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File Adapter FileName Macros

- by IntegrationOverload

I can never find these when I need them... Macro name Substitute value %datetime% Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) date time in the format YYYY-MM-DDThhmmss (for example, 1997-07-12T103508). %datetime_bts2000% UTC date time in the format YYYYMMDDhhmmsss, where sss means seconds and milliseconds (for example, 199707121035234 means 1997/07/12, 10:35:23 and 400 milliseconds). %datetime.tz% Local date time plus time zone from GMT in the format YYYY-MM-DDThhmmssTZD, (for example, 1997-07-12T103508+800). %DestinationParty% Name of the destination party. The value comes from the message context property BTS.DestinationParty. %DestinationPartyQualifier% Qualifier of the destination party. The value comes from the message context property BTS.DestinationPartyQualifier. %MessageID% Globally unique identifier (GUID) of the message in BizTalk Server. The value comes directly from the message context property BTS.MessageID. %SourceFileName% Name of the file from where the File adapter read the message. The file name includes the extension and excludes the file path, for example, Sample.xml. When substituting this property, the File adapter extracts the file name from the absolute file path stored in the FILE.ReceivedFileName context property. If the context property does not have a value, for example, if a message was received on an adapter other than the File adapter, the macro will not be substituted and will remain in the file name as is (for example, C:\Drop\%SourceFileName%). %SourceParty% Name of the source party from which the File adapter received the message. %SourcePartyQualifier% Qualifier of the source party from which the File adapter received the message. %time% UTC time in the format hhmmss. %time.tz% Local time plus time zone from GMT in the format hhmmssTZD (for example, 124525+530).

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ASP.NET Podcast Show #148 - ASP.NET WebForms to build a Mobile Web Application

- by Wallym

Check the podcast site for the original url. This is the video and source code for an ASP.NET WebForms app that I wrote that is optimized for the iPhone and mobile environments. Subscribe to everything. Subscribe to WMV. Subscribe to M4V for iPhone/iPad. Subscribe to MP3. Download WMV. Download M4V for iPhone/iPad. Download MP3. Link to iWebKit. Source Code: <%@ Page Title="MapSplore" Language="C#" MasterPageFile="iPhoneMaster.master" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeFile="Default.aspx.cs" Inherits="AT_iPhone_Default" %> <asp:Content ID="Content1" ContentPlaceHolderID="head" Runat="Server"></asp:Content><asp:Content ID="Content2" ContentPlaceHolderID="Content" Runat="Server" ClientIDMode="Static"> <asp:ScriptManager ID="sm" runat="server" EnablePartialRendering="true" EnableHistory="false" EnableCdn="true" /> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://maps.google.com/maps/api/js?sensor=true"></script> <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">  </script> <asp:HiddenField ID="Latitude" runat="server" /> <asp:HiddenField ID="Longitude" runat="server" /> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1/jquery.min.js%22%3E%3C/script> <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript"> $(document).ready(function () { GetLocation(); setupMapDiv(); setupPlaceIveBeen(); }); function GetLocation() { if (navigator.geolocation != null) { navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(getData); } else { var mess = document.getElementById('<%=Message.ClientID %>'); mess.innerHTML = "Sorry, your browser does not support geolocation. " + "Try the latest version of Safari on the iPhone, Android browser, or the latest version of FireFox."; } } function UpdateLocation_Click() { GetLocation(); } function getData(position) { var latitude = position.coords.latitude; var longitude = position.coords.longitude; var hdLat = document.getElementById('<%=Latitude.ClientID %>'); var hdLon = document.getElementById('<%=Longitude.ClientID %>'); hdLat.value = latitude; hdLon.value = longitude; } </script> <asp:Label ID="Message" runat="server" /> <asp:UpdatePanel ID="upl" runat="server"> <ContentTemplate> <asp:Panel ID="pnlStart" runat="server" Visible="true"> <div id="topbar"> <div id="title">MapSplore</div> </div> <div id="content"> <ul class="pageitem"> <li class="menu"> <asp:LinkButton ID="lbLocalDeals" runat="server" onclick="lbLocalDeals_Click"> <asp:Image ID="imLocalDeals" runat="server" ImageUrl="~/Images/ArtFavor_Money_Bag_Icon.png" Height="30" /> <span class="name">Local Deals.</span> <span class="arrow"></span> </asp:LinkButton> </li> <li class="menu"> <asp:LinkButton ID="lbLocalPlaces" runat="server" onclick="lbLocalPlaces_Click"> <asp:Image ID="imLocalPlaces" runat="server" ImageUrl="~/Images/Andy_Houses_on_the_horizon_-_Starburst_remix.png" Height="30" /> <span class="name">Local Places.</span> <span class="arrow"></span> </asp:LinkButton> </li> <li class="menu"> <asp:LinkButton ID="lbWhereIveBeen" runat="server" onclick="lbWhereIveBeen_Click"> <asp:Image ID="imImHere" runat="server" ImageUrl="~/Images/ryanlerch_flagpole.png" Height="30" /> <span class="name">I've been here.</span> <span class="arrow"></span> </asp:LinkButton> </li> <li class="menu"> <asp:LinkButton ID="lbMyStats" runat="server"> <asp:Image ID="imMyStats" runat="server" ImageUrl="~/Images/Anonymous_Spreadsheet.png" Height="30" /> <span class="name">My Stats.</span> <span class="arrow"></span> </asp:LinkButton> </li> <li class="menu"> <asp:LinkButton ID="lbAddAPlace" runat="server" onclick="lbAddAPlace_Click"> <asp:Image ID="imAddAPlace" runat="server" ImageUrl="~/Images/jean_victor_balin_add.png" Height="30" /> <span class="name">Add a Place.</span> <span class="arrow"></span> </asp:LinkButton> </li> <li class="button"> <input type="button" value="Update Your Current Location" onclick="UpdateLocation_Click()"> </li> </ul> </div> </asp:Panel> <div> <asp:Panel ID="pnlCoupons" runat="server" Visible="false"> <div id="topbar"> <div id="title">MapSplore</div> <div id="leftbutton"> <asp:LinkButton runat="server" Text="Return" ID="ReturnFromDeals" OnClick="ReturnFromDeals_Click" /></div></div> <div class="content"> <asp:ListView ID="lvCoupons" runat="server"> <LayoutTemplate> <ul class="pageitem" runat="server"> <asp:PlaceHolder ID="itemPlaceholder" runat="server" /> </ul> </LayoutTemplate> <ItemTemplate> <li class="menu"> <asp:LinkButton ID="lbBusiness" runat="server" Text='<%#Eval("Place.Name") %>' OnClick="lbBusiness_Click"> <span class="comment"> <asp:Label ID="lblAddress" runat="server" Text='<%#Eval("Place.Address1") %>' /> <asp:Label ID="lblDis" runat="server" Text='<%# Convert.ToString(Convert.ToInt32(Eval("Place.Distance"))) + " meters" %>' CssClass="smallText" /> <asp:HiddenField ID="hdPlaceId" runat="server" Value='<%#Eval("PlaceId") %>' /> <asp:HiddenField ID="hdGeoPromotionId" runat="server" Value='<%#Eval("GeoPromotionId") %>' /> </span> <span class="arrow"></span> </asp:LinkButton></li></ItemTemplate></asp:ListView><asp:GridView ID="gvCoupons" runat="server" AutoGenerateColumns="false"> <HeaderStyle BackColor="Silver" /> <AlternatingRowStyle BackColor="Wheat" /> <Columns> <asp:TemplateField AccessibleHeaderText="Business" HeaderText="Business"> <ItemTemplate> <asp:Image ID="imPlaceType" runat="server" Text='<%#Eval("Type") %>' ImageUrl='<%#Eval("Image") %>' /> <asp:LinkButton ID="lbBusiness" runat="server" Text='<%#Eval("Name") %>' OnClick="lbBusiness_Click" /> <asp:LinkButton ID="lblAddress" runat="server" Text='<%#Eval("Address1") %>' CssClass="smallText" /> <asp:Label ID="lblDis" runat="server" Text='<%# Convert.ToString(Convert.ToInt32(Eval("Distance"))) + " meters" %>' CssClass="smallText" /> <asp:HiddenField ID="hdPlaceId" runat="server" Value='<%#Eval("PlaceId") %>' /> <asp:HiddenField ID="hdGeoPromotionId" runat="server" Value='<%#Eval("GeoPromotionId") %>' /> <asp:Label ID="lblInfo" runat="server" Visible="false" /> </ItemTemplate> </asp:TemplateField> </Columns> </asp:GridView> </div> </asp:Panel> <asp:Panel ID="pnlPlaces" runat="server" Visible="false"> <div id="topbar"> <div id="title"> MapSplore</div><div id="leftbutton"> <asp:LinkButton runat="server" Text="Return" ID="ReturnFromPlaces" OnClick="ReturnFromPlaces_Click" /></div></div> <div id="content"> <asp:ListView ID="lvPlaces" runat="server"> <LayoutTemplate> <ul id="ulPlaces" class="pageitem" runat="server"> <asp:PlaceHolder ID="itemPlaceholder" runat="server" /> <li class="menu"> <asp:LinkButton ID="lbNotListed" runat="server" CssClass="name" OnClick="lbNotListed_Click"> Place not listed <span class="arrow"></span> </asp:LinkButton> </li> </ul> </LayoutTemplate> <ItemTemplate> <li class="menu"> <asp:LinkButton ID="lbImHere" runat="server" CssClass="name" OnClick="lbImHere_Click"> <%#DisplayName(Eval("Name")) %>  <%# Convert.ToString(Convert.ToInt32(Eval("Distance"))) + " meters" %> <asp:HiddenField ID="hdPlaceId" runat="server" Value='<%#Eval("PlaceId") %>' /> <span class="arrow"></span> </asp:LinkButton></li></ItemTemplate></asp:ListView> </div> </asp:Panel> <asp:Panel ID="pnlImHereNow" runat="server" Visible="false"> <div id="topbar"> <div id="title"> MapSplore</div><div id="leftbutton"> <asp:LinkButton runat="server" Text="Places" ID="lbImHereNowReturn" OnClick="lbImHereNowReturn_Click" /></div></div> <div id="rightbutton"> <asp:LinkButton runat="server" Text="Beginning" ID="lbBackToBeginning" OnClick="lbBackToBeginning_Click" /> </div> <div id="content"> <ul class="pageitem"> <asp:HiddenField ID="hdPlaceId" runat="server" /> <asp:HiddenField ID="hdPlaceLat" runat="server" /> <asp:HiddenField ID="hdPlaceLon" runat="server" /> <asp:HiddenField ID="hdPlaceTitle" runat="server" /> <asp:Button ID="btnImHereNow" runat="server" Text="I'm here" OnClick="btnImHereNow_Click" /> <asp:Label ID="lblPlaceTitle" runat="server" /><br /> <asp:TextBox ID="txtWhatsHappening" runat="server" TextMode="MultiLine" Rows="2" style="width:300px" /><br /> <div id="divImHere" style="width:300px; height:300px"></div> </div> </ul> </asp:Panel> <asp:Panel runat="server" ID="pnlIveBeenHere" Visible="false"> <div id="topbar"> <div id="title"> Where I've been</div><div id="leftbutton"> <asp:LinkButton ID="lbIveBeenHereBack" runat="server" Text="Back" OnClick="lbIveBeenHereBack_Click" /></div></div> <div id="content"> <asp:ListView ID="lvWhereIveBeen" runat="server"> <LayoutTemplate> <ul id="ulWhereIveBeen" class="pageitem" runat="server"> <asp:PlaceHolder ID="itemPlaceholder" runat="server" /> </ul> </LayoutTemplate> <ItemTemplate> <li class="menu" runat="server"> <asp:LinkButton ID="lbPlaceIveBeen" runat="server" OnClick="lbPlaceIveBeen_Click" CssClass="name"> <asp:Label ID="lblPlace" runat="server" Text='<%#Eval("PlaceName") %>' /> at <asp:Label ID="lblTime" runat="server" Text='<%#Eval("ATTime") %>' CssClass="content" /> <asp:HiddenField ID="hdATID" runat="server" Value='<%#Eval("ATID") %>' /> <span class="arrow"></span> </asp:LinkButton> </li> </ItemTemplate> </asp:ListView> </div> </asp:Panel> <asp:Panel runat="server" ID="pnlPlaceIveBeen" Visible="false"> <div id="topbar"> <div id="title"> I've been here </div> <div id="leftbutton"> <asp:LinkButton ID="lbPlaceIveBeenBack" runat="server" Text="Back" OnClick="lbPlaceIveBeenBack_Click" /> </div> <div id="rightbutton"> <asp:LinkButton ID="lbPlaceIveBeenBeginning" runat="server" Text="Beginning" OnClick="lbPlaceIveBeenBeginning_Click" /> </div> </div> <div id="content"> <ul class="pageitem"> <li> <asp:HiddenField ID="hdPlaceIveBeenPlaceId" runat="server" /> <asp:HiddenField ID="hdPlaceIveBeenLatitude" runat="server" /> <asp:HiddenField ID="hdPlaceIveBeenLongitude" runat="server" /> <asp:Label ID="lblPlaceIveBeenName" runat="server" /><br /> <asp:Label ID="lblPlaceIveBeenAddress" runat="server" /><br /> <asp:Label ID="lblPlaceIveBeenCity" runat="server" />, <asp:Label ID="lblPlaceIveBeenState" runat="server" /> <asp:Label ID="lblPlaceIveBeenZipCode" runat="server" /><br /> <asp:Label ID="lblPlaceIveBeenCountry" runat="server" /><br /> <div id="divPlaceIveBeen" style="width:300px; height:300px"></div> </li> </ul> </div> </asp:Panel> <asp:Panel ID="pnlAddPlace" runat="server" Visible="false"> <div id="topbar"><div id="title">MapSplore</div><div id="leftbutton"><asp:LinkButton ID="lbAddPlaceReturn" runat="server" Text="Back" OnClick="lbAddPlaceReturn_Click" /></div><div id="rightnav"></div></div><div id="content"> <ul class="pageitem"> <li id="liPlaceAddMessage" runat="server" visible="false"> <asp:Label ID="PlaceAddMessage" runat="server" /> </li> <li class="bigfield"> <asp:TextBox ID="txtPlaceName" runat="server" placeholder="Name of Establishment" /> </li> <li class="bigfield"> <asp:TextBox ID="txtAddress1" runat="server" placeholder="Address 1" /> </li> <li class="bigfield"> <asp:TextBox ID="txtCity" runat="server" placeholder="City" /> </li> <li class="select"> <asp:DropDownList ID="ddlProvince" runat="server" placeholder="Select State" /> <span class="arrow"></span> </li> <li class="bigfield"> <asp:TextBox ID="txtZipCode" runat="server" placeholder="Zip Code" /> </li> <li class="select"> <asp:DropDownList ID="ddlCountry" runat="server" onselectedindexchanged="ddlCountry_SelectedIndexChanged" /> <span class="arrow"></span> </li> <li class="bigfield"> <asp:TextBox ID="txtPhoneNumber" runat="server" placeholder="Phone Number" /> </li> <li class="checkbox"> <span class="name">You Here Now:</span> <asp:CheckBox ID="cbYouHereNow" runat="server" Checked="true" /> </li> <li class="button"> <asp:Button ID="btnAdd" runat="server" Text="Add Place" onclick="btnAdd_Click" /> </li> </ul></div> </asp:Panel> <asp:Panel ID="pnlImHere" runat="server" Visible="false"> <asp:TextBox ID="txtImHere" runat="server" TextMode="MultiLine" Rows="3" Columns="40" /><br /> <asp:DropDownList ID="ddlPlace" runat="server" /><br /> <asp:Button ID="btnHere" runat="server" Text="Tell Everyone I'm Here" onclick="btnHere_Click" /><br /> </asp:Panel> </div> </ContentTemplate> </asp:UpdatePanel> </asp:Content> Code Behind .cs file: using System;using System.Collections.Generic;using System.Linq;using System.Web;using System.Web.Security;using System.Web.UI;using System.Web.UI.HtmlControls;using System.Web.UI.WebControls;using LocationDataModel; public partial class AT_iPhone_Default : ViewStatePage{ private iPhoneDevice ipd; protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { LocationDataEntities lde = new LocationDataEntities(); if (!Page.IsPostBack) { var Countries = from c in lde.Countries select c; foreach (Country co in Countries) { ddlCountry.Items.Add(new ListItem(co.Name, co.CountryId.ToString())); } ddlCountry_SelectedIndexChanged(ddlCountry, null); if (AppleIPhone.IsIPad()) ipd = iPhoneDevice.iPad; if (AppleIPhone.IsIPhone()) ipd = iPhoneDevice.iPhone; if (AppleIPhone.IsIPodTouch()) ipd = iPhoneDevice.iPodTouch; } } protected void btnPlaces_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { } protected void btnAdd_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { bool blImHere = cbYouHereNow.Checked; string Place = txtPlaceName.Text, Address1 = txtAddress1.Text, City = txtCity.Text, ZipCode = txtZipCode.Text, PhoneNumber = txtPhoneNumber.Text, ProvinceId = ddlProvince.SelectedItem.Value, CountryId = ddlCountry.SelectedItem.Value; int iProvinceId, iCountryId; double dLatitude, dLongitude; DataAccess da = new DataAccess(); if ((!String.IsNullOrEmpty(ProvinceId)) && (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(CountryId))) { iProvinceId = Convert.ToInt32(ProvinceId); iCountryId = Convert.ToInt32(CountryId); if (blImHere) { dLatitude = Convert.ToDouble(Latitude.Value); dLongitude = Convert.ToDouble(Longitude.Value); da.StorePlace(Place, Address1, String.Empty, City, iProvinceId, ZipCode, iCountryId, PhoneNumber, dLatitude, dLongitude); } else { da.StorePlace(Place, Address1, String.Empty, City, iProvinceId, ZipCode, iCountryId, PhoneNumber); } liPlaceAddMessage.Visible = true; PlaceAddMessage.Text = "Awesome, your place has been added. Add Another!"; txtPlaceName.Text = String.Empty; txtAddress1.Text = String.Empty; txtCity.Text = String.Empty; ddlProvince.SelectedIndex = -1; txtZipCode.Text = String.Empty; txtPhoneNumber.Text = String.Empty; } else { liPlaceAddMessage.Visible = true; PlaceAddMessage.Text = "Please select a State and a Country."; } } protected void ddlCountry_SelectedIndexChanged(object sender, EventArgs e) { string CountryId = ddlCountry.SelectedItem.Value; if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(CountryId)) { int iCountryId = Convert.ToInt32(CountryId); LocationDataModel.LocationDataEntities lde = new LocationDataModel.LocationDataEntities(); var prov = from p in lde.Provinces where p.CountryId == iCountryId orderby p.ProvinceName select p; ddlProvince.Items.Add(String.Empty); foreach (Province pr in prov) { ddlProvince.Items.Add(new ListItem(pr.ProvinceName, pr.ProvinceId.ToString())); } } else { ddlProvince.Items.Clear(); } } protected void btnImHere_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { int i = 0; DataAccess da = new DataAccess(); double Lat = Convert.ToDouble(Latitude.Value), Lon = Convert.ToDouble(Longitude.Value); List<Place> lp = da.NearByLocations(Lat, Lon); foreach (Place p in lp) { ListItem li = new ListItem(p.Name, p.PlaceId.ToString()); if (i == 0) { li.Selected = true; } ddlPlace.Items.Add(li); i++; } pnlAddPlace.Visible = false; pnlImHere.Visible = true; } protected void lbImHere_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { string UserName = Membership.GetUser().UserName; ListViewItem lvi = (ListViewItem)(((LinkButton)sender).Parent); HiddenField hd = (HiddenField)lvi.FindControl("hdPlaceId"); long PlaceId = Convert.ToInt64(hd.Value); double dLatitude = Convert.ToDouble(Latitude.Value); double dLongitude = Convert.ToDouble(Longitude.Value); DataAccess da = new DataAccess(); Place pl = da.GetPlace(PlaceId); pnlImHereNow.Visible = true; pnlPlaces.Visible = false; hdPlaceId.Value = PlaceId.ToString(); hdPlaceLat.Value = pl.Latitude.ToString(); hdPlaceLon.Value = pl.Longitude.ToString(); hdPlaceTitle.Value = pl.Name; lblPlaceTitle.Text = pl.Name; } protected void btnHere_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { string UserName = Membership.GetUser().UserName; string WhatsH = txtImHere.Text; long PlaceId = Convert.ToInt64(ddlPlace.SelectedValue); double dLatitude = Convert.ToDouble(Latitude.Value); double dLongitude = Convert.ToDouble(Longitude.Value); DataAccess da = new DataAccess(); da.StoreUserAT(UserName, PlaceId, WhatsH, dLatitude, dLongitude); } protected void btnLocalCoupons_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { double dLatitude = Convert.ToDouble(Latitude.Value); double dLongitude = Convert.ToDouble(Longitude.Value); DataAccess da = new DataAccess(); } protected void lbBusiness_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { string UserName = Membership.GetUser().UserName; GridViewRow gvr = (GridViewRow)(((LinkButton)sender).Parent.Parent); HiddenField hd = (HiddenField)gvr.FindControl("hdPlaceId"); string sPlaceId = hd.Value; Int64 PlaceId; if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(sPlaceId)) { PlaceId = Convert.ToInt64(sPlaceId); } } protected void lbLocalDeals_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { double dLatitude = Convert.ToDouble(Latitude.Value); double dLongitude = Convert.ToDouble(Longitude.Value); DataAccess da = new DataAccess(); pnlCoupons.Visible = true; pnlStart.Visible = false; List<GeoPromotion> lgp = da.NearByDeals(dLatitude, dLongitude); lvCoupons.DataSource = lgp; lvCoupons.DataBind(); } protected void lbLocalPlaces_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { DataAccess da = new DataAccess(); double Lat = Convert.ToDouble(Latitude.Value); double Lon = Convert.ToDouble(Longitude.Value); List<LocationDataModel.Place> places = da.NearByLocations(Lat, Lon); lvPlaces.DataSource = places; lvPlaces.SelectedIndex = -1; lvPlaces.DataBind(); pnlPlaces.Visible = true; pnlStart.Visible = false; } protected void ReturnFromPlaces_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { pnlPlaces.Visible = false; pnlStart.Visible = true; } protected void ReturnFromDeals_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { pnlCoupons.Visible = false; pnlStart.Visible = true; } protected void btnImHereNow_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { long PlaceId = Convert.ToInt32(hdPlaceId.Value); string UserName = Membership.GetUser().UserName; string WhatsHappening = txtWhatsHappening.Text; double UserLat = Convert.ToDouble(Latitude.Value); double UserLon = Convert.ToDouble(Longitude.Value); DataAccess da = new DataAccess(); da.StoreUserAT(UserName, PlaceId, WhatsHappening, UserLat, UserLon); } protected void lbImHereNowReturn_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { pnlImHereNow.Visible = false; pnlPlaces.Visible = true; } protected void lbBackToBeginning_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { pnlStart.Visible = true; pnlImHereNow.Visible = false; } protected void lbWhereIveBeen_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { string UserName = Membership.GetUser().UserName; pnlStart.Visible = false; pnlIveBeenHere.Visible = true; DataAccess da = new DataAccess(); lvWhereIveBeen.DataSource = da.UserATs(UserName, 0, 15); lvWhereIveBeen.DataBind(); } protected void lbIveBeenHereBack_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { pnlIveBeenHere.Visible = false; pnlStart.Visible = true; } protected void lbPlaceIveBeen_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { LinkButton lb = (LinkButton)sender; ListViewItem lvi = (ListViewItem)lb.Parent.Parent; HiddenField hdATID = (HiddenField)lvi.FindControl("hdATID"); Int64 ATID = Convert.ToInt64(hdATID.Value); DataAccess da = new DataAccess(); pnlIveBeenHere.Visible = false; pnlPlaceIveBeen.Visible = true; var plac = da.GetPlaceViaATID(ATID); hdPlaceIveBeenPlaceId.Value = plac.PlaceId.ToString(); hdPlaceIveBeenLatitude.Value = plac.Latitude.ToString(); hdPlaceIveBeenLongitude.Value = plac.Longitude.ToString(); lblPlaceIveBeenName.Text = plac.Name; lblPlaceIveBeenAddress.Text = plac.Address1; lblPlaceIveBeenCity.Text = plac.City; lblPlaceIveBeenState.Text = plac.Province.ProvinceName; lblPlaceIveBeenZipCode.Text = plac.ZipCode; lblPlaceIveBeenCountry.Text = plac.Country.Name; } protected void lbNotListed_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { SetupAddPoint(); pnlPlaces.Visible = false; } protected void lbAddAPlace_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { SetupAddPoint(); } private void SetupAddPoint() { double lat = Convert.ToDouble(Latitude.Value); double lon = Convert.ToDouble(Longitude.Value); DataAccess da = new DataAccess(); var zip = da.WhereAmIAt(lat, lon); if (zip.Count > 0) { var z0 = zip[0]; txtCity.Text = z0.City; txtZipCode.Text = z0.ZipCode; ddlProvince.ClearSelection(); if (z0.ProvinceId.HasValue == true) { foreach (ListItem li in ddlProvince.Items) { if (li.Value == z0.ProvinceId.Value.ToString()) { li.Selected = true; break; } } } } pnlAddPlace.Visible = true; pnlStart.Visible = false; } protected void lbAddPlaceReturn_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { pnlAddPlace.Visible = false; pnlStart.Visible = true; liPlaceAddMessage.Visible = false; PlaceAddMessage.Text = String.Empty; } protected void lbPlaceIveBeenBack_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { pnlIveBeenHere.Visible = true; pnlPlaceIveBeen.Visible = false; } protected void lbPlaceIveBeenBeginning_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { pnlPlaceIveBeen.Visible = false; pnlStart.Visible = true; } protected string DisplayName(object val) { string strVal = Convert.ToString(val); if (AppleIPhone.IsIPad()) { ipd = iPhoneDevice.iPad; } if (AppleIPhone.IsIPhone()) { ipd = iPhoneDevice.iPhone; } if (AppleIPhone.IsIPodTouch()) { ipd = iPhoneDevice.iPodTouch; } return (iPhoneHelper.DisplayContentOnMenu(strVal, ipd)); }} iPhoneHelper.cs file: using System;using System.Collections.Generic;using System.Linq;using System.Web; public enum iPhoneDevice{ iPhone, iPodTouch, iPad}/// <summary>/// Summary description for iPhoneHelper/// </summary>/// public class iPhoneHelper{ public iPhoneHelper() { // // TODO: Add constructor logic here // } // This code is stupid in retrospect. Use css to solve this problem public static string DisplayContentOnMenu(string val, iPhoneDevice ipd) { string Return = val; string Elipsis = "..."; int iPadMaxLength = 30; int iPhoneMaxLength = 15; if (ipd == iPhoneDevice.iPad) { if (Return.Length > iPadMaxLength) { Return = Return.Substring(0, iPadMaxLength - Elipsis.Length) + Elipsis; } } else { if (Return.Length > iPhoneMaxLength) { Return = Return.Substring(0, iPhoneMaxLength - Elipsis.Length) + Elipsis; } } return (Return); }} Source code for the ViewStatePage: using System;using System.Data;using System.Data.SqlClient;using System.Configuration;using System.Web;using System.Web.Security;using System.Web.UI;using System.Web.UI.WebControls;using System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts;using System.Web.UI.HtmlControls; /// <summary>/// Summary description for BasePage/// </summary>#region Base class for a page.public class ViewStatePage : System.Web.UI.Page{ PageStatePersisterToDatabase myPageStatePersister; public ViewStatePage() : base() { myPageStatePersister = new PageStatePersisterToDatabase(this); } protected override PageStatePersister PageStatePersister { get { return myPageStatePersister; } } }#endregion #region This class will override the page persistence to store page state in a database.public class PageStatePersisterToDatabase : PageStatePersister{ private string ViewStateKeyField = "__VIEWSTATE_KEY"; private string _exNoConnectionStringFound = "No Database Configuration information is in the web.config."; public PageStatePersisterToDatabase(Page page) : base(page) { } public override void Load() { // Get the cache key from the web form data System.Int64 key = Convert.ToInt64(Page.Request.Params[ViewStateKeyField]); Pair state = this.LoadState(key); // Abort if cache object is not of type Pair if (state == null) throw new ApplicationException("Missing valid " + ViewStateKeyField); // Set view state and control state ViewState = state.First; ControlState = state.Second; } public override void Save() { // No processing needed if no states available if (ViewState == null && ControlState != null) return; System.Int64 key; IStateFormatter formatter = this.StateFormatter; Pair statePair = new Pair(ViewState, ControlState); // Serialize the statePair object to a string. string serializedState = formatter.Serialize(statePair); // Save the ViewState and get a unique identifier back. key = SaveState(serializedState); // Register hidden field to store cache key in // Page.ClientScript does not work properly with Atlas. //Page.ClientScript.RegisterHiddenField(ViewStateKeyField, key.ToString()); ScriptManager.RegisterHiddenField(this.Page, ViewStateKeyField, key.ToString()); } private System.Int64 SaveState(string PageState) { System.Int64 i64Key = 0; string strConn = String.Empty, strProvider = String.Empty; string strSql = "insert into tblPageState ( SerializedState ) values ( '" + SqlEscape(PageState) + "');select scope_identity();"; SqlConnection sqlCn; SqlCommand sqlCm; try { GetDBConnectionString(ref strConn, ref strProvider); sqlCn = new SqlConnection(strConn); sqlCm = new SqlCommand(strSql, sqlCn); sqlCn.Open(); i64Key = Convert.ToInt64(sqlCm.ExecuteScalar()); if (sqlCn.State != ConnectionState.Closed) { sqlCn.Close(); } sqlCn.Dispose(); sqlCm.Dispose(); } finally { sqlCn = null; sqlCm = null; } return i64Key; } private Pair LoadState(System.Int64 iKey) { string strConn = String.Empty, strProvider = String.Empty, SerializedState = String.Empty, strMinutesInPast = GetMinutesInPastToDelete(); Pair PageState; string strSql = "select SerializedState from tblPageState where tblPageStateID=" + iKey.ToString() + ";" + "delete from tblPageState where DateUpdated<DateAdd(mi, " + strMinutesInPast + ", getdate());"; SqlConnection sqlCn; SqlCommand sqlCm; try { GetDBConnectionString(ref strConn, ref strProvider); sqlCn = new SqlConnection(strConn); sqlCm = new SqlCommand(strSql, sqlCn); sqlCn.Open(); SerializedState = Convert.ToString(sqlCm.ExecuteScalar()); IStateFormatter formatter = this.StateFormatter; if ((null == SerializedState) || (String.Empty == SerializedState)) { throw (new ApplicationException("No ViewState records were returned.")); } // Deserilize returns the Pair object that is serialized in // the Save method. PageState = (Pair)formatter.Deserialize(SerializedState); if (sqlCn.State != ConnectionState.Closed) { sqlCn.Close(); } sqlCn.Dispose(); sqlCm.Dispose(); } finally { sqlCn = null; sqlCm = null; } return PageState; } private string SqlEscape(string Val) { string ReturnVal = String.Empty; if (null != Val) { ReturnVal = Val.Replace("'", "''"); } return (ReturnVal); } private void GetDBConnectionString(ref string ConnectionStringValue, ref string ProviderNameValue) { if (System.Configuration.ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings.Count > 0) { ConnectionStringValue = System.Configuration.ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings["ApplicationServices"].ConnectionString; ProviderNameValue = System.Configuration.ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings["ApplicationServices"].ProviderName; } else { throw new ConfigurationErrorsException(_exNoConnectionStringFound); } } private string GetMinutesInPastToDelete() { string strReturn = "-60"; if (null != System.Configuration.ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["MinutesInPastToDeletePageState"]) { strReturn = System.Configuration.ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["MinutesInPastToDeletePageState"].ToString(); } return (strReturn); }}#endregion AppleiPhone.cs file: using System;using System.Collections.Generic;using System.Linq;using System.Web; /// <summary>/// Summary description for AppleIPhone/// </summary>public class AppleIPhone{ public AppleIPhone() { // // TODO: Add constructor logic here // } static public bool IsIPhoneOS() { return (IsIPad() || IsIPhone() || IsIPodTouch()); } static public bool IsIPhone() { return IsTest("iPhone"); } static public bool IsIPodTouch() { return IsTest("iPod"); } static public bool IsIPad() { return IsTest("iPad"); } static private bool IsTest(string Agent) { bool bl = false; string ua = HttpContext.Current.Request.UserAgent.ToLower(); try { bl = ua.Contains(Agent.ToLower()); } catch { } return (bl); }} Master page .cs: using System;using System.Collections.Generic;using System.Linq;using System.Web;using System.Web.UI;using System.Web.UI.HtmlControls;using System.Web.UI.WebControls; public partial class MasterPages_iPhoneMaster : System.Web.UI.MasterPage{ protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { HtmlHead head = Page.Header; HtmlMeta meta = new HtmlMeta(); if (AppleIPhone.IsIPad() == true) { meta.Content = "width=400,user-scalable=no"; head.Controls.Add(meta); } else { meta.Content = "width=device-width, user-scalable=no"; meta.Attributes.Add("name", "viewport"); } meta.Attributes.Add("name", "viewport"); head.Controls.Add(meta); HtmlLink cssLink = new HtmlLink(); HtmlGenericControl script = new HtmlGenericControl("script"); script.Attributes.Add("type", "text/javascript"); script.Attributes.Add("src", ResolveUrl("~/Scripts/iWebKit/javascript/functions.js")); head.Controls.Add(script); cssLink.Attributes.Add("rel", "stylesheet"); cssLink.Attributes.Add("href", ResolveUrl("~/Scripts/iWebKit/css/style.css") ); cssLink.Attributes.Add("type", "text/css"); head.Controls.Add(cssLink); HtmlGenericControl jsLink = new HtmlGenericControl("script"); //jsLink.Attributes.Add("type", "text/javascript"); //jsLink.Attributes.Add("src", ResolveUrl("~/Scripts/jquery-1.4.1.min.js") ); //head.Controls.Add(jsLink); HtmlLink appleIcon = new HtmlLink(); appleIcon.Attributes.Add("rel", "apple-touch-icon"); appleIcon.Attributes.Add("href", ResolveUrl("~/apple-touch-icon.png")); HtmlMeta appleMobileWebAppStatusBarStyle = new HtmlMeta(); appleMobileWebAppStatusBarStyle.Attributes.Add("name", "apple-mobile-web-app-status-bar-style"); appleMobileWebAppStatusBarStyle.Attributes.Add("content", "black"); head.Controls.Add(appleMobileWebAppStatusBarStyle); } internal string FindPath(string Location) { string Url = Server.MapPath(Location); return (Url); }}

