September 1, 2010 10:41 by
JonThe FreeTextTable function in SQL Server is very useful when you need to search a column for words, phrases, etc. FreeTextTable will return a table that you can join on. It also returns the Rank of the matches so you can order the most relevant matches at the top.
In the example below I am searching the Keywords column of the MyTable table using the @Keywords passed into the stored procedure. I am then ordering them by Rank so the highest matches show up first.
CREATE PROCEDURE [dbo].[FreeTextSample]
@Keywords [varchar](1000) = ''
WITH EXECUTE AS CALLER
AS
BEGIN
SET NOCOUNT ON;
SELECT myTable.MyPrimaryKeyID,
myTable.Title,
myTable.Description
FROM MyTable myTable(nolock)
INNER JOIN FreeTextTable(dbo.MyTable, Keywords, @Keywords) AS searchTable
ON myTable.MyPrimaryKeyID = searchTable.[KEY]
ORDER By searchTable.[RANK] DESC
END
GO
One thing to note is that LINQ does not contain an equivalent keyword for FreeTextTable. So what I did was to create a new method on my DataContext that returns the results of the stored procedure. See my post here for further details on how to do this.
August 19, 2010 15:02 by
JonIn the following table the page executing the code is at the following physical location on my machine:
C:\Users\me\Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Projects\TestStuff\TestStuff\Nested\Paths.aspx
| Request.ApplicationPath
Gets the root virtual path.
|
/TestStuff |
| Request.CurrentExecutionFilePath
Gets the virtual path to the current file.
Same as Request.Path and Request.FilePath.
|
/TestStuff/Nested/Paths.aspx |
| Request.CurrentExecutionFilePathExtension
Gets the file extension of the current file.
|
.aspx |
| Request.FilePath
Gets the virtual path to the current file.
Same as Request.CurrentExecutionFilePath and Request.Path.
|
/TestStuff/Nested/Paths.aspx |
| Request.MapPath("")
Gets the full physical path to the current directory. Seems to be the same as Server.MapPath("").
|
C:\Users\me\Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Projects\TestStuff\TestStuff\Nested |
| Request.Path
Gets the virtual path to the current file.
Same as Request.CurrentExecutionFilePath and Request.FilePath.
|
/TestStuff/Nested/Paths.aspx |
| Request.PhysicalApplicationPath
Gets the physical path to the root directory.
Seems to be the same as AppDomain.CurrentDomain.BaseDirectory.
|
C:\Users\me\Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Projects\TestStuff\TestStuff\ |
| Request.PhysicalPath
Gets the full physical path to the current file.
|
C:\Users\me\Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Projects\TestStuff\TestStuff\Nested\Paths.aspx |
| AppDomain.CurrentDomain.BaseDirectory
Gets the physical path to the root directory.
Seems to be the same as Request.PhysicalApplicationPath.
|
C:\Users\me\Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Projects\TestStuff\TestStuff\ |
| Server.MapPath("")
Gets the full physical path to the current directory.
Seems to be the same as Request.MapPath("").
|
C:\Users\me\Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Projects\TestStuff\TestStuff\Nested |
Also, if you are joining a directory to a file/path I recommend using the Path.Combine method found in the System.IO namespace. Here is an example:
using System.IO;
string fileName = "MyFile.pdf";
string fullPath = Path.Combine(AppDomain.CurrentDomain.BaseDirectory
+ fileName);
July 16, 2010 13:22 by
JonFollowing is an easy way to hide the modal popup dialog extender from the AJAX control toolkit using JavaScript. The key is to set a BehaviorID on the ModalPopupExtender. Then you can use this ID to call the hide() method via Javascript like this:
function HideModal() {
$find('modalPopupBehavior').hide();
}
In the full example below I am closing the modal popup dialog box when the user clicks on a link.
