customer experience - Page 61

Assigining ID vs object - linq to sql

- by jess

Say, I have an entity Customer which has relationship with city,order etc.Now,when I am adding a customer object,should I assign customer.cityid, or customer.city? Now,from form I get cityid from dropdown,to assign city object,I will have to make a query using id selected.

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Circular database relationships. Good, Bad, Exceptions?

- by jim

I have been putting off developing this part of my app for sometime purely because I want to do this in a circular way but get the feeling its a bad idea from what I remember my lecturers telling me back in school. I have a design for an order system, ignoring the everything that doesn't pertain to this example I'm left with: CreditCard Customer Order I want it so that, Customers can have credit cards (0-n) Customers have orders (1-n) Orders have one customer(1-1) Orders have one credit card(1-1) Credit cards can have one customer(1-1) (unique ids so we can ignore uniqueness of cc number, husband/wife may share cc instances ect) Basically the last part is where the issue shows up, sometimes credit cards are declined and they wish to use a different one, this needs to update which their 'current' card is but this can only change the current card used for that order, not the other orders the customer may have on disk. Effectively this creates a circular design between the three tables. Possible solutions: Either Create the circular design, give references: cc ref to order, customer ref to cc customer ref to order or customer ref to cc customer ref to order create new table that references all three table ids and put unique on the order so that only one cc may be current to that order at any time Essentially both model the same design but translate differently, I am liking the latter option best at this point in time because it seems less circular and more central. (If that even makes sense) My questions are, What if any are the pros and cons of each? What is the pitfalls of circular relationships/dependancies? Is this a valid exception to the rule? Is there any reason I should pick the former over the latter? Thanks and let me know if there is anything you need clarified/explained. --Update/Edit-- I have noticed an error in the requirements I stated. Basically dropped the ball when trying to simplify things for SO. There is another table there for Payments which adds another layer. The catch, Orders can have multiple payments, with the possibility of using different credit cards. (if you really want to know even other forms of payment). Stating this here because I think the underlying issue is still the same and this only really adds another layer of complexity.

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Rails only returns blank page

- by user2793027

I am new to Ruby on Rails and am trying to find all the orders for a given customer and then search through their order and total it all up. However when I try and test the page I only get a blank page, can anyone tell me why that might be? Also I am running Rails v. 2.3.14 <% # custdisplay.html.erb.rb %> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head profile="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11"> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" /> </head> <body> <% # get the customer data from the customer table @custdata = Customer.find(@data) @orderinfo = Order.find(:all, :conditions => ["customer_id = ?",@custdata.id]) for i in [email protected] @total[i] = 0 @orderparts = Orderline.find(:all, :conditions => ["id = ?", @orderinfo[i].id]) for j in [email protected] @total[j] += @orderparts[i].quantity * @orderparts[i].price end end #for each quanity need to add up the part if @ordertotals.length > 0 %> <h1>customer data for customer: <%=@data %></h1> <table border=1> <tr> <td>Order Number</td> <td>Order Date</td> <td>Cost of Order</td> </tr> <% # for each customer who has this sales rep # display each customer in a row for @orderinfo in @ordertotals %> <tr> <td><%[email protected]%></td> <td><%[email protected]_date%></td> <td><%[email protected]%></td> </tr> <% end %> </table> <% else # no customers with this sales rep %> <h1>NO CUSTOMERS FOR SALES REP <%=@salesrepcust%></h1> <% end %>

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SQL: HAVING clause

- by Craig Johnston

See the following SQL statement: SELECT datediff("d", MAX(invoice.date), Now) As Date_Diff, MAX(invoice.date) AS max_invoice_date, customer.number AS customer_number FROM invoice INNER JOIN customer ON invoice.customer_number = customer.number GROUP BY customer.number If the the following was added: HAVING datediff("d", MAX(invoice.date), Now) > 365 would this simply exclude rows with Date_Diff <= 365? What should be the effect of the HAVING clause here?

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How to make the firewall popup a warning to my http server?

- by user497032

I integrated a small http server in my software distribution, so when my customer installs my software, a http server is also installed on his computer, he can visit the http server from his LAN (local network). The problem is that my customer has to manually add my software into the firewall's trusted applications list, I want the firewall to AUTOMATICALLY popup warning to let my customer choose yes/no to add my software into trusted applications list when my customer visit the small http server from LAN at first time. Any suggestions?

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Rails find through association

- by yogi

class Customer < ActiveRecord::Base has_one :address, :foreign_key => "customerid" end class Address < ActiveRecord::Base belongs_to :customer, :foreign_key => "customerid" end How do I find records in customer that do not have customerid in address table? in SQL i'd do select * from customer a, address b where a.customerid <> b.customerid

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SQL Alter: add multiple FKs?

- by acidzombie24

From here ALTER TABLE ORDERS ADD FOREIGN KEY (customer_sid) REFERENCES CUSTOMER(SID); How do i add several keys with SQL Server? is it something like the below? (I cant test ATM and unfortunately i have no way to test queries unless i run it through code) ALTER TABLE ORDERS ADD FOREIGN KEY (customer_sid) REFERENCES CUSTOMER(SID), ADD FOREIGN KEY (customer_sid2) REFERENCES CUSTOMER(SID2); or is it like ALTER TABLE ORDERS ADD FOREIGN KEY (customer_sid, customer_sid2) REFERENCES CUSTOMER(SID, SID2)

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Customer site is out of IP addresses, they want to go from /24 to /12 netmask... Bad idea?

- by ewwhite

One of my client sites called to ask me to change the subnet masks of the Linux servers I manage there while they re-IP/change the netmask of their network based on a 10.0.0.x scheme. "Can you change the server netmasks from 255.255.255.0 to 255.240.0.0?" You mean, 255.255.240.0? "No, 255.240.0.0." Are you sure you need that many IP addresses? "Yeah, we never want to run out of IP addresses." A quick check against the Subnet Cheat Sheet shows: a 255.255.255.0 netmask, a /24 provides 256 hosts. It's clear to see that an organization can exhaust that number of IP addresses. a 255.240.0.0 netmask, a /12 provides 1,048,576 hosts. This is a small < 200-user site. I doubt that they'd allocate more than 400 IP addresses. I suggested something that provides fewer hosts, like a /22 or /21 (1024 and 2048 hosts, respectively), but was unable to give a specific reason against using the /12 subnet. Is there anything this customer should be concerned about? Are there any specific reasons they shouldn't use such an incredibly large mask in their environment?

