I have a customer who really wants to keep a very long naming convention during a migration to a new database. The new database uses Crystal Reports for reporting. I have gotten an ok to shorten the naming convention somewhat to "shortened name-date" with all of the other pertinent information parsed out into new fields.
However, one of the users who does a lot of the reporting has now said that one of the most tedious parts of her job was parsing out the old names so she could have a simple, high level, parent name for executive reports. With the new naming convention, she will still need to parse the field to get just the shortened name as her executive-level parent name. If I can't manage to get the ok to drop the date from this field, can Crystal reports be used to parse the field at the "-" similar to parsing the data using Excel? What I'm looking for is that her reports would have a formula that generates the executive-level short name behind the scenes so she doesn't have to think about it.
The date already exists in a date field, so parsing out the date from the name would not change other report functionality. Ideally, I would want to enter the data already separated out and concatenate fields per each user's particular needs, but I may not be able to do. Any info would be much appreciated.
Thank you.
I think you are looking for this...
Split({fieldname},"-")[1]
Related
I am putting my collection of some 13000 books in a mySQL database. Most of the copies I possess
can be identified uniquely by ISBN. I need to use this distinguishing code as a foreign key into
another database table.
However, quite a few of my books date from pre-ISBN ages. So for these, I am trying to devise a
scheme to uniquely assign a code, sort of like an SKU.
The code would be strictly for private use. It should have the important property that, when I
obtain a pre-ISBN publication, I could build the code from inspecting the work, and based on the
result search the database to see if I already have other copies in my possession.
Many years ago I think I saw a search scheme for some university(?) catalogue, where you could
perform a search of a title based on a concatenated string' (or code) that was made up of let's
say 8 letters from the title, and 4 from the author, and maybe some other data. For example,
to search 'The Nature of Space and Time' by Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose you might perform
a search on the string 'Nature SHawk', being comprised of 8 characters from the title (omitting
non-filing words and stopwords) and 4 from the author(s).
I haven't been able to find any information on such scheme's, or whether or not such an approach
was standardized in any way.
Something along these lines could be made up of course, but I was wondering if people here have
heard of such schemes, of have ideas on how to come to a solution to this.
So keep in mind the important property of 'replicability': using the scheme, inspection of a pre-
ISBN dated work should --omitting very special or exclusive cases-- in general lead to a code
that can singly be used to subsequently determine if such a copy is already in the database.
Thank you for your time.
Just use the Title (add Author and Publisher as options) and a series id to produce a fake isbn. Take a look at fake_isbn.
NOTE: use the first digit as a series id but don't use 9!
I want to create something called dynamic parser.
My project input is some data file like XML, Excel, CSVand ... file and I must parse it and extract its records and its fields and finally save it to SQL Server database.
My problem is that fields of the record is dynamic and I can not write parser in development time. I must provide parser in run-time. By dynamic I mean a user select each record fields using a Web UI. So, I know the numbers of fields in each record in run-time and some information about each field like its name and so on.
I discussed this type of project in question titled 'Design Pattern for Custom Fields in Relational Database'.
I also looked at Parser Generator but i did not get enought information about it and I don't know it is really related to my problem or not.
Is there any design pattern for this type of problem?
If you know the number of fields and the field names then extract the data from the file and then build a query using string concatenation
How can I create a form-only look up in Informix 4GL? I am using form painter plus the informix SE. Any help would be appreciated. I tried to create the form but the field is empty while selecting the choice. I think I am missing the relation or something.
FORMONLY is the equivalent of DISPLAYONLY in isql perform screens. Why not just define the database columns in the attributes section and use the NOUPDATE attribute for each column, or use BEFORE EDITUPDATE OF tabname, ABORT?
Since I4GL doesn't come with a form painter, the only ways to know what you can do with it is by reading the manual for your form painter, or by experimenting.
