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  • SQL SERVER – What are Actions in SSAS and How to Make a Reporting Action

    - by Pinal Dave
    Actions are used for customized browsing and drilling of data for the end-user. It’s an event that a user can raise while accessing the cube data. They are used in cube browsers like excel and are triggered when a user in a client tool clicks on a particular member, level, dimension, cells or may be the cube itself.  For example a user might be able to see a reporting services report, open a web page or drill through to detailed information related to the cube data. Analysis server supports 3 types of actions :- Report Drill-through Standard Actions In this blog post, I will explain the Reporting  action. The objective of this action is to return a report with details of the product where the sales amount is greater than 1000 in cube browser analysis. You need to create a basic cube first with the facts and dimensions you want in the analysis. Following are the steps to create reporting action. Go to SQL server data tools and open the analysis services project. Navigate to actions and click on new reporting action. 2.) Specify the name of the action and choose target type as attribute members since we have to create the action on members for a attribute. 3.) Specify the Target object of your report action. Target object would be the dimension or attribute on which you want the report to appear. In our case it is product name. 4.) Next you have to define the condition on which you want the report link to appear. However, this is an optional feature. In this example we are specifying a condition, which will check if the sales amount is greater than 10,000. So, that the link appears only for those products where the defined condition is met. 5.) Next you have to specify the server name on which the report is present, report path  and the report format in which you want the report to appear. 6.) Additionally you can specify the parameters. As with conditional expression, the parameters should be a valid MDX expression. The parameter name should be same as the one defined in the report. 7.) Deploy your solution after you are done with specifying parameters and go to the cube browser. 8.) Click on the analyze in excel button, this will open your cube in excel 9.) Make an analysis which shows product names and their sales amount. 10.) Right click on a product where sales amount is greater than 10000 you will see the reporting action link. Click on that and you will be taken to your reporting services report. 11.) Clicking on the link will take you to the URL of the report. I created this report using report project wizard in SQL server data tools. So, this is how we can launch reports from a cube browser. Similarly you can open web pages, run applications and a number of  other tasks. Koenig Solutions offers SSAS training which contains all Analysis Services including Reporting in great detail. In my next blog post I will talk about drill-through actions. Author: Namita Sharma, Senior Corporate Trainer at Koenig Solutions. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL Tagged: SSAS

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  • Get Exchange Online Mailbox Size in GB

    - by Brian Jackett
    As mentioned in my previous post I was recently working with a customer to get started with Exchange Online PowerShell commandlets.  In this post I wanted to follow up and show one example of a difference in output from commandlets in Exchange 2010 on-premises vs. Exchange Online.   Problem    The customer was interested in getting the size of mailboxes in GB.  For Exchange on-premises this is fairly easy.  A fellow PFE Gary Siepser wrote an article explaining how to accomplish this (click here).  Note that Gary’s script will not work when remoting from a local machine that doesn’t have the Exchange object model installed.  A similar type of scenario exists if you are executing PowerShell against Exchange Online.  The data type for TotalItemSize  being returned (ByteQuantifiedSize) exists in the Exchange namespace.  If the PowerShell session doesn’t have access to that namespace (or hasn’t loaded it) PowerShell works with an approximation of that data type.    The customer found a sample script on this TechNet article that they attempted to use (minor edits by me to fit on page and remove references to deleted item size.)   Get-Mailbox -ResultSize Unlimited | Get-MailboxStatistics | Select DisplayName,StorageLimitStatus, ` @{name="TotalItemSize (MB)"; expression={[math]::Round( ` ($_.TotalItemSize.Split("(")[1].Split(" ")[0].Replace(",","")/1MB),2)}}, ` ItemCount | Sort "TotalItemSize (MB)" -Descending | Export-CSV "C:\My Documents\All Mailboxes.csv" -NoTypeInformation     The script is targeted to Exchange 2010 but fails for Exchange Online.  In Exchange Online when referencing the TotalItemSize property though it does not have a Split method which ultimately causes the script to fail.   Solution    A simple solution would be to add a call to the ToString method off of the TotalItemSize property (in bold on line 5 below).   Get-Mailbox -ResultSize Unlimited | Get-MailboxStatistics | Select DisplayName,StorageLimitStatus, ` @{name="TotalItemSize (MB)"; expression={[math]::Round( ` ($_.TotalItemSize.ToString().Split("(")[1].Split(" ")[0].Replace(",","")/1MB),2)}}, ` ItemCount | Sort "TotalItemSize (MB)" -Descending | Export-CSV "C:\My Documents\All Mailboxes.csv" -NoTypeInformation      This fixes the script to run but the numerous string replacements and splits are an eye sore to me.  I attempted to simplify the string manipulation with a regular expression (more info on regular expressions in PowerShell click here).  The result is a workable script that does one nice feature of adding a new member to the mailbox statistics called TotalItemSizeInBytes.  With this member you can then convert into any byte level (KB, MB, GB, etc.) that suits your needs.  You can download the full version of this script below (includes commands to connect to Exchange Online session). $UserMailboxStats = Get-Mailbox -RecipientTypeDetails UserMailbox ` -ResultSize Unlimited | Get-MailboxStatistics $UserMailboxStats | Add-Member -MemberType ScriptProperty -Name TotalItemSizeInBytes ` -Value {$this.TotalItemSize -replace "(.*\()|,| [a-z]*\)", ""} $UserMailboxStats | Select-Object DisplayName,@{Name="TotalItemSize (GB)"; ` Expression={[math]::Round($_.TotalItemSizeInBytes/1GB,2)}}   Conclusion    Moving from on-premises to the cloud with PowerShell (and PowerShell remoting in general) can sometimes present some new challenges due to what you have access to.  This means that you must always test your code / scripts.  I still believe that not having to physically RDP to a server is a huge gain over some of the small hurdles you may encounter during the transition.  Scripting is the future of administration and makes you more valuable.  Hopefully this script and the concepts presented help you be a better admin / developer.         -Frog Out     Links The Get-MailboxStatistics Cmdlet, the TotalitemSize Property, and that pesky little “b” http://blogs.technet.com/b/gary/archive/2010/02/20/the-get-mailboxstatistics-cmdlet-the-totalitemsize-property-and-that-pesky-little-b.aspx   View Mailbox Sizes and Mailbox Quotas Using Windows PowerShell http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/exchangelabshelp/gg576861#ViewAllMailboxes   Regular Expressions with Windows PowerShell http://www.regular-expressions.info/powershell.html   “I don’t always test my code…” image http://blogs.pinkelephant.com/images/uploads/conferences/I-dont-always-test-my-code-But-when-I-do-I-do-it-in-production.jpg   The One Thing: Brian Jackett and SharePoint 2010 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sg_h66HMP9o

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  • Design review for application facing memory issues

    - by Mr Moose
    I apologise in advance for the length of this post, but I want to paint an accurate picture of the problems my app is facing and then pose some questions below; I am trying to address some self inflicted design pain that is now leading to my application crashing due to out of memory errors. An abridged description of the problem domain is as follows; The application takes in a “dataset” that consists of numerous text files containing related data An individual text file within the dataset usually contains approx 20 “headers” that contain metadata about the data it contains. It also contains a large tab delimited section containing data that is related to data in one of the other text files contained within the dataset. The number of columns per file is very variable from 2 to 256+ columns. The original application was written to allow users to load a dataset, map certain columns of each of the files which basically indicating key information on the files to show how they are related as well as identify a few expected column names. Once this is done, a validation process takes place to enforce various rules and ensure that all the relationships between the files are valid. Once that is done, the data is imported into a SQL Server database. The database design is an EAV (Entity-Attribute-Value) model used to cater for the variable columns per file. I know EAV has its detractors, but in this case, I feel it was a reasonable choice given the disparate data and variable number of columns submitted in each dataset. The memory problem Given the fact the combined size of all text files was at most about 5 megs, and in an effort to reduce the database transaction time, it was decided to read ALL the data from files into memory and then perform the following; perform all the validation whilst the data was in memory relate it using an object model Start DB transaction and write the key columns row by row, noting the Id of the written row (all tables in the database utilise identity columns), then the Id of the newly written row is applied to all related data Once all related data had been updated with the key information to which it relates, these records are written using SqlBulkCopy. Due to our EAV model, we essentially have; x columns by y rows to write, where x can by 256+ and rows are often into the tens of thousands. Once all the data is written without error (can take several minutes for large datasets), Commit the transaction. The problem now comes from the fact we are now receiving individual files containing over 30 megs of data. In a dataset, we can receive any number of files. We’ve started seen datasets of around 100 megs coming in and I expect it is only going to get bigger from here on in. With files of this size, data can’t even be read into memory without the app falling over, let alone be validated and imported. I anticipate having to modify large chunks of the code to allow validation to occur by parsing files line by line and am not exactly decided on how to handle the import and transactions. Potential improvements I’ve wondered about using GUIDs to relate the data rather than relying on identity fields. This would allow data to be related prior to writing to the database. This would certainly increase the storage required though. Especially in an EAV design. Would you think this is a reasonable thing to try, or do I simply persist with identity fields (natural keys can’t be trusted to be unique across all submitters). Use of staging tables to get data into the database and only performing the transaction to copy data from staging area to actual destination tables. Questions For systems like this that import large quantities of data, how to you go about keeping transactions small. I’ve kept them as small as possible in the current design, but they are still active for several minutes and write hundreds of thousands of records in one transaction. Is there a better solution? The tab delimited data section is read into a DataTable to be viewed in a grid. I don’t need the full functionality of a DataTable, so I suspect it is overkill. Is there anyway to turn off various features of DataTables to make them more lightweight? Are there any other obvious things you would do in this situation to minimise the memory footprint of the application described above? Thanks for your kind attention.