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ASP.net roles and Projects

- by Zyphrax

EDIT - Rewrote my original question to give a bit more information Background info At my work I'm working on a ASP.Net web application for our customers. In our implementation we use technologies like Forms authentication with MembershipProviders and RoleProviders. All went well until I ran into some difficulties with configuring the roles, because the roles aren't system-wide, but related to the customer accounts and projects. I can't name our exact setup/formula, because I think our company wouldn't approve that... What's a customer / project? Our company provides management information for our customers on a yearly (or other interval) basis. In our systems a customer/contract consists of: one Account: information about the Company per Account, one or more Products: the bundle of management information we'll provide per Product, one or more Measurements: a period of time, in which we gather and report the data Extranet site setup Eventually we want all customers to be able to access their management information with our online system. The extranet consists of two sites: Company site: provides an overview of Account information and the Products Measurement site: after selecting a Measurement, detailed information on that period of time The measurement site is the most interesting part of the extranet. We will create submodules for new overviews, reports, managing and maintaining resources that are important for the research. Our Visual Studio solution consists of a number of projects. One web application named Portal for the basis. The sites and modules are virtual directories within that application (makes it easier to share MasterPages among things). What kind of roles? The following users (read: roles) will be using the system: Admins: development users :) (not customer related, full access) Employees: employees of our company (not customer related, full access) Customer SuperUser: top level managers (full access to their account/measurement) Customer ContactPerson: primary contact (full access to their measurement(s)) Customer Manager: a department manager (limited access, specific data of a measurement) What about ASP.Net users? The system will have many ASP.Net users, let's focus on the customer users: Users are not shared between Accounts SuperUser X automatically has access to all (and new) measurements User Y could be Primary contact for Measurement 1, but have no role for Measurement 2 User Y could be Primary contact for Measurement 1, but have a Manager role for Measurement 2 The department managers are many individual users (per Measurement), if Manager Z had a login for Measurement 1, we would like to use that login again if he participates in Measurement 2. URL structure These are typical urls in our application: http://host/login - the login screen http://host/project - the account/product overview screen (measurement selection) http://host/project/1000 - measurement (id:1000) details http://host/project/1000/planning - planning overview (for primary contact/superuser) http://host/project/1000/reports - report downloads (manager department X can only access report X) We will also create a document url, where you can request a specific document by it's GUID. The system will have to check if the user has rights to the document. The document is related to a Measurement, the User or specific roles have specific rights to the document. What's the problem? (finally ;)) Roles aren't enough to determine what a user is allowed to see/access/download a specific item. It's not enough to say that a certain navigation item is accessible to Managers. When the user requests Measurement 1000, we have to check that the user not only has a Manager role, but a Manager role for Measurement 1000. Summarized: How can we limit users to their accounts/measurements? (remember superusers see all measurements, some managers only specific measurements) How can we apply roles at a product/measurement level? (user X could be primarycontact for measurement 1, but just a manager for measurement 2) How can we limit manager access to the reports screen and only to their department's reports? All with the magic of asp.net classes, perhaps with a custom roleprovider implementation. Similar Stackoverflow question/problem http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1367483/asp-net-how-to-manage-users-with-different-types-of-roles

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How to use a nested form for multiple models in one form?

- by Magicked

I'm struggling to come up with the proper way to design a form that will allow me to input data for two different models. The form is for an 'Incident', which has the following relationships: belongs_to :customer belongs_to :user has_one :incident_status has_many :incident_notes accepts_nested_attributes_for :incident_notes, :allow_destroy => false So an incident is assigned to a 'Customer' and a 'User', and the user is able to add 'Notes' to the incident. I'm having trouble with the notes part of the form. Here how the form is being submitted: {"commit"=>"Create", "authenticity_token"=>"ECH5Ziv7JAuzs53kt5m/njT9w39UJhfJEs2x0Ms2NA0=", "customer_id"=>"4", "incident"=>{"title"=>"Something bad", "incident_status_id"=>"2", "user_id"=>"2", "other_id"=>"AAA01-042310-001", "incident_note"=>{"note"=>"This is a note"}}} It appears to be attempting to add the incident_note as a field under 'Incident', rather than creating a new entry in the incident_note table with an incident_id foreign key linking back to the incident. Here is the 'IncidentNote' model: belongs_to :incident belongs_to :user Here is the form for 'Incident': <% form_for([@customer,@incident]) do |f| %> <%= f.error_messages %> <p> <%= f.label :other_id, "ID" %><br /> <%= f.text_field :capc_id %> </p> <p> <%= f.label :title %><br /> <%= f.text_field :title %> </p> <p> <%= label_tag 'user', 'Assign to user?' %> <%= f.select :user_id, @users.collect {|u| [u.name, u.id]} %> </p> <p> <%= f.label :incident_status, 'Status?' %> <%= f.select :incident_status_id, @statuses.collect {|s| [s.name, s.id]} %> </p> <p> <% f.fields_for :incident_note do |inote_form| %> <%= inote_form.label :note, 'Add a Note' %> <%= inote_form.text_area :note, :cols => 40, :rows => 20 %> <% end %> </p> <p> <%= f.submit "Create" %> </p> <% end %> And finally, here are the incident_controller entries for New and Create. New: def new @customer = current_user.customer @incident = Incident.new @users = @customer.users @statuses = IncidentStatus.find(:all) @incident_note = IncidentNote.new respond_to do |format| format.html # new.html.erb format.xml { render :xml => @incident } end end Create: def create @users = @customer.users @statuses = IncidentStatus.find(:all) @incident = Incident.new(params[:incident]) @incident.customer = @customer @incident_note = @incident.incident_note.build(params[:incident_note]) @incident_note.user = current_user respond_to do |format| if @incident.save flash[:notice] = 'Incident was successfully created.' format.html { redirect_to(@incident) } format.xml { render :xml => @incident, :status => :created, :location => @incident } else format.html { render :action => "new" } format.xml { render :xml => @incident.errors, :status => :unprocessable_entity } end end end I'm not really sure where to look at this point. I'm sure it's just a limitation of my current Rails skill (I don't know much). So if anyone can point me in the right direction I would be very appreciative. Please let me know if more information is needed! Thanks!

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Increasing speed of python code

- by Curious2learn

Hi, I have some python code that has many classes. I used cProfile to find that the total time to run the program is 68 seconds. I found that the following function in a class called Buyers takes about 60 seconds of those 68 seconds. I have to run the program about 100 times, so any increase in speed will help. Can you suggest ways to increase the speed by modifying the code? If you need more information that will help, please let me know. def qtyDemanded(self, timePd, priceVector): '''Returns quantity demanded in period timePd. In addition, also updates the list of customers and non-customers. Inputs: timePd and priceVector Output: count of people for whom priceVector[-1] < utility ''' ## Initialize count of customers to zero ## Set self.customers and self.nonCustomers to empty lists price = priceVector[-1] count = 0 self.customers = [] self.nonCustomers = [] for person in self.people: if person.utility >= price: person.customer = 1 self.customers.append(person) else: person.customer = 0 self.nonCustomers.append(person) return len(self.customers) self.people is a list of person objects. Each person has customer and utility as its attributes. EDIT - responsed added ------------------------------------- Thanks so much for the suggestions. Here is the response to some questions and suggestions people have kindly made. I have not tried them all, but will try others and write back later. (1) @amber - the function is accessed 80,000 times. (2) @gnibbler and others - self.people is a list of Person objects in memory. Not connected to a database. (3) @Hugh Bothwell cumtime taken by the original function - 60.8 s (accessed 80000 times) cumtime taken by the new function with local function aliases as suggested - 56.4 s (accessed 80000 times) (4) @rotoglup and @Martin Thomas I have not tried your solutions yet. I need to check the rest of the code to see the places where I use self.customers before I can make the change of not appending the customers to self.customers list. But I will try this and write back. (5) @TryPyPy - thanks for your kind offer to check the code. Let me first read a little on the suggestions you have made to see if those will be feasible to use. EDIT 2 Some suggested that since I am flagging the customers and noncustomers in the self.people, I should try without creating separate lists of self.customers and self.noncustomers using append. Instead, I should loop over the self.people to find the number of customers. I tried the following code and timed both functions below f_w_append and f_wo_append. I did find that the latter takes less time, but it is still 96% of the time taken by the former. That is, it is a very small increase in the speed. @TryPyPy - The following piece of code is complete enough to check the bottleneck function, in case your offer is still there to check it with other compilers. Thanks again to everyone who replied. import numpy class person(object): def __init__(self, util): self.utility = util self.customer = 0 class population(object): def __init__(self, numpeople): self.people = [] self.cus = [] self.noncus = [] numpy.random.seed(1) utils = numpy.random.uniform(0, 300, numpeople) for u in utils: per = person(u) self.people.append(per) popn = population(300) def f_w_append(): '''Function with append''' P = 75 cus = [] noncus = [] for per in popn.people: if per.utility >= P: per.customer = 1 cus.append(per) else: per.customer = 0 noncus.append(per) return len(cus) def f_wo_append(): '''Function without append''' P = 75 for per in popn.people: if per.utility >= P: per.customer = 1 else: per.customer = 0 numcustomers = 0 for per in popn.people: if per.customer == 1: numcustomers += 1 return numcustomers

