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Convert SVG image with filters to PNG /PDF

- by user1599669

I have the following svg image to the png image & pdf image with 300 DPI. <svg width="640" height="480" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">  <defs> <filter height="200%" width="200%" y="-50%" x="-50%" id="svg_1_blur"> <feGaussianBlur stdDeviation="10" in="SourceGraphic"/> </filter> </defs> <g> <title>Layer 1</title> <image filter="url(#svg_1_blur)" xlink:href="images/logo.png" id="svg_1" height="162.999996" width="223.999992" y="99" x="185"/> <text xml:space="preserve" text-anchor="middle" font-family="serif" font-size="24" id="svg_2" y="210" x="289" stroke-width="0" stroke="#000000" fill="#000000">sdfdsdsfsdf</text> </g> </svg> I want to do this using PHP and I have applied filters to the blur filter to the image and I want to retain that. Also I have problem in viewing this image in the IE, because it doesn't show the blur effect on IE9. Any suggestions?

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Distinct() to return List<> returning Duplicates

- by KDM

I have a list of Filters that are passed into a webservice and I iterate over the collection and do Linq query and then add to the list of products but when I do a GroupBy and Distinct() it doesn't remove the duplicates. I am using a IEnumerable because when you use Disinct it converts it to IEnumerable. If you know how to construct this better and make my function return a type of List<Product> that would be appreciated thanks. Here is my code in C#: if (Tab == "All-Items") { List<Product> temp = new List<Product>(); List<Product> Products2 = new List<Product>(); foreach (Filter filter in Filters) { List<Product> products = (from p in db.Products where p.Discontinued == false && p.DepartmentId == qDepartment.Id join f in db.Filters on p.Id equals f.ProductId join x in db.ProductImages on p.Id equals x.ProductId where x.Dimension == "180X180" && f.Name == filter.Name /*Filter*/ select new Product { Id = p.Id, Title = p.Title, ShortDescription = p.ShortDescription, Brand = p.Brand, Model = p.Model, Image = x.Path, FriendlyUrl = p.FriendlyUrl, SellPrice = p.SellPrice, DiscountPercentage = p.DiscountPercentage, Votes = p.Votes, TotalRating = p.TotalRating }).ToList<Product>(); foreach (Product p in products) { temp.Add(p); } IEnumerable temp2 = temp.GroupBy(x => x.Id).Distinct(); IEnumerator e = temp.GetEnumerator(); while (e.MoveNext()) { Product c = e.Current as Product; Products2.Add(c); } } pf.Products = Products2;// return type must be List<Product> }

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Strange DataTable behaviour

- by DocSnuggles

There´s a strange behaviour in my code which I can´t explain... I have worked arround it but I´d like to know the reason of this behaviour. My Code: If dataset.Tables.Count > 0 Then Dim rows() As DataRow = dataset.Tables(0).Select("FileID = " + fileid.ToString) For Each row As DataRow In rows... the one and only table in dataset is: 18 1 1 testpara42 19 1 2 Para2 23 2 1 Para1 24 2 2 Para42 Where the colums are: ParamID - FileID - ParaPos - Paravalue. I want do filter it so that the only rows I get are the ones with the correct fileid... the result when the selection string is "FileID = 1" is an array with 2 rows... everything is fine... but the filter string "FileID = 2" will return 0 Rows... A filter like "FileID < 1" returns 2 Rows correctly. I really cant´t explain this od behaviour, maybe one of the community does. The Table does have more entries but the Filter string just works with the "FileID = 1" selection. Excuse my bad english. Please explain my mistake to me.

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Drop down menu going under #main div background in IE 7/8/9

- by Adrift

Here is the link to the domain http://linenwoods.com I am working on. I am going to fit the navigation list items on the header, but when the drop down menu is implemented I'm pretty sure it'll go under the #main div like you see currently. Is there any easy way fix to this? I couldn't find anything related to this from a google search .. was hoping someone could help me out. Below is the relevant CSS .. I tried playing around with z-index with no luck as I was told IE8 renders it strangely. If you have the time please follow the link with IE and leave a response .. I am trying to be as cross-browser compatible as possible and already am at a pretty pathetic start. Any help would be appreciated :) body { background-image:url('Background1.jpg'); background-position: center; height: 100%; margin: 0; padding: 0; opacity: 0.8; filter: alpha(opacity=80); } #main { width : 1010px; height: 1315px; background-color: white; margin-top: 15px; filter: alpha(opacity=80); } header { width: 1010px; height: 230px; background-color: white; margin: 0 auto; margin-top: 15px; filter: alpha(opacity=80); } footer { width: 1010px; height: 230px; background-color: white; margin: 15px 0 15px 0; filter: alpha(opacity=80); }

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Creating packages in code - Package Configurations

Continuing my theme of building various types of packages in code, this example shows how to building a package with package configurations. Incidentally it shows you how to add a variable, and a connection too. It covers the five most common configurations: Configuration File Indirect Configuration File SQL Server Indirect SQL Server Environment Variable For a general overview try the SQL Server Books Online Package Configurations topic. The sample uses a a simple helper function ApplyConfig to create or update a configuration, although in the example we will only ever create. The most useful knowledge is the configuration string (Configuration.ConfigurationString) that you need to set. Configuration Type Configuration String Description Configuration File The full path and file name of an XML configuration file. The file can contain one or more configuration and includes the target path and new value to set. Indirect Configuration File An environment variable the value of which contains full path and file name of an XML configuration file as per the Configuration File type described above. SQL Server A three part configuration string, with each part being quote delimited and separated by a semi-colon. -- The first part is the connection manager name. The connection tells you which server and database to look for the configuration table. -- The second part is the name of the configuration table. The table is of a standard format, use the Package Configuration Wizard to help create an example, or see the sample script files below. The table contains one or more rows or configuration items each with a target path and new value. -- The third and final part is the optional filter name. A configuration table can contain multiple configurations, and the filter is literal value that can be used to group items together and act as a filter clause when configurations are being read. If you do not need a filter, just leave the value empty. Indirect SQL Server An environment variable the value of which is the three part configuration string as per the SQL Server type described above. Environment Variable An environment variable the value of which is the value to set in the package. This is slightly different to the other examples as the configuration definition in the package also includes the target information. In our ApplyConfig function this is the only example that actually supplies a target value for the Configuration.PackagePath property. The path is an XPath style path for the target property, \Package.Variables[User::Variable].Properties[Value], the equivalent of which can be seen in the screenshot below, with the object being our variable called Variable, and the property to set is the Value property of that variable object. The configurations as seen when opening the generated package in BIDS: The sample code creates the package, adds a variable and connection manager, enables configurations, and then adds our example configurations. The package is then saved to disk, useful for checking the package and testing, before finally executing, just to prove it is valid. There are some external resources used here, namely some environment variables and a table, see below for more details. namespace Konesans.Dts.Samples { using System; using Microsoft.SqlServer.Dts.Runtime; public class PackageConfigurations { public void CreatePackage() { // Create a new package Package package = new Package(); package.Name = "ConfigurationSample"; // Add a variable, the target for our configurations package.Variables.Add("Variable", false, "User", 0); // Add a connection, for SQL configurations // Add the SQL OLE-DB connection ConnectionManager connectionManagerOleDb = package.Connections.Add("OLEDB"); connectionManagerOleDb.Name = "SQLConnection"; connectionManagerOleDb.ConnectionString = "Provider=SQLOLEDB.1;Data Source=(local);Initial Catalog=master;Integrated Security=SSPI;"; // Add our example configurations, first must enable package setting package.EnableConfigurations = true; // Direct configuration file, see sample file this.ApplyConfig(package, "Configuration File", DTSConfigurationType.ConfigFile, "C:\\Temp\\XmlConfig.dtsConfig", string.Empty); // Indirect configuration file, the emvironment variable XmlConfigFileEnvironmentVariable // contains the path to the configuration file, e.g. C:\Temp\XmlConfig.dtsConfig this.ApplyConfig(package, "Indirect Configuration File", DTSConfigurationType.IConfigFile, "XmlConfigFileEnvironmentVariable", string.Empty); // Direct SQL Server configuration, uses the SQLConnection package connection to read // configurations from the [dbo].[SSIS Configurations] table, with a filter of "SampleFilter" this.ApplyConfig(package, "SQL Server", DTSConfigurationType.SqlServer, "\"SQLConnection\";\"[dbo].[SSIS Configurations]\";\"SampleFilter\";", string.Empty); // Indirect SQL Server configuration, the environment variable "SQLServerEnvironmentVariable" // contains the configuration string e.g. "SQLConnection";"[dbo].[SSIS Configurations]";"SampleFilter"; this.ApplyConfig(package, "Indirect SQL Server", DTSConfigurationType.ISqlServer, "SQLServerEnvironmentVariable", string.Empty); // Direct environment variable, the value of the EnvironmentVariable environment variable is // applied to the target property, the value of the "User::Variable" package variable this.ApplyConfig(package, "EnvironmentVariable", DTSConfigurationType.EnvVariable, "EnvironmentVariable", "\\Package.Variables[User::Variable].Properties[Value]"); #if DEBUG // Save package to disk, DEBUG only new Application().SaveToXml(String.Format(@"C:\Temp\{0}.dtsx", package.Name), package, null); Console.WriteLine(@"C:\Temp\{0}.dtsx", package.Name); #endif // Execute package package.Execute(); // Basic check for warnings foreach (DtsWarning warning in package.Warnings) { Console.WriteLine("WarningCode : {0}", warning.WarningCode); Console.WriteLine(" SubComponent : {0}", warning.SubComponent); Console.WriteLine(" Description : {0}", warning.Description); Console.WriteLine(); } // Basic check for errors foreach (DtsError error in package.Errors) { Console.WriteLine("ErrorCode : {0}", error.ErrorCode); Console.WriteLine(" SubComponent : {0}", error.SubComponent); Console.WriteLine(" Description : {0}", error.Description); Console.WriteLine(); } package.Dispose(); } /// <summary> /// Add or update an package configuration. /// </summary> /// <param name="package">The package.</param> /// <param name="name">The configuration name.</param> /// <param name="type">The type of configuration</param> /// <param name="setting">The configuration setting.</param> /// <param name="target">The target of the configuration, leave blank if not required.</param> internal void ApplyConfig(Package package, string name, DTSConfigurationType type, string setting, string target) { Configurations configurations = package.Configurations; Configuration configuration; if (configurations.Contains(name)) { configuration = configurations[name]; } else { configuration = configurations.Add(); } configuration.Name = name; configuration.ConfigurationType = type; configuration.ConfigurationString = setting; configuration.PackagePath = target; } } } The following table lists the environment variables required for the full example to work along with some sample values. Variable Sample value EnvironmentVariable 1 SQLServerEnvironmentVariable "SQLConnection";"[dbo].[SSIS Configurations]";"SampleFilter"; XmlConfigFileEnvironmentVariable C:\Temp\XmlConfig.dtsConfig Sample code, package and configuration file. ConfigurationApplication.cs ConfigurationSample.dtsx XmlConfig.dtsConfig

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Pre-filtering and shaping OData feeds using WCF Data Services and the Entity Framework - Part 1

