DDevelopment & Design

Migracja strony kodowej

Ostatnio wystąpił problem z pewną bazą deweloperską, w której nie działały polskie znaki. Sprawdziłem parametry bazy poprzez zapytanie

select d.parameter Dparameter,
       d.value     Dvalue,
       i.value     Ivalue,
       s.value     Svalue
  from nls_database_parameters d, nls_instance_parameters i,
       nls_session_parameters s
 where d.parameter = i.parameter (+)
   and d.parameter = s.parameter (+)
order by 1

ze strony: http://www.databasejournal.com/features/oracle/article.php/3485216/The-Globalization-of-Language-in-Oracle—National-Language-Support.htm

Wartość parametru NLS_CHARACTERSET wskazała, że ustawiona jest zachodnioeuropejska strona kodowa WE8ISO8859P1 czyli ISO 8859-1. Konieczne było jej zmienienie albo na wschodnioeuropejską EE8ISO8859P2 czyli ISO 8859-2, albo na Unicode’ową AL32UTF8. W celu dokonania migracji skorzystałem z instrukcji ze strony http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B10500_01/server.920/a96529/ch10.htm

SHUTDOWN IMMEDIATE;
STARTUP MOUNT;
ALTER SYSTEM ENABLE RESTRICTED SESSION;
ALTER SYSTEM SET JOB_QUEUE_PROCESSES=0;
ALTER SYSTEM SET AQ_TM_PROCESSES=0;
ALTER DATABASE OPEN;
ALTER DATABASE CHARACTER SET AL32UTF8;
SHUTDOWN IMMEDIATE;
STARTUP;

Wszystkie te operacje musiałem robić na maszynie, na której stała baza. SQL*Plusa uruchomiłem komendą

sqlplus / as sysdba

Pojawiły się dwa problemy wynikłe z faktu, że podczas migracji strony kodowej Oracle nie modyfikuje zapisanych danych a jedynie zmienia swoje ustawienia:

  1. Kodowania WE8ISO8859P1 i EE8ISO8859P2 zawsze używają jednego bajtu na znak podczas gdy AL32UTF8 używa od 1 do 4 bajtów. Jednak
    dotyczy to tylko typów CHAR i VARCHAR. W przypadku ustawionego kodowania wielobajtowego stosowane jest w CLOBach 2-bajtowe kodowanie. Zmiana
    strony kodowej na AL32UTF8 spowodowałaby chaos, ponieważ każda para znaków ISO 8859-1 byłaby traktowana jako jeden znak Unicode. Z tego powodu taka
    konwersja jest niemożliwa. Jedynym sposobem jest migracja strony kodowej poprzez import i export danych, ale ta droga nie została
    udokumentowana.
  2. Możliwe jest tylko zmigrowanie na stronę kodową będącą ścisłym nadzbiorem dotychczasowej. Ten warunek oznacza, że dla każdego ciągu bitów dozwolonego w dotychczasowym kodowaniu – ten ciąg bitów mapuje się na ten sam znak w nowym kodowaniu. 7-bitowe kodowanie US7ASCII spełnia ten warunek w stosunku do EE8ISO8859P2 i AL32UTF8, ale WE8ISO8859P1 już nie. Na przykład æ (ae) ma kod E6 w WE8ISO8859P1, ale w AL32UTF8 bajt E6 nie występuje samodzielnie podczas gdy w EE8ISO8859P2 znaku æ nie ma a bajt E6 to ć
    Nie była możliwa migracja z WE8ISO8859P1 na EE8ISO8859P2, więc zmieniłem jako SYS ustawienia Oracle’a:
update sys.props$ set VALUE$='US7ASCII' where NAME='NLS_CHARACTERSET'

Nie polecam tej metody na produkcyjnych bazach, ponieważ zmienianie systemowych ustawień bywa niebezpieczne. Miałem jednak backup bazy, więc zaryzykowałem. Po zmianie wartości w tabeli komenda

ALTER DATABASE CHARACTER SET EE8ISO8859P2;

przeszła bez problemu. Jeśli byłyby jakieś znaki o kodach powyżej 127 to byłyby one wyświetlane jako inne w wielu wypadkach znaki, ale nie było takich przypadków.

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DDevelopment & Design

Using WsLite in practice

TL;DR

There is a example working GitHub project which covers unit testing and request/response logging when using WsLite.

Why Groovy WsLite ?

I’m a huge fan of Groovy WsLite project for calling SOAP web services. Yes, in a real world you have to deal with those - big companies have huge amount of “legacy” code and are crazy about homogeneous architecture - only SOAP, Java, Oracle, AIX…

But I also never been comfortable with XFire/CXF approach of web service client code generation. I wrote a bit about other posibilites in this post. With JAXB you can also experience some freaky classloading errors - as Tomek described on his blog. In a large commercial project the “the less code the better” principle is significant. And the code generated from XSD could look kinda ugly - especially more complicated structures like sequences, choices, anys etc.

Using WsLite with native Groovy concepts like XmlSlurper could be a great choice. But since it’s a dynamic approach you have to be really careful - write good unit tests and log requests. Below are my few hints for using WsLite in practice.