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Using RIA DomainServices with ASP.NET and MVC 2

- by Bobby Diaz

Recently, I started working on a new ASP.NET MVC 2 project and I wanted to reuse the data access (LINQ to SQL) and business logic methods (WCF RIA Services) that had been developed for a previous project that used Silverlight for the front-end. I figured that I would be able to instantiate the various DomainService classes from within my controller’s action methods, because after all, the code for those services didn’t look very complicated. WRONG! I didn’t realize at first that some of the functionality is handled automatically by the framework when the domain services are hosted as WCF services. After some initial searching, I came across an invaluable post by Joe McBride, which described how to get RIA Service .svc files to work in an MVC 2 Web Application, and another by Brad Abrams. Unfortunately, Brad’s solution was for an earlier preview release of RIA Services and no longer works with the version that I am running (PDC Preview). I have not tried the RC version of WCF RIA Services, so I am not sure if any of the issues I am having have been resolved, but I wanted to come up with a way to reuse the shared libraries so I wouldn’t have to write a non-RIA version that basically did the same thing. The classes I came up with work with the scenarios I have encountered so far, but I wanted to go ahead and post the code in case someone else is having the same trouble I had. Hopefully this will save you a few headaches! 1. Querying When I first tried to use a DomainService class to perform a query inside one of my controller’s action methods, I got an error stating that “This DomainService has not been initialized.” To solve this issue, I created an extension method for all DomainServices that creates the required DomainServiceContext and passes it to the service’s Initialize() method. Here is the code for the extension method; notice that I am creating a sort of mock HttpContext for those cases when the service is running outside of IIS, such as during unit testing! public static class ServiceExtensions { /// <summary> /// Initializes the domain service by creating a new <see cref="DomainServiceContext"/> /// and calling the base DomainService.Initialize(DomainServiceContext) method. /// </summary> /// <typeparam name="TService">The type of the service.</typeparam> /// <param name="service">The service.</param> /// <returns></returns> public static TService Initialize<TService>(this TService service) where TService : DomainService { var context = CreateDomainServiceContext(); service.Initialize(context); return service; } private static DomainServiceContext CreateDomainServiceContext() { var provider = new ServiceProvider(new HttpContextWrapper(GetHttpContext())); return new DomainServiceContext(provider, DomainOperationType.Query); } private static HttpContext GetHttpContext() { var context = HttpContext.Current; #if DEBUG // create a mock HttpContext to use during unit testing... if ( context == null ) { var writer = new StringWriter(); var request = new SimpleWorkerRequest("/", "/", String.Empty, String.Empty, writer); context = new HttpContext(request) { User = new GenericPrincipal(new GenericIdentity("debug"), null) }; } #endif return context; } } With that in place, I can use it almost as normally as my first attempt, except with a call to Initialize(): public ActionResult Index() { var service = new NorthwindService().Initialize(); var customers = service.GetCustomers(); return View(customers); } 2. Insert / Update / Delete Once I got the records showing up, I was trying to insert new records or update existing data when I ran into the next issue. I say issue because I wasn’t getting any kind of error, which made it a little difficult to track down. But once I realized that that the DataContext.SubmitChanges() method gets called automatically at the end of each domain service submit operation, I could start working on a way to mimic the behavior of a hosted domain service. What I came up with, was a base class called LinqToSqlRepository<T> that basically sits between your implementation and the default LinqToSqlDomainService<T> class. [EnableClientAccess()] public class NorthwindService : LinqToSqlRepository<NorthwindDataContext> { public IQueryable<Customer> GetCustomers() { return this.DataContext.Customers; } public void InsertCustomer(Customer customer) { this.DataContext.Customers.InsertOnSubmit(customer); } public void UpdateCustomer(Customer currentCustomer) { this.DataContext.Customers.TryAttach(currentCustomer, this.ChangeSet.GetOriginal(currentCustomer)); } public void DeleteCustomer(Customer customer) { this.DataContext.Customers.TryAttach(customer); this.DataContext.Customers.DeleteOnSubmit(customer); } } Notice the new base class name (just change LinqToSqlDomainService to LinqToSqlRepository). I also added a couple of DataContext (for Table<T>) extension methods called TryAttach that will check to see if the supplied entity is already attached before attempting to attach it, which would cause an error! 3. LinqToSqlRepository<T> Below is the code for the LinqToSqlRepository class. The comments are pretty self explanatory, but be aware of the [IgnoreOperation] attributes on the generic repository methods, which ensures that they will be ignored by the code generator and not available in the Silverlight client application. /// <summary> /// Provides generic repository methods on top of the standard /// <see cref="LinqToSqlDomainService<TContext>"/> functionality. /// </summary> /// <typeparam name="TContext">The type of the context.</typeparam> public abstract class LinqToSqlRepository<TContext> : LinqToSqlDomainService<TContext> where TContext : System.Data.Linq.DataContext, new() { /// <summary> /// Retrieves an instance of an entity using it's unique identifier. /// </summary> /// <typeparam name="TEntity">The type of the entity.</typeparam> /// <param name="keyValues">The key values.</param> /// <returns></returns> [IgnoreOperation] public virtual TEntity GetById<TEntity>(params object[] keyValues) where TEntity : class { var table = this.DataContext.GetTable<TEntity>(); var mapping = this.DataContext.Mapping.GetTable(typeof(TEntity)); var keys = mapping.RowType.IdentityMembers .Select((m, i) => m.Name + " = @" + i) .ToArray(); return table.Where(String.Join(" && ", keys), keyValues).FirstOrDefault(); } /// <summary> /// Creates a new query that can be executed to retrieve a collection /// of entities from the <see cref="DataContext"/>. /// </summary> /// <typeparam name="TEntity">The type of the entity.</typeparam> /// <returns></returns> [IgnoreOperation] public virtual IQueryable<TEntity> GetEntityQuery<TEntity>() where TEntity : class { return this.DataContext.GetTable<TEntity>(); } /// <summary> /// Inserts the specified entity. /// </summary> /// <typeparam name="TEntity">The type of the entity.</typeparam> /// <param name="entity">The entity.</param> /// <returns></returns> [IgnoreOperation] public virtual bool Insert<TEntity>(TEntity entity) where TEntity : class { //var table = this.DataContext.GetTable<TEntity>(); //table.InsertOnSubmit(entity); return this.Submit(entity, null, DomainOperation.Insert); } /// <summary> /// Updates the specified entity. /// </summary> /// <typeparam name="TEntity">The type of the entity.</typeparam> /// <param name="entity">The entity.</param> /// <returns></returns> [IgnoreOperation] public virtual bool Update<TEntity>(TEntity entity) where TEntity : class { return this.Update(entity, null); } /// <summary> /// Updates the specified entity. /// </summary> /// <typeparam name="TEntity">The type of the entity.</typeparam> /// <param name="entity">The entity.</param> /// <param name="original">The original.</param> /// <returns></returns> [IgnoreOperation] public virtual bool Update<TEntity>(TEntity entity, TEntity original) where TEntity : class { if ( original == null ) { original = GetOriginal(entity); } var table = this.DataContext.GetTable<TEntity>(); table.TryAttach(entity, original); return this.Submit(entity, original, DomainOperation.Update); } /// <summary> /// Deletes the specified entity. /// </summary> /// <typeparam name="TEntity">The type of the entity.</typeparam> /// <param name="entity">The entity.</param> /// <returns></returns> [IgnoreOperation] public virtual bool Delete<TEntity>(TEntity entity) where TEntity : class { //var table = this.DataContext.GetTable<TEntity>(); //table.TryAttach(entity); //table.DeleteOnSubmit(entity); return this.Submit(entity, null, DomainOperation.Delete); } protected virtual bool Submit(Object entity, Object original, DomainOperation operation) { var entry = new ChangeSetEntry(0, entity, original, operation); var changes = new ChangeSet(new ChangeSetEntry[] { entry }); return base.Submit(changes); } private TEntity GetOriginal<TEntity>(TEntity entity) where TEntity : class { var context = CreateDataContext(); var table = context.GetTable<TEntity>(); return table.FirstOrDefault(e => e == entity); } } 4. Conclusion So there you have it, a fully functional Repository implementation for your RIA Domain Services that can be consumed by your ASP.NET and MVC applications. I have uploaded the source code along with unit tests and a sample web application that queries the Customers table from inside a Controller, as well as a Silverlight usage example. As always, I welcome any comments or suggestions on the approach I have taken. If there is enough interest, I plan on contacting Colin Blair or maybe even the man himself, Brad Abrams, to see if this is something worthy of inclusion in the WCF RIA Services Contrib project. What do you think? Enjoy!

