Oman Developers

SharePoint List data with SQL Server Reporting Services

2009-05-15T11:07:00.010+04:00

SharePoint is becoming more populler every day, companies from around the world are starting using it as main intranet site of their headoffice.

since sharepoint provide (as promissed by microsoft) the highest compatibility with Microsoft Office , exchange server, active directory and combine them all into a intranet portal.

many companies started using this software either publishing site ( where anouncements & news could be easily shared with employees) , or team sites ( to manage work of small teams and assigning tasks to them) , or document center, or other many things.

Having huge amount of requirments of bespoke (custom) softwares that fullfill working enviroments needs developer having access to shareponit started using the lists & content types capabilities to create small & medium custom applications based on sharepoint lists

(well if that is good or bad is another issue but i think these two links clearify them link1 , link2 ).

Any how having these applications raise the need for reporting tool to genirated reports depending on the data entered in sharepoint lists/conent types, and for my suprise Microsoft's best reporting tool SSRS (SQL Server Reporting Services) don't have a nice way to provide this functionality. This thing made me search for ways of doing this and here are my findings:

eventhough SSRS do not connect in a straigh forward way to SQL server we can have workarounds :

1- Connecting to SharePoint web service out put XML, the problem here is it sometimes work and sometimes don't, and also i couldn't do inner join between different lists may be it is there but it will be trouble to do it.

2- Creating a link table in MS Access 2007 that links to sharepoint lists (amazingly this is very easy ), and then connect to the MS ACCESS link tables from SSRS 2005 : this will work but i am kind of scared of having ACCESS in the middle i always want to avoid using access (do you suggest this way please write comments)

3- Connecting to the views provided in the sharepoints backend database (there is a view for all lists and another view for all list items) : here column names will be troublsome to create the query the clounm names are like (float1,float2,...,date1,date2,date3,....) , also i am not sure if it is good thing to make SSRS talk directly to sharepoints backend database views

well these are the work arounds i could find for using SSRS as a reporting tool for SharePoint , but if you are willing to invest a bit to make this thing possible there are some plug-ins that provide this functionality such as Enesys RS Data Extension but again not sure how good they are in performance and other stuff.

hope this post will help you if you are dealing with SharePoint , feel free to discuss any thing and leave comments.

update 16/5/2009
4- the fourth way is to map the list directly to a database (Well i didn't wrote that because two things first it is redundancy, second it is hard to keep updating both the database and sharepoint lists when-ever any change happens to any record, but Mr. Allan seems to have a great solution for that in the comments which is "SLAM " (http://slam.codeplex.com)

SLAM allows you to easily maintain SharePoint data by hooking up against lists (or content types!) and having the data automatically synchronized with SQL server in real time. Best of all, it converts SharePoint look-ups to associations (with any multiplicity, one to one, one to many, many to many) that you can easily built queries against.

Thanks a for letting us know about this tool
update 21/5/2009 :
Well this time i tried the 2nd way on production (it works very well while it is on my machine in visual studio) but if we need to add it to the reporting services server it didn't work on my enviroment not sure if it works on other enviroments

New Feed

2009-01-14T02:11:00.006+04:00

Hello all,

We have just changed the way rss feeds are made for Omandev. Until know we had two feeds Arabic feed and an English feed, we noticed people do subscribe to only one of them and expect to get both, well the problem is that omandev was initially two blogs :)

Now i have created a feedburner feed which is taking from yahoo pipes that combine both Arabic and English feed. the feed is on http://feeds.feedburner.com/OmanDevelopers
currently trying it out (using this post ) and hope it will provide you better feeds, i think the option of having only english or only arabic posts should be still available thats why i am not cancelling them, but updated them to feedburner too
English at http://feeds.feedburner.com/omandevEn
Arabic at

Why Python

2009-01-06T11:33:00.001+04:00

Why Python

I am used to programe in Java at home and on almost all my personal projects , in my work place i am a C# guy (well in work place they only use .NET :( ) and this is because in college days all we have been exposed to were OO languages like C++, Java, .NET and that what we are using till now.

As scripting languages, developers around here are far away from them, may be the only scripting language used heavily in this side of the world is PHP, and the most powerfull JavaScript and thats it. I decieded that i want to learn a new programming language and it has to be a scripting language this time, i was looking for Ruby,pearl & python to learn one of them. Finally my choice was python and thats why i hope i will be able to put small tips and tricks of what ever i learn in python here on this blog.

In this blog i am just talking about why i am intrested in learning python , well first since i am used to java and C# and they are statically typed languages I don't experiance a lot the beauty of dynamically typed language where i dont have to declare variables or specify its type, also in dynamically typed language i will be able to use a variable as integer and after few lines i will use it as string , then again i can use it as an object of my class called money, or what ever else very easily.Another benifit of dynamic typing is that i can have a set, an array that contain compeletly different types of variable that while retriving them i dont have to cast them to their types which really simplifies a lot of rutine work

Other than being dynamically typed language python is very compact compared to java & C#, so typing is less, what ever you type in python will be used to solve your problem not the language problems as in the big OO languages

lets say i want to create a class constractor that meight take a variable or two variable, or three variables.

do that in java

do that in python

public class MyclassName
{

public MyclassName(String var1)
  {
      this(var1, 1);
  }

  //--------- constructor #2 -------------
  public MyclassName(String var1, int var2)
  {
     this(var1, var2, "single");
  }

  //--------- constructor #3 -------------
  public MyclassName(String var1,
         int var2,
         String var3)
  {
     this.att1= var1;
     this.att2= var2;
     this.att3= var3;
  }

class MyclassName():

  def __init__(self,
      var1, var2=1, var3="single"):
  
      self.att1= var1
       self.att2= var2
      self.att3= var3

to open file in java	to open file in python
BufferedReader br= new BufferedReader( new FileReader(filename));	fileName = open(filename)

so i think if i master python or any similler language (Ruby, pearl) i will have to type less and be able to concentrate more on solving the problems i am working on.