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  • MDM for Tax Authorities

    - by david.butler(at)oracle.com
    In last week’s MDM blog, we discussed MDM in the Public Sector. I want to continue that thread. After all, no industry faces tougher data quality problems than governmental organizations, and few industries suffer more significant down side consequences to poor operations than local, state and federal governments. One key challenge area is taxation. Tax Authorities face a multitude of IT challenges. Firstly, the data used in tax calculations is increasing in volume and complexity. They must improve service by introducing multi-channel contact centers and self-service capabilities. Security concerns necessitate increasingly sophisticated data protection procedures. And cost constraints are driving Tax Authorities to rely on off-the-shelf software for many of their functional areas. Compounding these issues is the fact that the IT architectures in operation at most revenue and collections agencies are very complex. They typically include multiple, disparate operational and analytical systems across which the sum total of data about individual constituents is fragmented. To make matters more complicated, taxation is not carried out by a single jurisdiction, and often sources of income including employers, investments and other sources of taxable income and deductions must also be tracked and shared among tax authorities. Collectively, these systems are involved in tax assessment and collections, risk analysis, scoring, tracking, auditing and investigation case management. The Problem of Constituent Data Management The infrastructure described above makes it very difficult to create a consolidated representation of a given party. Differing formats and data models mean that a constituent may be represented in one way in one system and in a different way in another. Individual records are frequently inaccurate, incomplete, out of date and/or inconsistent with other records relating to the same constituent. When constituent data must be aggregated and scored, information within each system must be rationalized and normalized so the agency can produce a constituent information file (CIF) that provides a single source of truth about that party. If information about that constituent changes, each system in turn must be updated. There have been many attempts to solve this problem with technology: from consolidating transactional systems to conducting manual systems integration projects and superimposing layers of business intelligence and analytics. All these approaches can be successful in solving a portion of the problem at a specific point in time, but without an enterprise perspective, anything gained is quickly lost again. Oracle Constituent Data Mastering for Tax Authorities: A Single View of the Constituent Oracle has a flexible and long-term solution to the problem of securely integrating and managing constituent data. The Oracle Solution for mastering Constituent Data for Tax Authorities is based on two core product offerings: Oracle Customer Hub and – optionally – Oracle Application Integration Architecture (AIA). Customer Hub is a master data management (MDM) product that centralizes, de-duplicates, and enriches constituent data. It unifies fragmented information without disrupting existing business processes or IT investments. Role based data access and privacy rules guarantee maximum security and privacy. Data is continuously and automatically synchronized with all source systems. With the Oracle Customer Hub managing the master constituent identity, every department can capture transaction activity against the same record, improving reporting accuracy, employee productivity, reliability of constituent analytics, and day-to-day constituent relationships. Oracle Application Integration Architecture provides a collection of core pre-built processes to support out of the box Master Data Governance across Oracle Customer Hub, Siebel CRM, and Oracle E-Business Suite. It also provides a framework to enable MDM integrations with other Oracle and non-Oracle applications. Oracle AIA removes some of the key inhibitors to implementing a service-oriented architecture (SOA) by providing a pre-built SOA-based middleware foundation as well as industry-optimized service oriented applications, all built around a SOA governance model that encourages effective design and reuse. I encourage you to read Oracle Solution for Mastering Constituents Data for Public Sector – Tax Authorities by Roberto Negro. It is an outstanding whitepaper that describes how the Oracle MDM solution allows you to create a unified, reconciled source of high-quality constituent data and gain an accurate single view of each constituent. This foundation enables you to lower the costs associated with data quality and integration and create a tax organization that is efficient, secure and constituent-centric. Also, don’t forget the upcoming webcast on Thursday, February 10th: Deliver Improved Services to Citizens at Lower Cost to your Organization Our Guest Speaker is Ruben Spekle, from Capgemini. He will also provide insight into Public Sector Master Data Management and Case Management implementations including one that was executed for a Dutch Government Agency. If you are interested in how governmental organizations from around the world are using MDM to advance their cause, click here to register for the webcast.

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  • ResourceSerializable: an alternate to ORM and ActiveRecord

    - by Levi Morrison
    A few opinionated reasons I don't like the traditional ORM and ActiveRecord patterns: They work only with a database. Sometimes I'm dealing with objects from an API and other objects from a database. All the implementations I have seen don't allow for that. Feel free to clue me in if I'm wrong on this. They are brittle. Changes in the database will likely break your implemenation. Some implementations can help reduce this, but a few of the ones I've seen don't. Their very design is influenced by the database. If I want to switch to using an API, I'll have to redesign the object to get it to work (likely). It seems to violate the single-responsibility pattern. They know what they are and how they act, but they also know how they are created, destroyed and saved? Seems a bit much. What about an approach that is somewhat more familiar in PHP: implementing an interface? In php 5.4, we'll have the JsonSerializable interface that defines the data to be json_encoded, so users will become accustomed to this type of thing. What if there was a ResourceSerializable interface? This is still an ORM by name, but certainly not by tradition. interface ResourceSerializable { /** * Returns the id that identifies the resource. */ function resourceId(); /** * Returns the 'type' of the resource. */ function resourceType(); /** * Returns the data to be serialized. */ function resourceSerialize(); } Things might be poorly named, I'll take suggestions. Notes: ResourceId will work for API's and databases. As long as your primary key in the database is the same as the resource ID in the API, there is no conflict. All of the API's I've worked with have a unique ID for the resource, so I don't see any issues there. ResourceType is the group or type associated with the resource. You can use this to map the resource to an API call or a database table. If the ResourceType was person, it could map to /api/1/person/{resourceId} and the table persons (or people, if it's smart enough). resourceSerialize() returns the data to be stored. Keys would identify API parameters and database table columns. This also seems easier to test than ActiveRecord / Orm implemenations. I haven't done much automated testing on traditional ActiveRecord/ORM implemenations, so this is merely a guess. But it seems that I being able to create objects independently of the library helps me. I don't have to use load() to get an existing resource, I can simply create one and set all the right properties. This is not so easy in the ActiveRecord / Orm implemenations I've dealt with. Downsides: You need another object to serialize it. This also means you have more code in general as you have to use more objects. You have to map resource types to API calls and database tables. This is even more work, but some ORMs and ActiveRecord implementations require you to map objects to table names anyway. Are there other downsides that you see? Does this seem feasible to you? How would you improve it? Note: I almost asked this on StackOverflow because it might be too vague for their standards, but I'm still not really familiar with programmers.stackexchange.com, so please help me improve my question if it doesn't shape up to standards here.

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  • Branching and Merging Improvements in TFS2010

    - by jehan
    Introducing the concept of “first class branches” is a significant improvement as part of the 2010 release with respect to version control.  Not only does it help to distinguish between folders and branches, but it enables branch visualizations. Let us see improvements in detail. ·         In TFS2008, you don’t know which of the folders are Branches: All folders looks the same, all have the folder icon. Now, In TFS 2010 there is a new icon that shows which of the folder is a Branch.       ·      There is no visual means to manage branches in TFS2008:   You dont have any means to identify which branches are related and the relation type. Now, In TFS 2010 you have visual tools to see the Branches Hierarchy. In order to see a Branch Hierarchy just Right Click the Branch and choose: Branching and Merging –> View Hierarchy     ·         In TFS2008, there is no option to track changes path between the Branches:  If you have made a merge in a Branch you can’t track from which Branch this Merge came from. Now, you have the tools that shows the path of change between the Branches, you can also see where change was added on a timeline.  In order to track a change do the following: Step1: Right click the Branch and click View History   Step 2: Choose a changeset to track and click the “Track Changeset” button.     Step 3: Choose the branches that will be in the view and click “Visualize”. In above visual, you can see that Changesets 108,109,110 and 119 where merged from Main to Release1.0 Branch and then “Release_1.0” Branched to “Dev1.0. Step4: You can also see the Merges on a Timeline by clicking on the “Timeline Tracking” button.   Creating New Branches: In TFS 2010, the creation of branches has been streamlined a bit from the process in 2008.  In 2008, creating a new branch was like every other action in the system – changes were pended on the client, and then checked in to the server. Because of this creating new branch in TFS2008 was time-consuming process.  In TFS2010, the step where changes are pended has been bypassed and now performing the branch creation is entirely on the server.  With this approach, the round trip time for downloading a copy of each file on the branch and then uploading each file again has been eliminated.  Note: In TFS2010, the new branch will be created and committed as a single operation on the server. Pending changes will not be created, it doesn’t require a check-in as it will be carried out as a single operation and it’s not possible to cancel.     Manage Branch Permissions: The properties view for branches is also different than that of ordinary folders or file, containing some metadata for the branch, relationship information, and permissions for the branch. In TFS2008, the users who have checkout and Check-in permissions can create a branch. But, In TFS2010 you can control the permissions for Branches using Manage Branch permissions.   Reparent option in TFS2010: In TFS2008, if we have two branches which don’t have parent-child relation and we want perform merge between these two branches then we have to perform baseless merge using tf.exe command line. I have two branches Release_1.0 and Dev1.0_F2 which don’t have any relation between them, that’s why when I click on merge option in Release_1.0, in Target Branch it’s not showing Dev1.0_F2 branch to perform the merges.     Let us see what can we do for this in TFS2010, first perform a TFS baseless merge to establish a relationship between the parent branch and the child branches.  It will only merge the folder, not its contents. TFS baseless merges are performed via the command line using VS2010 command prompt and do the following:   tf merge /baseless <ParentBranch> <childBranch> Check in your pending changes. It will create the link between the branches but the relationships are still not completed.  Now, select the child branch in Source Control Explorer and from the File menu choose Source Control –> Branching and Merging –> Reparent.      In the dialog box,  choose the appropriate branch as the new parent.   Click Reparent and then go to parent branch and click merge. Now, will see that in Target Branch option Dev1.0_F2 branch is added.         Converting Folders to Branches and Branches to Folders: You can convert any Folder as Branch from Context Menu by performing right click on the folderàBranching and MergingàConvert to Branch. In similar way, you can convert the Branches to Folder using Convert to Folder option available in File Menu (FileàSource ControlàBranching and MergingàConvert to Branch). This option is not available in context menu.