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Solving Big Problems with Oracle R Enterprise, Part II

- by dbayard

Part II – Solving Big Problems with Oracle R Enterprise In the first post in this series (see https://blogs.oracle.com/R/entry/solving_big_problems_with_oracle), we showed how you can use R to perform historical rate of return calculations against investment data sourced from a spreadsheet. We demonstrated the calculations against sample data for a small set of accounts. While this worked fine, in the real-world the problem is much bigger because the amount of data is much bigger. So much bigger that our approach in the previous post won’t scale to meet the real-world needs. From our previous post, here are the challenges we need to conquer: The actual data that needs to be used lives in a database, not in a spreadsheet The actual data is much, much bigger- too big to fit into the normal R memory space and too big to want to move across the network The overall process needs to run fast- much faster than a single processor The actual data needs to be kept secured- another reason to not want to move it from the database and across the network And the process of calculating the IRR needs to be integrated together with other database ETL activities, so that IRR’s can be calculated as part of the data warehouse refresh processes In this post, we will show how we moved from sample data environment to working with full-scale data. This post is based on actual work we did for a financial services customer during a recent proof-of-concept. Getting started with the Database At this point, we have some sample data and our IRR function. We were at a similar point in our customer proof-of-concept exercise- we had sample data but we did not have the full customer data yet. So our database was empty. But, this was easily rectified by leveraging the transparency features of Oracle R Enterprise (see https://blogs.oracle.com/R/entry/analyzing_big_data_using_the). The following code shows how we took our sample data SimpleMWRRData and easily turned it into a new Oracle database table called IRR_DATA via ore.create(). The code also shows how we can access the database table IRR_DATA as if it was a normal R data.frame named IRR_DATA. If we go to sql*plus, we can also check out our new IRR_DATA table: At this point, we now have our sample data loaded in the database as a normal Oracle table called IRR_DATA. So, we now proceeded to test our R function working with database data. As our first test, we retrieved the data from a single account from the IRR_DATA table, pull it into local R memory, then call our IRR function. This worked. No SQL coding required! Going from Crawling to Walking Now that we have shown using our R code with database-resident data for a single account, we wanted to experiment with doing this for multiple accounts. In other words, we wanted to implement the split-apply-combine technique we discussed in our first post in this series. Fortunately, Oracle R Enterprise provides a very scalable way to do this with a function called ore.groupApply(). You can read more about ore.groupApply() here: https://blogs.oracle.com/R/entry/analyzing_big_data_using_the1 Here is an example of how we ask ORE to take our IRR_DATA table in the database, split it by the ACCOUNT column, apply a function that calls our SimpleMWRR() calculation, and then combine the results. (If you are following along at home, be sure to have installed our myIRR package on your database server via “R CMD INSTALL myIRR”). The interesting thing about ore.groupApply is that the calculation is not actually performed in my desktop R environment from which I am running. What actually happens is that ore.groupApply uses the Oracle database to perform the work. And the Oracle database is what actually splits the IRR_DATA table by ACCOUNT. Then the Oracle database takes the data for each account and sends it to an embedded R engine running on the database server to apply our R function. Then the Oracle database combines all the individual results from the calls to the R function. This is significant because now the embedded R engine only needs to deal with the data for a single account at a time. Regardless of whether we have 20 accounts or 1 million accounts or more, the R engine that performs the calculation does not care. Given that normal R has a finite amount of memory to hold data, the ore.groupApply approach overcomes the R memory scalability problem since we only need to fit the data from a single account in R memory (not all of the data for all of the accounts). Additionally, the IRR_DATA does not need to be sent from the database to my desktop R program. Even though I am invoking ore.groupApply from my desktop R program, because the actual SimpleMWRR calculation is run by the embedded R engine on the database server, the IRR_DATA does not need to leave the database server- this is both a performance benefit because network transmission of large amounts of data take time and a security benefit because it is harder to protect private data once you start shipping around your intranet. Another benefit, which we will discuss in a few paragraphs, is the ability to leverage Oracle database parallelism to run these calculations for dozens of accounts at once. From Walking to Running ore.groupApply is rather nice, but it still has the drawback that I run this from a desktop R instance. This is not ideal for integrating into typical operational processes like nightly data warehouse refreshes or monthly statement generation. But, this is not an issue for ORE. Oracle R Enterprise lets us run this from the database using regular SQL, which is easily integrated into standard operations. That is extremely exciting and the way we actually did these calculations in the customer proof. As part of Oracle R Enterprise, it provides a SQL equivalent to ore.groupApply which it refers to as “rqGroupEval”. To use rqGroupEval via SQL, there is a bit of simple setup needed. Basically, the Oracle Database needs to know the structure of the input table and the grouping column, which we are able to define using the database’s pipeline table function mechanisms. Here is the setup script: At this point, our initial setup of rqGroupEval is done for the IRR_DATA table. The next step is to define our R function to the database. We do that via a call to ORE’s rqScriptCreate. Now we can test it. The SQL you use to run rqGroupEval uses the Oracle database pipeline table function syntax. The first argument to irr_dataGroupEval is a cursor defining our input. You can add additional where clauses and subqueries to this cursor as appropriate. The second argument is any additional inputs to the R function. The third argument is the text of a dummy select statement. The dummy select statement is used by the database to identify the columns and datatypes to expect the R function to return. The fourth argument is the column of the input table to split/group by. The final argument is the name of the R function as you defined it when you called rqScriptCreate(). The Real-World Results In our real customer proof-of-concept, we had more sophisticated calculation requirements than shown in this simplified blog example. For instance, we had to perform the rate of return calculations for 5 separate time periods, so the R code was enhanced to do so. In addition, some accounts needed a time-weighted rate of return to be calculated, so we extended our approach and added an R function to do that. And finally, there were also a few more real-world data irregularities that we needed to account for, so we added logic to our R functions to deal with those exceptions. For the full-scale customer test, we loaded the customer data onto a Half-Rack Exadata X2-2 Database Machine. As our half-rack had 48 physical cores (and 96 threads if you consider hyperthreading), we wanted to take advantage of that CPU horsepower to speed up our calculations. To do so with ORE, it is as simple as leveraging the Oracle Database Parallel Query features. Let’s look at the SQL used in the customer proof: Notice that we use a parallel hint on the cursor that is the input to our rqGroupEval function. That is all we need to do to enable Oracle to use parallel R engines. Here are a few screenshots of what this SQL looked like in the Real-Time SQL Monitor when we ran this during the proof of concept (hint: you might need to right-click on these images to be able to view the images full-screen to see the entire image): From the above, you can notice a few things (numbers 1 thru 5 below correspond with highlighted numbers on the images above. You may need to right click on the above images and view the images full-screen to see the entire image): The SQL completed in 110 seconds (1.8minutes) We calculated rate of returns for 5 time periods for each of 911k accounts (the number of actual rows returned by the IRRSTAGEGROUPEVAL operation) We accessed 103m rows of detailed cash flow/market value data (the number of actual rows returned by the IRR_STAGE2 operation) We ran with 72 degrees of parallelism spread across 4 database servers Most of our 110seconds was spent in the “External Procedure call” event On average, we performed 8,200 executions of our R function per second (110s/911k accounts) On average, each execution was passed 110 rows of data (103m detail rows/911k accounts) On average, we did 41,000 single time period rate of return calculations per second (each of the 8,200 executions of our R function did rate of return calculations for 5 time periods) On average, we processed over 900,000 rows of database data in R per second (103m detail rows/110s) R + Oracle R Enterprise: Best of R + Best of Oracle Database This blog post series started by describing a real customer problem: how to perform a lot of calculations on a lot of data in a short period of time. While standard R proved to be a very good fit for writing the necessary calculations, the challenge of working with a lot of data in a short period of time remained. This blog post series showed how Oracle R Enterprise enables R to be used in conjunction with the Oracle Database to overcome the data volume and performance issues (as well as simplifying the operations and security issues). It also showed that we could calculate 5 time periods of rate of returns for almost a million individual accounts in less than 2 minutes. In a future post, we will take the same R function and show how Oracle R Connector for Hadoop can be used in the Hadoop world. In that next post, instead of having our data in an Oracle database, our data will live in Hadoop and we will how to use the Oracle R Connector for Hadoop and other Oracle Big Data Connectors to move data between Hadoop, R, and the Oracle Database easily.

