Thanks to everyone that left a response and offered insight or an opinion. I will evaluate some of these options in the near future. Cheers,

Josh Blair Golden, CO

Hello, I'm looking for recommendations on a good Issue Tracker (that tracks bugs, enhancements, misc. tasks etc.) that is integrated to Subversion, preferably one that is open source and/or free/cheap and preferably one that runs on IIS/ASP.NET with a SQL Server back end. Is that asking too much? I know about FogBugz and Trac, and although FogBugz looks awesome but is beyond my budget and Trac is Python + SQLite/MySQL/PostgreSQL Thanks for your recommendations and insight,

Josh Blair Golden, CO

Thanks for the reply. I know I could iterate through my parent and child datatables but that seems like "brute force". I was hoping that there was a more elegant approach using built-in databinding. Or maybe way to configure 2 repeaters or datalists with a custom pager to accomplish this. I will try the brute force method and see where I get. If anyone else has a another alternative, please let me know. Cheers,

Josh Blair

Hello, I have been looking examples of how to create an A-Z grouped index page from a list of data. This index page will contain a hyperlinked list of letters of the alphabet a,b,c...z that link to HTML "a name" tags within the same page. These links will that point to the correct letter of the alphabet which will correspond to the correct alphabetically grouped subset of data. This is a common feature on many sites and I'm sure this problem has been solved many times, it just that I think I am searching using the wrong keywords. This solution would likely include some combination of repeaters and/or datalists, and possibly a custom pager. My list currently contains about 1000 items that I pull from a SQL table. I'd like to only hit the database once to grab the list of data if possible. This is hard to articulate, let me try to explain this with an example: There is an A-Z index on the top of the page (and maybe on the bottom) like this: A, B, C.....Z (if a user clicks the C, they are redirected to the names in the list that start with a C A = abc abe about ... B = ball barge bat ... C <-- user is directed here when they click on the C in the A-Z index above) = car cat cave Thanks for the help,

Josh Blair Golden, CO

Thanks for the tips.

Josh Blair http://joshblair.blogspot.com/

Hello, I am trying to build an ASP.NET webform that uses the en-GB culture. This screen needs to display dates MM-dd-yy and currencies in EUR using the € or € symbol. 1) does the Euro symbol come before or after the currency amount? Is there a space between them? 2) I set the culture page directive in the ASP.NET page to en-GB. This makes the currencies in my datagrid display in the GBP, but I need currencies to show in the euro. How is this overridden? ' page directive... Culture="en-GB" . . . ' datagrid <%# DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, "UNIT_PRICE", "{0:C}") %> [Note: This is .NET 1.1, VS. NET 2003] Thanks for the tips, -- modified at 13:49 Monday 21st August, 2006

Josh Blair http://joshblair.blogspot.com/

led mike, Not sure if these XML structures (schemas) change very often. They come from a company from Japan (from a division in Italy). I think they are pretty solid/permanent. Also, I'm not sure why they didn't provide schemas or DTDs either... I am using the XmlTextWriter only because it is fast (not that speed is really and issue at this point). I used the XMLDocument object in a previous cXML project that was very similar to this project and it seemed a little slower to generate the xml docs. I just wanted to try the XmlTextWriter to see if it was noticably faster. It is also easier to use the XmlTextWriter in my code generator. I also thought about the StringBuilder and it work just as well probably. The XmlTextWriter has a fwe handly features like being able to close off the element and stuff like that. Josh Blair Evergreen, CO

Dustin, thanks for the link. That is a pretty cool app. I tried it with my XML structures and it fails. I tweaked the app and my XML a bit an got it to run. That is a great sample. I'll see if the output is going to be useful and let you know. I also tried running XSD.exe (mentioned in one of the comments to the article) over my XML samples. Here is the output: C:\Projects\Customer_XMLCodeGenerator_CS>xsd CustomerDespatchAdvice.xml Microsoft (R) Xml Schemas/DataTypes support utility [Microsoft (R) .NET Framework, Version 1.1.4322.573] Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation 1998-2002. All rights reserved. Error: There was an error processing 'CustomerDespatchAdvice.xml'. - The same table (Country) cannot be the child table in two nested relations. (In this xml sample, there are multiple sections with the same element (Country), and the tool treats those as "tables" and 2 tables can't have the same name...) I have run into this type of error before with other XML-based projects. I think what is basically going on is that the XSD tool determines that the XML data is not valid according to the ADO.NET schema inference rules. See the following article for more on this issue. Quite a limitation if you ask me. Not a big deal if you have the luxury of defining the XML data from the beginning but not cool if you are forced to use someone elses structure... I had the same problem with cXML (http://www.cXML.org in another similar project) http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;325696 Anyway, thanks for the tip! Josh Blair Evergreen, CO

