Hi,

I'm try write down the stps above but I'm have problem with the part "We switch back to Logical View, select the Entity, Client (tab), Write Code, and then the created method.". I can't find the Client (tab). Beside that I can't find the "created method" (I understand because of the missing tab, right ?

Thanks for the help. Congratulations for the blog (Good job).

Ok. Thanks a lot. I'm going to check that.

Hi Michael,
thanks for the article, but i'm having some problems with this when I try to deploy it to an azure website. When running in debug mode all is well but when I try to run deployed on azure website it doesn't work.

To test this I added a simple Desktop client to your sample code just so that I could get the Administration screens to add new users. I added two users; test1 and test2, using the desktop client.

When I run the HTMLClient it prompts me for username and password as expected, but when I make the ajax call I receive an empty string for the user. I've tested that the IHttpHandler code is being called by hardcoding a dummy username to be returned.

Any idea what i'm doing wrong here!!! Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Hi michael washington , i deployed the PictureUploader application . can you give login user name and password , i try the server authentication its throw the this error "Your login attempt was not successful. Please try again"

Michael,
Does this work for windows authentication as well or only for forms authentication?
Scott

Michael,
I had the code in the Entity "Created" js instead of the html client browseappointments "created" screen. It works with AD/Windows and returns the correct username. :)
Scott

Thank you! This was very helpful in being able to customize the visible and enabled objects by user in my lightswitch html application.

I just finished doing this tutorial using the new Lightswitch in Visual Studio 2013 Preview.

It was interesting to see how the UI has been refined between VS 2012 and 2013. My hat is off to the UX designers...they did a great job streamlining these tasks. The part where it switched between "Logical View" and "Files view" was a little tricky, but everything went very smoothly.

Michael, thanks for a great blog post!

I have tried this example a couple of times now and continue to get an error message (captured via Fiddler)

Any ideas on what the cause and resolution could be? Thanks in advance.

b> Description: An error occurred during the parsing of a resource required to service this request. Please review the following specific parse error details and modify your source file appropriately.


Parser Error Message: Could not create type '.GetUserName'.

Michael - thanks for the follow up. Yes it does work on the download and I have just figured out what the issue was when I tried to translate the solution to my own project.

Gets me every time, but it was a case sensitivity issue in the namespace. The actual namespace was LightSwitchApplication.Web and in the GetUserName markup file it was labeled as LightswitchApplication.Web -- lower case s got me.

Thanks again for your attention in following up. Have a great day.

BTW - I bought your most recent book and have been using it with my first HTML client project. Very helpful. I have a half dozen LS Silverlight projects under my belt but this is my first attempt with the HTML client.

Is this still the recommended method in VS LightSwitch 2013? If not, would you please point me in the right direction?

Thanks for all your articles - they've been very helpful.

Thanks for the article Michael.

I can't run it on vb, your example runs ok on C#.

Public Class GetUserName
Implements IHttpHandler

Sub ProcessRequest(ByVal context As HttpContext)Implements IHttpHandler.ProcessRequest
Using serverContext = ServerApplicationContext.CreateContext()

context.Response.ContentType = "text/plain"
context.Response.Write(serverContext.Application.User.Name)

End Using

End Sub

ReadOnly Property IsReusable() As Boolean Implements IHttpHandler.IsReusable
Get
Return False
End Get
End Property

End Class

Anything wrong?

I was tired yerterday... this morning with new energy I fixed:

Sub ProcessRequest(ByVal context As HttpContext) Implements IHttpHandler.ProcessRequest

Dim servercontext = ServerApplicationContext.CreateContext()

context.Response.ContentType = "text/plain"
context.Response.Write(servercontext.Application.User.Name)

End Sub

Thanks!

Michael you rock, you save my life, thank you very much

Hi Michel,
Do you have any idea why there are times that I retrieve the user correctly, and others not?
I don't know where I could start looking to resolve it.

Thanks!

I haven't been clear, on "entity.UserName = PromiseResult;" there are times that I get the user name, and there are times that I get "" on PromiseResult.
I use a breakpoint on GetUserName, and using debug, the times that it didn't get the user, didn't go into "GetUserName". Is there a way to debug the function: "function CallGetUserName"?

Thanks!

I think the problem comes in because the code sample above does not have a line saying

servercontext.Dispose

after the Response.Write call. This one caused me lots of problems yesterday, but adding a Dispose seems to have fixed it.

Regards,
Reece

Quick addendum: Fernando's original VB code fragment should have worked, as wrapping the Response.Write in a Using block removes the need to explicitly call Dispose on the variable servercontext. I've tried both ways now in my app, and they work either way. My original error stemmed from using the Dim statement to instantiate servercontext without calling Dispose explicitly, as Fernando did in his second code fragment. This caused all sorts of hangs, Runtime Errors returned, and general chaos. However, as soon as the Dispose was handled properly, either explicitly or implicitly with a Using block, the app then worked as it should.

I was trying to solve this for months and today I've found my error, then I wanted to share it and I found that Reece has posted the answer one month ago :(
I don't forget "Using" lesson in my life ;)

Thanks Reece!

