I have a scenario wherein with the following details:
I have a form that contains fields like firstname,middle name,lastname,dob,pin,address for Client 1.
Now this form has to cater more than one client . The problem statement is - different clients may require different number of fields to be displayed on front end. For eg: a 2nd client would want - Country field instead of pin, would not require address on the form.
Now when i submit the form , currently i have a constant query which takes values of - firstname,middle name,lastname,dob,pin,address and inserts it into database for Client 1. I want to develop a query in a way that it is created at runtime and inserts only the values that come from the form into the database..
I hope my problem is clear. Can anyone help?????????????
You need to think about why you are doing this.
It will get hideously complex with just person form, add in more and it will balloon big style.
Dynamically building queries isn't particularly complicated, but it's a lot of code to do it.
Just think about each field you want to add to the query and it's type. What if a property on your person record was an image of them.
Do you have a configuration of the form, is the promary key on the record an auto inc, is it a compound key, do you use defaults, are some fields not null. How are you going to bubble back referential integrity exceptions...
Do the all singing all dancing version and basically you reinvent something like the Access IDE....
Personally I'd have a Person object with a set of Person Properties, they would have name, a value and a boolean to say whether they'd been changed.
Once you have teh list of chnaged properties and beacseu you are in the Person object you know the table is persons, it's keyed by an autoinc bigint, gender is mandatory and defaults to Male...
You have a fighting chance.
Your query should use parameters
So it would be say Insert Persons(FirstName, LastName, PIN) Values(#FirstName,#LastName,#PIN)
Then you'd nip through your changed fields and add parameters with same name, type and value.
As I said you can really go to town with this one, may be it's time for a night in though.
This should mean that some fields in your table like address and pin can be empty, in that case you can do without a dynamic query. Just collect all the inputs from your form and insert them into your table. Those form fields that were left empty due to different user needs will consequently have their corresponding field in your table empty. So just list all the needed fields in your table and all the possible input from your form in your insertion query.
Related
Let us say that we have an SQL database with a contacts table that has 5 fields; contactID, title, firstName, middleName, and lastName. On the front end we have a profile page with an update button.
Let us also say that we want to allow the user to update any given field without having to also enter data in the other fields (a last name change, for example.). Is there a 'simple' way to allow this?
My solution is to add a bit field to each property and add a series of condition statements to generate the UPDATE statement based on the bit field.
It is ugly and seems inefficient. Any advice?
The best way is to keep data retrieved from database in all fields and update all the fields. If user changes the value, it will be updated to new value. Otherwise it will stay the same old value.
Suppose that you retrieved all the values from database and on click of edit button, they are editable(textboxes) with old value already present in them. Then write a query like
update contacts set title =#title, firstName=#firstName, middleName=#middleName, lastName=#lastName where contactID=#ContactID
I have just started implementing search module in a project, where I have a form with fixed fields consisting of combo box, text box, radio button etc (around 200 fields in multiple tabs), and later client should be able to add extra fields too. Once user fills the fields which he wants to search, that search criteria also he should be able to save. For all these reasons, for each field I am associating metadata in the following format.
"EntityName.attributeName": attributeValue
Once the user fills the form fields to search, I will validate form data and and only non empty fields metadata I am sending to server in JSON format. Everything is fine till now. But I am facing an issues now.
Using the metadata of each field I will create a new criteria for each field. but if there are fields where one field metadata depends on other field metadata I am struck.
In the form I have few special category fields in following format : for example DOB,
FROM DATE (meta data: entity1.dob)
TO DATE (meta data: entity1.dob)
both fields belongs to same entity and same column only field name in the UI is different
Like this I have around 20 fields which asks for FROM and TO to query the range (it need not be on date, for example no of bed rooms..it can be on integer, string etc)
My query formation should be in the following way depending on user search criteria. If user entered only FROM field of number of bed rooms then I have to query using EQUAL to operator in sql and if both mentioned then MORETHANEQUAL to for FROM field and LESSTHANEQUAL to for to field. So how I can handle this special case ?
like if he entered number of fields as 4 in TO field of number of bed rooms, then I have to query for houses having number of bed rooms equal to 4. but if in FROM he entered 3 and in To if he entered 7 then I have to query for houses having greater than or equal to 3 bed rooms and less than or equal to 7 bed rooms.
Since I have same metadata for these category fields also I am unable to proceed, to achieve this, what kind of metadata I need to prepare ?