- by rajbk

The Open Data Protocol, referred to as OData, is a new data-sharing standard that breaks down silos and fosters an interoperative ecosystem for data consumers (clients) and producers (services) that is far more powerful than currently possible. It enables more applications to make sense of a broader set of data, and helps every data service and client add value to the whole ecosystem. WCF Data Services (previously known as ADO.NET Data Services), then, was the first Microsoft technology to support the Open Data Protocol in Visual Studio 2008 SP1. It provides developers with client libraries for .NET, Silverlight, AJAX, PHP and Java. Microsoft now also supports OData in SQL Server 2008 R2, Windows Azure Storage, Excel 2010 (through PowerPivot), and SharePoint 2010. Many other other applications in the works. * This post walks you through how to create an OData feed, define a shape for the data and pre-filter the data using Visual Studio 2010, WCF Data Services and the Entity Framework. A sample project is attached at the bottom of Part 2 of this post. Pre-filtering and shaping OData feeds using WCF Data Services and the Entity Framework - Part 2 Create the Web Application File –› New –› Project, Select “ASP.NET Empty Web Application” Add the Entity Data Model Right click on the Web Application in the Solution Explorer and select “Add New Item..” Select “ADO.NET Entity Data Model” under "Data”. Name the Model “Northwind” and click “Add”. In the “Choose Model Contents”, select “Generate Model From Database” and click “Next” Define a connection to your database containing the Northwind database in the next screen. We are going to expose the Products table through our OData feed. Select “Products” in the “Choose your Database Object” screen. Click “Finish”. We are done creating our Entity Data Model. Save the Northwind.edmx file created. Add the WCF Data Service Right click on the Web Application in the Solution Explorer and select “Add New Item..” Select “WCF Data Service” from the list and call the service “DataService” (creative, huh?). Click “Add”. Enable Access to the Data Service Open the DataService.svc.cs class. The class is well commented and instructs us on the next steps. public class DataService : DataService< /* TODO: put your data source class name here */ > { // This method is called only once to initialize service-wide policies. public static void InitializeService(DataServiceConfiguration config) { // TODO: set rules to indicate which entity sets and service operations are visible, updatable, etc. // Examples: // config.SetEntitySetAccessRule("MyEntityset", EntitySetRights.AllRead); // config.SetServiceOperationAccessRule("MyServiceOperation", ServiceOperationRights.All); config.DataServiceBehavior.MaxProtocolVersion = DataServiceProtocolVersion.V2; } } Replace the comment that starts with “/* TODO:” with “NorthwindEntities” (the entity container name of the Model we created earlier). WCF Data Services is initially locked down by default, FTW! No data is exposed without you explicitly setting it. You have explicitly specify which Entity sets you wish to expose and what rights are allowed by using the SetEntitySetAccessRule. The SetServiceOperationAccessRule on the other hand sets rules for a specified operation. Let us define an access rule to expose the Products Entity we created earlier. We use the EnititySetRights.AllRead since we want to give read only access. Our modified code is shown below. public class DataService : DataService<NorthwindEntities> { public static void InitializeService(DataServiceConfiguration config) { config.SetEntitySetAccessRule("Products", EntitySetRights.AllRead); config.DataServiceBehavior.MaxProtocolVersion = DataServiceProtocolVersion.V2; } } We are done setting up our ODataFeed! Compile your project. Right click on DataService.svc and select “View in Browser” to see the OData feed. To view the feed in IE, you must make sure that "Feed Reading View" is turned off. You set this under Tools -› Internet Options -› Content tab. If you navigate to “Products”, you should see the Products feed. Note also that URIs are case sensitive. ie. Products work but products doesn’t. Filtering our data OData has a set of system query operations you can use to perform common operations against data exposed by the model. For example, to see only Products in CategoryID 2, we can use the following request: /DataService.svc/Products?$filter=CategoryID eq 2 At the time of this writing, supported operations are $orderby, $top, $skip, $filter, $expand, $format†, $select, $inlinecount. Pre-filtering our data using Query Interceptors The Product feed currently returns all Products. We want to change that so that it contains only Products that have not been discontinued. WCF introduces the concept of interceptors which allows us to inject custom validation/policy logic into the request/response pipeline of a WCF data service. We will use a QueryInterceptor to pre-filter the data so that it returns only Products that are not discontinued. To create a QueryInterceptor, write a method that returns an Expression<Func<T, bool>> and mark it with the QueryInterceptor attribute as shown below. [QueryInterceptor("Products")] public Expression<Func<Product, bool>> OnReadProducts() { return o => o.Discontinued == false; } Viewing the feed after compilation will only show products that have not been discontinued. We also confirm this by looking at the WHERE clause in the SQL generated by the entity framework. SELECT [Extent1].[ProductID] AS [ProductID], ... ... [Extent1].[Discontinued] AS [Discontinued] FROM [dbo].[Products] AS [Extent1] WHERE 0 = [Extent1].[Discontinued] Other examples of Query/Change interceptors can be seen here including an example to filter data based on the identity of the authenticated user. We are done pre-filtering our data. In the next part of this post, we will see how to shape our data. Pre-filtering and shaping OData feeds using WCF Data Services and the Entity Framework - Part 2 Foot Notes * http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/aa937697.aspx † $format did not work for me. The way to get a Json response is to include the following in the request header “Accept: application/json, text/javascript, */*” when making the request. This is easily done with most JavaScript libraries.

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Cannot install or remove packages

- by Nuno

I tried to install the openoffice.org package but it gave an error. Now i cannot repair, remove or install nothing. The Software center of xubuntu gives this error log. Nothing seems to solve this. I tried apt-get install -f but it does not solve the problem either. Any suggestions? installArchives() failed: (Reading database ... (Reading database ... 5% (Reading database ... 10% (Reading database ... 15% (Reading database ... 20% (Reading database ... 25% (Reading database ... 30% (Reading database ... 35% (Reading database ... 40% (Reading database ... 45% (Reading database ... 50% (Reading database ... 55% (Reading database ... 60% (Reading database ... 65% (Reading database ... 70% (Reading database ... 75% (Reading database ... 80% (Reading database ... 85% (Reading database ... 90% (Reading database ... 95% (Reading database ... 100% (Reading database ... 184189 files and directories currently installed.) Unpacking libreoffice-common (from .../libreoffice-common_1%3a3.5.4-0ubuntu1.1_all.deb) ... dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/libreoffice-common_1%3a3.5.4-0ubuntu1.1_all.deb (--unpack): trying to overwrite '/usr/bin/soffice', which is also in package openoffice.org-debian-menus 3.2-9502 No apport report written because MaxReports is reached already rmdir: erro ao remover /var/lib/libreoffice/share/prereg/: Ficheiro ou directoria inexistente rmdir: erro ao remover /var/lib/libreoffice/share/: Directoria no vazia rmdir: erro ao remover /var/lib/libreoffice/program/: Ficheiro ou directoria inexistente rmdir: erro ao remover /var/lib/libreoffice: Directoria no vazia rmdir: erro ao remover /var/lib/libreoffice: Directoria no vazia Processing triggers for desktop-file-utils ... Processing triggers for shared-mime-info ... Processing triggers for gnome-icon-theme ... Processing triggers for hicolor-icon-theme ... Processing triggers for man-db ... Errors were encountered while processing: /var/cache/apt/archives/libreoffice-common_1%3a3.5.4-0ubuntu1.1_all.deb dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of libreoffice-java-common: libreoffice-java-common depends on libreoffice-common; however: Package libreoffice-common is not installed. dpkg: error processing libreoffice-java-common (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of libreoffice-filter-mobiledev: libreoffice-filter-mobiledev depends on libreoffice-java-common; however: Package libreoffice-java-common is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing libreoffice-filter-mobiledev (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of libreoffice-base: libreoffice-base depends on libreoffice-java-common (>= 1:3.5.4~); however: Package libreoffice-java-common is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing libreoffice-base (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of libreoffice-core: libreoffice-core depends on libreoffice-common (>> 1:3.5.4); however: Package libreoffice-common is not installed. dpkg: error processing libreoffice-core (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of libreoffice-style-human: libreoffice-style-human depends on libreoffice-core; however: Package libreoffice-core is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing libreoffice-style-human (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of libreoffice-math: libreoffice-math depends on libreoffice-core (= 1:3.5.4-0ubuntu1.1); however: Package libreoffice-core is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing libreoffice-math (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of libreoffice-impress: libreoffice-impress depends on libreoffice-core (= 1:3.5.4-0ubuntu1.1); however: Package libreoffice-core is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing libreoffice-impress (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of libreoffice-style-tango: libreoffice-style-tango depends on libreoffice-core; however: Package libreoffice-core is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing libreoffice-style-tango (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of libreoffice: libreoffice depends on libreoffice-core (= 1:3.5.4-0ubuntu1.1); however: Package libreoffice-core is not configured yet. libreoffice depends on libreoffice-impress; however: Package libreoffice-impress is not configured yet. libreoffice depends on libreoffice-math; however: Package libreoffice-math is not configured yet. libreoffice depends on libreoffice-base; however: Package libreoffice-base is not configured yet. libreoffice depends on libreoffice-filter-mobiledev; however: Package libreoffice-filter-mobiledev is not configured yet. libreoffice depends on libreoffice-java-common (>= 1:3.5.4~); however: Package libreoffice-java-common is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing libreoffice (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of libreoffice-writer: libreoffice-writer depends on libreoffice-core (= 1:3.5.4-0ubuntu1.1); however: Package libreoffice-core is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing libreoffice-writer (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of mythes-en-us: mythes-en-us depends on libreoffice-core | openoffice.org-core (>= 1.9) | language-support-writing-en; however: Package libreoffice-core is not configured yet. Package openoffice.org-core is not installed. Package language-support-writing-en is not installed. dpkg: error processing mythes-en-us (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of libreoffice-help-zh-cn: libreoffice-help-zh-cn depends on libreoffice-writer | language-support-translations-zh; however: Package libreoffice-writer is not configured yet. Package language-support-translations-zh is not installed. dpkg: error processing libreoffice-help-zh-cn (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of libreoffice-base-core: libreoffice-base-core depends on libreoffice-core (= 1:3.5.4-0ubuntu1.1); however: Package libreoffice-core is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing libreoffice-base-core (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of libreoffice-gnome: libreoffice-gnome depends on libreoffice-core (= 1:3.5.4-0ubuntu1.1); however: Package libreoffice-core is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing libreoffice-gnome (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of libreoffice-help-pt-br: libreoffice-help-pt-br depends on libreoffice-writer | language-support-translations-pt; however: Package libreoffice-writer is not configured yet. Package language-support-translations-pt is not installed. dpkg: error processing libreoffice-help-pt-br (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of libreoffice-emailmerge: libreoffice-emailmerge depends on libreoffice-core; however: Package libreoffice-core is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing libreoffice-emailmerge (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of libreoffice-help-en-gb: libreoffice-help-en-gb depends on libreoffice-writer | language-support-translations-en; however: Package libreoffice-writer is not configured yet. Package language-support-translations-en is not installed. dpkg: error processing libreoffice-help-en-gb (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured