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SSIS - XML Source Script

- by simonsabin

The XML Source in SSIS is great if you have a 1 to 1 mapping between entity and table. You can do more complex mapping but it becomes very messy and won't perform. What other options do you have? The challenge with XML processing is to not need a huge amount of memory. I remember using the early versions of Biztalk with loaded the whole document into memory to map from one document type to another. This was fine for small documents but was an absolute killer for large documents. You therefore need a streaming approach. For flexibility however you want to be able to generate your rows easily, and if you've ever used the XmlReader you will know its ugly code to write. That brings me on to LINQ. The is an implementation of LINQ over XML which is really nice. You can write nice LINQ queries instead of the XMLReader stuff. The downside is that by default LINQ to XML requires a whole XML document to work with. No streaming. Your code would look like this. We create an XDocument and then enumerate over a set of annoymous types we generate from our LINQ statement XDocument x = XDocument.Load("C:\\TEMP\\CustomerOrders-Attribute.xml"); foreach (var xdata in (from customer in x.Elements("OrderInterface").Elements("Customer") from order in customer.Elements("Orders").Elements("Order") select new { Account = customer.Attribute("AccountNumber").Value , OrderDate = order.Attribute("OrderDate").Value } )) { Output0Buffer.AddRow(); Output0Buffer.AccountNumber = xdata.Account; Output0Buffer.OrderDate = Convert.ToDateTime(xdata.OrderDate); } As I said the downside to this is that you are loading the whole document into memory. I did some googling and came across some helpful videos from a nice UK DPE Mike Taulty http://www.microsoft.com/uk/msdn/screencasts/screencast/289/LINQ-to-XML-Streaming-In-Large-Documents.aspx. Which show you how you can combine LINQ and the XmlReader to get a semi streaming approach. I took what he did and implemented it in SSIS. What I found odd was that when I ran it I got different numbers between using the streamed and non streamed versions. I found the cause was a little bug in Mikes code that causes the pointer in the XmlReader to progress past the start of the element and thus foreach (var xdata in (from customer in StreamReader("C:\\TEMP\\CustomerOrders-Attribute.xml","Customer") from order in customer.Elements("Orders").Elements("Order") select new { Account = customer.Attribute("AccountNumber").Value , OrderDate = order.Attribute("OrderDate").Value } )) { Output0Buffer.AddRow(); Output0Buffer.AccountNumber = xdata.Account; Output0Buffer.OrderDate = Convert.ToDateTime(xdata.OrderDate); } These look very similiar and they are the key element is the method we are calling, StreamReader. This method is what gives us streaming, what it does is return a enumerable list of elements, because of the way that LINQ works this results in the data being streamed in. static IEnumerable<XElement> StreamReader(String filename, string elementName) { using (XmlReader xr = XmlReader.Create(filename)) { xr.MoveToContent(); while (xr.Read()) //Reads the first element { while (xr.NodeType == XmlNodeType.Element && xr.Name == elementName) { XElement node = (XElement)XElement.ReadFrom(xr); yield return node; } } xr.Close(); } } This code is specifically designed to return a list of the elements with a specific name. The first Read reads the root element and then the inner while loop checks to see if the current element is the type we want. If not we do the xr.Read() again until we find the element type we want. We then use the neat function XElement.ReadFrom to read an element and all its sub elements into an XElement. This is what is returned and can be consumed by the LINQ statement. Essentially once one element has been read we need to check if we are still on the same element type and name (the inner loop) This was Mikes mistake, if we called .Read again we would advance the XmlReader beyond the start of the Element and so the ReadFrom method wouldn't work. So with the code above you can use what ever LINQ statement you like to flatten your XML into the rowsets you want. You could even have multiple outputs and generate your own surrogate keys.

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Master Data

- by david.butler(at)oracle.com

Let's take a deeper look at what we mean when we talk about 'Master' data. In its most general sense, master data is data that exists in more than one operational application. These are the applications that automate business processes. These applications require significant amounts of data to function correctly. This includes data about the objects that are involved in transactions, as well as the transaction data itself. For example, when a customer buys a product, the transaction is managed by a sales application. The objects of the transaction are the Customer and the Product. The transactional data is the time, place, price, discount, payment methods, etc. used at the point of sale. Many thousands of transactional data attributes are needed within the application. These important data elements are local to the applications and have no bearing on other applications. Harmonization and synchronization across applications is not necessary. The Customer and Product objects of the transaction also have a large number of attributes. Customer for example, includes hierarchies, hierarchical and matrixed relationships, contacts, classifications, preferences, accounts, identifiers, profiles, and addresses galore for 'ship to', 'mail to'; 'service at'; etc. Dozens of attributes exist for individuals, hundreds for organizations, and thousands for products. This data has meaning beyond any particular application. It exists in many applications and drives the vital cross application enterprise business processes. These are the processes that define and differentiate the organization. At every decision point, information about the objects of the process determines the direction of the process flow. This is the nature of the data that exists in more than one application, and this is why we call it 'master data'. Let me elaborate. Parties Oracle has developed a party schema to model all participants in your daily business operations. It models people, organizations, groups, customers, contacts, employees, and suppliers. It models their accounts, locations, classifications, and preferences. And most importantly, it models the vast array of hierarchical and matrixed relationships that exist between all the participants in your real world operations. The model logically separates people and organizations from their relationships and accounts. This separation creates flexibility unmatched in the industry and accounts for the fact that the Oracle schema for Customers, Suppliers, and Accounts is a true superset of the wide variety of commercial and homegrown customer models in existence. Sites Sites are places where business is conducted. They can be addresses, clusters such as retail malls, locations within a cluster, floors within a building, places where meters are located, rooms on floors, etc. Fully understanding all attributes of a site is key to many business processes. Attributes such as 'noise abatement policy' at a point of delivery, or the size of an oven in a business kitchen drive day-to-day activities such as delivery schedules or food promotions. Typically this kind of data is siloed in departments and scattered across applications and spreadsheets. This leads to conflicting information and poor operational efficiencies. Oracle's Global Single Schema can hold all site attributes in one place and enables a single version of authoritative site information across the enterprise. Products and Services The Oracle Global Single Schema also includes a number of entities that define the products and services a company creates and offers for sale. Key entities include Items organized into Catalogs and Price Lists. The Catalog structures provide for the ability to capture different views of a product such as engineering, manufacturing, and service which are based on a unified product model. As a result, designers, manufacturing engineers, purchasers and partners can work simultaneously on a common product definition. The Catalog schema allows for unlimited attributes, combines them into meaningful groups, and maps them to catalog categories to track these different types of information. The model also maps an unlimited number of functional structures for each item. For example, multiple Bills of Material (BOMs) can be constructed representing requirements BOM, features BOM, and packaging BOM for an item. The Catalog model also supports hierarchical information about each item and all standard Global Data Synchronization attributes. Business Processes Utilizing Linked Data Entities Each business entity codified into a centralized master data environment significantly improves the efficiency of the automated business processes that use the consolidated data. When all the key business entities used by an organization's process are so consolidated, the advantages are multiplied. The primary reason for business process breakdowns (i.e. data errors across application boundaries) is eliminated. All processes are positively impacted and business process automation is itself automated. I like to use the "Call to Resolution" business process as an example to help illustrate this important point. It involves call center applications, service applications, RMA applications, transportation applications, inventory applications, etc. Customer, Site, Product and Supplier master data must all be correct and consistent across these applications. What's more, the data relationships between customer and product, and product and suppliers must be right. This is the minimum quality needed to insure the business process flows without error. But that is not the end of the story. Critical master data attributes such as customer loyalty, profitability, credit worthiness, and propensity to buy can optimize the call center point of contact component of the process. Critical product information such as alternative parts or equivalent products can optimize the resolution selected by the process. A comprehensive understanding of the 'service at' location can help insure multiple trips are avoided in the process. Full supplier information on reliability, delivery delays, and potential alternates can prevent supplier exceptions and play a significant role in optimizing the process. In other words, these master data attributes enable the optimization of the "Call to Resolution" enterprise business process. Master data supports and guides business process flows. Thus the phrase 'Master Data' is indeed appropriate. MDM is the software that houses, manages, and governs the master data that resides in all applications and controls the enterprise business processes. A complete master data solution takes a data model that holds fully attributed master data entities and their inter-relationships. Oracle has this model. Oracle, with its deep understanding of application data is the logical choice for managing all your master data within the enterprise whether or not your organization actually runs any Oracle Applications.