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  • .Net Reflector 6.5 EAP now available

    - by CliveT
    With the release of CLR 4 being so close, we’ve been working hard on getting the new C# and VB language features implemented inside Reflector. The work isn’t complete yet, but we have some of the features working. Most importantly, there are going to be changes to the Reflector object model, and we though it would be useful for people to see the changes and have an opportunity to comment on them. Before going any further, we should tell you what the EAP contains that’s different from the released version. A number of bugs have been fixed, mainly bugs that were raised via the forum. This is slightly offset by the fact that this EAP hasn’t had a whole lot of testing and there may have been new bugs introduced during the development work we’ve been doing. The C# language writer has been changed to display in and out co- and contra-variance markers on interfaces and delegates, and to display default values for optional parameters in method definitions. We also concisely display values passed by reference into COM calls. However, we do not change callsites to display calls using named parameters; this looks like hard work to get right. The forthcoming version of the C# language introduces dynamic types and dynamic calls. The new version of Reflector should display a dynamic call rather than the generated C#: dynamic target = MyTestObject(); target.Hello("Mum"); We have a few bugs in this area where we are not casting to dynamic when necessary. These have been fixed on a branch and should make their way into the next EAP. To support the dynamic features, we’ve added the types IDynamicMethodReferenceExpression, IDynamicPropertyIndexerExpression, and IDynamicPropertyReferenceExpression to the object model. These types, based on the versions without “Dynamic” in the name, reflect the fact that we don’t have full information about the method that is going to be called, but only have its name (as a string). These interfaces are going to change – in an internal version, they have been extended to include information about which parameter positions use runtime types and which use compile time types. There’s also the interface, IDynamicVariableDeclaration, that can be used to determine if a particular variable is used at dynamic call sites as a target. A couple of these language changes have also been added to the Visual Basic language writer. The new features are exposed only when the optimization level is set to .NET 4. When the level is set this high, the other standard language writers will simply display a message to say that they do not handle such an optimization level. Reflector Pro now has 4.0 as an optional compilation target and we have done some work to get the pdb generation right for these new features. The EAP version of Reflector no longer installs the add-in on startup. The first time you run the EAP, it displays the integration options dialog. You can use the checkboxes to select the versions of Visual Studio into which you want to install the EAP version. Note that you can only have one version of Reflector Pro installed in Visual Studio; if you install into a Visual Studio that has another version installed, the previous version will be removed. Please try it out and send your feedback to the EAP forum.

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  • #altnetseattle &ndash; REST Services

    - by GeekAgilistMercenary
    Below are the notes I made in the REST Architecture Session I helped kick off with Andrew. RSS, ATOM, and such needed for better discovery.  i.e. there still is a need for some type of discovery. Difficult is modeling behaviors in a RESTful way.  ??  Invoking some type of state against an object.  For instance in the case of a POST vs. a GET.  The GET is easy, comes back as is, but what about a POST, which often changes some state or something. Challenge is doing multiple workflows with stateful workflows.  How does batch work.  Maybe model the batch as a resource. Frameworks aren’t particularly part of REST, REST is REST.  But point argued that REST is modeled, or part of modeling a state machine of some sort… ? Nothing is 100% reliable w/ REST – comparisons drawn with TCP/IP.  Sufficient probability is made however for the communications, but the idea of a possible failure has to be built into the usage model of REST. Ruby on Rails / RESTfully, and others used.  What were their issues, what do they do.  ATOM feeds, object serialized, using LINQ to XML w/ this.  No state machine libraries. Idempotent areas around REST and single change POST changes are inherent in the architecture. REST – one of the constrained languages is for the interaction w/ the system.  Limiting what can be done on the resources.  - disagreement, there is no agreed upon REST verbs. Sam Ruby – RESTful services.  Expanded the verbs within REST/HTTP pushes you off the web.  Of the existing verbs POST leaves the most up for debate. Robert Reem used Factory to deal with the POST to handle the new state.  The POST identifying what it just did by the return. Different states are put into POST, so that new prospective verbs, without creating verbs for REST/HTTP can be used to advantage without breaking universal clients. Biggest issue with REST services is their lack of state, yet it is also one of their biggest strengths.  What happens is that the client takes up the often onerous task of handling all state, state machines, and other extraneous resource management.  All the GETs, POSTs, DELETEs, INSERTs get all pushed into abstraction.  My 2 cents is that this in a way ends up pushing a huge proprietary burden onto the REST services often removing the point of REST to be simple and to the point. WADL does provide discovery and some state control (sort of?) Statement made, "WADL" isn't needed.  The JSON, XML, or other client side returned data handles this. I then applied the law of 2 feet rule for myself and headed to finish up these notes, post to the Wiki, and figure out what I was going to do next.  For the original Wiki entry check it out here. I will be adding more to this post with a subsequent post.  Please do feel free to post your thoughts and ideas about this, as I am sure everyone in the session will have more for elaboration.

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  • Employee Engagement Q&A with John Brunswick

    - by Kellsey Ruppel
    As we are focusing this week on Employee Engagement, I recently sat down with industry expert and thought leader John Brunswick on the topic. Here is the Q&A dialogue we shared.  Q: How do you effectively engage employees to drive business value?A: Motivation, both extrinsic and intrinsic, combined with the relevancy of various channels to support it.  Beyond chaining business strategies like compensation models within an organization, engagement ultimately is most successful when driven by employee's motivations.  Business value derived from engagement through technical capabilities can be objectively measured through metrics like the rate and accuracy of problem solving for a given business function or frequency of innovation created.  Providing employees performing "knowledge work" with capabilities that allow them to perform work with a higher degree of accuracy in the same or ideally less time, adds value for that individual and in turn, drives their level of engagement to drive business value. Q: Organizations with high levels of employee engagement outperform the total stock market index by 22%. Can you comment on why you think this might be? A: Alignment through shared purpose.  Zappos is an excellent example of a culture that arguably has higher than average levels of employee engagement and it permeates every aspect of their organization – embodied externally through their customer experience.  I recently made my first purchase with them and it was obvious through their web experience, visual design, communication style, customer service and attention to detail down to green packaging, that they have an amazingly strong shared purpose.  The Zappos.com ‘About page’ outlines their "Family Core Values", the first three being "Deliver WOW Through Service, Embrace and Drive Change & Create Fun and A Little Weirdness" – all reflected externally in my interaction with them.  Strong shared purpose enables higher product and service experience, equating to a dedicated customer base, repeat purchases and expanded marketshare. Q: Have you seen any trends in the market regarding employee engagement? A: Some companies now see offering a form of social engagement similar to Facebook and LinkedIn as standard communication infrastructure like email or instant messaging.  Originally offered as standalone tools, the value is now seen when these capabilities are offered in an integrated fashion in the context of business entities.  An emerging area of focus is around employee activities related to their organization on external social platforms, implicitly creating external communities with employees acting on behalf of the brand and interacting with each other (e.g. Twitter).  Companies have reached a formal understand that this now established communication medium requires strategies allowing employees to engage.  I have personally met colleagues from Oracle, like Oracle User Experience Director Ultan O'Broin (@ultan), via Twitter before meeting first through internal channels. Q: Employee engagement is important, but what about engaging customers and partners? A: The last few years we have witnessed an interesting evolution from the novelty of self-service to expectations of "intelligent" self-service.  From a consumer standpoint, engagement can end up being a key differentiator, especially in mature markets.  Customers that perform some level of interaction with a brand develop greater affinity for the brand and have a greater probability of acting as an advocate.  As organizations move toward a model of deeper engagement, they must ensure that their business is positioned to support deeper relationships, offering potentially greater transparency. From a partner standpoint greater engagement can lead to new types of business opportunities, much in the way that Amazon.com offers a unified shopping experience that can potentially span various vendors.  This same model can be extended to blending services and product delivery models, based on a closeness not easily possible before increased capability of engagement mechanisms. Q: What types of solutions are available to successfully deliver employee engagement? A: Solutions enabling higher levels of engagement do so on the basis of relevancy.  This relevancy is generally supported by aspects of content management, social collaboration, business intelligence, portal and process management technologies.  These technologies can help deliver an experience tailored to a given role or process within an organization that applies equally to work that is structured or unstructured, appearing in the form of functionality as simple as an online employee directory search, knowledge communities supported by social collaboration, as well as more feature rich business intelligence dashboards and portals. Looking to learn more about how to effectively engage your employees? Check out this webcast, or read more from John Brunswick. 

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  • SQL SERVER – Curious Case of Disappearing Rows – ON UPDATE CASCADE and ON DELETE CASCADE – Part 1 of 2