Full ASPX example:
<%@ Register Assembly="AjaxControlToolkit" Namespace="AjaxControlToolkit" TagPrefix="ajaxtk" %>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" >
<head runat="server">
<title>My Page</title>
<link href="css/Test.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
</head>
<body>
<form id="aspNetForm" runat="server">
<asp:ScriptManager ID="scriptMan" runat="server" />
<script type="text/javascript" language="javascript">
function HideModal() {
$find('modalPopupBehavior').hide();
}
</script>
<asp:UpdatePanel ID="upnlMain" runat="server">
<ContentTemplate>
<div>
<ajaxtk:ModalPopupExtender ID="modalPopup" runat="server"
BehaviorID="modalPopupBehavior"
TargetControlID="btnPopup" PopupControlID="pnlPopup">
</ajaxtk:ModalPopupExtender>
<asp:Button ID="btnPopup" runat="server" Text="Show Popup" />
<asp:Panel ID="pnlPopup" runat="server" CssClass="modalPopup"
style="width: 715px; display: none;">
<div>
<p>
<a href="http://www.jonathanjungman.com/blog/"
target="_blank" onclick="HideModal()">Hide Modal</a>
</p>
</div>
</asp:Panel>
</div>
</ContentTemplate>
</asp:UpdatePanel>
</form>
</body>
</html>
June 15, 2010 10:39 by
JonI ran into an issue the other day where my UpdateProgress control (an animated GIF) would display behind any div that was using the DropShadowExtender control from the AJAX Control Toolkit. In order to fix this issue I set the CSS class on the div of the UpateProgress to "postion: fixed" and the "z-index" to an arbitrarily high number.
This is before the CSS change. Notice the animated GIF just peeking out from the end of the drop shadow at the bottom right of this image.
And here is what it looks like after the CSS change. The animated GIF now displays properly in front of the div using the drop shadow.
CSS:
div.divProgress { z-index: 1001; position: fixed; }
ASPX:
<%@ Register Assembly="AjaxControlToolkit" Namespace="AjaxControlToolkit" TagPrefix="ajaxtk" %>
<ajaxtk:DropShadowExtender id="dse" runat="server" TargetControlID="divPanel"
TrackPosition="true" />
<div id="divPanel" runat="server" class="Box">
<div class="BoxHeader">This Is My Header</div>
<div>
<p>Text here. More Text. Whoa. Text here. More Text. Whoa. Text here. More Text. Whoa.
Text here. More Text. Whoa. Text here. More Text. Whoa. Text here. More Text. Whoa.
Text here. More Text. Whoa. Text here. More Text. Whoa. Text here. More Text. Whoa.
Text here. More Text. Whoa. Text here. More Text. Whoa. Text here. More Text. Whoa.
Text here. More Text. Whoa. Text here. More Text. Whoa. Text here. More Text. Whoa.
Text here. More Text. Whoa. Text here. More Text. Whoa. Text here. More Text. Whoa.
Text here. More Text. Whoa. Text here. More Text. Whoa. Text here. More Text. Whoa.
Text here. More Text. Whoa. Text here. More Text. Whoa. Text here. More Text. Whoa.
Text here. More Text. Whoa. Text here. More Text. Whoa. Text here. More Text. Whoa.</p>
<p>
<asp:Button ID="btnDoSomething" runat="server" Text="Do Something"
onclick="btnDoSomething_Click" />
</p>
</div>
</div>
<ajaxtk:AlwaysVisibleControlExtender ID="AlwaysVisibleControlExtender" runat="server"
TargetControlID="updateProgress" HorizontalSide="Center" VerticalSide="Middle" />
<asp:UpdateProgress ID="updateProgress" runat="server" DynamicLayout="true" >
<ProgressTemplate>
<div class="divProgress" id="divProgress" runat="server" align="center">
<img src="~/images/red_rotation.gif" id="imgUpdateProgress" runat="server" alt="Please Wait..." />
</div>
</ProgressTemplate>
</asp:UpdateProgress>
May 20, 2010 14:09 by
JonI got this error in Visual Studio when I was running one of our projects on a new development machine where I had just recently installed a fresh copy of Visual Studio 2008. After installing the Microsoft .NET SDK, this error went away. Hopefully this post helps someone else out there.
