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• UK OUG Conference Highlights and Insights

  - by Richard Bingham

  As per my preemptive post, this was the first time the annual conference organized by the UK Oracle User Group (UKOUG) was split into two events, one for Oracle Applications and another in December for Oracle Technology. Apps13, as it was branded, was hailed as a success, with over 1000 registered attendees and three days of sessions, exhibition, round-tables and many other types of content. As this poster on their stand illustrates, the UKOUG is a strong community with popular participants from both big and small Oracle partners and customers. The venue was a more intimate setting than previous years also, allowing everyone to casually bump into those they hoped to. It gave a real feeling of an Apps Community. The main themes over the days where CRM and Customer Experience, HCM, and FIN/SCM. This allowed people to attend just one focused day if they wanted. In addition the Apps Transformation stream ran across all three days, offering insights, advice, and details on the newer product solutions like Fusion Applications.  Here are some of the key take-aways I got from the conference, specific to my role in Fusion Applications Developer Relations: User Experience continues to be a significant reason for adopting some of the newer application products available, with immediately obvious gains in user productivity and satisfaction reported by customers. Also this doesn't stop with the baked-in UX either, with their Design Patterns proving popular and indeed currently being extended to including things like extending on ADF mobile and customizing the Simplified UI. More on this to come from us soon. The executive sessions emphasized the "it's a journey" phrase, illustrating that modern business applications are powered by technologies such as Cloud, Mobile, Social and Big Data and these can be harnessed to help propel your organization forward. Indeed the emphasis is away from the traditional vendor prescribed linear applications road map, and towards plotting a course based on business priorities supported by a broad range of integrated solutions. To help with this several conference sessions demoed the new "Applications Navigator" tool, developed in partnership with OUG members, which offers a visual framework to help organizations plan their Oracle Applications investments around business and technology imperatives. Initial reaction was positive, especially as customers do not need to decipher Oracle's huge product catalog and embeds the best blend of proven and integrated applications solutions. We'll share more on this when it is generally available. Several sessions focused around explanations and interpretation of Oracle OpenWorld 2013, helping highlight the key Oracle Applications messages and directions. With a relative small percentage of conference attendees also at OpenWorld (from a show of hands) this was a popular way to distill the information available down into specific items of interest for the community. Please note the original OpenWorld 2013 content is still available for download but will not remain available forever (via the Oracle website OpenWorld Content Catalog > pick a session > see the PDF download). With the release of E-Business Suite 12.2 the move to develop and deploy on the Fusion Middleware stack becomes a reality for many Oracle Applications customers. This coupled with recent E-Business Suite features such as the Integrated SOA Gateway and the E-Business Suite SDK for Java, illustrates how the gap between the technologies and techniques involved in extending E-Business Suite and Fusion Applications is quickly narrowing. We'll see this merging continue to evolve going forwards. Getting started with Oracle Cloud Applications is actually easier than many customers expected, with a broad selection of both large and medium sized organizations explaining how they added new features to their existing Oracle Applications portfolios. New functionality available from Fusion HCM and CX are popular extensions that do not have to disrupt those core business services. Coexistence is the buzzword here, and the available integration is also simpler than many expected, commonly involving an initial setup data load, then regularly incremental synchronizations, often without a need for real-time constant communication between systems. With much of this pre-built already the implementation process is also quite rapid. With most people dressed in suits, we wanted to get the conversations going without the traditional english reserve, so we decided to make ourselves a bit more obvious, as the photo below shows. This seemed to be quite successful and helped those interested identify and approach us. Keep a look out for similar again. In fact if you're in the UK there is an "Apps Transformation Day" planned by the UKOUG for the 19th March 2014, with more details to follow. Again something we'll be sure to participate in. I am hoping to attend the next half of the UKOUG annual conference, Tech13, that focuses more on Oracle technology and where there is more likely to be larger attendance of those interested in the lower-level aspects of applications customization and development. If you're going, let me know and maybe we can meet up.

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• Use a subdirectory as root with htaccess in Apache 1.3

  - by Andrew

  I'm trying to deploy a site generated with Jekyll and would like to keep the site in its own subfolder on my server to keep everything more organized. Essentially, I'd like to use the contents of /jekyll as the root unless a file similarly named exists in the actual web root. So something like /jekyll/sample-page/ would show as http://www.example.com/sample-page/, while something like /other-folder/ would display as http://www.example.com/other-folder. My test server runs Apache 2.2 and the following .htaccess (adapted from http://gist.github.com/97822) works flawlessly: RewriteEngine On # Map http://www.example.com to /jekyll. RewriteRule ^$ /jekyll/ [L] # Map http://www.example.com/x to /jekyll/x unless there is a x in the web root. RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/jekyll/ RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /jekyll/$1 # Add trailing slash to directories without them so DirectoryIndex works. # This does not expose the internal URL. RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !/$ RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1/ # Disable auto-adding slashes to directories without them, since this happens # after mod_rewrite and exposes the rewritten internal URL, e.g. turning # http://www.example.com/about into http://www.example.com/jekyll/about. DirectorySlash off However, my production server runs Apache 1.3, which doesn't allow DirectorySlash. If I disable it, the server gives a 500 error because of internal redirect overload. If I comment out the last section of ReWriteConds and rules: RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !/$ RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1/ …everything mostly works: http://www.example.com/sample-page/ displays the correct content. However, if I omit the trailing slash, the URL in the address bar exposes the real internal URL structure: http://www.example.com/jekyll/sample-page/ What is the best way to account for directory slashes in Apache 1.3, where useful tools like DirectorySlash don't exist? How can I use the /jekyll/ directory as the site root without revealing the actual URL structure? Edit: After a ton of research into Apache 1.3, I've found that this problem is essentially a combination of two different issues listed at the Apache 1.3 URL Rewriting Guide. I have a (partially) moved DocumentRoot, which in theory would be taken care of with something like this: RewriteRule ^/$ /e/www/ [R] I also have the infamous "Trailing Slash Problem," which is solved by setting the RewriteBase (as was suggested in one of the responses below): RewriteBase /~quux/ RewriteRule ^foo$ foo/ [R] The problem is combining the two. Moving the document root doesn't (can't?) use RewriteBase—fixing trailing slashes requires(?) it… Hmm…

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• Creating meaningful routes in wizard style ASP.NET MVC form

  - by R0MANARMY

  I apologize in advance for a long question, figured better have a bit more information than not enough. I'm working on an application with a fairly complex form (~100 fields on it). In order to make the UI a little more presentable the fields are organized into regions and split across multiple (~10) tabs (not unlike this, but each tab does a submit/redirect to next tab). This large input form can also be in one of 3 views (read only, editable, print friendly). The form represents a large domain object (let's call it Foo). I have a controller for said domain object (FooController). It makes sense to me to have the controller be responsible for all the CRUD related operations. Here are the problems I'm having trouble figuring out. Goals: I'd like to keep to conventions so that Foo/Create creates a new record Foo/Delete deletes a record Foo/Edit/{foo_id} takes you to the first tab of the form ...etc I'd like to be able to not repeat the data access code such that I can have Foo/Edit/{foo_id}/tab1 Foo/View/{foo_id}/tab1 Foo/Print/{foo_id}tab1 ...etc use the same data access code to get the data and just specify which view to use to render it. My current implementation has a massive FooController with Create, Delete, Tab1, Tab2, etc actions. Tab actions are split out into separate files for organization (using partial classes, which may or may not be abuse of partial classes). Problem I'm running into is how to organize my controller(s) and routes to make that happen. I have the default route {controller}/{action}/{id} Which handles goal 1 properly but doesn't quite play nice with goal 2. I tried to address goal 2 by defining extra routes like so: routes.MapRoute( "FooEdit", "Foo/Edit/{id}/{action}", new { controller = "Foo", action = "Tab1", mode = "Edit", id = (string)null } ); routes.MapRoute( "FooView", "Foo/View/{id}/{action}", new { controller = "Foo", action = "Tab1", mode = "View", id = (string)null } ); routes.MapRoute( "FooPrint", "Foo/Print/{id}/{action}", new { controller = "Foo", action = "Tab1", mode = "Print", id = (string)null } ); However defining these extra routes causes the Url.Action to generate routs like Foo/Edit/Create instead of Foo/Create. That leads me to believe I designed something very very wrong, but this is my first attempt an asp.net mvc project and I don't know any better. Any advice with this particular situation would be awesome, but feedback on design in similar projects is welcome.

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• Is this a situation where Qt Model/View architecture is not useful?

  - by csmithmaui

  Hi, I am writing a GUI based application where I read a string of values from serial port every few seconds and I need to display most of the values in some type graphical indicator(I was thinking of QprogressBar maybe) that displays the range and the value. Some of the other data that I am parsing from the string are the date and fault codes. Also, the data is hierarchical. I wanted to use the model/view architecture of Qt because I have been interested in MVC stuff for a while but have never quite wrapped my brain around how to implement it very well. As of now, I have subclassed QAbstractItemModel and in the model I read the serial port and wrap the items parsed from the string in a Tree data structure. I can view all of the data in a QtreeView with no issues. I have also began to subclass QAbstractItemView to build my custom view with all of the Graphical Indicators and such. This is where I am getting stuck. It seems to me that in order for me to design a view that knows how to display my custom model the view needs to know exactly how all of the data in the model is organized. Doesn't that defeat the purpose of Model/View? The QTreeView I tested the model with is basically just displaying the model as it is setup in the Tree structure but I don't want to do that because the data is not all of the same type. Is the type of data or the way you would like to present it to the user a determining factor in whether or not you should use this architecture? I always assumed it was just always better to design in an MVC style. It seems to me like it might have been better to just subclass QWidget and then read in from the serial port and update all of subwidgets(graphical indicators, labels, etc...) from the subclass. Essentially, do everything in one class. Does anybody understand this issue that can explain to me either what I am missing or why I shouldn't be doing it this way. As of now I am a little confused. Thanks so much for any help!

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• Should we denormalize database to improve performance?

  - by Groo

  We have a requirement to store 500 measurements per second, coming from several devices. Each measurement consists of a timestamp, a quantity type, and several vector values. Right now there is 8 vector values per measurement, and we may consider this number to be constant for needs of our prototype project. We are using HNibernate. Tests are done in SQLite (disk file db, not in-memory), but production will probably be MsSQL. Our Measurement entity class is the one that holds a single measurement, and looks like this: public class Measurement { public virtual Guid Id { get; private set; } public virtual Device Device { get; private set; } public virtual Timestamp Timestamp { get; private set; } public virtual IList<VectorValue> Vectors { get; private set; } } Vector values are stored in a separate table, so that each of them references its parent measurement through a foreign key. We have done a couple of things to ensure that generated SQL is (reasonably) efficient: we are using Guid.Comb for generating IDs, we are flushing around 500 items in a single transaction, ADO.Net batch size is set to 100 (I think SQLIte does not support batch updates? But it might be useful later). The problem Right now we can insert 150-200 measurements per second (which is not fast enough, although this is SQLite we are talking about). Looking at the generated SQL, we can see that in a single transaction we insert (as expected): 1 timestamp 1 measurement 8 vector values which means that we are actually doing 10x more single table inserts: 1500-2000 per second. If we placed everything (all 8 vector values and the timestamp) into the measurement table (adding 9 dedicated columns), it seems that we could increase our insert speed up to 10 times. Switching to SQL server will improve performance, but we would like to know if there might be a way to avoid unnecessary performance costs related to the way database is organized right now. [Edit] With in-memory SQLite I get around 350 items/sec (3500 single table inserts), which I believe is about as good as it gets with NHibernate (taking this post for reference: http://ayende.com/Blog/archive/2009/08/22/nhibernate-perf-tricks.aspx). But I might as well switch to SQL server and stop assuming things, right? I will update my post as soon as I test it.

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• What are the Options for Storing Hierarchical Data in a Relational Database?