    - by pinaldave
    Social media has created an Always Connected World for us. Recently I enrolled myself to learn new technologies as a student. I had decided to focus on learning and decided not to stay connected on the internet while I am in the learning session. On the second day of the event after the learning was over, I noticed lots of notification from my friend on my various social media handle. He had connected with me on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, YouTube as well SMS, WhatsApp on the phone, Skype messages and not to forget with a few emails. I right away called him up. The problem was very unique – let us hear the problem in his own words. “Pinal – we are in big trouble we are not able to figure out what is going on. Our product details table is continuously loosing rows. Lots of rows have disappeared since morning and we are unable to find why the rows are getting deleted. We have made sure that there is no DELETE command executed on the table as well. The matter of the fact, we have removed every single place the code which is referencing the table. We have done so many crazy things out of desperation but no luck. The rows are continuously deleted in a random pattern. Do you think we have problems with intrusion or virus?” After describing the problems he had pasted few rants about why I was not available during the day. I think it will be not smart to post those exact words here (due to many reasons). Well, my immediate reaction was to get online with him. His problem was unique to him and his team was all out to fix the issue since morning. As he said he has done quite a lot out in desperation. I started asking questions from audit, policy management and profiling the data. Very soon I realize that I think this problem was not as advanced as it looked. There was no intrusion, SQL Injection or virus issue. Well, long story short first - It was a very simple issue of foreign key created with ON UPDATE CASCADE and ON DELETE CASCADE.  CASCADE allows deletions or updates of key values to cascade through the tables defined to have foreign key relationships that can be traced back to the table on which the modification is performed. ON DELETE CASCADE specifies that if an attempt is made to delete a row with a key referenced by foreign keys in existing rows in other tables, all rows containing those foreign keys are also deleted. ON UPDATE CASCADE specifies that if an attempt is made to update a key value in a row, where the key value is referenced by foreign keys in existing rows in other tables, all of the foreign key values are also updated to the new value specified for the key. (Reference: BOL) In simple words – due to ON DELETE CASCASE whenever is specified when the data from Table A is deleted and if it is referenced in another table using foreign key it will be deleted as well. In my friend’s case, they had two tables, Products and ProductDetails. They had created foreign key referential integrity of the product id between the table. Now the as fall was up they were updating their catalogue. When they were updating the catalogue they were deleting products which are no more available. As the changes were cascading the corresponding rows were also deleted from another table. This is CORRECT. The matter of the fact, there is no error or anything and SQL Server is behaving how it should be behaving. The problem was in the understanding and inappropriate implementations of business logic.  What they needed was Product Master Table, Current Product Catalogue, and Product Order Details History tables. However, they were using only two tables and without proper understanding the relation between them was build using foreign keys. If there were only two table, they should have used soft delete which will not actually delete the record but just hide it from the original product table. This workaround could have got them saved from cascading delete issues. I will be writing a detailed post on the design implications etc in my future post as in above three lines I cannot cover every issue related to designing and it is also not the scope of the blog post. More about designing in future blog posts. Once they learn their mistake, they were happy as there was no intrusion but trust me sometime we are our own enemy and this is a great example of it. In tomorrow’s blog post we will go over their code and workarounds. Feel free to share your opinions, experiences and comments. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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  • SQLAuthority Guest Post – Lessons from Life and Work by Srini Chandra (Author of 3 Lives, in search of bliss)

    - by pinaldave
    Work and life are confusing terms together. How can one consider work outside of life. Work should be part of life or are we considering ourselves dead when we are at work. I have often seen developers and DBA complaining and confused about their job, work and life. Complaining is easy and everyone can do. I have heard quite often expression – “I do not have any other option.” I requested Srini Chanda (renowned author of Amazon Best Seller 3 Lives, in search of bliss (Amazon | Flipkart) to write a guest post on this subject which developer can read and appreciate. Let us see Srini’s thoughts in his own words. Each of us who works in the technology industry carries an especially heavy burden nowadays. For, fate has placed in our hands an awesome power to shape our society and its consciousness. For that reason, we must pay more and more attention to issues of professionalism, social responsibility and ethics. Equally importantly, the responsibility lies in our hands to ensure that we view our work and career as an opportunity to enlighten and lift ourselves up. Story: A Prisoner, 20 years and a Wheel Many years ago, I heard this story from a professor when I was a student at Carnegie Mellon. A man was sentenced to 20 years in prison. During his time in prison, he was asked to turn a wheel every day. So, every day he turned the wheel. At times, when he was tired or puzzled and stopped turning the wheel, he would be flogged with a whip. The man did not know anything about the wheel other than that it was placed outside his jail somewhere. He wondered if the wheel crushed corn or if it ground wheat or something similar. He wondered if turning the wheel was useful to anyone. At the end of his jail term, he rushed out to see what the wheel was doing. To his disappointment, he found that the wheel was not connected to anything. All these years, he had been toiling for nothing. He gave a loud, frustrated shout and dropped dead. How many of us are turning wheels wondering what it is connected to? How many of us have unstated, uncaring attitudes towards our careers? How many of us view work as drudgery, as no more than a way to earn that next paycheck? How many of us have wondered about the spiritually uplifting aspect of work? Can a workforce that views work as merely a chore, be ethical? Can it produce truly life enhancing technology? Can it make positive contributions to the quality of life of a society? I think not. Thanks to Pinal and you, his readers, for giving me this opportunity to share my thoughts in a series of guest posts. I’d like to present a few ways over the next few weeks, in which we can tap into the liberating potential of work and make our lives better in the process. Now, please allow me to tell you another version of the story that the good professor shared with us in the classroom that day. Story: A Prisoner, 20 years, a Wheel and the LIFE A man was sentenced to 20 years in prison. During his time in prison, he was asked to turn a wheel every day. So, every day he turned the wheel. At first, his whole body and mind rebelled against his predicament. So, his limbs grew weary and his mind became numb and confused. And then, his self-awareness began to grow. He began to wonder how he came to be in the prison in the first place. He looked around and saw all his fellow prisoners also turning the wheel. His wife, his parents, his friends and his children – they were all in the prison too, and turning their own wheels! He began to wonder how this came about. As he wondered more and more, he began to focus less on his physical drudgery and boredom. And he began to clearly see his inner spirit which guided him in ways that allowed him to see the world with a universal view. His inner spirit guided him towards the source of eternal wisdom and happiness. He began to see the source of happiness in everything around him – his prison bound relationships, even his jailers and in his wheel. He became a source of light to those around him. His wheel jokes and humor infected them with joy and happiness. Finally, the day came for his release from jail. He walked calmly outside the jail and laughed aloud when he saw that the wheel was not connected to anything. He knelt down, kissed it and thanked it for the wisdom it taught him. Life is the prison. The wheel is your work. Both are sacred. Both have enormous powers to teach us wisdom and bring us happiness. Whether we allow them to do so, is a choice we have to make. Over the next few weeks, I hope to share with you a few lessons that I have learnt at the wheel in my two decades of my career (prison). Thank you for reading, and do let me know what you think. Reference: Srini Chandra (3 Lives, in search of bliss), Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority Book Review, T SQL, Technology

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  • Implementing Search for BlogReader Windows 8 Sample

    - by Harish Ranganathan
    The BlogReader sample is an excellent place to start speeding up your Windows 8 development skills.  The tutorial is available here and the complete source code is available here Create a project called WindowsBlogReader and create pages for ItemsPage.xaml, SplitPage.xaml and DetailPage.xaml and copy the corresponding code blocks from the sample listed above. Created a class file FeedData.cs and copy the code.  Finally, create a class DateConverter.cs and copy the code associated with it. With that you should be able to build and run the project.  There seems to be one issue in the sample feeds listed that the first week (feed1) doesn’t seem to expose it.  So you can skip that and use the second feed as first feed.  You will end up with one feed less but it works. I had demonstrated this in the recent TechDays at Chennai.  How we can use the Search Contract and implement Search for within the Blog Titles. First off, we need to declare that the App will be using Search Contract, in the Package.appmanifest file Next, we would need a handle of the Search Contract when user types on the search window in Charms Menu. If you had completed the code sample from the link above, you would have ItemsPage.xaml and ItemsPage.xaml.cs.  Open the ItemsPage.xaml.cs. Import the namespaces using System.Collections.ObjectModel and System.Linq. in the ItemsPage() constructor, right after this.InitializeComponent(); add the following code Windows.ApplicationModel.Search.SearchPane.GetForCurrentView().QuerySubmitted += ItemsPage_QuerySubmitted; This event is fired when users open up the Search Panel from Charms Menu, type something and hit enter. We need to handle this event declared in the delegate.  For that we need to pull the FeedDataSource instantiation to the root of the class to make it global. So, add the following as the first line within the partial class FeedDataSource feedDataSource; Also, modify the LoadState method, as follows:- protected override void LoadState(Object navigationParameter, Dictionary<String, Object> pageState)        {            feedDataSource = (FeedDataSource)App.Current.Resources["feedDataSource"];            if (feedDataSource != null)            {                this.DefaultViewModel["Items"] = feedDataSource.Feeds;            }        } Next is to implement the ItemsPage_QuerySubmitted method void ItemsPage_QuerySubmitted(Windows.ApplicationModel.Search.SearchPane sender, Windows.ApplicationModel.Search.SearchPaneQuerySubmittedEventArgs args)         {             this.DefaultViewModel["Items"] = from dynamic item in feedDataSource.Feeds                                              where                                              item.Title.Contains(args.QueryText)                                              select item;         } As you can see we are almost using the same defaultviewmodel with the change that we are using a linq query to do a search on feeds which has the Title that matches QueryText. With this we are ready to run the app. Run the App.  Hit the Charms Menu with Windows + C key combination and type a text to search within the blog. You can see that it filters the Blogs which has the matching text. We can modify the above Linq query to do a search for the Text in other attributes like description, actual blog content etc., I have uploaded the complete code since the original WindowsBlogReader Code is not available for download.  You can download it from here note:  this code is provided as-is without any warranties.  Cheers!!!

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  • HTTP Module in detail

    - by Jalpesh P. Vadgama
    I know this post may sound like very beginner level. But I have already posted two topics regarding HTTP Handler and HTTP module and this will explain how http module works in the system. I have already posted What is the difference between HttpModule and HTTPHandler here. Same way I have posted about an HTTP Handler example here as people are still confused with it. In this post I am going to explain about HTTP Module in detail. What is HTTP Module As we all know that when ASP.NET Runtimes receives any request it will execute a series of HTTP Pipeline extensible objects. HTTP Module and HTTP handler play important role in extending this HTTP Pipelines. HTTP Module are classes that will pre and post process request as they pass into HTTP Pipelines.  So It’s one kind of filter we can say which will do some procession on begin request and end request. If we have to create HTTP Module we have to implement System.Web.IHttpModule interface in our custom class. An IHTTP Module contains two method dispose where you can write your clean up code and another is Init where your can write your custom code to handle request. Here you can your event handler that will execute at the time of begin request and end request. Let’s create an HTTP Module which will just print text in browser with every request. Here is the code for that. using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Web; namespace Experiment { public class MyHttpModule:IHttpModule { public void Dispose() { //add clean up code here if required } public void Init(HttpApplication context) { context.BeginRequest+=new EventHandler(context_BeginRequest); context.EndRequest+=new EventHandler(context_EndRequest); } public void context_BeginRequest(object o, EventArgs args) { HttpApplication app = (HttpApplication)o; if (app != null) { app.Response.Write("<h1>Begin Request Executed</h1>"); } } public void context_EndRequest(object o, EventArgs args) { HttpApplication app = (HttpApplication)o; if (app != null) { app.Response.Write("<h1>End Request Executed</h1>"); } } } } Here in above code you can see that I have created two event handler context_Beginrequest and context_EndRequest which will execute at begin request and end request when request are processed. In this event handler I have just written a code to print text on browser. Now In order enable this HTTP Module in HTTP pipeline we have to put a settings in web.config  HTTPModules section to tell which HTTPModule is enabled. Below is code for HTTPModule. <configuration> <system.web> <compilation debug="true" targetFramework="4.0" /> <httpModules> <add name="MyHttpModule" type="Experiment.MyHttpModule,Experiment"/> </httpModules> </system.web> </configuration> Now I just have created a sample webform with following code in HTML like following. <form id="form1" runat="server"> <B>test of HTTP Module</B> </form> Now let’s run this web form in browser and you can see here it the output as expected.   Technorati Tags: HTTPModule,ASP.NET,Request