Yes, the output from the code generator alone doesn't offer much by itself. So then, once I have the code that produces the XML document (an empty version with no invoice data), I add to that code. I add public properties with get and set accessors. I add the ablity to add line items to a "line itme collection", things like that. So from my code, I can grab all the data necessary that will eventually populate this document, then I instantiate this xml invoice business object filling its properties, collections, etc. Then i call a "create" method which generates a new xml document with the proper structure containing all the invoice data from my ERP system and other data sources. Am I approaching this bass-ackwards? Thanks, Josh Blair Evergreen, CO

Here is something that might help: different portions of the xml document(s) will come from different sources of data. Again taking an invoice as an example (but there are other types of docments as well): I have to send invoices to a third party. This third party defined the xml structures that I have to populate and did not provide schemas or DTDs. A large portion of the data that I need to send to this thord party will originate from a legacy ERP system that does offer an ODBC driver. I can obtain the data from this system, no problem...already got that part licked. The invoice XML document has a "header section" which contains sub-sections like "ship-to section", "buyer section" and so on nested within the "header section". It also contain a "line item section" where there can be one to many line items in this section. Some of the data that populates the "header section" will come from the invoice header in the ERP system (via ODBC). Other parts will come from a configuration file, while other data will come from database tables not originating from the ERP system (maybe a SQL Server). Most of the data that will populate the "line item section" will come from the ERP system from the lines on the invoice. Serialization might be the proper approach. I think the code generator that I wrote may be misusing the .NET framework because it is essentially reproducing the features of serialization. BUT...when using serialization, bdo you have full control over how things get serialized? I can't have all the "junk" that comes with serialization out of the box. When I say "junk", I mean the xml namespaces and extra crap not allowed by this third party. As in: xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance". Also, I need to have full control over the order of how elements are ordered and nested. Is this possible with .NET serialization? I'd rather not have to transform the serialized business object before I send it off because I'm not really versed at XSLT. Josh Blair Evergreen, CO

led mike, To answer #1, let me use an example: lets take an invoice...yes some of the data comes from an ODBC datasource (ERP system), but only some of the data. Other portions of the data come from other sources of data as well (config files, other data sources like SQL Server, etc.). I've used serialization in a limited capacity for things like reading and saving application configuration settings and such. Are you saying that I should build business objects that are serializable? As in an Invoice object that is serializable so I can instantiate the object, fill it's properties, call it's methods and thn have the ability to serialize it to produce an XML document from this business object? Thanks again for the clarification, Josh Blair Evergreen, CO

led mike, Thanks again for your information. It is very helpful. I must not be stating the problem and desired results appropriately. I apologize. I will try to explain myself better... Good news: I wrote the code generator that I was looking for myself. It is a simple solution that I may post if anyone is interested. I'll give you a description of what it does: It is a console app written in C# that takes a path/filename to an example XML file as a parameter and then subsequently generates the code necessary to create a duplicate xml structure in code using the XmlTextWriter. Very simple but effective. Once this generator does its thing, you can put the output into your own class files and use them as a starting point. You can add public properties and the like to these class files and then you use them to generate XML files from ODBC queries or any other datasources. Does this make any sense? I still my not be articulating this very well. Here is an example of what you can do with these objects once you get them built (pseudo code only): XMLInvoice invoice = new XMLInvoice(); invoice.InvoiceNumber = "INV12355"; // may come from helper method or database query or something like that... invoice.OtherField1 = "whatever"; invoice.OtherField2 = "whatever"; . . . // in a looping construct that may result from records obtained from a query or the like invoice.Lines.Add(param1, param2, etc...); invoice.Lines.Add(param1, param2, etc...); invoice.Lines.Add(param1, param2, etc...); . . . invoice.CreateXML(); // this is where the XmlTextWriter is used to generate the big nasty XML message (that the code generator helped create) . . . invoice.Save(filename); // for archiving purposes . . . B2BEngine b2b = new B2Bengine(); // object that knows how to communicate via HTTP with customers, suppliers, etc. CustomerInfo custInfo = new CustomerInfo("MyCustomer123"); some settings info about particular customer (Ip address of server, credentials, etc.) b2b.Send(invoice, custInfo); // Please me know if this helped to explain my situation an better. Also, this may lead you to believe that I am approaching the problem all wrong. If that is true, please let me know your thoughts... Thanks again, Josh Blair Evergreen, CO