  - by orangepips

  Good Overviews One more Nested Intervals vs. Adjacency List comparison: the best comparison of Adjacency List, Materialized Path, Nested Set and Nested Interval I've found. Models for hierarchical data: slides with good explanations of tradeoffs and example usage Representing hierarchies in MySQL: very good overview of Nested Set in particular Hierarchical data in RDBMSs: most comprehensive and well organized set of links I've seen, but not much in the way on explanation Options Ones I am aware of and general features: Adjacency List: Columns: ID, ParentID Easy to implement. Cheap node moves, inserts, and deletes. Expensive to find level (can store as a computed column), ancestry & descendants (Bridge Hierarchy combined with level column can solve), path (Lineage Column can solve). Use Common Table Expressions in those databases that support them to traverse. Nested Set (a.k.a Modified Preorder Tree Traversal) First described by Joe Celko - covered in depth in his book Trees and Hierarchies in SQL for Smarties Columns: Left, Right Cheap level, ancestry, descendants Compared to Adjacency List, moves, inserts, deletes more expensive. Requires a specific sort order (e.g. created). So sorting all descendants in a different order requires additional work. Nested Intervals Combination of Nested Sets and Materialized Path where left/right columns are floating point decimals instead of integers and encode the path information. Bridge Table (a.k.a. Closure Table: some good ideas about how to use triggers for maintaining this approach) Columns: ancestor, descendant Stands apart from table it describes. Can include some nodes in more than one hierarchy. Cheap ancestry and descendants (albeit not in what order) For complete knowledge of a hierarchy needs to be combined with another option. Flat Table A modification of the Adjacency List that adds a Level and Rank (e.g. ordering) column to each record. Expensive move and delete Cheap ancestry and descendants Good Use: threaded discussion - forums / blog comments Lineage Column (a.k.a. Materialized Path, Path Enumeration) Column: lineage (e.g. /parent/child/grandchild/etc...) Limit to how deep the hierarchy can be. Descendants cheap (e.g. LEFT(lineage, #) = '/enumerated/path') Ancestry tricky (database specific queries) Database Specific Notes MySQL Use session variables for Adjacency List Oracle Use CONNECT BY to traverse Adjacency Lists PostgreSQL ltree datatype for Materialized Path SQL Server General summary 2008 offers HierarchyId data type appears to help with Lineage Column approach and expand the depth that can be represented.

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• In a PHP project, how do you organize and access your helper objects?

  - by Pekka

  How do you organize and manage your helper objects like the database engine, user notification, error handling and so on in a PHP based, object oriented project? Say I have a large PHP CMS. The CMS is organized in various classes. A few examples: the database object user management an API to create/modify/delete items a messaging object to display messages to the end user a context handler that takes you to the right page a navigation bar class that shows buttons a logging object possibly, custom error handling etc. I am dealing with the eternal question, how to best make these objects accessible to each part of the system that needs it. my first apporach, many years ago was to have a $application global that contained initialized instances of these classes. global $application; $application->messageHandler->addMessage("Item successfully inserted"); I then changed over to the Singleton pattern and a factory function: $mh =&factory("messageHandler"); $mh->addMessage("Item successfully inserted"); but I'm not happy with that either. Unit tests and encapsulation become more and more important to me, and in my understanding the logic behind globals/singletons destroys the basic idea of OOP. Then there is of course the possibility of giving each object a number of pointers to the helper objects it needs, probably the very cleanest, resource-saving and testing-friendly way but I have doubts about the maintainability of this in the long run. Most PHP frameworks I have looked into use either the singleton pattern, or functions that access the initialized objects. Both fine approaches, but as I said I'm happy with neither. I would like to broaden my horizon on what is possible here and what others have done. I am looking for examples, additional ideas and pointers towards resources that discuss this from a long-term, real-world perspective. Also, I'm interested to hear about specialized, niche or plain weird approaches to the issue. Bounty I am following the popular vote in awarding the bounty, the answer which is probably also going to give me the most. Thank you for all your answers!

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• How To Send A Confirmation Number To Others And Myself?

  - by user2913307

  On my website I have a reservation form. Once someone clicks submit a confirmation number comes up (that number is different everytime). I get an e-mail with everything the person filled out on my reservation form but I want to know their confirmation number as well. RANDOM NUMBER CODE $(document).ready(function() { var ranval = Math.floor((Math.random()*10000)+1); $('input[name=lblrand]').val(ranval); // bind 'myForm' and provide a simple callback function $('#myForm').ajaxForm(function() { alert("Your Message has been sent!Your Form Registration Number is: "+ ranval); $('#myForm').resetForm(); WHAT GETS E-MAILED TO ME $('#rSubmit').click(function(){ var data = {}; data.to = "[email protected]"; data.from = "[email protected]>"; data.subject = "New Reservation"; data.message = "New Reservation from Website \n"+ '\n First Name : '+$('#name').val()+ '\n Last Name : '+$('#lastname').val() + '\n Confirmation : '+$('#lblrand').val () + '\n Coupon Code : '+$('#coupon').val() + '\n Company Name : '+$('#company').val() + '\n Phone Number : '+$('#phone').val() + '\n Street Address : '+$('#street').val() + '\n Pick-Up City : '+$('#city').val()+ '\n Pick-Up State : '+$('#state').val() + '\n Pick-Up Zip : '+$('#zip').val() + '\n Date : '+$('#calendar').val()+ '\n Time : '+$('#time').val() + '\n Time : '+$('#time2').val() + '\n Time : '+$('#time3').val() + '\n Airport : '+$('#airport').val() + '\n Airline : '+$('#airline').val() + '\n Flight # : '+$('#fnumber').val() + '\n Stops : '+$('#hstops').val() + '\n Stops Info : '+$('#info').val() + '\n Passengers : '+$('#passengers').val() + '\n Luggages : '+$('#luggages').val()+ '\n Car Seat : '+$('#seat').val()+ '\n Drop-Off Street : '+$('#dostreet').val() + '\n Drop-Off City : '+$('#docity').val()+ '\n Drop-Off State : '+$('#dostate').val() + '\n Drop-Off Zip : '+$('#dozip').val() + '\n D.O Airport : '+$('#doairport').val() + '\n D.O Airline : '+$('#doairline').val() + '\n Flight # : '+$('#dofnumber').val() + '\n Date : '+$('#calendar2').val()+ '\n Time : '+$('#rtime').val() + '\n Time : '+$('#rtime2').val() + '\n Time : '+$('#rtime3').val() + '\n Return Street : '+$('#rtstreet').val() + '\n Return City : '+$('#rtcity').val()+ '\n Return State : '+$('#rtstate').val() + '\n Return Zip : '+$('#rtzip').val() + '\n Return Airport : '+$('#rtairport').val() + '\n Return Airline : '+$('#rtairline').val() + '\n Return Flight # : '+$('#rtfnumber').val() + '\n Payment Type : '+$('#payment').val() + '\n Card Number : '+$('#creditcardno').val() + '\n Exp. Date : '+$('#expirydate').val() + '\n Exp. Date : '+$('#expirydate2').val() ; Also, if there is a way when this information gets e-mailed to me if I can put it in a table so it could come up more organized. Any help, tips, advice is appreciated. ALSO, check out my website and the form for yourself at http://www.greatlimoservice.com

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• Difference between Cloud and Virtualization

  - by Akash Kava

  Ops: This does not belong to ServerFault because it focuses on Programing Architecture. I have following questions regarding differences between Cloud and Virtualization.. How Cloud is different then Virtualization? Currently I tried to find out pricing of Rackspace, Amazone and all similar cloud providers, I found that our current 6 dedicated servers came cheaper then their pricing. So how one can claim cloud is cheaper? Is it cheaper only in comparison of normal hosting? We re organized our infrastructure in virtual environment to reduce or configuration overhead at time of failure, we did not have to rewrite any peice of code that is already written for earlier setup. So moving to virtualization does not require any re programming. But cloud is absoltely different and it will require entire reprogramming right? Is it really worth to recode when our current IT costs are 3-4 times lower then cloud hosting including raid backups and all sort of clustering for high availability? New programming architecture means new overheads of training staff, new methods of testing and new deployment schemes, does it justify over "on demand resource usage" words of cloud? We are having current development architecture with simple Server side ASP.NET WebServices with no local context and on client side Flex/Silverlight which offers pretty good REST architecture and its highly scalable. How does cloud differs from REST model of deployment? On storage, SQL Server or MySQL offers pretty good replication and high availibility then what is advantage in cloud? Data guarantee, one of our vendor hosting some other customer's app on cloud (one of most used), lost Entire Hard Disk (the virtual) and entire module in first 6 months. Second provider said its your duty to take backup, fine I agree, but no provider gives SLA for data guarantee, they give 99% uptime. However in most business apps, uptime is less important then data integrity. In our 10 years of dedicated hosting experience we had only one hard disk crash. This makes me little skeptical to go for cloud and loosing control over data. And I feel its just a big marketing buzz to sell virtulization in different form. Size of data, currently all providers charge very heavy for large data, if you are hosting only below 100GB cloud can be good alternative, but I think virtual servers and dedicated servers above 100GB to few TBs are still cheaper. Why would want to pay so high on cloud when there is no data guarentee as well as it doesnt say anything about redundancy. (I wish SO had something for spell check for Internet Explorer, sorry for wrong spellings in my post)

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• How to reconcile my support of open-source software and need to feed and house myself?

  - by Guzba

  I have a bit of a dilemma and wanted to get some other developers' opinions on it and maybe some guidance. So I have created a 2D game for Android from the ground up, learning and re factoring as I went along. I did it for the experience, and have been proud of the results. I released it for free as ad supported with AdMob not really expecting much out of it, but curious to see what would happen. Its been a few of months now since release, and it has become very popular (250k downloads!). Additionally, the ad revenue is great and is driving me to make more good games and even allowing me to work less so that I can focus on my own works. When I originally began working on the game, I was pretty new to concurrency and completely new to Android (had Java experience though). The standard advice I got for starting an Android game was to look at the sample games from Google (Snake, Lunar Lander, ...) so I did. In my opinion, these Android sample games from Google are decent to see in general what your code should look like, but not actually all that great to follow. This is because some of their features don't work (saving game state), the concurrency is both unexplained and cumbersome (there is no real separation between the game thread and the UI thread since they sync lock each other out all the time and the UI thread runs game thread code). This made it difficult for me as a newbie to concurrency to understand how it was organized and what was really running what code. Here is my dilemma: After spending this past few months slowly improving my code, I feel that it could be very beneficial to developers who are in the same position that I was in when I started. (Since it is not a complex game, but clearly coded in my opinion.) I want to open up the source so that others can learn from it but don't want to lose my ad revenue stream, which, if I did open the source, I fear I would when people released versions with the ad stripped, or minor tweaks that would fragment my audience, etc. I am a CS undergrad major in college and this money is giving me the freedom to work less at summer job, thus giving me the time and will to work on more of my own projects and improving my own skills while still paying the bills. So what do I do? Open the source at personal sacrifice for the greater good, or keep it closed and be a sort of hypocritical supporter of open source?

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• GWT: Reloading a single tab in a tab panel

  - by auste piliponyte

  I have a GWT tab panel and would like to reload a single tab when a certain event (e.g. button click) happens in another tab. Is there a way to do that? Another possibility would be executing some code (e.g. adding a new element to a tab) when that tab is selected. Any help would be really appreciated, I am stuck with this for a while already. To make the question more specific I am providing some code below. I have my code organized in screens, there is a home screen that initiates the tab panel. And there are separate screens for initiation of each tab. The simplified code for the home screen: public class HomeScreen extends Composite{ public HomeScreen() { TabPanel tabPanel = new TabPanel(); FlowPanel flowpanel; flowpanel = new FlowPanel(); ProfileTabScreen profileTabScreen = new ProfileTabScreen(); flowpanel.add(profileTabScreen); tabPanel.add(flowpanel, "Profile"); flowpanel = new FlowPanel(); GroupsTabScreen groupsTabScreen = new GroupsTabScreen(); flowpanel.add(groupsTabScreen); tabPanel.add(flowpanel, "Groups"); initWidget(tabPanel); } } Code for the tab screen from which I want to initiate the reload: private VerticalPanel groupPanel = new VerticalPanel(); private Button newGroupButton = new Button("New group"); public GroupsTabScreen() { newGroupButton.addClickHandler(new ClickHandler(){ public void onClick(ClickEvent event) { createNewGroup(); } }); groupPanel.add(newGroupButton); initWidget(groupPanel); } Code for the tab screen that has to be reloaded: private VerticalPanel profilePanel = new VerticalPanel(); private Label label = new Label("No groups yet."); public ProfileTabScreen() { profilePanel.add(label); initWidget(profilePanel); } So let's imagine I just want to change text of a label in profileTab (while in reality it will be ListBox and other elements), when the newGroupButton is clicked in groupTab. As I said, reloading the whole profileTab each time is is selected would be acceptable as well.