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  • Folders in SQL Server Data Tools

    - by jamiet
    Recently I have begun a new project in which I am using SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) and SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) 2012. Although I have been using SSDT & SSIS fairly extensively while SQL Server 2012 was in the beta phase I usually find that you don’t learn about the capabilities and quirks of new products until you use them on a real project, hence I am hoping I’m going to have a lot of experiences to share on my blog over the coming few weeks. In this first such blog post I want to talk about file and folder organisation in SSDT. The predecessor to SSDT is Visual Studio Database Projects. When one created a new Visual Studio Database Project a folder structure was provided with “Schema Objects” and “Scripts” in the root and a series of subfolders for each schema: Apparently a few customers were not too happy with the tool arbitrarily creating lots of folders in Solution Explorer and hence SSDT has gone in completely the opposite direction; now no folders are created and new objects will get created in the root – it is at your discretion where they get moved to: After using SSDT for a few weeks I can safely say that I preferred the older way because I never used Solution Explorer to navigate my schema objects anyway so it didn’t bother me how many folders it created. Having said that the thought of a single long list of files in Solution Explorer without any folders makes me shudder so on this project I have been manually creating folders in which to organise files and I have tried to mimic the old way as much as possible by creating two folders in the root, one for all schema objects and another for Pre/Post deployment scripts: This works fine until different developers start to build their own different subfolder structures; if you are OCD-inclined like me this is going to grate on you eventually and hence you are going to want to move stuff around so that you have consistent folder structures for each schema and (if you have multiple databases) each project. Moreover new files get created with a filename of the object name + “.sql” and often people like to have an extra identifier in the filename to indicate the object type: The overall point is this – files and folders in your solution are going to change. Some version control systems (VCSs) don’t take kindly to files being moved around or renamed because they recognise the renamed/moved file simply as a new file and when they do that you lose the revision history which, to my mind, is one of the key benefits of using a VCS in the first place. On this project we have been using Team Foundation Server (TFS) and while it pains me to say it (as I am no great fan of TFS’s version control system) it has proved invaluable when dealing with the SSDT problems that I outlined above because it is integrated right into the Visual Studio IDE. Thus the advice from this blog post is: If you are using SSDT consider using an Visual-Studio-integrated VCS that can easily handle file renames and file moves I suspect that fans of other VCSs will counter by saying that their VCS weapon of choice can handle renames/file moves quite satisfactorily and if that’s the case…great…let me know about them in the comments. This blog post is not an attempt to make people use one particular VCS, only to make people aware of this issue that might rise when using SSDT. More to come in the coming few weeks! @jamiet

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  • Customer Engagement: Are Your Customers Engaged With Your Brands?

    - by Michael Snow
    Engaging Customers is Critical for Business Growth This week we'll be spending some time looking at Customer Engagement. We all have stories about how we try to engage our customers better than ever before.  We all know that successfully engaging customers is critical to an organization’s business success. We also know that engaging our customers is more challenging today than ever before. There is so much noise to compete with for getting anyone's attention. Over the last decade and a half we’ve watched as the online channel became a primary one for conducting our business and even managing our lives. And during this whole process or evolution, the customer journey has grown increasingly complex. Customers themselves have assumed increasing power and influence over the purchase process and for setting the tone and pace of the relationships they have with brands and you see the evidence of this in the really high expectations that customers have today. They expect brand experiences that are personalized and relevant -- In other words they want experiences that demonstrate that the brand understands their interests, preferences and past interactions with them. They also expect their experience with a brand and the community surrounding it to be social and interactive – it’s no longer acceptable to have a static, one-way dialogue with your customer base or to fail to connect your customers with fellow customers, or with your employees and partners. And on top of all this, customers expect us to deliver this rich and engaging, personalized and interactive experience, in a consistent way across a variety of channels including web, mobile and social channels or even offline venues such as in-store or via a call center. And as a result, we see that delivery on these expectations and successfully engaging your customers is a great challenge today. Customers expect a personal, engaging and consistent online customer experience. Today’s consumer expects to engage with your brand and the community surrounding it in an interactive and social way. Customers have come to expect a lot for the online customer experience.  ·        They expect it to be personal: o   Accessible:  - Regardless of my device  Via my existing online identities  o   Relevant:  Content that interests me  o   Customized:  To be able to tailor my online experience  ·        They expect it to be engaging: o   Social:  So I can share content with my social networks  o   Intuitive:  To easily find what I need   o   Interactive:  So I can interact with online communities And they expect it to be consistent across the online experience – so you better have your brand and information ducks in a row. These expectations are not only limited to your customers by any means. Your employees (and partners) are also expecting to be empowered with engagement tools across their internal and external communications and interactions with customers, partners and other employees. We had a great conversation with Ted Schadler from Forrester Research entitled: "Mobile is the New Face of Engagement" that is now available On-Demand. Take a look at all the webcasts available to watch from our Social Business Thought Leader Series. Social capabilities have become so pervasive and changed customers’ expectations for their online experiences. The days of one-direction communication with customers are at an end. Today’s customers expect to engage in a dialogue with your brand and the community surrounding it in an interactive and social way. You have at a very short window of opportunity to engage a customer before they go to another site in their pursuit of information, product, or services. In fact, customers who engage with brands via social media tend to spend more that customers who don’t, between 20% and 40% more.  And your customers are also increasingly influenced by their social networks too – 40% of consumers say they factor in Facebook recommendations when making purchasing decisions.  This means a few different things for today’s businesses. Incorporating forms of social interaction such as commenting or reviews as well as tightly integrating your online experience with your customers’ social networking experiences into the online customer experience are crucial for maintaining the eyeballs on your desired pages. --- Notes/Sources: 93% - Cone Finds that Americans Expect Companies to Have a Presence in Social Media - http://www.coneinc.com/content1182 40% of consumers factor in Facebook recommendations when making decisions about purchasing (Increasing Campaign Effectiveness with Social Media, Syncapse, March 2011) 20%-40% - Customers who engage with a company via social media spend this percentage more with that company than other customers (Source: Bain & Company Report – Putting Social Media to Work)

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  • Responding to the page unload in a managed bean

    - by frank.nimphius
    Though ADF Faces provides an uncommitted data warning functionality, developers may have the requirement to respond to the page unload event within custom application code, programmed in a managed bean. The af:clientListener tag that is used in ADF Faces to listen for JavaScript and ADF Faces client component events does not provide the option to listen for the unload event. So this often recommended way of implementing JavaScript in ADF Faces does not work for this use case. To send an event from JavaScript to the server, ADF Faces provides the af:serverListener tag that you use to queue a CustomEvent that invokes method in a managed bean. While this is part of the solution, during testing, it turns out, the browser native JavaScript unload event itself is not very helpful to send an event to the server using the af:serverListener tag. The reason for this is that when the unload event fires, the page already has been unloaded and the ADF Faces AdfPage object needed to queue the custom event already returns null. So the solution to the unload page event handling is the unbeforeunload event, which I am not sure if all browsers support them. I tested IE and FF and obviously they do though. To register the beforeunload event, you use an advanced JavaScript programming technique that dynamically adds listeners to page events. <af:document id="d1" onunload="performUnloadEvent"                      clientComponent="true"> <af:resource type="javascript">   window.addEventListener('beforeunload',                            function (){performUnloadEvent()},false)      function performUnloadEvent(){   //note that af:document must have clientComponent="true" set   //for JavaScript to access the component object   var eventSource = AdfPage.PAGE.findComponentByAbsoluteId('d1');   //var x and y are dummy variables obviously needed to keep the page   //alive for as long it takes to send the custom event to the server   var x = AdfCustomEvent.queue(eventSource,                                "handleOnUnload",                                {args:'noargs'},false);   //replace args:'noargs' with key:value pairs if your event needs to   //pass arguments and values to the server side managed bean.   var y = 0; } </af:resource> <af:serverListener type="handleOnUnload"                    method="#{UnloadHandler.onUnloadHandler}"/> // rest of the page goes here … </af:document> The managed bean method called by the custom event has the following signature:  public void onUnloadHandler(ClientEvent clientEvent) {  } I don't really have a good explanation for why the JavaSCript variables "x" and "y" are needed, but this is how I got it working. To me it ones again shows how fragile custom JavaScript development is and why you should stay away from using it whenever possible. Note: If the unload event is produced through navigation in JavaServer Faces, then there is no need to use JavaScript for this. If you know that navigation is performed from one page to the next, then the action you want to perform can be handled in JSF directly in the context of the lifecycle.