Another new thing in this kind of language is they support functions as first class entity in the language, so functions could be stored in data structured and passed as arguments to other functions (not as pointers like in C++) Also functions could be created dynamically while the programe is running which i am sure will be very usefull, i have never though of using a dynamically created functions since none of my programe worlds supported that before. if you are new to this like me and need example check this

well i guess after all of these reasons it still didnt come to python, cause these reasons just show i want to learn an scripting language with the mentioned properties that could be any of Perl, Python, PHP, Lua, Tcl/Tk, ECMAScript (JavaScript, ActionScript), Ruby, Io, Scala, or Nemerle. I guess then it is true i wanted to learn python just because it is python :)
may be another reason is it is very known, supported heavily by Google, in their app engine !

to be honest i was thinking about ruby too. but after some search i found some information that made me like python more that are many blogs says the error messages in ruby compiler are not very much informative compared to python. Another reason is there is a lot of ways of doing the same thing in ruby which is good but can make a new language somewhat confusing. Also the fact that GUI libraries for Ruby they are very limited and in python there are a lot of libraries + default librari that comes with python itself

so i prefered python .
so hope fully i will be able to put some small python tips or tutorials as soon as possible.

sql Tip 3: getting DB schema in MYSQL

2009-01-05T00:13:00.004+04:00

long time since my last post here, well i was bit busy , hopefully i will not stop bloging for long times again.

for this blog the title actually shouldn't be SQL tip 3 , it should be MYSQL tip 3, since it is talking about something specific to MYSQL, but since i had two (very old) posts about sql tips SQL tip1 SQL tip2 ,well they were geniral but were demonistrated in MYSQL too.

back to the topic. i needed to know how to get the database schema for a MYSQL DB in one of my projects and knowing the how was not stright forward so thats why i think it will be good and usefull tip.

A very usefull information in this topic is that information on database tables is stored in a system table called "information_schema.tables ".However a better information is writting the query "select * FROM information_schema.tables " will get you some of the tables that you never had created (system tables) + your tables. to exclude system tables you have to add a where condition

"select * FROM information_schema.tables where version='10'" this will show only the tables you have created. version is not related to the version of your MYSQL, but older versions of MYSQL you have to write "select * FROM information_schema.tables where version='9'".Another simpller way you can know the table information without taking care of table version is to query based on the database name "select * FROM information_schema.tables where table_schema ='DB_Name'"

ok we have the table information but still we will need column information of these tables. These information could be extracted from another system table called information_schema.`COLUMNS`

a very simple query could give the most important information of your table's columns is
"SELECT column_name,data_type,column_key FROM information_schema.`COLUMNS` WHERE table_schema='DB_Name' and table_name = 'your_table_name';"

hope this very simple tip will be helpful to the readers as an extra knowledge or for those who come to this page searching through google hope this information will aid you

Texture Image retrieval

2008-11-14T23:38:00.004+04:00

Texture retrieval is the process of retrieving image content based on texture similarity. This may not seem very useful, since we are not using color content. On the other hand, the ability to match on texture similarity can often be useful in distinguishing between areas of images with similar color (such as sky and the sea). Several techniques have been used to measure texture similarity, well known techniques rely on comparing values calculated from query and stored images. From the values, it is possible to calculate measures of image texture such as the degree of contrast,coarseness, directionality and regularity or periodicity, directionality and randomness.
Different filters such as prewitt, Sobel, Roberts. We use the Sobel filter which is discussed later in the report. Texture queries can be formulated in a similar manner to color queries, by selecting examples of desired textures from a palette, or by supplying an example query image. The system then retrieves images with texture measures most similar in value to the query.

How to change the Size of a Legend in Crystal Report and MS Access

2008-11-14T23:36:00.000+04:00

Steps on how to change a legend font size on Crystal Reports and text on MS ACCESS pivot charts.

Well as easy as it may seem, this sometimes proves to be a tedious task to look for. Simply because the legends functionality are not provided on the legend display area. Well enough talk and lets learn how to do that in a few steps

Obviously you are creating a graph (chart of some kind),
* Right click on the Chart Area,
* Chart Expert
* Text Tab
* On the Format Area choose Legend,
* Click the Font button
* Change the font to the your desired display

For MS ACCESS
changing the legend size does not seem to be a problem but the legend caption is.

The Simplest way to change/remove the "Sum of..." text, or any text, in a LEGEND PivotChart.

* Switch from PivotChart View to PivotTable View
* Click once to highlight the field name that reads "Sum of..."
* Go to properties
* Select the "caption" tab
* On the title "caption" type in the new text you would like
* Change the view to pivot chart

Wavelet and its applications

2008-11-14T21:47:00.005+04:00

Comparing images is impractical and inefficient for large scale image retrieval. Wavelet transformation is a toll for processing images at multiple resolutions. In this project we use the discrete wavelet transform (DWT). The wavelet toll is an efficient, highly intuitive frame work for representation and storage of images. This tool provides insights into the image's spatial and frequency characteristics.

The wavelet transform is a tool is used for analyzing functions at different levels of detail. The DWT has a property of analyzing images at multiple resolutions. It is similar to the Fourier transform, but encodes both frequency and spatial information.

Wavelet tools can be used in a wide range of research on images such as in identifying pure frequency, de-noising, and image compression naming a few. In the project, wavelet transformation is used for decomposing images for retrieval of signature content (CSGV).

By saving the few largest wavelet coefficients for an image, it is possible to recover a fairly accurate representation of the image.

