that we use nHibernate as ORM. We would still like to accomplish a rest api as an extra benefit next to the SPA.

Thanks for an interesting course btw

Anders

John, great video and I continue to learn a lot. Much appreciated. Did you consider merging sessionadd and sessiondetail into one view/vm? If you did consider it, what were the pros/cons that lead you to keep separate?

Hi John – I’m working on the SPA Jumpstart Video and need to say thanks. I’ve learned more from your courses than most I’ve had at uni.

I’ve built my application following your SPA guidance, however I’m now at a point where I need to authorize/authenticate users. I’d like to keep this all within the SPA via JSON requests to my WebAPI server instead of using an MVC client along with my SPA, however I’m not sure how to get started. Would you recommend beginning with the MVC SPA template and converting their AccountController to inheriting from ApiController to serve JSON, or is there a better approach? Perhaps there’s another video of yours that I haven’t come across – I’d appreciate any help you can give! Thanks so much for your time.

John,
I’ve watched both your SPA course on Pluralsight. They’re good. But, I’ve been wondering about your client side caching of data in a multi-user environment.

For your videos, it all works because you’re the only user. Also, for lookups, caching the data in the client makes sense. The data doesn’t change so why go back to the server every time to refresh the data.

However, for CRUD operations (mainly CUD) in a multi-user scenario, one user may insert or update or delete, while all the other users do not see those operations because they’re using their version of cached data when they started the app or navigated to the view. So, the updates to the underlying database data are not reflected to all users.

Am I missing something?

How do you propose to handle this multi-user scenario for data that changes?

I’m sure you wouldn’t expect an end-user to always have to remember to click a refresh button. Right?

Or, for ‘volatile’ data, do you not use client-side caching of data (i.e., every you go to the view, you go to the server and get the latest data)?

Thanks.

Hi John,
Thanks for another great course. I completed your original SPA course and have really enjoyed how that knowledge gave me insight into the functionality of Breeze and Durandal. I am curious, however as to why you didn’t implement a repository / unit of work pattern as per your original SPA course. Perhaps just because it is more advanced? Most importantly, would you recommend implementing that pattern for a production application using Breeze? Are the advantages of that pattern somehow negated by Breeze?
Many thanks,
Dave

Hi John,

I’m working through your “Single Page Apps JumpStart” on PluralSight.com. It’s been informative so far. Thanks for doing it!

However, I ran into an issue today that really had me confounded. In the module “Navigation with Durandal”, at the beginning of the video titled “Preparing for New Views and the Router” you made the following statement:

“Because we’re going to be adding more views and view models, I [moved them] into [subfolders] named views and viewmodels. And I also put the data service logger and model inside of a services folder. The only code changes that were required for this were pointing the different references to those folders.”

You then gave a few examples, e.g., app.setRoot(‘shell’) changed to app.setRoot(‘viewmodels/shell’).

This did not work for me. Durandal still expected the views and viewmodels to be in the same folder. I can see in the Chrome developer tools network tab that it’s looking for viewmodels/shell.html, which actually resides in views/shell.html.

I’m ashamed to say it, but it took me hours to figure out what was going on. I eventually figured out that if I installed Durandal.router, and changed the main.js file from this:

require.config({
paths: { “text”: “durandal/amd/text” }
});

define(function(require) {
var system = require(‘durandal/system’),
app = require(‘durandal/app’);

system.debug(true);

app.start().then(function () {
app.setRoot(‘viewmodels/shell’);
});
});

To this:

require.config({
paths: { “text”: “durandal/amd/text” }
});

define(function(require) {
var system = require(‘durandal/system’),
app = require(‘durandal/app’),
viewLocator= require(‘durandal/viewLocator’);

system.debug(true);

app.start().then(function () {
viewLocator.useConvention();
app.setRoot(‘viewmodels/shell’);
});
});

Then it worked.

The key thing was adding the two viewLocator lines–first require()ing it, then calling viewLocator.useConvention(). From my reading on the Durandal documentation, this is what tells Durandal to look for view-viewmodel pairs in the views and viewmodels folders, respectively. Otherwise, it expects the pairs to be in the same folder.

