chrislail.net

How to Add a Hyperlink to a Pretty Photo Image Description

Chris Lail — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 21:55:38 +0000

I really wanted to write this blog because I keep forgetting how to create a hyperlink in a Pretty Photo Gallery description. I always forget that I can’t use regular syntax. To get a hyperlink in the description in a gallery you have to use HTML entity names.

Here is a screen shot of using the hyperlink in the title of the hyperlink to the image.

In the following code snip you will see how I was able to pull this off.

Tool of the week – Beyond Compare

Chris Lail — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 19:26:34 +0000

I’m going to try and spotlight a software tool or program every week that I use in my day to day operations. Our company, eXtensia Technologies, is very diverse in our offerings specializing in custom software and systems integrations. As you can imagine third party software is important to us. One such tool is Beyond Compare by Scooter Software.

Beyond Compare (BC) is a text and folder analyzer allowing the user to quickly compare files and folders. The folder compare feature is one of my favorite features of the program. Folder compare is very similar to the text compare with the exception that it compares the files and the file text of each folders to find the difference or similarities. Beyond Compare easily highlights the differences or similarities to really make it obvious to the user. I also use the text compare pretty frequently to compare code files. With the custom rules feature, I can assign a rule to look for or ignore particular patterns. Beyond Compare has the ability to compare JPG images, MP3 Files, .CSV data, other data files, and Excel Workbooks. There are also registry compare and version compare features in the Pro versions.

You can find out more about Beyond Compare at www.scootersoftware.com. I use it daily and love it. I hope it saves you some time as well.

Using the “Replace” Function in Sql Server/T-SQL

Chris Lail — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 20:33:43 +0000

I ran into an issue today where I needed to strip two characters out of a field while in a stored procedure. The string looked something like this:

@UserID = {abcdefghi}

I needed the middle text (abcdefgi) only so I used the replace function. The replace function only allows you to replace one thing at a time so I had to use it twice. This is what the end result looks like:

replace(replace(@UserID,’{‘,”),’}',”)

Ugly, yes, but it gets the job done.

How to count xml nodes using Freemarker

Chris Lail — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 22:06:54 +0000

I looked all over the web today for a working example of how to count xml branches in the xml dom using Freemarker. I finally came across the answer and thought I would share in case anyone else is looking for it.

Here is a sample from the XML:

Freemarker code: ${asn.Packages.Package?size}

Output: 2