BIT320 Remix: classquestions Archives

Would you like no ‘ or two ‘’ ?

After reading Kevin’s post about Requirement 6, I checked out that SQL script he suggest.

It seems to be exactly what we’re looking for. However, when I tried to implement the script via the X-team, I ran into some syntax problems. In order to select a specific table, the script required that the table name be between apostrophes. However, the bind variable ? does not work when placed between apostrophes, ‘?’. Does anyone know how to get around this syntax error?

In Matt's Musings, 12/19/2005 | Original | Archive | Post to del.icio.us | Technorati

Server Side Up

In a recent post by Shady she comments,

“We would input information for a retailer through the web and it wouldn’t show up, out of the 5 - 10 times we tried to input, 2 or 3 would actually go through and show up on the website. It wouldn’t work, and then it would work, and then it wouldn’t work.”

Supermatt adds to Shady’s comments with,

“We have had similar issues were our code partly works, but never inconsistency when we update data. Although we have not inserted much today.”

Without knowing exactly what you were inserting I can’t say for sure, but I would bet that you were running into problems with non-escaped characters. With many databases, characters such as apostrophes and quotes can cause an insert statement to fault. This occurs because of the coding language uses these characters to delimit statements and so when it encounters when of these characters in your statement, it thinks it has reached the end of the statement and the insert fails. So when inserting things such as apostrophes, ampersands, quotes and such use HTML ASCII codes such as ” or &. Or escape the characters with a \ as in \&.

In Matt's Musings, 12/19/2005 | Original | Archive | Post to del.icio.us | Technorati

Server Problem??

Following up on Shadywater’s question:

We couldn’t decide if it was our code’s problem or as we recently discovered at bud’s office, could be a server issue. What does everyone else think? Does anyone else run into the same problems?

We have not found this problem to be true. We have had similar issues were our code partly works, but never inconsistency when we update data. Although we have not inserted much today. Yesterday we added lots of data without problems. If it is a server problem please let us know.

In SuperMatt, 12/19/2005 | Original | Archive | Post to del.icio.us | Technorati

Helpful Hint

Requirement #6 asks us to generate a “show all tables and columns” report. At first we weren’t quite sure what this meant. After some exploration, we discovered the list_column_info_for_all.sql in our SQL directories. This should pull together all the tables and views.

Hope this helps!

In Kevin's Blog, 12/19/2005 | Original | Archive | Post to del.icio.us | Technorati

RSS - Team Goes for Bonus

Matt and I have been working on the RSS feed all night and we think we finally got it working! The feed is located at the following URL: http://elab-linux4.bus.umich.edu:8080/%7Ekevlers/RSS/testRSS.xsql (Bud - can you tell us if we’re all set with the feed)

The purpose of the feed is to notify customers of new store additions to the database. This is especially important to customers who do not have any stores in their immediate area. They can use the feed as a watch-list to see if any stores start carrying Denali Flavors. The xsql file pulls the information directly from the database, so it should be a valid feed, as opposed to just a well-formed document.

If any other teams are attempting to get the RSS feed working, I would recommend looking at this web site.

In Kevin's Blog, 12/19/2005 | Original | Archive | Post to del.icio.us | Technorati

The End is Near

As the semester draws to a close, I’m sure one question on everyone’s mind is what’s going to happen to http://www.thecommunityengine.com/bit320? Is the site simply going to close or will our posts live on? Will we be able to post once the course is over? Maybe Bud can let us know what he’s planning on doing. I absolutely think it’s worth keeping and would be beneficial to show future classes how we were able to develop a successful information community.

In Kevin's Blog, 12/18/2005 | Original | Archive | Post to del.icio.us | Technorati

Responding to Aga

Aga, saw your two posts. I was unaware of the jEdit problem. You can log into two separate hosts under different user names, i.e., thecommunityengine.com and elab-linux4.bus.umich.edu. I guess, per your report, not the same host though.

As for your other issue, I fixed it. We should talk. The general strategy is what I outlined here, but a few of the details were missing in your effort. You were right. You almost had it.

