I did a little bit on Doppelganger last week, namely setting up Warg which is running Windows Server 2008 R2. But most of my tinkering has been at work with a form and on Balrog playing more Minecraft.
/TECH
But let's talk about my tinkering at work first. I need to begin by describing a form that I'm working on migrating from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010. The form in question deals with allocating a funds to an employee for cell phones. As such, the form needs to be able to do several things right off: recognize the employee filling out the form (that's easy); query a list of current allocations and find all that pertain to said employee (hmm... okay); and check to see if the employee has submitted any forms for allocations during the current fiscal year (right).
The first part requires using the userName() function and then querying the user profile service to get their name and ID number. No problem.
The next part requires finding all the current allocations for the employee queried. All current allocations sit in a custom list which is easy enough to get to with a data connection, but how does one get just that employee's entries? Well with SharePoint and InfoPath 2010 it is now much easier to query list data connections that you receive data from. So by creating some rules that trigger on Form Load I set a field in the connection to equal the employee and then tell the form to query the connection. Boom! List of lots of allocations is now just 0 to 2 entries. This short list gives me information about each allocation along with how many allocations an employee already has. The form then presents pertinent information to set up a new allocation, update a current one, or renew an expiring one.
The last trick actually requires receiving data from the very library submitted to. This action allows us to see what other forms the employee has already submitted. But we only want to see ones submitted in the same fiscal year. Like the current allocations query, we query the forms library using the employee and also add in the fiscal year we want.
It's interesting to note that when I first modified and expanded this form that the data connection would return ALL information in the list or library and we used filters via rules and default values to get the information desired. When I looked at it this time, it just didn't make much sense to do it that way. It also helped that every one of those default values exploded in the conversion from 2007 to 2010.
Overall, I have to admit that I like SharePoint 2010 much better than SharePoint 2007. There are a few things we've had to adjust, some more annoying than others. For instance in InfoPath 2007 you could set a rule to check a condition and then do nothing except prevent any further rules from running. InfoPath 2010 doesn't allow this, but rather then just marking the rule as invalid it completely removes it without a trace. This is but a small pain though in comparison to the benefits that 2010 offers, like having a data connection sort the data returned by the field you specify. Drop-downs are now alphabetized even if the ID numbers of the queried data are out of order. The fact that data connections also have a separate set of "fields" for querying is also incredibly useful and is what inspired my recent redesign of the form mentioned above.
/EXISTENCE
As I mentioned in my intro, I haven't done much on Doppelganger recently except get one VM setup. It has really been running smoothly and I hardly have needed to mess with it since getting things set up. I guess I did move my TeamSpeak server to a new container called Raven where I now also run a Mumble (Murmur) server. But it wasn't hard and I didn't really learn much.
What I have noticed however, is that I get home from work in varying degrees of worn out--mildly to exhausted--and frequently just want to relax and not think about much. Enter Minecraft. Though it can be a very deep game with basic computer architecture simulation ability using redstone, it can also be one of the most mindless experiences out there.
It's such a strange game in that regard. it just places you near the center of 60 million square meters of blocks with a max build height of 256 meters and says, "Do something." At first you just stand there going, "WTF?" Then you move around and try punching something. You collect some dirt. If there are animals around, you might punch them a bit. Then you punch a tree and get wood. Eventually you're building a replica of Neuschwanstein castle before you come out of your stupor realizing you just spent 3 days of your life playing a game. All at once. Even forgetting to eat or sleep. (I'm exaggerating, but only a little.)
Only just today have I come up for air and realized that I need to get off my butt and get some exercise. At an embarrassing but not ungodly weight I realized that work is not going to get me moving around, rather it will keep me firmly planted in front of a computer so that I can earn strange pieces of paper-fabric which I can trade for silly and entertaining things like Minecraft, which is just more sitting in front of a computer. So today I actually went for a walk after work and managed to make it nearly a mile in 18 min. I don't know how many calories I burned, but I have a new sense of accomplishment and have set a goal down to get to 190 lbs again.