I'm also not entirely sure what you mean by a FORMONLY lookup? It could be any of a number of items. But the basics are that the field in the form is FORMONLY.fieldname TYPE xyz where xyz is the appropriate type. You use a CONSTRUCT or INPUT to get data into that field; you process the input to do the lookup. INPUT is more appropriate for an exact value lookup; CONSTRUCT will allow more flexible querying.
Since you've not shown what you've tried, nor indicated which form painter you're using, it is going to be hard to help further.
(And I note you've asked this question on the IIUG (International Informix Users Group) mailing list for 'classics' too.)
I am doing some maintenance on a database for an application that uses the Bold for Delphi object persistence framework. This database has been been in production for several years and several of the tables have grown quite large. One of them is the BOLD_CLOCKLOG which has something to do with Bold's transaction management.
I want to trim this table (it is up to 1.2GB, with entries from Jan 2006).
Can anyone confirm the system does not need this old information?
From the bolds documentation:
BOLD_CLOCKLOG
To be able to map the transaction numbers used in the TimeStamp columns to the corresponding physical time (such as 2001-01-01 12:34) the persistence mapper will store a log with timestamps and times. Normally, this log is written for each database operation, but if the traffic to the database is very intensive, it is possible to restrict how often this log is written by setting the property ClockLogGranularity. The event OnGetCurrentTime should also be implemented to ensure that all clients have the same time.The usage of this table can be controlled with the tagged value: Model.UseClockLog
So I believe this is used for versioning Boldobjects, see Object Versioning Extension in bolds documentation. If your application don't need this you can drop this in the database.
In our Bold application we don't use that feature. Why don't simply test to turn off Bold_ClockLog in the model, drop that big table and try to use your application. I'm pretty sure if something is wrong then it say so at once.
I can also mention that we have an own custom objecthistoy. It is simply big string (as TStringList.DelimetedText) in a ObjectHistory class that have Time, user and a note about action. This suits our need better that Bolds builtin objecthistory. The disadvantage is of course that we need to add calls in the code when logging to history is done.
Bold_ClockLog is an optional table, it's purpose is to store mapping between integer timestamps and corresponding DateTime values.
This allows you to find out datetime of the last modification to any object.
If you don't need this feature feel free to empty the table, it won't cause any problems.
In addition to Bold_ClockLog, the Bold_XFiles is another optional table that tends to grow large. But unlike the Bold_ClockLog the Bold_XFiles can not be emptied.
Both of these tables can be turned on/off in the model tag values.
assume a data structure Person used for a contact database. The fields of the structure should be configurable, so that users can add user defined fields to the structure and even change existing fields. So basically there should be a configuration file like
FieldNo FieldName DataType DefaultValue
0 Name String ""
1 Age Integer "0"
...
The program should then load this file, manage the dynamic data structure (dynamic not in a "change during runtime" way, but in a "user can change via configuration file" way) and allow easy and type-safe access to the data fields.
I have already implemented this, storing information about each data field in a static array and storing only the changed values in the objects.
My question: Is there any pattern describing that situation? I guess that I'm not the first one running into the problem of creating a user-adjustable class?
Thanks in advance. Tell me if the question is not clear enough.
I've had a quick look through "Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture" by Martin Folwer and the Metadata Mapping pattern describes (at quick glance) what you are describing.
An excerpt...
"A Metadata Mapping allows developers to define the mappings in a simple tabular form, which can then be processed bygeneric code to carry out the details of reading, inserting and updating the data."
HTH
I suggest looking at the various Object-Relational pattern in Martin Fowler's Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture available here. This is a list of patterns it covers here.
The best fit to your problem appears to be metadata mapping here. There are other patterns, Mapper, etc.
The normal way to handle this is for the class to have a list of user-defined records, each of which consists of list of user-defined fields. The configuration information forc this can easily be stored in a database table containing the a type id, field type etc, The actual data is then stored in a simple table with the data represented only as (objectid + field index)/string pairs - you convert the strings to and from the real type when you read or write the database.