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• Exchange 2003-Exchange 2010 post migration GAL/OAB problem

  - by user68726

  I am very new to Exchange so forgive my newbie-ness. I've exhausted Google trying to find a way to solve my problem so I'm hoping some of you gurus can shed some light on my next steps. Please forgive my bungling around through this. The problem I cannot download/update the Global Address List (GAL) and Offline Address Book (OAB) on my Outlook 2010 clients. I get: Task 'emailaddress' reported error (0x8004010F) : 'The operation failed. An object cannot be found.' ---- error. I'm using cached exchange mode, which if I turn off Outlook hangs completely from the moment I start it up. (Note I've replaced my actual email address with 'emailaddress') Background information I migrated mailboxes, public store, etc. from a Small Business Server 2003 with Exchange 2003 box to a Server 2008 R2 with Exchange 2010 based primarily on an experts exchange how to article. The exchange server is up and running as an internet facing exchange server with all of the roles necessary to send and receive mail and in that capacity is working fine. I "thought" I had successfully migrated everything from the SBS03 box, and due to huge amounts of errors in everything from AD to the Exchange install itself I removed the reference to the SBS03 server in adsiedit. I've still got access to the old SBS03 box, but as I said the number of errors in everything is preventing even the uninstall of Exchange (or the starting of the Exchange Information Store service), so I'm quite content to leave that box completely out of the picture while trying to solve my problem. After research I discovered this is most likely because I failed to run the “update-globaladdresslist” (or get / update) command from the Exchange shell before I removed the Exchange 2003 server from adsiedit (and the network). If I run the command now it gives me: WARNING: The recipient "domainname.com/Microsoft Exchange System Objects/Offline Address Book - first administrative group" is invalid and couldn't be updated. WARNING: The recipient "domainname.com/Microsoft Exchange System Objects/Schedule+ Free Busy Information – first administrative group" is invalid and couldn't be updated. WARNING: The recipient "domainname.com/Microsoft Exchange System Objects/ContainernameArchive" is invalid and couldn't be updated. WARNING: The recipient "domainname.com/Microsoft Exchange System Objects/ContainernameContacts" is invalid and couldn't be updated. (Note that I’ve replaced my domain with “domainname.com” and my organization name with “containername”) What I’ve tried I don’t want to use the old OAB, or GAL, I don’t care about either, our GAL and distribution lists needed to be organized anyway, so at this point I really just want to get rid of the old reference to the “first administrative group” and move on. I’ve tried to create a new GAL and tell Exchange 2010 to use that GAL instead of the old GAL, but I'm obviously missing some of the commands or something dumb I need to do to start over with a blank slate/GAL/OAB. I'm very tempted to completely delete the entire "first administrative group" tree from adsiedit and see if that gets rid of the ridiculous reference that no longer exists but I dont want to break something else. Commands run to try to create a new GAL and tell exch10 to use that GAL: New-globaladdresslist –name NAMEOFNEWGAL Set-globaladdresslist GUID –name NAMEOFNEWGAL This did nothing for me except now when I run get-globaladdresslist or with the | FL pipe I see two GALs listed, the “default global address list” and the “NAMEOFNEWGAL” that I created. After a little more research this morning it looks like you can't change/delete/remove the default address list, and the only way to do what I'm trying to do would be to maybe remove the default address list via adsiedit and recreate with a command something like new-GlobalAddressList -Name "Default Global Address List" -IncludedRecipients AllRecipients. This would be acceptable but I've searched and searched and can't find instructions or a breakdown of where exactly the default GAL lives in AD, and if I'd have to remove multiple child references/records. ** Of interest** I'm getting an event ID 9337 in my application log OALGen did not find any recipients in address list ‘\Global Address List. This offline address list will not be generated. -\NAMEOFMYOAB --------- on my Exchange 2010 box, which pretty much to me seems to confirm my suspicion that the empty GAL/OAB is what's causing the Outlook client 0x8004010F error. Help please!

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• Exchange 2003-Exchange 2010 post migration GAL/OAB problem

  - by user68726

  I am very new to Exchange so forgive my newbie-ness. I've exhausted Google trying to find a way to solve my problem so I'm hoping some of you gurus can shed some light on my next steps. Please forgive my bungling around through this. The problem I cannot download/update the Global Address List (GAL) and Offline Address Book (OAB) on my Outlook 2010 clients. I get: Task 'emailaddress' reported error (0x8004010F) : 'The operation failed. An object cannot be found.' ---- error. I'm using cached exchange mode, which if I turn off Outlook hangs completely from the moment I start it up. (Note I've replaced my actual email address with 'emailaddress') Background information I migrated mailboxes, public store, etc. from a Small Business Server 2003 with Exchange 2003 box to a Server 2008 R2 with Exchange 2010 based primarily on an experts exchange how to article. The exchange server is up and running as an internet facing exchange server with all of the roles necessary to send and receive mail and in that capacity is working fine. I "thought" I had successfully migrated everything from the SBS03 box, and due to huge amounts of errors in everything from AD to the Exchange install itself I removed the reference to the SBS03 server in adsiedit. I've still got access to the old SBS03 box, but as I said the number of errors in everything is preventing even the uninstall of Exchange (or the starting of the Exchange Information Store service), so I'm quite content to leave that box completely out of the picture while trying to solve my problem. After research I discovered this is most likely because I failed to run the “update-globaladdresslist” (or get / update) command from the Exchange shell before I removed the Exchange 2003 server from adsiedit (and the network). If I run the command now it gives me: WARNING: The recipient "domainname.com/Microsoft Exchange System Objects/Offline Address Book - first administrative group" is invalid and couldn't be updated. WARNING: The recipient "domainname.com/Microsoft Exchange System Objects/Schedule+ Free Busy Information – first administrative group" is invalid and couldn't be updated. WARNING: The recipient "domainname.com/Microsoft Exchange System Objects/ContainernameArchive" is invalid and couldn't be updated. WARNING: The recipient "domainname.com/Microsoft Exchange System Objects/ContainernameContacts" is invalid and couldn't be updated. (Note that I’ve replaced my domain with “domainname.com” and my organization name with “containername”) What I’ve tried I don’t want to use the old OAB, or GAL, I don’t care about either, our GAL and distribution lists needed to be organized anyway, so at this point I really just want to get rid of the old reference to the “first administrative group” and move on. I’ve tried to create a new GAL and tell Exchange 2010 to use that GAL instead of the old GAL, but I'm obviously missing some of the commands or something dumb I need to do to start over with a blank slate/GAL/OAB. I'm very tempted to completely delete the entire "first administrative group" tree from adsiedit and see if that gets rid of the ridiculous reference that no longer exists but I dont want to break something else. Commands run to try to create a new GAL and tell exch10 to use that GAL: New-globaladdresslist –name NAMEOFNEWGAL Set-globaladdresslist GUID –name NAMEOFNEWGAL This did nothing for me except now when I run get-globaladdresslist or with the | FL pipe I see two GALs listed, the “default global address list” and the “NAMEOFNEWGAL” that I created. After a little more research this morning it looks like you can't change/delete/remove the default address list, and the only way to do what I'm trying to do would be to maybe remove the default address list via adsiedit and recreate with a command something like new-GlobalAddressList -Name "Default Global Address List" -IncludedRecipients AllRecipients. This would be acceptable but I've searched and searched and can't find instructions or a breakdown of where exactly the default GAL lives in AD, and if I'd have to remove multiple child references/records. Of interest I'm getting an event ID 9337 in my application log OALGen did not find any recipients in address list \Global Address List. This offline address list will not be generated. -\NAMEOFMYOAB --------- on my Exchange 2010 box, which pretty much to me seems to confirm my suspicion that the empty GAL/OAB is what's causing the Outlook client 0x8004010F error. Help please!

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• Install Ubuntu Netbook Edition with Wubi Installer

  - by Matthew Guay

  Ubuntu is one of the most popular versions of Linux, and their Netbook Remix edition is especially attractive for netbook owners.  Here we’ll look at how you can easily try out Ubuntu on your netbook without a CD/DVD drive. Netbooks, along with the growing number of thin, full powered laptops, lack a CD/DVD drive.  Installing software isn’t much of a problem since most programs, whether free or for-pay, are available for download.  Operating systems, however, are usually installed from a disk.  You can easily install Windows 7 from a flash drive with our tutorial, but installing Ubuntu from a USB flash drive is more complicated.  However, using Wubi, a Windows installer for Ubuntu, you can easily install it directly on your netbook and even uninstall it with only a few clicks. Getting Started Download and run the Wubi installer for Ubuntu (link below).  In the installer, select the drive you where you wish to install Ubuntu, the size of the installation (this is the amount dedicated to Ubuntu; under 20Gb should be fine), language, username, and desired password.  Also, from the Desktop environment menu, select Ubuntu Netbook to install the netbook edition.  Click Install when your settings are correct. Wubi will automatically download the selected version of Ubuntu and install it on your computer. Windows Firewall may ask if you want to unblock Wubi; select your network and click Allow access. The download will take around an hour on broadband, depending on your internet connection speed.  Once the download is completed, it will automatically install to your computer.  If you’d prefer to have everything downloaded before you start the install, download the ISO of Ubuntu Netbook edition (link below) and save it in the same folder as Wubi. Then, when you run Wubi, select the netbook edition as before and click Install.  Wubi will verify that your download is valid, and will then proceed to install from the downloaded ISO.  This install will only take about 10 minutes. Once the install is finished you will be asked to reboot your computer.  Save anything else you’re working on, and then reboot to finish setting up Ubuntu on your netbook. When your computer reboots, select Ubuntu at the boot screen.  Wubi leaves the default OS as Windows 7, so if you don’t select anything it will boot into Windows 7 after a few seconds. Ubuntu will automatically finish the install when you boot into it the first time.  This took about 12 minutes in our test. When the setup is finished, your netbook will reboot one more time.  Remember again to select Ubuntu at the boot screen.  You’ll then see a second boot screen; press your Enter key to select the default.   Ubuntu only took less than a minute to boot in our test.  When you see the login screen, select your name and enter your password you setup in Wubi.  Now you’re ready to start exploring Ubuntu Netbook Remix. Using Ubuntu Netbook Remix Ubuntu Netbook Remix offers a simple, full-screen interface to take the best advantage of netbooks’ small screens.  Pre-installed applications are displayed in the application launcher, and are organized by category.  Click once to open an application. The first screen on the application launcher shows your favorite programs.  If you’d like to add another application to the favorites pane, click the plus sign beside its icon. Your files from Windows are still accessible from Ubuntu Netbook Remix.  From the home screen, select Files & Folders on the left menu, and then click the icon that says something like 100GB Filesystem under the Volumes section. Now you’ll be able to see all of your files from Windows.  Your user files such as documents, music, and pictures should be located in Documents and Settings in a folder with your user name. You can also easily install a variety of free applications via the Software Installer. Connecting to the internet is also easy, as Ubuntu Netbook Remix automatically recognized the WiFi adaptor on our test netbook, a Samsung N150.  To connect to a wireless network, click the wireless icon on the top right of the screen and select the network’s name from the list. And, if you’d like to customize your screen, right-click on the application launcher and select Change desktop background. Choose a background picture you’d like. Now you’ll see it through your application launcher.  Nice! Most applications are opened full-screen.  You can close them by clicking the x on the right of the program’s name. You can also switch to other applications from their icons on the top left.  Open the home screen by clicking the Ubuntu logo in the far left. Changing Boot Options By default, Wubi will leave Windows as the default operating system, and will give you 10 seconds at boot to choose to boot into Ubuntu.  To change this, boot into Windows and enter Advanced system settings in your start menu search. In this dialog, click Settings under Startup and Recovery. From this dialog, you can select the default operating system and the time to display list of operating systems.  You can enter a lower number to make the boot screen appear for less time. And if you’d rather make Ubuntu the default operating system, select it from the drop-down list.   Uninstalling Ubuntu Netbook Remix If you decide you don’t want to keep Ubuntu Netbook Remix on your computer, you can uninstall it just like you uninstall any normal application.  Boot your computer into Windows, open Control Panel, click Uninstall a Program, and enter ubuntu in the search box.  Select it, and click Uninstall. Click Uninstall at the prompt.  Ubuntu uninstalls very quickly, and removes the entry from the bootloader as well, so your computer is just like it was before you installed it.   Conclusion Ubuntu Netbook Remix offers an attractive Linux interface for netbooks.  We enjoyed trying it out, and found it much more user-friendly than most Linux distros.  And with the Wubi installer, you can install it risk-free and try it out on your netbook.  Or, if you’d like to try out another alternate netbook operating system, check out our article on Jolicloud, another new OS for netbooks. Links Download Wubi Installer for Windows Download Ubuntu Netbook Edition Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Easily Install Ubuntu Linux with Windows Using the Wubi InstallerInstall VMware Tools on Ubuntu Edgy EftHow to install Spotify in Ubuntu 9.10 using WineInstalling PHP5 and Apache on UbuntuInstalling PHP4 and Apache on Ubuntu TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips VMware Workstation 7 Acronis Online Backup DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Explorer++ is a Worthy Windows Explorer Alternative Error Goblin Explains Windows Error Codes Twelve must-have Google Chrome plugins Cool Looking Skins for Windows Media Player 12 Move the Mouse Pointer With Your Face Movement Using eViacam Boot Windows Faster With Boot Performance Diagnostics