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Adding A Custom Dropdown in RCDC for Forefront Identity Manager 2010

- by Daniel Lackey

My latest exploration has been FIM 2010 for Identity Management. The following is a post of how to add a custom dropdown for the FIM Portal. I have decided to document this as I cannot find documentation on how to do this anywhere else. I hope that it finds useful to others. For starters, this was to me not an easy task to figure out. I really would like to know why it is so cumbersome to do something that seems like a lot of people would need to do, but that’s for another day J The dropdown I wanted to add was for ‘Account Status’ which would display if the account is ‘Enabled’ or ‘Disabled’ in the data source Active Directory. This option would also allow helpdesk users or admins to administer the userAccountControl attribute in AD from the FIM Portal interface. The first thing I had to do was create the attribute itself. This is done by going to Administration à Schema Management from the FIM 2010 portal. Once here, you click on All Attributes. What is listed here are all attributes and their associated Resource Types in FIM. To create the ‘AccountStatus’ attribute, click on New. As shown below, enter ‘AccountStatus’ with no spaces for the System Name and ‘Account Status’ for the Display Name. The Data Type is going to be ‘Indexed String’. Click Next. Leave everything on the Localization tab default and click Next. On the Validation tab as shown below, we will enter the regex expression ^(Enabled|Disabled)?$ with our two desired string values ‘Enabled’ and ‘Disabled’. Click on Finish and then and Submit to complete adding the attribute. The next step involves associating the attribute with a resource type. This is called ‘Binding’ the attribute. From the Schema Management page, click on All Bindings. From the page that comes up, click on New. As shown below, enter ‘User’ for the Resource Type and ‘Account Status’ for the Attribute Type. This is essentially binding the Account Status attribute to the ‘User’ Resource Type. Click Next. On the ‘Attribute Override’ tab, type in ‘Account Status’ for the Display Name field. Click Next. On the ‘Localization’ tab, click Next. On the ‘Validation’ tab, enter the regex expression ^(Enabled|Disabled)?$ we entered previously for the attribute. Click Finish and then Submit to complete. Now that the Attribute and the Binding are complete, you have to give users permission to see the attribute on the User Edit page. Go to Administration à Management Policy Rules. Look for the rule named Administration: Administrators can read and update Users and click on it. Once it opens, click on the ‘Target Resources’ tab and look at the section named Resource Attributes. Type in at the end the ‘Account Status’ attribute and check it with the validator. Once done click on OK to save the changes. Lastly, we need to add the actual dropdown control to the RCDC (Resource Control Display Configuration) for User Editing. Go to Administration à Resource Control Display Configuration. From here navigate until you find the RCDC named Configuration for User Editing RCDC and click on it. The following is what you will see: First step is to export the Configuration Data file. Click on the Export configuration link and save the file to your desktop of other folder. Find the file you just exported and open the file in your XML editor of choice. I use notepad but anything will work. Since we are adding a dropdown control, first find another control in the existing file that is already a dropdown in FIM. I used EmployeeType as my example. Copy the control from the beginning tag named <my:Control… to the ending tag </my:Control>. Now take what you copied and paste it in whatever location you desire within the form between two other controls. I chose to place the ‘Account Status’ field after the ‘Account Name’ field. After you paste the control you will need to modify so it looks like this: Notice where you specify what attribute you are dealing with where it has AccountStatus in the XML. Once you are complete with modifying this, save the file and make sure it is a .xml file. Now go back to the Configuration for User Editing screen and look at the section named ‘Configuration Data’. Click the ‘Browse’ button and find the XML file you just modified and choose it. Click OK on the bottom of the window and you are done! Now when you click on a user’s name in the FIM Portal, you should see the newly added dropdown box as below: Later I will post more about this drop down, specifically on how to automate actually ‘Disabling’ the account in the data source through the FIM Workflows and MAs. <my:Control my:Name="AccountStatus" my:TypeName="UocDropDownList" my:Caption="{Binding Source=schema, Path=AccountStatus.DisplayName}" my:Description="{Binding Source=schema, Path=AccountStatus.Description}" my:RightsLevel="{Binding Source=rights, Path=AccountStatus}"> <my:Properties> <my:Property my:Name="ValuePath" my:Value="Value"/> <my:Property my:Name="CaptionPath" my:Value="Caption"/> <my:Property my:Name="HintPath" my:Value="Hint"/> <my:Property my:Name="ItemSource" my:Value="{Binding Source=schema, Path=AccountStatus.LocalizedAllowedValues}"/> <my:Property my:Name="SelectedValue" my:Value="{Binding Source=object, Path=AccountStatus, Mode=TwoWay}"/> </my:Properties> </my:Control>