How I can generalize this process to handle all the cases ?
my technology stack: ExtJs, Eclipse Link, spring.
and what are the best practices to follow to support custom fields adding feature in Forms in enterprise applications ?
Off of the top of my head, I would create wizards for these particular cases. So for example, have a custom wizard that allows the user to define a "from" field, a "to" field, and then the comparison operator in one action. This wizard could also be responsible for adding custom properties to the generated fields that could be used by your validation routine. So based on the combo of from, to, and operator, you could create a flexible validation mechanism for ensuring that correct values are entered, ranges are correct, whatever.
You might consider this "wizard" approach for all custom fields, in fact. I could see you predefining all the possible custom field types that could be used and create classes that can be used for those. The classes could be responsible not only for the field creation, but also for providing any custom validation, pre-submit transformation, etc. This approach would make adding new custom field types incredibly simple since all you'd have to do is follow the same implementation as the others that already exist, extend an existing one, etc.
I have problems with my records within my database, so I have a template with about 260,000 records and for each record they have 3 identification columns to determine what time period the record is from and location: one for year, one for month, and one for region. Then the information for identifying the specific item is TagName, and Description. The Problem I am having is when someone entered data into this database they entered different description for the same device, I know this because the tag name is the same. Can I write code that will go through the data base find the items with the same tag name and use one of the descriptions to replace the ones that are different to have a more uniform database. Also some devices do not have tag names so we would want to avoid the "" Case.
Also moving forward into the future I have added more columns to the database to allow for more information to be retrieved, is there a way that I can back fill the data to older records once I know that they have the same tag name and Description once the database is cleaned up? Thanks in advance for the information it is much appreciated.
I assume that this will have to be done with VBA of some sort to modify records by looking for the first record with that description and using a variable to assign that description to all the other items with the same tag name? I just am not sure of the correct VBA syntax to go about this. I assume a similar method would be used for the backfilling process?
Your question is rather broad and multifaceted, so I'll answer key parts in steps:
The Problem I am having is when someone entered data into this
database they entered different description for the same device, I
know this because the tag name is the same.
While you could fix up those inconsistencies easily enough with a bit of SQL code, it would be better to avoid those inconsistencies being possible in the first place:
Create a new table, let's call it 'Tags', with TagName and TagDescription fields, and with TagName set as the primary key. Ensure both fields have their Required setting to True and Allow Zero Length to False.
Populate this new table with all possible tags - you can do this with a one-off 'append query' in Access jargon (INSERT INTO statement in SQL).
Delete the tag description column from the main table.
Go into the Relationships view and add a one-to-many relation between the two tables, linking the TagName field in the main table to the TagName field in the Tags table.
As required, create a query that aggregates data from the two tables.
Also some devices do not have tag names so we would want to avoid the
"" Case.
In Access, the concept of an empty string ("") is different from the concept of a true blank or 'null'. As such, it would be a good idea to replace all empty strings (if there are any) with nulls -
UPDATE MyTable SET TagName = Null WHERE TagName = '';
You can then set the TagName field's Allow Zero Length property to False in the table designer.
Also moving forward into the future I have added more columns to the
database to allow for more information to be retrieved
Think less in terms of more columns than more tables.
I assume that this will have to be done with VBA of some sort to modify records
Either VBA, SQL, or the Access query designers (which create SQL code behind the scenes). In terms of being able to crunch through data the quickest, SQL is best, though pure VBA (and in particular, using the DAO object library) can be easier to understand and follow.
In an alternate application, the user has the ability to update their address and phone number. When these are changed, three fields will update: Old Value, New Value, and Field Changed. If the Field Changed was the address, I need to create two report pages - one with the old address and one with the new. However, if the Field Changed was the phone number, I only need to create one report page for the current address.
My initial plan was to do a Union that would have one record with the Old Value and another with the New Value. This should work when only the Address has changed. However, it won't whenever the Phone Number has changed. I assume I need to do some sort of case statement, but I'm not really sure if this is the right approach. Sorry if the data is a little confusing (I didn't design the data structure. This was provided by our professor's assistant). If you need more information, I'll try to provide it.
I'm not looking for exact SQL, but I am wondering if I'm approaching this the correct way.
What do you mean by a 1 or 2 page report? Are you outputting to a CSV, PDF, XLSX or something eles?