In Blogonautic Solutions, 12/18/2005 | Original | Archive | Post to del.icio.us | Technorati

Almost there: Please help

We’re getting the query form to work and we’re almost there. I got it to work (it’s simple, but the big complicated baby is being born tomorrow). I got everything to work except for the data to show up as a table. I’ve been trying to figure out what’s not working with connecting the simpleTable.xsl to the final output file and the only thing I could come up with was the templatematch command which refers to the rowset-element. I think everything is right so I’m out of ideas. Something’s missing and I’m determined to make this work. Please help. The files that interlink are on Kevin’s account under webapps/XSQL5/XSQL5TEST called createStoreInsertFormAGA1.xsql, customerHTMLAGA.xsl, insertStoreHTMLAGA.xsl, insertStoreAGA.xsql. THANK YOU SO MUCH!

In Pink Footsie, 12/18/2005 | Original | Archive | Post to del.icio.us | Technorati

RSS Project Question, SuperMatt Goes for Bonus

Matt references an RSS question Aga raised last week. Frankly, I confused this one with a bookmark someone had made about RSS resources they had found for the project. The bookmark sounded like people were charging ahead. Matt and Aga want some ideas for how RSS could be used for Denali. Here’s a couple of ideas:

A feed of the most recent flavor requests from customers. Maybe the zip code could be a category element (i.e., a tag). You could easily aggregate requests by zip. Flavor might be another category element.
You could also have a feed of salesperson updates.

Basically, the ideas is to use RSS as a notification format. Categories give you convenient ways to aggregate the information in the feed.

In Blogonautic Solutions, 12/17/2005 | Original | Archive | Post to del.icio.us | Technorati

RSS Question still not answered

A week ago Aga wondered:

We’re wondering what kind of functionality would you like us to have involving RSS? We have a couple of ideas on how we could feed, but we’re wondering what are some options or preferential ways to feed into (let’s say we have a website…what do we feed it to? is there anything else we should consider?). Though we haven’t gotten to it, we’d like to attempt this portion though we may not get it to work. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

We still haven’t resolved this issue and now I am trying to decide which data I should try to transform into valid RSS feeds. Any ideas or thoughts are welcomed. Thank you

In SuperMatt, 12/17/2005 | Original | Archive | Post to del.icio.us | Technorati

Answering Supriya’s question from 30,000 feet

After clearly having done much leg work, Supriya asks a rather detailed but conceptual question about how to employ user input to refine a query. My best answer, given the conceptual nature of the question, is to study XSQL4. In XSQL4, we took user input into an html form and submitted it to an XSQL page. In XSQL4, this page then added data to the database, but you could very easily have had the page just ask a query substituting the form data for the bind parameters.

My best advice is to start trying to figure out how to adapt XSQL4 and start asking questions from there.

In Blogonautic Solutions, 12/17/2005 | Original | Archive | Post to del.icio.us | Technorati

jbartko panics much too soon!

Jenny notes some continuing problems using a database sequence to generate a customer ID. Her team has struggled with this, and it is indeed hard to get to work right. You have to set up a sequence in oracle. You have to use XSQL to grab a new number from the sequence and XSLT to convert the result into an html form. Finally you have to submit the form to another XSQL page that actually inserts the customer into the database.

Well, Jenny’s group got the Oracle problem solved and thought they had everything set up for the rest of the chain. But, they were still getting an error message.

However, I tried it now, and it just worked.

“How can that be?” you might ask. Well, at each phase in the chain I just described, there is caching. Oracle cashes, XSQL and XSLT cache, and your browser caches. It can be hard to get all of these caches to clear out. Waiting a little bit can fix the issue. Changing the file slightly and resaving it can also fix the issue.

In Blogonautic Solutions, 12/17/2005 | Original | Archive | Post to del.icio.us | Technorati

Project Question

I have a question regarding our project. So, I am trying to create a form which asks the customer to enter the retailername and outputs the store information (address, phone etc.) for the retailername queried by the customer.