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Oracle OpenWorld Preview: Real World Perspectives from Oracle WebCenter Customers

- by Christie Flanagan

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An important aspect of the customer experience revolution is the increasing role that peers play in influencing how others perceive a product, brand or solution, simply by sharing their own, real-world experiences. Think about it, who do you trust more -- marketers and sales people pitching polished messages or peers with similar roles and similar challenges to the ones you face in your business every day? With this spirit in mind, this polished marketer personally invites you to hear directly from Oracle WebCenter customers about their real-life experiences during our customer panel sessions at Oracle OpenWorld next week. If you’re currently using WebCenter, thinking about it, or just want to find out more about best practices in social business, next-generation portals, enterprise content management or web experience management, be sure to attend these sessions: CON8899 - Becoming a Social Business: Stories from the Front Lines of Change Wednesday, Oct 3, 11:45 AM - 12:45 PM - Moscone West - 3000Priscilla Hancock - Vice President/CIO, University of Louisville Kellie Christensen - Director of Information Technology, Banner EngineeringWhat does it really mean to be a social business? How can you change your organization to embrace social approaches? What pitfalls do you need to avoid? In this lively panel discussion, customer and industry thought leaders in social business explore these topics and more as they share their stories of the good, the bad, and the ugly that can happen when embracing social methods and technologies to improve business success. Using moderated questions and open Q&A from the audience, the panel discusses vital topics such as the critical factors for success, the major issues to avoid, how to gain senior executive support for social efforts, how to handle undesired behavior, and how to measure business impact. This session will take a thought-provoking look at becoming a social business from the inside. CON8900 - Building Next-Generation Portals: An Interactive Customer Panel DiscussionWednesday, Oct 3, 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM - Moscone West - 3000Roberts Wayne - Director, IT, Canadian Partnership Against CancerMike Beattie - VP Application Development, Aramark Uniform ServicesJohn Chen - Utilities Services Manager 6, Los Angeles Department of Water & PowerJörg Modlmayr - Head of Product Managment, Siemens AGSocial and collaborative technologies have changed how people interact, learn, and collaborate, and providing a modern, social Web presence is imperative to remain competitive in today’s market. Can your business benefit from a more collaborative and interactive portal environment for employees, customers, and partners? Attend this session to hear from Oracle WebCenter Portal customers as they share their strategies and best practices for providing users with a modern experience that adapts to their needs and includes personalized access to content in context. The panel also addresses how customers have benefited from creating next-generation portals by migrating from older portal technologies to Oracle WebCenter Portal. CON8898 - Land Mines, Potholes, and Dirt Roads: Navigating the Way to ECM NirvanaThursday, Oct 4, 12:45 PM - 1:45 PM - Moscone West - 3001Stephen Madsen - Senior Management Consultant, Alberta Agriculture and Rural DevelopmentHimanshu Parikh - Sr. Director, Enterprise Architecture & Middleware, Ross Stores, Inc.Ten years ago, people were predicting that by this time in history, we’d be some kind of utopian paperless society. As we all know, we're not there yet, but are we getting closer? What is keeping companies from driving down the road to enterprise content management bliss? Most people understand that using ECM as a central platform enables organizations to expedite document-centric processes, but most business processes in organizations are still heavily paper-based. Many of these processes could be automated and improved with an ECM platform infrastructure. In this panel discussion, you’ll hear from Oracle WebCenter customers that have already solved some of these challenges as they share their strategies for success and roads to avoid along your journey. CON8897 - Using Web Experience Management to Drive Online Marketing SuccessThursday, Oct 4, 2:15 PM - 3:15 PM - Moscone West - 3001Blane Nelson - Chief Architect, Ancestry.comMike Remedios - CIO, ArbonneCaitlin Scanlon - Product Manager, Monster WorldwideEvery year, the online channel becomes more imperative for driving organizational top-line revenue, but for many companies, mastering how to best market their products and services in a fast-evolving online world with high customer expectations for personalized experiences can be a complex proposition. Come to this panel discussion, and hear directly from customers on how they are succeeding today by using Web experience management to drive marketing success, using capabilities such as targeting and optimization, user-generated content, mobile site publishing, and site visitor personalization to deliver engaging online experiences. Your Handy Guide to WebCenter at Oracle OpenWorld Want a quick and easy guide to all the keynotes, demos, hands-on labs and WebCenter sessions you definitely don't want to miss at Oracle OpenWorld? Download this handy guide, Focus on WebCenter. More helpful links: * Oracle OpenWorld* Oracle Customer Experience Summit @ OpenWorld* Oracle OpenWorld on Facebook * Oracle OpenWorld on Twitter* Oracle OpenWorld on LinkedIn* Oracle OpenWorld Blog

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Calculated control on subform based on current record

- by rtochip

I have the following: main form "customer" from a "customer" table. subform "invoices" with fields "invoice date", "invoice amount" "customer id" etc. from a table "invoices" whenever user clicks or goes to a record in the "invoices" sub form. I would like a "total so far" control to calculate the sum of the "invoices amount" up until the date of the current record being "clicked" or selected. i.e. for customer microsoft with invoices: 1) may 2 09, $150 2) may 3 09, $200 3) may 4 09, $500 If user clicks on record 2), "total so far" should show $350 If user clicks on record 1), "total so far" should show $150 If user clicks on record 3), "total so far" should show $850 Currently, I am using DSum function on an event "OnCurrent" in the subform "invoices" to set the "total so far" value. Is this method slow, inefficient? Any other simpler,cleaner,more elegant,faster, efficient method using ms access features? I want the "invoices" subform to show ALL the invoices for this customer no matter which record is clicked.