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Using the West Wind Web Toolkit to set up AJAX and REST Services

- by Rick Strahl

I frequently get questions about which option to use for creating AJAX and REST backends for ASP.NET applications. There are many solutions out there to do this actually, but when I have a choice - not surprisingly - I fall back to my own tools in the West Wind West Wind Web Toolkit. I've talked a bunch about the 'in-the-box' solutions in the past so for a change in this post I'll talk about the tools that I use in my own and customer applications to handle AJAX and REST based access to service resources using the West Wind West Wind Web Toolkit. Let me preface this by saying that I like things to be easy. Yes flexible is very important as well but not at the expense of over-complexity. The goal I've had with my tools is make it drop dead easy, with good performance while providing the core features that I'm after, which are: Easy AJAX/JSON Callbacks Ability to return any kind of non JSON content (string, stream, byte[], images) Ability to work with both XML and JSON interchangeably for input/output Access endpoints via POST data, RPC JSON calls, GET QueryString values or Routing interface Easy to use generic JavaScript client to make RPC calls (same syntax, just what you need) Ability to create clean URLS with Routing Ability to use standard ASP.NET HTTP Stack for HTTP semantics It's all about options! In this post I'll demonstrate most of these features (except XML) in a few simple and short samples which you can download. So let's take a look and see how you can build an AJAX callback solution with the West Wind Web Toolkit. Installing the Toolkit Assemblies The easiest and leanest way of using the Toolkit in your Web project is to grab it via NuGet: West Wind Web and AJAX Utilities (Westwind.Web) and drop it into the project by right clicking in your Project and choosing Manage NuGet Packages from anywhere in the Project. When done you end up with your project looking like this: What just happened? Nuget added two assemblies - Westwind.Web and Westwind.Utilities and the client ww.jquery.js library. It also added a couple of references into web.config: The default namespaces so they can be accessed in pages/views and a ScriptCompressionModule that the toolkit optionally uses to compress script resources served from within the assembly (namely ww.jquery.js and optionally jquery.js). Creating a new Service The West Wind Web Toolkit supports several ways of creating and accessing AJAX services, but for this post I'll stick to the lower level approach that works from any plain HTML page or of course MVC, WebForms, WebPages. There's also a WebForms specific control that makes this even easier but I'll leave that for another post. So, to create a new standalone AJAX/REST service we can create a new HttpHandler in the new project either as a pure class based handler or as a generic .ASHX handler. Both work equally well, but generic handlers don't require any web.config configuration so I'll use that here. In the root of the project add a Generic Handler. I'm going to call this one StockService.ashx. Once the handler has been created, edit the code and remove all of the handler body code. Then change the base class to CallbackHandler and add methods that have a [CallbackMethod] attribute. Here's the modified base handler implementation now looks like with an added HelloWorld method: using System; using Westwind.Web; namespace WestWindWebAjax { /// <summary> /// Handler implements CallbackHandler to provide REST/AJAX services /// </summary> public class SampleService : CallbackHandler { [CallbackMethod] public string HelloWorld(string name) { return "Hello " + name + ". Time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString(); } } } Notice that the class inherits from CallbackHandler and that the HelloWorld service method is marked up with [CallbackMethod]. We're done here. Services Urlbased Syntax Once you compile, the 'service' is live can respond to requests. All CallbackHandlers support input in GET and POST formats, and can return results as JSON or XML. To check our fancy HelloWorld method we can now access the service like this: http://localhost/WestWindWebAjax/StockService.ashx?Method=HelloWorld&name=Rick which produces a default JSON response - in this case a string (wrapped in quotes as it's JSON): (note by default JSON will be downloaded by most browsers not displayed - various options are available to view JSON right in the browser) If I want to return the same data as XML I can tack on a &format=xml at the end of the querystring which produces: <string>Hello Rick. Time is: 11/1/2011 12:11:13 PM</string> Cleaner URLs with Routing Syntax If you want cleaner URLs for each operation you can also configure custom routes on a per URL basis similar to the way that WCF REST does. To do this you need to add a new RouteHandler to your application's startup code in global.asax.cs one for each CallbackHandler based service you create: protected void Application_Start(object sender, EventArgs e) { CallbackHandlerRouteHandler.RegisterRoutes<StockService>(RouteTable.Routes); } With this code in place you can now add RouteUrl properties to any of your service methods. For the HelloWorld method that doesn't make a ton of sense but here is what a routed clean URL might look like in definition: [CallbackMethod(RouteUrl="stocks/HelloWorld/{name}")] public string HelloWorld(string name) { return "Hello " + name + ". Time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString(); } The same URL I previously used now becomes a bit shorter and more readable with: http://localhost/WestWindWebAjax/HelloWorld/Rick It's an easy way to create cleaner URLs and still get the same functionality. Calling the Service with $.getJSON() Since the result produced is JSON you can now easily consume this data using jQuery's getJSON method. First we need a couple of scripts - jquery.js and ww.jquery.js in the page: <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <link href="Css/Westwind.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> <script src="scripts/jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="scripts/ww.jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> </head> <body> Next let's add a small HelloWorld example form (what else) that has a single textbox to type a name, a button and a div tag to receive the result: <fieldset> <legend>Hello World</legend> Please enter a name: <input type="text" name="txtHello" id="txtHello" value="" /> <input type="button" id="btnSayHello" value="Say Hello (POST)" /> <input type="button" id="btnSayHelloGet" value="Say Hello (GET)" /> <div id="divHelloMessage" class="errordisplay" style="display:none;width: 450px;" > </div> </fieldset> Then to call the HelloWorld method a little jQuery is used to hook the document startup and the button click followed by the $.getJSON call to retrieve the data from the server. <script type="text/javascript"> $(document).ready(function () { $("#btnSayHelloGet").click(function () { $.getJSON("SampleService.ashx", { Method: "HelloWorld", name: $("#txtHello").val() }, function (result) { $("#divHelloMessage") .text(result) .fadeIn(1000); }); });</script> .getJSON() expects a full URL to the endpoint of our service, which is the ASHX file. We can either provide a full URL (SampleService.ashx?Method=HelloWorld&name=Rick) or we can just provide the base URL and an object that encodes the query string parameters for us using an object map that has a property that matches each parameter for the server method. We can also use the clean URL routing syntax, but using the object parameter encoding actually is safer as the parameters will get properly encoded by jQuery. The result returned is whatever the result on the server method is - in this case a string. The string is applied to the divHelloMessage element and we're done. Obviously this is a trivial example, but it demonstrates the basics of getting a JSON response back to the browser. AJAX Post Syntax - using ajaxCallMethod() The previous example allows you basic control over the data that you send to the server via querystring parameters. This works OK for simple values like short strings, numbers and boolean values, but doesn't really work if you need to pass something more complex like an object or an array back up to the server. To handle traditional RPC type messaging where the idea is to map server side functions and results to a client side invokation, POST operations can be used. The easiest way to use this functionality is to use ww.jquery.js and the ajaxCallMethod() function. ww.jquery wraps jQuery's AJAX functions and knows implicitly how to call a CallbackServer method with parameters and parse the result. Let's look at another simple example that posts a simple value but returns something more interesting. Let's start with the service method: [CallbackMethod(RouteUrl="stocks/{symbol}")] public StockQuote GetStockQuote(string symbol) { Response.Cache.SetExpires(DateTime.UtcNow.Add(new TimeSpan(0, 2, 0))); StockServer server = new StockServer(); var quote = server.GetStockQuote(symbol); if (quote == null) throw new ApplicationException("Invalid Symbol passed."); return quote; } This sample utilizes a small StockServer helper class (included in the sample) that downloads a stock quote from Yahoo's financial site via plain HTTP GET requests and formats it into a StockQuote object. Lets create a small HTML block that lets us query for the quote and display it: <fieldset> <legend>Single Stock Quote</legend> Please enter a stock symbol: <input type="text" name="txtSymbol" id="txtSymbol" value="msft" /> <input type="button" id="btnStockQuote" value="Get Quote" /> <div id="divStockDisplay" class="errordisplay" style="display:none; width: 450px;"> <div class="label-left">Company:</div> <div id="stockCompany"></div> <div class="label-left">Last Price:</div> <div id="stockLastPrice"></div> <div class="label-left">Quote Time:</div> <div id="stockQuoteTime"></div> </div> </fieldset> The final result looks something like this: Let's hook up the button handler to fire the request and fill in the data as shown: $("#btnStockQuote").click(function () { ajaxCallMethod("SampleService.ashx", "GetStockQuote", [$("#txtSymbol").val()], function (quote) { $("#divStockDisplay").show().fadeIn(1000); $("#stockCompany").text(quote.Company + " (" + quote.Symbol + ")"); $("#stockLastPrice").text(quote.LastPrice); $("#stockQuoteTime").text(quote.LastQuoteTime.formatDate("MMM dd, HH:mm EST")); }, onPageError); }); So we point at SampleService.ashx and the GetStockQuote method, passing a single parameter of the input symbol value. Then there are two handlers for success and failure callbacks. The success handler is the interesting part - it receives the stock quote as a result and assigns its values to various 'holes' in the stock display elements. The data that comes back over the wire is JSON and it looks like this: { "Symbol":"MSFT", "Company":"Microsoft Corpora", "OpenPrice":26.11, "LastPrice":26.01, "NetChange":0.02, "LastQuoteTime":"2011-11-03T02:00:00Z", "LastQuoteTimeString":"Nov. 11, 2011 4:20pm" } which is an object representation of the data. JavaScript can evaluate this JSON string back into an object easily and that's the reslut that gets passed to the success function. The quote data is then applied to existing page content by manually selecting items and applying them. There are other ways to do this more elegantly like using templates, but here we're only interested in seeing how the data is returned. The data in the object is typed - LastPrice is a number and QuoteTime is a date. Note about the date value: JavaScript doesn't have a date literal although the JSON embedded ISO string format used above ("2011-11-03T02:00:00Z") is becoming fairly standard for JSON serializers. However, JSON parsers don't deserialize dates by default and return them by string. This is why the StockQuote actually returns a string value of LastQuoteTimeString for the same date. ajaxMethodCallback always converts dates properly into 'real' dates and the example above uses the real date value along with a .formatDate() data extension (also in ww.jquery.js) to display the raw date properly. Errors and Exceptions So what happens if your code fails? For example if I pass an invalid stock symbol to the GetStockQuote() method you notice that the code does this: if (quote == null) throw new ApplicationException("Invalid Symbol passed."); CallbackHandler automatically pushes the exception message back to the client so it's easy to pick up the error message. Regardless of what kind of error occurs: Server side, client side, protocol errors - any error will fire the failure handler with an error object parameter. The error is returned to the client via a JSON response in the error callback. In the previous examples I called onPageError which is a generic routine in ww.jquery that displays a status message on the bottom of the screen. But of course you can also take over the error handling yourself: $("#btnStockQuote").click(function () { ajaxCallMethod("SampleService.ashx", "GetStockQuote", [$("#txtSymbol").val()], function (quote) { $("#divStockDisplay").fadeIn(1000); $("#stockCompany").text(quote.Company + " (" + quote.Symbol + ")"); $("#stockLastPrice").text(quote.LastPrice); $("#stockQuoteTime").text(quote.LastQuoteTime.formatDate("MMM dd, hh:mmt")); }, function (error, xhr) { $("#divErrorDisplay").text(error.message).fadeIn(1000); }); }); The error object has a isCallbackError, message and stackTrace properties, the latter of which is only populated when running in Debug mode, and this object is returned for all errors: Client side, transport and server side errors. Regardless of which type of error you get the same object passed (as well as the XHR instance optionally) which makes for a consistent error retrieval mechanism. Specifying HttpVerbs You can also specify HTTP Verbs that are allowed using the AllowedHttpVerbs option on the CallbackMethod attribute: [CallbackMethod(AllowedHttpVerbs=HttpVerbs.GET | HttpVerbs.POST)] public string HelloWorld(string name) { … } If you're building REST style API's this might be useful to force certain request semantics onto the client calling. For the above if call with a non-allowed HttpVerb the request returns a 405 error response along with a JSON (or XML) error object result. The default behavior is to allow all verbs access (HttpVerbs.All). Passing in object Parameters Up to now the parameters I passed were very simple. But what if you need to send something more complex like an object or an array? Let's look at another example now that passes an object from the client to the server. Keeping with the Stock theme here lets add a method called BuyOrder that lets us buy some shares for a stock. Consider the following service method that receives an StockBuyOrder object as a parameter: [CallbackMethod] public string BuyStock(StockBuyOrder buyOrder) { var server = new StockServer(); var quote = server.GetStockQuote(buyOrder.Symbol); if (quote == null) throw new ApplicationException("Invalid or missing stock symbol."); return string.Format("You're buying {0} shares of {1} ({2}) stock at {3} for a total of {4} on {5}.", buyOrder.Quantity, quote.Company, quote.Symbol, quote.LastPrice.ToString("c"), (quote.LastPrice * buyOrder.Quantity).ToString("c"), buyOrder.BuyOn.ToString("MMM d")); } public class StockBuyOrder { public string Symbol { get; set; } public int Quantity { get; set; } public DateTime BuyOn { get; set; } public StockBuyOrder() { BuyOn = DateTime.Now; } } This is a contrived do-nothing example that simply echoes back what was passed in, but it demonstrates how you can pass complex data to a callback method. On the client side we now have a very simple form that captures the three values on a form: <fieldset> <legend>Post a Stock Buy Order</legend> Enter a symbol: <input type="text" name="txtBuySymbol" id="txtBuySymbol" value="GLD" />   Qty: <input type="text" name="txtBuyQty" id="txtBuyQty" value="10" style="width: 50px" />   Buy on: <input type="text" name="txtBuyOn" id="txtBuyOn" value="<%= DateTime.Now.ToString("d") %>" style="width: 70px;" /> <input type="button" id="btnBuyStock" value="Buy Stock" /> <div id="divStockBuyMessage" class="errordisplay" style="display:none"></div> </fieldset> The completed form and demo then looks something like this: The client side code that picks up the input values and assigns them to object properties and sends the AJAX request looks like this: $("#btnBuyStock").click(function () { // create an object map that matches StockBuyOrder signature var buyOrder = { Symbol: $("#txtBuySymbol").val(), Quantity: $("#txtBuyQty").val() * 1, // number Entered: new Date() } ajaxCallMethod("SampleService.ashx", "BuyStock", [buyOrder], function (result) { $("#divStockBuyMessage").text(result).fadeIn(1000); }, onPageError); }); The code creates an object and attaches the properties that match the server side object passed to the BuyStock method. Each property that you want to update needs to be included and the type must match (ie. string, number, date in this case). Any missing properties will not be set but also not cause any errors. Pass POST data instead of Objects In the last example I collected a bunch of values from form variables and stuffed them into object variables in JavaScript code. While that works, often times this isn't really helping - I end up converting my types on the client and then doing another conversion on the server. If lots of input controls are on a page and you just want to pick up the values on the server via plain POST variables - that can be done too - and it makes sense especially if you're creating and filling the client side object only to push data to the server. Let's add another method to the server that once again lets us buy a stock. But this time let's not accept a parameter but rather send POST data to the server. Here's the server method receiving POST data: [CallbackMethod] public string BuyStockPost() { StockBuyOrder buyOrder = new StockBuyOrder(); buyOrder.Symbol = Request.Form["txtBuySymbol"]; ; int qty; int.TryParse(Request.Form["txtBuyQuantity"], out qty); buyOrder.Quantity = qty; DateTime time; DateTime.TryParse(Request.Form["txtBuyBuyOn"], out time); buyOrder.BuyOn = time; // Or easier way yet //FormVariableBinder.Unbind(buyOrder,null,"txtBuy"); var server = new StockServer(); var quote = server.GetStockQuote(buyOrder.Symbol); if (quote == null) throw new ApplicationException("Invalid or missing stock symbol."); return string.Format("You're buying {0} shares of {1} ({2}) stock at {3} for a total of {4} on {5}.", buyOrder.Quantity, quote.Company, quote.Symbol, quote.LastPrice.ToString("c"), (quote.LastPrice * buyOrder.Quantity).ToString("c"), buyOrder.BuyOn.ToString("MMM d")); } Clearly we've made this server method take more code than it did with the object parameter. We've basically moved the parameter assignment logic from the client to the server. As a result the client code to call this method is now a bit shorter since there's no client side shuffling of values from the controls to an object. $("#btnBuyStockPost").click(function () { ajaxCallMethod("SampleService.ashx", "BuyStockPost", [], // Note: No parameters - function (result) { $("#divStockBuyMessage").text(result).fadeIn(1000); }, onPageError, // Force all page Form Variables to be posted { postbackMode: "Post" }); }); The client simply calls the BuyStockQuote method and pushes all the form variables from the page up to the server which parses them instead. The feature that makes this work is one of the options you can pass to the ajaxCallMethod() function: { postbackMode: "Post" }); which directs the function to include form variable POST data when making the service call. Other options include PostNoViewState (for WebForms to strip out WebForms crap vars), PostParametersOnly (default), None. If you pass parameters those are always posted to the server except when None is set. The above code can be simplified a bit by using the FormVariableBinder helper, which can unbind form variables directly into an object: FormVariableBinder.Unbind(buyOrder,null,"txtBuy"); which replaces the manual Request.Form[] reading code. It receives the object to unbind into, a string of properties to skip, and an optional prefix which is stripped off form variables to match property names. The component is similar to the MVC model binder but it's independent of MVC. Returning non-JSON Data CallbackHandler also supports returning non-JSON/XML data via special return types. You can return raw non-JSON encoded strings like this: [CallbackMethod(ReturnAsRawString=true,ContentType="text/plain")] public string HelloWorldNoJSON(string name) { return "Hello " + name + ". Time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString(); } Calling this method results in just a plain string - no JSON encoding with quotes around the result. This can be useful if your server handling code needs to return a string or HTML result that doesn't fit well for a page or other UI component. Any string output can be returned. You can also return binary data. Stream, byte[] and Bitmap/Image results are automatically streamed back to the client. Notice that you should set the ContentType of the request either on the CallbackMethod attribute or using Response.ContentType. This ensures the Web Server knows how to display your binary response. Using a stream response makes it possible to return any of data. Streamed data can be pretty handy to return bitmap data from a method. The following is a method that returns a stock history graph for a particular stock over a provided number of years: [CallbackMethod(ContentType="image/png",RouteUrl="stocks/history/graph/{symbol}/{years}")] public Stream GetStockHistoryGraph(string symbol, int years = 2,int width = 500, int height=350) { if (width == 0) width = 500; if (height == 0) height = 350; StockServer server = new StockServer(); return server.GetStockHistoryGraph(symbol,"Stock History for " + symbol,width,height,years); } I can now hook this up into the JavaScript code when I get a stock quote. At the end of the process I can assign the URL to the service that returns the image into the src property and so force the image to display. Here's the changed code: $("#btnStockQuote").click(function () { var symbol = $("#txtSymbol").val(); ajaxCallMethod("SampleService.ashx", "GetStockQuote", [symbol], function (quote) { $("#divStockDisplay").fadeIn(1000); $("#stockCompany").text(quote.Company + " (" + quote.Symbol + ")"); $("#stockLastPrice").text(quote.LastPrice); $("#stockQuoteTime").text(quote.LastQuoteTime.formatDate("MMM dd, hh:mmt")); // display a stock chart $("#imgStockHistory").attr("src", "stocks/history/graph/" + symbol + "/2"); },onPageError); }); The resulting output then looks like this: The charting code uses the new ASP.NET 4.0 Chart components via code to display a bar chart of the 2 year stock data as part of the StockServer class which you can find in the sample download. The ability to return arbitrary data from a service is useful as you can see - in this case the chart is clearly associated with the service and it's nice that the graph generation can happen off a handler rather than through a page. Images are common resources, but output can also be PDF reports, zip files for downloads etc. which is becoming increasingly more common to be returned from REST endpoints and other applications. Why reinvent? Obviously the examples I've shown here are pretty basic in terms of functionality. But I hope they demonstrate the core features of AJAX callbacks that you need to work through in most applications which is simple: return data, send back data and potentially retrieve data in various formats. While there are other solutions when it comes down to making AJAX callbacks and servicing REST like requests, I like the flexibility my home grown solution provides. Simply put it's still the easiest solution that I've found that addresses my common use cases: AJAX JSON RPC style callbacks Url based access XML and JSON Output from single method endpoint XML and JSON POST support, querystring input, routing parameter mapping UrlEncoded POST data support on callbacks Ability to return stream/raw string data Essentially ability to return ANYTHING from Service and pass anything All these features are available in various solutions but not together in one place. I've been using this code base for over 4 years now in a number of projects both for myself and commercial work and it's served me extremely well. Besides the AJAX functionality CallbackHandler provides, it's also an easy way to create any kind of output endpoint I need to create. Need to create a few simple routines that spit back some data, but don't want to create a Page or View or full blown handler for it? Create a CallbackHandler and add a method or multiple methods and you have your generic endpoints. It's a quick and easy way to add small code pieces that are pretty efficient as they're running through a pretty small handler implementation. I can have this up and running in a couple of minutes literally without any setup and returning just about any kind of data. Resources Download the Sample NuGet: Westwind Web and AJAX Utilities (Westwind.Web) ajaxCallMethod() Documentation Using the AjaxMethodCallback WebForms Control West Wind Web Toolkit Home Page West Wind Web Toolkit Source Code © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in ASP.NET jQuery AJAX Tweet (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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ComboBox Control using silverlight

