Computer Magic - Quality Custom Software Solutions

MSSQL 2000 - Merge Replication Errors

November 14th, 2007

The ProblemOn a recent project, merge replication was required. Any one who has seriously tried to use MSSQL Merge replication knows that it can be a total pain. It sounds nice, but in practice it can be a real bear. It gets worse if you have had to break the replication manually for any reason.Replication doesn’t clean up nice. We used sp_removedbreplication ‘dbname’ on the subscriber to clear out all replication settings. It did a fairly nice job, but there were still a few things left behind.Once merge replication was setup again properly, updates would flow from the publisher but not from the subscriber. There was an error: “tsvw_FB…”What happend?There were leftovers in the database. When you setup replication, the system adds triggers to your replicated tables. When those triggers fire, they add the changes to your replication queue so that they get pushed to the other servers. The TSVW and CSVW errors are generally leftovers from past replication configurations.The SolutionWhen you setup replication, a new set of TSVW and CSVW triggers are created. You could end up with multiple triggers (e.g. 2 update triggers). To find out which one you SHOULD keep, look in your views and you will see some TSVW and CSVW views created. Look at those numbers. They are followed by big hashes. Now go back to the problem table and remove the triggers that do NOT have those numbers. After that, your problem should be solved.Ray Pulsipher

Posted in Database, MS SQL | Comments Off

CSS positioning made easy

September 25th, 2007

I saw this page the other day. It is great. It shows you very simple examples of CSS positioning in an easy to understand format with visible examples.

Posted in Tech Rambling | No Comments »

When student loans go bad - Sallie Mae

August 21st, 2007

In the last ten years, I have noticed a disturbing trend. The deregulation of the loan and credit industry has left many americans hurting. I, like many others, have had to take on student loans in the past to pay for the skyrocketing costs of education.

I borrowed from two companies, Sallie Mae and Wachovia. Getting money is easy, its how they act when you miss a payment that shows the true colors.

I simply put the student loan payment cupons in the wrong pile and they didn’t get paid one month. Wachovia never called. They sent me a letter notifying me that I was late and as such had lost certain benifits (e.g. lower interest rates for paying on time). Otherwise, they said that I owed a double payment (may or may not have been a small service fee). No biggie, I cut a check for the full ammount, problem solved.

Sallie Mae on the other hand began a barrage of phone calls and letters. Keep in mind that I was about ready to write a check for the current month so I am only one month behind… not 3 or 6 or 9 months. From the time of the first call until today (7 days) I have recieved 4 letters, and been called upwards of 24 times. The first time I explained that I would have a check in the mail with a day or so. The next call, I explained again and said I had already talked to some one. On the third call in 2 days I started to loose my patience.

This third call is special. I got a little upset and told them that calling every day would not speed up the US post office and that a check was in the mail. She informed me that I would get calls EVERY day until they got their payment. Keep in mind, that this is the first payment I have missed, and the first payment that has been late, and that from the beginning I promised to catch up and pay in full. I have not disputed the fact that I needed to pay nor have I ever refused to do so.

Here I am a week later and still getting calls and being harrassed by Sallie Mae while Wachovia has been both polite and quite reasonable in its efforts to inform me of my mistake.

I might also add tha Sallie Mae is charging me the highest interest rates and that they refused to release my loans when I consolodated them (otherwise I would only be paying Wachovia now). The federal government obviously isn’t looking out for college students these days. I would STRONGLY advise any one who needs to take student loans to stear clear of Sallie Mae at all costs.

Sallie Mae has made themselves into a joke around my place. When they call, we try to think of new ways to mess with their collections people. I truly hope that the calls really are monitored.

UPDATE: 8/22/2007 - They broke their record. I had a total of 5 calls from them in one day! You would think I was a hardened crimial or something.

Posted in Student Loans | No Comments »

TinyMCE and Ajax Update Panels

July 6th, 2007

For those of you who want to embed a WYSIWIG HTML editor in your web pages, check out TinyMCE. It is a great editor, very customizable.

I recently tried to put the TinyMCE editor into a project that was using Update Panels from the Microsoft Ajax library (previously called Atlas). The TinyMCE editor is a javascript only library that converts text areas to the WYSIWIG editor. This happens at load time.

The trouble I had was when a textarea is displayed after a post back event (e.g. you clicked a link and the editor comes up). The javascript scans the web page when it loads looking for textareas but fails to scan for textareas that are added as a result of an ajax event. The result is that any textareas that are displayed later simply continue to look like a textarea.

The solution is to make sure the init code is called for tinyMCE and tell it manually to add the new textarea.

In your server side code (where ever that is, clicking a page name, etc..) add this code:


ScriptManager.RegisterClientScriptBlock(UpdatePanel1, Me.GetType(), “Init”, “tinyMCE.execCommand(’mceAddControl’, false, ‘” + txtPage.ClientID + “‘);”, True)

You tell .Net to setup a line of javascript to run when the ajax call completes. This line of javascript is sufficient to tell TinyMCE the name of the new textarea. Notice that I use the ClientID attribute of the text box in question as the name on the client side can be different due to name mangling. Also note, you may have to change the names of the update panel (updatepanel1) and textarea (txtPage) to match your controls. Otherwise, this code should work. Good luck.

Ray Pulsipher

Owner

Computer Magic And Software Design

Posted in AJAX, ASP.NET, DOT NET | No Comments »