Until next time:
Work hard. Play harder.
/TECH
But let's talk about my tinkering at work first. I need to begin by describing a form that I'm working on migrating from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010. The form in question deals with allocating a funds to an employee for cell phones. As such, the form needs to be able to do several things right off: recognize the employee filling out the form (that's easy); query a list of current allocations and find all that pertain to said employee (hmm... okay); and check to see if the employee has submitted any forms for allocations during the current fiscal year (right).
The first part requires using the userName() function and then querying the user profile service to get their name and ID number. No problem.
The next part requires finding all the current allocations for the employee queried. All current allocations sit in a custom list which is easy enough to get to with a data connection, but how does one get just that employee's entries? Well with SharePoint and InfoPath 2010 it is now much easier to query list data connections that you receive data from. So by creating some rules that trigger on Form Load I set a field in the connection to equal the employee and then tell the form to query the connection. Boom! List of lots of allocations is now just 0 to 2 entries. This short list gives me information about each allocation along with how many allocations an employee already has. The form then presents pertinent information to set up a new allocation, update a current one, or renew an expiring one.
The last trick actually requires receiving data from the very library submitted to. This action allows us to see what other forms the employee has already submitted. But we only want to see ones submitted in the same fiscal year. Like the current allocations query, we query the forms library using the employee and also add in the fiscal year we want.
It's interesting to note that when I first modified and expanded this form that the data connection would return ALL information in the list or library and we used filters via rules and default values to get the information desired. When I looked at it this time, it just didn't make much sense to do it that way. It also helped that every one of those default values exploded in the conversion from 2007 to 2010.
Overall, I have to admit that I like SharePoint 2010 much better than SharePoint 2007. There are a few things we've had to adjust, some more annoying than others. For instance in InfoPath 2007 you could set a rule to check a condition and then do nothing except prevent any further rules from running. InfoPath 2010 doesn't allow this, but rather then just marking the rule as invalid it completely removes it without a trace. This is but a small pain though in comparison to the benefits that 2010 offers, like having a data connection sort the data returned by the field you specify. Drop-downs are now alphabetized even if the ID numbers of the queried data are out of order. The fact that data connections also have a separate set of "fields" for querying is also incredibly useful and is what inspired my recent redesign of the form mentioned above.
/EXISTENCE
As I mentioned in my intro, I haven't done much on Doppelganger recently except get one VM setup. It has really been running smoothly and I hardly have needed to mess with it since getting things set up. I guess I did move my TeamSpeak server to a new container called Raven where I now also run a Mumble (Murmur) server. But it wasn't hard and I didn't really learn much.
What I have noticed however, is that I get home from work in varying degrees of worn out--mildly to exhausted--and frequently just want to relax and not think about much. Enter Minecraft. Though it can be a very deep game with basic computer architecture simulation ability using redstone, it can also be one of the most mindless experiences out there.
It's such a strange game in that regard. it just places you near the center of 60 million square meters of blocks with a max build height of 256 meters and says, "Do something." At first you just stand there going, "WTF?" Then you move around and try punching something. You collect some dirt. If there are animals around, you might punch them a bit. Then you punch a tree and get wood. Eventually you're building a replica of Neuschwanstein castle before you come out of your stupor realizing you just spent 3 days of your life playing a game. All at once. Even forgetting to eat or sleep. (I'm exaggerating, but only a little.)
Only just today have I come up for air and realized that I need to get off my butt and get some exercise. At an embarrassing but not ungodly weight I realized that work is not going to get me moving around, rather it will keep me firmly planted in front of a computer so that I can earn strange pieces of paper-fabric which I can trade for silly and entertaining things like Minecraft, which is just more sitting in front of a computer. So today I actually went for a walk after work and managed to make it nearly a mile in 18 min. I don't know how many calories I burned, but I have a new sense of accomplishment and have set a goal down to get to 190 lbs again.
Until next time:
Work hard. Play harder.
