Tony Flaks: Tech Blog

Siebel 7.8 Web Services: Correcting WSDL

2008-01-29T17:30:00.001Z

The WSDL that is generated by Siebel for inbound web services is lacking some internal schema imports. The .NET SOAP tooling gives some warnings, but works around it. Some other toolkits refuse to work with the schema. Passing the WSDL through this XSLT transform fixes the problem:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
xmlns:msxsl="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:xslt" exclude-result-prefixes="msxsl"
xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
xmlns:wsdl="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/wsdl/"
>
<xsl:output method="xml" indent="no"/>

<xsl:template match="xsd:schema[@targetNamespace='http://siebel.com/asi/']">
<xsd:schema>
<xsl:copy-of select="@*" />
</xsd:schema>
<xsd:import>
<xsl:attribute name="namespace">
<xsl:value-of select="//xsd:schema/@targetNamespace"/>
</xsl:attribute>
</xsd:import>
<xsl:copy-of select="node()"/>
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="@* | node()">
<xsl:copy>
<xsl:apply-templates select="@* | node()"/>
</xsl:copy>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

Visual Studio 2008 unit tests: one App.config to rule them all

2008-01-21T12:00:00.001Z

Background

When using NUnit, I tended to include unit tests in their projects, so they would be built as part of the .dll or .exe depending on the output type (so they were excluded in release builds).

Visual Studio's unit tests are built as separate libraries. This is good in that it further removes dependencies, but removes access to internal methods: unit testing of internal methods was something I'd catered for since using JUnit, although in practice I can't remember many times that I've really needed to call an internal, rather than testing against the public interfaces.

Each project (e.g. libraries) now has a settings file, and VS 2008 takes care of maintaining a skeleton app.config within each project that contains the relevant applicationSettings section. Typically a unit test for a library will depend on a lot of configuration for other libraries, e.g. application settings, WCF, etc. Having a separate App.config under each unit test project with all this information means duplicating a lot of information that may change (e.g. locations of web services or databases required for tests).

Solution

Under 'Solution Items', add a new App.config that will be the master configuration for development and unit testing. Then configure each unit test project with a post-build step to copy this configuration into the output directory using the 'Build Events' tab in the project settings.

Unit testing: Visual Studio native and NUnit

2008-01-21T10:43:00.001Z

Since Team System unit tests are now available in Visual Studio 2008 Pro, it is convenient to be able to use this rather than rely on a 3rd party add-ins to support NUnit. On the other hand, it is good to have backwards compatibility with NUnit so that code could be built outside of VS, or in VS Express edition.

There is a pattern that Microsoft has been using to allow this, involving conditional compilation: place this at the top of a project file:

#if !NUNIT
using Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UnitTesting;
#else
using NUnit.Framework;
using TestClass = NUnit.Framework.TestFixtureAttribute;
using TestMethod = NUnit.Framework.TestAttribute;
using TestInitialize = NUnit.Framework.SetUpAttribute;
using TestCleanup = NUnit.Framework.TearDownAttribute;
#endif

The two APIs are not exactly the same but there is a useful subset of Assert methods that will work in both.

Access control of HTTP addresses in Vista

2007-12-09T23:04:00.000Z

Vista has namespace reservations to control the set up of HTTP listening ports. By default, a user does not have access to listen to arbitrary HTTP ports e.g. using wsHttpBinding in WCF.

To show the access control for all ports, use command:

netsh http show urlacl

To grant user Tony access to port 8000, do:

netsh http add urlacl url=http://+:8000/ user=Tony

Update: there is a deployment tool for WCF that includes this step.

Junctions and symbolic links

2007-08-30T10:34:00.000Z

NTFS Junctions Points

managed through the linkd command from the WRK.
(linkd /d is the safe way to delete junction points - don't use Explorer)

NTFS Symbolic Links

Vista and Server 2008
created using mklink
file links deleted using del
directory links deleted using rmdir

JBoss 4.0.2 under Java 1.5 / 1.6

2007-05-14T10:35:00.001Z

I had a slight problem with this combination and was getting the following exception:

provider org.apache.xalan.processor.TransformerFactoryImpl not found

After some searching it turns out that the provider class has moved and it's now necessary to set a property to locate the new location. I did this with a JAVA_OPTS switch in the setenv.bat:

set JAVA_OPTS=-Djavax.xml.transform.TransformerFactory=com.sun.org.apache.xalan.internal.xsltc.trax.TransformerFactoryImpl

Terminal Services / Remote Desktop commands

2007-05-11T10:24:00.000Z

I was looking for a way to see who is logged on before I bounce a Windows server. There are some useful commands for managing sessions:

mstsc: start new session
shadow: join a session
qwinsta: query window station e.g. show sessions
tskill: kill a session
tsdisconn: disconnect current session.b

Windows Desktop Search: Searching Sharepoint

2007-04-18T13:09:00.000Z

I'm getting on very well with Windows Desktop Search (see earlier post). The integration with Outlook is better than I had with Google Desktop.