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• SQLAuthority News – Pluralsight Course Review – Practices for Software Startups – Part 1 of 2

  - by pinaldave

  This is first part of the two part series of Practices for Software Startup Pluralsight Course. The course is written by Stephen Forte (Blog | Twitter). Stephen Forte is the Chief Strategy Officer of the venture backed company, Telerik, a leading vendor of developer and team productivity tools. Stephen is also a Certified Scrum Master, Certified Scrum Professional, PMP, and also speaks regularly at industry conferences around the world. He has written several books on application and database development.  Stephen is also a board member of the Scrum Alliance. Startups – Everybodies Dream Start-up companies are an important topic right now – everyone wants to start their own business.  It is also important to remember that all companies were a start up at one point – from your corner store to the giants like Microsoft and Apple.  Research proves that not every start-up succeeds, in fact, most will fail before their first year.  There are many reasons for this, and this could be due to the fact that there are many stages to a start-up company, and stumbling at any of these stages can lead to failure.  It is important to understand what makes a start-up company succeed at all its hurdles to become successful.  It is even important to define success.  For most start-ups this would mean becoming their own independently functioning company or to be bought out for a hefty profit by a larger company.  The idea of making a hefty profit by living your dream is extremely important, and you can even think of start-ups as the new craze.  That’s why studying them is so important – they are very popular, but things have changed a lot since their inception. Starting the Startups Beginning a start-up company used to be difficult, but now facilities and information is widely available, and it is much easier.  But that means it is much easier to fail, also.  Previously to start your own company, everything was planned and organized, resources were ensured and backed up before beginning; even the idea of starting your own business was a big thing.  Now anybody can do it, and the steps are simple and outlines everywhere – you can get online software and easily outsource , cloud source, or crowdsource a lot of your material.  But without the type of planning previously required, things can often go badly. New Products – New Ideas – New World There are so many fantastic new products, but they don’t reach success all the time.  I find start-up companies very interesting, and whenever I meet someone who is interested in the subject or already starting their own company, I always ask what they are doing, their plans, goals, market, etc.  I am sorry to say that in most cases, they cannot answer my questions.  It is true that many fantastic ideas fail because of bad decisions.  These bad decisions were not made intentionally, but people were simply unaware of what they should be doing.  This will always lead to failure.  But I am happy to say that all these issues can be gone because Pluralsight is now offering a course all about start-ups by Stephen Forte.  Stephen is a start up leader.  He has successfully started many companies and most are still going strong, or have gone on to even bigger and better things. Beginning Course on Startup I have always thought start-ups are a fascinating subject, and decided to take his course, but it is three hours long.  This would be hard to fit into my busy work day all at once, so I decided to do half of his course before my daughter wakes up, and the other half after she goes to sleep.  The course is divided into six modules, so this would be easy to do.  I began the first chapter early in the morning, at 5 am.  Stephen jumped right into the middle of the subject in the very first module – designing your business plan.  The first question you will have to answer to yourself, to others, and to investors is: What is your product and when will we be able to see it?  So a very important concept is a “minimal viable product.”  This means setting goals for yourself and your product.  We all have large dreams, but your minimal viable product doesn’t have to be your final vision at the very first.  For example: Apple is a giant company, but it is still evolving.  Steve Jobs didn’t envision the iPhone 6 at the very beginning.  He had to start at the first iPhone and do his market research, and the idea evolved into the technology you see now.  So for yourself, you should decide a beginning and stop point.  Do your market research.  Determine who you want to reach, what audience you want for your product.  You can have a great idea that simply will not work in the market, do need, bottlenecks, lack of resources, or competition.  There is a lot of research that needs to be done before you even write a business plan, and Stephen covers it in the very first chapter. The Team – Unique Key to Success After jumping right into the subject in the very first module, I wondered what Stephen could have in store for me for the rest of the course.  Chapter number two is building a team.  Having a team is important regardless of what your startup is.  You can be a true visionary with endless ideas and energy, but one person can still not do everything.  It is important to decide from the very beginning if you will have cofounders, team leaders, and how many employees you’ll need.  Even more important, you’ll need to decide what kind of team you want – what personalities, skills, and type of energy you want each of your employees to bring.  Do you want to have an A+ team with a B- idea, or do you have a B- idea that needs an A+ team to sell it?  Stephen asks all the hard questions!  I was especially impressed by his insight on developing.  You have to decide if you need developers, how many, and what their skills should be. I found this insight extremely useful for everyday usage, not just for start-up companies.  I would apply this kind of information in management at any position.  An amazing team will build an amazing product – and that doesn’t matter if you’re a start-up company or a small team working for a much larger business. Customer Development – The Ultimate Obective Chapter three was about customer development. According to Stephen, there are four different steps to develop a customer base.  The first question to ask yourself is if you are envisioning a large customer base buying a few products each, or a small, dedicated base that buys a lot of your product – quantity vs. Quality.  He also discusses how to earn, retain, and get more customers.  He also says that each customer should be placed in a different role – some will be like investors, who regularly spend with you and invest their money in your business.  It is then your job to take that investment and turn it into a better product in the future.  You need to deal with their money properly – think of it is as theirs as investors, not yours as profit.  At the end of this module I felt that only Stephen could provide this kind of insight, and then he listed all the resources he took his information from.  I have never seen a group of people so passionate about their customers. It was indeed a long day for me. In tomorrow’s part 2 we will discuss rest of the three module and also will see a quick video of the Practices for Software Startup Pluralsight Course. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Best Practices, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• South Florida Code Camp 2010 &ndash; VI &ndash; 2010-02-27

  - by Dave Noderer

  Catching up after our sixth code camp here in the Ft Lauderdale, FL area. Website at: http://www.fladotnet.com/codecamp. For the 5th time, DeVry University hosted the event which makes everything else really easy! Statistics from 2010 South Florida Code Camp: 848 registered (we use Microsoft Group Events) ~ 600 attended (516 took name badges) 64 speakers (including speaker idol) 72 sessions 12 parallel tracks Food 400 waters 600 sodas 900 cups of coffee (it was cold!) 200 pounds of ice 200 pizza's 10 large salad trays 900 mouse pads Photos on facebook Dave Noderer: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/album.php?aid=190812&id=693530361 Joe Healy: http://www.facebook.com/devfish?ref=mf#!/album.php?aid=202787&id=720054950 Will Strohl:http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/album.php?aid=2045553&id=1046966128&ref=mf Veronica Gonzalez: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/album.php?aid=150954&id=672439484 Florida Speaker Idol One of the sessions at code camp was the South Florida Regional speaker idol competition. After user group level competitions there are five competitors. I acted as MC and score keeper while Ed Hill, Bob O’Connell, John Dunagan and Shervin Shakibi were judges. This statewide competition is being run by Roy Lawsen in Lakeland and the winner, Jeff Truman from Naples will move on to the state finals to be held at the Orlando Code Camp on 3/27/2010: http://www.orlandocodecamp.com/. Each speaker has 10 minutes. The participants were: Alex Koval Jeff Truman Jared Nielsen Chris Catto Venkat Narayanasamy They all did a great job and I’m working with each to make sure they don’t stop there and start speaking at meetings. Thanks to everyone involved! Volunteers As always events like this don’t happen without a lot of help! The key people were: Ed Hill, Bob O’Connell – DeVry For the months leading up to the event, Ed collects all of the swag, books, etc and stores them. He holds meeting with various DeVry departments to coordinate the day, he works with the students in the days  before code camp to stuff bags, print signs, arrange tables and visit BJ’s for our supplies (I go and pay but have a small car!). And of course the day of the event he is there at 5:30 am!! We took two SUV’s to BJ’s, i was really worried that the 36 cases of water were going to break his rear axle! He also helps with the students and works very hard before and after the event. Rainer Haberman – Speakers and Volunteer of the Year Rainer has helped over the past couple of years but this time he took full control of arranging the tracks. I did some preliminary work solicitation speakers but he took over all communications after that. We have tried various organizations around speakers, chair per track, central team but having someone paying attention to the details is definitely the way to go! This was the first year I did not have to jump in at the last minute and re-arrange everything. There were lots of kudo’s from the speakers too saying they felt it was more organized than they have experienced in the past from any code camp. Thanks Rainer! Ray Alamonte – Book Swap We saw the idea of a book swap from the Alabama Code Camp and thought we would give it a try. Ray jumped in and took control. The idea was to get people to bring their old technical books to swap or for others to buy. You got a ticket for each book you brought that you could then turn in to buy another book. If you did not have a ticket you could buy a book for $1. Net proceeds were $153 which I rounded up and donated to the Red Cross. There is plenty going on in Haiti and Chile! I don’t think we really got a count of how many books came in. I many cases the books barely hit the table before being picked up again. At the end we were left with a dozen books which we donated to the DeVry library. A great success we will definitely do again! Jace Weiss / Ratchelen Hut – Coffee and Snacks Wow, this was an eye opener. In past years a few of us would struggle to give some attention to coffee, snacks, etc. But it was always tenuous and always ended up running out of coffee. In the past we have tried buying Dunkin Donuts coffee, renting urns, borrowing urns, etc. This year I actually purchased 2 – 100 cup Westbend commercial brewers plus a couple of small urns (30 and 60 cup we used for decaf). We got them both started early (although i forgot to push the on button on one!) and primed it with 10 boxes of Joe from Dunkin. then Jace and Rachelen took over.. once a batch was brewed they would refill the boxes, keep the area clean and at one point were filling cups. We never ran out of coffee and served a few hundred more than last  year. We did look but next year I’ll get a large insulated (like gatorade) dispensing container. It all went very smoothly and having help focused on that one area was a big win. Thanks Jace and Rachelen! Ken & Shirley Golding / Roberta Barbosa – Registration Ken & Shirley showed up and took over registration. This year we printed small name tags for everyone registered which was great because it is much easier to remember someone’s name when they are labeled! In any case it went the smoothest it has ever gone. All three were actively pulling people through the registration, answering questions, directing them to bags and information very quickly. I did not see that there was too big a line at any time. Thanks!! Scott Katarincic / Vishal Shukla – Website For the 3rd?? year in a row, Scott was in charge of the website starting in August or September when I start on code camp. He handles all the requests, makes changes to the site and admin. I think two years ago he wrote all the backend administration and tunes it and the website a bit but things are pretty stable. The only thing I do is put up the sponsors. It is a big pressure off of me!! Thanks Scott! Vishal jumped into the web end this year and created a new Silverlight agenda page to replace the old ajax page. We will continue to enhance this but it is definitely a good step forward! Thanks! Alex Funkhouser – T-shirts/Mouse pads/tables/sponsors Alex helps in many areas. He helps me bring in sponsors and handles all the logistics for t-shirts, sponsor tables and this year the mouse pads. He is also a key person to help promote the event as well not to mention the after after party which I did not attend and don’t want to know much about! Students There were a number of student volunteers but don’t have all of their names. But thanks to them, they stuffed bags, patrolled pizza and helped with moving things around. Sponsors We had a bunch of great sponsors which allowed us to feed people and give a way a lot of great swag. Our major sponsors of DeVry, Microsoft (both DPE and UGSS), Infragistics, Telerik, SQL Share (End to End, SQL Saturdays), and Interclick are very much appreciated. The other sponsors Applied Innovations (also supply code camp hosting), Ultimate Software (a great local SW company), Linxter (reliable cloud messaging we are lucky to have here!), Mediascend (a media startup), SoftwareFX (another local SW company we are happy to have back participating in CC), CozyRoc (if you do SSIS, check them out), Arrow Design (local DNN and Silverlight experts),Boxes and Arrows (a local SW consulting company) and Robert Half. One thing we did this year besides a t-shirt was a mouse pad. I like it because it will be around for a long time on many desks. After much investigation and years of using mouse pad’s I’ve determined that the 1/8” fabric top is the best and that is what we got!   So now I get a break for a few months before starting again!