Now, I have the xsql, xsml and xml working right now. But it is setup such that when I convert the xsql to xml, I enter RETAILERNAME= MEIJER in the secureshell as per the discussions with Tigerliliy and Bud earlier. But now I want to automate the whole process so that a form shows up on the screes where the customer enters Meijer, and the information shows up. My question is that how do I remove the manual interface of entering information in the secure shell, and put it in a form instead?

Bud, I know you mentioned about FORM ACTION, and to use that in your OH. However, where do I put this command? Does it go in the XSQL file, or do I create another file (of what type?)? Is there an example of such an interface with the form that we may have done in class?

I would really appreciate some help. Please let me know if you need any clarification. Thank you.

In supriya, 12/17/2005 | Original | Archive | Post to del.icio.us | Technorati

need more help please

Follow up to Lindsay’s post:

Part 1 of our problem is solved. Create statements have been updated, sequences in there, etc.

PART 2 - we still don’t know what to do. High level problem: it is not grabbing the next number and putting it in the table. Therefore, we get a message that it cannot insert a null value for primary key (customer ID). Here’s the error message:

ORA-01400: cannot insert NULL into (”JBARTKO”.”CUSTOMER”.”CUSTOMERID”) ORA-06512: at line 2

Help?

In jb's blog, 12/17/2005 | Original | Archive | Post to del.icio.us | Technorati

sequence problems

Lindsay mentions some sequence problems. Specifically, she is getting these problems:

create sequence retID increment by 1 start with 100
*
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-00955: name is already used by an existing object

From the message, the issue is clearly that something else has the name she wants to give her sequence. A two part solution:

Give the sequence another name that will be unique, for instance, retIDSeq giving: create sequence retIDSeq increment by 1 start with 100
When dropping tables, don’t forget to drop the sequence, for instance, drop sequence retIDSeq

In Blogonautic Solutions, 12/16/2005 | Original | Archive | Post to del.icio.us | Technorati

Project Questions

Zeenah and Pink Footsie have been having a conversation about this clause in the project requirements:

justify the choice of functionality you implement

Zeenah’s cut:

Is this just telling us to explain the level we took our project to, in the aspect of how it serves customers and Denali, and why we took it to the level that we did?

Zeenah, you hit the nail on the head. Remember, you cannot do everything. Your group did a great job nailing the problem and proposing a solution. That’s a good way to define your focus, what you will and will not do.

In Blogonautic Solutions, 12/15/2005 | Original | Archive | Post to del.icio.us | Technorati

Zeenah’s question

Zeenah says:

justify the choice of functionality you implement
Is this just telling us to explain the level we took our project to, in the aspect of how it serves customers and Denali, and why we took it to the level that we did?

I think you are correct. That is what we are planning on doing. In addition to a thorough description of the business problem, we are supposed to justify why we chose to implement what we did and why we thought those things to be more important than others (why some things are just a mock up). Obviously some things we don’t know how to do, but I think this is an exercise in being able to justify why let’s say Denali should go with your version of the project than their professionals’. I think it’s just selling your idea and being able to explain why X and not Z. I hope this wasn’t too confusing and that it helps.

In Pink Footsie, 12/14/2005 | Original | Archive | Post to del.icio.us | Technorati

Question about Write Up

The last section of Project 2’s write up says to

justify the choice of functionality you implement

Is this just telling us to explain the level we took our project to, in the aspect of how it serves customers and Denali, and why we took it to the level that we did?

In zee124, 12/14/2005 | Original | Archive | Post to del.icio.us | Technorati

Creating RSS for your HTML file

Another great resource to help us with RSS

In del.icio.us/supriya, 12/14/2005 | Original | Archive

RSS - As we all work our ways through the final projects.

This is a good resource for getting some background knowledge on RSS, and basic tutorials. It would be helpful to learn as we complete the final projects, and try to incorporate RSS for the extra points :)

In del.icio.us/supriya, 12/14/2005 | Original | Archive

Response for Supriya

Sorry for being a little vague. In my previous post, about supriya’s question I said you need to have ?RETAILERNAME=MEIJER (or whatever retailer you want) at the end of the URL for whatever page it is on. So in response to your recent post, it would be this url. I know you can do something so that it automatically comes up but we haven’t figured it out yet. Hope this helps.

