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Context and Facets

A part of designing a method-based system is detailed design. So, once you have defined the service components, it is time to define the contracts. Context In searching for volatilities in your system you have probably found some parts that depend on the context in which they are executed. What does that mean? How I like to explain it is, that context is about achieving the same result but from a different perspective. Like canceling a doctor's appointment. Imagine a healtcare manager contract with the following operations: public interface IHealthcareManager { Task<CreateAppointmentResult> CreateAppointment(CreateAppointmentRequest request); Task<CancelAppointmentResult> CancelAppointment(CancelAppointmentRequest request); } Canceling an appointment in the context of a patient is likely to be different than when the doctor's assistant cancels the appointment. And with different I mean; it will involve less or more steps in the proc

Google Releases Chart Image Generator

Google Releases Chart Image Generator 12/6/2007 1:11:05 PM Google released a chart generator service they are calling the Google Chart API . Usage is quite straightforward: you link to an image in the form of a parameterized URL, e.g. (line break added) http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht= p3&chd=t:90,49&chs=350x150&chl=Foo|Bar ... and Google returns a PNG graphic containing the chart. For instance, above URL results in the following image: Splitting up the image URL parameters, you can see what it's made up of: cht=p3 the chart type, in this case, a pie chart chd=t:90,49 the chart values, text-encoded, and separated by a comma chs=350x150 the custom chart size, 350x150 pixels chl=Foo|Bar the different labels for the pie chart sections, separated via the pipe character I'm not linking live to Google but caching this image on my server instead, just in case, as Google limits your requests to this API to 50,000 per day. Even with that limit, you ca