JB's blog

iDontCParts..... Hey where is the iParts documents that was mentioned at innovations?

JB — Mon, 04 May 2009 17:09:35 -0400

I cleared my whole week so I can read the 20-30 white pages regarding iParts I heard about and I can't seem to find it on this website. Is this the wrong website? Sorry please bear with me I just bought my first computer last week and this is my first time on the Information super highway so I am not sure what I am doing..

IQA Business Objects spec changes, undocumented by ASI

JB — Tue, 06 May 2008 16:09:02 -0400

I have just discovered that with the upgrade to iMIS 15.0. ASI has decided to drop the IQA Business Object of 'Contact' and replaced it with 'NetContact'. After about 1 hour looking through IQA for this object (an object that I have been using since 10.4) I finally gave up.

Like a good boy I went through the http://docs.imis.com to see what I should be using and what happened to 'Contact'. No such luck.

iBO for .NET not 'supported' but officially integrated into product

JB — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 17:42:44 -0400

OK this gets me everytime. As I continue to develop using iBO for .NET. I am always run into some issue. Like a good boy because the product is marked as 'ETP' in this fine community I go into the forums and document the issue.

With iMIS 15 release I am discovering the same issues I had with iBO for .NET is happening in the Casual View and public view.
The reason...
iMIS 15 release uses iBO for .NET for some of the web view components. fair enough... It is good that ASI is using their own API for their product.

Release Notes.... Please Note, not being released anymore

JB — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 12:33:29 -0400

When I was 15 years old I created a Q-Basic Blackjack game. I gave it to my father to review and play with. When I gave it to him I tried to be professional and included a Readme.txt file with it. At the time I didn't know what a readme file was used for but I knew enough that every time I recieved new software it was included.

I guess part of the Ready...Set...Evolve... motto of ASI is to not only evolve iMIS but rather evolve the industry and no longer attach release notes for their new versions of iMIS. Starting with 15.0.3 the nice Release notes PDF is no more. Instead it is replaced with a link to docs.imis.com

iMIS 15 - Ability to track the User who modified a record ??

JB — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 19:11:20 -0500

with the change of authentication methods between iMIS 10.x to iMIS 15.0 you can no longer from a SQL prospective know who the imis client user is who is performing the update/insert/delete. There are various third party triggers...etc that currently exist on iMIS databases that go ahead and insert lines into the Name_log table for one reason or another. The trigger whould know who the user is by parsing the SESSION_USER variable in SQL.

Bruce and I

JB — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 23:56:48 -0400

ok a number of NiUG members have suggested I start a Blog. where else to start a blog then this community.

I know most of you are wondering how Bruce and I treated each other at NiUG after our numerous heated debates involving T-SQL theories on the NiUG listserver.

Well to put it short and sweet, during GameWorks night a group of NiUG members were playing a popular video game racing game.

Unified Login Example : WSS 3.0 and iMIS15

JB — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 14:46:58 -0500

off the heals of chris castle's blog about the Unified Login of iMIS15, I have successfully merged WSS3.0 (sharepoint services 3.0) and iMIS15 to have one Single Sign on

Background/History

Sharepoint services 2.0 (WSS 2.) comes FREE with Windows Server 2003.

WSS 2.0 only authentication provider is NT Authentication.

WSS 3.0 came out in November 2006.
WSS 3.0 comes FREE with windows Server 2003 (requires an upgrade)

SQL best practice : comment your objects?

JB — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 20:04:32 -0500

I was wondering what each of your Business Practice is of creating header comment for each of your SQL objects (views,functions,triggers)...I know I have a really bad habit of not always doing it with everything I create and or leaving parts out.. I want to start documenting these things for my company..

Do you all give examples, define the Pre and Post conditions? etc....

Do you have a different format for each type of language.. your VB,ActiveX,Coldfusion,Javascript,CSS... all have the same format?

Answering the Where question in your reports

JB — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 21:33:54 -0500

Ok I hear all this talk about iMIS 15 and I am really excited about it but I can't sit still until I ask this question

will iMIS 15 support geocode? I soo wish iMIS had a geocode (Lat,Lng) float fields in the Name_Address table. I had to go to a third party to provide my company geocodes and it seems kind of silly since we already have a Address validator built in with Accumail.

With having a geocode for all the addresses, lets you do things like compare distances between two addresses. List how many members live in my zipcode...etc

Fine Tuning your SQL code

JB — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 22:15:17 -0500

Here is a great webpage that any SQL developer should read once in a while. It is a refresher course on some of the things you might have learned in college but forgot. sometimes we get in the habit of coding a certain way and get lazy

http://www.awprofessional.com/articles/article.asp?p=30247&seqNum=2&...

Tonight I was doing a little coding (girlfriend and I had a huge fight so I went back to the office) I just happened to change a couple things in the where clause around and noticed that the speed was improved. Since I was amazed and confused at the same time. My ADHD got the best of me and I quickly ignored my script I needed to write before tommorrow morning and spent the next 2 hours of my life solving this little puzzle.

IQA on the sidemenu

JB — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 22:34:11 -0400

If you attended the 2006 Discovery conference. I spoke in a short but sweet workshop on the very last day on the very last timeslot about how to display various IQA queries on the dashboard.

Well that was only a step in my goal, which is to provide my users a way to quickly access their favorite IQA queries at any time during their iMIS workload.

I have developed a pretty neat way to include the IQA queries on every module's sidemenu without having to update each client's machine after every new IQA query is created.

Screenshot below

Basic workflow

I have two files stored in the ../system framwork directory

MyIQA-Submenu.html
Department-Submenu.html

For each sidemenu I want my IQA menu options to appear
I just add the raw html syntax not to forget to include the javascript that ASI uses to interact the popup window.

Inside each Submenu.html file contains an object tag. For those HTML coders out there: Since ASI uses windows.createpopup for their menus, a popup window does not render all html tags including the useful iframe.

the object tag just calls an .ASP page that pulls the names of the queries from the iMIS DB and displays the list.

How does it know the queries to pull

In our shop, we have organized our IQA into various folders. every iMIS users has their own folder Report view/Personal/userid and every department has their own folder Report view/Department/departmentname. I have create a SQL view that includes all the iMIS userids. their matching iMIS ID and their department.