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• Validating a linked item&rsquo;s data template in Sitecore

  - by Kyle Burns

  I’ve been doing quite a bit of work in Sitecore recently and last week I encountered a situation that it appears many others have hit.  I was working with a field that had been configured originally as a grouped droplink, but now needed to be updated to support additional levels of hierarchy in the folder structure.  If you’ve done any work in Sitecore that statement makes sense, but if not it may seem a bit cryptic.  Sitecore offers a number of different field types and a subset of these field types focus on providing links either to other items on the content tree or to content that is not stored in Sitecore.  In the case of the grouped droplink, the field is configured with a “root” folder and each direct descendant of this folder is considered to be a header for a grouping of other items and displayed in a dropdown.  A picture is worth a thousand words, so consider the following piece of a content tree: If I configure a grouped droplink field to use the “Current” folder as its datasource, the control that gets to my content author looks like this: This presents a nicely organized display and limits the user to selecting only the direct grandchildren of the folder root.  It also presents the limitation that struck as we were thinking through the content architecture and how it would hold up over time – the authors cannot further organize content under the root folder because of the structure required for the dropdown to work.  Over time, not allowing the hierarchy to go any deeper would prevent out authors from being able to organize their content in a way that it would be found when needed, so the grouped droplink data type was not going to fit the bill. I needed to look for an alternative data type that allowed for selection of a single item and limited my choices to descendants of a specific node on the content tree.  After looking at the options available for links in Sitecore and considering them against each other, one option stood out as nearly perfect – the droptree.  This field type stores its data identically to the droplink and allows for the selection of zero or one items under a specific node in the content tree.  By changing my data template to use droptree instead of grouped droplink, the author is now presented with the following when selecting a linked item: Sounds great, but a did say almost perfect – there’s still one flaw.  The code intended to display the linked item is expecting the selection to use a specific data template (or more precisely it makes certain assumptions about the fields that will be present), but the droptree does nothing to prevent the author from selecting a folder (since folders are items too) instead of one of the items contained within a folder.  I looked to see if anyone had already solved this problem.  I found many people discussing the problem, but the closest that I found to a solution was the statement “the best thing would probably be to create a custom validator” with no further discussion in regards to what this validator might look like.  I needed to create my own validator to ensure that the user had not selected a folder.  Since so many people had the same issue, I decided to make the validator as reusable as possible and share it here. The validator that I created inherits from StandardValidator.  In order to make the validator more intuitive to developers that are familiar with the TreeList controls in Sitecore, I chose to implement the following parameters: ExcludeTemplatesForSelection – serves as a “deny list”.  If the data template of the selected item is in this list it will not validate IncludeTemplatesForSelection – this can either be empty to indicate that any template not contained in the exclusion list is acceptable or it can contain the list of acceptable templates Now that I’ve explained the parameters and the purpose of the validator, I’ll let the code do the rest of the talking: 1: /// <summary> 2: /// Validates that a link field value meets template requirements 3: /// specified using the following parameters: 4: /// - ExcludeTemplatesForSelection: If present, the item being 5: /// based on an excluded template will cause validation to fail. 6: /// - IncludeTemplatesForSelection: If present, the item not being 7: /// based on an included template will cause validation to fail 8: /// 9: /// ExcludeTemplatesForSelection trumps IncludeTemplatesForSelection 10: /// if the same value appears in both lists. Lists are comma seperated 11: /// </summary> 12: [Serializable] 13: public class LinkItemTemplateValidator : StandardValidator 14: { 15: public LinkItemTemplateValidator() 16: { 17: } 18:   19: /// <summary> 20: /// Serialization constructor is required by the runtime 21: /// </summary> 22: /// <param name="info"></param> 23: /// <param name="context"></param> 24: public LinkItemTemplateValidator(SerializationInfo info, StreamingContext context) : base(info, context) { } 25:   26: /// <summary> 27: /// Returns whether the linked item meets the template 28: /// constraints specified in the parameters 29: /// </summary> 30: /// <returns> 31: /// The result of the evaluation. 32: /// </returns> 33: protected override ValidatorResult Evaluate() 34: { 35: if (string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(ControlValidationValue)) 36: { 37: return ValidatorResult.Valid; // let "required" validation handle 38: } 39:   40: var excludeString = Parameters["ExcludeTemplatesForSelection"]; 41: var includeString = Parameters["IncludeTemplatesForSelection"]; 42: if (string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(excludeString) && string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(includeString)) 43: { 44: return ValidatorResult.Valid; // "allow anything" if no params 45: } 46:   47: Guid linkedItemGuid; 48: if (!Guid.TryParse(ControlValidationValue, out linkedItemGuid)) 49: { 50: return ValidatorResult.Valid; // probably put validator on wrong field 51: } 52:   53: var item = GetItem(); 54: var linkedItem = item.Database.GetItem(new ID(linkedItemGuid)); 55:   56: if (linkedItem == null) 57: { 58: return ValidatorResult.Valid; // this validator isn't for broken links 59: } 60:   61: var exclusionList = (excludeString ?? string.Empty).Split(','); 62: var inclusionList = (includeString ?? string.Empty).Split(','); 63:   64: if ((inclusionList.Length == 0 || inclusionList.Contains(linkedItem.TemplateName)) 65: && !exclusionList.Contains(linkedItem.TemplateName)) 66: { 67: return ValidatorResult.Valid; 68: } 69:   70: Text = GetText("The field \"{0}\" specifies an item which is based on template \"{1}\". This template is not valid for selection", GetFieldDisplayName(), linkedItem.TemplateName); 71:   72: return GetFailedResult(ValidatorResult.FatalError); 73: } 74:   75: protected override ValidatorResult GetMaxValidatorResult() 76: { 77: return ValidatorResult.FatalError; 78: } 79:   80: public override string Name 81: { 82: get { return @"LinkItemTemplateValidator"; } 83: } 84: }   In this blog entry, I have shared some code that I found useful in solving a problem that seemed fairly common.  Hopefully the next person that is looking for this answer finds it useful as well.

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• JMaghreb 2012 Trip Report

  - by arungupta

  JMaghreb is the inaugural Java conference organized by Morocco JUG. It is the biggest Java conference in Maghreb (5 countries in North West Africa). Oracle was the exclusive platinum sponsor with several others. The registrations had to be closed at 1412 for the free conference and several folks were already on the waiting list. Rabat with 531 registrations and Casablanca with 426 were the top cities. Some statistics ... 850+ attendees over 2 days, 500+ every day 30 sessions were delivered by 18 speakers from 10 different countries 10 sessions in French and 20 in English 6 of the speakers spoke at JavaOne 2012 8 will be at Devoxx Attendees from 5 different countries and 57 cities in Morocco 40.9% qualified them as professional and rest as students Topics ranged from HTML5, Java EE 7, ADF, JavaFX, MySQL, JCP, Vaadin, Android, Community, JCP Java EE 6 hands-on lab was sold out within 7 minutes and JavaFX in 12 minutes I gave the keynote along with Simon Ritter which was basically a recap of the Strategy and Technical keynotes presented at JavaOne 2012. An informal survey during the keynote showed the following numbers: 25% using NetBeans, 90% on Eclipse, 3 on JDeveloper, 1 on IntelliJ About 10 subscribers to free online Java magazine. This digital magazine is a comprehensive source of information for everything Java - subscribe for free!! About 10-15% using Java SE 7. Download JDK 7 and get started today! Even JDK 8 builds have been available for a while now. My second talk explained the core concepts of WebSocket and how JSR 356 is providing a standard API to build WebSocket-driven applications in Java EE 7. TOTD #183 explains how you can easily get started with WebSocket in GlassFish 4. The complete slide deck is available: Next day started with a community keynote by Sonya Barry. Some of us live the life of JCP, JSR, EG, EC, RI, etc every day, but not every body is. To address that, Sonya prepared an excellent introductory presentation providing an explanation of these terms and how java.net infrastructure supports Java development. The registration for the lab showed there is a definite demand for these technologies in this part of the world. I delivered the Java EE 6 hands-on lab to a packed room of about 120 attendees. Most of the attendees were able to progress and follow the lab instructions. Some of the attendees did not have a laptop but were taking extensive notes on paper notepads. Several attendees were already using Java EE 6 in their projects and typically they are the ones asking deep dive questions. Also gave out three copies of my recently released Java EE 6 Pocket Guide and new GlassFish t-shirts. Definitely feels happy to coach ~120 more Java developers learn standards-based enterprise Java programming. I also participated in a JCP BoF along with Werner, Sonya, and Badr. Adotp-a-JSR, java.net infrastructure, how to file a JSR, what is an RI, and other similar topics were discussed in a candid manner. You can follow @JMaghrebConf or check out their facebook page. java.net published a timely conversation with Badr El Houari - the fearless leader of the Morocco JUG team. Did you know that Morocco JUG stood for JCP EC elections (ADD LINK) ? Even though they did not get elected but did fairly well. Now some sample tweets from #JMaghreb ... #JMaghreb is over. Impressive for a first edition! Thanks @badrelhouari and all the @MoroccoJUG team ! Since you @speakjava : System.out.println("Thank you so much dear Tech Evangelist ! The JavaFX was pretty amazing !!! "); #JMaghreb @YounesVendetta @arungupta @JMaghrebConf Right ! hope he will be back to morocco again and again .. :) @Alji_ @arungupta @JMaghrebConf That dude is a genius ;) Put it on your wall :p @arungupta rocking Java EE 6 at @JMaghrebConf #Java #JavaEE #JMaghreb http://t.co/isl0Iq5p @sonyabarry you are an awesome speaker ;-) #JMaghreb rich more than 550 attendees in day one. Expecting more tomorrow! ongratulations @badrelhouari the organisation was great! The talks were pretty interesting, and the turnout was surprising at #JMaghreb! #JMaghreb is truly awesome... The speakers are unbelievable ! #JavaFX... Just amazing #JMaghreb Charmed by the talk about #javaFX ( nodes architecture, MVC, Lazy loading, binding... ) gotta start using it intead of SWT. #JMaghreb JavaFX is killing JFreeChart. It supports Charts a lot of kind of them ... #JMaghreb The british man is back #JMaghreb I do like him!! #JMaghreb @arungupta rocking @JMaghrebConf. pic.twitter.com/CNohA3PE @arungupta Great talk about the future of Java EE (JEE 7 & JEE 8) Thank you. #JMaghreb JEE7 more mooore power , leeess less code !! #JMaghreb They are simplifying the existing API for Java Message Service 2.0 #JMaghreb good to know , the more the code is simplified the better ! The Glassdoor guy #arungupta is doing it RIGHT ! #JMaghreb Great presentation of The Future of the Java Platform: Java EE 7, Java SE 8 & Beyond #jMaghreb @arungupta is a great Guy apparently #JMaghreb On a personal front, the hotel (Soiftel Jardin des Roses) was pretty nice and the location was perfect. There was a 1.8 mile loop dirt trail right next to it so I managed to squeeze some runs before my upcoming marathon. Also enjoyed some great Moroccan cuisine - Couscous, Tajine, mint tea, and moroccan salad. Visit to Kasbah of the Udayas, Hassan II (one of the tallest mosque in the world), and eating in a restaurant in a kasbah are some of the exciting local experiences. Now some pictures from the event (and around the city) ... And the complete album: Many thanks to Badr, Faisal, and rest of the team for organizing a great conference. They are already thinking about how to improve the content, logisitics, and flow for the next year. I'm certainly looking forward to JMaghreb 2.0 :-)