The Wavelet Transform


20 coeffs	100 coeffs	400 coeffs	Original (16,000 coeffs)

image source

The example shown above is used for image compression the third image from the left would require 3% of the of disk space as compared to the original image. In our project, we decompose upto 3 levels which results in a significant “signature content” and because the content is small enough, it allows a higher higher on searching for images in a large scale image database.

The Wavelet Toolbox (a collection of Math Works function of wavelet analysis) which is used in the implementation phase to decompose images to the user desired level.

Ipv4 vs. Ipv6

2008-11-07T00:04:00.005+04:00

Although the Internet Protocol version 4 (Ipv4) is the fourth revision in the development of the Internet Protocol, it was the only one which was deployed successfully to be used. The IPv4 is at the foundation of standards-based inter-networking methods of the Internet, and is still by far the most widely deployed Internet Layer protocol. Most the currently used internet communication uses IPv4. It is almost 20 years old.

IPv4 addresses are written in dot-decimal notation, which consists of the four octets of the address expressed in decimal and separated by periods. Example of an IPv4 address 192.0.2.10. The IPv4 uses a 32 bit addressing that is 4 octects 8+8+8+8 = 32 and 2^32 (4,294,967,296 unique addresses) .

Ipv4 has four different class types, the class types are A, B, C, and D. The ipv4 uses a subnet mask due to the larger growing number of computers. The subnet mask could also represent a way in understanding the network address and the number of hosts that can be allowed in the network minus two for the network address and the broadcast address.

IPv4 Header

+	Bits 0–3	4–7	8–15	16–18	19–31
0	Version	Header length	Type of Service	Total Length
32	Identification			Flags	Fragment Offset
64	Time to Live		Protocol	Header Checksum
96	Source Address
128	Destination Address
160	Options
160 or 192+	Data

Ipv6 is the next Internet Protocol, an advancement to the currently existing Ipv4. Pv6 is short for "Internet Protocol Version 6". IPv6 is the "next generation" protocol designed by the IETF to replace the current version Internet Protocol, IP Version 4 ("IPv4").

IPv6 has a large number of rooms available for the internet users. Compared to the Ipv4 which allows for only 4,294,967,296 unique addresses, the Ipv6 that uses a 128-bit system will hold 340-undecillion (thats 340 with 11 more zeros) this number is so vast that when one is born and starts counting continuously, he/she would need approximately 1105389096962130669995 millenniums to reach that number(or lets just say the number is really huge).

An example of Ipv6 is:
212. 121. 231. 235. 207. 242. 131. 235. 207. 127. 131. 235. 200. 142. 131. 215.

IPv6 is expected to gradually replace IPv4, with the two coexisting for a number of years during a transition period.

IPv6 Header

+	Bits 0–3	4–7	8–11	12-15	16–23	24–31
0	Version	Traffic Class		Flow Label
32	Payload Length				Next Header	Hop Limit
64	Source Address
96
128
160
192	Destination Address
224
256
288

Version - version 6 (4-bit IP version).
Traffic class - packet priority (8-bits). Priority values subdivide into ranges: traffic where the source provides congestion control and non-congestion control traffic.
Flow label - QoS management (20 bits). Originally created for giving real-time applications special service, but currently unused.
Payload length - payload length in bytes (16 bits). When cleared to zero, the option is a "Jumbo payload" (hop-by-hop).
Next header - Specifies the next encapsulated protocol. The values are compatible with those specified for the IPv4 protocol field (8 bits).
Hop limit - replaces the time to live field of IPv4 (8 bits) routing hop count.
Source and destination addresses - 128 bits each.

Why use IPv6?

Larger Address Space: address filed in IPv6 are 16 bytes long while the address filed of IPv4 is only 4 bytes in length. Due to the current development of hand gadgets and "everything connected" there is a need for a large number of unique addresses which in a while IPv4 will not be able to withhold.
Better header format: IPv6 header is lighter. the header is designed to speed up the routing process. In header of IPv6 options are separated from the base header. Options are inserted into base header only when required by the upper-layer data.
Provision for extension: IPv6 has been designed in a way that a protocol can be extended easily to meet the requirements of emerging technologies or new applications.
Resource Allocation support in IPv6: IPv6 provides a mechanism called Flow Label for resource allocation. Flow label enables source to send request for the special handling of a packet. This mechanism is really helpful in real-time audio and video transmission.

sharepoint SPListItem

2008-11-06T12:15:00.009+04:00

Shareponit SPListItem

Hello there, well to be honest I am not a fan of Microsoft technologies well any how I cannot live without my XP these days (one of the best things the big M have done), but SharePoint is completely different story. It has a lot of potentials and abilities and once I saw the first time I said to myself this will finish all of my working place's problems. But I had a feeling something will be wrong in it. To be honest I have faced a lot of challenges many times I was surprised with what SharePoint provides and many many more times I was disappointed with its limitations. But thanks to friends and fellow bloggers who helped a lot out of the problems.

This time I was facing a very strange problem that I am even not sure if it is SharePoint problems or it is just our environment, I was not able to find any similar problem on the net so thought I could document it here.

SharePoint API provides a great API to access list items , search them, add, delete, and update them that save you the effort of reading list information from SharePoint’s database directly, and it is provided in a very nice way. But the updating I have had some strange issue with that I have solved now, but I couldn’t understand why I got it in the first place.

Here I will give you the basics of accessing items from SharePoint Lists and show the issue

To access a list is very simple make a variable and assign it the url where you see the list in the sharepoint

string strDashListRoot = "http://[Servername]/[subsite/subsite]/Lists/[list name]/AllItems.aspx";// just copy past the link form your browser

Then from the link you can get the site and website and the list easily

using (SPSite site = new SPSite(strDashListRoot))
{

using (SPWeb web = site.OpenWeb())
{
SPList list = web.Lists["listname"]; // do not forget to close the brakets after your code is done } }

Now here you can access the list items easily

String information=Lists.items[2][“fieldname”].toString(); // simply put the index of the item you need and then the field name that you want to show

Now the main thing here is when we want to change field of the list item we could do easily this

Lists.items[2][“fieldname”]= “myvalues”;

Lists.items[2].Update();

but that didn’t worked in our environment while doing the folling code worked !!!