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CakePHP: 2-level JOIN with one Query

- by Daniel Magliola

I have the following models in CakePHP: A Deposit belongs to an Account An Account belongs to a Customer I want to have a list of Deposits, and I need to show the name of the customer (so I have to join through the Customer). I also need to paginate this list. If I set Deposit->recursive = 2, I can get the Customer, however, CakePHP runs one query joining Deposit and Account, and then runs one query per each Deposit, to get the Customer. How can I make it get both models with only one query? I tried this, but it didn't work: $this->paginate = array('joins' => array( array( 'table' => 'customers', 'alias' => 'AccountCustomer', 'type' => 'inner', 'foreignKey' => false, 'conditions' => array('Account.customer_id = AccountCustomer.id') ) )); Any ideas? Thanks! Daniel

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Doing a large number of upserts as fast as possible

- by Jason Swett

My app (which uses MySQL) is doing a large number of subsequent upserts. Right now my SQL looks like this: INSERT IGNORE INTO customer (name,customer_number,social_security_number,phone) VALUES ('VICTOR H KINDELL','123','123','123') INSERT IGNORE INTO customer (name,customer_number,social_security_number,phone) VALUES ('VICTOR H KINDELL','123','123','123') INSERT IGNORE INTO customer (name,customer_number,social_security_number,phone) VALUES ('VICTOR H KINDELL OR','123','123','123') INSERT IGNORE INTO customer (name,customer_number,social_security_number,phone) VALUES ('TRACY L WALTER PERSONAL REP FOR','123','123','123') INSERT IGNORE INTO customer (name,customer_number,social_security_number,phone) VALUES ('TRACY L WALTER PERSONAL REP FOR','123','123','123') So far I've found INSERT IGNORE to be the fastest way to achieve upserts. Selecting a record to see if it exists and then either updating it or inserting a new one is too slow. Even this is not as fast as I'd like because I need to do a separate statement for each record. Sometimes I'll have around 50,000 of these statements in a row. Is there a way to take care of all of these in just one statement, without deleting any existing records?

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Returning the value of an identity column during/after INSERT command

- by Adam Kane

Using VS 2010, with ASP.NET, and .NET 3.0, and C#... When I use a System.Web.UI.WebControls.SqlDataSource and call its Insert() method to insert a new row, and that table has an identity column, I'd like my method to return the value of that column. For example, in my SQL 2005 table, I've got: Customer.Id Customer.FirstName Customer.LastName Where Customer.Id is an identity colum. When I call my method InsertNewCustomerRecord( "John", "Smith" ), I'd like to be able to return the Customer.Id that gets automatically generated in the database. Sorry for such a roughly posed question. Let me know if I can add better detail. Thanks.

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Difference b/w putting condition in JOIN clause versus WHERE clause

- by user244953

Suppose I have 3 tables. Sales Rep Rep Code First Name Last Name Phone Email Sales Team Orders Order Number Rep Code Customer Number Order Date Order Status Customer Customer Number Name Address Phone Number I want to get a detailed report of Sales for 2010. I would be doing a join. I am interested in knowing which of the following is more efficient and why ? SELECT O.OrderNum, R.Name, C.Name FROM Order O INNER JOIN Rep R ON O.RepCode = R.RepCode INNER JOIN Customer C ON O.CustomerNumber = C.CustomerNumber WHERE O.OrderDate >= '01/01/2010' OR SELECT O.OrderNum, R.Name, C.Name FROM Order O INNER JOIN Rep R ON (O.RepCode = R.RepCode AND O.OrderDate >= '01/01/2010') INNER JOIN Customer C ON O.CustomerNumber = C.CustomerNumber

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Reading xml document in firefox

- by Searock

I am trying to read customers.xml using javascript. My professor has taught us to read xml using `ActiveXObjectand he has given us an assignment to create a sample login page which checks username and password by reading customers.xml. I am trying to use DOMParser so that it works with firefox. But when I click on Login button I get this error. Error: syntax error Source File: file:///C:/Users/Searock/Desktop/home/project/project/login.html Line: 1, Column: 1 Source Code: customers.xml Here's my code. login.js var xmlDoc = 0; function checkUser() { var user = document.login.txtLogin.value; var pass = document.login.txtPass.value; //xmlDoc = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLDOM"); /* xmlDoc = document.implementation.createDocument("","",null); xmlDoc.async = "false"; xmlDoc.onreadystatechange = redirectUser; xmlDoc.load("customers.xml"); */ var parser = new DOMParser(); xmlDoc = parser.parseFromString("customers.xml", "text/xml"); alert(xmlDoc.documentElement.nodeName); xmlDoc.async = "false"; xmlDoc.onreadystatechange = redirectUser; } function redirectUser() { alert(''); var user = document.login.txtLogin.value; var pass = document.login.txtPass.value; var log = 0; if(xmlDoc.readyState == 4) { xmlObj = xmlDoc.documentElement; var len = xmlObj.childNodes.length; for(i = 0; i < len; i++) { var nodeElement = xmlObj.childNodes[i]; var userXml = nodeElement.childNodes[0].firstChild.nodeValue; var passXml = nodeElement.childNodes[1].firstChild.nodeValue; var idXML = nodeElement.attributes[0].value if(userXml == user && passXml == pass) { log = 1; document.cookie = escape(idXML); document.login.submit(); } } } if(log == 0) { var divErr = document.getElementById('Error'); divErr.innerHTML = "<b>Login Failed</b>"; } } customers.xml <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <customers> <customer custid="CU101"> <user>jack</user> <pwd>PW101</pwd> <email>[email protected]</email> </customer> <customer custid="CU102"> <user>jill</user> <pwd>PW102</pwd> <email>[email protected]</email> </customer> <customer custid="CU103"> <user>john</user> <pwd>PW103</pwd> <email>[email protected]</email> </customer> <customer custid="CU104"> <user>jeff</user> <pwd>PW104</pwd> <email>[email protected]</email> </customer> </customers> I get parsererror message on line alert(xmlDoc.documentElement.nodeName); I don't know what's wrong with my code. Can some one point me in a right direction? Edit : Ok, I found a solution. var xmlDoc = 0; var xhttp = 0; function checkUser() { var user = document.login.txtLogin.value; var pass = document.login.txtPass.value; var err = ""; if(user == "" || pass == "") { if(user == "") { alert("Enter user name"); } if(pass == "") { alert("Enter Password"); } return; } if (window.XMLHttpRequest) { xhttp=new XMLHttpRequest(); } else // IE 5/6 { xhttp=new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP"); } xhttp.onreadystatechange = redirectUser; xhttp.open("GET","customers.xml",true); xhttp.send(); } function redirectUser() { var log = 2; var user = document.login.txtLogin.value; var pass = document.login.txtPass.value; if (xhttp.readyState == 4) { log = 0; xmlDoc = xhttp.responseXML; var xmlUsers = xmlDoc.getElementsByTagName('user'); var xmlPasswords = xmlDoc.getElementsByTagName('pwd'); var userLen = xmlDoc.getElementsByTagName('customer').length; var xmlCustomers = xmlDoc.getElementsByTagName('customer'); for (var i = 0; i < userLen; i++) { var xmlUser = xmlUsers[i].childNodes[0].nodeValue; var xmlPass = xmlPasswords[i].childNodes[0].nodeValue; var xmlId = xmlCustomers.item(i).attributes[0].nodeValue; if(xmlUser == user && xmlPass == pass) { log = 1; document.cookie = xmlId; document.login.submit(); break; } } } if(log == 0) { alert("Login failed"); } } Thanks.