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• Clustering for Mere Mortals (Pt 3)

  - by Geoff N. Hiten

  The Controller Now we get to the meat of the matter.  You want a virtual cluster, the first thing you have to do is create your own portable domain.  Start with a plain vanilla install of Windows 2003 R2 Standard on a semi-default VM. (1 GB RAM, 2 cores, 2 NICs, 128GB dynamically expanding VHD file).  I chose this because it had the smallest disk and memory footprint of any current supported Microsoft Server product.  I created the VM with a single dynamically expanding VHD, one fixed 16 GB VHD, and two NICs.  One NIC is connected to the outside world and the other one is part of an internal-only network.  The first NIC is set up as a DHCP client.  We will get to the other one later. I actually tried this with Windows 2008 R2, but it failed miserably.  Not sure whether it was 2008 R2 or the fact I tried to use cloned VMs in the cluster.  Clustering is one place where NewSID would really come in handy.  Too bad Microsoft bought and buried it. Load and Patch the OS (hence the need for the outside connection).This is a good time to go get dinner.  Maybe a movie too.  There are close to a hundred patches that need to be downloaded and applied.  Avoiding that mess was why I put so much time into trying to get the 2008 R2 version working.  Maybe next time.  Don’t forget to add the extensions for VMLite (or whatever virtualization product you prefer). Set a fixed IP address on the internal-only NIC.  Do not give it a gateway.  Put the same IP address for the NIC and for the DNS Server.  This IP should be in a range that is never available on your public network.  You will need all the addresses in the range available.  See the previous post for the exact settings I used. I chose 10.97.230.1 as the server.  The rest of the 10.97.230 range is what I will use later.  For the curious, those numbers are based on elements of my home address.  Not truly random, but good enough for this project. Do not bridge the network connections.  I never allowed the cluster nodes direct access to any public network. Format the fixed VHD and leave it alone for now. Promote the VM to a Domain Controller.  If you have never done this, don’t worry.  The only meaningful decision is what to call the new domain.  I prefer a bogus name that does not correspond to a real Top-Level Domain (TLD).  .com, .biz., .net, .org  are all TLDs that we know and love.  I chose .test as the TLD since it is descriptive AND it does not exist in the real world.  The domain is called MicroAD.  This gives me MicroAD.Test as my domain. During the promotion process, you will be prompted to install DNS as part of the Domain creation process.  You want to accept this option.  The installer will automatically assign this DNS server as the authoritative owner of the MicroAD.test DNS domain (not to be confused with the MicroAD.test Active Directory domain.) For the rest of the DCPROMO process, just accept the defaults. Now let’s make our IP address management easy.  Add the DHCP Role to the server.  Add the server (10.97.230.1 in this case) as the default gateway to assign to DHCP clients.  Here is where you have to be VERY careful and bind it ONLY to the Internal NIC.  Trust me, your network admin will NOT like an extra DHCP server “helping” out on her network.  Go ahead and create a range of 10-20 IP Addresses in your scope.  You might find other uses for a pocket domain controller <cough> Mirroring </cough> than just for building a cluster.  And Clustering in SQL 2008 and Windows 2008 R2 fully supports DHCP addresses. Now we have three of the five key roles ready.  Two more to go. Next comes file sharing.  Since your cluster node VMs will not have access to any outside, you have to have some way to get files into these VMs.  I simply go to the root of C: and create a “Shared” folder.  I then share it out and grant full control to “Everyone” to both the share and to the underlying NTFS folder.   This will be immensely useful for Service Packs, demo databases, and any other software that isn’t packaged as an ISO that we can mount to the VM. Finally we need to create a block-level multi-connect storage device.  The kind folks at Starwinds Software (http://www.starwindsoftware.com/) graciously gave me a non-expiring demo license for expressly this purpose.  Their iSCSI SAN software lets you create an iSCSI target from nearly any storage medium.  Refreshingly, their product does exactly what they say it does.  Thanks. Remember that 16 GB VHD file?  That is where we are going to carve into our LUNs.  I created an iSCSI folder off the root, just so I can keep everything organized.  I then carved 5 ea. 2 GB iSCSI targets from that folder.  I chose a fixed VHD for performance.  I tried this earlier with a dynamically expanding VHD, but too many layers of abstraction and sparseness combined to make it unusable even for a demo.  Stick with a fixed VHD so there is a one-to-one mapping between abstract and physical storage.  If you read the previous post, you know what I named these iSCSI LUNs and why.  Yes, I do have some left over space.  Always leave yourself room for future growth or options. This gets us up to where we can actually build the nodes and install SQL.  As with most clusters, the real work happens long before the individual nodes get installed and configured.  At least it does if you want the cluster to be a true high-availability platform.

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• How you can extend Tasklists in Fusion Applications

  - by Elie Wazen

  In this post we describe the process of modifying and extending a Tasklist available in the Regional Area of a Fusion Applications UI Shell. This is particularly useful to Customers who would like to expose Setup Tasks (generally available in the Fusion Setup Manager application) in the various functional pillars workareas. Oracle Composer, the tool used to implement such extensions allows changes to be made at runtime. The example provided in this document is for an Oracle Fusion Financials page. Let us examine the case of a customer role who requires access to both, a workarea and its associated functional tasks, and to an FSM (setup) task.  Both of these tasks represent ADF Taskflows but each is accessible from a different page.  We will show how an FSM task is added to a Functional tasklist and made accessible to a user from within a single workarea, eliminating the need to navigate between the FSM application and the Functional workarea where transactions are conducted. In general, tasks in Fusion Applications are grouped in two ways: Setup tasks are grouped in tasklists available to implementers in the Functional Setup Manager (FSM). These Tasks are accessed by implementation users and in general do not represent daily operational tasks that fit into a functional business process and were consequently included in the FSM application. For these tasks, the primary organizing principle is precedence between tasks. If task "Manage Suppliers" has prerequisites, those tasks must precede it in a tasklist. Task Lists are organized to efficiently implement an offering. Tasks frequently performed as part of business process flows are made available as links in the tasklist of their corresponding menu workarea. The primary organizing principle in the menu and task pane entries is to group tasks that are generally accessed together. Customizing a tasklist thus becomes required for business scenarios where a task packaged under FSM as a setup task, is for a particular customer a regular maintenance task that is accessed for record updates or creation as part of normal operational activities and where the frequency of this access merits the inclusion of that task in the related operational tasklist A user with the role of maintaining Journals in General Ledger is also responsible for maintaining Chart of Accounts Mappings.  In the Fusion Financials Product Family, Manage Journals is a task available from within the Journals Menu whereas Chart of Accounts Mapping is available via FSM under the Define Chart of Accounts tasklist Figure 1. The Manage Chart of Accounts Mapping Task in FSM Figure 2. The Manage Journals Task in the Task Pane of the Journals Workarea Our goal is to simplify cross task navigation and allow the user to access both tasks from a single tasklist on a single page without having to navigate to FSM for the Mapping task and to the Journals workarea for the Manage task. To accomplish that, we use Oracle Composer to customize  the Journals tasklist by adding to it the Mapping task. Identify the Taskflow name and path of the FSM Task The first step in our process is to identify the underlying taskflow for the Manage Chart of Accounts Mappings task. We select to Setup and Maintenance from the Navigator to launch the FSM Application, and we query the task from Manage Tasklists and Tasks Figure 3. Task Details including Taskflow path The Manage Chart of Accounts Mapping Task Taskflow is: /WEB-INF/oracle/apps/financials/generalLedger/sharedSetup/coaMappings/ui/flow /CoaMappingsMainAreaFlow.xml#CoaMappingsMainAreaFlow We copy that value and use it later as a parameter to our new task in the customized Journals Tasklist. Customize the Journals Page A user with Administration privileges can start the run time customization directly from the Administration Menu of the Global Area.  This customization is done at the Site level and once implemented becomes available to all users with access to the Journals Workarea. Figure 4.  Customization Menu The Oracle Composer Window is displayed in the same browser and the Hierarchy of the page component is displayed and available for modification. Figure 5.  Oracle Composer In the composer Window select the PanelFormLayout node and click on the Edit Button.  Note that the selected component is simultaneously highlighted in the lower pane in the browser. In the Properties popup window, select the Tasks List and Task Properties Tab, where the user finds the hierarchy of the Tasklist and is able to Edit nodes or create new ones. src="https://blogs.oracle.com/FunctionalArchitecture/resource/TL5.jpg" Figure 6.  The Tasklist in edit mode Add a Child Task to the Tasklist In the Edit Window the user will now create a child node at the desired level in the hierarchy by selecting the immediate parent node and clicking on the insert node button.  This process requires four values to be set as described in Table 1 below. Parameter Value How to Determine the Value Focus View Id /JournalEntryPage This is the Focus View ID of the UI Shell where the Tasklist we want to customize is.  A simple way to determine this value is to copy it from any of the Standard tasks on the Tasklist Label COA Mapping This is the Display name of the Task as it will appear in the Tasklist Task Type dynamicMain If the value is dynamicMain, the page contains a new link in the Regional Area. When you click the link, a new tab with the loaded task opens Taskflowid /WEB-INF/oracle/apps/financials/generalLedger/sharedSetup/ coaMappings/ui/flow/ CoaMappingsMainAreaFlow.xml#CoaMappingsMainAreaFlow This is the Taskflow path we retrieved from the Task Definition in FSM earlier in the process Table 1.  Parameters and Values for the Task to be added to the customized Tasklist Figure 7.   The parameters window of the newly added Task   Access the FSM Task from the Journals Workarea Once the FSM task is added and its parameters defined, the user saves the record, closes the Composer making the new task immediately available to users with access to the Journals workarea (Refer to Figure 8 below). Figure 8.   The COA Mapping Task is now visible and can be invoked from the Journals Workarea   Additional Considerations If a Task Flow is part of a product that is deployed on the same app server as the Tasklist workarea then that task flow can be added to a customized tasklist in that workarea. Otherwise that task flow can be invoked from its parent product’s workarea tasklist by selecting that workarea from the Navigator menu. For Example The following Taskflows  belong respectively to the Subledger Accounting, and to the General Ledger Products.  /WEB-INF/oracle/apps/financials/subledgerAccounting/accountingMethodSetup/mappingSets/ui/flow/MappingSetFlow.xml#MappingSetFlow /WEB-INF/oracle/apps/financials/generalLedger/sharedSetup/coaMappings/ui/flow/CoaMappingsMainAreaFlow.xml#CoaMappingsMainAreaFlow Since both the Subledger Accounting and General Ledger products are part of the LedgerApp J2EE Applicaton and are both deployed on the General Ledger Cluster Server (Figure 8 below), the user can add both of the above taskflows to the  tasklist in the  /JournalEntryPage FocusVIewID Workarea. Note:  both FSM Taskflows and Functional Taskflows can be added to the Tasklists as described in this document Figure 8.   The Topology of the Fusion Financials Product Family. Note that SubLedger Accounting and General Ledger are both deployed on the Ledger App Conclusion In this document we have shown how an administrative user can edit the Tasklist in the Regional Area of a Fusion Apps page using Oracle Composer. This is useful for cases where tasks packaged in different workareas are frequently accessed by the same user. By making these tasks available from the same page, we minimize the number of steps in the navigation the user has to do to perform their transactions and queries in Fusion Apps.  The example explained above showed that tasks classified as Setup tasks, meaning made accessible to implementation users from the FSM module can be added to the workarea of their respective Fusion application. This eliminates the need to navigate to FSM to access tasks that are both setup and regular maintenance tasks. References Oracle Fusion Applications Extensibility Guide 11g Release 1 (11.1.1.5) Part Number E16691-02 (Section 3.2) Oracle Fusion Applications Developer's Guide 11g Release 1 (11.1.4) Part Number E15524-05

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• Does Test Driven Development (TDD) improve Quality and Correctness? (Part 1)