SPListItem item = Lists.items[2];

item[“fieldname”]= “myvalues”;

item.Update();

Well may be that is something related to our environment but hope through this simple blog you know how to access and edit SPList items.

Ubuntu 8.10 is now available for download

2008-10-31T01:11:00.004+04:00

Ubuntu is a free operating system based on linux. Ubuntu's goals include providing an up-to-date, stable operating system for the average user, with a strong focus on usability and ease of installation and here is there latest version.

Linux fans, Ubuntu 8.10 is now available for download. The operating system is right on schedule. Has promises on its peformances gains, a new connection manager with 3G support and the ability to install from USB devices. This latest release brings the open source together on a single platform with better features and promises free updates up to 18 months.

Some of the features

Ubuntu comes with Mozilla's Firefox 3 as the default browser. Faster, safer and themed browsing for users.

Word Processing
Spreadsheets and
presentations can all be delivered through Open Office and they completely integrate with the proprietary office applications out there. The big difference is that they are free :)

Download Ubuntu

Optical Character Recognisition

2008-10-28T23:36:00.012+04:00

Optical character recognition (OCR) is a process of translating images by obtaining or capturing its content and translating them to corresponding alphanumeric or other characters.. The main characteristic of OCR are patterns. From patterns, a picture can be translated to a digital content.

On the 20 century, this technology boomed because of the necessity factor. There were so many files stored where making use of the content was very difficult due to the time consumed on searching for the needed content. The ability to scan a page and transform it to digital characters as ASCII was regarded as a powerful technique. These files could then be stored in databases where gigabytes could represent rooms of papers stored.

The OCR technique has evolved and so many researches have been made on the subject improving the conversion in matters of accuracy and performance.

OCR does not take the technique for transforming office paper work to digital information only, there are so many other uses of the technique like radar systems transforming car plate numbers to meaningful digital information, exam correction method, signature recognition and so on.

Well the drawbacks of OCR technology is that it can not recognize everything for example the image

One of an example where such technology is being used and researched is The windows 7 tablet PC. Windows 7 tablet PC uses this technology and with the help of GottaBeMobile.com more improvements are being done to the tablet.

Ericsson Volvo Ocean race

2008-10-24T18:21:00.003+04:00

This is one of the interesting things got to see on GTEX Dubai. A boat Controlled By a remote seems such a normal idea. Well Let me be more specific

The boat is controlled by a remote which any human can use. The remote does not control the boat directly but controlls the fans on the board which blows the boat in different directions which one would desire.

This is actually an idea of application development, have enough modules to do the dirty work.

Funny computer Acronyms

2008-09-06T18:16:00.000+04:00

Funny computer Acronyms

Sometimes computer geeks have time for fun. Those are some of funny acronyms about computer world. In fact those acronyms are expressing the original feelings of their founders. They could be considered as a result of some companies policies. I hope you enjoy them.

Here we go:

-Acronym
Annoying Copy Resemble Original Yankee Methods

-APPLE
Arrogance Produces Profit-Losing Entity

-CA
Constant Acquisition

-CD-ROM
Consumer Device, Rendered Obsolete in Months

-COBOL
Completely Obsolete Business Oriented Language

-DEC
Do Expect Cuts

-DOS
Defunct Operating System

-IBM
I Blame Microsoft

-ISDN
It Still Does Nothing

-LISP
Lots of Insipid and Stupid Parentheses

-MACINTOSH
Most Applications Crash, If Not, the Operating System Hangs

-MICROSOFT
Most Intelligent Customers Realize Our Software Only Fools Teenagers

-MIPS
Meaningless Indication of Processor Speed

-OS/2
Obsolete Soon, Too

-PCMCIA
People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms

-PnP
Plug and Pray

-SCSI
System Can't See It

-VISTA
Very Inconsistent System Try Another

-Windows
Will Install Needless Data on Whole System

-WYSIWYMGIYRRLAAGW
What You See Is What You Might Get If You're Really, Really Lucky and All Goes Well

My favorite plug-in for Firefox

2008-09-06T18:01:00.001+04:00

My favorite plug-in for Firefox

Firefox is one of best browsers used by human being. In the third version, it is more and more elegant and powerful. Today Firefox has more than 19% of the browser users. It is not just that Firefox is stable, fast, free, secure, elegant, light, portable, powerful, etc, what make it this famous. But it is also the plug-in features that can be added to the browser in easy way.

I am here not to advertise Firefox, since nobody pays me for such thing. I am here to share with all of you what I believe to be best experience of plug-in for normal users like me.

1. DownThemAll!
It is one of the most powerful download mangers you may encounter. It will speed your downloading rate. Since it is embedded in the browser itself, it will make you feel more comfortable than using an external downloading manger. Adding to that it can (sometimes) trick site that prevent downloading using download managers.

2. Fast Video Download
Very good tool for downloading embedded video. It is simple as a click.

3. Undo Closed Tabs Button
Users always close the wrong tab in the wrong time. Sometimes this lead for losing a link forever and sometime it does not. This tool memorizes the closed tabs in case you want to undo your close action. You must use install it before you need it.

4. FoxyProxy
It is the best tool for managing your proxy list. Just give it the list and leave the rest for it.

5. Simple RSS Reader
It is as simple as the name says. It is simple, fast and small. Just a small toolbar and you have the world news on it. It is a good solution for who attracted to the titles more than the topic itself.

Finally I hope all of you nice surfing on the net.