- by Aamir Hasan

DropDown.zip (135.33 kb) LiveDemo Introduction In this article i am going to explore some of the features of the ComboBox.ComboBox makes the collection visible and allows users to pick an item from the collection.After its first initialization, no matter if you bind a new datasource with fewer or more elements, the dropdown persists its original height.One workaround is the following:1. store the Properties from the original ComboBox2. delete the ComboBox removing it from its container3. create a new ComboBox and place it in the container4. recover the stores Properties5. bind the new DataSource to the newly created combobox Creating Silverlight ProjectCreate a new Silverlight 3 Project in VS 2008. Name it as ComboBoxtSample. Simple Data BindingAdd System.Windows.Control.Data reference to the Silverlight project. Silverlight UserControl Add a new page to display Bus data using DataGrid. Following shows Bus column XAML snippet:The ComboBox element represents a ComboBox control in XAML. <ComboBox></ComboBox>ComboBox XAML <StackPanel Orientation="Vertical"> <ComboBox Width="120" Height="30" x:Name="DaysDropDownList" DisplayMemberPath="Name">  </ComboBox> </StackPanel> The following code below is an example implementation Combobox control support data binding 1 By setting the DisplayMemberPath property you can specify which data item in your data you want displayed in the ComboBox. 2 Setting the SelectedIndex allows you to specify which item in the ComboBox you want selected. Business Object public class Bus { public string Name { get; set; } public float Price { get; set; } } Data Binding private List populatedlistBus() { listBus = new List(); listBus.Add(new Bus() {Name = "Bus 1", Price = 55f }); listBus.Add(new Bus() { Name = "Bus 2", Price = 55.7f }); listBus.Add(new Bus() { Name = "Bus 3", Price = 2f }); listBus.Add(new Bus() { Name = "Bus 4", Price = 6f }); listBus.Add(new Bus() { Name = "Bus 5", Price = 9F }); listBus.Add(new Bus() { Name = "Bus 6", Price = 10.1f }); return listBus; } The following line of code sets the ItemsSource property of a ComboBox. DaysDropDownList.ItemsSource = populatedlistBus(); Output I hope you enjoyed this simple Silverlight example Conclusion In this article, we saw how data binding works in ComboBox.You learnt how to work with the ComboBox control in Silverlight.

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How to Add a Business Card, or vCard (.vcf) File, to a Signature in Outlook 2013 Without Displaying an Image

- by Lori Kaufman

Whenever you add a Business Card to your signature in Outlook 2013, the Signature Editor automatically generates a picture of it and includes that in the signature as well as attaching the .vcf file. However, there is a way to leave out the image. To remove the business card image from your signature but maintain the attached .vcf file, you must make a change to the registry. NOTE: Before making changes to the registry, be sure you back it up. We also recommend creating a restore point you can use to restore your system if something goes wrong. Before changing the registry, we must add the Business Card to the signature and save it so a .vcf file of the contact is created in the Signatures folder. To do this, click the File tab. Click Options in the menu list on the left side of the Account Information screen. On the Outlook Options dialog box, click Mail in the list of options on the left side of the dialog box. On the Mail screen, click Signatures in the Compose messages section. For this example, we will create a new signature to include the .vcf file for your business card without the image. Click New below the Select signature to edit box. Enter a name for the new signature, such as Business Card, and click OK. Enter text in the signature editor and format it the way you want or insert a different image or logo. Click Business Card above the signature editor. Select the contact you want to include in the signature on the Insert Business Card dialog box and click OK. Click Save below the Select signature to edit box. This creates a .vcf file for the business card in the Signatures folder. Click on the business card image in the signature and delete it. You should only see your formatted text or other image or logo in the signature editor. Click OK to save your new signature and close the signature editor. Close Outlook as well. Now, we will open the Registry Editor to add a key and value to indicate where to find the .vcf to include in the signature we just created. If you’re running Windows 8, press the Windows Key + X to open the command menu and select Run. You can also press the Windows Key + R to directly access the Run dialog box. NOTE: In Windows 7, select Run from the Start menu. In the Open edit box on the Run dialog box, enter “regedit” (without the quotes) and click OK. If the User Account Control dialog box displays, click Yes to continue. NOTE: You may not see this dialog box, depending on your User Account Control settings. Navigate to the following registry key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Outlook\Signatures Make sure the Signatures key is selected. Select New | String Value from the Edit menu. NOTE: You can also right-click in the empty space in the right pane and select New | String Value from the popup menu. Rename the new value to the name of the Signature you created. For this example, we named the value Business Card. Double-click on the new value. In the Value data edit box on the Edit String dialog box, enter the value indicating the location of the .vcf file to include in the signature. The format is: <signature name>_files\<name of .vcf file> For our example, the Value data should be as follows: Business Card_files\Lori Kaufman The name of the .vcf file is generally the contact name. If you’re not sure of what to enter for the Value data for the new key value, you can check the location and name of the .vcf file. To do this, open the Outlook Options dialog box and access the Mail screen as instructed earlier in this article. However, press and hold the Ctrl key while clicking the Signatures button. The Signatures folder opens in Windows Explorer. There should be a folder in the Signatures folder named after the signature you created with “_files” added to the end. For our example, the folder is named Business Card_files. Open this folder. In this folder, you should see a .vcf file with the name of your contact as the name of the file. For our contact, the file is named Lori Kaufman.vcf. The path to the .vcf file should be the name of the folder for the signature (Business Card_files), followed by a “\”, and the name of the .vcf file without the extension (Lori Kaufman). Putting these names together, you get the path that should be entered as the Value data in the new key you created in the Registry Editor. Business Card_files\Lori Kaufman Once you’ve entered the Value data for the new key, select Exit from the File menu to close the Registry Editor. Open Outlook and click New Email on the Home tab. Click Signature in the Include section of the New Mail Message tab and select your new signature from the drop-down menu. NOTE: If you made the new signature the default signature, it will be automatically inserted into the new mail message. The .vcf file is attached to the email message, but the business card image is not included. All you will see in the body of the email message is the text or other image you included in the signature. You can also choose to include an image of your business card in a signature with no .vcf file attached.

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So…is it a Seek or a Scan?

- by Paul White

You’re probably most familiar with the terms ‘Seek’ and ‘Scan’ from the graphical plans produced by SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). The image to the left shows the most common ones, with the three types of scan at the top, followed by four types of seek. You might look to the SSMS tool-tip descriptions to explain the differences between them: Not hugely helpful are they? Both mention scans and ranges (nothing about seeks) and the Index Seek description implies that it will not scan the index entirely (which isn’t necessarily true). Recall also yesterday’s post where we saw two Clustered Index Seek operations doing very different things. The first Seek performed 63 single-row seeking operations; and the second performed a ‘Range Scan’ (more on those later in this post). I hope you agree that those were two very different operations, and perhaps you are wondering why there aren’t different graphical plan icons for Range Scans and Seeks? I have often wondered about that, and the first person to mention it after yesterday’s post was Erin Stellato (twitter | blog): Before we go on to make sense of all this, let’s look at another example of how SQL Server confusingly mixes the terms ‘Scan’ and ‘Seek’ in different contexts. The diagram below shows a very simple heap table with two columns, one of which is the non-clustered Primary Key, and the other has a non-unique non-clustered index defined on it. The right hand side of the diagram shows a simple query, it’s associated query plan, and a couple of extracts from the SSMS tool-tip and Properties windows. Notice the ‘scan direction’ entry in the Properties window snippet. Is this a seek or a scan? The different references to Scans and Seeks are even more pronounced in the XML plan output that the graphical plan is based on. This fragment is what lies behind the single Index Seek icon shown above: You’ll find the same confusing references to Seeks and Scans throughout the product and its documentation. Making Sense of Seeks Let’s forget all about scans for a moment, and think purely about seeks. Loosely speaking, a seek is the process of navigating an index B-tree to find a particular index record, most often at the leaf level. A seek starts at the root and navigates down through the levels of the index to find the point of interest: Singleton Lookups The simplest sort of seek predicate performs this traversal to find (at most) a single record. This is the case when we search for a single value using a unique index and an equality predicate. It should be readily apparent that this type of search will either find one record, or none at all. This operation is known as a singleton lookup. Given the example table from before, the following query is an example of a singleton lookup seek: Sadly, there’s nothing in the graphical plan or XML output to show that this is a singleton lookup – you have to infer it from the fact that this is a single-value equality seek on a unique index. The other common examples of a singleton lookup are bookmark lookups – both the RID and Key Lookup forms are singleton lookups (an RID lookup finds a single record in a heap from the unique row locator, and a Key Lookup does much the same thing on a clustered table). If you happen to run your query with STATISTICS IO ON, you will notice that ‘Scan Count’ is always zero for a singleton lookup. Range Scans The other type of seek predicate is a ‘seek plus range scan’, which I will refer to simply as a range scan. The seek operation makes an initial descent into the index structure to find the first leaf row that qualifies, and then performs a range scan (either backwards or forwards in the index) until it reaches the end of the scan range. The ability of a range scan to proceed in either direction comes about because index pages at the same level are connected by a doubly-linked list – each page has a pointer to the previous page (in logical key order) as well as a pointer to the following page. The doubly-linked list is represented by the green and red dotted arrows in the index diagram presented earlier. One subtle (but important) point is that the notion of a ‘forward’ or ‘backward’ scan applies to the logical key order defined when the index was built. In the present case, the non-clustered primary key index was created as follows: CREATE TABLE dbo.Example ( key_col INTEGER NOT NULL, data INTEGER NOT NULL, CONSTRAINT [PK dbo.Example key_col] PRIMARY KEY NONCLUSTERED (key_col ASC) ) ; Notice that the primary key index specifies an ascending sort order for the single key column. This means that a forward scan of the index will retrieve keys in ascending order, while a backward scan would retrieve keys in descending key order. If the index had been created instead on key_col DESC, a forward scan would retrieve keys in descending order, and a backward scan would return keys in ascending order. A range scan seek predicate may have a Start condition, an End condition, or both. Where one is missing, the scan starts (or ends) at one extreme end of the index, depending on the scan direction. Some examples might help clarify that: the following diagram shows four queries, each of which performs a single seek against a column holding every integer from 1 to 100 inclusive. The results from each query are shown in the blue columns, and relevant attributes from the Properties window appear on the right: Query 1 specifies that all key_col values less than 5 should be returned in ascending order. The query plan achieves this by seeking to the start of the index leaf (there is no explicit starting value) and scanning forward until the End condition (key_col < 5) is no longer satisfied (SQL Server knows it can stop looking as soon as it finds a key_col value that isn’t less than 5 because all later index entries are guaranteed to sort higher). Query 2 asks for key_col values greater than 95, in descending order. SQL Server returns these results by seeking to the end of the index, and scanning backwards (in descending key order) until it comes across a row that isn’t greater than 95. Sharp-eyed readers may notice that the end-of-scan condition is shown as a Start range value. This is a bug in the XML show plan which bubbles up to the Properties window – when a backward scan is performed, the roles of the Start and End values are reversed, but the plan does not reflect that. Oh well. Query 3 looks for key_col values that are greater than or equal to 10, and less than 15, in ascending order. This time, SQL Server seeks to the first index record that matches the Start condition (key_col >= 10) and then scans forward through the leaf pages until the End condition (key_col < 15) is no longer met. Query 4 performs much the same sort of operation as Query 3, but requests the output in descending order. Again, we have to mentally reverse the Start and End conditions because of the bug, but otherwise the process is the same as always: SQL Server finds the highest-sorting record that meets the condition ‘key_col < 25’ and scans backward until ‘key_col >= 20’ is no longer true. One final point to note: seek operations always have the Ordered: True attribute. This means that the operator always produces rows in a sorted order, either ascending or descending depending on how the index was defined, and whether the scan part of the operation is forward or backward. You cannot rely on this sort order in your queries of course (you must always specify an ORDER BY clause if order is important) but SQL Server can make use of the sort order internally. In the four queries above, the query optimizer was able to avoid an explicit Sort operator to honour the ORDER BY clause, for example. Multiple Seek Predicates As we saw yesterday, a single index seek plan operator can contain one or more seek predicates. These seek predicates can either be all singleton seeks or all range scans – SQL Server does not mix them. For example, you might expect the following query to contain two seek predicates, a singleton seek to find the single record in the unique index where key_col = 10, and a range scan to find the key_col values between 15 and 20: SELECT key_col FROM dbo.Example WHERE key_col = 10 OR key_col BETWEEN 15 AND 20 ORDER BY key_col ASC ; In fact, SQL Server transforms the singleton seek (key_col = 10) to the equivalent range scan, Start:[key_col >= 10], End:[key_col <= 10]. This allows both range scans to be evaluated by a single seek operator. To be clear, this query results in two range scans: one from 10 to 10, and one from 15 to 20. Final Thoughts That’s it for today – tomorrow we’ll look at monitoring singleton lookups and range scans, and I’ll show you a seek on a heap table. Yes, a seek. On a heap. Not an index! If you would like to run the queries in this post for yourself, there’s a script below. Thanks for reading! IF OBJECT_ID(N'dbo.Example', N'U') IS NOT NULL BEGIN DROP TABLE dbo.Example; END ; -- Test table is a heap -- Non-clustered primary key on 'key_col' CREATE TABLE dbo.Example ( key_col INTEGER NOT NULL, data INTEGER NOT NULL, CONSTRAINT [PK dbo.Example key_col] PRIMARY KEY NONCLUSTERED (key_col) ) ; -- Non-unique non-clustered index on the 'data' column CREATE NONCLUSTERED INDEX [IX dbo.Example data] ON dbo.Example (data) ; -- Add 100 rows INSERT dbo.Example WITH (TABLOCKX) ( key_col, data ) SELECT key_col = V.number, data = V.number FROM master.dbo.spt_values AS V WHERE V.[type] = N'P' AND V.number BETWEEN 1 AND 100 ; -- ================ -- Singleton lookup -- ================ ; -- Single value equality seek in a unique index -- Scan count = 0 when STATISTIS IO is ON -- Check the XML SHOWPLAN SELECT E.key_col FROM dbo.Example AS E WHERE E.key_col = 32 ; -- =========== -- Range Scans -- =========== ; -- Query 1 SELECT E.key_col FROM dbo.Example AS E WHERE E.key_col <= 5 ORDER BY E.key_col ASC ; -- Query 2 SELECT E.key_col FROM dbo.Example AS E WHERE E.key_col > 95 ORDER BY E.key_col DESC ; -- Query 3 SELECT E.key_col FROM dbo.Example AS E WHERE E.key_col >= 10 AND E.key_col < 15 ORDER BY E.key_col ASC ; -- Query 4 SELECT E.key_col FROM dbo.Example AS E WHERE E.key_col >= 20 AND E.key_col < 25 ORDER BY E.key_col DESC ; -- Final query (singleton + range = 2 range scans) SELECT E.key_col FROM dbo.Example AS E WHERE E.key_col = 10 OR E.key_col BETWEEN 15 AND 20 ORDER BY E.key_col ASC ; -- === TIDY UP === DROP TABLE dbo.Example; © 2011 Paul White email: [email protected] twitter: @SQL_Kiwi

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Advanced TSQL Tuning: Why Internals Knowledge Matters