In Tigerlily's Blog, 12/13/2005 | Original | Archive | Post to del.icio.us | Technorati

Question for Tigerlily

Thanks to Tigerlily for looking at our code, and coming up with a possible solution. I have a quick question. When you entered ?RETAILERNAME=MEIJER, where did you enter this? As in, did you enter it in the Where clause or along with xsql:query bind-params=”RETAILERNAME”? I actually entered in with the Where clause but that is still giving me an error. Also, do you still define the bind param with the command xsql:query bind-params=”RETAILERNAME”?

Thanks again for your help

In supriya, 12/13/2005 | Original | Archive | Post to del.icio.us | Technorati

Supriya’s Question Suggestion

In her post, she said that their view didn’t return any rows (i think). We had a problem with having a bind variable that was text and we changed what he told us (which is the same thing he told you). We didn’t get anything to show up originally because with this type of bind parameter you can set a default. So we had to type ?container=5+gal, where container is the bind and 5+gal is what we want to find. This is typed at the end of the URL on that page. I did this for yours and added ?RETAILERNAME=MEIJER and it returned this:

&ltpage>
-
&ltROWSET>
-
&ltROW num=”1″>
&ltRETAILERNAME>MEIJER
&ltZIPCODE>00002
&ltSTORESTREET>543 BUD STREET
&ltSTORECITY>DETROIT
&ltSTORESTATE>MI
&ltSTOREPHONE>5233542654

-
&ltROW num=”2″>
&ltRETAILERNAME>MEIJER
&ltZIPCODE>00004
&ltSTORESTREET>243 JENNY DRIVE
&ltSTORECITY>SEATTLE
&ltSTORESTATE>WA
&ltSTOREPHONE>5234543577

I don’t know if you have tried this yet, but I hope it helps.

In Tigerlily's Blog, 12/13/2005 | Original | Archive | Post to del.icio.us | Technorati

Project: Problem with XSL File

We have another problem with our XSL file. We modified the original XSL file that we used to create forms to input store information and was working to create another file to create a form that the customer would enter the query and retrieve the store information. So, the xsl file is called insertStoreHTMLTEST3.xsl and we converted the xsql to TEST6.xml. Now, when we do oraxsl insertStoreHTMLTEST3.xsl TEST6.xml, we get the following error:

Error occurred while parsing insertStoreTEST3.xsl: /home/usr01/bit320/kevlers/webapps/XSQL5/XSQL5TEST/insertStoreTEST3.xsl (No such file or directory)

But insertStoreTEST3.xsl does exist in the directory. Could you please look into our files, and tell us where we are going wrong?

Thank you.

In supriya, 12/12/2005 | Original | Archive | Post to del.icio.us | Technorati

Question regarding project

We made the changes as advised by Bud in his post and added the RETAILNAME parameter in place of the ?. However, our XSQL is still not working. Our files are in Kevin’s account in the directory kevlers>webapps>XSQL5>XSQL5TEST. We created two versions - insertStoreTEST5.xsql has the code as advised by Bud. The other file - insertStoreTEST3.xsql has the same code as the other but we defined the bind param in the code above.

However, neither of the two files are working.

When we run the file insertStoreTEST3.xsql, we get the followin error:

&lt ?xml version = ‘1.0′? &gt
&lt page &gt
        &lt xsql-error code=”1006″ action=”xsql:query” &gt &lt statement &gt SELECT RETAILERNAME, ZIPCODE, STORESTREET, STORECITY, STORESTATE, STOREPHONE
        FROM STORE
        WHERE RETAILERNAME='’ &lt/statement &gt &lt message &gt ORA-01006: bind variable does not exist
&lt /message &gt &lt /xsql-error &gt
&lt /page &gt

Then, when we run the file insertStoreTEST5.xsql, we get the error:

&lt ?xml version = ‘1.0′? &gt
&lt page &gt
&lt ROWSET&gt
&lt /page &gt

Could you please tell us what is going wrong. We replaced the ? with the RETAILERNAME parameter, and then tried two ways: with and without defining RETAILERNAME parameter, but none of it is working. Thank you

In supriya, 12/12/2005 | Original | Archive | Post to del.icio.us | Technorati

Frame Alternatives

As Bud already touched on, frames are generally looked down upon in the web design community. In fact, some go so far as to say that using frames is one of the top ten biggest mistakes in web design. A brief search on the term frames on Google revealed many web sites, such as this one, that discuss the downsides of using frames.