JavaScript, the language for them all!! (Jquery with gridview in asp.net 2.0)

2008-09-04T11:13:00.001+04:00

Once a long time ago (in 80s) I think Assembly was considered the savior for when ever some one need to do some dirty work with their C or whatever language code and its not clear for him how to do it there or few things are not supported assembly comes to give you control on the tiniest transistor on the PC so you can do what ever in your mind (this is not just 80s it is applicable for all times  )

In 90s the days of C++, Visual Basic 6.0, JAVA, PHP,… etc I think the savior was the C language, really when ever there was something you cannot do in any of these languages that you are working on, you would just connect it to a c DLL or any c library file!!, using JNI for Java or active or DLL library for visual basic and similarly for others.

These days (WEB 2.0 days) all of the applications are moving to web using PHP J2EE, .NET 2005/2008, R on R and others. The common factor between them is they all need JavaScript to do the dirty work for them (working on client machines) so as in old days when all programmers needed to know assembly or as in 90s when all programmers needed to know C to do wonders with their softwares, these days developers must know JavaScript; cause it is the language for them all (applicable to any JavaScript framework (jquery, mootool, prototype))!!!

Ok that’s enough chit chat, now why I am talking all about this?? Because jquery enabled me to do something fun with asp.net 2.0’s gridview

I will show you

I have added a jscript folder to my project and in it I have added the jquery and one of its plug-in: datepicker which will show a date picker calendar

Added jquery to my master page code so it will be available to all of my pages in the application that uses this master page

Now I have a gridview (well for my application need I have a very complex 3 level nested gridview)

Now close date is a template column where I have a textbox I made the cssclass of the text box equals to “datepickerz” <asp:TextBox ID="TextBox1" runat="server" Text='<%# Bind("close_date") %>' CssClass="datepickerz" Width="89px"></asp:TextBox>

Now I need for each row in this complex gridview the textbox to be a datepicker so simply I wrote the following jquery script

$(document).ready(function() {

$('.datepickerz').each( function () {

$(this).attachDatepicker();

});

</script>

Which is one of the beautiful magic of jquery it allows to pick all controls that have been assigned the class datepickerz and then for each control I just attach it with the datepicker.

The result whenever I click on the textbox in any editable row in the complex gridview I will get a floating calendar to select a date that will be stored in the textbox.

I know I have not discovered the atoms by doing this simple activity, but I wanted to mention it because as I see around me (in Oman) most of .NET developers are not aware of Jquery and other JavaScript frameworks and their features.

Adding a friendly splash (waiting screen) while the code is being executed in ASP

2008-08-25T19:15:00.010+04:00

Nowadays, most websites are connected to databases. the larger the data in the database, the longer it takes for the browser (or the code) to fetch/retrieve the required data for the user. and ofcourse, that's where the developers' skills comes handy, where developing an efficient code and using the minimum queries as possible is a must. i would like to add that having a little data in the database is not an excuse for not developing an efficient code for retrieving information from databases.

now, i assume that you "developers" did the most efficient way to retrieve the data, but above that there is still a considerable "fetching" time to wait inorder to fully display the records queried, here comes the benefit of adding a splash screen for the user, so he/she doesn't panic and think that the page is stuck or something.

easy steps to follow inorder to get an attractive waiting screen (see below) while the code is processing and the user is waiting:

first of all you need to add one important line of code to the top of your ASP page, that line is:

<%Response.Buffer = True%>

This line tells the server not to send anything to the client until the page is finished processing or you use "Response.Flush" code in part of your ASP page to send everything fully loaded so far.

now just add the following to javascript functions to your code between "script" tags, those functions are used to "show" and "hide" the splash screen when needed:



function showObj(obj)
{
obj.style.visibility = "visible";
}

function hideObj(obj)

{
obj.style.visibility = "hidden";
}

now after we created the functions we create the part that gonna show as "splash" screen, i created it as "div" as it can contain more then one element inside it not just an animated image or text..


  <div id="splashScreen" style="position:absolute;z-index:5;align:center;">
           Searching, please wait .. <br>
          <img src="loada.gif"/>

  </div>

its strongly recommended to put this div as close as possible to the nearest element after you invoke a "search" button or a "submit" button so the div would show as soon as the "fetching" face starts

you can put any animated "gif" pic in the img src, i choose to put a loading indicator, you can find a very nice collection of activity indicators from http://www.ajaxload.info/

after you put the div in the right position, you should put the "Response.Flush" code so you tell the browser to show to the user everything loaded so far "including the splash screen" and then do the processing, code executing and searching. after that you do "Response.Flush" again to show the information fetched, and finally you hide the "splash screen" .. so to make it simple, your code would be like the following:

<%
.
.
Response.Flush  'this will show everything loaded so far including the splash screen
.
'... put the searching/fetching code here and show the results ...
'... remember that your results wont show until you flush again ..
.
.
Response.Flush  'this will show everything so far including splash screen AND results

%>

and after we finished from everything we hide the "splash" screen with the following command (put the command in javascript script tag)


var splash
splash = document.getElementById("splashScreen");
hideObj(splash);

remember that you can customize the splash to your liking, after all its a div and can be pretty flexible.