- by Paul White

There is much more to query tuning than reducing logical reads and adding covering nonclustered indexes. Query tuning is not complete as soon as the query returns results quickly in the development or test environments. In production, your query will compete for memory, CPU, locks, I/O and other resources on the server. Today’s entry looks at some tuning considerations that are often overlooked, and shows how deep internals knowledge can help you write better TSQL. As always, we’ll need some example data. In fact, we are going to use three tables today, each of which is structured like this: Each table has 50,000 rows made up of an INTEGER id column and a padding column containing 3,999 characters in every row. The only difference between the three tables is in the type of the padding column: the first table uses CHAR(3999), the second uses VARCHAR(MAX), and the third uses the deprecated TEXT type. A script to create a database with the three tables and load the sample data follows: USE master; GO IF DB_ID('SortTest') IS NOT NULL DROP DATABASE SortTest; GO CREATE DATABASE SortTest COLLATE LATIN1_GENERAL_BIN; GO ALTER DATABASE SortTest MODIFY FILE ( NAME = 'SortTest', SIZE = 3GB, MAXSIZE = 3GB ); GO ALTER DATABASE SortTest MODIFY FILE ( NAME = 'SortTest_log', SIZE = 256MB, MAXSIZE = 1GB, FILEGROWTH = 128MB ); GO ALTER DATABASE SortTest SET ALLOW_SNAPSHOT_ISOLATION OFF ; ALTER DATABASE SortTest SET AUTO_CLOSE OFF ; ALTER DATABASE SortTest SET AUTO_CREATE_STATISTICS ON ; ALTER DATABASE SortTest SET AUTO_SHRINK OFF ; ALTER DATABASE SortTest SET AUTO_UPDATE_STATISTICS ON ; ALTER DATABASE SortTest SET AUTO_UPDATE_STATISTICS_ASYNC ON ; ALTER DATABASE SortTest SET PARAMETERIZATION SIMPLE ; ALTER DATABASE SortTest SET READ_COMMITTED_SNAPSHOT OFF ; ALTER DATABASE SortTest SET MULTI_USER ; ALTER DATABASE SortTest SET RECOVERY SIMPLE ; USE SortTest; GO CREATE TABLE dbo.TestCHAR ( id INTEGER IDENTITY (1,1) NOT NULL, padding CHAR(3999) NOT NULL, CONSTRAINT [PK dbo.TestCHAR (id)] PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED (id), ) ; CREATE TABLE dbo.TestMAX ( id INTEGER IDENTITY (1,1) NOT NULL, padding VARCHAR(MAX) NOT NULL, CONSTRAINT [PK dbo.TestMAX (id)] PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED (id), ) ; CREATE TABLE dbo.TestTEXT ( id INTEGER IDENTITY (1,1) NOT NULL, padding TEXT NOT NULL, CONSTRAINT [PK dbo.TestTEXT (id)] PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED (id), ) ; -- ============= -- Load TestCHAR (about 3s) -- ============= INSERT INTO dbo.TestCHAR WITH (TABLOCKX) ( padding ) SELECT padding = REPLICATE(CHAR(65 + (Data.n % 26)), 3999) FROM ( SELECT TOP (50000) n = ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY (SELECT 0)) - 1 FROM master.sys.columns C1, master.sys.columns C2, master.sys.columns C3 ORDER BY n ASC ) AS Data ORDER BY Data.n ASC ; -- ============ -- Load TestMAX (about 3s) -- ============ INSERT INTO dbo.TestMAX WITH (TABLOCKX) ( padding ) SELECT CONVERT(VARCHAR(MAX), padding) FROM dbo.TestCHAR ORDER BY id ; -- ============= -- Load TestTEXT (about 5s) -- ============= INSERT INTO dbo.TestTEXT WITH (TABLOCKX) ( padding ) SELECT CONVERT(TEXT, padding) FROM dbo.TestCHAR ORDER BY id ; -- ========== -- Space used -- ========== -- EXECUTE sys.sp_spaceused @objname = 'dbo.TestCHAR'; EXECUTE sys.sp_spaceused @objname = 'dbo.TestMAX'; EXECUTE sys.sp_spaceused @objname = 'dbo.TestTEXT'; ; CHECKPOINT ; That takes around 15 seconds to run, and shows the space allocated to each table in its output: To illustrate the points I want to make today, the example task we are going to set ourselves is to return a random set of 150 rows from each table. The basic shape of the test query is the same for each of the three test tables: SELECT TOP (150) T.id, T.padding FROM dbo.Test AS T ORDER BY NEWID() OPTION (MAXDOP 1) ; Test 1 – CHAR(3999) Running the template query shown above using the TestCHAR table as the target, we find that the query takes around 5 seconds to return its results. This seems slow, considering that the table only has 50,000 rows. Working on the assumption that generating a GUID for each row is a CPU-intensive operation, we might try enabling parallelism to see if that speeds up the response time. Running the query again (but without the MAXDOP 1 hint) on a machine with eight logical processors, the query now takes 10 seconds to execute – twice as long as when run serially. Rather than attempting further guesses at the cause of the slowness, let’s go back to serial execution and add some monitoring. The script below monitors STATISTICS IO output and the amount of tempdb used by the test query. We will also run a Profiler trace to capture any warnings generated during query execution. DECLARE @read BIGINT, @write BIGINT ; SELECT @read = SUM(num_of_bytes_read), @write = SUM(num_of_bytes_written) FROM tempdb.sys.database_files AS DBF JOIN sys.dm_io_virtual_file_stats(2, NULL) AS FS ON FS.file_id = DBF.file_id WHERE DBF.type_desc = 'ROWS' ; SET STATISTICS IO ON ; SELECT TOP (150) TC.id, TC.padding FROM dbo.TestCHAR AS TC ORDER BY NEWID() OPTION (MAXDOP 1) ; SET STATISTICS IO OFF ; SELECT tempdb_read_MB = (SUM(num_of_bytes_read) - @read) / 1024. / 1024., tempdb_write_MB = (SUM(num_of_bytes_written) - @write) / 1024. / 1024., internal_use_MB = ( SELECT internal_objects_alloc_page_count / 128.0 FROM sys.dm_db_task_space_usage WHERE session_id = @@SPID ) FROM tempdb.sys.database_files AS DBF JOIN sys.dm_io_virtual_file_stats(2, NULL) AS FS ON FS.file_id = DBF.file_id WHERE DBF.type_desc = 'ROWS' ; Let’s take a closer look at the statistics and query plan generated from this: Following the flow of the data from right to left, we see the expected 50,000 rows emerging from the Clustered Index Scan, with a total estimated size of around 191MB. The Compute Scalar adds a column containing a random GUID (generated from the NEWID() function call) for each row. With this extra column in place, the size of the data arriving at the Sort operator is estimated to be 192MB. Sort is a blocking operator – it has to examine all of the rows on its input before it can produce its first row of output (the last row received might sort first). This characteristic means that Sort requires a memory grant – memory allocated for the query’s use by SQL Server just before execution starts. In this case, the Sort is the only memory-consuming operator in the plan, so it has access to the full 243MB (248,696KB) of memory reserved by SQL Server for this query execution. Notice that the memory grant is significantly larger than the expected size of the data to be sorted. SQL Server uses a number of techniques to speed up sorting, some of which sacrifice size for comparison speed. Sorts typically require a very large number of comparisons, so this is usually a very effective optimization. One of the drawbacks is that it is not possible to exactly predict the sort space needed, as it depends on the data itself. SQL Server takes an educated guess based on data types, sizes, and the number of rows expected, but the algorithm is not perfect. In spite of the large memory grant, the Profiler trace shows a Sort Warning event (indicating that the sort ran out of memory), and the tempdb usage monitor shows that 195MB of tempdb space was used – all of that for system use. The 195MB represents physical write activity on tempdb, because SQL Server strictly enforces memory grants – a query cannot ‘cheat’ and effectively gain extra memory by spilling to tempdb pages that reside in memory. Anyway, the key point here is that it takes a while to write 195MB to disk, and this is the main reason that the query takes 5 seconds overall. If you are wondering why using parallelism made the problem worse, consider that eight threads of execution result in eight concurrent partial sorts, each receiving one eighth of the memory grant. The eight sorts all spilled to tempdb, resulting in inefficiencies as the spilled sorts competed for disk resources. More importantly, there are specific problems at the point where the eight partial results are combined, but I’ll cover that in a future post. CHAR(3999) Performance Summary: 5 seconds elapsed time 243MB memory grant 195MB tempdb usage 192MB estimated sort set 25,043 logical reads Sort Warning Test 2 – VARCHAR(MAX) We’ll now run exactly the same test (with the additional monitoring) on the table using a VARCHAR(MAX) padding column: DECLARE @read BIGINT, @write BIGINT ; SELECT @read = SUM(num_of_bytes_read), @write = SUM(num_of_bytes_written) FROM tempdb.sys.database_files AS DBF JOIN sys.dm_io_virtual_file_stats(2, NULL) AS FS ON FS.file_id = DBF.file_id WHERE DBF.type_desc = 'ROWS' ; SET STATISTICS IO ON ; SELECT TOP (150) TM.id, TM.padding FROM dbo.TestMAX AS TM ORDER BY NEWID() OPTION (MAXDOP 1) ; SET STATISTICS IO OFF ; SELECT tempdb_read_MB = (SUM(num_of_bytes_read) - @read) / 1024. / 1024., tempdb_write_MB = (SUM(num_of_bytes_written) - @write) / 1024. / 1024., internal_use_MB = ( SELECT internal_objects_alloc_page_count / 128.0 FROM sys.dm_db_task_space_usage WHERE session_id = @@SPID ) FROM tempdb.sys.database_files AS DBF JOIN sys.dm_io_virtual_file_stats(2, NULL) AS FS ON FS.file_id = DBF.file_id WHERE DBF.type_desc = 'ROWS' ; This time the query takes around 8 seconds to complete (3 seconds longer than Test 1). Notice that the estimated row and data sizes are very slightly larger, and the overall memory grant has also increased very slightly to 245MB. The most marked difference is in the amount of tempdb space used – this query wrote almost 391MB of sort run data to the physical tempdb file. Don’t draw any general conclusions about VARCHAR(MAX) versus CHAR from this – I chose the length of the data specifically to expose this edge case. In most cases, VARCHAR(MAX) performs very similarly to CHAR – I just wanted to make test 2 a bit more exciting. MAX Performance Summary: 8 seconds elapsed time 245MB memory grant 391MB tempdb usage 193MB estimated sort set 25,043 logical reads Sort warning Test 3 – TEXT The same test again, but using the deprecated TEXT data type for the padding column: DECLARE @read BIGINT, @write BIGINT ; SELECT @read = SUM(num_of_bytes_read), @write = SUM(num_of_bytes_written) FROM tempdb.sys.database_files AS DBF JOIN sys.dm_io_virtual_file_stats(2, NULL) AS FS ON FS.file_id = DBF.file_id WHERE DBF.type_desc = 'ROWS' ; SET STATISTICS IO ON ; SELECT TOP (150) TT.id, TT.padding FROM dbo.TestTEXT AS TT ORDER BY NEWID() OPTION (MAXDOP 1, RECOMPILE) ; SET STATISTICS IO OFF ; SELECT tempdb_read_MB = (SUM(num_of_bytes_read) - @read) / 1024. / 1024., tempdb_write_MB = (SUM(num_of_bytes_written) - @write) / 1024. / 1024., internal_use_MB = ( SELECT internal_objects_alloc_page_count / 128.0 FROM sys.dm_db_task_space_usage WHERE session_id = @@SPID ) FROM tempdb.sys.database_files AS DBF JOIN sys.dm_io_virtual_file_stats(2, NULL) AS FS ON FS.file_id = DBF.file_id WHERE DBF.type_desc = 'ROWS' ; This time the query runs in 500ms. If you look at the metrics we have been checking so far, it’s not hard to understand why: TEXT Performance Summary: 0.5 seconds elapsed time 9MB memory grant 5MB tempdb usage 5MB estimated sort set 207 logical reads 596 LOB logical reads Sort warning SQL Server’s memory grant algorithm still underestimates the memory needed to perform the sorting operation, but the size of the data to sort is so much smaller (5MB versus 193MB previously) that the spilled sort doesn’t matter very much. Why is the data size so much smaller? The query still produces the correct results – including the large amount of data held in the padding column – so what magic is being performed here? TEXT versus MAX Storage The answer lies in how columns of the TEXT data type are stored. By default, TEXT data is stored off-row in separate LOB pages – which explains why this is the first query we have seen that records LOB logical reads in its STATISTICS IO output. You may recall from my last post that LOB data leaves an in-row pointer to the separate storage structure holding the LOB data. SQL Server can see that the full LOB value is not required by the query plan until results are returned, so instead of passing the full LOB value down the plan from the Clustered Index Scan, it passes the small in-row structure instead. SQL Server estimates that each row coming from the scan will be 79 bytes long – 11 bytes for row overhead, 4 bytes for the integer id column, and 64 bytes for the LOB pointer (in fact the pointer is rather smaller – usually 16 bytes – but the details of that don’t really matter right now). OK, so this query is much more efficient because it is sorting a very much smaller data set – SQL Server delays retrieving the LOB data itself until after the Sort starts producing its 150 rows. The question that normally arises at this point is: Why doesn’t SQL Server use the same trick when the padding column is defined as VARCHAR(MAX)? The answer is connected with the fact that if the actual size of the VARCHAR(MAX) data is 8000 bytes or less, it is usually stored in-row in exactly the same way as for a VARCHAR(8000) column – MAX data only moves off-row into LOB storage when it exceeds 8000 bytes. The default behaviour of the TEXT type is to be stored off-row by default, unless the ‘text in row’ table option is set suitably and there is room on the page. There is an analogous (but opposite) setting to control the storage of MAX data – the ‘large value types out of row’ table option. By enabling this option for a table, MAX data will be stored off-row (in a LOB structure) instead of in-row. SQL Server Books Online has good coverage of both options in the topic In Row Data. The MAXOOR Table The essential difference, then, is that MAX defaults to in-row storage, and TEXT defaults to off-row (LOB) storage. You might be thinking that we could get the same benefits seen for the TEXT data type by storing the VARCHAR(MAX) values off row – so let’s look at that option now. This script creates a fourth table, with the VARCHAR(MAX) data stored off-row in LOB pages: CREATE TABLE dbo.TestMAXOOR ( id INTEGER IDENTITY (1,1) NOT NULL, padding VARCHAR(MAX) NOT NULL, CONSTRAINT [PK dbo.TestMAXOOR (id)] PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED (id), ) ; EXECUTE sys.sp_tableoption @TableNamePattern = N'dbo.TestMAXOOR', @OptionName = 'large value types out of row', @OptionValue = 'true' ; SELECT large_value_types_out_of_row FROM sys.tables WHERE [schema_id] = SCHEMA_ID(N'dbo') AND name = N'TestMAXOOR' ; INSERT INTO dbo.TestMAXOOR WITH (TABLOCKX) ( padding ) SELECT SPACE(0) FROM dbo.TestCHAR ORDER BY id ; UPDATE TM WITH (TABLOCK) SET padding.WRITE (TC.padding, NULL, NULL) FROM dbo.TestMAXOOR AS TM JOIN dbo.TestCHAR AS TC ON TC.id = TM.id ; EXECUTE sys.sp_spaceused @objname = 'dbo.TestMAXOOR' ; CHECKPOINT ; Test 4 – MAXOOR We can now re-run our test on the MAXOOR (MAX out of row) table: DECLARE @read BIGINT, @write BIGINT ; SELECT @read = SUM(num_of_bytes_read), @write = SUM(num_of_bytes_written) FROM tempdb.sys.database_files AS DBF JOIN sys.dm_io_virtual_file_stats(2, NULL) AS FS ON FS.file_id = DBF.file_id WHERE DBF.type_desc = 'ROWS' ; SET STATISTICS IO ON ; SELECT TOP (150) MO.id, MO.padding FROM dbo.TestMAXOOR AS MO ORDER BY NEWID() OPTION (MAXDOP 1, RECOMPILE) ; SET STATISTICS IO OFF ; SELECT tempdb_read_MB = (SUM(num_of_bytes_read) - @read) / 1024. / 1024., tempdb_write_MB = (SUM(num_of_bytes_written) - @write) / 1024. / 1024., internal_use_MB = ( SELECT internal_objects_alloc_page_count / 128.0 FROM sys.dm_db_task_space_usage WHERE session_id = @@SPID ) FROM tempdb.sys.database_files AS DBF JOIN sys.dm_io_virtual_file_stats(2, NULL) AS FS ON FS.file_id = DBF.file_id WHERE DBF.type_desc = 'ROWS' ; TEXT Performance Summary: 0.3 seconds elapsed time 245MB memory grant 0MB tempdb usage 193MB estimated sort set 207 logical reads 446 LOB logical reads No sort warning The query runs very quickly – slightly faster than Test 3, and without spilling the sort to tempdb (there is no sort warning in the trace, and the monitoring query shows zero tempdb usage by this query). SQL Server is passing the in-row pointer structure down the plan and only looking up the LOB value on the output side of the sort. The Hidden Problem There is still a huge problem with this query though – it requires a 245MB memory grant. No wonder the sort doesn’t spill to tempdb now – 245MB is about 20 times more memory than this query actually requires to sort 50,000 records containing LOB data pointers. Notice that the estimated row and data sizes in the plan are the same as in test 2 (where the MAX data was stored in-row). The optimizer assumes that MAX data is stored in-row, regardless of the sp_tableoption setting ‘large value types out of row’. Why? Because this option is dynamic – changing it does not immediately force all MAX data in the table in-row or off-row, only when data is added or actually changed. SQL Server does not keep statistics to show how much MAX or TEXT data is currently in-row, and how much is stored in LOB pages. This is an annoying limitation, and one which I hope will be addressed in a future version of the product. So why should we worry about this? Excessive memory grants reduce concurrency and may result in queries waiting on the RESOURCE_SEMAPHORE wait type while they wait for memory they do not need. 245MB is an awful lot of memory, especially on 32-bit versions where memory grants cannot use AWE-mapped memory. Even on a 64-bit server with plenty of memory, do you really want a single query to consume 0.25GB of memory unnecessarily? That’s 32,000 8KB pages that might be put to much better use. The Solution The answer is not to use the TEXT data type for the padding column. That solution happens to have better performance characteristics for this specific query, but it still results in a spilled sort, and it is hard to recommend the use of a data type which is scheduled for removal. I hope it is clear to you that the fundamental problem here is that SQL Server sorts the whole set arriving at a Sort operator. Clearly, it is not efficient to sort the whole table in memory just to return 150 rows in a random order. The TEXT example was more efficient because it dramatically reduced the size of the set that needed to be sorted. We can do the same thing by selecting 150 unique keys from the table at random (sorting by NEWID() for example) and only then retrieving the large padding column values for just the 150 rows we need. The following script implements that idea for all four tables: SET STATISTICS IO ON ; WITH TestTable AS ( SELECT * FROM dbo.TestCHAR ), TopKeys AS ( SELECT TOP (150) id FROM TestTable ORDER BY NEWID() ) SELECT T1.id, T1.padding FROM TestTable AS T1 WHERE T1.id = ANY (SELECT id FROM TopKeys) OPTION (MAXDOP 1) ; WITH TestTable AS ( SELECT * FROM dbo.TestMAX ), TopKeys AS ( SELECT TOP (150) id FROM TestTable ORDER BY NEWID() ) SELECT T1.id, T1.padding FROM TestTable AS T1 WHERE T1.id IN (SELECT id FROM TopKeys) OPTION (MAXDOP 1) ; WITH TestTable AS ( SELECT * FROM dbo.TestTEXT ), TopKeys AS ( SELECT TOP (150) id FROM TestTable ORDER BY NEWID() ) SELECT T1.id, T1.padding FROM TestTable AS T1 WHERE T1.id IN (SELECT id FROM TopKeys) OPTION (MAXDOP 1) ; WITH TestTable AS ( SELECT * FROM dbo.TestMAXOOR ), TopKeys AS ( SELECT TOP (150) id FROM TestTable ORDER BY NEWID() ) SELECT T1.id, T1.padding FROM TestTable AS T1 WHERE T1.id IN (SELECT id FROM TopKeys) OPTION (MAXDOP 1) ; SET STATISTICS IO OFF ; All four queries now return results in much less than a second, with memory grants between 6 and 12MB, and without spilling to tempdb. The small remaining inefficiency is in reading the id column values from the clustered primary key index. As a clustered index, it contains all the in-row data at its leaf. The CHAR and VARCHAR(MAX) tables store the padding column in-row, so id values are separated by a 3999-character column, plus row overhead. The TEXT and MAXOOR tables store the padding values off-row, so id values in the clustered index leaf are separated by the much-smaller off-row pointer structure. This difference is reflected in the number of logical page reads performed by the four queries: Table 'TestCHAR' logical reads 25511 lob logical reads 000 Table 'TestMAX'. logical reads 25511 lob logical reads 000 Table 'TestTEXT' logical reads 00412 lob logical reads 597 Table 'TestMAXOOR' logical reads 00413 lob logical reads 446 We can increase the density of the id values by creating a separate nonclustered index on the id column only. This is the same key as the clustered index, of course, but the nonclustered index will not include the rest of the in-row column data. CREATE UNIQUE NONCLUSTERED INDEX uq1 ON dbo.TestCHAR (id); CREATE UNIQUE NONCLUSTERED INDEX uq1 ON dbo.TestMAX (id); CREATE UNIQUE NONCLUSTERED INDEX uq1 ON dbo.TestTEXT (id); CREATE UNIQUE NONCLUSTERED INDEX uq1 ON dbo.TestMAXOOR (id); The four queries can now use the very dense nonclustered index to quickly scan the id values, sort them by NEWID(), select the 150 ids we want, and then look up the padding data. The logical reads with the new indexes in place are: Table 'TestCHAR' logical reads 835 lob logical reads 0 Table 'TestMAX' logical reads 835 lob logical reads 0 Table 'TestTEXT' logical reads 686 lob logical reads 597 Table 'TestMAXOOR' logical reads 686 lob logical reads 448 With the new index, all four queries use the same query plan (click to enlarge): Performance Summary: 0.3 seconds elapsed time 6MB memory grant 0MB tempdb usage 1MB sort set 835 logical reads (CHAR, MAX) 686 logical reads (TEXT, MAXOOR) 597 LOB logical reads (TEXT) 448 LOB logical reads (MAXOOR) No sort warning I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to work out why trying to eliminate the Key Lookup by adding the padding column to the new nonclustered indexes would be a daft idea Conclusion This post is not about tuning queries that access columns containing big strings. It isn’t about the internal differences between TEXT and MAX data types either. It isn’t even about the cool use of UPDATE .WRITE used in the MAXOOR table load. No, this post is about something else: Many developers might not have tuned our starting example query at all – 5 seconds isn’t that bad, and the original query plan looks reasonable at first glance. Perhaps the NEWID() function would have been blamed for ‘just being slow’ – who knows. 5 seconds isn’t awful – unless your users expect sub-second responses – but using 250MB of memory and writing 200MB to tempdb certainly is! If ten sessions ran that query at the same time in production that’s 2.5GB of memory usage and 2GB hitting tempdb. Of course, not all queries can be rewritten to avoid large memory grants and sort spills using the key-lookup technique in this post, but that’s not the point either. The point of this post is that a basic understanding of execution plans is not enough. Tuning for logical reads and adding covering indexes is not enough. If you want to produce high-quality, scalable TSQL that won’t get you paged as soon as it hits production, you need a deep understanding of execution plans, and as much accurate, deep knowledge about SQL Server as you can lay your hands on. The advanced database developer has a wide range of tools to use in writing queries that perform well in a range of circumstances. By the way, the examples in this post were written for SQL Server 2008. They will run on 2005 and demonstrate the same principles, but you won’t get the same figures I did because 2005 had a rather nasty bug in the Top N Sort operator. Fair warning: if you do decide to run the scripts on a 2005 instance (particularly the parallel query) do it before you head out for lunch… This post is dedicated to the people of Christchurch, New Zealand. © 2011 Paul White email: @[email protected] twitter: @SQL_Kiwi