If you need to do this through "pure" sql I would recommend a stored procedure that is given a value stating whether it's the address or phone number that is being updated. It can then do the update and you can simply do an if statement which determines which report to run and return.
I'd recommend handling it programatically if possible. Have your code run the sql update and then call the appropriate function within your code to get the report you need. You can then easily re-use the code for that report in other ways.
I've been tasked with learning Lotus Domino Designer - not sure what I did in a previous life, but it must have been pretty bad... - and was wondering how to do a lookup on a database to get some values for selections. As this information could potentially be used in a lot of the applications, I'd prefer it only to be in the one place.
I gather I can use #DBColumn, but what happens if an entry in that lookup changes? If the unique value of the lookup is the text, then the relationship would be broken, wouldn't it? Is there any way of mimicing the idea of relational lookups?
I'm assuming I'm looking at Lotus development from the wrong angle, as this seems to be a real limitation of look ups.
I haven't found any decent learning material on the interwebs, so would appreciate any help.
Ta
You would want to store a unique ID along with the textual value in the source database (not unlike what you would do in an RDBMS). Then, only store that ID in any referencing documents, and use a computed-for-display field to lookup the display value. (There is a performance consideration here - and you could "de-normalize" the data and store the ID and text value in the referencing documents, and do some asynchronous work to keep the values in sync - eg: using a scheduled agent that runs every night or every week).
If DB1 has the key values and DB2 has the documents which will reference these values, then in the form in DB2, you would still do a #DbColumn to lookup your value list. In the lookup view in DB1, concat the text value and ID with a pipe separator (textField + "|" + ID) in the first column. That will tell Notes to store only the ID value (what follows the pipe is the "alias" and is what will be stored).
Note: I would avoid using #DocumentUniqueID as the unique ID for these values, as the Document Unique ID will change if the documents are copied and pasted, or the entire database is copied, etc. You can use the #unique formula function in a computed-when-composed field to generate something close to a unique ID (almost like an identity column in sql).
If you need relational properties, look for non-Notes solutions. It is possible to get some relational behavior using document UNIDs and update agents, but it will be harder than with a proper relational backend.
Your specific problem with referencing to a piece of text that might change can to some extent be resolved by using aliases in the choice fields. If a dialog list contains values on the form...
Foo|id1
Bar|id2
...the form will display Foo but the back-end document will store the value id1 - (and this is what you will be able to show in standard views - although xpages could solve that). Using the #DocumentUniqueID for alias can be a good idea under some circumstances.
It depends on where your using the data. The #DBLookup or #DBColumn will work in Lotus Notes fields if the fields are set to be computed for display. That way they always get the most up to date information when you open the form etc.
If you make it so the data is saved on to the document then you will have to write some update code when you need to refresh the values.
The Lotus Notes help files for designer are pretty good, have a look at that.
SM
You could use a key or alias to store the relationship to your lookup value so if the value itself changes, the connection remains because the alias is intact. For example, if your lookup values were being stored as a collection of documents, I'd have the #DBColumn retrieve Document UNID|lookup value pairs. When in display mode, you could then retrive the value using #GetDocField. If the lookup values are in a different database, then you'd have to retrieve them for display using #DBLookup and construct a view that is keyed off of the UNID or whatever key you decide to use.The only drawback to this technique is that you wouldn't be able to display the field value in views as the actual value isn't stored in the document, just a reference to it. Using XPages, though, you COULD map the relationship into a dynamic datatable just like you would in a truly relational system.
It's tricky, but using LEI, you could also use Notes to front-end a relational backend system, also giving you the dynamic relationship you desire in your lookups.
Hope this helps!
The content of the lookup can change freely. A problem only arises (as it would on any other platform in the same circumstances) if the lookup key changes. You need to use a key that won't change. Human-readable text is an advantage, but if you want to be able to change your key description from, say, "Divisions" to "Business Units" and still have lookups work, you need to use an alias of some kind, which will presumably be mapped to your text description and only used internally. #Unique is pretty good for this, and gives a shortish key, if that is important to you. #DocumentUniqueID is most reliable, but as Ed pointed out, will change (must change - it's a new document) if you copy/paste or make a non-replica copy. This is easy to get around, though. Create a Computed-when-composed field (called, say, "LookupRef") on the form you are using for your reference document with the formula "#DocumentUniqueID". That will capture the ID at the time of creation, and it will not change on copy/paste etc. Use that as your key.