Increasing performance and adding flexibility using arrays instead of recordsets in ASP with databases

2008-08-21T17:24:00.008+04:00

Those days, inorder to increase the websites/intranets features and interactivity it is essential to have a connectivity to a database wither its an oracle database or MS access or other types of databases, .. and with databases comes the issue of performance, so in this article i would like to share some of the things that a developer can do to maintain a reasonable performance and even adding more flexibility to the ASP code dealing with databases that has huge data that needs to be fetched.

in this article am using vbscript as a server-side script.

for convenience i will show the steps on how to connect to MS access database first and after that i will start on the tweaks that developers can do in the coding to enhance performance and adding flexibility

dim conn
set conn=Server.CreateObject("ADODB.Connection")
conn.Provider="Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0"
conn.Open "c:YOUR_DATABASENAME.mdb"

first of all, after you set up a connectivity to the database, you create a query, for example:

<%

dim rs 'recored set

set rs=Server.CreateObject("ADODB.recordset")
rs.Open "Select * from TABLE_NAME", conn

%>

at this point not much can be done, connecting to the database and querying to get data is pretty much fixed.

the thing start when manipulating the data we just fetched, most of the people do is manipulating the data like the following code

<%

do while not rs.EOF
' manipulate data here, go through the query exucuted, movenext, movelast move previous, etc

response.write(rs("FIELD_NAME"))
rs.MoveNext
loop
rs.Close
conn.Close
set rs=nothing
set conn=nothing

%>

the above code would work perfectly if you have to deal with one query, relatively small data set in the query, and only small code is used to manipulate the recordset, and as long as you want to deal with the data (in the above code) the recordset should stay open .. what if we wanted to do a new query while we are dealing with the existing one while it is still not closed? .. we would have to create another record set and set it and open connection to it, and this would make a nightmare interms of performance if we have a larg data and multiple quieries to deal with. to avoid this we can copy the query information to a multi-dimensional array and close the recordset so we can use it again while we are working with the existing data. instead of doing the previous code we can do the following code:

<%

dim rsArray

rsArray=rs.getrows()
rs.close
for i=0 to UBound(rsArray,2)-1
' .... work with the data here using a multi-dim array, its easier and faster, we can even
'use another query with the same recordset, ..
' we can work with the old data and with the new query data without creating new record set

next
conn.Close
set rs=nothing
set conn=nothing

%>

after we fetched the information we needed into "rsArray" we finished from the record set and we closed it "rs.close" so we can use it later while dealing with the existing data without having to create a new recordset. now while we have a multi dimensional array in our hand, we can take advantage of that to our benefit, even we can redim it if we want to add new columns or rows, but when redim-ing the data is lost, so we have to use "preserve" keyword to preserve the data after rediming, for example if we have number of rows and we want to add a new one we do the following code

<%

dim cols

dim rows

cols = UBound(rsArray,1) +1

rows = UBound(rsArray,2) +1

redim preserve rsArray(cols,rows+1) ' we have extra row
%>

notice the preserve keyword only works when redim-ing the last dimension, if we want to redim the first one (or the second one or third if we have more then 2) we have to go around it, copying the array to another array and put the dimension we want to change in the last place, and then we can use the "redim preserve" and work with the temp. array.

As a conclusion, using the actual record sets while manipulating data and creating new ones whenever we need is not efficient, on the other hand knowing the features of the arrays we can use it to our advantage so dealing with arrays is more flexible and more efficient then the actual record set.

Calling ASP Functions from java script

2008-08-08T00:49:00.002+04:00

Umm i think some may get confused that isn't it that Ajax can call server side functions from JavaScript ?? ! well thats write but i want to talk about those people who are still using Microsoft .NET 2005 and not lucky enough to get gaya or other ajax plug-in from Microsoft, or those who are still not ready to deal with Ajax and other Ajax/JavaScript plug ins such as jquery .

Most of the old .NET developer are used to have their web applications deal with post-backs but very few of them really knows how these post-backs do work. well most of the things in .NET application are done depending on client side script (JavaScript).

For that when you have a good amount of JavaScript controlling your application you need to know how to make that JavaScript call an asp function.

Before explaining how to do this first lets see why do we need it ? Well may be you will need to do something with JavaScript before calling server side codes, like validating entered data ( well i know that is a very bad example since in .NET there is a ready validating controles) a better example lets say you have created a web page that allow users to draw for example mind maps, or charts, or mouse gestures so that when user drag his mouse in a specific way there will be a specific response from your web application.

well in all of these examples JavaScript or JavaScript frameworks like jquery will be doing most of the things in the application here the decision to make a server side function call should be given to java script code.

Calling asp.NET function by JavaScript you need to do a simple trick,

Well as i found from some of my tries to get there, that you can not do it having normal form buttons you will need at least one "link button" (sure you can hide it, but NEVER make visible = false because it will be removed from the HTML code; instead apply CSS style on it that make it hidden)

visibility:hidden;

then you need to call the post back function that usually is called if you really do click that link_button and in the asp.NET code do call your asp function in the link_button event handler function.

well thats a lot of blah blah, theoretical talks, well then lets get into action then.

here i will show a very simple example (sorry i am out of creativity by now so the example will be very simple) i created a very simple page with a text box an a link button

i added a very simple response code to the link button click event in C#

well yeah this is our server side function (i told you this week i am out of creativity).

and then i added they style to hide the link button

now even in the IDE you just cannot see the link button

now the real thing is in the java script i have done a very simple and a very boring thing witch is on each button press it makes the text in the text box uppercase and if the length of text reaches to 6 it will call the server side function

i have added it just before the end of form tag

well you can see the real point is in the function __doPostBack('','')
which is created by Visual Studio it self you do not have to program it and it can call server side functions by its own way (well what you do not know that there are a lot of hidden fields in your page that are getting created by visual studio and are used for these kind of stuff)

and the reason i say that we must have a link button is that i found Visual studio do not create this JavaScript function __doPostBack('','') if we dont have link button

well thats all for today i think hope this thing (which i had to search and try a lot of things to be able to do) will help you in your projects

How to change the size of a legend in Crystal Report

2008-07-07T14:41:00.004+04:00

Well as easy as it may seem, this sometimes prooves to be a tidious task to look for. Simply because the legends functionality are not provided on the legend display area. Well enough talk and lets learn how to do that in a few steps

Obviously you are creating a graph (chart of some kind),

Right click on the Chart Area,
Chart Expert
Text Tab
On the Format Area choose Legend,
Click the Font button
Change the font to the your desired display.

