Let’s say that you have a table that holds your shopping list:

  CREATE TABLE [#DuplicatedData]
  (
	  [ID]		INT,
	  [MyData]	NVARCHAR(255),
	  [Date]	DATETIME
  )

You and your girlfriend both have an application on your phones that lets you enter data into this shopping list.  However, you don’t coordinate every single thing you enter, so you’re bound to have some duplication sometimes as each of you realizes that, hey, you’re out of potatoes.  So, on January 1, you both enter that you need potatoes, and you further enter that you need celery:

  INSERT INTO [#DuplicatedData] VALUES (1, 'Potatoes', '1/1/2010 5:35:04 PM')
  INSERT INTO [#DuplicatedData] VALUES (2, 'Celery', '1/1/2010 5:36:12 PM')
  INSERT INTO [#DuplicatedData] VALUES (3, 'Potatoes', '1/1/2010 6:02:38 PM')

A few days later, you’ve used up your potatoes, so you need more:

  INSERT INTO [#DuplicatedData] VALUES (4, 'Potatoes', '1/4/2010 1:20:09 PM')

When you went to print out your list on January 2, you didn’t want to see Potatoes twice.. and when you look back on your shopping habits, you also don’t want to see Potatoes twice for January 1.  So you decide that, while maybe it’s possible once in a while, it’s probably pretty rate that you will need potatoes more than once in a day, so you’re going to remove any entries that are for the same item on the same day.  You’ll only take the latest entry in a day for any particular item.  But how?

That’s where the beauty of PARTITION BY comes into play.  Let’s take a look at this query:

  SELECT
	  ROW_NUMBER() OVER(PARTITION BY [MyData], CONVERT(VARCHAR, [Date], 101) ORDER BY [ID] DESC) AS [RowNum],
	  *
  FROM
	  [#DuplicatedData]

We are breaking up the data by item and then by date (but not time) and ordering to get the latest entries showing up first, then we are getting a row number to identify the order in each partition of the items.  The results from this query look like this:

  1	  2	  Celery	2010-01-01 17:36:12.000
  1	  3	  Potatoes	2010-01-01 18:02:38.000
  2	  1	  Potatoes	2010-01-01 17:35:04.000
  1	  4	  Potatoes	2010-01-04 13:20:09.000

The Potatoes entries on January 1 have been grouped together and numbered 1 and 2, whereas the others are each in their own partitions and are numbered 1.  Once we have this, it’s trivial to get the data that we want:

  SELECT [MyData], [Date] FROM
	  (
		  SELECT
			  ROW_NUMBER() OVER(PARTITION BY [MyData], CONVERT(VARCHAR, [Date], 101) ORDER BY [ID] DESC) AS [RowNum],
			  *
		  FROM
			  [#DuplicatedData]
	  ) AS [Sub]
  WHERE
	  [RowNum] = 1
  ORDER BY
	  [Date] ASC

Results:

  Celery	2010-01-01 17:36:12.000
  Potatoes	2010-01-01 18:02:38.000
  Potatoes	2010-01-04 13:20:09.000

Thanks to Sam Grose for teaching me pretty much everything in this post.

http://hiddensanctum.wordpress.com/

Now that I’ve figured out my password for this blog, I will continue to use it to post interesting .NET/SQL finds that do not relate to the above, but I am no longer working in SharePoint, so I won’t be posting any more SharePoint entries.  (Not that I’ve posted a lot of entries at all so far.)

Time is slim, but I’m hoping to be able to make a post now and again that may help someone else out there.

Anyway,…

The Situation

I am creating a form to track the staffing process at my company.  I have an InfoPath 2007 form that has a repeating table.  This table has two fields in it:  a Candidate Name textbox and a Notes attachment.  I want to know when, say, the Notes field has been filled in for every candidate.  So, upon submit, I want to check if all of the Notes fields in the repeating table have been filled in/have attachments in them, and, if they have, I want to populate a value in another field, Date.

The Issue

So, I created a rule on the Submit button to set the Date field to today’s date if the Notes field is not blank:

(The rule checks if the Date field is blank to ensure that the Date field is only filled in the first time the Notes fields are set, not every time the form is submitted.)

This rule meets what I would imagine would make sense – and also what I’ve seen other posts telling me to do.  However, this rule exhibits some unexpected behavior.  Let’s look at a truth table for two instances of the repeating table:

If even one of the Notes fields is not blank, then “is not blank” evaluates to True.  This is not the behavior that I am looking for – I want only the last column to evaluate to true.  But for a repeating field, if “is not blank” is true for one of the individual fields, it evaluates to True for the repeating field.