Is this the correct solution? If so, adding a note about this to your course could help save future students some frustration!

If it’s not the correct solution, I’d like to know what I was supposed to do.

Thanks!

-Josh

Hi John, great course on pluralsight. I’m using it as a framework for a LOB application I’m currently writing.

I have one issue I haven’t been able to solve.

In createNullos, I want the id of the lookup to be null since my model supports a null foreign key. Here’s how I’m doing it:

createNullo(entityNames.Bed, {id: null, bedCode: ‘…’});

At first, it works great. My drop down has the Nullo record. The save also works great, it saves a null foreign key to the database. Then “kaboom”, when I return to my list of entities, all entities have disappeared except for the new record I created.

Even my I press refresh from my list, I do not get back the data from the database. The database however contains all records, including the new one with the null FK.

Any ideas?

What will be the best way to reset or sync the lookups when records get updated?

Hi,

I have this scenario where i have multiple attributes for one item. So I pass the item it’s collection of attributes to the view model. Now the deal is that I would like to display all attributes in the view but they can have different types and so require different controls. I had a look at widgets in durandal but could not figure out a way to dynamically pick a widget type based on my data. Any ideas on how to work around something like this?

Hi John, I am doing your Single Page Apps JumpStart course, really great! I have problems to deploy the course samples projects (4-spajs-m4-adding-a-view-exercise-files). I deployed the to http://www.myspa.somee.com/ and the app hangs with this “Uncaught SyntaxError: Unexpected token * vendor:9 Uncaught ReferenceError: $ is not defined” error. This does not happen with a CCJS really from scratch. I cannot figure out what it is happening with the sample projects. Did you try to deploy any CCJS samples? Thank you. Ciao, Stefano

Question about dtoToEntityMapper classes.

I seem to be getting different behaviors depending upon how I query via breeze.

If I use a select clause (note Company is an entity:
var query = EntityQuery.from(‘Positions’)
.select(‘id, endDate, gauge, hoursPerWeek, memberId, title, summary, startDate, totalHours, weightedHours, company’)
.where(‘memberId’, ‘==’, id)

the query succeed call to mapToEntity works just fine.

If I simply call with out the select i get an error: “entityAspect is undefined”
by my queries without out select all fail.
var query = EntityQuery.from(‘Positions’)
.where(‘memberId’, ‘==’, id)

My IQueryable

function mapToEntity(entity, dto) {
// entity is an object with observables
// dto is from json
for (var prop in dto) {
if (dto.hasOwnProperty(prop) && prop !=”entityAspect”) {
entity[prop](dto[prop]);
}
}
return entity;
}

when stepping through Q

function _fulfilled(value) {
try {
return typeof fulfilled === “function” ? fulfilled(value) : value;
} catch (exception) {
return reject(exception);
}
}

I get an error from Breeze debug on line 4212
“TypeError: newValue.entityAspect is undefined”

I see the navigation property in my JSON, the data is there, and appears to be a dependent observable. I just don’t know what I need to do to use a breeze query that returns a complex object graph (both the primary entity and children (and children collections) so I can extend this SPA.
I have tried to call my IQueryable with and without includes:

public IQueryable Positions()
{
return _contextProvider.Context.Positions.Include(“Company”)
.Include(“ChartVals”).Include(“Tags”);
}

I would like for my app to have 2 different entry points. The default one being (http://localhost) and then the second one being (http://localhost/parameter1/parameter2). How would I go about setting this up in an app using the current example?

This forum has been a great source for answers/inspiration for projects based on the SPA Hot towel.
Although I must admit I’ve been finding myself in hot water as much as enjoying the hot towel…!

My latest bit of angst is trying to deal with promises and DOM injection.

I’ve got Breeze returning my data and I’m calling my javascript method to inject the DOM with a tag cloud (one cloud per row), but the problem is that my DOM target doesn’t yet exist, even though I’m calling it at the end of my activation event with a promise.

Any ideas how to make this behave?

Question posted on SO

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16367578/dom-injection-and-knockout-timing-issues