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Fun with Aggregates

- by Paul White

There are interesting things to be learned from even the simplest queries. For example, imagine you are given the task of writing a query to list AdventureWorks product names where the product has at least one entry in the transaction history table, but fewer than ten. One possible query to meet that specification is: SELECT p.Name FROM Production.Product AS p JOIN Production.TransactionHistory AS th ON p.ProductID = th.ProductID GROUP BY p.ProductID, p.Name HAVING COUNT_BIG(*) < 10; That query correctly returns 23 rows (execution plan and data sample shown below): The execution plan looks a bit different from the written form of the query: the base tables are accessed in reverse order, and the aggregation is performed before the join. The general idea is to read all rows from the history table, compute the count of rows grouped by ProductID, merge join the results to the Product table on ProductID, and finally filter to only return rows where the count is less than ten. This ‘fully-optimized’ plan has an estimated cost of around 0.33 units. The reason for the quote marks there is that this plan is not quite as optimal as it could be – surely it would make sense to push the Filter down past the join too? To answer that, let’s look at some other ways to formulate this query. This being SQL, there are any number of ways to write logically-equivalent query specifications, so we’ll just look at a couple of interesting ones. The first query is an attempt to reverse-engineer T-SQL from the optimized query plan shown above. It joins the result of pre-aggregating the history table to the Product table before filtering: SELECT p.Name FROM ( SELECT th.ProductID, cnt = COUNT_BIG(*) FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th GROUP BY th.ProductID ) AS q1 JOIN Production.Product AS p ON p.ProductID = q1.ProductID WHERE q1.cnt < 10; Perhaps a little surprisingly, we get a slightly different execution plan: The results are the same (23 rows) but this time the Filter is pushed below the join! The optimizer chooses nested loops for the join, because the cardinality estimate for rows passing the Filter is a bit low (estimate 1 versus 23 actual), though you can force a merge join with a hint and the Filter still appears below the join. In yet another variation, the < 10 predicate can be ‘manually pushed’ by specifying it in a HAVING clause in the “q1” sub-query instead of in the WHERE clause as written above. The reason this predicate can be pushed past the join in this query form, but not in the original formulation is simply an optimizer limitation – it does make efforts (primarily during the simplification phase) to encourage logically-equivalent query specifications to produce the same execution plan, but the implementation is not completely comprehensive. Moving on to a second example, the following query specification results from phrasing the requirement as “list the products where there exists fewer than ten correlated rows in the history table”: SELECT p.Name FROM Production.Product AS p WHERE EXISTS ( SELECT * FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = p.ProductID HAVING COUNT_BIG(*) < 10 ); Unfortunately, this query produces an incorrect result (86 rows): The problem is that it lists products with no history rows, though the reasons are interesting. The COUNT_BIG(*) in the EXISTS clause is a scalar aggregate (meaning there is no GROUP BY clause) and scalar aggregates always produce a value, even when the input is an empty set. In the case of the COUNT aggregate, the result of aggregating the empty set is zero (the other standard aggregates produce a NULL). To make the point really clear, let’s look at product 709, which happens to be one for which no history rows exist: -- Scalar aggregate SELECT COUNT_BIG(*) FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = 709; -- Vector aggregate SELECT COUNT_BIG(*) FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = 709 GROUP BY th.ProductID; The estimated execution plans for these two statements are almost identical: You might expect the Stream Aggregate to have a Group By for the second statement, but this is not the case. The query includes an equality comparison to a constant value (709), so all qualified rows are guaranteed to have the same value for ProductID and the Group By is optimized away. In fact there are some minor differences between the two plans (the first is auto-parameterized and qualifies for trivial plan, whereas the second is not auto-parameterized and requires cost-based optimization), but there is nothing to indicate that one is a scalar aggregate and the other is a vector aggregate. This is something I would like to see exposed in show plan so I suggested it on Connect. Anyway, the results of running the two queries show the difference at runtime: The scalar aggregate (no GROUP BY) returns a result of zero, whereas the vector aggregate (with a GROUP BY clause) returns nothing at all. Returning to our EXISTS query, we could ‘fix’ it by changing the HAVING clause to reject rows where the scalar aggregate returns zero: SELECT p.Name FROM Production.Product AS p WHERE EXISTS ( SELECT * FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = p.ProductID HAVING COUNT_BIG(*) BETWEEN 1 AND 9 ); The query now returns the correct 23 rows: Unfortunately, the execution plan is less efficient now – it has an estimated cost of 0.78 compared to 0.33 for the earlier plans. Let’s try adding a redundant GROUP BY instead of changing the HAVING clause: SELECT p.Name FROM Production.Product AS p WHERE EXISTS ( SELECT * FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = p.ProductID GROUP BY th.ProductID HAVING COUNT_BIG(*) < 10 ); Not only do we now get correct results (23 rows), this is the execution plan: I like to compare that plan to quantum physics: if you don’t find it shocking, you haven’t understood it properly :) The simple addition of a redundant GROUP BY has resulted in the EXISTS form of the query being transformed into exactly the same optimal plan we found earlier. What’s more, in SQL Server 2008 and later, we can replace the odd-looking GROUP BY with an explicit GROUP BY on the empty set: SELECT p.Name FROM Production.Product AS p WHERE EXISTS ( SELECT * FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = p.ProductID GROUP BY () HAVING COUNT_BIG(*) < 10 ); I offer that as an alternative because some people find it more intuitive (and it perhaps has more geek value too). Whichever way you prefer, it’s rather satisfying to note that the result of the sub-query does not exist for a particular correlated value where a vector aggregate is used (the scalar COUNT aggregate always returns a value, even if zero, so it always ‘EXISTS’ regardless which ProductID is logically being evaluated). The following query forms also produce the optimal plan and correct results, so long as a vector aggregate is used (you can probably find more equivalent query forms): WHERE Clause SELECT p.Name FROM Production.Product AS p WHERE ( SELECT COUNT_BIG(*) FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = p.ProductID GROUP BY () ) < 10; APPLY SELECT p.Name FROM Production.Product AS p CROSS APPLY ( SELECT NULL FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = p.ProductID GROUP BY () HAVING COUNT_BIG(*) < 10 ) AS ca (dummy); FROM Clause SELECT q1.Name FROM ( SELECT p.Name, cnt = ( SELECT COUNT_BIG(*) FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = p.ProductID GROUP BY () ) FROM Production.Product AS p ) AS q1 WHERE q1.cnt < 10; This last example uses SUM(1) instead of COUNT and does not require a vector aggregate…you should be able to work out why :) SELECT q.Name FROM ( SELECT p.Name, cnt = ( SELECT SUM(1) FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = p.ProductID ) FROM Production.Product AS p ) AS q WHERE q.cnt < 10; The semantics of SQL aggregates are rather odd in places. It definitely pays to get to know the rules, and to be careful to check whether your queries are using scalar or vector aggregates. As we have seen, query plans do not show in which ‘mode’ an aggregate is running and getting it wrong can cause poor performance, wrong results, or both. © 2012 Paul White Twitter: @SQL_Kiwi email: [email protected]

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Fun with Aggregates

- by Paul White

There are interesting things to be learned from even the simplest queries. For example, imagine you are given the task of writing a query to list AdventureWorks product names where the product has at least one entry in the transaction history table, but fewer than ten. One possible query to meet that specification is: SELECT p.Name FROM Production.Product AS p JOIN Production.TransactionHistory AS th ON p.ProductID = th.ProductID GROUP BY p.ProductID, p.Name HAVING COUNT_BIG(*) < 10; That query correctly returns 23 rows (execution plan and data sample shown below): The execution plan looks a bit different from the written form of the query: the base tables are accessed in reverse order, and the aggregation is performed before the join. The general idea is to read all rows from the history table, compute the count of rows grouped by ProductID, merge join the results to the Product table on ProductID, and finally filter to only return rows where the count is less than ten. This ‘fully-optimized’ plan has an estimated cost of around 0.33 units. The reason for the quote marks there is that this plan is not quite as optimal as it could be – surely it would make sense to push the Filter down past the join too? To answer that, let’s look at some other ways to formulate this query. This being SQL, there are any number of ways to write logically-equivalent query specifications, so we’ll just look at a couple of interesting ones. The first query is an attempt to reverse-engineer T-SQL from the optimized query plan shown above. It joins the result of pre-aggregating the history table to the Product table before filtering: SELECT p.Name FROM ( SELECT th.ProductID, cnt = COUNT_BIG(*) FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th GROUP BY th.ProductID ) AS q1 JOIN Production.Product AS p ON p.ProductID = q1.ProductID WHERE q1.cnt < 10; Perhaps a little surprisingly, we get a slightly different execution plan: The results are the same (23 rows) but this time the Filter is pushed below the join! The optimizer chooses nested loops for the join, because the cardinality estimate for rows passing the Filter is a bit low (estimate 1 versus 23 actual), though you can force a merge join with a hint and the Filter still appears below the join. In yet another variation, the < 10 predicate can be ‘manually pushed’ by specifying it in a HAVING clause in the “q1” sub-query instead of in the WHERE clause as written above. The reason this predicate can be pushed past the join in this query form, but not in the original formulation is simply an optimizer limitation – it does make efforts (primarily during the simplification phase) to encourage logically-equivalent query specifications to produce the same execution plan, but the implementation is not completely comprehensive. Moving on to a second example, the following query specification results from phrasing the requirement as “list the products where there exists fewer than ten correlated rows in the history table”: SELECT p.Name FROM Production.Product AS p WHERE EXISTS ( SELECT * FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = p.ProductID HAVING COUNT_BIG(*) < 10 ); Unfortunately, this query produces an incorrect result (86 rows): The problem is that it lists products with no history rows, though the reasons are interesting. The COUNT_BIG(*) in the EXISTS clause is a scalar aggregate (meaning there is no GROUP BY clause) and scalar aggregates always produce a value, even when the input is an empty set. In the case of the COUNT aggregate, the result of aggregating the empty set is zero (the other standard aggregates produce a NULL). To make the point really clear, let’s look at product 709, which happens to be one for which no history rows exist: -- Scalar aggregate SELECT COUNT_BIG(*) FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = 709; -- Vector aggregate SELECT COUNT_BIG(*) FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = 709 GROUP BY th.ProductID; The estimated execution plans for these two statements are almost identical: You might expect the Stream Aggregate to have a Group By for the second statement, but this is not the case. The query includes an equality comparison to a constant value (709), so all qualified rows are guaranteed to have the same value for ProductID and the Group By is optimized away. In fact there are some minor differences between the two plans (the first is auto-parameterized and qualifies for trivial plan, whereas the second is not auto-parameterized and requires cost-based optimization), but there is nothing to indicate that one is a scalar aggregate and the other is a vector aggregate. This is something I would like to see exposed in show plan so I suggested it on Connect. Anyway, the results of running the two queries show the difference at runtime: The scalar aggregate (no GROUP BY) returns a result of zero, whereas the vector aggregate (with a GROUP BY clause) returns nothing at all. Returning to our EXISTS query, we could ‘fix’ it by changing the HAVING clause to reject rows where the scalar aggregate returns zero: SELECT p.Name FROM Production.Product AS p WHERE EXISTS ( SELECT * FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = p.ProductID HAVING COUNT_BIG(*) BETWEEN 1 AND 9 ); The query now returns the correct 23 rows: Unfortunately, the execution plan is less efficient now – it has an estimated cost of 0.78 compared to 0.33 for the earlier plans. Let’s try adding a redundant GROUP BY instead of changing the HAVING clause: SELECT p.Name FROM Production.Product AS p WHERE EXISTS ( SELECT * FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = p.ProductID GROUP BY th.ProductID HAVING COUNT_BIG(*) < 10 ); Not only do we now get correct results (23 rows), this is the execution plan: I like to compare that plan to quantum physics: if you don’t find it shocking, you haven’t understood it properly :) The simple addition of a redundant GROUP BY has resulted in the EXISTS form of the query being transformed into exactly the same optimal plan we found earlier. What’s more, in SQL Server 2008 and later, we can replace the odd-looking GROUP BY with an explicit GROUP BY on the empty set: SELECT p.Name FROM Production.Product AS p WHERE EXISTS ( SELECT * FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = p.ProductID GROUP BY () HAVING COUNT_BIG(*) < 10 ); I offer that as an alternative because some people find it more intuitive (and it perhaps has more geek value too). Whichever way you prefer, it’s rather satisfying to note that the result of the sub-query does not exist for a particular correlated value where a vector aggregate is used (the scalar COUNT aggregate always returns a value, even if zero, so it always ‘EXISTS’ regardless which ProductID is logically being evaluated). The following query forms also produce the optimal plan and correct results, so long as a vector aggregate is used (you can probably find more equivalent query forms): WHERE Clause SELECT p.Name FROM Production.Product AS p WHERE ( SELECT COUNT_BIG(*) FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = p.ProductID GROUP BY () ) < 10; APPLY SELECT p.Name FROM Production.Product AS p CROSS APPLY ( SELECT NULL FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = p.ProductID GROUP BY () HAVING COUNT_BIG(*) < 10 ) AS ca (dummy); FROM Clause SELECT q1.Name FROM ( SELECT p.Name, cnt = ( SELECT COUNT_BIG(*) FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = p.ProductID GROUP BY () ) FROM Production.Product AS p ) AS q1 WHERE q1.cnt < 10; This last example uses SUM(1) instead of COUNT and does not require a vector aggregate…you should be able to work out why :) SELECT q.Name FROM ( SELECT p.Name, cnt = ( SELECT SUM(1) FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = p.ProductID ) FROM Production.Product AS p ) AS q WHERE q.cnt < 10; The semantics of SQL aggregates are rather odd in places. It definitely pays to get to know the rules, and to be careful to check whether your queries are using scalar or vector aggregates. As we have seen, query plans do not show in which ‘mode’ an aggregate is running and getting it wrong can cause poor performance, wrong results, or both. © 2012 Paul White Twitter: @SQL_Kiwi email: [email protected]

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Currency Conversion in Oracle BI applications