Many of you are probably wondering how to include a navigational structure on top of the XSLT pages if you can’t use frames.

One option is to include an inline frame. Inline frames are similar to frames pages except that the inline frame and its contents are embedded on an existing Web page, so you don’t need a separate frames page. Below is an example:

http://elab-linux4.bus.umich.edu:8080/~kevlers/XSQL5/VARIETY%20insert%20form/VARIETYInsertForm.html” title=”Variety Insert Form” scrolling=”no” border=”0″ frameborder=”0″><br />Your browser does not support inline frames or is currently configured not to display inline frames.<br />

Another way to include content is to use server side include. SSI
allows you add dynamically generate content into an existing HTML page, with
the following code <!–#include virtual="PageToIncludeHere.htm" –>

Another option is to simply include the navigational structure directly
in the XSLT pages. However, this becomes complicated when updating.

In Kevin's Blog, 12/11/2005 | Original | Archive | Post to del.icio.us | Technorati

Problems with xsql:query

Aga writes describing a problem with one of her XSQL pages. This is the page as orginally written:

<?xml version="1.0"?>

nnection="cis320" xmlns:xsql="urn:oracle-xsql">
<xsql:dml
bind-params="RETAILERNAME">
<!-- Everthing between the BEGIN and END key words is called a $
SELECT RETAILERNAME, ZIPCODE, STORESTREET, STORECITY, STORESTATS
FROM STORE
WHERE RETAILERNAME=?
</xsql:dml>
</page>

The big problem here is the use of the <xsql:dml> tag for a query. Just does not work. You need an <xsql:query> tag instead. Also, we have on occasion found problems using bind parameters for comparing text values. There’s an alternative way to do bind parameters that gets around that issue. Here’s a more fool proof rendition of Aga’s query with these two fixes:

<?xml version="1.0"?>

nnection="cis320" xmlns:xsql="urn:oracle-xsql">
<xsql:query>
<!-- Everthing between the BEGIN and END key words is called a $
SELECT RETAILERNAME, ZIPCODE, STORESTREET, STORECITY, STORESTATS
FROM STORE
WHERE RETAILERNAME='{@RETAILERNAME}'
</xsql:query>
</page>

Note that I took the bind parameter RETAILERNAME and just embedded it directly in the query with no bind-params attribute. The generic syntax for that is {@BindParameterName}. I surrounded it with single quotes here because it represents a text value. Other than this change in syntax, everything else applies.

In Blogonautic Solutions, 12/10/2005 | Original | Archive | Post to del.icio.us | Technorati

Tabbing Question Solved

So I have found a way to answer Pink Footsie’s question. Her question was:

How do you change the drop down menu in jEdit to tabbing? I know it can be done and it’s easier to switch between windows this way than working with a drop down menu. Oh and how do you bring up the tabs we have in class that have the XML & XSLT transformer on the side?

Here is what I did to fix the problem!

Download the Plug-in called Buffer Tab. You can do this easily by clicking on the Plug-in Drop Down and the open the plug-in manager.
Open up Plug-ins option under the plug-ins drop down and find the BufferTab plug in. Make sure “Enable Buffer tabs by default” button is checked.
Now you should have tabbed browsing for your Jedit page.

I hope this helps blog if you have any other questions.

In SuperMatt, 12/10/2005 | Original | Archive | Post to del.icio.us | Technorati

Frames, Think about avoiding them

Zee has been talking about using frames, and Kevin has been advising her. Frames appear an attractive alternative for organizing web content. You essentially frame specific pieces of content in a little tile on your web page. When the content of the tile changes, you just swap in a new one.