For MS ACCESS changing the legend size does not seem to be a problem but the legend caption is. I found a solution posted on http://www.tek-tips.com/faqs.cfm?fid=5491

Simple way to change/remove the "Sum of..." text, or any text, in a PivotChart LEGEND.

To change the text in a PivotChart LEGEND, switch from PivotChart View to PivotTable View. Then click once to highlight the field name that reads "Sum of...", then go to properties, when the properties dialog box displays select the "caption" tab, now go to the item titled "caption" and simply type in the new text you would like reflected in your Legend. Switch back to PivotChart View and you will see the Legend has changed.

How-to get a job (for graduates)?

2008-05-26T22:18:00.006+04:00

In this (my first post) non-IT (sorry Ali) post I note what I think is the main things I used to get my IT job. I was actually surprise with the number of job opportunities I come across here in Oman. So, here it is…

Since I have graduated I have been doing interviews all over the place (9 until today): ministries, government agencies, government companies, to-be companies, dream-to-be companies, actual companies ..ext..ext .. For me it was interesting journey. Each interview (or test) was unique experience: a mix of meeting new people, testing my skills and Learning about myself! It is great opportunity to find what you are really after (if u haven’t decided yet). So what is it really employers are looking for? Well, first let us list the facts about them:

They are humans with basic needs just like us. They need to feel love, security, excitement and joy! They want to be acknowledged and appreciated.

Dose any of this have anything to do with get them to hire me? Aren’t they looking for skills?

Explanation: This crab has nothing to do with neither you nor your skills. It is about them and their needs. They need to like you and be able to work with you.

They need assurances that you will do the job.

! I have the bachelor degree aint that enough?

Explanation: We all have the degree, so what? What information they can get from it other than you spent X # of years in the Y collage. What really determine your capabilities is the projects you did, activities you involved in and the way you represent those!

The presentation(interview) is important.

! I have skills; I have experience they should take me. But i was sick that day.

Explanation: they wouldn’t care if you ware sick that day! May be you are a nice guy but they actually don’t know that! It is very important to be in your optimal condition and do a flawless interview. That’s because employer have limited time and many candidates to choose from.

Hmmm,, ok that all I can remember right now. So, how to be ready for all this? How to drive them to give you interview anyway?!

The Perfect CV.

Having very well written CV is a key element in job hunting process. CV is direct marketing tool for your skills and character. It contains everything that maters to employers: basic info about you, skills, experience and glimpse of your character. Make sure your CV contain skills match job requirements and contain the keywords employer is looking for. Writing a universally ‘perfect’ CV is impossible so, you have to adapt it for each job opportunity. (Change the structure and the words used for example.)

Calling everyone!

Make sure that you: call employers for more information about jobs, do follow-up calls. Make sure that almost everyone you know (colleagues, friends, family, employers) knows that you in “job-hunt”. Sometimes opportunities come from unexpected people/organizations. For this, you have to keep in touch with everyone!

Keep your eyes open!

Make sure that you watch for newspapers, job-search sites and major companies sites for new opportunities. For obvious reasons!

Know what is going on!

Knowing what is going on around you is important. Make sure you know about major market events (even non IT) and new IT projects. Of course, you need to know what is going on in the IT field: new products, technologies and upcoming events. This can assist you to anticipate opportunities and be ready for them (by acquiring skills for example). Also, it improves your standing in interviews.

That’s all I can think of for now. So what do you think? :)

Java Beans

2008-05-19T00:01:00.003+04:00

As software or application developers, we are constantly being asked to build applications in less time and with less money. And, of course, these applications are expected to be better and faster than ever before.

Object-oriented techniques and component software environments are in wide use now, in the hope that they can help us build applications more quickly. Development tools like Microsoft's Visual Basic have made it easier to build applications faster by taking a building-block approach to software development (developing the software as pieces of blocks and mending them up to deliver complete software for the proposed requirement). Such tools provide a visual programming model that allows you to include software components rapidly in your applications.

The Java Beans architecture brings the component development model to Java.

Component Model

Components are self-contained elements of software that can be controlled dynamically and assembled to form applications. There are set of rules and guidelines where all components must bind to them. The set of rules are set to provide a standards form for all components which encourages usability and a clear understanding. Components are expected to exhibit certain behaviors and characteristics in order to participate in the component structure and to interact with the environment, as well as with other components. Most articles would define components like a society of software citizens; the citizens (components) bring functionality, while the society (environment) brings structure and order.

Java Beans component Model

Java Beans is a component model architect brought to Java. It allows users to construct applications by piecing components together either programmatically or visually (or both). Support of visual programming is paramount to the component model; it's what makes component-based software development truly useful and powerful.

The model is made up of architecture and an API (Application Programming Interface). Together, these elements provide a structure whereby components can be combined to develop an application. This environment provides services and rules, which allows a standard structure. This means that components are provided with the tools necessary to work in the environment, and they exhibit certain behaviors that identify them. One very important aspect of this structure is containment. A container provides a context in which components can interact. A common example would be a panel that provides layout management or mediation of interactions for visual components. Of course, containers themselves can be components.

The Java Beans Architecture

JavaBeans is architecture for both using and building components in Java. This architecture supports the features of software reuse, component models, and object orientation. One of the most important features of JavaBeans is that it does not alter the existing Java language (i.e. if you know how to write software in Java, you know how to use and create Beans). The strengths of Java are built upon and extended to create the JavaBeans component architecture.

Although Beans are intended to work in a visual application development tool, they don't necessarily have a visual representation at run-time (although many will). What this does mean is that Beans must allow their property values to be changed through some type of visual interface, and their methods and events should be exposed so that the development tool can write code capable of manipulating the component when the application is executed.