One more thing will make my life much easier: the ability to trawl a cetain remote Sharepoint site. I have access to the site in question using Windows authentication and the WebDav (aka web folder) address of http://somesite/Intranet/Hidden Folder/InterestingDocuments.

I don't think there is any way to point WDS at a web folder - I tried specifying one in the UNC box but it wasn't accepted.

On the other hand it is just about possible to mount a web folder as a drive letter and get WDS to index it.

I hit some problems in my situation:

I don't have access to Intranet, only to the folders underneath.
Hidden Folder has a space in it - and the net use command fails with this, even if it is encoded as %20.

These are surmountable if I mount the hidden level as a drive letter and then explicity add the folders underneath to the list of folders to index.

Mapping the Drive

In a command prompt:

net use M: "http://somesite/Intranet" /persistent:yes

A dir m:\ shows no files because it is hidden from me. This is okay - I don't have permission to list the folder contents but I can access folders underneath if I know their names.

Indexing the Folder

To add the original folder to WDS, I opened the Indexing Options in Control Panel, clicked Advanced and then added

m:\
Hidden Folder/InterestingDocuments

under the Add UNC Location tab.

That's it - just let the indexing engine gradually trawl the sharepoint folders across the network.

Searching

Searches will then include results from the sharepoint folders, but if I want to I can add a search condition to only search under those folders:

e.g. title:"Web Services" kind:docs under:InterestingDocuments

Windows Desktop Search

2007-04-11T09:31:00.000Z

I recently uninstalled Google Desktop Search after watching a demo of an exploit. Although the particular case seems to be fixed it looks like the feature of mixing the local with web results opens the door to a whole family of similar exploits. Ideally I'd be able to just turn off the Desktop Link feature. Until then I'm looking for another solution.

Windows Desktop Search is shipped with Vista but is also available as a free download for earlier Windows. It comes with a set of filters and a plug-in for Outlook (which is presumably the result of this buyout.

There are also a number of third-party filters available.

Just waiting for the indexing service to complete it's first run, then hopefully I can find emails again...

It looks like WDS also had an XSS attack vulnerability: see advisory and patches.

Packaging WSDL

2007-04-02T14:29:00.000Z

It's often a good thing to reference XML Schema documents from WSDL so that common types are not duplicated in multiple WSDL files.

On the other hand not all tooling will handle referenced schemas and it is necessary to embed the schema in the WSDL.

This XSLT transformation will turn a WSDL containing references to other schemas into an equivalent WSDL that embeds those schemas inline.

<?xml version="1.0"?>


<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
xmlns:wsdl="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/wsdl/"
xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">

<xsl:output method="xml" indent="no"/>

<xsl:template match="@*|node()">
<xsl:copy>
<xsl:apply-templates select="@*|node()"/>
</xsl:copy>
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="wsdl:types">
<xsl:copy>
<xsl:apply-templates select="xsd:schema/xsd:import" mode="embed" />
<xsl:apply-templates select="@*|node()"/>
</xsl:copy>
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="xsd:import">
<xsd:import>
<xsl:attribute name="namespace"><xsl:value-of select="@namespace" /></xsl:attribute>
</xsd:import>
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="xsd:import" mode="embed">
<xsl:apply-templates select="document(@schemaLocation)" />
</xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

Enabling SSL for Apache2 in Ubuntu

2007-01-22T16:58:00.000Z

Quick recipe:

Create self-signed certificate:
apache2-ssl-certificate
Enable SSL mod:
a2enmod ssl
Enable name-based virtual hosts on 443:
NameVirtualHost *:443
Add virtual-host in sites-available, and include SSL directives:
SSLEngine On
SSLCertificateFile /etc/apache2/ssl/apache.pem
Add 443 to ports.conf:
Listen 443