- by Saurabh Verma

Authored by Vijay Aggarwal and Hichem Sellami A typical data warehouse contains Star and/or Snowflake schema, made up of Dimensions and Facts. The facts store various numerical information including amounts. Example; Order Amount, Invoice Amount etc. With the true global nature of business now-a-days, the end-users want to view the reports in their own currency or in global/common currency as defined by their business. This presents a unique opportunity in BI to provide the amounts in converted rates either by pre-storing or by doing on-the-fly conversions while displaying the reports to the users. Source Systems OBIA caters to various source systems like EBS, PSFT, Sebl, JDE, Fusion etc. Each source has its own unique and intricate ways of defining and storing currency data, doing currency conversions and presenting to the OLTP users. For example; EBS stores conversion rates between currencies which can be classified by conversion rates, like Corporate rate, Spot rate, Period rate etc. Siebel stores exchange rates by conversion rates like Daily. EBS/Fusion stores the conversion rates for each day, where as PSFT/Siebel store for a range of days. PSFT has Rate Multiplication Factor and Rate Division Factor and we need to calculate the Rate based on them, where as other Source systems store the Currency Exchange Rate directly. OBIA Design The data consolidation from various disparate source systems, poses the challenge to conform various currencies, rate types, exchange rates etc., and designing the best way to present the amounts to the users without affecting the performance. When consolidating the data for reporting in OBIA, we have designed the mechanisms in the Common Dimension, to allow users to report based on their required currencies. OBIA Facts store amounts in various currencies: Document Currency: This is the currency of the actual transaction. For a multinational company, this can be in various currencies. Local Currency: This is the base currency in which the accounting entries are recorded by the business. This is generally defined in the Ledger of the company. Global Currencies: OBIA provides five Global Currencies. Three are used across all modules. The last two are for CRM only. A Global currency is very useful when creating reports where the data is viewed enterprise-wide. Example; a US based multinational would want to see the reports in USD. The company will choose USD as one of the global currencies. OBIA allows users to define up-to five global currencies during the initial implementation. The term Currency Preference is used to designate the set of values: Document Currency, Local Currency, Global Currency 1, Global Currency 2, Global Currency 3; which are shared among all modules. There are four more currency preferences, specific to certain modules: Global Currency 4 (aka CRM Currency) and Global Currency 5 which are used in CRM; and Project Currency and Contract Currency, used in Project Analytics. When choosing Local Currency for Currency preference, the data will show in the currency of the Ledger (or Business Unit) in the prompt. So it is important to select one Ledger or Business Unit when viewing data in Local Currency. More on this can be found in the section: Toggling Currency Preferences in the Dashboard. Design Logic When extracting the fact data, the OOTB mappings extract and load the document amount, and the local amount in target tables. It also loads the exchange rates required to convert the document amount into the corresponding global amounts. If the source system only provides the document amount in the transaction, the extract mapping does a lookup to get the Local currency code, and the Local exchange rate. The Load mapping then uses the local currency code and rate to derive the local amount. The load mapping also fetches the Global Currencies and looks up the corresponding exchange rates. The lookup of exchange rates is done via the Exchange Rate Dimension provided as a Common/Conforming Dimension in OBIA. The Exchange Rate Dimension stores the exchange rates between various currencies for a date range and Rate Type. Two physical tables W_EXCH_RATE_G and W_GLOBAL_EXCH_RATE_G are used to provide the lookups and conversions between currencies. The data is loaded from the source system’s Ledger tables. W_EXCH_RATE_G stores the exchange rates between currencies with a date range. On the other hand, W_GLOBAL_EXCH_RATE_G stores the currency conversions between the document currency and the pre-defined five Global Currencies for each day. Based on the requirements, the fact mappings can decide and use one or both tables to do the conversion. Currency design in OBIA also taps into the MLS and Domain architecture, thus allowing the users to map the currencies to a universal Domain during the implementation time. This is especially important for companies deploying and using OBIA with multiple source adapters. Some Gotchas to Look for It is necessary to think through the currencies during the initial implementation. 1) Identify various types of currencies that are used by your business. Understand what will be your Local (or Base) and Documentation currency. Identify various global currencies that your users will want to look at the reports. This will be based on the global nature of your business. Changes to these currencies later in the project, while permitted, but may cause Full data loads and hence lost time. 2) If the user has a multi source system make sure that the Global Currencies and Global Rate Types chosen in Configuration Manager do have the corresponding source specific counterparts. In other words, make sure for every DW specific value chosen for Currency Code or Rate Type, there is a source Domain mapping already done. Technical Section This section will briefly mention the technical scenarios employed in the OBIA adaptors to extract data from each source system. In OBIA, we have two main tables which store the Currency Rate information as explained in previous sections. W_EXCH_RATE_G and W_GLOBAL_EXCH_RATE_G are the two tables. W_EXCH_RATE_G stores all the Currency Conversions present in the source system. It captures data for a Date Range. W_GLOBAL_EXCH_RATE_G has Global Currency Conversions stored at a Daily level. However the challenge here is to store all the 5 Global Currency Exchange Rates in a single record for each From Currency. Let’s voyage further into the Source System Extraction logic for each of these tables and understand the flow briefly. EBS: In EBS, we have Currency Data stored in GL_DAILY_RATES table. As the name indicates GL_DAILY_RATES EBS table has data at a daily level. However in our warehouse we store the data with a Date Range and insert a new range record only when the Exchange Rate changes for a particular From Currency, To Currency and Rate Type. Below are the main logical steps that we employ in this process. (Incremental Flow only) – Cleanup the data in W_EXCH_RATE_G. Delete the records which have Start Date > minimum conversion date Update the End Date of the existing records. Compress the daily data from GL_DAILY_RATES table into Range Records. Incremental map uses $$XRATE_UPD_NUM_DAY as an extra parameter. Generate Previous Rate, Previous Date and Next Date for each of the Daily record from the OLTP. Filter out the records which have Conversion Rate same as Previous Rates or if the Conversion Date lies within a single day range. Mark the records as ‘Keep’ and ‘Filter’ and also get the final End Date for the single Range record (Unique Combination of From Date, To Date, Rate and Conversion Date). Filter the records marked as ‘Filter’ in the INFA map. The above steps will load W_EXCH_RATE_GS. Step 0 updates/deletes W_EXCH_RATE_G directly. SIL map will then insert/update the GS data into W_EXCH_RATE_G. These steps convert the daily records in GL_DAILY_RATES to Range records in W_EXCH_RATE_G. We do not need such special logic for loading W_GLOBAL_EXCH_RATE_G. This is a table where we store data at a Daily Granular Level. However we need to pivot the data because the data present in multiple rows in source tables needs to be stored in different columns of the same row in DW. We use GROUP BY and CASE logic to achieve this. Fusion: Fusion has extraction logic very similar to EBS. The only difference is that the Cleanup logic that was mentioned in step 0 above does not use $$XRATE_UPD_NUM_DAY parameter. In Fusion we bring all the Exchange Rates in Incremental as well and do the cleanup. The SIL then takes care of Insert/Updates accordingly. PeopleSoft:PeopleSoft does not have From Date and To Date explicitly in the Source tables. Let’s look at an example. Please note that this is achieved from PS1 onwards only. 1 Jan 2010 – USD to INR – 45 31 Jan 2010 – USD to INR – 46 PSFT stores records in above fashion. This means that Exchange Rate of 45 for USD to INR is applicable for 1 Jan 2010 to 30 Jan 2010. We need to store data in this fashion in DW. Also PSFT has Exchange Rate stored as RATE_MULT and RATE_DIV. We need to do a RATE_MULT/RATE_DIV to get the correct Exchange Rate. We generate From Date and To Date while extracting data from source and this has certain assumptions: If a record gets updated/inserted in the source, it will be extracted in incremental. Also if this updated/inserted record is between other dates, then we also extract the preceding and succeeding records (based on dates) of this record. This is required because we need to generate a range record and we have 3 records whose ranges have changed. Taking the same example as above, if there is a new record which gets inserted on 15 Jan 2010; the new ranges are 1 Jan to 14 Jan, 15 Jan to 30 Jan and 31 Jan to Next available date. Even though 1 Jan record and 31 Jan have not changed, we will still extract them because the range is affected. Similar logic is used for Global Exchange Rate Extraction. We create the Range records and get it into a Temporary table. Then we join to Day Dimension, create individual records and pivot the data to get the 5 Global Exchange Rates for each From Currency, Date and Rate Type. Siebel: Siebel Facts are dependent on Global Exchange Rates heavily and almost none of them really use individual Exchange Rates. In other words, W_GLOBAL_EXCH_RATE_G is the main table used in Siebel from PS1 release onwards. As of January 2002, the Euro Triangulation method for converting between currencies belonging to EMU members is not needed for present and future currency exchanges. However, the method is still available in Siebel applications, as are the old currencies, so that historical data can be maintained accurately. The following description applies only to historical data needing conversion prior to the 2002 switch to the Euro for the EMU member countries. If a country is a member of the European Monetary Union (EMU), you should convert its currency to other currencies through the Euro. This is called triangulation, and it is used whenever either currency being converted has EMU Triangulation checked. Due to this, there are multiple extraction flows in SEBL ie. EUR to EMU, EUR to NonEMU, EUR to DMC and so on. We load W_EXCH_RATE_G through multiple flows with these data. This has been kept same as previous versions of OBIA. W_GLOBAL_EXCH_RATE_G being a new table does not have such needs. However SEBL does not have From Date and To Date columns in the Source tables similar to PSFT. We use similar extraction logic as explained in PSFT section for SEBL as well. What if all 5 Global Currencies configured are same? As mentioned in previous sections, from PS1 onwards we store Global Exchange Rates in W_GLOBAL_EXCH_RATE_G table. The extraction logic for this table involves Pivoting data from multiple rows into a single row with 5 Global Exchange Rates in 5 columns. As mentioned in previous sections, we use CASE and GROUP BY functions to achieve this. This approach poses a unique problem when all the 5 Global Currencies Chosen are same. For example – If the user configures all 5 Global Currencies as ‘USD’ then the extract logic will not be able to generate a record for From Currency=USD. This is because, not all Source Systems will have a USD->USD conversion record. We have _Generated mappings to take care of this case. We generate a record with Conversion Rate=1 for such cases. Reusable Lookups Before PS1, we had a Mapplet for Currency Conversions. In PS1, we only have reusable Lookups- LKP_W_EXCH_RATE_G and LKP_W_GLOBAL_EXCH_RATE_G. These lookups have another layer of logic so that all the lookup conditions are met when they are used in various Fact Mappings. Any user who would want to do a LKP on W_EXCH_RATE_G or W_GLOBAL_EXCH_RATE_G should and must use these Lookups. A direct join or Lookup on the tables might lead to wrong data being returned. Changing Currency preferences in the Dashboard: In the 796x series, all amount metrics in OBIA were showing the Global1 amount. The customer needed to change the metric definitions to show them in another Currency preference. Project Analytics started supporting currency preferences since 7.9.6 release though, and it published a Tech note for other module customers to add toggling between currency preferences to the solution. List of Currency Preferences Starting from 11.1.1.x release, the BI Platform added a new feature to support multiple currencies. The new session variable (PREFERRED_CURRENCY) is populated through a newly introduced currency prompt. This prompt can take its values from the xml file: userpref_currencies_OBIA.xml, which is hosted in the BI Server installation folder, under :< home>\instances\instance1\config\OracleBIPresentationServicesComponent\coreapplication_obips1\userpref_currencies.xml This file contains the list of currency preferences, like“Local Currency”, “Global Currency 1”,…which customers can also rename to give them more meaningful business names. There are two options for showing the list of currency preferences to the user in the dashboard: Static and Dynamic. In Static mode, all users will see the full list as in the user preference currencies file. In the Dynamic mode, the list shown in the currency prompt drop down is a result of a dynamic query specified in the same file. Customers can build some security into the rpd, so the list of currency preferences will be based on the user roles…BI Applications built a subject area: “Dynamic Currency Preference” to run this query, and give every user only the list of currency preferences required by his application roles. Adding Currency to an Amount Field When the user selects one of the items from the currency prompt, all the amounts in that page will show in the Currency corresponding to that preference. For example, if the user selects “Global Currency1” from the prompt, all data will be showing in Global Currency 1 as specified in the Configuration Manager. If the user select “Local Currency”, all amount fields will show in the Currency of the Business Unit selected in the BU filter of the same page. If there is no particular Business Unit selected in that filter, and the data selected by the query contains amounts in more than one currency (for example one BU has USD as a functional currency, the other has EUR as functional currency), then subtotals will not be available (cannot add USD and EUR amounts in one field), and depending on the set up (see next paragraph), the user may receive an error. There are two ways to add the Currency field to an amount metric: In the form of currency code, like USD, EUR…For this the user needs to add the field “Apps Common Currency Code” to the report. This field is in every subject area, usually under the table “Currency Tag” or “Currency Code”… In the form of currency symbol ($ for USD, € for EUR,…) For this, the user needs to format the amount metrics in the report as a currency column, by specifying the currency tag column in the Column Properties option in Column Actions drop down list. Typically this column should be the “BI Common Currency Code” available in every subject area. Select Column Properties option in the Edit list of a metric. In the Data Format tab, select Custom as Treat Number As. Enter the following syntax under Custom Number Format: [$:currencyTagColumn=Subjectarea.table.column] Where Column is the “BI Common Currency Code” defined to take the currency code value based on the currency preference chosen by the user in the Currency preference prompt.