Java Bean set of rules

Creating a Bean doesn't require any advanced concepts. All you need is follow the following coding conventions

Implements java.io.Serializable interface
Provides no argument constructor
Provides getter and setter methods for accessing it's properties

Serializable interface allows objects to be stored/retrieved using ObjectOutputStream/ObjectInputStream

```
class must be declared as public
```

class must implement Serializable interface

```
class must have a default constructor
```

all data members must be primitive, serializable objects or declared transient

Image Retrieval

2008-05-18T23:58:00.001+04:00

An image retrieval system is a computer system for browsing, searching and retrieving images from a large database of digital images.

A common saying goes “A picture is better than a thousand words”. Images represented using tags, labels or captioned tend to lose what the actual information the image represents. Images have a large amount of information through human vision and computer vision. Using multiple tags to represent the content of an image simply does not describe an image for efficient retrieval. Content-based image retrieval (CBIR) uses the actual content of the image proving to be more efficient but yet challenging. The most important factor of image retrieval is its accuracy. One problem with using image search results as a training set for a classifier is the high percentage of unrelated images within the results. Estimation has shown a high number of inaccuracies of the result of image in Google image search. Problems with traditional methods of image indexing have led to the rise of interest in techniques for retrieving images on the basis of automatically-derived features such as color, texture and shape.

Most traditional and common methods of image retrieval use methods of adding meta data such as captions, keywords, tags, or descriptions to the images so that retrieval can be performed over the annotation words. Manual image annotation is time-consuming, laborious and expensive; to address this, there has been a large amount of research done on automatic image annotation.

Content-based image retrieval (CBIR), also known as query by image content (QBIC) and content-based visual information retrieval (CBVIR) is the application of computer vision to the image retrieval problem. In other words, an image produces image data in a form of rows and columns. This image data derived from computations can be used to produce vector or quantifiers which would then be a primary key (index) for an image to be retrieved in a large database.

"Content-based" means that the search will analyze the actual contents which in this context; it will be the contents of the image. The term 'content' in this context might refer to colors, shapes, textures, or any other visual information that can be derived from the image itself. Without the ability to examine image content, searching for images must rely on meta data or the traditional methods.

Meta data are very hard to generate which proves to be more expensive. A security camera capturing picture could be caption by the time, date, location rather than by the actual contents of the image it represents. Here, CBIR comes into play by deriving image data for analysis and use of different image problem based areas.

UPL

2008-02-10T19:47:00.000+04:00

UPL : "Universal Programming Language", or you can say UPL : "UPL is Programming Language" :).

It is an idea that we were thinking of for more than a year, and thanks to Yamani it is slowly coming to the reality.

The Idea
As was discussed in many blogs few weeks ago, we need to find good and intelligent ways to teach our children and "programming children" (those who are not Childs in real but newbie in programming world) about programming.

Thinking about that we can see (as we think) the two biggest obstacles faced by these two groups are:
(1) The complex syntax:
come on how many people you know were able to understand the pointer of pointer of a function that takes a reference and a pointer in C++ from the first time :).
(2) The Language:
by language we do not mean the programming language but the "English" language (even though it is becoming the universal language now, still lots of kids have problems in English learning it. (and come on who said programming must be in "English").

What UPL can do about that!
Well so what do UPL do exactly?
It is not the direct solution to the problem, but it is one of the keys to the solution. It is a simple engine where you can create your own programming language with your own syntax, and with the human language that you desire.

The current version of UPL support a very simple syntax that is some how look like old quick basic. There is a language file where you can replace any keyword in the (English UPL) to any other keyword in any other language or any other word in English itself , for example the keyword “Declare” could be changed to “dim” to look like visual basic more, or it can be changed to “Aref” the Arabic word the means declare, or even you can write in Arabic writing, French , Japanese, and like that it gives endless choices of creating your own language.

What happens inside the upl Editor is what ever syntax you are using it will be translated to the ~~English up~~ ~~and then again the English upl is translated into JAVA~~ (in the current version the algorithim is updated to change any syntax to Java directly) and finally java file is produced compiled and executed.

the syntax of current English UPL is very simple:

download

UPL in action(Future)
Well yes it is not in action yet (well it is still alpha, still it don’t have loops,still … , ….,….) but lets talk about future , what UPL can do when it gets into action. So lets see some possible futures for upl:
1- Engine for creating lots of educational programming language syntax in different human language scripts (English , French, japanease, ….).

2- The same engine mentioned before could be use to make programming look more like story writing for kids (I mean after a lot of modifications) a kid will be able to write some kind of story and clicking on run will show him the story happening infront of him ( well we will need to use graphical libraries for doing so).

3- Visual animated programming ( ummm imagine this ) : a kid opens a software he drags an icon of a hummer with declare written on it then he writes “x=12” , next he will drag an icon of wondering rabbit that have if written between it ears and write “x>10”, and continue programming in this way. We can see this drag and drop will create may be html document, and there will be a translation file from that kind of html into the English upl which will be automatically translated to java and run.

Comparison between Macromedia Dreamweaver and other web editors

2007-11-29T20:49:00.000+04:00

Macromedia Dreamweaver is one of the greatest web editors. This is recommended by professional web developers because of its High-ability to treat with different web environments. The program provides many features by compare with other applications.

1) Advanced file manger support local and remote file environments
2) Integrating system support many web servers
3) Full support for Macromedia Applications
4) Possibility to treat with different objects types on the web page
5) Support for all (old & new) standards like XHTML
6) Internal reference for web programming languages
7) Advanced control for CSS Tech.
8) Sophisticated Database Connection manger
9) Ability to create SQL statements
10) Java Script Library for common procedures
11) High ability to customize forms
12) Easy code editor
13) Apply visual effects for some server-side languagesMulti-Project Management System