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Hello Operator, My Switch Is Bored

- by Paul White

This is a post for T-SQL Tuesday #43 hosted by my good friend Rob Farley. The topic this month is Plan Operators. I haven’t taken part in T-SQL Tuesday before, but I do like to write about execution plans, so this seemed like a good time to start. This post is in two parts. The first part is primarily an excuse to use a pretty bad play on words in the title of this blog post (if you’re too young to know what a telephone operator or a switchboard is, I hate you). The second part of the post looks at an invisible query plan operator (so to speak). 1. My Switch Is Bored Allow me to present the rare and interesting execution plan operator, Switch: Books Online has this to say about Switch: Following that description, I had a go at producing a Fast Forward Cursor plan that used the TOP operator, but had no luck. That may be due to my lack of skill with cursors, I’m not too sure. The only application of Switch in SQL Server 2012 that I am familiar with requires a local partitioned view: CREATE TABLE dbo.T1 (c1 int NOT NULL CHECK (c1 BETWEEN 00 AND 24)); CREATE TABLE dbo.T2 (c1 int NOT NULL CHECK (c1 BETWEEN 25 AND 49)); CREATE TABLE dbo.T3 (c1 int NOT NULL CHECK (c1 BETWEEN 50 AND 74)); CREATE TABLE dbo.T4 (c1 int NOT NULL CHECK (c1 BETWEEN 75 AND 99)); GO CREATE VIEW V1 AS SELECT c1 FROM dbo.T1 UNION ALL SELECT c1 FROM dbo.T2 UNION ALL SELECT c1 FROM dbo.T3 UNION ALL SELECT c1 FROM dbo.T4; Not only that, but it needs an updatable local partitioned view. We’ll need some primary keys to meet that requirement: ALTER TABLE dbo.T1 ADD CONSTRAINT PK_T1 PRIMARY KEY (c1); ALTER TABLE dbo.T2 ADD CONSTRAINT PK_T2 PRIMARY KEY (c1); ALTER TABLE dbo.T3 ADD CONSTRAINT PK_T3 PRIMARY KEY (c1); ALTER TABLE dbo.T4 ADD CONSTRAINT PK_T4 PRIMARY KEY (c1); We also need an INSERT statement that references the view. Even more specifically, to see a Switch operator, we need to perform a single-row insert (multi-row inserts use a different plan shape): INSERT dbo.V1 (c1) VALUES (1); And now…the execution plan: The Constant Scan manufactures a single row with no columns. The Compute Scalar works out which partition of the view the new value should go in. The Assert checks that the computed partition number is not null (if it is, an error is returned). The Nested Loops Join executes exactly once, with the partition id as an outer reference (correlated parameter). The Switch operator checks the value of the parameter and executes the corresponding input only. If the partition id is 0, the uppermost Clustered Index Insert is executed, adding a row to table T1. If the partition id is 1, the next lower Clustered Index Insert is executed, adding a row to table T2…and so on. In case you were wondering, here’s a query and execution plan for a multi-row insert to the view: INSERT dbo.V1 (c1) VALUES (1), (2); Yuck! An Eager Table Spool and four Filters! I prefer the Switch plan. My guess is that almost all the old strategies that used a Switch operator have been replaced over time, using things like a regular Concatenation Union All combined with Start-Up Filters on its inputs. Other new (relative to the Switch operator) features like table partitioning have specific execution plan support that doesn’t need the Switch operator either. This feels like a bit of a shame, but perhaps it is just nostalgia on my part, it’s hard to know. Please do let me know if you encounter a query that can still use the Switch operator in 2012 – it must be very bored if this is the only possible modern usage! 2. Invisible Plan Operators The second part of this post uses an example based on a question Dave Ballantyne asked using the SQL Sentry Plan Explorer plan upload facility. If you haven’t tried that yet, make sure you’re on the latest version of the (free) Plan Explorer software, and then click the Post to SQLPerformance.com button. That will create a site question with the query plan attached (which can be anonymized if the plan contains sensitive information). Aaron Bertrand and I keep a close eye on questions there, so if you have ever wanted to ask a query plan question of either of us, that’s a good way to do it. The problem The issue I want to talk about revolves around a query issued against a calendar table. The script below creates a simplified version and adds 100 years of per-day information to it: USE tempdb; GO CREATE TABLE dbo.Calendar ( dt date NOT NULL, isWeekday bit NOT NULL, theYear smallint NOT NULL, CONSTRAINT PK__dbo_Calendar_dt PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED (dt) ); GO -- Monday is the first day of the week for me SET DATEFIRST 1; -- Add 100 years of data INSERT dbo.Calendar WITH (TABLOCKX) (dt, isWeekday, theYear) SELECT CA.dt, isWeekday = CASE WHEN DATEPART(WEEKDAY, CA.dt) IN (6, 7) THEN 0 ELSE 1 END, theYear = YEAR(CA.dt) FROM Sandpit.dbo.Numbers AS N CROSS APPLY ( VALUES (DATEADD(DAY, N.n - 1, CONVERT(date, '01 Jan 2000', 113))) ) AS CA (dt) WHERE N.n BETWEEN 1 AND 36525; The following query counts the number of weekend days in 2013: SELECT Days = COUNT_BIG(*) FROM dbo.Calendar AS C WHERE theYear = 2013 AND isWeekday = 0; It returns the correct result (104) using the following execution plan: The query optimizer has managed to estimate the number of rows returned from the table exactly, based purely on the default statistics created separately on the two columns referenced in the query’s WHERE clause. (Well, almost exactly, the unrounded estimate is 104.289 rows.) There is already an invisible operator in this query plan – a Filter operator used to apply the WHERE clause predicates. We can see it by re-running the query with the enormously useful (but undocumented) trace flag 9130 enabled: Now we can see the full picture. The whole table is scanned, returning all 36,525 rows, before the Filter narrows that down to just the 104 we want. Without the trace flag, the Filter is incorporated in the Clustered Index Scan as a residual predicate. It is a little bit more efficient than using a separate operator, but residual predicates are still something you will want to avoid where possible. The estimates are still spot on though: Anyway, looking to improve the performance of this query, Dave added the following filtered index to the Calendar table: CREATE NONCLUSTERED INDEX Weekends ON dbo.Calendar(theYear) WHERE isWeekday = 0; The original query now produces a much more efficient plan: Unfortunately, the estimated number of rows produced by the seek is now wrong (365 instead of 104): What’s going on? The estimate was spot on before we added the index! Explanation You might want to grab a coffee for this bit. Using another trace flag or two (8606 and 8612) we can see that the cardinality estimates were exactly right initially: The highlighted information shows the initial cardinality estimates for the base table (36,525 rows), the result of applying the two relational selects in our WHERE clause (104 rows), and after performing the COUNT_BIG(*) group by aggregate (1 row). All of these are correct, but that was before cost-based optimization got involved :) Cost-based optimization When cost-based optimization starts up, the logical tree above is copied into a structure (the ‘memo’) that has one group per logical operation (roughly speaking). The logical read of the base table (LogOp_Get) ends up in group 7; the two predicates (LogOp_Select) end up in group 8 (with the details of the selections in subgroups 0-6). These two groups still have the correct cardinalities as trace flag 8608 output (initial memo contents) shows: During cost-based optimization, a rule called SelToIdxStrategy runs on group 8. It’s job is to match logical selections to indexable expressions (SARGs). It successfully matches the selections (theYear = 2013, is Weekday = 0) to the filtered index, and writes a new alternative into the memo structure. The new alternative is entered into group 8 as option 1 (option 0 was the original LogOp_Select): The new alternative is to do nothing (PhyOp_NOP = no operation), but to instead follow the new logical instructions listed below the NOP. The LogOp_GetIdx (full read of an index) goes into group 21, and the LogOp_SelectIdx (selection on an index) is placed in group 22, operating on the result of group 21. The definition of the comparison ‘the Year = 2013’ (ScaOp_Comp downwards) was already present in the memo starting at group 2, so no new memo groups are created for that. New Cardinality Estimates The new memo groups require two new cardinality estimates to be derived. First, LogOp_Idx (full read of the index) gets a predicted cardinality of 10,436. This number comes from the filtered index statistics: DBCC SHOW_STATISTICS (Calendar, Weekends) WITH STAT_HEADER; The second new cardinality derivation is for the LogOp_SelectIdx applying the predicate (theYear = 2013). To get a number for this, the cardinality estimator uses statistics for the column ‘theYear’, producing an estimate of 365 rows (there are 365 days in 2013!): DBCC SHOW_STATISTICS (Calendar, theYear) WITH HISTOGRAM; This is where the mistake happens. Cardinality estimation should have used the filtered index statistics here, to get an estimate of 104 rows: DBCC SHOW_STATISTICS (Calendar, Weekends) WITH HISTOGRAM; Unfortunately, the logic has lost sight of the link between the read of the filtered index (LogOp_GetIdx) in group 22, and the selection on that index (LogOp_SelectIdx) that it is deriving a cardinality estimate for, in group 21. The correct cardinality estimate (104 rows) is still present in the memo, attached to group 8, but that group now has a PhyOp_NOP implementation. Skipping over the rest of cost-based optimization (in a belated attempt at brevity) we can see the optimizer’s final output using trace flag 8607: This output shows the (incorrect, but understandable) 365 row estimate for the index range operation, and the correct 104 estimate still attached to its PhyOp_NOP. This tree still has to go through a few post-optimizer rewrites and ‘copy out’ from the memo structure into a tree suitable for the execution engine. One step in this process removes PhyOp_NOP, discarding its 104-row cardinality estimate as it does so. To finish this section on a more positive note, consider what happens if we add an OVER clause to the query aggregate. This isn’t intended to be a ‘fix’ of any sort, I just want to show you that the 104 estimate can survive and be used if later cardinality estimation needs it: SELECT Days = COUNT_BIG(*) OVER () FROM dbo.Calendar AS C WHERE theYear = 2013 AND isWeekday = 0; The estimated execution plan is: Note the 365 estimate at the Index Seek, but the 104 lives again at the Segment! We can imagine the lost predicate ‘isWeekday = 0’ as sitting between the seek and the segment in an invisible Filter operator that drops the estimate from 365 to 104. Even though the NOP group is removed after optimization (so we don’t see it in the execution plan) bear in mind that all cost-based choices were made with the 104-row memo group present, so although things look a bit odd, it shouldn’t affect the optimizer’s plan selection. I should also mention that we can work around the estimation issue by including the index’s filtering columns in the index key: CREATE NONCLUSTERED INDEX Weekends ON dbo.Calendar(theYear, isWeekday) WHERE isWeekday = 0 WITH (DROP_EXISTING = ON); There are some downsides to doing this, including that changes to the isWeekday column may now require Halloween Protection, but that is unlikely to be a big problem for a static calendar table ;) With the updated index in place, the original query produces an execution plan with the correct cardinality estimation showing at the Index Seek: That’s all for today, remember to let me know about any Switch plans you come across on a modern instance of SQL Server! Finally, here are some other posts of mine that cover other plan operators: Segment and Sequence Project Common Subexpression Spools Why Plan Operators Run Backwards Row Goals and the Top Operator Hash Match Flow Distinct Top N Sort Index Spools and Page Splits Singleton and Range Seeks Bitmaps Hash Join Performance Compute Scalar © 2013 Paul White – All Rights Reserved Twitter: @SQL_Kiwi

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SQL SERVER – SmallDateTime and Precision – A Continuous Confusion

- by pinaldave

Some kinds of confusion never go away. Here is one of the ancient confusing things in SQL. The precision of the SmallDateTime is one concept that confuses a lot of people, proven by the many messages I receive everyday relating to this subject. Let me start with the question: What is the precision of the SMALLDATETIME datatypes? What is your answer? Write it down on your notepad. Now if you do not want to continue reading the blog post, head to my previous blog post over here: SQL SERVER – Precision of SMALLDATETIME. A Social Media Question Since the increase of social media conversations, I noticed that the amount of the comments I receive on this blog is a bit staggering. I receive lots of questions on facebook, twitter or Google+. One of the very interesting questions yesterday was asked on Facebook by Raghavendra. I am re-organizing his script and asking all of the questions he has asked me. Let us see if we could help him with his question: CREATE TABLE #temp (name VARCHAR(100),registered smalldatetime) GO DECLARE @test smalldatetime SET @test=GETDATE() INSERT INTO #temp VALUES ('Value1',@test) INSERT INTO #temp VALUES ('Value2',@test) GO SELECT * FROM #temp ORDER BY registered DESC GO DROP TABLE #temp GO Now when the above script is ran, we will get the following result: Well, the expectation of the query was to have the following result. The row which was inserted last was expected to return as first row in result set as the ORDER BY descending. Side note: Because the requirement is to get the latest data, we can’t use any column other than smalldatetime column in order by. If we use name column in the order by, we will get an incorrect result as it can be any name. My Initial Reaction My initial reaction was as follows: 1) DataType DateTime2: If file precision of the column is expected from the column which store date and time, it should not be smalldatetime. The precision of the column smalldatetime is One Minute (Read Here) for finer precision use DateTime or DateTime2 data type. Here is the code which includes above suggestion: CREATE TABLE #temp (name VARCHAR(100), registered datetime2) GO DECLARE @test datetime2 SET @test=GETDATE() INSERT INTO #temp VALUES ('Value1',@test) INSERT INTO #temp VALUES ('Value2',@test) GO SELECT * FROM #temp ORDER BY registered DESC GO DROP TABLE #temp GO 2) Tie Breaker Identity: There are always possibilities that two rows were inserted at the same time. In that case, you may need a tie breaker. If you have an increasing identity column, you can use that as a tie breaker as well. CREATE TABLE #temp (ID INT IDENTITY(1,1), name VARCHAR(100),registered datetime2) GO DECLARE @test datetime2 SET @test=GETDATE() INSERT INTO #temp VALUES ('Value1',@test) INSERT INTO #temp VALUES ('Value2',@test) GO SELECT * FROM #temp ORDER BY ID DESC GO DROP TABLE #temp GO Those two were the quick suggestions I provided. It is not necessary that you should use both advices. It is possible that one can use only DATETIME datatype or Identity column can have datatype of BIGINT or have another tie breaker. An Alternate NO Solution In the facebook thread this was also discussed as one of the solutions: CREATE TABLE #temp (name VARCHAR(100),registered smalldatetime) GO DECLARE @test smalldatetime SET @test=GETDATE() INSERT INTO #temp VALUES ('Value1',@test) INSERT INTO #temp VALUES ('Value2',@test) GO SELECT name, registered, ROW_NUMBER() OVER(ORDER BY registered DESC) AS "Row Number" FROM #temp ORDER BY 3 DESC GO DROP TABLE #temp GO However, I believe it is not the solution and can be further misleading if used in a production server. Here is the example of why it is not a good solution: CREATE TABLE #temp (name VARCHAR(100) NOT NULL,registered smalldatetime) GO DECLARE @test smalldatetime SET @test=GETDATE() INSERT INTO #temp VALUES ('Value1',@test) INSERT INTO #temp VALUES ('Value2',@test) GO -- Before Index SELECT name, registered, ROW_NUMBER() OVER(ORDER BY registered DESC) AS "Row Number" FROM #temp ORDER BY 3 DESC GO -- Create Index ALTER TABLE #temp ADD CONSTRAINT [PK_#temp] PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED (name DESC) GO -- After Index SELECT name, registered, ROW_NUMBER() OVER(ORDER BY registered DESC) AS "Row Number" FROM #temp ORDER BY 3 DESC GO DROP TABLE #temp GO Now let us examine the resultset. You will notice that an index which is created on the base table which is (indeed) schema change the table but can affect the resultset. As you can see, an index can change the resultset, so this method is not yet perfect to get the latest inserted resultset. No Schema Change Requirement After giving these two suggestions, I was waiting for the feedback of the asker. However, the requirement of the asker was there can’t be any schema change because the application was used by many other applications. I validated again, and of course, the requirement is no schema change at all. No addition of the column of change of datatypes of any other columns. There is no further help as well. This is indeed an interesting question. I personally can’t think of any solution which I could provide him given the requirement of no schema change. Can you think of any other solution to this? Need of Database Designer This question once again brings up another ancient question: “Do we need a database designer?” I often come across databases which are facing major performance problems or have redundant data. Normalization is often ignored when a database is built fast under a very tight deadline. Often I come across a database which has table with unnecessary columns and performance problems. While working as Developer Lead in my earlier jobs, I have seen developers adding columns to tables without anybody’s consent and retrieving them as SELECT *. There is a lot to discuss on this subject in detail, but for now, let’s discuss the question first. Do you have any suggestions for the above question? Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: CodeProject, Developer Training, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL DateTime, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology