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How to add new filters to CAML queries in SharePoint 2007

- by uruit

Normal 0 21 false false false ES-UY X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} One flexibility SharePoint has is CAML (Collaborative Application Markup Language). CAML it’s a markup language like html that allows developers to do queries against SharePoint lists, it’s syntax is very easy to understand and it allows to add logical conditions like Where, Contains, And, Or, etc, just like a SQL Query. For one of our projects we have the need to do a filter on SharePoint views, the problem here is that the view it’s a list containing a CAML Query with the filters the view may have, so in order to filter the view that’s already been filtered before, we need to append our filters to the existing CAML Query. That’s not a trivial task because the where statement in a CAML Query it’s like this: <Where> <And> <Filter1 /> <Filter2 /> </And> </Where> If we want to add a new logical operator, like an OR it’s not just as simple as to append the OR expression like the following example: <Where> <And> <Filter1 /> <Filter2 /> </And> <Or> <Filter3 /> </Or> </Where> But instead the correct query would be: <Where> <Or> <And> <Filter1 /> <Filter2 /> </And> <Filter3 /> </Or> </Where> Notice that the <Filter# /> tags are for explanation purpose only. In order to solve this problem we created a simple component, it has a method that receives the current query (could be an empty query also) and appends the expression you want to that query. Example: string currentQuery = @“ <Where> <And> <Contains><FieldRef Name='Title' /><Value Type='Text'>A</Value></Contains> <Contains><FieldRef Name='Title' /><Value Type='Text'>B</Value></Contains> </And> </Where>”; currentQuery = CAMLQueryBuilder.AppendQuery( currentQuery, “<Contains><FieldRef Name='Title' /><Value Type='Text'>C</Value></Contains>”, CAMLQueryBuilder.Operators.Or); The fist parameter this function receives it’s the actual query, the second it’s the filter you want to add, and the third it’s the logical operator, so basically in this query we want all the items that the title contains: the character A and B or the ones that contains the character C. The result query is: <Where> <Or> <And> <Contains><FieldRef Name='Title' /><Value Type='Text'>A</Value></Contains> <Contains><FieldRef Name='Title' /><Value Type='Text'>B</Value></Contains> </And> <Contains><FieldRef Name='Title' /><Value Type='Text'>C</Value></Contains> </Or> </Where> The code: First of all we have an enumerator inside the CAMLQueryBuilder class that has the two possible Options And, Or. public enum Operators { And, Or } Then we have the main method that’s the one that performs the append of the filters. public static string AppendQuery(string containerQuery, string logicalExpression, Operators logicalOperator){ In this method the first we do is create a new XmlDocument and wrap the current query (that may be empty) with a “<Query></Query>” tag, because the query that comes with the view doesn’t have a root element and the XmlDocument must be a well formatted xml. XmlDocument queryDoc = new XmlDocument(); queryDoc.LoadXml("<Query>" + containerQuery + "</Query>"); The next step is to create a new XmlDocument containing the logical expression that has the filter needed. XmlDocument logicalExpressionDoc = new XmlDocument(); logicalExpressionDoc.LoadXml("<root>" + logicalExpression + "</root>"); In these next four lines we extract the expression from the recently created XmlDocument and create an XmlElement. XmlElement expressionElTemp = (XmlElement)logicalExpressionDoc.SelectSingleNode("/root/*"); XmlElement expressionEl = queryDoc.CreateElement(expressionElTemp.Name); expressionEl.InnerXml = expressionElTemp.InnerXml; Below are the main steps in the component logic. The first “if” checks if the actual query doesn’t contains a “Where” clause. In case there’s no “Where” we add it and append the expression. In case that there’s already a “Where” clause, we get the entire statement that’s inside the “Where” and reorder the query removing and appending elements to form the correct query, that will finally filter the list. XmlElement whereEl; if (!containerQuery.Contains("Where")) { queryDoc.FirstChild.AppendChild(queryDoc.CreateElement("Where")); queryDoc.SelectSingleNode("/Query/Where").AppendChild(expressionEl); } else { whereEl = (XmlElement)queryDoc.SelectSingleNode("/Query/Where"); if (!containerQuery.Contains("<And>") && !containerQuery.Contains("<Or>")) { XmlElement operatorEl = queryDoc.CreateElement(GetName(logicalOperator)); XmlElement existingExpression = (XmlElement)whereEl.SelectSingleNode("/Query/Where/*"); whereEl.RemoveChild(existingExpression); operatorEl.AppendChild(existingExpression); operatorEl.AppendChild(expressionEl); whereEl.AppendChild(operatorEl); } else { XmlElement operatorEl = queryDoc.CreateElement(GetName(logicalOperator)); XmlElement existingOperator = (XmlElement)whereEl.SelectSingleNode("/Query/Where/*"); whereEl.RemoveChild(existingOperator); operatorEl.AppendChild(existingOperator); operatorEl.AppendChild(expressionEl); whereEl.AppendChild(operatorEl); } } return queryDoc.FirstChild.InnerXml } Finally the GetName method converts the Enum option to his string equivalent. private static string GetName(Operators logicalOperator) { return Enum.GetName(typeof(Operators), logicalOperator); } This component helped our team a lot using SharePoint 2007 and modifying the queries, but now in SharePoint 2010; that wouldn’t be needed because of the incorporation of LINQ to SharePoint. This new feature enables the developers to do typed queries against SharePoint lists without the need of writing any CAML code. Normal 0 21 false false false ES-UY X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi; mso-fareast-language:EN-US;} Post written by Sebastian Rodriguez - Portals and Collaboration Solutions @ UruIT

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How to add new filters to CAML queries in SharePoint 2007

- by uruit

Normal 0 21 false false false ES-UY X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} One flexibility SharePoint has is CAML (Collaborative Application Markup Language). CAML it’s a markup language like html that allows developers to do queries against SharePoint lists, it’s syntax is very easy to understand and it allows to add logical conditions like Where, Contains, And, Or, etc, just like a SQL Query. For one of our projects we have the need to do a filter on SharePoint views, the problem here is that the view it’s a list containing a CAML Query with the filters the view may have, so in order to filter the view that’s already been filtered before, we need to append our filters to the existing CAML Query. That’s not a trivial task because the where statement in a CAML Query it’s like this: <Where> <And> <Filter1 /> <Filter2 /> </And> </Where> If we want to add a new logical operator, like an OR it’s not just as simple as to append the OR expression like the following example: <Where> <And> <Filter1 /> <Filter2 /> </And> <Or> <Filter3 /> </Or> </Where> But instead the correct query would be: <Where> <Or> <And> <Filter1 /> <Filter2 /> </And> <Filter3 /> </Or> </Where> Notice that the <Filter# /> tags are for explanation purpose only. In order to solve this problem we created a simple component, it has a method that receives the current query (could be an empty query also) and appends the expression you want to that query. Example: string currentQuery = @“ <Where> <And> <Contains><FieldRef Name='Title' /><Value Type='Text'>A</Value></Contains> <Contains><FieldRef Name='Title' /><Value Type='Text'>B</Value></Contains> </And> </Where>”; currentQuery = CAMLQueryBuilder.AppendQuery( currentQuery, “<Contains><FieldRef Name='Title' /><Value Type='Text'>C</Value></Contains>”, CAMLQueryBuilder.Operators.Or); The fist parameter this function receives it’s the actual query, the second it’s the filter you want to add, and the third it’s the logical operator, so basically in this query we want all the items that the title contains: the character A and B or the ones that contains the character C. The result query is: <Where> <Or> <And> <Contains><FieldRef Name='Title' /><Value Type='Text'>A</Value></Contains> <Contains><FieldRef Name='Title' /><Value Type='Text'>B</Value></Contains> </And> <Contains><FieldRef Name='Title' /><Value Type='Text'>C</Value></Contains> </Or> </Where> The code: First of all we have an enumerator inside the CAMLQueryBuilder class that has the two possible Options And, Or. public enum Operators { And, Or } Then we have the main method that’s the one that performs the append of the filters. public static string AppendQuery(string containerQuery, string logicalExpression, Operators logicalOperator){ In this method the first we do is create a new XmlDocument and wrap the current query (that may be empty) with a “<Query></Query>” tag, because the query that comes with the view doesn’t have a root element and the XmlDocument must be a well formatted xml. XmlDocument queryDoc = new XmlDocument(); queryDoc.LoadXml("<Query>" + containerQuery + "</Query>"); The next step is to create a new XmlDocument containing the logical expression that has the filter needed. XmlDocument logicalExpressionDoc = new XmlDocument(); logicalExpressionDoc.LoadXml("<root>" + logicalExpression + "</root>"); In these next four lines we extract the expression from the recently created XmlDocument and create an XmlElement. XmlElement expressionElTemp = (XmlElement)logicalExpressionDoc.SelectSingleNode("/root/*"); XmlElement expressionEl = queryDoc.CreateElement(expressionElTemp.Name); expressionEl.InnerXml = expressionElTemp.InnerXml; Below are the main steps in the component logic. The first “if” checks if the actual query doesn’t contains a “Where” clause. In case there’s no “Where” we add it and append the expression. In case that there’s already a “Where” clause, we get the entire statement that’s inside the “Where” and reorder the query removing and appending elements to form the correct query, that will finally filter the list. XmlElement whereEl; if (!containerQuery.Contains("Where")) { queryDoc.FirstChild.AppendChild(queryDoc.CreateElement("Where")); queryDoc.SelectSingleNode("/Query/Where").AppendChild(expressionEl); } else { whereEl = (XmlElement)queryDoc.SelectSingleNode("/Query/Where"); if (!containerQuery.Contains("<And>") && !containerQuery.Contains("<Or>")) { XmlElement operatorEl = queryDoc.CreateElement(GetName(logicalOperator)); XmlElement existingExpression = (XmlElement)whereEl.SelectSingleNode("/Query/Where/*"); whereEl.RemoveChild(existingExpression); operatorEl.AppendChild(existingExpression); operatorEl.AppendChild(expressionEl); whereEl.AppendChild(operatorEl); } else { XmlElement operatorEl = queryDoc.CreateElement(GetName(logicalOperator)); XmlElement existingOperator = (XmlElement)whereEl.SelectSingleNode("/Query/Where/*"); whereEl.RemoveChild(existingOperator); operatorEl.AppendChild(existingOperator); operatorEl.AppendChild(expressionEl); whereEl.AppendChild(operatorEl); } } return queryDoc.FirstChild.InnerXml } Finally the GetName method converts the Enum option to his string equivalent. private static string GetName(Operators logicalOperator) { return Enum.GetName(typeof(Operators), logicalOperator); } Normal 0 21 false false false ES-UY X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Normal 0 21 false false false ES-UY X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} This component helped our team a lot using SharePoint 2007 and modifying the queries, but now in SharePoint 2010; that wouldn’t be needed because of the incorporation of LINQ to SharePoint. This new feature enables the developers to do typed queries against SharePoint lists without the need of writing any CAML code. But there is still much development to the 2007 version, so I hope this information is useful for other members. Post Normal 0 21 false false false ES-UY X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi; mso-fareast-language:EN-US;} written by Sebastian Rodriguez - Portals and Collaboration Solutions @ UruIT

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How to implement RSA-CBC?(I have uploaded the request document)

- by tq0fqeu

I don't konw more about cipher, I just want to implement RSA-CBC which maybe mean that the result of RSA encrypt in CBC mode, and I have implemented RSA. any code languages will be ok, java will be appreciated thx I copy the request as follow(maybe has spelling wrong), but that's French I don't konw that: Pr´esentation du mini-projet Le but du mini-projet est d’impl´ementer une version ´el´ementaire du chi?rement d’un bloc par RSA et d’inclure cette primitive dans un systeme de chi?rement par bloc avec chaˆinage de blocs et IV (Initial Vector ) al´eatoire. Dans ce systeme, un texte clair (`a chi?rer) est d´ecompos´e en blocs de taille t (?x´ee par l’utilisa- teur), chaque bloc (clair) est chi?r´e par RSA en un bloc crypt´e de mˆeme taille, puis le cryptogramme associ´e au texte clair initial est obtenu en chaˆinant les blocs crypt´es par la m´ethode CBC (cipher- block chaining) d´ecrite dans le cours (voir poly “Block Ciphers”) Votre programme devra demander a l’utilisateur la taille t, puis, apres g´en´eration des cl´es publique et priv´ee, lui proposer de chi?rer ou d´echi?rer un (court) ?chier ASCII. Il est indispensable que votre programme soit au moins capable de traiter le cas (tres peu r´ealiste du point de vue de la s´ecurit´e) t = 32. Pour les traiter des blocs plus grands, il vous faudra impl´ementer des routines d’arithm´etique multi-pr´ecision ; pour cela, je vous conseille de faire appela des bibliotheques libres comme GMP (GNU Multiprecision Library). Pour la g´en´eration al´eatoire des nombres premiers p et q, vous pouvez ´egalement faire appela des bibliotheques sp´ecialis´ees,a condition de me donner toutes les pr´ecisions n´ecessaires. Vous devez m’envoyer (avant une date qui reste a ?xer)a mon adresse ´electronique ([email protected]) un courriel (sujet : [MI1-crypto] : devoir, corps du message : les noms des ´etudiants ayant travaill´e sur le mini-projet) auquel sera attach´e un dossier compress´e regroupant vos sources C ou Java comment´ees, votre programme ex´ecutable, et un ?chier texte ou PDF donnant toutes les pr´ecisions sur les biblioth`eques utilis´ees, vos choix algorithmiques et d’impl´ementation, et les raisons de ces choix (complexit´e algorithmique, robus- tesse, facilit´e d’impl´ementation, etc.). Vous pouvez travailler en binˆome ou en trinˆome, mais je serai nettement plus exigeant avec les trinˆomes I have uploaded the request at http://uploading.com/files/22emmm6b/enonce_projet.pdf/ thx