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Some mail details about Orange Mauritius

Being an internet service provider is not easy after all for a lot of companies. Luckily, there are quite some good international operators in this world. For example Orange Mauritius aka Mauritius Telecom aka Wanadoo(?) aka MyT here in Mauritius. The local circumstances give them a quasi-monopol position on fixed lines for telephony and therefore cable-based DSL internet connectivity. So far, not bad but as usual... the details. Just for the records, I am only using the services of Orange for mobile but friends and customers are bound, eh stuck, with other services of Orange Mauritius. And usually, being the IT guy, they get in touch with me to complain about problems or to ask questions on either their ADSL / MyT connection, mail services or whatever. Most of those issues are user-related and easily to solve by tweaking the configuration of their computer a little bit but sometimes it's getting weird. Using Orange ADSL... somewhere else Now, let's imagine we are an Orange ADSL customer for ages and we are using their mail services with our very own mail address like "[email protected]". We configured our mail client like Thunderbird, Outlook Express, Outlook or Windows Mail as publicly described, and we are able to receive and send emails like a champion. No problems at all, the world is green. Did I mention that we have a laptop? Ok, let's take our movable piece of information technology and visit a friend here on the island. Not surprising, he is also customer of Orange, so we can read and answer emails. But Orange is not the online internet service provider and one day, we happen to hang out with someone that uses Emtel via WiMAX or UMTS.. And the fun starts... We can still receive and read emails from our Orange mail account and the IT world is still bright but try to send mails to someone outside the domain "@intnet.mu" or "@orange.mu". Your mail client will deny sending mail with SMTP message 5.1.0 "blah not allowed". First guess, there is problem with the mail client, maybe magically the configuration changed over-night. But no it is still working at home... So, there is for sure a problem with the guy's internet connection. At least, it is his fault not to have Orange internet services, so it can not work properly... The Orange Mail FAQ After some more frustation we finally checkout the Orange Mail FAQ to see whether this (obviously?) common problem has been described already. Sorry, but those FAQ entries are even more confusing as it is not really clear how to handle this scenario. Best of all is that most of the entries are still refering to use servers of the domain "intnet.mu". I mean Orange will disable those systems in favour of the domain "orange.mu" in the near future and does not amend their FAQs. Come on, guys! Ok, settings for POP3 are there. Hm, what about the secure version POP3S? No signs at all... Even changing your mail client to use password encryption with STARTTLS is not allowed at all. Use "bow.intnet.mu" for incoming mail... Ahhh, pretty obvious host name. I mean, at least something like pop.intnet.mu or pop3.intnet.mu would have been more accurate. Funny of all, the hostname "pop.orange.mu" is accessible to receive your mail account. Alright, checking SMTP options for authentication or other like POP-before-SMTP or whatever well-known and established mechanism to send emails are described. I guess that spotting a whale or shark in Mauritian waters would be easier. Trial and error on SMTP settings reveal that neither STARTTLS or any other connection / password encryption is available. Using SSL/TLS on SMTP only reveals that there is no service answering your request. Calling customer service So, we have to bite into the bitter apple and get in touch with Orange customer service and complain/explain them our case and ask for advice. After some hiccups, we finally manage to get hold of someone competent in mail services and we receive the golden spoon of mail configuration made by Orange Mauritius: SMTP hostname: smtpauth.intnet.mu And the world of IT is surprisingly green again. Customer satisfaction? Dear Orange Mauritius, what's the problem with this information? Are you scared of mail spammer? Why isn't there any case in your FAQs? Ok, talking about your FAQs - simply said: they are badly outdated! Configure your mail client to use server name based in the domain intnet.mu but specify your account username with orange.mu as domain part. Although, that there are servers available on the domain orange.mu after all. So, why don't you provide current information like this: POP3 server name: pop.orange.muSMTP server name: smtp.orange.muSMTP authenticated: smtpauth.orange.mu It's not difficult, is it? In my humble opinion not really and you would provide clean, consistent and up-to-date information for your customers. This would produce less frustation and so less traffic on your customer service lines. Which after all, would improve the total user experience and satisfaction level on both sides. Without knowing these facts. Now, imagine you would take your laptop abroad and have to use other internet service providers to be able to be online... Calling your customer service would be unnecessary expensive!

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SQL syntax Newbie student

- by sammysmall

Describe the output of the following SQL query: select custId, name from customer where region = "New York" UNION select cust.custId, cust.name from customer cust where cust.custId IN (select cust_order.custId from customer_order cust_order, company_employee comp_emp where cust_order.salesEmpId = comp_emp.empId AND comp_emp.name = 'DANIEL'); My question is: at line from customer cust is cust referring to a column in the customer table... This is a homework question I have identified the components leading up to this line and I think that cust is a column in the customer table... I am not asking for an overall solution just a bit of encouragement if I am on the right track...

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How customers view and interact with a company

The Harvard Business Review article written by Rayport and Jaworski is aptly titled “Best Face Forward” because it sheds light on how customers view and interact with a company. In the past most business interaction between customers was performed in a face to face meeting where one party would present an item for sale and then the other would decide whether to purchase the item. In addition, if there was a problem with a purchased item then they would bring the item back to the person who sold the item for resolution. One of my earliest examples of witnessing this was when I was around 6 or 7 years old and I was allowed to spend the summer in Tennessee with my Grandparents. My Grandfather had just written a book about the local history of his town and was selling them to his friends and local bookstores. I still remember he offered to pay me a small commission for every book I helped him sell because I was carrying the books around for him. Every sale he made was face to face with his customers which allowed him to share his excitement for the book with everyone. In today’s modern world there is less and less human interaction as the use of computers and other technologies allow us to communicate within seconds even though both parties may be across the globe or just next door. That being said, customers view a company through multiple access points called faces that represent the ability to interact without actually seeing a human face. As a software engineer this is a good and a bad thing because direct human interaction and technology based interaction have both good and bad attributes based on the customer. How organizations coordinate business and IT functions, to provide quality service varies based on each individual business and the goals and directives put in place by its management. According to Rayport and Jaworski, the type of interaction used through a particular access point may lend itself to be people-dominate, machine-dominate, or a combination of both. The method by which a company communicates information through an access point is a strategic choice that relates costs and customer outcomes. To simplify this, the choice is based on what can give the customer the best experience interacting with the company when the cost of the interaction is also a factor. I personally see examples of this every day at work. The company website is machine-dominate with people updating and maintaining information, our groups department is people dominate because most of the customer interaction is done at the customers location and is backed up by machine based data sources, and our sales/member service department is a hybrid because employees work in tandem with machines in order for them to assist customers with signing up or any other issue they may have. The positive and negative aspects of human and machine interfaces are a key aspect in deciding which interface to use when allowing customers to access a company or a combination of the two. Rayport and Jaworski also used MIT professor Erik Brynjolfsson preliminary catalog of human and machine strengths. He stated that humans outperform machines in judgment, pattern recognition, exception processing, insight, and creativity. I have found this to be true based on the example of how sales and member service reps at my company handle a multitude of questions and various situations with a lot of unknown variables. A machine interface could never effectively be able to handle these scenarios because there are too many variables to consider and would not have the built-in logic to process each customer’s claims and needs. In addition, he also stated that machines outperform humans in collecting, storing, transmitting and routine processing. An example of this would be my employer’s website. Customers can simply go online and purchase a product without even talking to a sales or member services representative. The information is then stored in a database so that the customer can always go back and review there order, and access their selected services. A human, no matter how smart they are would never be able to keep track of hundreds of thousands of customers let alone know what they purchased or how much they paid. In today’s technology driven economy every company must offer their customers multiple methods of accessibly in order to survive. The more of an opportunity a company has to create a positive experience for their customers, in my opinion, they more likely the customer will return to that company again. I have noticed this with my personal shopping habits and experiences. References Rayport, J., & Jaworski, B. (2004). Best Face Forward. Harvard Business Review, 82(12), 47-58. Retrieved from Business Source Complete database.

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