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Use WLST to Delete All JMS Messages From a Destination

- by james.bayer

I got a question today about whether WebLogic Server has any tools to delete all messages from a JMS Queue. It just so happens that the WLS Console has this capability already. It’s available on the screen after the “Show Messages” button is clicked on a destination’s Monitoring tab as seen in the screen shot below. The console is great for something ad-hoc, but what if I want to automate this? Well it just so happens that the console is just a weblogic application layered on top of the JMX Management interface. If you look at the MBean Reference, you’ll find a JMSDestinationRuntimeMBean that includes the operation deleteMessages that takes a JMS Message Selector as an argument. If you pass an empty string, that is essentially a wild card that matches all messages. Coding a stand-alone JMX client for this is kind of lame, so let’s do something more suitable to scripting. In addition to the console, WebLogic Scripting Tool (WLST) based on Jython is another way to browse and invoke MBeans, so an equivalent interactive shell session to delete messages from a destination would looks like this: D:\Oracle\fmw11gr1ps3\user_projects\domains\hotspot_domain\bin>setDomainEnv.cmd D:\Oracle\fmw11gr1ps3\user_projects\domains\hotspot_domain>java weblogic.WLST Initializing WebLogic Scripting Tool (WLST) ... Welcome to WebLogic Server Administration Scripting Shell Type help() for help on available commands wls:/offline> connect('weblogic','welcome1','t3://localhost:7001') Connecting to t3://localhost:7001 with userid weblogic ... Successfully connected to Admin Server 'AdminServer' that belongs to domain 'hotspot_domain'. Warning: An insecure protocol was used to connect to the server. To ensure on-the-wire security, the SSL port or Admin port should be used instead. wls:/hotspot_domain/serverConfig> serverRuntime() Location changed to serverRuntime tree. This is a read-only tree with ServerRuntimeMBean as the root. For more help, use help(serverRuntime) wls:/hotspot_domain/serverRuntime> cd('JMSRuntime/AdminServer.jms/JMSServers/JMSServer-0/Destinations/SystemModule-0!Queue-0') wls:/hotspot_domain/serverRuntime/JMSRuntime/AdminServer.jms/JMSServers/JMSServer-0/Destinations/SystemModule-0!Queue-0> ls() dr-- DurableSubscribers -r-- BytesCurrentCount 0 -r-- BytesHighCount 174620 -r-- BytesPendingCount 0 -r-- BytesReceivedCount 253548 -r-- BytesThresholdTime 0 -r-- ConsumersCurrentCount 0 -r-- ConsumersHighCount 0 -r-- ConsumersTotalCount 0 -r-- ConsumptionPaused false -r-- ConsumptionPausedState Consumption-Enabled -r-- DestinationInfo javax.management.openmbean.CompositeDataSupport(compositeType=javax.management.openmbean.CompositeType(name=DestinationInfo,items=((itemName=ApplicationName,itemType=javax.management.openmbean.SimpleType(name=java.lang.String)),(itemName=ModuleName,itemType=javax.management.openmbean.SimpleType(name=java.lang.String)),(itemName openmbean.SimpleType(name=java.lang.Boolean)),(itemName=SerializedDestination,itemType=javax.management.openmbean.SimpleType(name=java.lang.String)),(itemName=ServerName,itemType=javax.management.openmbean.SimpleType(name=java.lang.String)),(itemName=Topic,itemType=javax.management.openmbean.SimpleType(name=java.lang.Boolean)),(itemName=VersionNumber,itemType=javax.management.op ule-0!Queue-0, Queue=true, SerializedDestination=rO0ABXNyACN3ZWJsb2dpYy5qbXMuY29tbW9uLkRlc3RpbmF0aW9uSW1wbFSmyJ1qZfv8DAAAeHB3kLZBABZTeXN0ZW1Nb2R1bGUtMCFRdWV1ZS0wAAtKTVNTZXJ2ZXItMAAOU3lzdGVtTW9kdWxlLTABAANBbGwCAlb6IS6T5qL/AAAACgEAC0FkbWluU2VydmVyAC2EGgJW+iEuk+ai/wAAAAsBAAtBZG1pblNlcnZlcgAthBoAAQAQX1dMU19BZG1pblNlcnZlcng=, ServerName=JMSServer-0, Topic=false, VersionNumber=1}) -r-- DestinationType Queue -r-- DurableSubscribers null -r-- InsertionPaused false -r-- InsertionPausedState Insertion-Enabled -r-- MessagesCurrentCount 0 -r-- MessagesDeletedCurrentCount 3 -r-- MessagesHighCount 2 -r-- MessagesMovedCurrentCount 0 -r-- MessagesPendingCount 0 -r-- MessagesReceivedCount 3 -r-- MessagesThresholdTime 0 -r-- Name SystemModule-0!Queue-0 -r-- Paused false -r-- ProductionPaused false -r-- ProductionPausedState Production-Enabled -r-- State advertised_in_cluster_jndi -r-- Type JMSDestinationRuntime -r-x closeCursor Void : String(cursorHandle) -r-x deleteMessages Integer : String(selector) -r-x getCursorEndPosition Long : String(cursorHandle) -r-x getCursorSize Long : String(cursorHandle) -r-x getCursorStartPosition Long : String(cursorHandle) -r-x getItems javax.management.openmbean.CompositeData[] : String(cursorHandle),Long(start),Integer(count) -r-x getMessage javax.management.openmbean.CompositeData : String(cursorHandle),Long(messageHandle) -r-x getMessage javax.management.openmbean.CompositeData : String(cursorHandle),String(messageID) -r-x getMessage javax.management.openmbean.CompositeData : String(messageID) -r-x getMessages String : String(selector),Integer(timeout) -r-x getMessages String : String(selector),Integer(timeout),Integer(state) -r-x getNext javax.management.openmbean.CompositeData[] : String(cursorHandle),Integer(count) -r-x getPrevious javax.management.openmbean.CompositeData[] : String(cursorHandle),Integer(count) -r-x importMessages Void : javax.management.openmbean.CompositeData[],Boolean(replaceOnly) -r-x moveMessages Integer : String(java.lang.String),javax.management.openmbean.CompositeData,Integer(java.lang.Integer) -r-x moveMessages Integer : String(selector),javax.management.openmbean.CompositeData -r-x pause Void : -r-x pauseConsumption Void : -r-x pauseInsertion Void : -r-x pauseProduction Void : -r-x preDeregister Void : -r-x resume Void : -r-x resumeConsumption Void : -r-x resumeInsertion Void : -r-x resumeProduction Void : -r-x sort Long : String(cursorHandle),Long(start),String[](fields),Boolean[](ascending) wls:/hotspot_domain/serverRuntime/JMSRuntime/AdminServer.jms/JMSServers/JMSServer-0/Destinations/SystemModule-0!Queue-0> cmo.deleteMessages('') 2 where the domain name is “hotspot_domain”, the JMS Server name is “JMSServer-0”, the Queue name is “Queue-0” and the System Module is named “SystemModule-0”. To invoke the operation, I use the “cmo” object, which is the “Current Management Object” that represents the currently navigated to MBean. The 2 indicates that two messages were deleted. Combining this WLST code with a recent post by my colleague Steve that shows you how to use an encrypted file to store the authentication credentials, you could easily turn this into a secure automated script. If you need help with that step, a long while back I blogged about some WLST basics. Happy scripting.

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How do I run a stable Windows XP kvm guest on Ubuntu 10.04?

- by Jean-Paul Calderone

I have three Windows XP guests running on a recently upgraded 64-bit Ubuntu 10.04 system. Occasionally (on the order of once every few days), one of the guests will become non-responsive and the kvm process on the host which is running that guest will start consuming 100% CPU. It will continue to do so until it is killed. When restarted, it will be fine for a while, and then the issue repeats. The kvm command line used to run all three guests is this: /usr/bin/kvm -S -M pc-0.12 -enable-kvm -m 1024 -smp 1 -name bigdog21vmxp1 \ -uuid ea47ff84-125b-16f7-9a4d-a6d0d8bab46a \ -chardev socket,id=monitor,path=/var/lib/libvirt/qemu/bigdog21vmxp1.monitor,server,nowait \ -monitor chardev:monitor \ -localtime \ -boot c \ -drive file=/var/lib/libvirt/images/windowsxp-1.qcow2,if=ide,index=0,boot=on,format=qcow2 \ -net nic,macaddr=54:52:00:02:06:0e,vlan=0,name=nic.0 \ -net tap,fd=58,vlan=0,name=tap.0 \ -chardev pty,id=serial0 \ -serial chardev:serial0 \ -parallel none \ -usb \ -usbdevice tablet \ -vnc 127.0.0.1:1 \ -k en-us \ -vga cirrus \ -soundhw es1370 Why do the systems misbehave this way sometimes? And what configuration can I change in order to fix it? Or, if the problem is due to a bug in kvm, what is the process for isolating a kvm failure so that the developers have a chance of fixing it?

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DBCC CHECKDB on VVLDB and latches (Or: My Pain is Your Gain)

- by Argenis

Does your CHECKDB hurt, Argenis? There is a classic blog series by Paul Randal [blog|twitter] called “CHECKDB From Every Angle” which is pretty much mandatory reading for anybody who’s even remotely considering going for the MCM certification, or its replacement (the Microsoft Certified Solutions Master: Data Platform – makes my fingers hurt just from typing it). Of particular interest is the post “Consistency Options for a VLDB” – on it, Paul provides solid, timeless advice (I use the word “timeless” because it was written in 2007, and it all applies today!) on how to perform checks on very large databases. Well, here I was trying to figure out how to make CHECKDB run faster on a restored copy of one of our databases, which happens to exceed 7TB in size. The whole thing was taking several days on multiple systems, regardless of the storage used – SAS, SATA or even SSD…and I actually didn’t pay much attention to how long it was taking, or even bothered to look at the reasons why - as long as it was finishing okay and found no consistency errors. Yes – I know. That was a huge mistake, as corruption found in a database several days after taking place could only allow for further spread of the corruption – and potentially large data loss. In the last two weeks I increased my attention towards this problem, as we noticed that CHECKDB was taking EVEN LONGER on brand new all-flash storage in the SAN! I couldn’t really explain it, and were almost ready to blame the storage vendor. The vendor told us that they could initially see the server driving decent I/O – around 450Mb/sec, and then it would settle at a very slow rate of 10Mb/sec or so. “Hum”, I thought – “CHECKDB is just not pushing the I/O subsystem hard enough”. Perfmon confirmed the vendor’s observations. Dreaded @BlobEater What was CHECKDB doing all the time while doing so little I/O? Eating Blobs. It turns out that CHECKDB was taking an extremely long time on one of our frankentables, which happens to be have 35 billion rows (yup, with a b) and sucks up several terabytes of space in the database. We do have a project ongoing to purge/split/partition this table, so it’s just a matter of time before we deal with it. But the reality today is that CHECKDB is coming to a screeching halt in performance when dealing with this particular table. Checking sys.dm_os_waiting_tasks and sys.dm_os_latch_stats showed that LATCH_EX (DBCC_OBJECT_METADATA) was by far the top wait type. I remembered hearing recently about that wait from another post that Paul Randal made, but that was related to computed-column indexes, and in fact, Paul himself reminded me of his article via twitter. But alas, our pathologic table had no non-clustered indexes on computed columns. I knew that latches are used by the database engine to do internal synchronization – but how could I help speed this up? After all, this is stuff that doesn’t have a lot of knobs to tweak. (There’s a fantastic level 500 talk by Bob Ward from Microsoft CSS [blog|twitter] called “Inside SQL Server Latches” given at PASS 2010 – and you can check it out here. DISCLAIMER: I assume no responsibility for any brain melting that might ensue from watching Bob’s talk!) Failed Hypotheses Earlier on this week I flew down to Palo Alto, CA, to visit our Headquarters – and after having a great time with my Monkey peers, I was relaxing on the plane back to Seattle watching a great talk by SQL Server MVP and fellow MCM Maciej Pilecki [twitter] called “Masterclass: A Day in the Life of a Database Transaction” where he discusses many different topics related to transaction management inside SQL Server. Very good stuff, and when I got home it was a little late – that slow DBCC CHECKDB that I had been dealing with was way in the back of my head. As I was looking at the problem at hand earlier on this week, I thought “How about I set the database to read-only?” I remembered one of the things Maciej had (jokingly) said in his talk: “if you don’t want locking and blocking, set the database to read-only” (or something to that effect, pardon my loose memory). I immediately killed the CHECKDB which had been running painfully for days, and set the database to read-only mode. Then I ran DBCC CHECKDB against it. It started going really fast (even a bit faster than before), and then throttled down again to around 10Mb/sec. All sorts of expletives went through my head at the time. Sure enough, the same latching scenario was present. Oh well. I even spent some time trying to figure out if NUMA was hurting performance. Folks on Twitter made suggestions in this regard (thanks, Lonny! [twitter]) …Eureka? This past Friday I was still scratching my head about the whole thing; I was ready to start profiling with XPERF to see if I could figure out which part of the engine was to blame and then get Microsoft to look at the evidence. After getting a bunch of good news I’ll blog about separately, I sat down for a figurative smack down with CHECKDB before the weekend. And then the light bulb went on. A sparse column. I thought that I couldn’t possibly be experiencing the same scenario that Paul blogged about back in March showing extreme latching with non-clustered indexes on computed columns. Did I even have a non-clustered index on my sparse column? As it turns out, I did. I had one filtered non-clustered index – with the sparse column as the index key (and only column). To prove that this was the problem, I went and setup a test. Yup, that'll do it The repro is very simple for this issue: I tested it on the latest public builds of SQL Server 2008 R2 SP2 (CU6) and SQL Server 2012 SP1 (CU4). First, create a test database and a test table, which only needs to contain a sparse column: CREATE DATABASE SparseColTest; GO USE SparseColTest; GO CREATE TABLE testTable (testCol smalldatetime SPARSE NULL); GO INSERT INTO testTable (testCol) VALUES (NULL); GO 1000000 That’s 1 million rows, and even though you’re inserting NULLs, that’s going to take a while. In my laptop, it took 3 minutes and 31 seconds. Next, we run DBCC CHECKDB against the database: DBCC CHECKDB('SparseColTest') WITH NO_INFOMSGS, ALL_ERRORMSGS; This runs extremely fast, as least on my test rig – 198 milliseconds. Now let’s create a filtered non-clustered index on the sparse column: CREATE NONCLUSTERED INDEX [badBadIndex] ON testTable (testCol) WHERE testCol IS NOT NULL; With the index in place now, let’s run DBCC CHECKDB one more time: DBCC CHECKDB('SparseColTest') WITH NO_INFOMSGS, ALL_ERRORMSGS; In my test system this statement completed in 11433 milliseconds. 11.43 full seconds. Quite the jump from 198 milliseconds. I went ahead and dropped the filtered non-clustered indexes on the restored copy of our production database, and ran CHECKDB against that. We went down from 7+ days to 19 hours and 20 minutes. Cue the “Argenis is not impressed” meme, please, Mr. LaRock. My pain is your gain, folks. Go check to see if you have any of such indexes – they’re likely causing your consistency checks to run very, very slow. Happy CHECKDBing, -Argenis ps: I plan to file a Connect item for this issue – I consider it a pretty serious bug in the engine. After all, filtered indexes were invented BECAUSE of the sparse column feature – and it makes a lot of sense to use them together. Watch this space and my twitter timeline for a link.