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  • ODI 12c - Aggregating Data

    - by David Allan
    This posting will look at the aggregation component that was introduced in ODI 12c. For many ETL tool users this shouldn't be a big surprise, its a little different than ODI 11g but for good reason. You can use this component for composing data with relational like operations such as sum, average and so forth. Also, Oracle SQL supports special functions called Analytic SQL functions, you can use a specially configured aggregation component or the expression component for these now in ODI 12c. In database systems an aggregate transformation is a transformation where the values of multiple rows are grouped together as input on certain criteria to form a single value of more significant meaning - that's exactly the purpose of the aggregate component. In the image below you can see the aggregate component in action within a mapping, for how this and a few other examples are built look at the ODI 12c Aggregation Viewlet here - the viewlet illustrates a simple aggregation being built and then some Oracle analytic SQL such as AVG(EMP.SAL) OVER (PARTITION BY EMP.DEPTNO) built using both the aggregate component and the expression component. In 11g you used to just write the aggregate expression directly on the target, this made life easy for some cases, but it wan't a very obvious gesture plus had other drawbacks with ordering of transformations (agg before join/lookup. after set and so forth) and supporting analytic SQL for example - there are a lot of postings from creative folks working around this in 11g - anything from customizing KMs, to bypassing aggregation analysis in the ODI code generator. The aggregate component has a few interesting aspects. 1. Firstly and foremost it defines the attributes projected from it - ODI automatically will perform the grouping all you do is define the aggregation expressions for those columns aggregated. In 12c you can control this automatic grouping behavior so that you get the code you desire, so you can indicate that an attribute should not be included in the group by, that's what I did in the analytic SQL example using the aggregate component. 2. The component has a few other properties of interest; it has a HAVING clause and a manual group by clause. The HAVING clause includes a predicate used to filter rows resulting from the GROUP BY clause. Because it acts on the results of the GROUP BY clause, aggregation functions can be used in the HAVING clause predicate, in 11g the filter was overloaded and used for both having clause and filter clause, this is no longer the case. If a filter is after an aggregate, it is after the aggregate (not sometimes after, sometimes having).  3. The manual group by clause let's you use special database grouping grammar if you need to. For example Oracle has a wealth of highly specialized grouping capabilities for data warehousing such as the CUBE function. If you want to use specialized functions like that you can manually define the code here. The example below shows the use of a manual group from an example in the Oracle database data warehousing guide where the SUM aggregate function is used along with the CUBE function in the group by clause. The SQL I am trying to generate looks like the following from the data warehousing guide; SELECT channel_desc, calendar_month_desc, countries.country_iso_code,       TO_CHAR(SUM(amount_sold), '9,999,999,999') SALES$ FROM sales, customers, times, channels, countries WHERE sales.time_id=times.time_id AND sales.cust_id=customers.cust_id AND   sales.channel_id= channels.channel_id  AND customers.country_id = countries.country_id  AND channels.channel_desc IN   ('Direct Sales', 'Internet') AND times.calendar_month_desc IN   ('2000-09', '2000-10') AND countries.country_iso_code IN ('GB', 'US') GROUP BY CUBE(channel_desc, calendar_month_desc, countries.country_iso_code); I can capture the source datastores, the filters and joins using ODI's dataset (or as a traditional flow) which enables us to incrementally design the mapping and the aggregate component for the sum and group by as follows; In the above mapping you can see the joins and filters declared in ODI's dataset, allowing you to capture the relationships of the datastores required in an entity-relationship style just like ODI 11g. The mix of ODI's declarative design and the common flow design provides for a familiar design experience. The example below illustrates flow design (basic arbitrary ordering) - a table load where only the employees who have maximum commission are loaded into a target. The maximum commission is retrieved from the bonus datastore and there is a look using employees as the driving table and only those with maximum commission projected. Hopefully this has given you a taster for some of the new capabilities provided by the aggregate component in ODI 12c. In summary, the actions should be much more consistent in behavior and more easily discoverable for users, the use of the components in a flow graph also supports arbitrary designs and the tool (rather than the interface designer) takes care of the realization using ODI's knowledge modules. Interested to know if a deep dive into each component is interesting for folks. Any thoughts? 

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  • Restrict number of characters to be typed for af:autoSuggestBehavior

    - by Arunkumar Ramamoorthy
    When using AutoSuggestBehavior for a UI Component, the auto suggest list is displayed as soon as the user starts typing in the field. In this article, we will find how to restrict the autosuggest list to be displayed till the user types in couple of characters. This would be more useful in the low latency networks and also the autosuggest list is bigger. We could display a static message to let the user know that they need to type in more characters to get a list for picking a value from. Final output we would expect is like the below image Lets see how we can implement this. Assuming we have an input text for the users to enter the country name and an autosuggest behavior is added to it. <af:inputText label="Country" id="it1"> <af:autoSuggestBehavior /> </af:inputText> Also, assuming we have a VO (we'll name it as CountryView for this example), with a view criteria to filter out the VO based on the bind variable passed. Now, we would generate View Impl class from the java node (including bind variables) and then expose the setter method of the bind variable to client interface. In the View layer, we would create a tree binding for the VO and the method binding for the setter method of the bind variable exposed above, in the pagedef file As we've already added an input text and an autosuggestbehavior for the test, we would not need to build the suggested items for the autosuggest list.Let us add a method in the backing bean to return us List of select items to be bound to the autosuggest list. padding: 5px; background-color: #fbfbfb; min-height: 40px; width: 544px; height: 168px; overflow: auto;"> public List onSuggest(String searchTerm) { ArrayList<SelectItem> selectItems = new ArrayList<SelectItem>(); if(searchTerm.length()>1) { //get access to the binding context and binding container at runtime BindingContext bctx = BindingContext.getCurrent(); BindingContainer bindings = bctx.getCurrentBindingsEntry(); //set the bind variable value that is used to filter the View Object //query of the suggest list. The View Object instance has a View //Criteria assigned OperationBinding setVariable = (OperationBinding) bindings.get("setBind_CountryName"); setVariable.getParamsMap().put("value", searchTerm); setVariable.execute(); //the data in the suggest list is queried by a tree binding. JUCtrlHierBinding hierBinding = (JUCtrlHierBinding) bindings.get("CountryView1"); //re-query the list based on the new bind variable values hierBinding.executeQuery(); //The rangeSet, the list of queries entries, is of type //JUCtrlValueBndingRef. List<JUCtrlValueBindingRef> displayDataList = hierBinding.getRangeSet(); for (JUCtrlValueBindingRef displayData : displayDataList){ Row rw = displayData.getRow(); //populate the SelectItem list selectItems.add(new SelectItem( (String)rw.getAttribute("Name"), (String)rw.getAttribute("Name"))); } } else{ SelectItem a = new SelectItem("","Type in two or more characters..","",true); selectItems.add(a); } return selectItems; } So, what we are doing in the above method is, to check the length of the search term and if it is more than 1 (i.e 2 or more characters), the return the actual suggest list. Otherwise, create a read only select item new SelectItem("","Type in two or more characters..","",true); and add it to the list of suggested items to be displayed. The last parameter for the SelectItem (boolean) is to make it as readOnly, so that users would not be able to select this static message from the displayed list. Finally, bind this method to the input text's autosuggestbehavior's suggestedItems property. <af:inputText label="Country" id="it1"> <af:autoSuggestBehavior suggestedItems="#{AutoSuggestBean.onSuggest}"/> </af:inputText>

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  • How would I handle input with a Game Component?

    - by Aufziehvogel
    I am currently having problems from finding my way into the component-oriented XNA design. I read an overview over the general design pattern and googled a lot of XNA examples. However, they seem to be right on the opposite site. In the general design pattern, an object (my current player) is passed to InputComponent::update(Player). This means the class will know what to do and how this will affect the game (e.g. move person vs. scroll text in a menu). Yet, in XNA GameComponent::update(GameTime) is called automatically without a reference to the current player. The only XNA examples I found built some sort of higher-level Keyboard engine into the game component like this: class InputComponent: GameComponent { public void keyReleased(Keys); public void keyPressed(Keys); public bool keyDown(Keys); public void override update(GameTime gameTime) { // compare previous state with current state and // determine if released, pressed, down or nothing } } Some others went a bit further making it possible to use a Service Locator by a design like this: interface IInputComponent { public void downwardsMovement(Keys); public void upwardsMovement(Keys); public bool pausedGame(Keys); // determine which keys pressed and what that means // can be done for different inputs in different implementations public void override update(GameTime); } Yet, then I am wondering if it is possible to design an input class to resolve all possible situations. Like in a menu a mouse click can mean "click that button", but in game play it can mean "shoot that weapon". So if I am using such a modular design with game components for input, how much logic is to be put into the InputComponent / KeyboardComponent / GamepadComponent and where is the rest handled? What I had in mind, when I heard about Game Components and Service Locator in XNA was something like this: use Game Components to run the InputHandler automatically in the loop use Service Locator to be able to switch input at runtime (i.e. let player choose if he wants to use a gamepad or a keyboard; or which shall be player 1 and which player 2). However, now I cannot see how this can be done. First code example does not seem flexible enough, as on a game pad you could require some combination of buttons for something that is possible on keyboard with only one button or with the mouse) The second code example seems really hard to implement, because the InputComponent has to know in which context we are currently. Moreover, you could imagine your application to be multi-layered and let the key-stroke go through all layers to the bottom-layer which requires a different behaviour than the InputComponent would have guessed from the top-layer. The general design pattern with passing the Player to update() does not have a representation in XNA and I also cannot see how and where to decide which class should be passed to update(). At most time of course the player, but sometimes there could be menu items you have to or can click I see that the question in general is already dealt with here, but probably from a more elobate point-of-view. At least, I am not smart enough in game development to understand it. I am searching for a rather code-based example directly for XNA. And the answer there leaves (a noob like) me still alone in how the object that should receive the detected event is chosen. Like if I have a key-up event, should it go to the text box or to the player?

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  • DataContractSerializer: type is not serializable because it is not public?