April 27, 2010 15:33 by
JonThis one is simple but nice to know. To remove a control from the tab order you can just set its TabIndex to -1. I thought there might be a "turn tabbing off" property, but this seems to be the easiest way.
<asp:CheckBox ID="myCB" runat="server" Text="MyCB" TabIndex="-1" />
March 26, 2010 16:40 by
JonCreating a GridView (or other data control) with efficient paging is very easy with LINQ. You can thank the Take and Skip operators for this; they allow you to only pull back the records you need. In the simple example below we are using a LinqDataSource and handling its onselecting method to create our LINQ query and do our paging. Set AutoPage to false since we are writing code to handle paging ourselves. Also the PageSize property of the GridView control is being populated from a constant in the code-behind class.
ASPX:
<asp:LinqDataSource ID="linqDS" runat="server" AutoPage="false"
ContextTypeName="Namespace.MyDataContext"
onselecting="linqDS_Selecting" />
<asp:GridView ID="myGV" runat="server" DataSourceID="linqDS"
AllowPaging="true" PageSize="<%# PAGE_SIZE %>"
AutoGenerateColumns="false">
<Columns>
<!--Removed for simplicity -->
</Columns>
</asp:GridView>
Code-behind:
// Const declared at top of code-behind
public const int PAGE_SIZE = 100;
protected void linqDS_Selecting(object sender, LinqDataSourceSelectEventArgs e)
{
// LINQ query
var query = from c in myDC.Class
select c;
// Set the total count
// so GridView knows how many pages to create
e.Arguments.TotalRowCount = query.Count();
// Get only the rows we need for the page requested
query = query.Skip(myGV.PageIndex * PAGE_SIZE).Take(PAGE_SIZE);
e.Result = query;
}
March 16, 2010 17:05 by
JonAs you probably know, you can implement caching in an ASPX page using the OutputCache directive. However, you can't use this in an ASHX handler. So what if you are using a handler to server binary files from the database and you want to improve peformance by using server side output caching? You'll just need to add some of your own caching logic in your code-behind. Here is some sample code of how you can do this. In this very basic example we are passing the ID of our object on the query string.
// Get ID from query string
int myID = Convert.ToInt32(context.Request.QueryString["ID"]);
// Attempt to get item from cache if it exists
string myCacheKey = "MyKey" + myID; // Unique Identifier
MyObject myObject = context.Cache[myCacheKey] as MyObject;
if (myObject == null)
{
// Item isn't cached; Grab business object from the database
myObject = MyObject.GetMyObject(myID);
// Add object to Cache using the cache key
// In this example we are caching for 30 minutes
context.Cache.Insert(myCacheKey, myObject,
null, DateTime.UtcNow.AddMinutes(30),
Cache.NoSlidingExpiration);
}
// Code to generate file from binary data here
March 16, 2010 14:15 by
JonToday I had a problem hitting a breakpoint in an .ASHX file I created. I noticed the project was using the built-in Visual Studio Development Server. Once I switched over to using IIS I had no problem hitting the breakpoint. I thought it was very strange, but hopefully this might help someone else out if they manage to find this post via Google.
February 10, 2010 16:10 by
JonWe saw the above message in SourceSafe after moving to SQL Server 2008 and then saving the scripts for our tables back to SourceSafe. It appears that SQL 2008 Management Studio uses a different text encoding than prior versions of Management Studio/Enterprise Manager.
To save your script using a specific text encoding. You can "Save as.." and then there is an arrow to the right of the Save button. Click this and select "Save with Encoding...". Then you can select the specific encoding you need. In my case I needed to change the encoding from "Western Eurpean (Windows) - Codepage 1252" to "Unicode - Codepage 1200".
