Monthly Archives: April 2006

Last night I whipped up my first Flex 2 app. I added a contact request form to Red Omega Solutions‘ site, since I hadn’t gotten around to making a function to email me those requests, I made a quicky little datagrid to show the contents of the table. Simple I know, but it got the flex 2 juices flowing which is what I needed to jump start on getting the TMC flexified.

The website for Red Omega Solutions has been live as a Model Glue app for a while but last night I added a bit more (A tiny bit I’ll admit) of complexity.



Up until yesterday I was simply using  views for static content, then I finished the contact form, which is a simple Flash Form, so I finally got a change to do a bit more complex Model Gluing.



I must say, it’s a great framework. I’m really enjoying getting into it.

Yesterday my project with the Ant Farm came to an end.



I hope to do business with them again, it was a lot of fun. They’re a great group of people, and incredibly smart to boot, so a nice combo.



I’m glad I had the opportunity to work with them. They afforded me the opportunity to get knee (sometimes chin) deep in and MVC architected application, and on top of that I learned a great deal about SQL Server and XML. Things I’m sure will come in handy in the future.



I’m looking forward to hearing from them again. More so, I’m looking forward to a month of getting filthy with Flex 2. I’m planning to spend the next 30 or so days getting a flex 2 application built.

So after all my blodd sweat and tears went into getting SQL to write well formed XML from our multiple tabled resume database… A minor glitch.



We had initially encoded everything withing a CDATA directive when SQL Server builds the XML. Well then in getting it to work with the neat XML data type, we made that not work. That’s the short and sweet of it.



According to the experts on one of M$, usenet newsgroups, yes in fact those are still around. When using FOR XML EXPLICIT in your XML construction, if you add ",TYPE" to that it negates the CDATA directives. TYPE puts the output into the XML datatype, which it seems doesn’t care for the CDATA directive.



I had to go through all the procs and essentially take all my datatypes from XML, to nvarchar(max) so that CDATA would work, and then remove the TYPE directive at the end of my statement.



@xmldata xml output —>  @xmldata nvarchar(max) output

and

FOR XML EXPLICIT, TYPE —>  FOR XML EXPLICIT



The only downside to this as far as I can tell so far, is we’re not taking advantage of the native (now) XML datatype in SQL Server 2k5. Oh well.