The Solution

You will notice that the above behavior is reflected in “is blank” as well:

If “is blank” is true for one of the individual fields, “is blank” evaluates to True for the repeating field.  Luckily, this is to our advantage:

What we are looking for is the exact opposite of the behavior we notice in “is blank;” we want the first three columns to evaluate to False and only the last column to evaluate to True.  To do that, all we need to do is take the “not” of the “is blank” function:

This gives us the behavior that we are seeking.  In order to do this in InfoPath, we want to open the Condition for the Rule, set “Notes is blank,” then switch “Notes” to “The expression:”

This will allow you to edit the expression directly.  Just put a “not()” around the expression, and you’re done!

Thanks go to g-man and crew for posting how to not an expression in this thread on InfoPath Dev.

I am creating a workflow that needs escalation capabilities.  Because of the issues that SharePoint has with Delaying, I decided to make a separate console application that can be run as a timer job to check the running workflows on my list items and nudge them along if necessary.

That’s a bit of a broad, general overview.  Here are the specific details of the issue I ran into:

The workflow is designed to wait until the item on which it is running has a certain field updated to a value other than the default.  This is taken care of by placing an OnWorkflowItemChanged activity within a While activity:

If I edit the item myself, through the UI, it works without a hitch – once the correct field is edited, the workflow moves on.  The interesting part is the behavior when the list item is edited programmatically in my console application:

    workflow.ParentItem["FieldName"] = "NewValue";
    workflow.ParentItem.Update();

The field will update, but the OnWorkflowItemChanged (ItemChaanged2) event won’t fire.  In fact, after running the code above, the event won’t even fire from the UI anymore.

The solution?

Web services:

    // Create the web service reference
    Lists.Lists listsService = new Lists.Lists();

    // Set credentials
    listsService.Credentials = CredentialCache.DefaultCredentials;

    // Set the URL
    listsService.Url = string.Format(
        "{0}/_vti_bin/lists.asmx",
        siteURL
      );

    // Build the CAML statement
    string updateCAML = "<Method ID='1' Cmd='Update'>";
    updateCAML += "<Field Name='ID'>" + itemID.ToString() + "</Field>"; // ID of the item (index of the item in the list)
    updateCAML += "<Field Name='FieldName'>NewValue</Field>"; // Update information
    updateCAML += "</Method>";

    // Build the XmlElement object that contains the update request
    XmlDocument document = new XmlDocument();
    XmlElement batch = document.CreateElement("Batch");
    batch.SetAttribute("OnError", "Continue");
    batch.SetAttribute("ListVersion", listVersion.ToString());
    batch.InnerXml = updateCAML;

    // Do the update
    XmlNode returnNode = listsService.UpdateListItems(listID.ToString(), batch);

Like I said, I’m not sure if this is the best approach, but the workflow responded just fine when the update was made through a web service call instead of through the object model.

If you are trying to modify promoted fields from an InfoPath form, do not use the above method. To get the above to work, you would need to allow your promoted fields to be editable through the browser – and the edits would then not be available when you load the form again.  If you are working with promoted fields, the following code will let you alter the field in the form XML itself, which will both solve the above problem and still keep within the spirit of a Forms Library:

    private void AlterField(SPListItem item, string fieldXPath, string newValue, string xmlNamespace, string xmlNamespaceUri)
        {
            SPFile file = item.File;
            XmlDocument form = new XmlDocument();
            using (StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(file.OpenBinaryStream()))
            {
                form.LoadXml(reader.ReadToEnd());
            }

            MemoryStream inStream = new MemoryStream(file.OpenBinary());
            XmlDocument myDoc = new XmlDocument();
            myDoc.PreserveWhitespace = true;
            myDoc.Load(inStream);

            XmlElement root = myDoc.DocumentElement;
            XPathNavigator navigator = form.CreateNavigator();

            XmlNamespaceManager manager = new XmlNamespaceManager(navigator.NameTable);
            manager.AddNamespace(xmlNamespace, xmlNameSpaceUri);

            XmlNode fieldToAlter = root.SelectSingleNode(
                    fieldXPath,
                    manager
                );
            fieldToAlter.InnerText = newValue;

            MemoryStream outStream = new MemoryStream();
            myDoc.Save(outStream);
            file.SaveBinary(outStream.ToArray());
        }

Thanks to Christopher Jones for this solution:  http://www.qualitysharepoint.com/2009/03/update-infopath-form-from-workflow.html.

Eventually.