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Is there any way to combine transparency and "ajax usability" with HTML templates

- by Sam

I'm using HTML_Template_Flexy in PHP but the question should apply to any language or template library. I am outputting a list of relatively complex objects. In the beginning I just iterated over a list of the objects and called a toHtml method on them. When I was about to have my layout designer look over the template I noticed that it was too opaque and that he would have ended up looking through and/or editing many additional php source files to see what really gets generated by the toHtml method. So I extracted most of the HTML strings in the php classes up to the template which made for one clear file where you can see the whole page structure at once. However this causes problems when you want to add an object to the list using javascript. Then I have to keep the old toHtml method and maintain both the main template and the html strings at the same time, so I can output just the HTML for a new object that should be added to the page. So I'm back to the idea of using smaller templates for the objects that make up the page, but I was wondering if there was some easy way of having my cake and eating it too by having one template that shows the whole page but also the mini-templates for smaller objects on the page. Edit: Yes, updating the page is not a problem at all. My concern is with having both maintainability and transparency of the template files. If I have one single template for the whole page, then I must maintain mini-templates of the objects that are shown on the page. If I just have the mini-templates and include them from the higher-level template it becomes more difficult to look at the top-level html and imagine what the end result will look like.

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building a gl3 app under cygwin

- by user445264

i've got a small opengl 3.2 app that i've been developing on linux using the standard gnu tools (gmake/gcc). the code seems pretty portable--i had no problems running it on osx until i started using gl3 features that the mac mini gl drivers don't seem to support. i've got a bootcamp partition with windows xp on the same mini, and i'd like to run my app there if possible. the windows drivers definitely support gl 3.2, but i'm having trouble linking. this seems like a really common issue, but i haven't found any answers online that address using opengl 1.2 under cygwin. i'm using glew-1.5.5 and linking like so: g++ -o glToy *.o -L/cygdrive/c/Program\ Files/glew-1.5.5/lib -lglew32 -lglut32 -lglu32 -lopengl32 but i get a whole lot of this sort of output: Program.o:/home/Jacob/glToy/Program.cpp:134: undefined reference to `__imp____glewUseProgram' Program.o:/home/Jacob/glToy/Program.cpp:235: undefined reference to `__imp____glewActiveTexture' Program.o:/home/Jacob/glToy/Program.cpp:73: undefined reference to `__imp____glewGetShaderiv' ... any ideas what i'm doing wrong? or perhaps this isn't a workable setup? other ideas for getting this going on the mac mini (2009 version)? thanks!

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How to check if a position inside a std string exists ?? (c++)

- by yox

Hello, i have a long string variable and i want to search in it for specific words and limit text according to thoses words. Say i have the following text : "This amazing new wearable audio solution features a working speaker embedded into the front of the shirt and can play music or sound effects appropriate for any situation. It's just like starring in your own movie" and the words : "solution" , "movie". I want to substract from the big string (like google in results page): "...new wearable audio solution features a working speaker embedded..." and "...just like starring in your own movie" for that i'm using the code : for (std::vector<string>::iterator it = words.begin(); it != words.end(); ++it) { int loc1 = (int)desc.find( *it, 0 ); if( loc1 != string::npos ) { while(desc.at(loc1-i) && i<=80){ i++; from=loc1-i; if(i==80) fromdots=true; } i=0; while(desc.at(loc1+(int)(*it).size()+i) && i<=80){ i++; to=loc1+(int)(*it).size()+i; if(i==80) todots=true; } for(int i=from;i<=to;i++){ if(fromdots) mini+="..."; mini+=desc.at(i); if(todots) mini+="..."; } } but desc.at(loc1-i) causes OutOfRange exception... I don't know how to check if that position exists without causing an exception ! Help please!

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Issues with simple jQuery image gallery with Colorbox plugin

- by Chris

I'm putting together an image gallery for an ecommerce site and wanting to use colorbox to launch larger images. My problem is that image launched in colorbox stays as the first one launched and should reflect the image shown as img#bigpic - the link to the image does appear to be updating correctly. Here's the jQuery I have: $(document).ready(function(){ $("#largeimage").colorbox(); imageSwapper(".thumbnails a"); function imageSwapper(link) { $(link).click(function(){ $("#bigpic").attr("src", this.href); $("#largeimage").attr("href", this.rel); return false; }); }; $("#largeimage").bind('mouseenter mouseleave', function(event) { $("#largeimage span").toggleClass('showspan'); }); }); ...and the HTML <a href="_images/products/large/bpn0001_1.jpg" id="largeimage"><span></span><img src="_images/products/bpn0001_1.jpg" id="bigpic" /></a> <div class="thumbnails"> <ul> <li><a href="_images/products/bpn0001_1.jpg" rel="_images/products/large/bpn0001_1.jpg"><img src="_images/products/mini/bpn0001_1.jpg" /></a></li> <li><a href="_images/products/bpn0001_2.jpg" rel="_images/products/large/bpn0001_2.jpg"><img src="_images/products/mini/bpn0001_2.jpg" /></a></li> <li><a href="_images/products/bpn0001_3.jpg" rel="_images/products/large/bpn0001_3.jpg"><img src="_images/products/mini/bpn0001_3.jpg" /></a></li> </ul> </div> Any help would be much appreciated!

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Windows Azure: Import/Export Hard Drives, VM ACLs, Web Sockets, Remote Debugging, Continuous Delivery, New Relic, Billing Alerts and More