You don’t have to get that fancy, and in fact, most web designers avoid frames. The reason is that frames add complexity to the page design. They make the designer’s job more complex because they can render slightly differently on different browsers.

In Blogonautic Solutions, 12/10/2005 | Original | Archive | Post to del.icio.us | Technorati

Web Site Frames

Zee124 recently asked about linking and frames. Each frame on your page has a name attribute. If you have two frames on your page, one might be called main and the other one might be footer. If you have a link in your footer frame and you want the page to load in the main frame, then you’ll need to link to it like this:

<a target="main" href="http://www.yahoo.com">Yahoo</a>

To have the linked page appear in the same window, use the following code:

<a target="_self" href="http://www.yahoo.com">Yahoo</a>

I hope this helps.

In Kevin's Blog, 12/10/2005 | Original | Archive | Post to del.icio.us | Technorati

Dreamweaver aint so dreamy!

We are working on our project and have a quick question for anyone who is familiar with dreamweaver. Basically we have set up a navigation bar on the bottom of the page and when we click on one of the buttons, we want the new page linked to show up within the frame and not in a new page (which is how we set it up right now). Does anyone know how to do that??

In zee124, 12/09/2005 | Original | Archive | Post to del.icio.us | Technorati

BIT 311- Response to JB

JB recently posted a blog, inquiring about BIT 311.

However, I’m on the waitlist for BIT 311 and can’t decide if it’s worth it to try to get in. Has anyone ever taken this course? If so, was it valuable?

I am actually taking the class right now. I think its a good class to take, specially if you want to learn about Macros and VBA. For the first few weeks, we learn about excel functionality such as creating charts, pivot tables, solver etc. Then, the last half focuses on VBA.

You can learn a lot of the topics taught in class by reading the dummies books or just trying out different features yourself. But I like watching the in-class demos, and then doing it. So, I would definitely recommend the class. I think the part on macros or even tables and VBA would be useful in future jobs. Moreover, I have heard from many Michigan Alumni, who are now in the financial industry, that they use a lot of Excel functionality learned in this class at work everyday. Hope that helps!

In supriya, 12/08/2005 | Original | Archive | Post to del.icio.us | Technorati

Dynamically Generated Lists… not good enough

Dynamically generated lists are all well and good, but is there a way to alphabetize the list? Especially once the list of stores or ZIP codes starts increasing in size, it can become difficult to find specific values. In an effort to make it as easy as possible for the user, there must be someway to better organize the list. Any suggestions Bud? Thanks.

In Kevin's Blog, 12/08/2005 | Original | Archive | Post to del.icio.us | Technorati

Re: JB’s problems in her ice cream cone

Shady Waters recently posted about a problem they are having with project 2. The error message seems to indicate that there aren’t enough input values. Does your table contain more than just those three fields? If the table contains more than three fields and it’s set to not allow null values, then this error would occur. Check the number of items in each set and change the SQL statement to make them equal.

In Kevin's Blog, 12/08/2005 | Original | Archive | Post to del.icio.us | Technorati

Problems with Project 2

We tried to make one of our views show up as on the web page, but it didn’t work. We followed the same steps as we did for the other ones and even used the same template, which we knew worked. The odd thing is that there is no error…it just doesn’t show up on the web page. Here is the site I am talking about. Has anyone else had a problem like this?

In Tigerlily's Blog, 12/07/2005 | Original | Archive | Post to del.icio.us | Technorati

JB’s problems in her ice cream cone

JB’s group has an error. We are trying to create a customer input form. We can get the page up with the source. check it out here. But the problem we have is when we input information on a customer and we get an error that looks like this!

This is the code we used to insert the info. We pretty much took the examples from class and changed it to our specific case.

bind-params=”customerID zip flavor”>
BEGIN
INSERT INTO customer VALUES(?,?,?);
COMMIT;
END;

p>

Help us please…otherwise JB can’t eat her ice cream

In Shady Waters, 12/07/2005 | Original | Archive | Post to del.icio.us | Technorati

Change Directory the XPath & Linux Way

PinkFootsie and Shady recently had a converation about the CD function in Linux. Shady gave some excellent advice to PinkFootsie:

“Some help might be found on this site that Blogstar found in response to a post Tiger Lilly.”