  - by David V. Corbin

  Since the dawn of the computer age, various methodologies have been introduced to improve quality and reduce cost. In this posting, I will by sharing my experiences with Test Driven Development; both its benefits and limitations. To start this topic, we need to agree on what TDD is. The first is to define each of the three words as used in this context. Test - An item or action which measures something in some quantifiable form. Driven - The primary motivation or focus of a series of activities (process) Development - All phases of a software project/product from concept through delivery. The above are very simple definitions that result in the following: "TDD is a process where the primary focus is on measuring and quantifying all aspects of the creation of a (software) product." There are many places where TDD is used outside of software development, even though it is not known by this name. Consider the (conventional) education process that most of us grew up on. The focus was to get the best grades as measured by different tests. Many of these tests measured rote memorization and not understanding of the subject matter. The result of this that many people graduated with high scores but without "quality and correctness" in their ability to utilize the subject matter (of course, the flip side is true where certain people DID understand the material but were not very good at taking this type of test). Returning to software development, let us look at some common scenarios. While these items are generally applicable regardless of platform, language and tools; the remainder of this post will utilize Microsoft Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server (TFS) for examples. It should be realized that everyone does at least some aspect of TDD. At the most rudimentary level, getting a program to compile involves a "pass/fail" measurement (is the syntax valid) that drives their ability to proceed further (run the program). Other developers may create "Unit Tests" in the belief that having a test for every method/property of a class and good code coverage is the goal of TDD. These items may be helpful and even important, but really only address a small aspect of the overall effort. To see TDD in a bigger view, lets identify the various activities that are part of the Software Development LifeCycle. These are going to be presented in a Waterfall style for simplicity, but each item also occurs within Iterative methodologies such as Agile/Scrum. the key ones here are: Requirements Gathering Architecture Design Implementation Quality Assurance Can each of these items be subjected to a process which establishes metrics (quantified metrics) that reflect both the quality and correctness of each item? It should be clear that conventional Unit Tests do not apply to all of these items; at best they can verify that a local aspect (e.g. a Class/Method) of implementation matches the (test writers perspective of) the appropriate design document. So what can we do? For each of area, the goal is to create tests that are quantifiable and durable. The ability to quantify the measurements (beyond a simple pass/fail) is critical to tracking progress(eventually measuring the level of success that has been achieved) and for providing clear information on what items need to be addressed (along with the appropriate time to address them - in varying levels of detail) . Durability is important so that the test can be reapplied (ideally in an automated fashion) over the entire cycle. Returning for a moment back to our "education example", one must also be careful of how the tests are organized and how the measurements are taken. If a test is in a multiple choice format, there is a significant statistical probability that a correct answer might be the result of a random guess. Also, in many situations, having the student simply provide a final answer can obscure many important elements. For example, on a math test, having the student simply provide a numeric answer (rather than showing the methodology) may result in a complete mismatch between the process and the result. It is hard to determine which is worse: The student who makes a simple arithmetric error at one step of a long process (resulting in a wrong answer) or The student who (without providing the "workflow") uses a completely invalid approach, yet still comes up with the right number. The "Wrong Process"/"Right Answer" is probably the single biggest problem in software development. Even very simple items can suffer from this. As an example consider the following code for a "straight line" calculation....Is it correct? (for Integral Points)         int Solve(int m, int b, int x) { return m * x + b; }   Most people would respond "Yes". But let's take the question one step further... Is it correct for all possible values of m,b,x??? (no fair if you cheated by being focused on the bolded text!)  Without additional information regarding constrains on "the possible values of m,b,x" the answer must be NO, there is the risk of overflow/wraparound that will produce an incorrect result! To properly answer this question (i.e. Test the Code), one MUST be able to backtrack from the implementation through the design, and architecture all the way back to the requirements. And the requirement itself must be tested against the stakeholder(s). It is only when the bounding conditions are defined that it is possible to determine if the code is "Correct" and has "Quality". Yet, how many of us (myself included) have written such code without even thinking about it. In many canses we (think we) "know" what the bounds are, and that the code will be correct. As we all know, requirements change, "code reuse" causes implementations to be applied to different scenarios, etc. This leads directly to the types of system failures that plague so many projects. This approach to TDD is much more holistic than ones which start by focusing on the details. The fundamental concepts still apply: Each item should be tested. The test should be defined/implemented before (or concurrent with) the definition/implementation of the actual item. We also add concepts that expand the scope and alter the style by recognizing: There are many things beside "lines of code" that benefit from testing (measuring/evaluating in a formal way) Correctness and Quality can not be solely measured by "correct results" In the future parts, we will examine in greater detail some of the techniques that can be applied to each of these areas....

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• What Makes a Good Design Critic? CHI 2010 Panel Review

  - by jatin.thaker

  Author: Daniel Schwartz, Senior Interaction Designer, Oracle Applications User Experience Oracle Applications UX Chief Evangelist Patanjali Venkatacharya organized and moderated an innovative and stimulating panel discussion titled "What Makes a Good Design Critic? Food Design vs. Product Design Criticism" at CHI 2010, the annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. The panelists included Janice Rohn, VP of User Experience at Experian; Tami Hardeman, a food stylist; Ed Seiber, a restaurant architect and designer; John Kessler, a food critic and writer at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution; and Larry Powers, Chef de Cuisine at Shaun's restaurant in Atlanta, Georgia. Building off the momentum of his highly acclaimed panel at CHI 2009 on what interaction design can learn from food design (for which I was on the other side as a panelist), Venkatacharya brought together new people with different roles in the restaurant and software interaction design fields. The session was also quite delicious -- but more on that later. Criticism, as it applies to food and product or interaction design, was the tasty topic for this forum and showed that strong parallels exist between food and interaction design criticism. Figure 1. The panelists in discussion: (left to right) Janice Rohn, Ed Seiber, Tami Hardeman, and John Kessler. The panelists had great insights to share from their respective fields, and they enthusiastically discussed as if they were at a casual collegial dinner. John Kessler stated that he prefers to have one professional critic's opinion in general than a large sampling of customers, however, "Web sites like Yelp get users excited by the collective approach. People are attracted to things desired by so many." Janice Rohn added that this collective desire was especially true for users of consumer products. Ed Seiber remarked that while people looked to the popular view for their target tastes and product choices, "professional critics like John [Kessler] still hold a big weight on public opinion." Chef Powers indicated that chefs take in feedback from all sources, adding, "word of mouth is very powerful. We also look heavily at the sales of the dishes to see what's moving; what's selling and thus successful." Hearing this discussion validates our design work at Oracle in that we listen to our users (our diners) and industry feedback (our critics) to ensure an optimal user experience of our products. Rohn considers that restaurateur Danny Meyer's book, Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business, which is about creating successful restaurant experiences, has many applicable parallels to user experience design. Meyer actually argues that the customer is not always right, but that "they must always feel heard." Seiber agreed, but noted "customers are not designers," and while designers need to listen to customer feedback, it is the designer's job to synthesize it. Seiber feels it's the critic's job to point out when something is missing or not well-prioritized. In interaction design, our challenges are quite similar, if not parallel. Software tasks are like puzzles that are in search of a solution on how to be best completed. As a food stylist, Tami Hardeman has the demanding and challenging task of presenting food to be as delectable as can be. To present food in its best light requires a lot of creativity and insight into consumer tastes. It's no doubt then that this former fashion stylist came up with the ultimate catch phrase to capture the emotion that clients want to draw from their users: "craveability." The phrase was a hit with the audience and panelists alike. Sometime later in the discussion, Seiber remarked, "designers strive to apply craveability to products, and I do so for restaurants in my case." Craveabilty is also very applicable to interaction design. Creating straightforward and smooth workflows for users of Oracle Applications is a primary goal for my colleagues. We want our users to really enjoy working with our products where it makes them more efficient and better at their jobs. That's our "craveability." Patanjali Venkatacharya asked the panel, "if a design's "craveability" appeals to some cultures but not to others, then what is the impact to the food or product design process?" Rohn stated that "taste is part nature and part nurture" and that the design must take the full context of a product's usage into consideration. Kessler added, "good design is about understanding the context" that the experience necessitates. Seiber remarked how important seat comfort is for diners and how the quality of seating will add so much to the complete dining experience. Sometimes if these non-food factors are not well executed, they can also take away from an otherwise pleasant dining experience. Kessler recounted a time when he was dining at a restaurant that actually had very good food, but the photographs hanging on all the walls did not fit in with the overall décor and created a negative overall dining experience. While the tastiness of the food is critical to a restaurant's success, it is a captivating complete user experience, as in interaction design, which will keep customers coming back and ultimately making the restaurant a hit. Figure 2. Patanjali Venkatacharya enjoyed the Sardinian flatbread salad. As a surprise Chef Powers brought out a signature dish from Shaun's restaurant for all the panelists to sample and critique. The Sardinian flatbread dish showcased Atlanta's taste for fresh and local produce and cheese at its finest as a salad served on a crispy flavorful flat bread. Hardeman said it could be photographed from any angle, a high compliment coming from a food stylist. Seiber really enjoyed the colors that the dish brought together and thought it would be served very well in a casual restaurant on a summer's day. The panel really appreciated the taste and quality of the different components and how the rosemary brought all the flavors together. Seiber remarked that "a lot of effort goes into the appearance of simplicity." Rohn indicated that the same notion holds true with software user interface design. A tremendous amount of work goes into crafting straightforward interfaces, including user research, prototyping, design iterations, and usability studies. Design criticism for food and software interfaces clearly share many similarities. Both areas value expert opinions and user feedback. Both areas understand the importance of great design needing to work well in its context. Last but not least, both food and interaction design criticism value "craveability" and how having users excited about experiencing and enjoying the designs is an important goal. Now if we can just improve the taste of software user interfaces, people may choose to dine on their enterprise applications over a fresh organic salad.

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• Clustering for Mere Mortals (Pt3)

  - by Geoff N. Hiten

  The Controller Now we get to the meat of the matter.  You want a virtual cluster, the first thing you have to do is create your own portable domain.  IStart with a plain vanilla install of Windows 2003 R2 Standard on a semi-default VM. (1 GB RAM, 2 cores, 2 NICs, 128GB dynamically expanding VHD file).  I chose this because it had the smallest disk and memory footprint of any current supported Microsoft Server product.  I created the VM with a single dynamically expanding VHD, one fixed 16 GB VHD, and two NICs.  One NIC is connected to the outside world and the other one is part of an internal-only network.  The first NIC is set up as a DHCP client.  We will get to the other one later. I actually tried this with Windows 2008 R2, but it failed miserably.  Not sure whether it was 2008 R2 or the fact I tried to use cloned VMs in the cluster.  Clustering is one place where NewSID would really come in handy.  Too bad Microsoft bought and buried it. Load and Patch the OS (hence the need for the outside connection).This is a good time to go get dinner.  Maybe a movie too.  There are close to a hundred patches that need to be downloaded and applied.  Avoiding that mess was why I put so much time into trying to get the 2008 R2 version working.  Maybe next time.  Don’t forget to add the extensions for VMLite (or whatever virtualization product you prefer). Set a fixed IP address on the internal-only NIC.  Do not give it a gateway.  Put the same IP address for the NIC and for the DNS Server.  This IP should be in a range that is never available on your public network.  You will need all the addresses in the range available.  See the previous post for the exact settings I used. I chose 10.97.230.1 as the server.  The rest of the 10.97.230 range is what I will use later.  For the curious, those numbers are based on elements of my home address.  Not truly random, but good enough for this project. Do not bridge the network connections.  I never allowed the cluster nodes direct access to any public network. Format the fixed VHD and leave it alone for now. Promote the VM to a Domain Controller.  If you have never done this, don’t worry.  The only meaningful decision is what to call the new domain.  I prefer a bogus name that does not correspond to a real Top-Level Domain (TLD).  .com, .biz., .net, .org  are all TLDs that we know and love.  I chose .test as the TLD since it is descriptive AND it does not exist in the real world.  The domain is called MicroAD.  This gives me MicroAD.Test as my domain. During the promotion process, you will be prompted to install DNS as part of the Domain creation process.  You want to accept this option.  The installer will automatically assign this DNS server as the authoritative owner of the MicroAD.test DNS domain (not to be confused with the MicroAD.test Active Directory domain.) For the rest of the DCPROMO process, just accept the defaults. Now let’s make our IP address management easy.  Add the DHCP Role to the server.  Add the server (10.97.230.1 in this case) as the default gateway to assign to DHCP clients.  Here is where you have to be VERY careful and bind it ONLY to the Internal NIC.  Trust me, your network admin will NOT like an extra DHCP server “helping” out on her network.  Go ahead and create a range of 10-20 IP Addresses in your scope.  You might find other uses for a pocket domain controller <cough> Mirroring </cough> than just for building a cluster.  And Clustering in SQL 2008 and Windows 2008 R2 fully supports DHCP addresses. Now we have three of the five key roles ready.  Two more to go. Next comes file sharing.  Since your cluster node VMs will not have access to any outside, you have to have some way to get files into these VMs.  I simply go to the root of C: and create a “Shared” folder.  I then share it out and grant full control to “Everyone” to both the share and to the underlying NTFS folder.   This will be immensely useful for Service Packs, demo databases, and any other software that isn’t packaged as an ISO that we can mount to the VM. Finally we need to create a block-level multi-connect storage device.  The kind folks at Starwinds Software (http://www.starwindsoftware.com/) graciously gave me a non-expiring demo license for expressly this purpose.  Their iSCSI SAN software lets you create an iSCSI target from nearly any storage medium.  Refreshingly, their product does exactly what they say it does.  Thanks. Remember that 16 GB VHD file?  That is where we are going to carve into our LUNs.  I created an iSCSI folder off the root, just so I can keep everything organized.  I then carved 5 ea. 2 GB iSCSI targets from that folder.  I chose a fixed VHD for performance.  I tried this earlier with a dynamically expanding VHD, but too many layers of abstraction and sparseness combined to make it unusable even for a demo.  Stick with a fixed VHD so there is a one-to-one mapping between abstract and physical storage.  If you read the previous post, you know what I named these iSCSI LUNs and why.  Yes, I do have some left over space.  Always leave yourself room for future growth or options. This gets us up to where we can actually build the nodes and install SQL.  As with most clusters, the real work happens long before the individual nodes get installed and configured.  At least it does if you want the cluster to be a true high-availability platform.