    - by Michael B. McLaughlin
    I recently ran into an odd and annoying error when working with the DataContractSerializer class for a WP7 project. I thought I’d share it to save others who might encounter it the same annoyance I had. So I had an instance of  ObservableCollection<T> that I was trying to serialize (with T being a class I wrote for the project) and whenever it would hit the code to save it, it would give me: The data contract type 'ProjectName.MyMagicItemsClass' is not serializable because it is not public. Making the type public will fix this error. Alternatively, you can make it internal, and use the InternalsVisibleToAttribute attribute on your assembly in order to enable serialization of internal members - see documentation for more details. Be aware that doing so has certain security implications. This, of course, was malarkey. I was trying to write an instance of MyAwesomeClass that looked like this: [DataContract] public class MyAwesomeClass { [DataMember] public ObservableCollection<MyMagicItemsClass> GreatItems { get; set; }   [DataMember] public ObservableCollection<MyMagicItemsClass> SuperbItems { get; set; }     public MyAwesomeClass { GreatItems = new ObservableCollection<MyMagicItemsClass>(); SuperbItems = new ObservableCollection<MyMagicItemsClass>(); } }   That’s all well and fine. And MyMagicItemsClass was also public with a parameterless public constructor. It too had DataContractAttribute applied to it and it had DataMemberAttribute applied to all the properties and fields I wanted to serialize. Everything should be cool, but it’s not because I keep getting that “not public” exception. I could tell you about all the things I tried (generating a List<T> on the fly to make sure it wasn’t ObservableCollection<T>, trying to serialize the the Collections directly, moving it all to a separate library project, etc.), but I want to keep this short. In the end, I remembered my the “Debug->Exceptions…” VS menu option that brings up the list of exception-related circumstances under which the Visual Studio debugger will break. I checked the “Thrown” checkbox for “Common Language Runtime Exceptions”, started the project under the debugger, and voilà: the true problem revealed itself. Some of my properties had fairly elaborate setters whose logic I wanted to ignore. So for some of them, I applied an IgnoreDataMember attribute to them and applied the DataMember attribute to the underlying fields instead. All of which, in line with good programming practices, were private. Well, it just so happens that WP7 apps run in a “partial trust” environment and outside of “full trust”-land, DataContractSerializer refuses to serialize or deserialize non-public members. Of course that exception was swallowed up internally by .NET so all I ever saw was that bizarre message about things that I knew for certain were public being “not public”. I changed all the private fields I was serializing to public and everything worked just fine. In hindsight it all makes perfect sense. The serializer uses reflection to build up its graph of the object in order to write it out. In partial trust, you don’t want people using reflection to get at non-public members of an object since there are potential security problems with allowing that (you could break out of the sandbox pretty quickly by reflecting and calling the appropriate methods and cause some havoc by reflecting and setting the appropriate fields in certain circumstances. The fact that you cannot reflect your own assembly seems a bit heavy-handed, but then again I’m not a compiler writer or a framework designer and I have no idea what sorts of difficulties would go into allowing that from a compilation standpoint or what sorts of security problems allowing that could present (if any). So, lesson learned. If you get an incomprehensible exception message, turn on break on all thrown exceptions and try running it again (it might take a couple of tries, depending) and see what pops out. Chances are you’ll find the buried exception that actually explains what was going on. And if you’re getting a weird exception when trying to use DataContractSerializer complaining about public types not being public, chances are you’re trying to serialize a private or protected field/property.

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  • Your Next IT Job

    - by BuckWoody
    Some data professionals have worked (and plan to work) in the same place for a long time. In organizations large and small, the turnover rate just isn’t that high. This has not been my experience. About every 3-5 years I’ve changed either roles or companies. That might be due to the IT environment or my personality (or a mix of the two), but the point is that I’ve had many roles and worked for many companies large and small throughout my 27+ years in IT. At one point this might have been a detriment – a prospective employer looks at the resume and says “it seems you’ve moved around quite a bit.” But I haven’t found that to be the case all the time –in fact, in some cases the variety of jobs I’ve held has been an asset because I’ve seen what works (and doesn’t) in other environments, which can save time and money. So if you’re in the first camp – great! Stay where you are, and continue doing the work you love. but if you’re in the second, then this post might be useful. If you are planning on making a change, or perhaps you’ve hit a wall at your current location, you might start looking around for a better paying job – and there’s nothing wrong with that. We all try to make our lives better, and for some that involves more money. Money, however, isn’t always the primary motivator. I’ve gone to another job that doesn’t have as many benefits or has the same salary as the current job I’m working to gain more experience, get a better work/life balance and so on. It’s a mix of factors that only you know about. So I thought I would lay out a few advantages and disadvantages in the shops I’ve worked at. This post isn’t aimed at a single employer, but represents a mix of what I’ve experienced, and of course the opinions here are my own. You will most certainly have a different take – if so, please post a response! I also won’t mention a specific industry – I’ve worked everywhere from medical firms, legal offices, retail, billing centers, manufacturing, government, even to NASA. I’m focusing here mostly on size and composition. And I’m making some very broad generalizations here – I am fully aware that a small company might have great benefits and a large company might allow a lot of role flexibility.  your mileage may vary – and again, post those comments! Small Company To me a “small company” means around 100 people or less – sometimes a lot less. These can be really fun, frustrating places to to work. Advantages: a great deal of flexibility, a wide range of roles (often at the same time), a large degree of responsibility, immediate feedback, close relationships with co-workers, work directly with your customer. Disadvantages: Too much responsibility, little work/life balance, immature political structure, few (if any) benefits. If the business is family-owned, they can easily violate work/life boundaries. Medium Size company In my experience the next size company I would work for involves from a few hundred people to around five thousand. Advantages: Good mobility – fairly easy to get promoted, acceptable benefits, more defined responsibilities, better work/life balance, balanced load for expertise, but still the organizational structure is fairly simple to understand. Disadvantages: Pay is not always highest, rapid changes in structure as the organization grows, transient workforce. You may not be given the opportunity to work with another technology if someone already “owns” it. Politics are painful at this level as people try to learn how to do it. Large Company When you get into the tens of thousands of folks employed around the world, you’re in a large company. Advantages: Lots of room to move around – sometimes you can work (as I have) multiple jobs through the years and yet stay at the same company, building time for benefits, very defined roles, trained managers (yes, I know some of them are still awful – trust me – I DO know that), higher-end benefits, long careers possible, discounts at retailers and other “soft” benefits, prestige. For some, a higher level of politics (done professionally) is a good thing. Disadvantages: You could become another faceless name in the crowd, might not allow a great deal of flexibility,  large organizational changes might take away any control you have of your career. I’ve also seen large layoffs happen, and good people get let go while “dead weight” is retained. For some, a higher level of politics is distasteful. So what are your experiences? Share with the group! Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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  • WPF: Running code when Window rendering is completed

    - by Ilya Verbitskiy
    WPF is full of surprises. It makes complicated tasks easier, but at the same time overcomplicates easy  task as well. A good example of such overcomplicated things is how to run code when you’re sure that window rendering is completed. Window Loaded event does not always work, because controls might be still rendered. I had this issue working with Infragistics XamDockManager. It continued rendering widgets even when the Window Loaded event had been raised. Unfortunately there is not any “official” solution for this problem. But there is a trick. You can execute your code asynchronously using Dispatcher class.   Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(new Action(() => Trace.WriteLine("DONE!", "Rendering")), DispatcherPriority.ContextIdle, null);   This code should be added to your Window Loaded event handler. It is executed when all controls inside your window are rendered. I created a small application to prove this idea. The application has one window with a few buttons. Each button logs when it has changed its actual size. It also logs when Window Loaded event is raised, and, finally, when rendering is completed. Window’s layout is straightforward.   1: <Window x:Class="OnRendered.MainWindow" 2: xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" 3: xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" 4: Title="Run the code when window rendering is completed." Height="350" Width="525" 5: Loaded="OnWindowLoaded"> 6: <Window.Resources> 7: <Style TargetType="{x:Type Button}"> 8: <Setter Property="Padding" Value="7" /> 9: <Setter Property="Margin" Value="5" /> 10: <Setter Property="HorizontalAlignment" Value="Center" /> 11: <Setter Property="VerticalAlignment" Value="Center" /> 12: </Style> 13: </Window.Resources> 14: <StackPanel> 15: <Button x:Name="Button1" Content="Button 1" SizeChanged="OnSizeChanged" /> 16: <Button x:Name="Button2" Content="Button 2" SizeChanged="OnSizeChanged" /> 17: <Button x:Name="Button3" Content="Button 3" SizeChanged="OnSizeChanged" /> 18: <Button x:Name="Button4" Content="Button 4" SizeChanged="OnSizeChanged" /> 19: <Button x:Name="Button5" Content="Button 5" SizeChanged="OnSizeChanged" /> 20: </StackPanel> 21: </Window>   SizeChanged event handler simply traces that the event has happened.   1: private void OnSizeChanged(object sender, SizeChangedEventArgs e) 2: { 3: Button button = (Button)sender; 4: Trace.WriteLine("Size has been changed", button.Name); 5: }   Window Loaded event handler is slightly more interesting. First it scheduler the code to be executed using Dispatcher class, and then logs the event.   1: private void OnWindowLoaded(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) 2: { 3: Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(new Action(() => Trace.WriteLine("DONE!", "Rendering")), DispatcherPriority.ContextIdle, null); 4: Trace.WriteLine("Loaded", "Window"); 5: }   As the result I had seen these trace messages.   1: Button5: Size has been changed 2: Button4: Size has been changed 3: Button3: Size has been changed 4: Button2: Size has been changed 5: Button1: Size has been changed 6: Window: Loaded 7: Rendering: DONE!   You can find the solution in GitHub.