While reading Chapter 5: XPath Espresso, in the XSLT For Dummies book, they mention that the XPath commands mimic directory structure navigation commands. Things such as “..” represent the parent, while “.” represents self, and children can be accessed by “/child/child”..etc. I hadn’t made this connection until the until the book pointed it out. I think this is pretty cool and will help me remember the XPath commands now that they don’t seem so arbitrary. So just like in linux, to go up a directory you type “cd ..”, in XPath to access the parent you type “..”. Pretty cool if you ask me.

In Matt's Musings, 12/05/2005 | Original | Archive | Post to del.icio.us | Technorati

Errors in Project 2

Tigerlilly observes:

We have been working on project 2 and we have an error with one of our views:

select DISTINCT brand, flavor from brand, BCF where brand.brandID=BCF.brandIDORA-00904: invalid column name

The select statement works in Oracle but when we tried viewing the webpage it came up with the above. Also, we took the distinct command out and it still had an error, so I do not think that is the cause. Any suggestions?

One thought I have is that you may need to quit your sqlplus session. Have you dropped and recreated your tables in that session? If you have, the changes could be masked until you quit the session.

Also, are you running the queries in one account and the web pages from another?

Try both these things.

If those do not work, try just running a command like select * from brand in your web page. Does that work?

Finally, always include the URL of the page that is throwing the error message. That way, I can go peek at it.

In Blogonautic Solutions, 12/04/2005 | Original | Archive | Post to del.icio.us | Technorati

Error message for project 2. Please Help!

We have been working on project 2 and we have an error with one of our views:

select DISTINCT brand, flavor from brand, BCF where brand.brandID=BCF.brandIDORA-00904: invalid column name

The select statement works in Oracle but when we tried viewing the webpage it came up with the above. Also, we took the distinct command out and it still had an error, so I do not think that is the cause. Any suggestions?

In Tigerlily's Blog, 12/04/2005 | Original | Archive | Post to del.icio.us | Technorati

Templates Rule!

Matt recently inquired about the difference between xsl:value-of and xsl:apply-templates and when to use which one. Xsl:value-of inserts the value of an expression into the result tree. Similarly, Xsl:apply-templates with a select attribute processes the expression and places the value into the result tree. However, the primary difference is that if select is not defined with xsl:apply-templates, then the current node and all child nodes will be processed.

In Kevin's Blog, 12/04/2005 | Original | Archive | Post to del.icio.us | Technorati

Inserting Code: Thanks Kevin

Kevin wrote a really good post on how to write code on the community engine website. I remember that the first time I posted code on the remix site, I just typed it directly in WordPress, not realizing that it would execute the command. As a result, the result of my code got posted rather than the actual code I was asking about. And I felt pretty silly about it since I could not go back and edit it either as the post would not show the updated changes.

But I like Kevin’s idea:

I would recommend inserting a textbox in Microsoft FrontPage and then pasting your code into the textbox. Then copy and paste all the HTML from FrontPage to Wordpress.

Using the Front Page text box would save a lot of time and energy used by the cumbersome character codes. Thanks Kevin

In supriya, 12/02/2005 | Original | Archive | Post to del.icio.us | Technorati

Inserting code: now easier than ever!

I just discovered an even easier way of displaying code on the community engine site. Instead the laborious process of inserting the character codes for the opening and closing brackets or taking screenshots, you can just insert all the code into an HTML textbox, as shown below:
guaranteed to display correctly. To do this, I
would recommend inserting a textbox in Microsoft FrontPage and then pasting
your code into the textbox. Then copy and paste all the HTML from
FrontPage to Wordpress.

In Kevin's Blog, 12/01/2005 | Original | Archive | Post to del.icio.us | Technorati

Re: Zebrality.com?