First off I just purchased your html client book (Michael) and it is very good.
I have a question about this solution. I have a UserModified field in a table that I update on the server side using the entity_Updating method and this works by itself. I do not need to show this on the html client side. However, the issue is that when I click on a grid in the browse screen to edit record and then save and if I click on same record to edit again and click save, I get the Save Operation failed error and it wants me to refresh the browse screen which I do not want to do. This seems to be an issue (look at http://markgstacey.net/2013/05/09/using-sql-server-defaults-with-lightswitch/ and http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/786d9d6f-ba7c-476c-b9ff-efb4f4b653c7/value-on-screen-doesnt-match-value-in-the-entity?forum=lightswitchhtml ) in VS 2012.

I am using VS 2013 and it still is an issue that Huy Nguyen said that would be fixed in an update to refresh the screen.
So should I use the code in the first link to fix my issue or maybe update UserModified in the client side using your code? I do not understand why this is still an issue. That means you cannot save any data in the Updating method in the server since the html client will cache and not sync with the server changes. This means you cannot use the updating method at all in my opinion. I am using AD authentication.

OK, I added it to the msdn forum, http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/vstudio/en-US/e694fc49-d349-45ca-b812-f21fafebcaec/save-operation-failed-in-html-client-screen?forum=lightswitch .
I noticed that when I remove the code in the server side updating method everything is OK but when the usermodified field is updated then I get the error: Save Operation failed. The data your are editing has been updated by another transaction. Please refresh the page and try again. It is just a simple browse grid screen and an edit screen.
Thanks

Hi Michael,
I had problems again with promise operation after March 2014 Update, but just with an upgraded project.
Now the url needs myapp.rootUri.

Do you know why this has changed?

Thank you!

Hi,

one thing I don't understand.
Why would we create the UserName field when there is CreatedBy field already there.
Isn't it the same user (string)? How can we call that CreatedBy field in the screen?

I am using Visual Studio 2013 and your solution works if I use Windows Authenfication. In my own solution which is using a database as datasource, I allways recieving "No items". It doesn't seems to entering the methods (inserting, updating or create) ? Any idea whats happening? Is this the only way of getting the logged in user?

I wonder if you could use the screen object instead like:

myapp.PromiseOrders.created = function (screen) {

I am getting this error:
arguments = Accessing the 'arguments' property of a function is not allowed in strict mode
when the application executes:
ls.promiseOperation(CallGetUserName).then(function PromiseSuccess(PromiseResult) {

Any cluess?

HI ,

Could you please help me.

I have created one lightswtich application using c#. my problem is when i'm not able to search the record with name of some 'X' in data grid until and unless providing very first letter as capital.

thanks in advance.

Thanks,
Siva.

When i run the application and login then also when it redirect to default.htm page of lightswitch i get testuser.

this.Application.User.Name == testuser

why even after login from VS2013

I have added "entity.author=this.Application.User.Name" to the HTML side created js and received the following error

"Unable to get property 'User' of undefined or null reference"

Good Morning Michael,
Firstly I would like to thank you for sharing all this information. I’ve also purchased one of your books which is extremely helpful. Unfortunately I have a problem which I hope you could help me with, please. I had no problems with recreating what you said in this post, but I’m having problems with automatically filling in field which has dropdown list (due to relationship with another table).

I have two tables: tblHolidayRequests and tblEmployees. One of the fields in tblHolidayRequests takes data from tblEmployees (via relationship). This automatically created dropdown list on screen for tblHolidayRequests.

I’m trying to automatically fill in that dropdown list based on currently logged in user. I’ve added few employees to the table and one of them is called “TestUser”. I was hoping that as long as the same name exists in the table, your method should allow for dropdown list field to be filled in automatically with that name. Unfortunately that doesn’t work.
I’ve found a website where someone else used your method and claimed that he managed to achieve similar thing by changing the code. However I’ve tried that and it didn’t work. I’m starting to suspect that his tables had no relationships set up. Here is the website:
http://lightswitch.harshgarg.com/2013/09/select-current-user-in-lightswitch.html
Your help in this matter would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you very much in advance,
Kind regards,
Tom

Thank you very much for fast reply. Following your suggestion I've just posted my question on LightSwitch forum. Thank you very much once more.

I've been struggling a bit with this. The worked example is great but didn't work on my VS2013 environment. I downloaded the example which worked fine and set about tracking down what was different.

My pain all centered around not creating the handler correctly. I created it in the another directory initially then moved it to a directory called Web.

It ended up that the ASHX file (which you can't edit in VS) looked like this



instead of



Everything seemed fine, though no name was returned when creating a new THINGY but when trying to save them it just stalled because the call to the handler in the promise was none responsive. I tracked the cause down by using a URL like http://localhost:53349/Web/GetUserName.ashx while debugging. This should return your username but was returning an error that the App_Code namespace could not be found.

Having started again on another app and created the Web directory then the GetUserName.ashx in the correct order it all worked exactly as described.

Its all now working a treat. I'm loving LS even though I'm a very very late arrival. We're using it to do simple data capture for BI projects where they currently use Excel. Its just fantastic and I can't thank you enough for this amazing resource and the rather fabulous books.