Bunch's Blog

RadGrid Column Sizing

Bunch — Fri, 31 Aug 2012 13:54:06 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/Bunch/archive/2012/08/31/radgrid-column-sizing.aspx

I came across this column sizing weirdness the other day. Using a RadGrid the headers looked great. The rows with the data however sized however they felt like it, usually way too small. After looking around I came across this that solved my problem. Adding the meta tag of <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7" /> in the head section of my aspx page was what I needed.

My issue was pretty specific since I had to target IE8 for the app I was working on but it may apply to other scenarios as well.

Tags: ASP.Net

Oracle and Looping Through Columns

Bunch — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 19:24:37 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/Bunch/archive/2012/07/17/oracle-and-looping-through-columns.aspx

I recently had to write a stored procedure that validated some data in a staging table. Looping through the records was pretty straight forward in Oracle using a loop (way easier than the SQL Server version). However there was set of columns in the table that were all the same type but different values that needed to be checked. To clarify I had a table setup like this:

ID Name Number Position1 Position2 Position3

The ID is just an integer PK value, Name would be a players name, Number their jersey number and then Position1 - 3 the different positions the player knows how to play (like shortstop, second base, left field, etc.).

To start with I create my outer loop that I would use to check their Name and Number along with getting the various Position values.

for players in (select p.ID, p.Name, p.Number, p.Position1, p.Position2,
p.Position3
from stage_players p) loop

After checking the Name and Number I needed now to loop through the three possible Positions for the player's record or loop through that record's columns. To do this I setup an inner loop like this.

for positions in (select players.Position1 as pos from dual
                       union
                     select players.Position2 as pos from dual
                       union
                       select players.Position3 as pos from dual) loop

Now I can use this loop to check each positions.pos to make sure they are valid.

Tags: PLSQL

SSMS Slow To Save

Bunch — Tue, 29 May 2012 17:52:45 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/Bunch/archive/2012/05/29/ssms-slow-to-save.aspx

When using SSMS 2008 I found it to be really slow when trying to save a file, even a small one with just some simple SELECT statements on it. The symptoms were the flashing save disk icons in the lower right corner and selecting the location to save in the Save File dialog would hang each time I picked a location (e.g. Libraries, a folder). This was the first I had seen anything like this where it was really, really slow. It ended up that a server had died last week and I was still mapping a drive to it. SSMS was still trying to connect to it causing the slow down (further information here and here). Once I removed that the save functionality worked like it should.

Tags: SQL

New Window Via JavaScript Clears Parent

Bunch — Fri, 25 May 2012 17:28:35 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/Bunch/archive/2012/05/25/new-window-via-javascript-clears-parent.aspx

This is not a new item at all but I came across it recently. For an app I had been using some JavaScript like:

javascript:window.open(someurl.aspx here)

to open a new window via a button. That bit of code had been working great in several other apps. Then in one app that same code decided to open the new window correctly while clearing the parent of everything but [object]. The fix ended up being simple, change the javascript to:

javascript:void(window.open(someurl.aspx here);

Then it worked like I thought it should.

Tags: ASP.Net, JavaScript

BoundField Formatting

Bunch — Wed, 23 May 2012 20:24:33 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/Bunch/archive/2012/05/23/boundfield-formatting.aspx

If you have a GridView that uses BoundFields but does not display line breaks or a lot of spaces quite right here is a way to get around that. This example uses a GridView with one BoundField that uses a DataField of comments. The comments are stored in a database and entered from another page which displays the comments properly in a textbox with all the spaces and line breaks you intended. The trick to get a BoundField to show those items is to take the item and replace the \r\n with a <br /> and the spaces with &nbsp. Also you need to set the HtmlEncode property of the BoundField to false.

This example shows the data being returned to a DataView which is the DataSource for the GridView.

The GridView:

<asp:GridView ID="gvComments" runat="server" AutoGenerateColumns="false" >
   <Columns>
      <asp:BoundField DataField="comments" HtmlEncode="false" />
   </Columns>
</asp:GridView>

The code (assumes the DataView dv is already filled):

int i = 0;
foreach (DataRow dr in dv.Table.Rows)
{
   string comment = dr.Field<string>(6);
   comment = comment.Replace(" ", " ");
   comment = comment.Replace("\r\n", "<br />");
   dv.Table.Rows[i][6] = comment;
   i++;
}

Tags: ASP.Net, CSharp

Old SQL, Top and a Variable

Bunch — Tue, 15 May 2012 17:48:32 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/Bunch/archive/2012/05/15/old-sql-top-and-a-variable.aspx

I came across this the other day. Using SQL 2000 I could not get a Top statement to work with a variable. I had forgotten that only with SQL 2005 and higher could you do this trick. I found a good way around it, you can read about it here. Anyway this works on SQL 2000:

declare @top int
set @top = 5

BEGIN
set rowcount @top
select Some_ID
from tblStuff
set rowcount 0
END

The code above would return the first five records from tblStuff. For any of the newer SQL Server version you can simply use the @top variable in Top like:

select top (@top) Some_ID
from tblStuff

Tags: SQL

Searching SQL Server Objects

Bunch — Tue, 08 May 2012 13:41:07 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/Bunch/archive/2012/05/08/searching-sql-server-objects.aspx

I came across this tool the other day and found it to be very useful. In the past if I needed to search within all the stored procedures or views in a database I would use some SQL to run a query using sysobjects and syscomments. That worked well but this is a bit slicker. The tool is redgate's SQL Search and it is available (for now at least) as a free stand alone tool. You can download it here.

