Environmental Consciousness

With all the news about the environment and trying to reduce our footprints on the world, in midst of a growing family. Yup, my wife's due in mid-February! ;-)

Some things we are doing:

• Buying the best (or near best) fuel economy cars in it's class.


• You know how with showers running until we get hot water out? Well, we put in a bucket in the shower stall, let it run until it gets hot, then take the bucket out and I shower coming out smelling good! (I hope) After the bucket gets semi-filled, we bring it downstairs to the laundry room and pour 1/2 (maybe 1/4 if you got a front-loading machine) and then it won't use the plumbing water.


• Of course, never using hot water for your laundry -- soaps nowadays are so much better than our childhood.


• Dry your laundry on a huge rack -- check some of the Amish furniture sites on the 'net for them. The Amish knows what they're talking about.


• Recycle. Probably have to by mandate anyway.


• Buying kids WOODEN toys... that way they can be repaired (glued, shaved, etc) and in the future morph into something else, or in event of SEVERE economic recession, burn 'em for heat. Cannot do that with plastics.


• Live in a compact community within walking distance to your local food store and doing your best to avoid mowing lawns; condos, townhouses, and if you're lucky a house behind a plaza or something.


• Using florescent or LED bulbs.


• Alternatively, you could use the shower-filled bucket of water and pour it down the toilet bowl until it flushes. (hat tip to Neil McD)

Some things I WISH we could do!

• Setting up solar panels in our condo.


• Rerouting shower water from the sewer (except for overflow) and pipe it into a vat outside, then the vat would filter the water and use it for your toilet. We wouldn't even drink or put our hands even in a clean toilet so what's the difference?

When some more ideas comes to mind, I'll post it and perhaps add your ideas to this list.

Stupid Crystal Reports tricks

Been developing with Crystal Reports since 1995-ish first as a direct connection into SQL Server 4.5 & 6 (my goodness, ages ago!). Then as a VB6 developer, embedded reports into a Report Viewer using .dsr files. With embedded reports, its a whole different ball game since I'm only passing it recordsets rather than allowing Crystal to connect to the database (I do use database connections to pull in the data schema to design the reports.)

Those are the good ol' days, doing some hand-wrangling, hair-pulling sessions trying to get my stored procedures to work with Crystal Reports.

Now, I've been tasked to upgrade AACTS from VB into .NET using C#. While Crystal Reports has been under different ownerships, first its own, then Seagate, then now Business Objects -- wonder why tho' -- and now Microsoft the most ideal acquirer has gone out to make its own Reporting Services product several years back. Again, wonder why?

Regardless of what I said above, I'm a sucker for punishment and am now working on Crystal Reports XI R2.

Well, the news is... I fared no better, still doing that "hand-wrangling, hair-pulling" sessions. Some workarounds in place to make that happen after searching over and over to make things work.

One example, if you have a parameters in the report and is populating the report using System.Data.DataSet. Yes, DataSets are bloated, but on the other hand, returning, say, 5 tables/resultsets from a stored procedure can be arguably more efficient since its only one roundtrip to the database?

I built a wrapper class to get parameters into the report:

public class ParametersHelper
{
    // Wrapper to help populate the parameters if user wants to export the 
    // hash - Stores all the parameters in key/value pairs
    public ParameterFields FillParameterFields(Hashtable hash)
    {
        ParameterFields pfields = new ParameterFields();
        foreach (DictionaryEntry entry in hash)
        {
            ParameterField pfield = new ParameterField();
            ParameterDiscreteValue disValue = new ParameterDiscreteValue();
    
            disValue.Value = entry.Value;
            pfield.Name = entry.Key.ToString();  // Parameter Name
            pfield.CurrentValues.Add(disValue);
            pfields.Add(pfield);
        }
        return pfields;
    }
}

To use it:

Report1 r1 = new Report1();
r1.Load();
r1.SetDataSource(ds.Tables[0]);
if (hash.Count > 0)
{        
    crystalReportViewer1.ParameterFieldInfo = ph.FillParameterFields(hash);
    for (int i = 0; i < r1.ParameterFields.Count; i++)
    {  
        r1.DataDefinition.ParameterFields[i].ApplyCurrentValues(crystalReportViewer1.ParameterFieldInfo[i].CurrentValues);
    }
}
this.crystalReportViewer1.ReportSource = r1;
this.crystalReportViewer1.Show();

[sorry if it is cutting off, just copy-paste it into Notepad then you'll see the code in all its glory.]