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  • What to "CRM" in San Francisco? CRM Highlights for OpenWorld '12

    - by Tony Berk
    There is plenty to SEE for CRM during OpenWorld in San Francisco, September 30 - October 4! As I mentioned in my earlier post about some of the keynote sessions, Is There a Cloud Over OpenWorld?, I'm going try to highlight some key sessions to help you find the best sessions for you. Interested to find out where Oracle CRM products are headed, then find your "roadmap" session. Here are some of the sessions in the CRM Track that you might want to consider attending for products you currently own or might consider for the future. I think you'll agree, there is quite a bit of investment going on across Oracle CRM. Please use OpenWorld Schedule Builder or check the OpenWorld Content Catalog for all of the session details and any time or location changes. Tip: Pre-enrolled session registrants via Schedule Builder are allowed into the session rooms before anyone else, so Schedule Builder will guarantee you a seat. Many of the sessions below will likely be at capacity. General Session: Oracle Fusion CRM—Improving Sales Effectiveness, Efficiency, and Ease of Use (Session ID: GEN9674) - Oct 2, 11:45 AM - 12:45 PM. Anthony Lye, Senior VP, Oracle leads this general session focused on Oracle Fusion CRM. Oracle Fusion CRM optimizes territories, combines quota management and incentive compensation, integrates sales and marketing, and cleanses and enriches data—all within a single application platform. Oracle Fusion can be configured, changed, and extended at runtime by end users, business managers, IT, and developers. Oracle Fusion CRM can be used from the Web, from a smartphone, from Microsoft Outlook, or from an iPad. Deloitte, sponsor of the CRM Track, will also present key concepts on CRM implementations. Oracle Fusion Customer Relationship Management: Overview/Strategy/Customer Experiences/Roadmap (CON9407) - Oct 1, 3:15PM - 4:15PM. In this session, learn how Oracle Fusion CRM enables companies to create better sales plans, generate more quality leads, and achieve higher win rates and find out why customers are adopting Oracle Fusion CRM. Gain a deeper understanding of the unique capabilities only Oracle Fusion CRM provides, and learn how Oracle’s commitment to CRM innovation is driving a wide range of future enhancements. Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service Vision and Roadmap (CON9764) - Oct 1, 10:45 AM - 11:45 AM. Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service combines Web, social, and contact center experiences for a unified, cross-channel service solution in the cloud, enabling organizations to increase sales and adoption, build trust, strengthen relationships, and reduce costs and effort. Come to this session to hear from Oracle experts about where the product is going and how Oracle is committed to accelerating the pace of innovation and value to its customers. Siebel CRM Overview, Strategy, and Roadmap (CON9700) - Oct 1, 12:15PM - 1:15PM. The world’s most complete CRM solution, Oracle’s Siebel CRM helps organizations differentiate their businesses. Come to this session to learn about the Siebel product roadmap and how Oracle is committed to accelerating the pace of innovation and value for its customers on this platform. Additionally, the session covers how Siebel customers can leverage many Oracle assets such as Oracle WebCenter Sites; InQuira, RightNow, and ATG/Endeca applications, and Oracle Policy Automation in conjunction with their current Siebel investments. Oracle Fusion Social CRM Strategy and Roadmap: Future of Collaboration and Social Engagement (CON9750) - Oct 4, 11:15 AM - 12:15 PM. Social is changing the customer experience! Come find out how Oracle can help you know your customers better, encourage brand affinity, and improve collaboration within your ecosystem. This session reviews Oracle’s social media solution and shows how you can discover hidden insights buried in your enterprise and social data. Also learn how Oracle Social Network revolutionizes how enterprise users work, collaborate, and share to achieve successful outcomes. Oracle CRM On Demand Strategy and Roadmap (CON9727) - Oct 1, 10:45AM - 11:45AM. Oracle CRM On Demand is a powerful cloud-based customer relationship management solution. Come to this session to learn directly from Oracle experts about future product plans and hear how Oracle is committed to accelerating the pace of innovation and value to its customers. Knowledge Management Roadmap and Strategy (CON9776) - Oct 1, 12:15PM - 1:15PM. Learn how to harness the knowledge created as a natural byproduct of day-to-day interactions to lower costs and improve customer experience by delivering the right answer at the right time across channels. This session includes an overview of Oracle’s product roadmap and vision for knowledge management for both the Oracle RightNow and Oracle Knowledge (formerly InQuira) product families. Oracle Policy Automation Roadmap: Supercharging the Customer Experience (CON9655) - Oct 1, 12:15PM - 1:15PM. Oracle Policy Automation delivers rapid customer value by streamlining the capture, analysis, and deployment of policies across every facet of the customer experience. This session discusses recent Oracle Policy Automation enhancements for policy analytics; the latest Oracle Policy Automation Connector for Siebel; and planned new capabilities, including availability with the Oracle RightNow product line. There is much more, so stay tuned for more highlights or check out the Content Catalog and search for your areas of interest. Which session are you most interested in? Make your suggestions! But no voting for Pearl Jam or Kings of Leon. Those are after hours! 

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  • Session and Pop Up Window

    - by imran_ku07
     Introduction :        Session is the secure state management. It allows the user to store their information in one page and access in another page. Also it is so much powerful that store any type of object. Every user's session is identified by their cookie, which client presents to server. But unfortunately when you open a new pop up window, this cookie is not post to server with request, due to which server is unable to identify the session data for current user.         In this Article i will show you how to handle this situation,  Description :         During working in a application, i was getting an Exception saying that Session is null, when a pop window opens. After seeing the problem more closely i found that ASP.NET_SessionId cookie for parent page is not post in cookie header of child (popup) window.         Therefore for making session present in both parent and child (popup) window, you have to present same cookie. For cookie sharing i passed parent SessionID in query string,   window.open('http://abc.com/s.aspx?SASID=" & Session.SessionID &','V');           and in Application_PostMapRequestHandler application Event, check if the current request has no ASP.NET_SessionId cookie and SASID query string is not null then add this cookie to Request before Session is acquired, so that Session data remain same for both parent and popup window.    Private Sub Application_PostMapRequestHandler(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As EventArgs)           If (Request.Cookies("ASP.NET_SessionId") Is Nothing) AndAlso (Request.QueryString("SASID") IsNot Nothing) Then               Request.Cookies.Add(New HttpCookie("ASP.NET_SessionId", Request.QueryString("SASID")))           End If       End Sub           Now access Session in your parent and child window without any problem. How this works :          ASP.NET (both Web Form or MVC) uses a cookie (ASP.NET_SessionId) to identify the user who is requesting. Cookies are may be persistent (saved permanently in user cookies ) or non-persistent (saved temporary in browser memory). ASP.NET_SessionId cookie saved as non-persistent. This means that if the user closes the browser, the cookie is immediately removed. This is a sensible step that ensures security. That's why ASP.NET unable to identify that the request is coming from the same user. Therefore every browser instance get it's own ASP.NET_SessionId. To resolve this you need to present the same parent ASP.NET_SessionId cookie to the server when open a popup window.           You can confirm this situation by using some tools like Firebug, Fiddler,  Summary :          Hopefully you will enjoy after reading this article, by seeing that how to workaround the problem of sharing Session between different browser instances by sharing their Session identifier Cookie.

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  • C++ OpenGL wireframe cube rendering blank

    - by caleb.breckon
    I'm just trying to draw a bunch of lines that make up a "cube". I can't for the life of me figure out why this is producing a black screen. The debugger does not break at any point. I'm sure it's a problem with my pointers, as I'm only decent at them in regular c++ and in OpenGL it gets even worse. const char* vertexSource = "#version 150\n" "in vec3 position;" "void main() {" " gl_Position = vec4(position, 1.0);" "}"; const char* fragmentSource = "#version 150\n" "out vec4 outColor;" "void main() {" " outColor = vec4(1.0, 1.0, 1.0, 1.0);" "}"; int main() { initializeGLFW(); // Initialize GLEW glewExperimental = GL_TRUE; glewInit(); // Create Vertex Array Object GLuint vao; glGenVertexArrays(1, &vao); glBindVertexArray(vao); // Create a Vertex Buffer Object and copy the vertex data to it GLuint vbo; glGenBuffers( 1, &vbo ); float vertices[] = { 1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, // Vertex 0 (X, Y, Z) -1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, // Vertex 1 (X, Y, Z) -1.0f, -1.0f, 1.0f, // Vertex 2 (X, Y, Z) 1.0f, -1.0f, 1.0f, // Vertex 3 (X, Y, Z) 1.0f, 1.0f, -1.0f, // Vertex 4 (X, Y, Z) -1.0f, 1.0f, -1.0f, // Vertex 5 (X, Y, Z) -1.0f, -1.0f, -1.0f, // Vertex 6 (X, Y, Z) 1.0f, -1.0f, -1.0f // Vertex 7 (X, Y, Z) }; GLuint indices[] = { 0, 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 0, 4, 5, 5, 6, 6, 7, 7, 4, 0, 4, 1, 5, 2, 6, 3, 7 }; glBindBuffer( GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, vbo ); glBufferData( GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, sizeof( vertices ), vertices, GL_STATIC_DRAW ); //glBindBuffer( GL_ELEMENT_ARRAY_BUFFER, vbo); //glBufferData( GL_ELEMENT_ARRAY_BUFFER, sizeof( indices ), indices, GL_STATIC_DRAW ); // Create and compile the vertex shader GLuint vertexShader = glCreateShader( GL_VERTEX_SHADER ); glShaderSource( vertexShader, 1, &vertexSource, NULL ); glCompileShader( vertexShader ); // Create and compile the fragment shader GLuint fragmentShader = glCreateShader( GL_FRAGMENT_SHADER ); glShaderSource( fragmentShader, 1, &fragmentSource, NULL ); glCompileShader( fragmentShader ); // Link the vertex and fragment shader into a shader program GLuint shaderProgram = glCreateProgram(); glAttachShader( shaderProgram, vertexShader ); glAttachShader( shaderProgram, fragmentShader ); glBindFragDataLocation( shaderProgram, 0, "outColor" ); glLinkProgram (shaderProgram); glUseProgram( shaderProgram); // Specify the layout of the vertex data GLint posAttrib = glGetAttribLocation( shaderProgram, "position" ); glEnableVertexAttribArray( posAttrib ); glVertexAttribPointer( posAttrib, 3, GL_FLOAT, GL_FALSE, 0, 0 ); // Main loop while(glfwGetWindowParam(GLFW_OPENED)) { // Clear the screen to black glClearColor( 0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f ); glClear( GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT ); // Draw lines from 2 vertices glDrawElements(GL_LINES, sizeof(indices), GL_UNSIGNED_INT, indices ); // Swap buffers glfwSwapBuffers(); } // Clean up glDeleteProgram( shaderProgram ); glDeleteShader( fragmentShader ); glDeleteShader( vertexShader ); //glDeleteBuffers( 1, &ebo ); glDeleteBuffers( 1, &vbo ); glDeleteVertexArrays( 1, &vao ); glfwTerminate(); exit( EXIT_SUCCESS ); }

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