When I read jb’s post saying “My post now appears as a link on their Hurricane Katrina page.” I was reminded of an article that I found and a post that I wrote about splogs. What I think is that zebrality is using your post to increase their presence on search engines. Like I wrote previously: “The unforntunate part is that authors of credible material are being used by others to increase their presence on searches and to make money by having people click on ads on the sites.” Sorry Jennie. You can take it as a complement that your blog is popular enough that it will increase search presence for other sites or you can be upset that you are being used.

Disclaimer:I could be completely wrong on what they are trying to do with Jennie’s post.

In Tigerlily's Blog, 11/30/2005 | Original | Archive | Post to del.icio.us | Technorati

Screen Shots in Posts

In one of Aga’s posts she talks about the idea of using the print screen function. This is a good idea because it saves students time, and ensure an exact replica of text. However I’m worried about the clearly of the reading. Also it is a huge pain to do. In fact, I have tired numerous ways to insert a screen shot and it doesn’t seem to work. This first way I tired was to save the screen shot as a file then insert it in the blog. That did not work. Then I tired to copy and paste the image in, but that did not work either. In both of these tries, the computer basically tries to post a local file into my blog. The only way I figure I could do this is to post the picture (screenshot) on the internet somewhere then have the html code pull the picture from the website where the file is located. All of this is much harder than just coping and pasting the XML text. Does anyone have an easier way?

In SuperMatt, 11/30/2005 | Original | Archive | Post to del.icio.us | Technorati

CD Sophistication at its best

Pink Footsie seems to be having some issues with the Secure Shell we use in class. Some help might be found on this site that Blogstar found in response to a post Tiger Lilly.

But as a suggestion, just type in “cd” and it should pop you back into the very original directory that you start out in when you log in. Hopefully that will help It’s not a really sophisticated solution but it gets the job done

In Shady Waters, 11/30/2005 | Original | Archive | Post to del.icio.us | Technorati

The “value-of” “apply-templates”

While reading throught the XSLT book (specifically chapter 4), I ran across examples using and and am confused by the difference. Take for example basic.p54-1.xsl:

<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="1.0"> <xsl:template match=”score”> <xsl:apply-templates select=”grade”/> is the critic’s rating for the musical score of <xsl:apply-templates select=”film”/>

This produces the output: 100 is the critic’s rating for th emusical score of A Little Princess

Then, I substitued “xsl:value-of” for “xsl:apply-templates”.

<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="1.0"> <xsl:template match=”score”> <xsl:value-of select=”grade”/> is the critic’s rating for the musical score of <xsl:value-of select=”film”/>

This produced the same result. So my question is, when you are trying to output literal values when do you use “xsl:apply-templates” and “xsl:value-of”? I think it might have something to do with the defaults but I’m not sure (since this section confused me a bit as well). Any thoughts?

In Matt's Musings, 11/30/2005 | Original | Archive | Post to del.icio.us | Technorati

zebrality.com?

So, my post about Wi-fi received a comment. Actually more of a trackback. From a site called zebrality.com. My post now appears as a link on their Hurricane Katrina page. I’ve never heard of zebrality.com and I’m not sure what to think of it. It looks like a news site for tv and other topics, but I’m not sure how credible it is. Any thoughts? My main concern is that my blog is listed as a link under “latest news.” I love my blog, but should I be considered a credible source for Katrina news?

In jb's blog, 11/29/2005 | Original | Archive | Post to del.icio.us | Technorati

After some spelunking

Zee124 mentions some issues with leftover white space in response to a post by SuperMatt. Here’s the basic gist of the story. In XSLT — Chapter 4, Matt was playing around with basic.p54-2.xsl (available here) trying to get the additional information after the <movie> element to go away. He followed my advice to use empty <xsl:template/> rules to make the elements disappear, but was left with extra whitespace. Put concretely, Matt started with this:

<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl=\"http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform\" version=\"1.0\">
<!-- Sample from XSLT For Dummies, by Richard Wagner -->
  <xsl:template match=\"film\">
    <movie><xsl:apply-templates/&

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