led mike, Can you explain how I would use XSLT to generate these XML documents from empty example ones? Do you mean to transform the empty document into one that is populated with the data values? More background: the data that I will use to populate the values in these XML documents will be coming from an ERP system (ODBC). Thanks for the recommendation and clarification. Josh Blair Evergreen, CO

Hello, Has anyone ever seen/created such an animal? I'm looking for a sample of a code generator that will generate code (preferably one that uses C# and the XMLTextWriter) to create an XML document structure based on an XML file as input. I have to build some classes that allow me to generate some very complex/large/nasty XML documents for use in B2B exchange of data (like invoices, orders, etc.). A third party has dictated the structure and provided example XML documents. Instead of hand coding these classes, I'd like to be able to automatically generate them by using these example XML documents as input. This seems like a fairly easy task but I haven't sun across a demonstration of this yet. An Example XML file (contents): =============================== . . . . . . Example output from the code generator that takes the path of the xml file above (this is merely a simple example): ================================================== // instantiate XmlTextWriter over file stream using UTF-8 XmlTextWriter tw = new XmlTextWriter(fileName, Encoding.UTF8); // specify serialization details tw.Formatting = Formatting.Indented; tw.Indentation = 8; tw.QuoteChar = '\"'; // No need for a start element //tw.WriteStartDocument(); tw.WriteStartElement("myRootNode"); tw.WriteStartElement("myChildNode1"); tw.WriteStartElement("myChildNode2"); tw.WriteAttributeString("", "myAttribute1", "", "test"); tw.WriteEndElement(); // myChildNode2 tw.WriteEndElement(); // myChildNode1 tw.WriteEndElement(); // myRootNode // No need for a start element //tw.WriteEndDocument(); // close the stream tw.Close(); Thanks for your time and input, Josh Blair Evergreen, CO -- modified at 13:00 Thursday 25th May, 2006

Guffa, Jon, Thanks for the tips. Do you know if these techniques work in IE, Firefox, AOL, and other browsers? I forgot to mention that this solution needs to be supported by an extensive list of browsers. Thanks again, Josh Blair Evergreen, CO

Hello, Does anyone have a simple way to provide a web user the ability to download binary files like PDF and EXE without revealing the path to these files? Basically I'm trying to hide the URL so the web user doesn't get a clue as to the directory structure that the files are stored on. -- modified at 14:10 Thursday 2nd March, 2006 Also, some of these documents are the type of documents that can load directly into the web browser: PDF, DOC, XLS. I also need to hide the URL if loaded directly into the browser. Thanks for your time and information, Josh Blair Evergreen, CO

Nick, Thanks for the idea. It sounds more robust that my initial attempt. Josh Blair Evergreen, CO

Guffa, Thanks for your input. I get the warning. Josh Blair Evergreen, CO

Hello, I have an extranet site built in ASP.NET. My suppliers use this site for many activities. I generate notification messages for a number of reasons and would like to be able to include an URL in the messages that they can click on that would automatically log then on the extranet site and redirect them to a particular URL. Does anyone have any recommendations on how to achieve this in a relatively simple manner and still keep security tight? I have come up with methods that included querystring (or make-shift "tokens") in the url that are parsed and used to accomplish the task at hand but figured that others may have come up with a slicker approach. Thanks for your time and recommendations, Josh Blair Evergreen, CO

Tom, thanks for the recommendation. Is there a particular Handspring model that I need to look for or are they all pretty much capable of reading e-books? Thanks again, Josh Blair