- by ScottGu

Two weeks ago we released a giant set of improvements to Windows Azure, as well as a significant update of the Windows Azure SDK. This morning we released another massive set of enhancements to Windows Azure. Today’s new capabilities include: Storage: Import/Export Hard Disk Drives to your Storage Accounts HDInsight: General Availability of our Hadoop Service in the cloud Virtual Machines: New VM Gallery, ACL support for VIPs Web Sites: WebSocket and Remote Debugging Support Notification Hubs: Segmented customer push notification support with tag expressions TFS & GIT: Continuous Delivery Support for Web Sites + Cloud Services Developer Analytics: New Relic support for Web Sites + Mobile Services Service Bus: Support for partitioned queues and topics Billing: New Billing Alert Service that sends emails notifications when your bill hits a threshold you define All of these improvements are now available to use immediately (note that some features are still in preview). Below are more details about them. Storage: Import/Export Hard Disk Drives to Windows Azure I am excited to announce the preview of our new Windows Azure Import/Export Service! The Windows Azure Import/Export Service enables you to move large amounts of on-premises data into and out of your Windows Azure Storage accounts. It does this by enabling you to securely ship hard disk drives directly to our Windows Azure data centers. Once we receive the drives we’ll automatically transfer the data to or from your Windows Azure Storage account. This enables you to import or export massive amounts of data more quickly and cost effectively (and not be constrained by available network bandwidth). Encrypted Transport Our Import/Export service provides built-in support for BitLocker disk encryption – which enables you to securely encrypt data on the hard drives before you send it, and not have to worry about it being compromised even if the disk is lost/stolen in transit (since the content on the transported hard drives is completely encrypted and you are the only one who has the key to it). The drive preparation tool we are shipping today makes setting up bitlocker encryption on these hard drives easy. How to Import/Export your first Hard Drive of Data You can read our Getting Started Guide to learn more about how to begin using the import/export service. You can create import and export jobs via the Windows Azure Management Portal as well as programmatically using our Server Management APIs. It is really easy to create a new import or export job using the Windows Azure Management Portal. Simply navigate to a Windows Azure storage account, and then click the new Import/Export tab now available within it (note: if you don’t have this tab make sure to sign-up for the Import/Export preview): Then click the “Create Import Job” or “Create Export Job” commands at the bottom of it. This will launch a wizard that easily walks you through the steps required: For more comprehensive information about Import/Export, refer to Windows Azure Storage team blog. You can also send questions and comments to the [email protected] email address. We think you’ll find this new service makes it much easier to move data into and out of Windows Azure, and it will dramatically cut down the network bandwidth required when working on large data migration projects. We hope you like it. HDInsight: 100% Compatible Hadoop Service in the Cloud Last week we announced the general availability release of Windows Azure HDInsight. HDInsight is a 100% compatible Hadoop service that allows you to easily provision and manage Hadoop clusters for big data processing in Windows Azure. This release is now live in production, backed by an enterprise SLA, supported 24x7 by Microsoft Support, and is ready to use for production scenarios. HDInsight allows you to use Apache Hadoop tools, such as Pig and Hive, to process large amounts of data in Windows Azure Blob Storage. Because data is stored in Windows Azure Blob Storage, you can choose to dynamically create Hadoop clusters only when you need them, and then shut them down when they are no longer required (since you pay only for the time the Hadoop cluster instances are running this provides a super cost effective way to use them). You can create Hadoop clusters using either the Windows Azure Management Portal (see below) or using our PowerShell and Cross Platform Command line tools: The import/export hard drive support that came out today is a perfect companion service to use with HDInsight – the combination allows you to easily ingest, process and optionally export a limitless amount of data. We’ve also integrated HDInsight with our Business Intelligence tools, so users can leverage familiar tools like Excel in order to analyze the output of jobs. You can find out more about how to get started with HDInsight here. Virtual Machines: VM Gallery Enhancements Today’s update of Windows Azure brings with it a new Virtual Machine gallery that you can use to create new VMs in the cloud. You can launch the gallery by doing New->Compute->Virtual Machine->From Gallery within the Windows Azure Management Portal: The new Virtual Machine Gallery includes some nice enhancements that make it even easier to use: Search: You can now easily search and filter images using the search box in the top-right of the dialog. For example, simply type “SQL” and we’ll filter to show those images in the gallery that contain that substring. Category Tree-view: Each month we add more built-in VM images to the gallery. You can continue to browse these using the “All” view within the VM Gallery – or now quickly filter them using the category tree-view on the left-hand side of the dialog. For example, by selecting “Oracle” in the tree-view you can now quickly filter to see the official Oracle supplied images. MSDN and Supported checkboxes: With today’s update we are also introducing filters that makes it easy to filter out types of images that you may not be interested in. The first checkbox is MSDN: using this filter you can exclude any image that is not part of the Windows Azure benefits for MSDN subscribers (which have highly discounted pricing - you can learn more about the MSDN pricing here). The second checkbox is Supported: this filter will exclude any image that contains prerelease software, so you can feel confident that the software you choose to deploy is fully supported by Windows Azure and our partners. Sort options: We sort gallery images by what we think customers are most interested in, but sometimes you might want to sort using different views. So we’re providing some additional sort options, like “Newest,” to customize the image list for what suits you best. Pricing information: We now provide additional pricing information about images and options on how to cost effectively run them directly within the VM Gallery. The above improvements make it even easier to use the VM Gallery and quickly create launch and run Virtual Machines in the cloud. Virtual Machines: ACL Support for VIPs A few months ago we exposed the ability to configure Access Control Lists (ACLs) for Virtual Machines using Windows PowerShell cmdlets and our Service Management API. With today’s release, you can now configure VM ACLs using the Windows Azure Management Portal as well. You can now do this by clicking the new Manage ACL command in the Endpoints tab of a virtual machine instance: This will enable you to configure an ordered list of permit and deny rules to scope the traffic that can access your VM’s network endpoints. For example, if you were on a virtual network, you could limit RDP access to a Windows Azure virtual machine to only a few computers attached to your enterprise. Or if you weren’t on a virtual network you could alternatively limit traffic from public IPs that can access your workloads: Here is the default behaviors for ACLs in Windows Azure: By default (i.e. no rules specified), all traffic is permitted. When using only Permit rules, all other traffic is denied. When using only Deny rules, all other traffic is permitted. When there is a combination of Permit and Deny rules, all other traffic is denied. Lastly, remember that configuring endpoints does not automatically configure them within the VM if it also has firewall rules enabled at the OS level. So if you create an endpoint using the Windows Azure Management Portal, Windows PowerShell, or REST API, be sure to also configure your guest VM firewall appropriately as well. Web Sites: Web Sockets Support With today’s release you can now use Web Sockets with Windows Azure Web Sites. This feature enables you to easily integrate real-time communication scenarios within your web based applications, and is available at no extra charge (it even works with the free tier). Higher level programming libraries like SignalR and socket.io are also now supported with it. You can enable Web Sockets support on a web site by navigating to the Configure tab of a Web Site, and by toggling Web Sockets support to “on”: Once Web Sockets is enabled you can start to integrate some really cool scenarios into your web applications. Check out the new SignalR documentation hub on www.asp.net to learn more about some of the awesome scenarios you can do with it. Web Sites: Remote Debugging Support The Windows Azure SDK 2.2 we released two weeks ago introduced remote debugging support for Windows Azure Cloud Services. With today’s Windows Azure release we are extending this remote debugging support to also work with Windows Azure Web Sites. With live, remote debugging support inside of Visual Studio, you are able to have more visibility than ever before into how your code is operating live in Windows Azure. It is now super easy to attach the debugger and quickly see what is going on with your application in the cloud. Remote Debugging of a Windows Azure Web Site using VS 2013 Enabling the remote debugging of a Windows Azure Web Site using VS 2013 is really easy. Start by opening up your web application’s project within Visual Studio. Then navigate to the “Server Explorer” tab within Visual Studio, and click on the deployed web-site you want to debug that is running within Windows Azure using the Windows Azure->Web Sites node in the Server Explorer. Then right-click and choose the “Attach Debugger” option on it: When you do this Visual Studio will remotely attach the debugger to the Web Site running within Windows Azure. The debugger will then stop the web site’s execution when it hits any break points that you have set within your web application’s project inside Visual Studio. For example, below I set a breakpoint on the “ViewBag.Message” assignment statement within the HomeController of the standard ASP.NET MVC project template. When I hit refresh on the “About” page of the web site within the browser, the breakpoint was triggered and I am now able to debug the app remotely using Visual Studio: Note above how we can debug variables (including autos/watchlist/etc), as well as use the Immediate and Command Windows. In the debug session above I used the Immediate Window to explore some of the request object state, as well as to dynamically change the ViewBag.Message property. When we click the the “Continue” button (or press F5) the app will continue execution and the Web Site will render the content back to the browser. This makes it super easy to debug web apps remotely. Tips for Better Debugging To get the best experience while debugging, we recommend publishing your site using the Debug configuration within Visual Studio’s Web Publish dialog. This will ensure that debug symbol information is uploaded to the Web Site which will enable a richer debug experience within Visual Studio. You can find this option on the Web Publish dialog on the Settings tab: When you ultimately deploy/run the application in production we recommend using the “Release” configuration setting – the release configuration is memory optimized and will provide the best production performance. To learn more about diagnosing and debugging Windows Azure Web Sites read our new Troubleshooting Windows Azure Web Sites in Visual Studio guide. Notification Hubs: Segmented Push Notification support with tag expressions In August we announced the General Availability of Windows Azure Notification Hubs - a powerful Mobile Push Notifications service that makes it easy to send high volume push notifications with low latency from any mobile app back-end. Notification hubs can be used with any mobile app back-end (including ones built using our Mobile Services capability) and can also be used with back-ends that run in the cloud as well as on-premises. Beginning with the initial release, Notification Hubs allowed developers to send personalized push notifications to both individual users as well as groups of users by interest, by associating their devices with tags representing the logical target of the notification. For example, by registering all devices of customers interested in a favorite MLB team with a corresponding tag, it is possible to broadcast one message to millions of Boston Red Sox fans and another message to millions of St. Louis Cardinals fans with a single API call respectively. New support for using tag expressions to enable advanced customer segmentation With today’s release we are adding support for even more advanced customer targeting. You can now identify customers that you want to send push notifications to by defining rich tag expressions. With tag expressions, you can now not only broadcast notifications to Boston Red Sox fans, but take that segmenting a step farther and reach more granular segments. This opens up a variety of scenarios, for example: Offers based on multiple preferences—e.g. send a game day vegetarian special to users tagged as both a Boston Red Sox fan AND a vegetarian Push content to multiple segments in a single message—e.g. rain delay information only to users who are tagged as either a Boston Red Sox fan OR a St. Louis Cardinal fan Avoid presenting subsets of a segment with irrelevant content—e.g. season ticket availability reminder to users who are tagged as a Boston Red Sox fan but NOT also a season ticket holder To illustrate with code, consider a restaurant chain app that sends an offer related to a Red Sox vs Cardinals game for users in Boston. Devices can be tagged by your app with location tags (e.g. “Loc:Boston”) and interest tags (e.g. “Follows:RedSox”, “Follows:Cardinals”), and then a notification can be sent by your back-end to “(Follows:RedSox || Follows:Cardinals) && Loc:Boston” in order to deliver an offer to all devices in Boston that follow either the RedSox or the Cardinals. This can be done directly in your server backend send logic using the code below: var notification = new WindowsNotification(messagePayload); hub.SendNotificationAsync(notification, "(Follows:RedSox || Follows:Cardinals) && Loc:Boston"); In your expressions you can use all Boolean operators: AND (&&), OR (||), and NOT (!). Some other cool use cases for tag expressions that are now supported include: Social: To “all my group except me” - group:id && !user:id Events: Touchdown event is sent to everybody following either team or any of the players involved in the action: Followteam:A || Followteam:B || followplayer:1 || followplayer:2 … Hours: Send notifications at specific times. E.g. Tag devices with time zone and when it is 12pm in Seattle send to: GMT8 && follows:thaifood Versions and platforms: Send a reminder to people still using your first version for Android - version:1.0 && platform:Android For help on getting started with Notification Hubs, visit the Notification Hub documentation center. Then download the latest NuGet package (or use the Notification Hubs REST APIs directly) to start sending push notifications using tag expressions. They are really powerful and enable a bunch of great new scenarios. TFS & GIT: Continuous Delivery Support for Web Sites + Cloud Services With today’s Windows Azure release we are making it really easy to enable continuous delivery support with Windows Azure and Team Foundation Services. Team Foundation Services is a cloud based offering from Microsoft that provides integrated source control (with both TFS and Git support), build server, test execution, collaboration tools, and agile planning support. It makes it really easy to setup a team project (complete with automated builds and test runners) in the cloud, and it has really rich integration with Visual Studio. With today’s Windows Azure release it is now really easy to enable continuous delivery support with both TFS and Git based repositories hosted using Team Foundation Services. This enables a workflow where when code is checked in, built successfully on an automated build server, and all tests pass on it – I can automatically have the app deployed on Windows Azure with zero manual intervention or work required. The below screen-shots demonstrate how to quickly setup a continuous delivery workflow to Windows Azure with a Git-based ASP.NET MVC project hosted using Team Foundation Services. Enabling Continuous Delivery to Windows Azure with Team Foundation Services The project I’m going to enable continuous delivery with is a simple ASP.NET MVC project whose source code I’m hosting using Team Foundation Services. I did this by creating a “SimpleContinuousDeploymentTest” repository there using Git – and then used the new built-in Git tooling support within Visual Studio 2013 to push the source code to it. Below is a screen-shot of the Git repository hosted within Team Foundation Services: I can access the repository within Visual Studio 2013 and easily make commits with it (as well as branch, merge and do other tasks). Using VS 2013 I can also setup automated builds to take place in the cloud using Team Foundation Services every time someone checks in code to the repository: The cool thing about this is that I don’t have to buy or rent my own build server – Team Foundation Services automatically maintains its own build server farm and can automatically queue up a build for me (for free) every time someone checks in code using the above settings. This build server (and automated testing) support now works with both TFS and Git based source control repositories. Connecting a Team Foundation Services project to Windows Azure Once I have a source repository hosted in Team Foundation Services with Automated Builds and Testing set up, I can then go even further and set it up so that it will be automatically deployed to Windows Azure when a source code commit is made to the repository (assuming the Build + Tests pass). Enabling this is now really easy. To set this up with a Windows Azure Web Site simply use the New->Compute->Web Site->Custom Create command inside the Windows Azure Management Portal. This will create a dialog like below. I gave the web site a name and then made sure the “Publish from source control” checkbox was selected: When we click next we’ll be prompted for the location of the source repository. We’ll select “Team Foundation Services”: Once we do this we’ll be prompted for our Team Foundation Services account that our source repository is hosted under (in this case my TFS account is “scottguthrie”): When we click the “Authorize Now” button we’ll be prompted to give Windows Azure permissions to connect to the Team Foundation Services account. Once we do this we’ll be prompted to pick the source repository we want to connect to. Starting with today’s Windows Azure release you can now connect to both TFS and Git based source repositories. This new support allows me to connect to the “SimpleContinuousDeploymentTest” respository we created earlier: Clicking the finish button will then create the Web Site with the continuous delivery hooks setup with Team Foundation Services. Now every time someone pushes source control to the repository in Team Foundation Services, it will kick off an automated build, run all of the unit tests in the solution , and if they pass the app will be automatically deployed to our Web Site in Windows Azure. You can monitor the history and status of these automated deployments using the Deployments tab within the Web Site: This enables a really slick continuous delivery workflow, and enables you to build and deploy apps in a really nice way. Developer Analytics: New Relic support for Web Sites + Mobile Services With today’s Windows Azure release we are making it really easy to enable Developer Analytics and Monitoring support with both Windows Azure Web Site and Windows Azure Mobile Services. We are partnering with New Relic, who provide a great dev analytics and app performance monitoring offering, to enable this - and we have updated the Windows Azure Management Portal to make it really easy to configure. Enabling New Relic with a Windows Azure Web Site Enabling New Relic support with a Windows Azure Web Site is now really easy. Simply navigate to the Configure tab of a Web Site and scroll down to the “developer analytics” section that is now within it: Clicking the “add-on” button will display some additional UI. If you don’t already have a New Relic subscription, you can click the “view windows azure store” button to obtain a subscription (note: New Relic has a perpetually free tier so you can enable it even without paying anything): Clicking the “view windows azure store” button will launch the integrated Windows Azure Store experience we have within the Windows Azure Management Portal. You can use this to browse from a variety of great add-on services – including New Relic: Select “New Relic” within the dialog above, then click the next button, and you’ll be able to choose which type of New Relic subscription you wish to purchase. For this demo we’ll simply select the “Free Standard Version” – which does not cost anything and can be used forever: Once we’ve signed-up for our New Relic subscription and added it to our Windows Azure account, we can go back to the Web Site’s configuration tab and choose to use the New Relic add-on with our Windows Azure Web Site. We can do this by simply selecting it from the “add-on” dropdown (it is automatically populated within it once we have a New Relic subscription in our account): Clicking the “Save” button will then cause the Windows Azure Management Portal to automatically populate all of the needed New Relic configuration settings to our Web Site: Deploying the New Relic Agent as part of a Web Site The final step to enable developer analytics using New Relic is to add the New Relic runtime agent to our web app. We can do this within Visual Studio by right-clicking on our web project and selecting the “Manage NuGet Packages” context menu: This will bring up the NuGet package manager. You can search for “New Relic” within it to find the New Relic agent. Note that there is both a 32-bit and 64-bit edition of it – make sure to install the version that matches how your Web Site is running within Windows Azure (note: you can configure your Web Site to run in either 32-bit or 64-bit mode using the Web Site’s “Configuration” tab within the Windows Azure Management Portal): Once we install the NuGet package we are all set to go. We’ll simply re-publish the web site again to Windows Azure and New Relic will now automatically start monitoring the application Monitoring a Web Site using New Relic Now that the application has developer analytics support with New Relic enabled, we can launch the New Relic monitoring portal to start monitoring the health of it. We can do this by clicking on the “Add Ons” tab in the left-hand side of the Windows Azure Management Portal. Then select the New Relic add-on we signed-up for within it. The Windows Azure Management Portal will provide some default information about the add-on when we do this. Clicking the “Manage” button in the tray at the bottom will launch a new browser tab and single-sign us into the New Relic monitoring portal associated with our account: When we do this a new browser tab will launch with the New Relic admin tool loaded within it: We can now see insights into how our app is performing – without having to have written a single line of monitoring code. The New Relic service provides a ton of great built-in monitoring features allowing us to quickly see: Performance times (including browser rendering speed) for the overall site and individual pages. You can optionally set alert thresholds to trigger if the speed does not meet a threshold you specify. Information about where in the world your customers are hitting the site from (and how performance varies by region) Details on the latency performance of external services your web apps are using (for example: SQL, Storage, Twitter, etc) Error information including call stack details for exceptions that have occurred at runtime SQL Server profiling information – including which queries executed against your database and what their performance was And a whole bunch more… The cool thing about New Relic is that you don’t need to write monitoring code within your application to get all of the above reports (plus a lot more). The New Relic agent automatically enables the CLR profiler within applications and automatically captures the information necessary to identify these. This makes it super easy to get started and immediately have a rich developer analytics view for your solutions with very little effort. If you haven’t tried New Relic out yet with Windows Azure I recommend you do so – I think you’ll find it helps you build even better cloud applications. Following the above steps will help you get started and deliver you a really good application monitoring solution in only minutes. Service Bus: Support for partitioned queues and topics With today’s release, we are enabling support within Service Bus for partitioned queues and topics. Enabling partitioning enables you to achieve a higher message throughput and better availability from your queues and topics. Higher message throughput is achieved by implementing multiple message brokers for each partitioned queue and topic. The multiple messaging stores will also provide higher availability. You can create a partitioned queue or topic by simply checking the Enable Partitioning option in the custom create wizard for a Queue or Topic: Read this article to learn more about partitioned queues and topics and how to take advantage of them today. Billing: New Billing Alert Service Today’s Windows Azure update enables a new Billing Alert Service Preview that enables you to get proactive email notifications when your Windows Azure bill goes above a certain monetary threshold that you configure. This makes it easier to manage your bill and avoid potential surprises at the end of the month. With the Billing Alert Service Preview, you can now create email alerts to monitor and manage your monetary credits or your current bill total. To set up an alert first sign-up for the free Billing Alert Service Preview. Then visit the account management page, click on a subscription you have setup, and then navigate to the new Alerts tab that is available: The alerts tab allows you to setup email alerts that will be sent automatically once a certain threshold is hit. For example, by clicking the “add alert” button above I can setup a rule to send myself email anytime my Windows Azure bill goes above $100 for the month: The Billing Alert Service will evolve to support additional aspects of your bill as well as support multiple forms of alerts such as SMS. Try out the new Billing Alert Service Preview today and give us feedback. Summary Today’s Windows Azure release enables a ton of great new scenarios, and makes building applications hosted in the cloud even easier. If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using all of the above features today. Then visit the Windows Azure Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with it. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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Win7 playback of dvr-ms files stutters