It supports SQL 2005 and later and I found it to integrate with the SSMS IDE well. It will add a red binocular SQL Search icon in your tool bar. Clicking that will open a nice tab with the searching fields. You can easily search for some value within a view then switch to a stored procedure. I found it to be really useful when setting up a test database and I needed to search for names of objects that might have changed for the new test environment. You search for a value then double click the item on the list which opens the item within Object Explorer.

Tags: SQL

ORA-00900 Super Easy Fix (for some cases)

Bunch — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 20:25:40 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/Bunch/archive/2012/04/13/ora-00900-super-easy-fix-for-some-cases.aspx

Here is a really easy fix for some ORA-00900 errors. Well at least the one I saw the other day. This was something that I did not come across when searching either. I found lots of other ideas on what the problem might be but not the fix. Since I am fairly new to PL/SQL (TSQL only for a long time) this one stumped me for a while. Until I asked someone and they saw the error in about two seconds.

When using the Command Window to add a view I was receiving an ORA-00900 error. So I checked that everything the view was referencing was there and that the permissions looked OK. The code for the view was fairly simple and it ran just fine in a regular SQL Window. It ended up that the Command Window did not like the space I had between the list of items in the select before the from.

Bad:

col1,
col2,
<--- does not like the empty line
from tblSomething

Good:

col1,
col2,
from tblSomething

I will just chalk that up to my familiarity with PL/SQL.

Tags: PLSQL

Finding Buried Controls

Bunch — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 18:27:01 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/Bunch/archive/2012/03/28/finding-buried-controls.aspx

This post is pretty specific to an issue I had but still has some ideas that could be applied in other scenarios. The problem I had was updating a few buttons so their Text values could be set in the code behind which had a method to grab the proper value from an external source. This was so that if the application needed to be installed by a customer using a language other than English or needed a different notation for the button's Text they could simply update the database.

Most of the time this was no big deal. However I had one instance where the button was part of a control, the button had no set ID and that control was only found in a dll. So there was no markup to edit for the Button. Also updating the dll was not an option so I had to make the best of what I had to work with.

In the cs file for the aspx file with the control on it I added the Page_LoadComplete. The problem button was within a GridView so I added a foreach to go through each GridViewRow and find the button I needed. Since I did not have an ID to work with besides a random ctl00$main$DllControl$gvStuff$ctl03$ctl05 using the GridView's FindControl was out. I ended up looping through each GridViewRow, then if a RowState equaled Edit loop through the Cells, each control in the Cell and check each control to see if it held a Panel that contained the button. If the control was a Panel I could then loop through the controls in the Panel, find the Button that had text of "Update" (that was the hard coded part) and change it using the method to return the proper value from the database.

if (rowState.Contains("Edit"))
{
foreach (DataControlFieldCell rowCell in gvr.Cells)
{
   foreach (Control ctrl in rowCell.Controls)
   {
    if (ctrl.GetType() == typeof(Panel))
    {
     foreach (Control childCtrl in ctrl.Controls)
     {
      if (childCtrl.GetType() == typeof(Button))
      {
       Button update = (Button)childCtrl;
       if (update.Text == "Update")
       {
        update.Text = method to return the external value for the button's text;
       }
      }
     }
    }
   }
}
}

Tags: ASP.Net, CSharp

RadGrid PagerStyle in Code Behind

Bunch — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 20:56:43 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/Bunch/archive/2012/03/06/radgrid-pagerstyle-in-code-behind.aspx

Recently I ran into an issue where the paging text in a RadGrid control needed to be customizable. In my case I was specifically looking at the "Page size" and "xx items in yy pages" text. Getting around it for the "Page size" was a snap. If your RadGrid is called rgTest one line would do it:

rgTest.PagerStyle.PageSizeLabelText = "your text here";

The "xx items in yy pages" was a bit trickier, but still handled in one line of code.

rgTest.PagerStyle.PagerTextFormat = "{4} {5} things in {1} my pages";

The tricky part was determining which items to use, there are five in total ({1} through {5}). The {4} needs to be first otherwise the rest will not show up. A good guide (but not for my particular situation) is found here.

Tags: ASP.Net, CSharp