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PhP Login/Register system [migrated]

- by Marian

I found this good tutorial on creating a login/register system using PhP and MySQL. The forum is around 5 years old (edited last year) but it can still be usefull. Beginner Simple Register-Login system There seems to be an issue with both login and register pages. <?php function register_form(){ $date = date('D, M, Y'); echo "<form action='?act=register' method='post'>" ."Username: <input type='text' name='username' size='30'><br>" ."Password: <input type='password' name='password' size='30'><br>" ."Confirm your password: <input type='password' name='password_conf' size='30'><br>" ."Email: <input type='text' name='email' size='30'><br>" ."<input type='hidden' name='date' value='$date'>" ."<input type='submit' value='Register'>" ."</form>"; } function register(){ $connect = mysql_connect("host", "username", "password"); if(!$connect){ die(mysql_error()); } $select_db = mysql_select_db("database", $connect); if(!$select_db){ die(mysql_error()); } $username = $_REQUEST['username']; $password = $_REQUEST['password']; $pass_conf = $_REQUEST['password_conf']; $email = $_REQUEST['email']; $date = $_REQUEST['date']; if(empty($username)){ die("Please enter your username!<br>"); } if(empty($password)){ die("Please enter your password!<br>"); } if(empty($pass_conf)){ die("Please confirm your password!<br>"); } if(empty($email)){ die("Please enter your email!"); } $user_check = mysql_query("SELECT username FROM users WHERE username='$username'"); $do_user_check = mysql_num_rows($user_check); $email_check = mysql_query("SELECT email FROM users WHERE email='$email'"); $do_email_check = mysql_num_rows($email_check); if($do_user_check > 0){ die("Username is already in use!<br>"); } if($do_email_check > 0){ die("Email is already in use!"); } if($password != $pass_conf){ die("Passwords don't match!"); } $insert = mysql_query("INSERT INTO users (username, password, email) VALUES ('$username', '$password', '$email')"); if(!$insert){ die("There's little problem: ".mysql_error()); } echo $username.", you are now registered. Thank you!<br><a href=login.php>Login</a> | <a href=index.php>Index</a>"; } switch($act){ default; register_form(); break; case "register"; register(); break; } ?> Once pressed the register button the page does nothing, fields are erased and no data is added inside the database or error given. I tought that the problem might be the switch($act){ part so I removed it and changed the page using a require require('connect.php'); where connect.php is <?php mysql_connect("localhost","host","password"); mysql_select_db("database"); ?> Removed the function register_form(){ and echo part turning it into an HTML code: <form action='register' method='post'> Username: <input type='text' name='username' size='30'><br> Password: <input type='password' name='password' size='30'><br> Confirm your password: <input type='password' name='password_conf' size='30'><br> Email: <input type='text' name='email' size='30'><br> <input type='hidden' name='date' value='$date'> <input type='submit' name="register" value='Register'> </form> And instead of having a function register(){ I replaced it with a if($register){ So when the Register button is pressed it runs the php code, but this edit doesn't seem to work either. So what can the problem be? If needed I can re-add this code on my Domain The login page has the same issue, nothing happens when the button is pressed beside emptying the fields.

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Coping with infrastructure upgrades

- by Fatherjack

A common topic for questions on SQL Server forums is how to plan and implement upgrades to SQL Server. Moving from old to new hardware or moving from one version of SQL Server to another. There are other circumstances where upgrades of other systems affect SQL Server DBAs. For example, where I work at the moment there is an Microsoft Exchange (email) server upgrade in progress. It it being handled by a different team so I’m not wholly sure on the details but we are in a situation where there are currently 2 Exchange email servers – the old one and the new one. Users mail boxes are being transferred in a planned process but as we approach the old server being turned off we have to also make sure that our SQL Servers get updated to use the new SMTP server for all of the SQL Agent notifications, SSIS packages etc. My servers have a number of profiles so that various jobs can send emails on behalf of various departments and different systems. This means there are lots of places that the old server name needs to be replaced by the new one. Anyone who has set up DBMail and enjoyed the click-tastic odyssey of screens to create Profiles and Accounts and so on and so forth ought to seek some professional help in my opinion. It’s a nightmare of back and forth settings changes and it stinks. I wasn’t looking forward to heading into this mess of a UI and changing the old Exchange server name for the new one on all my SQL Instances for all of the accounts I have set up. So I did what any Englishmen with a shed would do, I decided to take it apart and see if I can fix it another way. I took a guess that we are going to be working in MSDB and Books OnLine was remarkably helpful and amongst a lot of information told me about a couple of procedures that can be used to interrogate DBMail settings. USE [msdb] -- It's where all the good stuff is kept GO EXEC dbo.sysmail_help_profile_sp; EXEC dbo.sysmail_help_account_sp; Both of these procedures take optional parameters with the same name – ID and Name. If you provide an ID or a name then the results you get back are for that specific Profile or Account. Otherwise you get details of all Profiles and Accounts on the server you are connected to. As you can see (click for a bigger image), the Account has the SMTP server information in the servername column. We want to change that value to NewSMTP.Contoso.com. Now it appears that the procedure we are looking at gets it’s data from the sysmail_account and sysmail_server tables, you can get the results the stored procedure provides if you run the code below. SELECT [account_id] , [name] , [description] , [email_address] , [display_name] , [replyto_address] , [last_mod_datetime] , [last_mod_user] FROM dbo.sysmail_account AS sa; SELECT [account_id] , [servertype] , [servername] , [port] , [username] , [credential_id] , [use_default_credentials] , [enable_ssl] , [flags] , [last_mod_datetime] , [last_mod_user] , [timeout] FROM dbo.sysmail_server AS sms Now, we have no real idea how these tables are linked and whether making an update direct to one or other of them is going to do what we want or whether it will entirely cripple our ability to send email from SQL Server so we wont touch those tables with any UPDATE TSQL. So, back to Books OnLine then and we find sysmail_update_account_sp. It’s exactly what we need. The examples in BOL take the form (as below) of having every parameter explicitly defined. Not wanting to totally obliterate the existing values by not passing values in all of the parameters I set to writing some code to gather the existing data from the tables and re-write the SMTP server name and then execute the resulting TSQL. IF OBJECT_ID('tempdb..#sysmailprofiles') IS NOT NULL DROP TABLE #sysmailprofiles GO CREATE TABLE #sysmailprofiles ( account_id INT , [name] VARCHAR(50) , [description] VARCHAR(500) , email_address VARCHAR(500) , display_name VARCHAR(500) , replyto_address VARCHAR(500) , servertype VARCHAR(10) , servername VARCHAR(100) , port INT , username VARCHAR(100) , use_default_credentials VARCHAR(1) , ENABLE_ssl VARCHAR(1) ) INSERT [#sysmailprofiles] ( [account_id] , [name] , [description] , [email_address] , [display_name] , [replyto_address] , [servertype] , [servername] , [port] , [username] , [use_default_credentials] , [ENABLE_ssl] ) EXEC [dbo].[sysmail_help_account_sp] DECLARE @TSQL NVARCHAR(1000) SELECT TOP 1 @TSQL = 'EXEC [dbo].[sysmail_update_account_sp] @account_id = ' + CAST([s].[account_id] AS VARCHAR(20)) + ', @account_name = ''' + [s].[name] + '''' + ', @email_address = N''' + [s].[email_address] + '''' + ', @display_name = N''' + [s].[display_name] + '''' + ', @replyto_address = N''' + s.replyto_address + '''' + ', @description = N''' + [s].[description] + '''' + ', @mailserver_name = ''NEWSMTP.contoso.com''' + +', @mailserver_type = ' + [s].[servertype] + ', @port = ' + CAST([s].[port] AS VARCHAR(20)) + ', @username = ' + COALESCE([s].[username], '''''') + ', @use_default_credentials =' + CAST(s.[use_default_credentials] AS VARCHAR(1)) + ', @enable_ssl =' + [s].[ENABLE_ssl] FROM [#sysmailprofiles] AS s WHERE [s].[servername] = 'SMTP.Contoso.com' SELECT @tsql EXEC [sys].[sp_executesql] @tsql This worked well for me and testing the email function EXEC dbo.sp_send_dbmail afterwards showed that the settings were indeed using our new Exchange server. It was only later in writing this blog that I tried running the sysmail_update_account_sp procedure with only the SMTP server name parameter value specified. Despite what Books OnLine might intimate, you can do this and only the values for parameters specified get changed. If a parameter is not specified in the execution of the procedure then the values remain unchanged. This renders most of the above script unnecessary as I could have simply specified the account_id that I want to amend and the new value for the parameter I want to update. EXEC sysmail_update_account_sp @account_id = 1, @mailserver_name = 'NEWSMTP.Contoso.com' This wasn’t going to be the main reason for this post, it was meant to describe how to capture values from a stored procedure and use them in dynamic TSQL but instead we are here and (re)learning the fact that Books Online is a little flawed in places. It is a fantastic resource for anyone working with SQL Server but the reader must adopt an enquiring frame of mind and use a little curiosity to try simple variations on examples to fully understand the code you are working with. I think the author(s) of this part of Books OnLine missed an opportunity to include a third example that had fewer than all parameters specified to give a lead to this method existing.

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Silverlight Relay Commands

- by George Evjen

v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Normal 0 false false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} I am fairly new at Silverlight development and I usually have an issue that needs research every day. Which I enjoy, since I like the idea of going into a day knowing that I am going to learn something new. The issue that I am currently working on centers around relay commands. I have a pretty good handle on Relay Commands and how we use them within our applications. <Button Command="{Binding ButtonCommand}" CommandParameter="NewRecruit" Content="New Recruit" /> Here in our xaml we have a button. The button has a Command and a CommandParameter. The command binds to the ButtonCommand that we have in our ViewModel RelayCommand _buttonCommand; /// <summary> /// Gets the button command. /// </summary> /// <value>The button command.</value> public RelayCommand ButtonCommand { get { if (_buttonCommand == null) { _buttonCommand = new RelayCommand( x => x != null && x.ToString().Length > 0 && CheckCommandAvailable(x.ToString()), x => ExecuteCommand(x.ToString())); } return _buttonCommand; } } In our relay command we then do some checks with a lambda expression. We check if the command parameter is null, is the length greater than 0 and we have a CheckCommandAvailable method that will tell us if the button is even enabled. After we check on these three items we then pass the command parameter to an action method. This is all pretty straight forward, the issue that we solved a few days ago centered around having a control that needed to use a Relay Command and this control was a nested control and was using a different DataContext. The example below illustrates how we handled this scenario. In our xaml usercontrol we had to set a name to this control. <Controls3:RadTileViewItem x:Class="RecruitStatusTileView" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008" xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006" xmlns:Controls1="clr-namespace:Telerik.Windows.Controls;assembly=Telerik.Windows.Controls" xmlns:Controls2="clr-namespace:Telerik.Windows.Controls;assembly=Telerik.Windows.Controls.Input" xmlns:Controls3="clr-namespace:Telerik.Windows.Controls;assembly=Telerik.Windows.Controls.Navigation" mc:Ignorable="d" d:DesignHeight="400" d:DesignWidth="800" Header="{Binding Title,Mode=TwoWay}" MinimizedHeight="100" x:Name="StatusView"> Here we are using a telerik RadTileViewItem. We set the name of this control to “StatusView”. In our button control we set our command parameters and commands different than the example above. <HyperlinkButton Content="{Binding BigBoardButtonText, Mode=TwoWay}" CommandParameter="{Binding 'Position.PositionName'}" Command="{Binding ElementName=StatusView, Path=DataContext.BigBoardCommand, Mode=TwoWay}" /> This hyperlink button lives in a ListBox control and this listbox has an ItemSource of PositionSelectors. The Command Parameter is binding to the Position.Position property of that PositionSelectors object. This again is pretty straight forward again. What gets a bit tricky is the Command property in the hyperlink. It is binding to the element name we created in the user control (StatusView) Because this hyperlink is in a listbox and is in the item template it doesn’t have a direct handle on the DataContext that the RadTileViewItem has so we have to make sure it does. We do that by binding to the element name of status view then set the path to DataContext.BigBoardCommand. BigBoardCommand is the name of the RelayCommand in the view model. private RelayCommand _bigBoardCommand = null; /// <summary> /// Gets the big board command. /// </summary> /// <value>The big board command.</value> public RelayCommand BigBoardCommand { get { if (_bigBoardCommand == null) { _bigBoardCommand = new RelayCommand(x => true, x => AddToBigBoard(x.ToString())); } return _bigBoardCommand; } } From there we check for true again and then call the action and pass in the parameter that we had as the command parameter. What we are working on now is a bit trickier than this second example. In the above example we are only creating this TileViewItem with this name “StatusView” once. In another part of our application we are generating multiple TileViewItems, so we cannot set the name in the control as we cant have multiple controls with the same name. When we run the application we get an error that reads that the value is out of expected range. My searching has led me to think we cannot have multiple controls with the same name. This is today’s problem and Ill post the solution to this once it is found.

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Rules for Naming

- by PointsToShare

© 2011 By: Dov Trietsch. All rights reserved Naming Documents (or is it “Document, Naming”?) Tis but thy name that is my enemy; Thou art thyself, though not a Montague. What's Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot, Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part Belonging to a man. O, be some other name! What's in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet; So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call'd, Retain that dear perfection which he owes Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name And for that name which is no part of thee Take all myself. Shakespeare – Romeo and Juliet Act II, Scene 2 We normally only use the bold portion of the famous Shakespearean quote above, but it is really out of context. As the play unfolds, we learn that a name is all too powerful. Indeed it is because of their names that the doomed lovers die. There might be life and death in a name (BTW, when I wrote this monogram, I was in Hatfield, PA. Remember the Hatfields and the McCoys?) This is a bit extreme, but in the field of Knowledge Management (KM) names are of the utmost importance as well. When I write an article about managing SharePoint sites, how should I name it? “Managing a site” or “Site, managing”? Nine times out of ten I’d opt for the latter. Almost everything we do is “Managing” so to make life easier for a person looking for meaningful content, we title our articles starting with the differentiator rather than the common factor. As a rule of thumb, we start the name with the noun rather than the verb. It is not what we do that is the primary key; it is what we do it to. So, answer this – is it a “rule of thumb” or a “thumb rule?” This is tough. A lot of what we do when naming is a judgment call. Both thumb and rule are nouns, albeit concrete and abstract (more about this later), but to most people “thumb rule” is meaningless while “rule of thumb” is an idiom. The difference between knowledge and information is that knowledge is meaningful information placed in context. Thus I elect the “rule of thumb”. It is the more meaningful title. Abstract and Concrete are relative terms. Many nouns (and verbs) that are abstract to a commoner, are concrete to a practitioner of one profession or another and may even have different concrete meanings in different professional jargons. Think about “running”. To an executive it means running a business, to a marathoner its meaning is much more literal. Generally speaking, we store and disseminate knowledge within a practice more than we do it in general. Even dictionaries encyclopedias define terms as they apply to different audiences. The rule of thumb is to put the more concrete first, but within the audience’s jargon. Even the title of this monogram is a question. Do I name it “Naming Documents” or “Documents, Naming”? Well, my own rule of thumb (“Here he goes again!?”) states that the latter is better because it starts with a noun, but this is a document about naming more than it about documents. The rules of naming also apply to graphs and charts, excel spreadsheets, and so on. Thus, I vote for the former. A better title could have been “Naming Objects” only the word “Object” is a bit too abstract. How about just “Naming” or “Naming, rules of”? You get the drift. One of the ways to resolve all of this is to store the documents in Knowledge-Bases, which may become the subjects of a future punditry. Knowledge bases use keywords to describe their content. Use a Metadata store for the keywords to at least attempt some common grounds. Here is another general rule (rule of thumb?!!) – put at least the one keyword in the title. Use subtitles. Here is an example: Migrating documents – Screening, cleaning, and organizing our knowledge. The main keyword is “documents”, next is “migrating”, other keywords also appear in the subtitle. They are “screening”, “cleaning”, and “organizing”. Any questions? Send me an amply named document by email: [email protected]

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Retrieve a user's Exchange database in powershell

- by Paul

Hey Everyone, I've scoured the interwebs for a few days now off and on to find this. I am creating a powershell script for email-enabling new user's(Exchange 2007). To give you a little background when we have a new hire, their AD account is created at our off-site helpdesk, but they don't create their email account. I'm trying to automate the process of mail-enabling the user which involves putting them in the same database as an existing user, disable imap pop activesync, and lastly email the requester of the ticket. I would like to just get prompted for the New User's name, User to Replicate(mailbox, storage group, database), and the person to email after it's been created. So if someone could just help with a command to Retrieve a user's Exchange database in powershell that would be great, but if people also want to help with my hacked up script please do so as well!!! Here is what I have so far: Write-output “ENTER THE FOLLOWING DETAILS” $DName = Read-Host “User Diplay Name" $RUser = Read-Host "Replicate User(Database Grab)" ***$RData = #get the Replicate user's mailbox database here*** $REmail = #either just use a Read-Host “Requester's Email address" or ask for Requester's name and pipe through their email address by digging for it w/ powershell Enable-Mailbox -Identity "$DName" -Database "$RData" Send-MailMessage -From "John Doe <[email protected]>" -To (put $REmail here which is the Requester's email) -Subject "Test Person's email account" -Body "Test Person's email account has been setup.`n`n`nJohn Doe`nGeneric Company`nSystems Administrator`nOffice: 123.456.7890`[email protected]" -SmtpServer genericexchange.exchange.com

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TechEd 2014 Day 2

- by John Paul Cook

Today people asked me about backing up older versions of SQL Server to Azure. Older versions back to SQL Server 2005 can be easily backed up to Azure Storage by installing Microsoft SQL Server Backup to Windows Azure Tool. It installs a service of the same name that applies rules to SQL Server backups. You can tell the tool to backup or encrypt your SQL Server backups. You can have it automatically upload your backups to Azure Storage. Even if you don’t want to upload your backups to Azure, you might...(read more)

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TechEd 2014 Day 2

- by John Paul Cook

Today people asked me about backing up older versions of SQL Server to Azure. Older versions back to SQL Server 2005 can be easily backed up to Azure Storage by installing Microsoft SQL Server Backup to Windows Azure Tool. It installs a service of the same name that applies rules to SQL Server backups. You can tell the tool to backup or encrypt your SQL Server backups. You can have it automatically upload your backups to Azure Storage. Even if you don’t want to upload your backups to Azure, you might...(read more)

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Curl Error 52 Empty reply from server

- by Paul Sheldrake

Hello I have a cron job setup on one server to run a backup script in PHP that is hosted on another server. The command I've been using is formatted like this: curl -sS http://www.example.com/backup.php Lately I've been getting this error when the Cron runs curl: (52) Empty reply from server I have no idea what this means. If I go to the link directly in my browser the script runs fine and I get my little backup zip file. Can anyone help? Thanks, Paul

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Java SQL database independence.

- by Paul

Hello, I have been looking for an alternative to Hibernate for various reasons. I came across Liquibase and i like the idea so i am willing to try it. Liquibase will cater for database creation/modification in a SQL independent fashion. My main question is how does my code in my application execute SQL statements without being database dependent? Is there some other project that acts like Hibernates Dialect classes? Thanks, Paul

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Android browser GREEN border on click...

- by Paul

Hi, I want to develop a web application using HTML, CSS and Javascript one thing that is really annoying is that any link or button etc when clicked inside the Android browser gets highlighted with a green border. To demonstrate what I mean I have included a link to a page that contains a basic game written in CSS http://marbles2.com/app/ Is there any way that you are aware of to disable the click green border? Cheers Paul

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XDocument unable to digest url in header if encountered twice

- by Paul Connolly

Hi there, I am consuming an xml response from a government gateway which contains a url in its root node twice (being firstly xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/CM/envelope" and also xmlns="http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/CM/envelope") XDocument will only parse this if I pull out the second one (the xmlns one) from the node. Is there some way I can prepare XDocument to digest this repeated URL without having to manipulate the incoming xml in any way? Thanks Paul

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asp.net MVC 2 - View Model / Model Validation - Is there a way to map validation attributes from mod

- by Paul Hinett

A short while ago I'm sure I read that is was possible to use AutoMapper to map the validation attributes from the domain model to the view model, i can't find that post any more though! Has anybody seen any code or know if it would be possible to do this? This would give the added benefit of not repeating validation in both ViewModel + Models. Paul

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