- by Jim Lynn

I've just had to install Windows 7 on my Media Center machine because my Vista installation had a faulty drive. I've got the latest drivers that I can find - Intel 945GM integrated Graphics, Realtek audio drivers. Things are working OK with one exception. Playback of old recordings, from dvr-ms format files, is choppy. The picture freezes for a fraction of a second, then quickly catches up. The sound is uninterrupted and doesn't pause. These freezes happen once every 5 seconds or so. It's very regular. Playback of Live TV from the digital tuner is perfectly smooth. DVD playback is perfectly smooth. As an experiment, I used the MPEG editing package VideoReDo to create a small test file in three different formats. This program takes the raw MPEG streams and repackages them into the desired container. I took the same clip and created three files in three formats: dvr-ms (Microsoft's old recorded TV format); mpg (standard MPEG); and ts (raw MPEG transport stream of the kind often produced by PVRs). When these three files are played back under Windows 7, the mpg and ts files play smoothly, but the dvr-ms file stutters. The last piece of data I have is that two other Windows 7 machines can play back dvr-ms files smoothly with no stuttering. One is a netbook, with less grunt than the media centre. So there must be something specific about my Media Center machine that's causing the problem. Does anyone have any idea where I can look now? I don't know much about AV software, codecs, filter graphs etc. but I suspect that's where the problem lies. Rendering the video isn't the problem, but extracting the streams is. How would I go about diagnosing the problem? Edited to add: I just used the GraphStudio tool to look at the filter graph on the offending PC. The filter graph it uses by default for dvr-ms looks identical to the other machines, and, interestingly, when I play the files using GraphStudio they run smoothly. Under Windows Media Player and Windows Media Center they stutter. I'd like to see the filter graph for WMP but GraphStudio won't show it. It looks like WMP and WMC are using a different decoding path to GraphStudio. Edited again to add: Today I purchased a new HDTV. The same Media Center driving the TV at 1080p is now playing back the old Recorded TV files smoothly, without stuttering. So whatever the cause of the original problem, using a different resolution seems to have removed the problem. It might also explain why nobody else has had this problem. I doubt many people use Media Centre with a 14in portable TV.

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Organize mail with Evolution & Gmail IMAP

- by Phuong Nguyen

With thunderbird & Gmail POP, things are very easy. I can create filter that will automatically move the mail to the appropriate sub-folder. However, with evolution & Gmail IMAP, I find things very messy. I cannot figure out how to create filter that will automatically move my email to a sub folder. Please advice. Thanks

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Windows 7 playback of dvr-Microsoft files stutters

- by Jim Lynn

I've just had to install Windows 7 on my Media Center machine because my Vista installation had a faulty drive. I've got the latest drivers that I can find - Intel 945GM integrated Graphics, Realtek audio drivers. Things are working OK with one exception. Playback of old recordings, from dvr-Microsoft format files, is choppy. The picture freezes for a fraction of a second, then quickly catches up. The sound is uninterrupted and doesn't pause. These freezes happen once every 5 seconds or so. It's very regular. Playback of Live TV from the digital tuner is perfectly smooth. DVD playback is perfectly smooth. As an experiment, I used the MPEG editing package VideoReDo to create a small test file in three different formats. This program takes the raw MPEG streams and repackages them into the desired container. I took the same clip and created three files in three formats: dvr-Microsoft (Microsoft's old recorded TV format); mpg (standard MPEG); and ts (raw MPEG transport stream of the kind often produced by PVRs). When these three files are played back under Windows 7, the mpg and ts files play smoothly, but the dvr-Microsoft file stutters. The last piece of data I have is that two other Windows 7 machines can play back dvr-Microsoft files smoothly with no stuttering. One is a netbook, with less grunt than the media centre. So there must be something specific about my Media Center machine that's causing the problem. Does anyone have any idea where I can look now? I don't know much about AV software, codecs, filter graphs etc. but I suspect that's where the problem lies. Rendering the video isn't the problem, but extracting the streams is. How would I go about diagnosing the problem? Edited to add: I just used the GraphStudio tool to look at the filter graph on the offending PC. The filter graph it uses by default for dvr-Microsoft looks identical to the other machines, and, interestingly, when I play the files using GraphStudio they run smoothly. Under Windows Media Player and Windows Media Center they stutter. I'd like to see the filter graph for Windows Media Player but GraphStudio won't show it. It looks like Windows Media Player and WMC are using a different decoding path to GraphStudio. Edited again to add: Today I purchased a new HDTV. The same Media Center driving the TV at 1080p is now playing back the old Recorded TV files smoothly, without stuttering. So whatever the cause of the original problem, using a different resolution seems to have removed the problem. It might also explain why nobody else has had this problem. I doubt many people use Media Centre with a 14in portable TV.

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Implement DNS filtering

- by Michele

I was wondering what would be the best way to implement DNS filterting. The scenario is this: we need to setup two custom DNS servers to use on our company's computers so that we can filter DNS requests for certain domains and return custom IPs and forward other requests to our ISPs DNS servers. We were thinking about using either PowerDNS or MyDNS because they support MySQL out of the box and we need to change the list of domains to filter quite often. Thanks a lot for your help! :)

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Dynamic IP and spam filtering

- by pipalia

Is it possible to filter incoming spam when the mail server is hosted on a dynamic IP. Static IP is not an option at the moment. Outgoing mail is relayed through a third party service which works great, but I am not sure how I could filter incoming mail within Domino. Has anyone figured out how to do achieve this? Or I am limited to what Domino has to offer to control spam and doing it manually by creating mail rules?

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BUILDROOT files during RPM generation

- by khmarbaise

Currently i have the following spec file to create a RPM. The spec file is generated by maven plugin to produce a RPM out of it. The question is: will i find files which are mentioned in the spec file after the rpm generation inside the BUILDROOT/SPECS/SOURCES/SRPMS structure? %define _unpackaged_files_terminate_build 0 Name: rpm-1 Version: 1.0 Release: 1 Summary: rpm-1 License: 2009 my org Distribution: My App Vendor: my org URL: www.my.org Group: Application/Collectors Packager: my org Provides: project Requires: /bin/sh Requires: jre >= 1.5 Requires: BASE_PACKAGE PreReq: dependency Obsoletes: project autoprov: yes autoreq: yes BuildRoot: /home/build/.jenkins/jobs/rpm-maven-plugin/workspace/target/it/rpm-1/target/rpm/rpm-1/buildroot %description %install if [ -e $RPM_BUILD_ROOT ]; then mv /home/build/.jenkins/jobs/rpm-maven-plugin/workspace/target/it/rpm-1/target/rpm/rpm-1/tmp-buildroot/* $RPM_BUILD_ROOT else mv /home/build/.jenkins/jobs/rpm-maven-plugin/workspace/target/it/rpm-1/target/rpm/rpm-1/tmp-buildroot $RPM_BUILD_ROOT fi ln -s /usr/myusr/app $RPM_BUILD_ROOT/usr/myusr/app2 ln -s /tmp/myapp/somefile $RPM_BUILD_ROOT/tmp/myapp/somefile2 ln -s name.sh $RPM_BUILD_ROOT/usr/myusr/app/bin/oldname.sh %files %defattr(-,myuser,mygroup,-) %dir "/usr/myusr/app" "/usr/myusr/app2" "/tmp/myapp/somefile" "/tmp/myapp/somefile2" "/usr/myusr/app/lib" %attr(755,myuser,mygroup) "/usr/myusr/app/bin/start.sh" %attr(755,myuser,mygroup) "/usr/myusr/app/bin/filter-version.txt" %attr(755,myuser,mygroup) "/usr/myusr/app/bin/name.sh" %attr(755,myuser,mygroup) "/usr/myusr/app/bin/name-Linux.sh" %attr(755,myuser,mygroup) "/usr/myusr/app/bin/filter.txt" %attr(755,myuser,mygroup) "/usr/myusr/app/bin/oldname.sh" %dir "/usr/myusr/app/conf" %config "/usr/myusr/app/conf/log4j.xml" "/usr/myusr/app/conf/log4j.xml.deliver" %prep echo "hello from prepare" %pre -p /bin/sh #!/bin/sh if [ -s "/etc/init.d/myapp" ] then /etc/init.d/myapp stop rm /etc/init.d/myapp fi %post #!/bin/sh #create soft link script to services directory ln -s /usr/myusr/app/bin/start.sh /etc/init.d/myapp chmod 555 /etc/init.d/myapp %preun #!/bin/sh #the argument being passed in indicates how many versions will exist #during an upgrade, this value will be 1, in which case we do not want to stop #the service since the new version will be running once this script is called #during an uninstall, the value will be 0, in which case we do want to stop #the service and remove the /etc/init.d script. if [ "$1" = "0" ] then if [ -s "/etc/init.d/myapp" ] then /etc/init.d/myapp stop rm /etc/init.d/myapp fi fi; %triggerin -- dependency, dependency1 echo "hello from install" %changelog * Tue May 23 2000 Vincent Danen <[email protected]> 0.27.2-2mdk -update BuildPreReq to include rep-gtk and rep-gtkgnome * Thu May 11 2000 Vincent Danen <[email protected]> 0.27.2-1mdk -0.27.2 * Thu May 11 2000 Vincent Danen <[email protected]> 0.27.1-2mdk -added BuildPreReq -change name from Sawmill to Sawfish The problem i found is that the files (filter.txt in particular) after the generation process on a Ubuntu system but not on SuSE system. Which might be caused by different rpm versions ? Currently we have an integration test which fails based on the non existing of the file (filter.txt under a buildroot folder?)

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Capturing same interface with tshark with same or different capture filters

- by Pankaj Goyal

I am in stuck in a situation where an interface will be captured more than one time. Like :- $ tshark -i rpcap://1.1.1.1/lo -f "ip proto 1" -i rpcap://1.1.1.1/lo -f "ip proto 132" or (same filter) $ tshark -i rpcap://1.1.1.1/lo -f "ip proto 1" -i rpcap://1.1.1.1/lo -f "ip proto 1" what will happen in both the cases ? In first case, will the capture filter gets OR'ed or AND'ed ?? In second case, will the same packets be captured two times ?

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