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• The Shift: how Orchard painlessly shifted to document storage, and how it’ll affect you

  - by Bertrand Le Roy

  We’ve known it all along. The storage for Orchard content items would be much more efficient using a document database than a relational one. Orchard content items are composed of parts that serialize naturally into infoset kinds of documents. Storing them as relational data like we’ve done so far was unnatural and requires the data for a single item to span multiple tables, related through 1-1 relationships. This means lots of joins in queries, and a great potential for Select N+1 problems. Document databases, unfortunately, are still a tough sell in many places that prefer the more familiar relational model. Being able to x-copy Orchard to hosters has also been a basic constraint in the design of Orchard. Combine those with the necessity at the time to run in medium trust, and with license compatibility issues, and you’ll find yourself with very few reasonable choices. So we went, a little reluctantly, for relational SQL stores, with the dream of one day transitioning to document storage. We have played for a while with the idea of building our own document storage on top of SQL databases, and Sébastien implemented something more than decent along those lines, but we had a better way all along that we didn’t notice until recently… In Orchard, there are fields, which are named properties that you can add dynamically to a content part. Because they are so dynamic, we have been storing them as XML into a column on the main content item table. This infoset storage and its associated API are fairly generic, but were only used for fields. The breakthrough was when Sébastien realized how this existing storage could give us the advantages of document storage with minimal changes, while continuing to use relational databases as the substrate. public bool CommercialPrices { get { return this.Retrieve(p => p.CommercialPrices); } set { this.Store(p => p.CommercialPrices, value); } } This code is very compact and efficient because the API can infer from the expression what the type and name of the property are. It is then able to do the proper conversions for you. For this code to work in a content part, there is no need for a record at all. This is particularly nice for site settings: one query on one table and you get everything you need. This shows how the existing infoset solves the data storage problem, but you still need to query. Well, for those properties that need to be filtered and sorted on, you can still use the current record-based relational system. This of course continues to work. We do however provide APIs that make it trivial to store into both record properties and the infoset storage in one operation: public double Price { get { return Retrieve(r => r.Price); } set { Store(r => r.Price, value); } } This code looks strikingly similar to the non-record case above. The difference is that it will manage both the infoset and the record-based storages. The call to the Store method will send the data in both places, keeping them in sync. The call to the Retrieve method does something even cooler: if the property you’re looking for exists in the infoset, it will return it, but if it doesn’t, it will automatically look into the record for it. And if that wasn’t cool enough, it will take that value from the record and store it into the infoset for the next time it’s required. This means that your data will start automagically migrating to infoset storage just by virtue of using the code above instead of the usual: public double Price { get { return Record.Price; } set { Record.Price = value; } } As your users browse the site, it will get faster and faster as Select N+1 issues will optimize themselves away. If you preferred, you could still have explicit migration code, but it really shouldn’t be necessary most of the time. If you do already have code using QueryHints to mitigate Select N+1 issues, you might want to reconsider those, as with the new system, you’ll want to avoid joins that you don’t need for filtering or sorting, further optimizing your queries. There are some rare cases where the storage of the property must be handled differently. Check out this string[] property on SearchSettingsPart for example: public string[] SearchedFields { get { return (Retrieve<string>("SearchedFields") ?? "") .Split(new[] {',', ' '}, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries); } set { Store("SearchedFields", String.Join(", ", value)); } } The array of strings is transformed by the property accessors into and from a comma-separated list stored in a string. The Retrieve and Store overloads used in this case are lower-level versions that explicitly specify the type and name of the attribute to retrieve or store. You may be wondering what this means for code or operations that look directly at the database tables instead of going through the new infoset APIs. Even if there is a record, the infoset version of the property will win if it exists, so it is necessary to keep the infoset up-to-date. It’s not very complicated, but definitely something to keep in mind. Here is what a product record looks like in Nwazet.Commerce for example: And here is the same data in the infoset: The infoset is stored in Orchard_Framework_ContentItemRecord or Orchard_Framework_ContentItemVersionRecord, depending on whether the content type is versionable or not. A good way to find what you’re looking for is to inspect the record table first, as it’s usually easier to read, and then get the item record of the same id. Here is the detailed XML document for this product: <Data> <ProductPart Inventory="40" Price="18" Sku="pi-camera-box" OutOfStockMessage="" AllowBackOrder="false" Weight="0.2" Size="" ShippingCost="null" IsDigital="false" /> <ProductAttributesPart Attributes="" /> <AutoroutePart DisplayAlias="camera-box" /> <TitlePart Title="Nwazet Pi Camera Box" /> <BodyPart Text="[...]" /> <CommonPart CreatedUtc="2013-09-10T00:39:00Z" PublishedUtc="2013-09-14T01:07:47Z" /> </Data> The data is neatly organized under each part. It is easy to see how that document is all you need to know about that content item, all in one table. If you want to modify that data directly in the database, you should be careful to do it in both the record table and the infoset in the content item record. In this configuration, the record is now nothing more than an index, and will only be used for sorting and filtering. Of course, it’s perfectly fine to mix record-backed properties and record-less properties on the same part. It really depends what you think must be sorted and filtered on. In turn, this potentially simplifies migrations considerably. So here it is, the great shift of Orchard to document storage, something that Orchard has been designed for all along, and that we were able to implement with a satisfying and surprising economy of resources. Expect this code to make its way into the 1.8 version of Orchard when that’s available.

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• Oracle's Global Single Schema

  - by david.butler(at)oracle.com

  Maximizing business process efficiencies in a heterogeneous environment is very difficult. The difficulty stems from the fact that the various applications across the Information Technology (IT) landscape employ different integration standards, different message passing strategies, and different workflow engines. Vendors such as Oracle and others are delivering tools to help IT organizations manage the complexities introduced by these differences. But the one remaining intractable problem impacting efficient operations is the fact that these applications have different definitions for the same business data. Business data is your business information codified for computer programs to use. A good data model will represent the way your organization does business. The computer applications your organization deploys to improve operational efficiency are built to operate on the business data organized into this schema.  If the schema does not represent how you do business, the applications on that schema cannot provide the features you need to achieve the desired efficiencies. Business processes span these applications. Data problems break these processes rendering them far less efficient than they need to be to achieve organization goals. Thus, the expected return on the investment in these applications is never realized. The success of all business processes depends on the availability of accurate master data.  Clearly, the solution to this problem is to consolidate all the master data an organization uses to run its business. Then clean it up, augment it, govern it, and connect it back to the applications that need it. Until now, this obvious solution has been difficult to achieve because no one had defined a data model sufficiently broad, deep and flexible enough to support transaction processing on all key business entities and serve as a master superset to all other operational data models deployed in heterogeneous IT environments. Today, the situation has changed. Oracle has created an operational data model (aka schema) that can support accurate and consistent master data across heterogeneous IT systems. This is foundational for providing a way to consolidate and integrate master data without having to replace investments in existing applications. This Global Single Schema (GSS) represents a revolutionary breakthrough that allows for true master data consolidation. Oracle has deep knowledge of applications dating back to the early 1990s.  It developed applications in the areas of Supply Chain Management (SCM), Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Human Capital Management (HCM), Financials and Manufacturing. In addition, Oracle applications were delivered for key industries such as Communications, Financial Services, Retail, Public Sector, High Tech Manufacturing (HTM) and more. Expertise in all these areas drove requirements for GSS. The following figure illustrates Oracle's unique position that enabled the creation of the Global Single Schema. GSS Requirements Gathering GSS defines all the key business entities and attributes including Customers, Contacts, Suppliers, Accounts, Products, Services, Materials, Employees, Installed Base, Sites, Assets, and Inventory to name just a few. In addition, Oracle delivers GSS pre-integrated with a wide variety of operational applications.  Business Process Automation EBusiness is about maximizing operational efficiency. At the highest level, these 'operations' span all that you do as an organization.  The following figure illustrates some of these high-level business processes. Enterprise Business Processes Supplies are procured. Assets are maintained. Materials are stored. Inventory is accumulated. Products and Services are engineered, produced and sold. Customers are serviced. And across this entire spectrum, Employees do the procuring, supporting, engineering, producing, selling and servicing. Not shown, but not to be overlooked, are the accounting and the financial processes associated with all this procuring, manufacturing, and selling activity. Supporting all these applications is the master data. When this data is fragmented and inconsistent, the business processes fail and inefficiencies multiply. But imagine having all the data under these operational business processes in one place. ·            The same accurate and timely customer data will be provided to all your operational applications from the call center to the point of sale. ·            The same accurate and timely supplier data will be provided to all your operational applications from supply chain planning to procurement. ·            The same accurate and timely product information will be available to all your operational applications from demand chain planning to marketing. You would have a single version of the truth about your assets, financial information, customers, suppliers, employees, products and services to support your business automation processes as they flow across your business applications. All company and partner personnel will access the same exact data entity across all your channels and across all your lines of business. Oracle's Global Single Schema enables this vision of a single version of the truth across the heterogeneous operational applications supporting the entire enterprise. Global Single Schema Oracle's Global Single Schema organizes hundreds of thousands of attributes into 165 major schema objects supporting over 180 business application modules. It is designed for international operations, and extensibility.  The schema is delivered with a full set of public Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and an Integration Repository with modern Service Oriented Architecture interfaces to make data available as a services (DaaS) to business processes and enable operations in heterogeneous IT environments. ·         Key tables can be extended with unlimited numbers of additional attributes and attribute groups for maximum flexibility.  o    This enables model extensions that reflect business entities unique to your organization's operations. ·         The schema is multi-organization enabled so data manipulation can be controlled along organizational boundaries. ·         It uses variable byte Unicode to support over 31 languages. ·         The schema encodes flexible date and flexible address formats for easy localizations. No matter how complex your business is, Oracle's Global Single Schema can hold your business objects and support your global operations. Oracle's Global Single Schema identifies and defines the business objects an enterprise needs within the context of its business operations. The interrelationships between the business objects are also contained within the GSS data model. Their presence expresses fundamental business rules for the interaction between business entities. The following figure illustrates some of these connections.   Interconnected Business Entities Interconnecte business processes require interconnected business data. No other MDM vendor has this capability. Everyone else has either one entity they can master or separate disconnected models for various business entities. Higher level integrations are made available, but that is a weak architectural alternative to data level integration in this critically important aspect of Master Data Management.    

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