Unit testing

Suppose you have some invocation of WsLite SOAPClient (original WsLite example):

def getMothersDay(long _year) {
    def response = client.send(SOAPAction: action) {
       body {
           GetMothersDay('xmlns':'http://www.27seconds.com/Holidays/US/Dates/') {
              year(_year)
           }
       }
    }
    response.GetMothersDayResponse.GetMothersDayResult.text()
}

How can the unit test like? My suggestion is to mock SOAPClient and write a simple helper to test that builded XML is correct. Example using great SpockFramework: 

void setup() {
   client = Mock(SOAPClient)
   service.client = client
}

def "should pass year to GetMothersDay and return date"() {
  given:
      def year = 2013
  when:
      def date = service.getMothersDay(year)
  then:
      1 * client.send(_, _) >> { Map params, Closure requestBuilder ->
            Document doc = buildAndParseXml(requestBuilder)
            assertXpathEvaluatesTo("$year", '//ns:GetMothersDay/ns:year', doc)
            return mockResponse(Responses.mothersDay)
      }
      date == "2013-05-12T00:00:00"
}

This uses a real cool feature of Spock - even when you mock the invocation with “any mark” (_), you are able to get actual arguments. So we can build XML that would be passed to SOAPClient's send method and check that specific XPaths are correct:

void setup() {
    engine = XMLUnit.newXpathEngine()
    engine.setNamespaceContext(new SimpleNamespaceContext(namespaces()))
}

protected Document buildAndParseXml(Closure xmlBuilder) {
    def writer = new StringWriter()
    def builder = new MarkupBuilder(writer)
    builder.xml(xmlBuilder)
    return XMLUnit.buildControlDocument(writer.toString())
}

protected void assertXpathEvaluatesTo(String expectedValue,
                                      String xpathExpression, Document doc) throws XpathException {
    Assert.assertEquals(expectedValue,
            engine.evaluate(xpathExpression, doc))
}

protected Map namespaces() {
    return [ns: 'http://www.27seconds.com/Holidays/US/Dates/']
}

The XMLUnit library is used just for XpathEngine, but it is much more powerful for comparing XML documents. The NamespaceContext is needed to use correct prefixes (e.g. ns:GetMothersDay) in your Xpath expressions.

Finally - the mock returns SOAPResponse instance filled with envelope parsed from some constant XML:

protected SOAPResponse mockResponse(String resp) {
    def envelope = new XmlSlurper().parseText(resp)
    new SOAPResponse(envelope: envelope)
}

Request and response logging

The WsLite itself doesn’t use any logging framework. We usually handle it by adding own sendWithLogging method:

private SOAPResponse sendWithLogging(String action, Closure cl) {
    SOAPResponse response = client.send(SOAPAction: action, cl)
    log(response?.httpRequest, response?.httpResponse)
    return response
}

private void log(HTTPRequest request, HTTPResponse response) {
    log.debug("HTTPRequest $request with content:\n${request?.contentAsString}")
    log.debug("HTTPResponse $response with content:\n${response?.contentAsString}")
}

This logs the actual request and response send through SOAPClient. But it logs only when invocation is successful and errors are much more interesting… So here goes withExceptionHandler method:

private SOAPResponse withExceptionHandler(Closure cl) {
    try {
        cl.call()
    } catch (SOAPFaultException soapEx) {
        log(soapEx.httpRequest, soapEx.httpResponse)
        def message = soapEx.hasFault() ? soapEx.fault.text() : soapEx.message
        throw new InfrastructureException(message)
    } catch (HTTPClientException httpEx) {
        log(httpEx.request, httpEx.response)
        throw new InfrastructureException(httpEx.message)
    }
}
def send(String action, Closure cl) {
    withExceptionHandler {
        sendWithLogging(action, cl)
    }
}

XmlSlurper gotchas

Working with XML document with XmlSlurper is generally great fun, but is some cases could introduce some problems. A trivial example is parsing an id with a number to Long value:

def id = Long.valueOf(edit.'@id' as String)

The Attribute class (which edit.'@id' evaluates to) can be converted to String using as operator, but converting to Long requires using valueOf.

The second example is a bit more complicated. Consider following XML fragment:

<edit id="3">
   <params>
      <param value="label1" name="label"/>
      <param value="2" name="param2"/>
   </params>
   <value>123</value>
</edit>
<edit id="6">
   <params>
      <param value="label2" name="label"/>
      <param value="2" name="param2"/>
   </params>
   <value>456</value>
</edit>

We want to find id of edit whose label is label1. The simplest solution seems to be:

def param = doc.edit.params.param.find { it['@value'] == 'label1' }
def edit = params.parent().parent()

But it doesn’t work! The parent method returns multiple edits, not only the one that is parent of given param…

Here’s the correct solution:

doc.edit.find { edit ->
    edit.params.param.find { it['@value'] == 'label1' }
}

Example

The example working project covering those hints could be found on GitHub.

DDevelopment & Design

Grails with Spock unit test + IntelliJ IDEA = No thread-bound request found

During my work with Grails project using Spock test in IntelliJ IDEA I've encountered this error:

java.lang.IllegalStateException: No thread-bound request found: Are you referring to request attributes outside of an actual web request, or processing a request outside of the originally receiving thread? If you are actually operating within a web request and still receive this message, your code is probably running outside of DispatcherServlet/DispatcherPortlet: In this case, use RequestContextListener or RequestContextFilter to expose the current request.
 at org.springframework.web.context.request.RequestContextHolder.currentRequestAttributes(RequestContextHolder.java:131)
 at org.codehaus.groovy.grails.plugins.web.api.CommonWebApi.currentRequestAttributes(CommonWebApi.java:205)
 at org.codehaus.groovy.grails.plugins.web.api.CommonWebApi.getParams(CommonWebApi.java:65)
... // and few more lines of stacktrace ;)

It occurred when I tried to debug one of test from IDEA level. What is interesting, this error does not happen when I'm running all test using grails test-app for instance.

So what was the issue? With little of reading and tip from Tomek Kalkosiński (http://refaktor.blogspot.com/) it turned out that our test was missing @TestFor annotation and adding it solved all problems.

This annotation, according to Grails docs (link), indicates Spock what class is being tested and implicitly creates field with given type in test class. It is somehow strange as problematic test had explicitly and "manually" created field with proper controller type. Maybe there is a problem with mocking servlet requests?